A majority of travelers begin their travel planning on Google and where a hotel shows up in local rankings influences its clickthrough rates and likelihood of getting booked.
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Last week, Google shared a blog, providing us with insights into how it calculates local search rankings, noting that local results are based primarily on a business’s relevance, distance, and prominence.
Here’s what that means for hotels.
Relevance
A hotel’s relevance is simply how closely its listing matches what a traveler is looking for. It is determined by the hotel’s business description and reviews. TrustYou powers Google’s hotel scores and provides hotels with TrustYou Stars, a survey product that allows hotels to seamlessly push more verified reviews directly to Google. Hotels using TrustYou Stars have seen an increase in review scores on Google and a healthy increase in volume of reviews (one great example here).
Distance
Distance is simply the hotel’s proximity to the location in which a traveler wants to visit (i.e. if someone searches for hotels in Boston, he or she would get results for hotels located within Boston).
Prominence
Prominence is how well-known a hotel is. It is based on information that Google has about a hotel across the web as well as review count and the review score, which is powered by TrustYou. According to Google, “more reviews and positive ratings will improve a business’s local ranking. A hotel’s position in web results is also a factor, so SEO best practices apply to local search optimization.” TrustYou Stars allows hotels to improve their prominence by gaining more Google reviews as well as improving their own site’s SEO by incorporating verified reviews.
What It Means for Hotels
Hotels have the power to influence relevance and prominence to improve their local search rankings and ultimately generate more bookings. TrustYou Stars gives hoteliers the tools they need to simply and quickly improve local search results. Hotels can get started with a 90-day free trial of TrustYou Stars here.
Get the full scoop from Google here.
Margaret Ady serves as Vice President, Marketing at TrustYou, a big data and online reputation management company specializing in the hospitality industry.
About TrustYou: TrustYou’s Mission is to positively influence travelers’ decisions. Reviews and user-generated content rank #1 in influencing travelers’ hotel selections and industry reputations. Digesting all of these opinions, however, is beyond any one person’s capacity. Each day things become more complicated because millions of new opinions in thousands of formats and dozens of languages enter the fray. TrustYou searches, analyzes and distills hundreds of millions of opinions scattered across this vast, fragmented market. Our products are extensively used by suppliers " hotels, accommodations, restaurants " to provide travelers with better services and enhanced offerings by monitoring, surveying and acting upon all worldwide guest feedback. Travel intermediaries " OTAs, meta-search, destination marketers " use TrustYou’s Meta-Reviews™ to help travelers purchase wisely. TrustYou’s Meta-Reviews™ are based solely on verified travel reviews. They do not include data from TripAdvisor.
www.trustyou.com
