In the competitive New York City hotel market, Marriott International, Bethesda, Maryland, is focusing its search engine optimization efforts on organic search by targeting local keywords instead of paid search.
Editor’s note: Click here for an in-depth look at hotel companies’ search engine optimization efforts in the January/February issue of HOTELS Magazine.
Given the importance of neighborhoods in New York City, Marriott has been uncovering local keywords that have good search value and have relevance to the properties but aren’t highly competitive. In addition to this, like other hotel companies focusing on niche customer groups, Marriott aligns keywords to the experiences of guests at its hotels.
Marriott supplement organic with paid when rankings aren’t high enough, or conversely, when rankings are so strong that they don’t need to put time and resources into organic and have some leftover budget. However, there has been a pullback in paid search efforts, as organic search is the top driver for traffic and conversion on Marriott’s hotel websites. “We’ve definitely pulled back on the paid search and focused on that organic ranking,” said Kelli Crean, a cluster e-commerce manager for Marriott International covering the New York/New Jersey region. “We’ve seen that organic search has really dominate a lot of the space, so paid search is only used sparingly to fill in the gaps.”
Crean said that for a large market like New York, Marriott targets short-tail SEO terms and add modifiers to them in addition to long-trail SEO.
Fully understanding Google’s Carousel feature remains a work in progress, having spurred a concerted effort for compelling content, leveraging Google+ and back links. “We really put a focus into how can we get up there, how can we get into that space and the top listings. With Google, it’s going to be a constant evolution, so we’re focused on the foundations of our strategies so we can rank strongly going forward in the future,” Crean said.
