What is local search and why is it important to Hotels?
If you haven't heard about local search, "FIRE YOUR CEO PROFESSIONAL" because they're not doing their job or worse they don't know what they're doing.
Local search is proving to be one of the most important advertising tools for small companies everywhere. However, no other industry will benefit quite as much as the hospitality industry. It can literally send hundreds of customers to your very door and the best part it won't cost you a penny.
Now, do I have your attention yet?
This thing called local search is what every hotel and restaurant owner has been dreaming of. It quite simply will enable people to find your property based on your location and what ever services your offering. Let me give you an example. Let's say, you're visiting downtown Orlando Florida and you're not familiar with the city. It's 11"30 PM on a Friday night and your girlfriend turns to you and says she's craving chicken wings but not just any chicken wings, she wants extremely "HOT N SPICY" chicken wings. What do you do? Well if you're like me, I own a Palm Treo you would pull out your trusty Palm Treo and start searching online for "Hot n Spicy Chicken Wings". In a flash. I found information and location for Tony Roma's and they serve "Hot n Spicy Chicken Wings" until 2:00 AM and they were within walking distance.
The technology that makes this possible requires your website to Be properly optimized for local search. I'll give you the quick highlights, you need to include your address in the visible text on particular webpages, and this is assuming that the search engines can find those pages on your website. You'll also need to include the appropriate Meta tags and link text. More on this later. This is where your web master and or search engine optimization professional comes in. Remember what I said earlier, if they don't know what you mean you need to let them go and find someone who does. It's that important.
The Internet is killing the yellow pages
Just in case you haven't noticed, the world wide web is quickly becoming a virtual yellow pages directory in your pocket. (Think about that the next time your local yellow page representative shows up and wants you to take a bigger ad). It's inevitable, just like the car replaced the horse and buggy, the Internet will soon replace the yellow pages. The World Wide Web has become local there was no other choice. You didn't really expect the Internet to keep growing and stay disconnected from the real world, did you?
OK, so right about now. You're wondering if you should bother about bringing your website up to local search standards or not. Well just think about this, right now at this minute the Internet is filled with billions of web pages, over 108,000,000 websites, with over 10,000,000 individual businesses. It's called on everyday by consumers to deliver search engine results for everything you can think of including hotels, motels, inns, bed and breakfasts, lodges and so on. That's a whole lot of real estate you're competing with everyday. In less you're one of those lucky few that has more business than they can handle, I would suggest to you to just do it!
Internet users love local search
A growing number of people discover local search every day, and turn to the Internet to find wedding cakes, chiropractors and Tire Stores and a myriad of other local services using the Internet. They're looking to find those companies who can fill their needs and are convenient to their location.
But mostly people use local search, to help make travel arrangements. Here's something that actually happened to me before I started making my own travel arrangements. I was booked in to a Best Western hotel across town from where I was having my meeting. It took approximately 20 minutes to get their. After I paid the cab, I looked up and what should I see? That's right a brand new best western hotel right across the street from where I was having my meeting.
Local search and travel planning
Today most people use local search for their business and pleasure travel planning.
Nowadays when I travel, I'll first search for hotels which are close in proximity to where I'm meeting. It doesn't make much sense to fly into some place and then commute. Let the locals commute, I'm finding a hotel as close as possible to where I'm meeting. The bottom line is, business travelers need their hotel centrally located to their work day. Thanks to the search engines, filling this need is becoming easier, as more companies optimize their websites for local search.
So as a website owner what can you do to attract local search customers?
That's easy, just optimize your website for local search. Amazingly there's still a large number of hospitality companies that are not utilizing local search. First, if you're a small hotel, inn, bed and breakfast or lodge and have a website and a physical address you should already be using local search.
Remember, people no longer automatically reach for the yellow pages, instead increasing numbers of consumers reach out to the Internet and click onto Google, Yahoo or MSN. Customer usage is evolving, they no longer just search to answer questions. They now expect to find more local relevant information. A growing number of people expect to find shopping centers, hair salons and movie theaters and other local services by using the Internet. They're looking for businesses that cater to their needs and lie within a convenient proximity to their physical location.
What your website has to have for local search
First, I'd like to say, optimizing for local search will not hurt your regular search results. By optimizing for local search your just adding to your existing web site elements for example keywords, Meta tags and visible text. In fact the additional elements will work to improve your overall rankings. Which will often result in more people just walking in without even mentioning they found you on the web. When you make it easier for local clients to find you, you make it easier for them to support you.
Now let's look a little closer at those additional elements.
