You should add these to your hotel website. You should claim your hotel Google Plus Business Listing, You should create and or merge your page with that listing. You should add all the snippets you can, and verify your website URL. All this makes you stronger in Google Plus, and all of Google Plus makes you stronger in organic search. And it doesn’t end there….
Do these!
If you know any other ways to make your site friendlier with Google Plus and google, please comment!
People keep trying to crack the data to show how organic search rankings are effected by Google Plus, and how Google informs it’s search picture carousel and ranking of hotels in the new travel vertical part of search.
Hotel people like data, but sometimes a lovely, simple metaphor, and a simple picture, is all you need.
METAPHOR: By looking at the attached pics, I think it’s easy to visualize Google Plus as the largest and most beautiful ad, that you control, and it’s totally free, as long as you maintain the Google Plus page. I am doing that, but to create further relevance, we should optimize the site for Google. Those codes will help.
Basically, Google Plus is becoming far more important. If you look at the Inn at the Presidio search pic- I didn’t even search the right search terms, and 50% of the page of the returned organic search results shows our hotel Google Plus page, with pictures, recent posts, reviews, links, etc. People now are clicking that because it’s so obvious, and G+ has a booking engine in the business page, now, too. I am working with our team to find out how to add our direct booking engine, vs letting OTA’s run amock. It’s like a glorious, beautiful ad that takes all the attention off the organic search results (that we populate, anyway).
But, with that image, it obviously means that all attention is on the right. What’s more, if you are NOT active online and claiming this G+ listing, you become irrelevent. I think this is the scariest message I want to relate. This is wholly by accident, but there’s another hotel with “Presidio” and “Inn” in the title, and they barely appear anywhere, anymore. We’ve taken ownership of their brand name with our activity, and add that to their absence of presence, wholly by accident…. we’re probably digging into them a bit.
To make Google happy, you need to do these little header snippets, because it further verifies your website, makes it more valuable and relevant, therefore ranking higher, in organic search.
But the way the Google Plus page is displaying is just astonishing. Think about organic search, Google’s travel vertical, and what is going on here. Then laugh at this article:
(Facebook says wooing travel industry will be key focus in 2014? NINE YEARS TOO LATE? I know, I gotta get my Facebook dig in… but when hoteliers realize what’s happening in Google, do you think they will ever listen to FB, who has burned us and ignored us, for NINE YEARS?!?!)
With the 2nd pic, it’s even more sobering. I searched for Tide Inn, and the “Inn Above Tide” is what pops up. The hotel populates 50% of the page… and at the very bottom, tiny, it reads: “see results about the Tides Inn”. I know the search term isn’t precise, but to think that our hotel could crowd that much organic search real estate is astonishing. I also know these are personalized and non global searches, reaffirming my own confirmation bias and selective perception, as we all learned about in Eli Pariser’s BRILLIANT “Filter Bubble: What the PErsonalized web is not telling you.” Watch a TED Talk here. Still… with this awareness of how the internet delivers tailored results, the obviousness of the succinct and somewhat elegant metaphor of your plus page as an ad should not ring hollow. These photos should help you get on the bandwagon, and stop focusing on silly posts that don’t do anything for your hotel.
Get with it guys! Let’s not let independent and hard working boutique operators get left behind because we don’t have the R&D, corporate communication structure, or marketing dollars that everyone else has! The value here is gold! =)
Think about that – our activity on Google Plus has pushed the actual hotel that is the name of my exact search, BELOW THE FOLD. That is very important. We now own their hotel name, because of our footprint online. We didn’t mean to do that…. we are just active online. It shocked us as much as anyone, and in time I am sure it will balance. But being at the forefront of this is amazing… the edge this is giving hoteliers who focus on Plus is astounding.
Important stuff.
Hope this helps.