Hotel Blogging: How to Create a Successful Blog to Attract More Guests and Maximize Bookings

In 2024, more than 1.5 billion tourists were travelling internationally. And almost all of these trips started with a Google search.

From finding attractions to booking stays and tours, the internet has become the go-to resource for travel planning, and the best way to stand out within the travel industry is by helping your audience book the best trip to their destination.

At Kurt’sCopy, we help hotels build blogs to reach a wider audience, grow their online authority, and become trusted resources within their destinations. This drives bookings for their stay while establishing a strong brand voice that stands out from the competition.

In this blog post, we will detail why hotel blogging has become a necessity in the modern hotel industry and provide actionable tips on how you can begin leveraging your blog to generate more stays for your accommodation.

Why Your Hotel Needs a Blog

Hotel blogs have become one of the marketing pillars of the hospitality industry. While there are several benefits to hotel content marketing, these are a few of the key reasons why you should incorporate it into your hotel marketing strategy:

• Boosts Visibility and Traffic: By creating content around common travel tips and questions, you provide valuable resources for travellers to your destination. When your content is optimized for search engines, potential guests can find it online, creating a channel for connecting directly with travellers. This, in turn, generates exposure to your brand and drives traffic to your website for you to convert into bookings.
• Builds Audience Engagement: When a traveller comes across a helpful resource online, they commonly want to share it across their channels. Whether it’s their own blog or social media, hotel blogs generate user engagement, which creates a compounding effect on your growing hotel brand.
• Generates Trust and Authority: Whether they found it through an online search or social media, an effective hotel blogging strategy consistently serves as a helpful resource. This leaves a lasting impression on its audience, positioning you as a trusted authority in your destination for all of their travel needs, especially when it comes time to book their stay.

When all is said and done, a hotel blog’s primary purpose is to generate touch points with a broad audience. Creating content around common questions and themes for your destination lets you connect with potential guests at multiple points in their booking journey.

Then, when reserving their stay, they will recognize your brand on the booking engine and trust you to deliver an unforgettable hotel experience.

4 Key Elements of a Successful Hotel Blog

From a local boutique to a corporate brand, hotel blogs can serve various functions and goals. On the surface, content marketing is about driving traffic and converting bookings. But really, a hotel blog focuses on long-term success by focusing on various key elements. A successful hotel blogging strategy incorporates these key attributes:

1. Inspires Guests With Brand Storytelling

At one time, travel inspiration primarily came from magazines. But with the dawn of the internet, blogs quickly became the go-to resource for finding your next dream destination. Today, hotels can leverage this travel connectivity to inform and inspire potential guests to visit their hotels.

Using your unique brand voice, you can leverage your blog to speak directly to your audience. Tell them why your destination and hotel are must-visits, and paint them a picture of the ultimate getaway. In doing so, you may even tempt a visitor who wasn’t planning a trip to your destination, creating an increased demand for your service where there wasn’t one before.

For example, say you are running a hotel on a lesser-visited Greek island. Creating a blog post titled “X Best Greek Islands for Escaping the Tourist Crowds” will let you connect with people looking to go off the beaten path.

This allows you to connect with a target audience that can benefit from your services and provides a channel for pitching why your stay is the best choice to satisfy their wants.

2. Provides Insider Tips

Another aspect all successful hotel blogs have in common is that they are used to share insider tips for their destinations. By providing unique travel tips, you show you are a travel expert in your region. This, in turn, will make your audience more likely to trust you in all aspects of their travel planning, most notably when booking their hotel.

3. Targets Relevant Types of Travellers

One aspect that many marketers overlook is tailoring their hotel blog posts around types of travellers. You can target plenty of general travel posts, but the ones that drive the best conversion are those that sell a specific experience.

Attraction, restaurant, and event highlights are great for targeting leisure travellers. However, attracting business, honeymoon, or solo travellers requires an entirely different approach.

For example, business travellers prioritize professional services. As such, you should create content detailing nearby business centres, work share spaces, and meeting venues, emphasizing your hotel as a convenient nearby stay.

This personalized approach works for all types of travellers. Create a guest profile for each type you would like to target and brainstorm a few things they prioritize when planning.

4. Incorporates High Potential Keywords

Creating fantastic content means nothing if it isn’t being read. For this reason, incorporating high-potential keywords is one of the most important aspects of a successful hotel blog. KeySearch is an excellent, low-cost keyword research tool for finding relevant queries, but you can also use Google Keyword Planner to get you started.

Start by brainstorming content ideas. Then, plug these keywords into your tool to produce a list of related queries and variations. Look through this list for keywords with a high search volume and a relatively low difficulty score.

When you find the keyword you would like to target, group together all of its variations and incorporate them into your content.

There is more to using keywords to their full potential, but following the steps above is enough to get you started and begin driving traffic to your hotel website.

3 Blog Topics to Attract Guests

The hardest part of starting a hotel blog is generating ideas that drive traffic and interest. You want your hotel blog ideas to be something your audience wants to read. But you also want to make sure it is something that they are searching for.

Luckily, generating ideas gets easier with time, and once you get started, you will quickly have a long list of topics you want to cover. In the meantime, here are a few hotel blog post ideas to get you started.

1. Highlight Local Attractions

The easiest way to get your hotel blog started is through local attraction posts. Start with the top tens, then break them into specific feature highlights.

For instance, “10 Top Attractions in [Destination]” is one of the most common posts hotels will start their blogs with. However, this can serve as a template for dozens of posts. Simply replace “Attractions” with museums, restaurants, historical landmarks, or any other standout feature of your destination, and you will have a quick list of easy blog post topics you can cover.

Another quick tip: After writing these Top 10 listicles, you can break it down further and create a blog post about each featured item. This is a quick and easy way to build up some topical authority around the theme of the original post while driving additional traffic to your site.

2. Announce Upcoming Events and Festivals

The great thing about operating in a popular area with local events and festivals is that they drive reliable tourism traffic to your destination. But, you need to know how to capitalize on it.

An easy way to promote your hotel to festival-goers is to create an ultimate guide for the event. Provide everything they need to know to plan a fantastic experience, including festival highlights, schedule, and insider tips.

At the bottom of the post, you can include suggestions on where to stay, placing your accommodation as the #1 hotel for the event.

The trick to getting the most out of these posts is publishing them when festival-goers buy their tickets. Typically, these tourists will begin planning their trip 6 months before the event.

If you are publishing a new post, be sure to have it out there in time or update the previous year’s post to include the most recent information.

3. Celebrate Guests and Their Stories

A hotel blog is a great way to share positive guest experiences and reinforce your authority as a leading hospitality provider. While these hotel blog content ideas won’t do much regarding SEO traffic, they are a great way to nurture leads into future guests.

The key to creating these types of posts effectively is finding the right candidate. Interact with your guests to uncover unique guest experiences with your hotel. When you see an inspiring story, ask if you can include it on your blog and share it across your social media platforms.

You’ll be surprised by how many people connect with a good travel story and plan their future trips around it.

SEO Best Practices for Hotel Blogs

Writing helpful content is one thing, but you also need to ensure your target audience can find it. This is why search engine optimization (SEO) is so important to the success of hotel blogging. Here are a few tips for making your hotel blog posts search-engine friendly without compromising the quality of your hotel content.

Use Targeted Keywords

Keyword research is the foundation of successful SEO. Before writing any content, you want to ensure it targets a query people are searching for. However, you also want to make sure it is a term for which you have a reasonable chance of ranking.

Keyword research starts with the right tools. I suggest KeySearch as a great beginner-friendly tool, but you can always use the free Google Keyword Planner to help get you started.

Once you have decided on a tool, start plugging in terms related to your content ideas. This will yield a comprehensive list of related keywords that can be targeted within your content or saved for a later post.

Now, you aren’t going to want to use every keyword that turns up in the results. Instead, look for keywords with a high search volume but a difficulty score relative to your site’s domain authority.

KeySearch provides information regarding what difficulty score you should target, but you can always do it yourself by checking the domain authorities of the websites currently ranking for your query.

Internal Linking for Navigation

If you are looking to boost your online traffic, then you have likely heard of the importance of external links. As a hotel, these will come naturally. However, internal linking should not be overlooked, even though you won’t find nearly as many resources for it online.

Internal linking guides both users and search engines through your site’s hierarchy. It shows what pages are related and the direction you want users to go throughout your content marketing funnel.

Along with giving context to your content, internal links are pivotal to the converting power of your hotel blog. Every post needs to include CTAs, directing readers to either new blog posts or your bookings page.

Create Topical Authority

The easiest way to begin ranking on Google and other search engines is to build up topical authority. This is when you create a series of pages around a singular theme. In doing so, you become an authority for that theme, making search engines more likely to rank you for relevant searches.

Take the example of creating content around local events and festivals. Creating a basic event calendar establishes a parent page for that content cluster. Then, create an ultimate guide for each of the events and link to them from the calendar. In doing so, you build your topical authority around local events, become a trusted resource, and earn higher rankings for each blog post in the topic cluster.

Creating a topic cluster is easy to do independently with some planning. However, when working with an already established hotel blog, I like to use SurferSEO’s topic mapping tool to find opportunities to reinforce the topical authority that’s already present.

Share on Social Media

Social media impacts 52% of travellers’ planning decisions. A presence on these platforms is critical to any hotel content marketing strategy.

The good news is that having a blog is a quick way to build your social presence, as it is as easy as sharing your blog content across all your channels. While the best hotel blogs adapt each piece of content to their medium, simply sharing your content leads to it being re-shared and reaching a wider audience.

Additionally, search engines, like Google, use social media as a user signal that determines search rankings. So, having a presence generates referral visits and can boost organic traffic.

Measuring Success and Maintaining Your Blog

Maintaining a hotel blog requires a significant commitment of time and resources. While it has the potential for an even more substantial ROI, it requires consistent analytics and monitoring to ensure you are hitting your targets. Here are a few quick tips to ensure you get the most out of your marketing blog.

Tracking Performance

I start every day by checking my analytics tools for each of my and my client’s websites. This includes checking rankings, page performance, and conversions. As a content marketing expert, I rely on various tools to track these KPIs, including Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SurferSEO.

Now, if you are a hotel manager and plan on managing your accommodation’s blog yourself, you don’t need to pay for all of these tools. The free versions will be more than enough. Rely mainly on Google Search Console and Analytics to track overall web traffic, comparing year-over-year data to ensure increasing performance.

Consistent Publication Schedule

The key to blog marketing success is consistency. Find a publication schedule that works for you and your available resources, and stick with it. Google loves active websites. Maintaining a consistent publication schedule shows search engines that you are active and relays to your audience when they can expect new content.

At a minimum, I suggest that new hotels post at least two blogs per month on a biweekly schedule. However, the more frequently you post, the more keywords you will rank for, the more traffic you will drive to your website, and the more bookings you will have for your hotel.

Content Updates

Once your blog is established, updating your content becomes a quick and easy way to maintain a publication schedule. First, updates take much less work than writing a blog post from scratch, freeing up time for you to focus resources where they matter most, delivering exceptional hospitality.

Secondly, search engines tend to value matured content, but they don’t like outdated information. So, by updating your older blog posts, you are leveraging the authority that the page already has while providing fresh information for users. This often results in a quick boost to your search engine rankings and improves organic traffic.

Generate More Bookings With Kurt’sCopy

At Kurt’sCopy, we have experience boosting hotel organic traffic by up to 617% in just one year of our services. Your time and resources mean a lot. Don’t waste them on sub-par writers. Schedule a free content marketing consultation and learn how we can turn your hotel blog into a booking-generating machine.