The Hotel Marketing Blog from HotelSphere

Page 1, position 1 on Google! For the search term "hotel website copy". It took less than one hour.

The social networking site Ecademy.com was used.

Some social networking websites can be very useful for getting listed fast because they are spidered regularly by the search engines. Google in particular seems to like Ecademy.

Now we'll just have to keep en eye on the Hotelsphere.co.uk listings!

Posted by HotelBlogger

Well, that's the article published. It's on both Ecademy and on HotelSphere. Let's see how long it takes to get noticed.

Just for good measure, here's the article again:

This article forms part of an experiment to find out how long it takes for different parts of the Internet to find and rank – this article!

It’s about hotel website copy. That is, the words you use to tell visitors to your website about your hotel.

Good hotel website copy follows simple rules and is all the more effective for them. For example:

Use short sentences.
Use short words – words with lots of syllables are hard to read.
Tell a story about your hotel with your website copy. People love to read stories. Do not underestimate the power of the story when it comes to website visitors remembering what you’ve told them.
Use lots of active verbs in your copy. The “action” sparks lots of connections in the readers’ emotions and imagination.
Talk to your visitor! Say “you” a lot.
Answer their primary question – if you don’t know what this is, you can always ask me…
Tell them what to do next.

The problem with most hotel website copy is that it talks all about the hotel and what it is, rather than what it does for the visitor.

You’ll find descriptions of décor, trouser presses, “tea and coffee making facilities” and all sorts of clichéd nonsense. All of it written for the hotelier, not for the visitor.

Your hotel website copy needs to sell the feeling and experience of staying in your hotel.

If you’d like to find out if your hotel website copy could be improved, you can ask for the free hotel website copycheck at HotelSphere.co.uk.

What is your website telling your visitors?

Posted by HotelBlogger

One of the features of specialising in copywriting and online selling for hotels, is that people who aren't clients (and in some cases have no intention of becoming one...) call up to "pick your brains" about the way their current supplier is performing.

Now, farbeit from me to cast doubt on the skills, services and products sold to hoteliers in the UK, but there does seem to be a bit of a gap between what is being provided and what could be provided. We'll leave aside any arguments about seo "snake oil" services for the moment. I hope you don't mind.

Today, we're going to consider a problem that was presented to me over the weekend. An hotelier emailed me yesterday asking for advice about getting his hotel listed on Google. The poor man felt that his seo "specialist" wasn't providing the service he could have been. The key phrases this chap wanted to use weren't difficult ones to work with. They weren't too short (anything short with "hotel" in it can be difficult, competition is strong for that keyword) and looked reasonable enough to me. Yet his advisor was telling him it would take three months to secure a page one listing.

Of course, most of you know that nobody can guarantee page one on Google. So I started thinking about how fast one can get a listing for a particular phrase. To find out, we need to run an experiment.

The HotelSphere website performs rather nicely for the search phrases "hotel website copywriter" and "hotel website copywriting". Both currently enjoy position 1, page 1 on Google.co.uk.

The challenge today, dear reader, is to secure a listing for the phrase "hotel website copy". For some reason, I've missed this out completely for HotelSphere. The best performance for the phrase is on my Ecademy listing, which appears on page 5 of Google. The HotelSphere website is effectively invisble for this phrase.

So today, I'm going to find out how long it takes for Google to find copy which has been designed with the phrase "hotel website copy" in mind.

There are a few things which need to be prepared, not least my lunch, so I'll be back soon.

Posted by HotelBlogger