3 Tips for International Hotel Internet Marketing

Catering to an international audience is very important in the hospitality industry. For this reason, hotel revenue management teams should look beyond their borders and look at opportunities elsewhere. A lot of yield management practices make the mistake of focusing too much on developing an English website without considering how they can promote their hotel internationally. Some of the principles in search engine optimization in English-speaking countries are also applicable elsewhere.

But it is also crucial to remember that there are cultural connotations in the wording of these sites. People will type the content differently. Improving hotel SEO means that hotels should be aware of these differences and think of ways to take advantage of it. It is challenging to optimize a hotel website for an international audience at the same time to boost profitability. There are certain guidelines that can help your online hotel distribution strategy a success though. Among these are:

Language Targeting – obviously, targeting an international audience means creating a website in that language. However, some hotel revenue managers make the mistake of simply translating their English content to another language. Direct translation would not be that effective in this case, it is important to consider accurate translation containing words international audiences use.

Register at Local Search Engines – registering at top sites like Google and Yahoo is a must. But in certain countries, there are preferred search engines that locals patronize. In addition, registering a physical address in that location may also be beneficial. It will give you the advantage of local listing. The process is pretty straightforward and is quite effective.

Relocate Your Site’s Hosting – one highly overlooked factor is where your site is hosted. Most hotel revenue managers will simply set up a virtual host in their existing server. While this is acceptable, it is important to note that Google and other search engines actually give priority to web servers located to the origin of the search. That is, if your targeted searcher is searching in France, Google prioritize the sites hosted in that country.