How to write a better hotel blog: 6 steps

A blog can provide your business with a powerful platform to showcase your hotel’s unique features, promote your brand, and connect with potential guests. Alongside boosting search engine optimisation and driving traffic to your website, your hotel blog can perform many other great functions. It’s time to make start writing a better hotel blog! Whether you’re just getting started, posting sporadically, or publishing a blog every week, this article will help take your hotel blog to the next level in six simple steps.

Upgrade your hotel blog

In 2023, if your hotel has a website then it should have a blog – this is what many hotels believe. As a result, hotel owners post uninformed content without the help of a strategy, in hope of it magically making a difference to their online presence.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. No benefit comes from blogging just for the sake of it. Your hotel blog should be built upon a strong and well-considered strategy, should be consistent and should follow a number of core SEO principles. In fact, continuously writing low quality content could actually do your hotel website harm.

6 steps to a better hotel blog

Whether you have been writing a blog for a while and you’re not convinced by its effectiveness, or your blog page is home to only three posts from 2018, you might be starting to consider upgrading your hotel blog. In this article, we tell you exactly how to go about just this so that your content shines out amongst the crowd and brings traffic to your site.

Carry out informed keyword research

The best place to start when starting a blog (or working to improve it) is with keyword research. Conducting keyword research is crucial for effective SEO strategy, because it helps you to keep focused on the task at hand, as well as come up with topics that people want to read about. That’s because through keyword research, you’ll identify the terms and phrases people use to search for information related to your business, services or products. For example, if you have written a blog titled ‘Things to do in the Barossa Valley’ and a potential visitor searches for this term, your content (and thus your website) has a chance of popping up.

By finding high-ranking and relevant keywords and writing interesting content surrounding each, your website and content will improve its chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). So how do you find these keywords? To carry out keyword research for SEO, you can use various tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz Keyword Explorer. Identifying keywords, analysing their search volume (how many people search for the term each month) and competition, you can start to create a list of keywords to target directly.

Need a little more help? Try learning a little for yourself here, or reach out to 1834 Hotels and ask how they can help you.

Use catchy headlines for your blog

There’s no use in writing a great, lengthy and in-depth blog post on a particular topic if the headline lets you down. As the first thing people see when they come across your content, your headline should make readers want to learn more. Ultimately, the headline you choose can actually determine whether or not a person clicks through to read the rest of the content or not. And that’s pretty important.

Catchy headlines can grab the reader’s attention, pique their curiosity, and entice them to read on. They can also help your content stand out in a crowded online space and improve your chances of building a loyal readership. So how can you come up with a great one? Here are some headline structures that do wonders for your click through rate:

• ‘How tos’: for example, ‘How to visit Sydney on a tight budget’
• Numerical/lists: ‘7 unique things to do in Sydney’
• Demonstrating value: ‘Experience the true Riverland with our latest offer’
• Distrust: ‘The 3 over-touristy Sydney sites they recommend (and we would avoid)’
• Questions: ‘Where to see sea lions in South Australia’

Write about different topics

Those writing a blog for the first time may not fully understand its purpose. As a result, many hotel blogs end up becoming news feeds, offering only updates of the property. Whilst this is interesting every now and then, it is unlikely that your audience wants to know every little piece of news about your hotel. What’s more, there’s so much missed opportunity in this scenario; for example despite all the time going into the blog, you won’t rank in search engines this way.

As a hotel, there are lots of different things you could cover. From regional/local advice, to information on new offers, hotel news, helpful information such as ‘How to get to…. by car’, travel tips and more – make sure you’re covering enough topics.

Avoid short blog posts

Typically, a post is too short when it’s under 500 words. Writing long form content which covers your given topic in depth is a great way to increase your chances of ranking highly in Google. Blog posts that are too short might be seen as thin content, which can negatively affect your website’s rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Having said this, it’s worth noting that high quality content is always your goal; avoiding babbling on for 3000 words if most of the content is filler and offers no actual value. Google can pick up on this! Instead, you should focus on creating comprehensive content that provides value to your readers and meets their needs. It’s better to have a well-written, informative blog post that’s shorter in length (say 600 words) than a lengthy post that provides little value.

Use appealing imagery

Browse through your hotel’s imagery, sign up for your state’s tourism media gallery collections and start using Unsplash (or Pexels, or Pixabay), because appealing imagery is a great addition to your blog. Helping to break up text, captivate readers and making content more memorable and sharable, imagery is absolutely essential to your blog posts.

In fact, studies have shown that blog posts with images or visuals perform better in terms of engagement and social shares. And if that wasn’t enough reason to use a few images in your blogs, using images that are optimised for SEO can also help improve the visibility of your blog post in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Include calls to action at the end of your blog

To round off your vastly improving and generally better hotel blog, you’ll want to use call to actions (CTAs) to ensure that your readers visit your website for the reason you’d hope (to book a room). Following your nicely written content about the best restaurants in Victor Harbor, South Australia, consider writing a heading such as ‘Comfortable and central accommodation in Victor Harbor’. Write a short call to action about your property and ask guests to click on a button which takes them to your booking page. You might even want to offer them a small discount for their direct booking, to really encourage them to take the next step.

Make your hotel blog better with 1834 Hotels

Hotel management company 1834 Hotels is driven by an evolutionary sales, marketing & online distribution strategy as well as solid objectives and goals. Learn more about our hotel management services here.