Future of the Hotel Industry – Impact of Voice Search
How many of us use voice search to get details about the best hotels and the cheapest flights on Google? The nature of queries is seeing new changes since the advent of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana. More people have now started asking their queries rather than typing them out. Voice search is gaining prominence, albeit slowly, and is likely to be helpful for the hotel industry in many ways.
Voice Search and Its Impact
The volume of voice search is just about growing in size while the technology is improving by the day. According to Google, the overall use of voice assistants has gone up by 40% in the last year, and 20% of all its mobile queries are voice-activated.
Travel agents functioning online have observed that voice search will likely play a dominant role in travel bookings which will ultimately influence the way accommodation bookings are going to be done by consumers, impacting the performance of the hotel industry.
In this article, we attempt to detail how the different challenges that the hotel industry currently faces can be met by partnering with digital marketing agencies that provide quality SEO and voice optimization services.
#1: Improving the marketing strategy for the hotel industry
According to statistics, approximately 32% of consumers prefer voice search instead of typing in a query. That is, they are going to speak out their queries instead of typing them in. If your hotel does not figure in the voice search or listings, you are going to be left behind. This is to say that ineffective marketing strategies can kill your business.
It is not a secret anymore that professional and engaging website content is the key to marketing your website. If relevant hotel data is missing or does not appear in the search results, your hotel can be out of the race even before it begins.
Therefore, to be found at the top on search results pages, you need to implement effective SEO and voice search optimization strategies.
#2: Staying ahead of the competition
Intense competition among individual hotels, hotel chains, online aggregators, and price comparison websites makes it a challenging task for businesses in the hospitality sector to succeed.
The latest reports indicate a few startling but promising facts as regards voice-based searches. Voice-based commerce is expected to hit the $40 billion mark by 2022. Furthermore, voice search is already used by 55% of millennials. These statistics clearly indicate that the popularity of voice search is on the rise.
The need of the hour, therefore, is the implementation of a great strategy that combines both voice search optimization techniques and effective SEO to help you stay ahead of your competitors.
#3: Acquiring New Bookings/Customers
Building a great-looking website for your business is just one part of the equation. You need an effective strategy to scale up your hotel business by leveraging the power of digital marketing. You need to ensure that more users visit your website if your goal is to acquire new customers.
SEO is one of the proven strategies that drive organic traffic to your website and this, in turn, results in you getting new customers/bookings. However, it is also important to include voice search optimization as part of your SEO strategy. This is because voice search has started impacting SEO rankings in a big way and Google is assigning more emphasis on voice search optimization.
In the hotel industry, businesses have just started to appreciate the importance of optimizing their sites for voice search. You will have a head start if you choose to do it now.
#4: Improving customer loyalty
Customer retention is one of the major challenges faced by hotels. Rapidly changing guest preferences, expectations, and behaviors contribute a great deal to worsening the situation. Most people prefer to make hotel reservations right from their smartphones. If they find that your website is not mobile-friendly or responsive and making reservations is not simple and easy, they will never come back for more.
Hotels that strive to improve their online visibility and deliver memorable experiences through excellent amenities, personal touches, and great customer service are often rewarded with repeat business.
SEO and voice search optimization help you to get your website listed on the first page in search engine listings. As you achieve this goal, you must focus on improving visitors’ experience on your site to ensure customer loyalty.
#5: Maintaining Your Hotel’s Reputation Online
Your hotel’s brand image is impacted by the content you produce and the same generated through customer engagement, reactions, responses, etc. A few aspects that affect your hotel’s online reputation include negative reviews, social media reactions/responses, poor digital marketing campaigns, and security breaches. Further studies have shown that 49 percent of users will not look at your business if you don’t have at least a four-star review rating. Besides, 85 percent of users trust online reviews, and 65 percent trust the search engines when researching hotels.
As such, reputation management has emerged as one of the most important SEO strategies for beating the competition and enhancing sales. However, SEO, as applicable for reputation management, is different from traditional SEO. For reputation management, branded keywords are used and it includes mentions of your business, top executives, and products/services you offer. Voice search optimization will also be helpful in this regard given its growing popularity.
SayOne Digital
As the leading digital marketing agency in India, SayOne Digital focuses its efforts on growing your hospitality business through SEO and voice search optimization services. Whether it is about increasing the top line of your business, improving website traffic and conversions, or implementing SEO and voice search optimization, our professional team can help you achieve your goals quickly.
Digital marketing experts at SayOne have the experience to support you in overcoming all the problems listed above that are preventing you from growing your business. We will provide our services for FREE for the first 30 days to give you a feel of the possibilities. If you are satisfied with the results, we will sign an agreement with you, laying out clear-cut targets. We offer our services at highly competitive rates (one-tenth of the rates charged by our competitors). Besides, we are committed to submitting customized reports on a weekly or monthly basis to keep you updated on the progress of the implementation of SEO and voice search optimization strategies and outcomes.
