White Paper: Widespread US Hotel SEO Failure Revealed
Direct hotel websites earn a Grade “F” for Search Engine Optimisation due to basic errors, says a new hospitality industry survey
Measured against SEO best practice metrics, US hotel direct websites score just 58.3% on average. The result, equivalent to a US High School Grade F, has prompted a call to action from global hospitality marketing agency, three&six. Their white paper, A Wake-Up Call: The State of SEO in the USA Hotel Industry, is now available online.
Although the poor performance grabs the attention, it didn’t come as a total surprise to three&six co-founders Ben Hanley and Tristan Heaword. Tristan begins “We had long had a suspicion that direct hotel websites were failing. Anecdotally, we sensed they had been relegated to a box-ticking exercise behind OTAs and other third-party channels.”
This hunch prompted three&six to survey 14,000 properties in 32 major US destinations from North to South and East to West Coast. The agency’s team of number crunchers spent the early part of 2023 analysing the results using 100 SEO data points and creating individual percentage scores.
Ben continues, “Alongside the disappointing headline figure, our white paper shows revenue and booking managers how, and why, they might be losing out on precious direct market share.”
The good news is the SEO errors identified by three&six, which are explained in detail in the white paper, are not overly challenging to fix. Readers will discover recommendations they can start implementing straight away including tagging pages correctly and finding authoritative sites to link to.
Tristan adds “Given the current level of poor performance, even a simple change or small improvement could win you an advantage over your competition. These are real world changes that can be made right now.”
A Wake-Up Call: The State of SEO in the USA Hotel Industry is available through the three&six website and you can download the SEO white paper for free (no email sign-up necessary). Tristan and Ben are also happy to offer hotels a free 100-point SEO audit of their own which is also available on the three&six website.
