The art of being found

The vast majority of hotels are found and booked via Booking.com. Yet it does pay to also appear as high as possible in the results of search engines like Google or Bing. After all, that means that, as a hotel, you actually build a relationship with your guest yourself instead of Booking.com claiming the hotel guest as its own customer. Good findability is therefore essential. The specialists at online marketing agency Becurious know better than anyone how hotels should go about this.

"More than 75 per cent of people click on the top results in Google when searching for a hotel," states Niels Drenth, online marketer at Becurious and a specialist in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). To directly point out the importance of such a top position. 

"So when we arrange that for hotels, we immediately make sure that both paid and organic results mention in the title that it is the actual hotel - with the correct name - as well as that it is possible to book for the lowest rate via that link," adds Thomas Dieben, founder and owner of Becurious. "After all, that's what the average hotel searcher or booker is looking for." 

Dieben and Drenth see daily examples of hotels that have their business online less well organised. And that can mean that they miss out on quite a few bookings, but also that they fail to build a direct relationship with their guests. 

Hotels have been quite spoilt by a website like Booking.com in recent years, Dieben argues. "Reservations come in almost automatically and there is no need to pay until a reservation is confirmed. This has made many hotels a bit lazy. Partly because of corona, they found out that they were very dependent on Booking and how important a direct relationship with a guest is. Because direct contact makes it much easier to inform guests about specials, offers or certain measures. We are now slowly seeing a change in thinking where hotel managers are realising the importance of their own findability." 

To add weight to his story, Dieben outlines how the average guest proceeds when looking for a hotel. "The vast majority of people start at Booking.com. In fact, that is a search engine in itself that displays a hotel selection that exactly meets the searcher's criteria. For example: 'hotel in Amsterdam, with 3 stars, good reviews, near the Vondelpark and with a family room'. From those results, potential guests already get a very good idea of the rates. Many people then decide to search directly to the website of the displayed hotels anyway. We call this the billboard effect, where Booking acts as a billboard. So as a hotel, you have to be findable within Booking.com anyway. Otherwise, it becomes very difficult to be findable in search engines." 

People searching further usually type the name of the hotel into Google, in technical terms a so-called 'branded search'. Dieben: "Ideally, the link to that hotel - including the cheapest rate and side links to the appropriate pages on the hotel website - then appears not only at the top of the search results list, but also at the top of the right-hand column of the results page. There, the Google Business Listings include a photo of the hotel, a review score, address details and a price comparator. The latter has both a free and a paid section and ideally, a hotel is also listed there with the cheapest rates at the top. So there are quite a few places on a results page where you need to claim a position. Especially now that Google is trying to snatch market share from Booking with its Hotel Finder feature." 

By no means all hotels have yet realised the importance of good online findability, see Dieben and Drenth. "Findability and a good website are not a priority for many hotels," says the latter. "Unlike e-commerce companies, for example, hotels focus much more on guest experience and pricing policy. Online, the hotel world is just a little less mature. While the average hotel guest - precisely because they arrange and buy more and more things online - does have very high expectations. For our clients, we make the difference by taking their website to a higher level: both in terms of content and technology. That's where we spend most of our time." 

Dieben gives an example: "We develop websites for hotels that load incredibly fast. This is not only very important for search engines because the loading time partly determines the position of a search result, but also for users. Because if a website is slow to load, the visitor quickly leaves. Then he prefers to go to Booking."

And again, for hotels, direct booking is ultimately preferable. Because a direct booking means not paying a commission to Booking, but also direct contact with the guest. "And for that, everything has to be right," says Dieben. "The technology behind a website, the content, the link to a reservation system and the price. Together with our clients, we make sure that basis is right. The next step is determining the right search terms and setting up our tools and configuring the right settings that ensure that a hotel with those search terms actually appears in the first place of the search results."     

Hotels that take care of their online presence together with Becurious's specialists often see the share in direct reservations increase by double digits, Drenth and Dieben know. "Because we extensively monitor everything around the website and findability," Drenth explains. "Conversion and findability are really improving by leaps and bounds. If only because we are integrating the reservation systems in the right way. In this - because of our years of experience and our knowledge of the hotel industry - we are really leading the way in this market." 

Another thing the websites developed by Becurious excel at is multilingualism. Not insignificant for findability by international guests. "It is precisely this multilingualism that is one of the reasons why we developed our own technology," Dieben explains. "With other website builders, it just wasn't good enough. Our content management system is specially made for multilingual websites. And for hotels in particular, that can be very important. If we analyse that a lot of website visitors come from France, for example, but that the bounce rate - the number of visitors who leave - is also very high, then we always recommend creating a French version of the website. By the way, and this is sometimes overlooked, it also means that your hotel staff is set up for French guests. And therefore speaks a word of French."

Cooperation with Becurious ultimately provides hotels with a smoothly functioning website with a seamlessly integrated reservation system, as well as excellent findability within search engines. "After all, the hotel industry is a very competitive market," Dieben concludes. "Knowing that more than 75 per cent of your guests don't look any further than the top result, you have to make sure that it's not Booking or a competitor that is there, but you. We take care of that."