Friday 15 February 2019

SEO Hostel Health Check



Keeping your website SEO Friendly



We want you to make the most of your assets, and having a kick ass website is a great way to showcase them. Attract your perfect match with beautiful and relevant content, and a strong message to book direct at this amazing hostel. The purpose of good SEO is to get good positions in SERPS (search engine result pages) - make your website the best it can be for you, Google, and your customers - everyone wins! 


SEO Hostel Health Check


So how do you master this wizardry? Well, there are some basic steps that you can do for yourself before calling in the experts. Here's how to get yourself off the blocks.

Some key points to look out for:


  • Make sure that your site is mobile friendly!! Depending on your audience this could be up to 89% of your traffic. Insane.

  • Be Google friendly. Make sure you are on Google Maps and when you appear on Google business check that your reviews are responded to (nicely) and you have added your own photos and description. This will help your organic views push you to the top.

  • Be user friendly. The user experience is important for bookings and and search engines - you need do to be easily navigable and have a website that makes sense - not a cat's picnic!

  • Keep content relevant. Have your important content on your homepage, optimize it for keywords related to your hostel and destination, keep it interesting and unique. Don't bury the really useful stuff somewhere in the back. Like your address.

  • Be aware of Good Practice rules to avoid penalties. Don't duplicate content or syndicate it to other websites; it has to be unique. And careful what images you use - it's not ok to borrow from Instagram unless you want a copyright fine - always get permission first!
SEO Hostel Health Check

  • Get on top of your content by creating it yourself. Start a blog and try to add relevant topics. Blogs help keep material fresh and make Google bots re-visit and index your pages more. User content is also joyful, but this is something you have to have under your control.

  • Make sure your website also loads quickly for anyone with a slow connection. Have your images and videos set to web pixel sizes and don't have huge files you don't need. Search speed is incorporated into rankings.

  • Keep on top of your tabs. Pay attention to where pages are leading and what information is on them, and match up your content, titles and descriptions to the relevant pages. Just keep it tidy!
SEO Hostel Health Check

  • Be social. Link to your social accounts and make sure they are active and relevant. You don't have to be posting all the time, but make sure when you do it is on brand, with your business tone of voice, and relevant, engaging or useful to your audience.

  • Connect with bloggers and partners with your press releases or getting personal with them. This may be just through Facebook, but don't leave them out when it comes to connecting.

  • Make sure those you do build a relation with have happy SEO and are not going to be bad for you to link with. Links aren't as important as they used to be, but you want to link with authority sites to be seen as one - so avoid a tour company with terrible reviews and dodgy certification - keep it classy!

  • Secure you website with 'https' to give buyer confidence 


So those are your basic SEO health check tips from the Hostel Doctor! Make sure that you are helping yourself get direct bookings with the best organic search you can get. Get this right, and your hostel will benefit from an amazing website! 


We hope these tips help - get in touch with us at hello@hosteldoctor.com for more help with your hostel website. We're here to help keep your hostel healthy!

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