SEO for Hotel: KPIs that Define Success for Your Hotel

How hotels can define (in collaboration with the agencies that they are working with) their successful key performance indicators (KPIs)?

Primarily, Google Analytics is the most credible source of information from which we are able to extract useful information for the performance of our clients. Data coming from the Audience, Acquisition sections will be able to help us comprehend any weaknesses or strong elements of our clients and help us draw a customised strategy according to the needs of our clients.

Another useful source of information is the interpretation of data from Google Webmaster Tools that will be reflected upon our report.

Another sub-section of our report should concern our off-site optimisation efforts in quantifiable results with the use of ahrefs link analysis tools. In other words, most agencies show their link building actions (e.g. actions on directory submission sites, article submissions etc.) but in many cases they do not quantify their actions into results. In this article, we are going to show few metrics that quantify your link building actions.

We should bear in mind that when we are working on a report related to the measurement of data we need to compare data that are of similar timeframe and not making arbitrary comparisons. In other words, we need to compare data of similar date range (in terms of day and month but different year). For example a good comparison would be: 1/1/2012 – 31/12/2012 vs. 1/1/2013 – 31/12/2013.

Without any further ado some of the most important KPIs that can define success of a hotel are:

Unique Visitors

(Audience>Overview)

Unique Visitors, according to Google Analytics: ‘’is the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period.’’ It’s more important to know that the number of unique visitors is going better (than last year) and this metric better reflects how many people are ‘’reached’’ through our website.

Bounce Rate

(Audience>Overview)

With Bounce Rate we are able to see the percentage of single-page visits. In other words, visits in which the person left our site from the entrance page without interacting with the page.

There’s no ‘’good’’ or ‘’bad’’ bounce rate. However, there’s bounce rate that we could perceive as encouraging or alarming for our websites. For instance, a percentage of less than 50% is not that alarming and it’s something common that most sites appear to have. Once the bounce rate appears to be show a bounce rate of more than 50%, 55% then it’s something that we should monitor more closely in order to assess any further actions to be made.

In order to stay alert for our clients (the case in point for hotels), then we will need to visit our Google Analytics account and create an alert based on which we will receive an update/alert for any website that gets a bounce rate of higher than 55% for instance or if it gets 0% (this means that by mistake the Google Analytics tracking code has been removed).

(Organic) Branded Keywords and Non Branded Keywords

(Acquisition>Keywords>Organic)

The organic branded keywords will show to clients how they perform in terms of branded keywords. In other words, keywords that come from their brand name (e.g. Meridian Hotel) or variations or misspellings (Merdian Hotel, Meidian Hotel, Merridian Hotel, Meridan Hotel etc.) of their brand name.

Within this list of our (organic) branded keywords we need to take into consideration the ‘’not provided’’ keywords and a safe way to allocate the ‘’not provided keywords’’ to the branded and non-branded keywords is the inclusion of a Secondary Dimension (Landing Pages).

So, for instance the landing page from our homepage (or the multiple language versions of our multilingual website) will go under the category of branded keywords. For the rest of the ‘’not provided’’ keywords under the secondary dimension ‘’Landing Pages’’ of all the other pages (except the homepage) will go under the category of non-branded keywords.

The sum of branded and non-branded keywords (including the not provided keywords), should be equal to the overall number of our Organic Search Traffic.

For your convenience, all the above (calculation of non-branded and branded keywords) are summed to the calculation below:

Conversion Rate

The Conversion Rate can be calculated:

Mobile Traffic (Unique Visits)

Bounce Rate – (mobile website)

The bounce rate is a reliable and effective indicator on whether the mobile version of our website needs redesign or it offers good user experience that ultimately can lead to bookings.

Conversion Rate – (mobile visitors)

The (mobile) Conversion Rate can be calculated:

Geo Performance

(Audience> Geo> Location)

It is important to confirm the top 5 list of our geo traffic. Having a list of the top countries that generate more traffic can help us get better decisions on:

Running PPC/display campaign on these countries.
Optimising in another language: Creating a new language version of a website, in the event that one country generates more traffic but its language version does not exist.

Keywords Performance

Keywords used to be the number one criterion for hoteliers on whether they are performing well or poorly. The keyword rankings can be another indicator of how a website (for certain keywords) is performing. In the event that a hotel is not performing that well for certain keywords that define its unique selling point (e.g. honeymoon hotel in {city}) and it’s outperforming, then we can intensify our onsite and offsite SEO actions in order to improve its rankings.

Acquisition

The Acquisition can help us show to clients the performance of various types of traffic (direct traffic, referral traffic and search traffic) between the current and the previous year, on a certain time.

Referrals

(Acquisition> All Referrals)

A (top 5) list of the top referring pages can help have better understanding of where our top referrers are coming from (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, some popular blogs etc.). We can furthermore expand our in-depth knowledge on the top referring pages by monitoring the landing pages that have come up from these referring sites.

Google Webmaster Tools

(Search Traffic > Search Queries)

For Search Queries on Google Webmaster Tools we cannot see data coming from last year but only the last 3 months. So the screenshot that we see below show the performance of our website on Impressions and Clicks compared to last month.

The screenshot below is enough to summarise the overall monthly performance of our SEO actions, which is reflected upon our keywords on SERPs.

Revenue from Online Bookings

(Conversion> E-Commerce> Overview)

With e-commerce data from our booking engine we will be able to have clear understanding of our digital sales in terms of transactions/sales (bookings) and the revenue from these online bookings. In this way we will be able to comprehend better the value of our digital business.

Link Building Actions – Overview

In order to quantify our link building actions and add value in our off-site action it’s better to use link analysis tools that will offer us (and hotels) a better understanding of our link building efforts to see how much they bring in results. The ideal tool to quantify and measure our link building actions is Ahrefs.

Backlinks / Referring Pages

Referring Domains

One of the most important metrics on link building is related to the unique referring domains that a website receives. It’s more important to gain a high number of unique (and high quality) domains rather than getting from one domain 500 backlinks.

Assessment of link building actions with URL Rank and Domain Rank

If we want to show and assess the quality of our link building actions then the URL Rank and the Domain Rank are indicators of the quality of our work.

URL Rank

According to Ahrefs, “range of the rank is from 0-100. Ahrefs URL Rank measures how important the URL is by verifying the number and quality of its backlinks. Ahrefs’s algorithm, calculates a score between 1-100, with 100 being the highest. A rank of 0-30 means the URL is unpopular, 31-70 means that it is average and 71-100 indicates that it is very popular”.

Thus, if we want to increase the URL rank to 71, we need to implement a series of link building actions on:

(High quality) directory submissions sites.
Guest posting on multi-author (high quality) sites/blogs.

Domain Rank

According to Ahrefs, Domain Rank “measures how important the domain is by verifying the number and quality of its backlinks. Ahrefs’s algorithm, calculates a score between 1-100, with 100 being the highest. A rank of 0-30 means the domain is unpopular, 31-70 means that it is average and 71-100 indicates that it is very popular”.

Therefore, if we want to increase the domain rank to reach the logarithmic scale of 71 and above, we need to put into action a series of link building efforts with high quality websites.

Your Thoughts

Are there any other key performance indicators that you consider as vital for the performance of your clients from hotel industry? Let me know in the comments section!