4 easy ways to improve your organic listing
If you invest in digital marketing or work on your site’s SEO, you know a major goal of all that work is to improve your organic listing and ranking in the search engines. In fact, more than 50% of your website traffic should be organic traffic, meaning they found you through search and not clicking an ad or from your TripAdvisor listing. Right now is a great time for independent hoteliers to execute tactical work to ensure their website’s organic listings are going to be driving traffic and conversions for the busy season!
Here are four easy ways to improve your organic listing for 2017:
#1 Improve poor performers
Use Google Analytics to find pages that aren’t getting clicked on though they’re being shown in the results (Acquisition > Search Console > Landing pages, and compare impressions to CTR). Are these pages targeting the wrong keyword? Is the information out of date or no longer relevant? Are the meta tags showcasing the right information? Evaluate the page’s content and images to see where improvements can be made.
A healthy CTR is at least 1.5%. This information can also verify if your keywords are mapped correctly with good impressions though if you have great impressions but a low CTR, your meta data (see below) could use some love.
#2 Grab interest with an expanded title tag
Google has refined how much of your title will be shown to searchers over the years but in mid-2016 they expanded the limit to 600 pixels from 512 pixels. This doesn’t necessarily equate to character or word counts that many of us are familiar with but thinking about the width of particular letters can help you understand this size limit. For example, an “I” is going to use less pixel space than an “H.” Smart Search Marketing offers a free Google preview tool to help you test different title and description tags!
Don't you think you'd click on the longer titles with more information?
#3 Drive intrigue with meta tags
Think about your old English class in high school and learning to write papers for a moment. You probably learned to be clear and concise in the title to convey what the article is about and grab the reader’s interest and share the most important data in the first paragraph. Treat your meta tags the same way! Use your title to pull people in or evoke emotion and use your description tag to really sell your page’s content and encourage people to click the link to learn more.
Obviously you’ll want to focus one keywords and optimizing your meta tags but also remember that your content is most importantly written for your website visitors and not the robots crawling your site. Don’t just use a bunch of keywords or phrases that may rank well for the robots but makes no sense for your human readers or even worse, a title and description that has barely anything in common with the content on the page.
#4 Enhance your result with rich snippets
Rich snippets are tags you can add to your result listing to make it stand out among the rest of the links. Perhaps you highlight your room pricing, star ratings, or how many reviews you have. Obviously the more information you can provide and draw searchers’ eyes toward your result can easily improve your CTR.
