Hotels & SEO: Balancing Brand, Keywords & Structured Data

When you’re heading off on a trip, how do you go about planning your accommodation? Let me reframe that: do you search broadly or specifically? Wait, let me try again: are you loyal to a hotel or booking brand?

Brand loyalty and customer retention vs. fresh conversions is one of the most renowned playoffs in the business world. It’s pretty concerning if you’re not ranking for your own branded searches. So I wanted to explore how travel businesses capture the undecided, and I’ve looked into a few high-end hotels to investigate this. How do they or how might they reach those who have the money and desire to spend on a luxury stay but don’t know their name? How do they reach those who are, perhaps, loyal to another brand?

Does The Dorchester Collection Rely Too Heavily on Its Name?

The Dorchester Collection is a group that owns luxury hotels and residences around the world. Through its content, it paints a picture of itself for the reader: together, its text and images evoke luxury, prestige, “a certain way of life”, offering a little bit of mystique.

The Dorchester isn’t an outlier in its sector for the fact that a solid majority of the traffic it gains is from branded traffic: people don’t tend to search for a brand name with the intent of discovering and then clicking on another brand’s website.

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But viewing the site’s domain overview in Semrush, it doesn’t seem to be tapping into non-branded, high-intent keywords, either. Even after filtering out all branded terms, including the Collection’s hotel names from the search terms, we’re still seeing items that point to searchers who know what they’re looking for: hotels in a specific location. 

Few if any of those are first-place rankings (I’m excluding “park lane london hotel” because the Dorchester has an establishment under the name 45 Park Lane). It gets a shout for “5 star hotels in ascot berkshire”, “5 star hotel ascot” and “dubai hotel pool”, before we slip into second place rankings.

When we move into the keywords it ranks second place for, we start to see an increase in the broader keywords that may be more useful for the brand if it wants to draw in new customers: “london hotels with spa and pool”, “hotels in london with spa and pool”, “luxury hotel los angeles ca”, “hotel with pool dubai”, “london luxury afternoon tea”. But they’re still surrounded by terms that clearly indicate the searchers know what they’re looking for.

Good Optimisation Also Sees Results in “Packs”

What my analysis here rather conveniently ignores is another playoff, between the hotel pack and local pack. 

Hotels can be marked up with schema for a chance of appearing in the hotel pack at the top of the search and, as Semrush rightly comments, users may never explore the SERP below the pack if it turns up hotels they’re looking for. 

The local pack is for:

• Hotels near the searcher - probably not that useful to a luxury hotel, in all honesty: this is an assumption, but how many travellers are booking costly luxury accommodation on a whim because they’re nearby? It’s not a stable source of business to rely on, either.
• Hotels near a location mentioned in the search - much more useful: “Hotels in [location]” is probably what I’d be searching for if I were booking travel. 

With these considerations in mind, I further filtered the keywords to account only for one of the Dorchester’s main London hotels: The Dorchester itself. Again, filtering out any branded searches, it’s fifth-place rankings before the hotel achieves “iconic london hotels” and “hotel london 5”, with respectful SVs of 1900 and 1000... respectively.

In a search for “5 star hotels London”, the Dorchester doesn’t make it to the top three of the hotel pack, and that’s not because it hasn’t got the structured data for the hotel pack:

So to return to my initial analysis of the site’s content: on the surface, it seems this particular site isn’t doing so well using terms people are searching for while also conveying its identity and that sentiment of luxury. After all, mystique isn’t searchable.

The Dorchester could possibly remedy this by being more specific: could they hint at the cuisines they offer “dining” in, the purpose behind the “space” they have? Could they mention somewhere on their homepage that their hotels are all 5-star? Not even the meta details quite capture terms people may be searching for.

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The Savoy Hits SERPs and Packs with Keyword Usage

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For comparison’s (or maybe argument’s) sake, I took a look at the top runner in the hotel pack for my “5 star hotel London search”: The Savoy. Admittedly, it’s got the advantage of only needing its homepage to focus on one location - the Savoy is a singular hotel in London, The Dorchester Collection is a group with its global selection of hotels subcategorised beneath its homepage. So this isn’t by any means a competitor analysis. 

But The Savoy does show us some website handicraft in capturing search queries: it calls out specific features (pool, room types via the carousel), builds prestige subtly with a bit of historic storytelling. Its meta details call out that it's five star, it’s a hotel, and it’s in London.

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For me a standout feature from the keyword overview for The Savoy is the number and variety of keywords it’s ranking number one for in the SERP. Filter out branded searches and you can still take your pick of a quantity of high-intent and relevant keywords that, as we saw earlier, were a struggle to find for The Dorchester Collection or its eponymous hotel, The Dorchester:

• afternoon tea london
• 5 star hotels in london
• 5 star hotel london
• london 5 star hotels
• afternoon tea in london
• 5 star hotel in london
• luxury hotels in london
• hotels.in london
• london hotel 5
• london 5 star hotel
• 5 stars hotel london
• hotel afternoon tea
• room luxury hotel
• afternoon tea hotels
• famous hotels london uk
• luxury accommodation london uk
• 5-star hotels in london
• five star hotel london
• 5 stars hotels in london
• hotel london 5 star
• 5 star hotels in central london
• luxury hotel in london
• luxury london hotel
• hotels in london luxury
• luxury suites

There’s much more detail we could go into here, but on the surface it’s already easy to spot how different approaches to content and SEO can impact rankings for high-intent, non-branded searches. A beautiful site and branding that conveys the brand’s personality and can convert its target audience is excellent, but targeted SEO to secure non-branded rankings is vital to get them to the site in the first place.

At ICS-digital, we pride ourselves in our collaborative means of working, with our in-house content and editorial team and tech SEO service coming together to create a blended approach that achieves the best for our clients. So when it comes to balancing the very technical aspects of SEO with the essence and personality of a bespoke brand, we’re the experts. Contact us to see what we can do for you today.