We all know how important content marketing is, not just from an SEO perspective but from a conversion perspective too. Content is a powerful tool that can help you generate more bookings on a number of levels:

•  It provides fuel for social media posts and will help to build and maintain engagement

•  It provides raking signals to Google to obtain and maintain higher positions in the SERPS

•  It gives other sites a reason to link to you, helping with SEO

•  It gives website visitors a reason to remain on your page

•  It gives email subscribers a reason to open your email messages

•  It encourages visitors to book rooms

Blogs are key to unlocking all of these benefits but, while this type of content marketing activity should be a given for your hotel website, it’s also one of the easiest things to get wrong. To ensure you are unlocking all of the possibilities that content marketing presents, double check that you aren’t making any of these common blogging mistakes.

If you haven’t taken the time to sit down and document your content marketing strategy, you aren’t alone. Research by the Content Marketing Institute indicates that 60% of all B2C marketers fail to document their strategy. If you don’t have a strategy for your blogs in place, you’re less likely to create content that helps you guide visitors towards your conversion goals, such as carrying out a rate comparison or making a reservation. Your posts may be well written and well received but, if they aren’t created with a particular goal in mind, you’re unlikely to be making the number of conversions you should be.

Generating new content can be a challenge but, frequent content creation is a must. Not only does regular blog posting encourage your visitors to come back to your site again and again, therefore deepening their brand loyalty, it also helps build stronger SEO foundations.

The more optimized pages you have on your site, the better your hotel’s search engine rankings will be on Google. Frequently failing to post new blogs means that you’re opening the field up to your competitors. You’re allowing them to give more ranking food to Google and leapfrog your own rankings. You’re also leaving the playing field clear for them to present more reasons for your potential guests to click through to their site instead of your own.

Having a lack of fresh content can also make other marketing activities, such as social media post creation and email marketing, much more difficult and more time consuming.

Blogs should not always be overtly sales focused. While they are important for nurturing leads and directing readers to take an action, your blog should not be filled with post after post of promotion. If a glance through your latest posts reveals a host of articles promoting offers and special rates, you need to ramp up your interesting, educational, informational and entertaining post production.

It can be hard to think up new and interesting ideas for blog content but, there is a big difference between what you consider an interesting post and what your site visitors are actually looking for.

If you are creating blog posts without referencing any of your marketing analytics, chances are you aren’t tuned in to what your visitors are actually looking for. Creating buyer personas will give you some indication of what makes your guests tick but you’ll also need to couple this with data from Google Analytics (or other analytics platform). An easy solution to this problem is to look at which search queries are drawing visitors to site and then build your next blog posts around those keywords.

If you are struggling with your content marketing, get in touch with our team to find out how we can help you get your blogging back on track.