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Is Hotel SEO Dead? Not by a Long Shot – More Than Half of Your Website’s Revenue Depends on It. By Max Starkov and Sue Wiker Marketers love exclaiming “SEO is dead!”

Is Hotel SEO Dead? Not by a Long Shot – More Than Half of Your Website’s Revenue Depends on It

And heralding the next big thing that will save your website – social media, retargeting, mobile, tablets, you name it. However, regardless of what some in the industry say, SEO is still alive and well. HeBS Digital’s own experience categorically shows that more than half of website booking revenue (56% to be exact) across our client portfolio comes as direct referral from the search engines, including organic and paid search.

The ongoing Google Panda updates (Panda 3.9 just launched) have made many hotel websites with thin and weak content obsolete and have raised the bar for hotel websites, demanding not only relevant and deep content but also unique and engaging content on the site. Hoteliers are also challenged to keep their hotel website consistently updated with fresh content as this significantly affects SEO. Case Study: Hotel Search Engine Revenues SEO revenues: 32.7%SEM revenues: 22.9% What’s left? 1. 2. 3. 4. Marketers weigh offline vs. online channel ROI. REPORT FROM THE U.S.

Marketers weigh offline vs. online channel ROI

—The intense focus in the industry on creating a strong presence and thriving online and mobile channels can be telling of just how much hotel marketers believe consumers are evolving. Last month during a general session at the EyeforTravel North American Distribution Summit in Las Vegas, Clem Bason, president of the Hotwire Group, said at some point the “traditional TV market will die,” while Jack Feuer, founder and president of Digital Marketing Works, said he believes “TV advertising is in trouble.” Leisure and business travelers are shifting their focus to online media to research hotel information, according to a Google Travel Study released in May. Of leisure travelers, 82% use the Internet as a source to research hotels, while 6%, 5% and 3% primarily use TV, magazines and newspapers, respectively.

The statistics for business travelers weren’t much different, varying no more than two percentage points for each source. Source: Google Travel Study, May 2012. A Crystal Clear Explanation of How Social Media Influences SEO. In the history of search engine optimization the rank of a piece of content in search engine results has typically come down to two key drivers: relevancy and authority.

A Crystal Clear Explanation of How Social Media Influences SEO

Relevancy is all about using the right keywords in your headlines, sub-headlines and anchor text to match what people are searching for online. Authority has predominantly been defined by the number and type of sites that are linking to your content via inbound links. Pretty standard stuff, right? Well recently, things have changed a bit. More and more, search engines have begun to incorporate social context into their search results. What is Social Search? "Social search" is an evolving term for the way in which search engines factor a user's social network -- also referred to as social graph -- into how results are displayed after a search query.

Examples of Social Search Google Plus Your World Bing Social Search This summer, Bing announced a new version of its search engine.