Author: Dr. Manus Ward │Head of Digital Strategy and Data Protection │Hotelconsultant.com is a qualified and experienced former hotel manager, culinary Olympic team manager and hospitality Head of School who is passionate about passing on the knowledge he gained from one of the few hotel digital strategy doctorates in the world to you the hotelier. Bonus: If you have any problems with this contact me (100% free) at manus@hotelconsultant.com or 086 8185829 on this or any aspect of your hotel’s digital strategy.
Why do we need to do this
Google believes that a page linked to by relevant sites is a sign of a quality page and rewards these pages with higher ranks in the search engine.
What does this mean
Google examines the backlinks to and from each of your pages and rewards you with higher rankings if your links are more relevant than your competitors’ links. An example is that your restaurant should have links to and from other restaurants locally. This would boost you in search rankings such as the example below for the search term “Galway restaurants”. While creating links to your competitors restaurants or other competing hospitality products may seem a little crazy the research indicates that if your guests want to eat outside your hotel they will and on the negative side if they feel there are no other quality restaurants locally except for yours it may deter them from booking your hotel.
What do I do: Create a relevant page and create links to all these hospitality websites. When you have done this, send the website owners an email showing the link to their site and request a link back. If you create a link first they will be significantly more likely to create a link back to you. The local area could also set up a separate website selling the local area as a culinary hot spot increasing everybody’s business.
How do I find out all the relevant local hospitality activities and their contact details: Click on http://www.tripadvisor.com and do the following:
Insert restaurants or whatever the content of the page you want to rank higher in Google is. In this case we picked restaurants and this page will come up.
Find out their contact details on this page.
Then click on the map page to both find out their location but also to find out their restaurant’s contact details.
In this case I would have contacted all the equivalent restaurants e.g. fine dining for a luxury hotel or cheap eats for a hostel etc and asked them to link to us. Now do this for all your pages.
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