Reviews Help the Ranks
In order to bring more people to your hotel, you need to make sure you give the travellers what they want. That means above average service with caring and respect, quick transactions and quick response to requests. What helps the rest of the world find out about these great qualities is reviews. Reviews help the ranks in a website search as well as surveys that travellers take for different companies to show their appreciation.
By showing reviews both on your own website as well as others, you increase the opportunity to bring in even more customers. The more places you are mentioned on the web the more people will know about you. This could be considered the Internet’s version of word-of-mouth.
This is actually called search engine optimization (SEO) and SEO helps you rank higher in search results. With enough information out there on your hotel, you could conceivably be the first hotel mentioned when the results come back on a search.
What’s happening is when a search engine looks for something, not only does it “only” look for keywords or tags, but it also considers the fact that reviews indicate that a business matters. So with reviews on the Internet it tells search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing, among others, that this isn’t some fly-by-night website but it counts and, hey!, let’s show other people.
There are a few clues on how to get reviews to help the ranks. You’ll need to get your company listed everywhere on the Internet that can complement your hotel. For instance: travel websites, travel review sites, chambers of commerce, tourist sites, and the list could go on.
Ask for reviews from your customers as they check out or check in. Of course, for it to be a good review you want to offer stellar customer service. Besides travel-specific sites such as these, you should post reviews on sites such as ProntoHotel.com, Yelp, Yahoo! Local, GetListed, CitySearch.com and AboutUs.org.
By creating backlinks to these sites, that is, have someone click on your company name within these sites to bring them to your own home page; you can succeed in even higher rankings. This coupled with anchor text, the words you use to embed your link, you will be able to experience great success.
Reviews help the ranks of your own website, as well as your specific hotel location. The more information available on you and your services and staff, the more the search engines find on you. The more information (SEO) you produce about yourself, the higher your rank will be on the results page.
