What is SEO?
SEO is an abbreviation for search engine optimization.
It is the process of increasing the volume and quality of website traffic to your website. In the modern era, Google dominates the search engine in its purest form, a company that rewards certain elements that cater to its algorithm. We will go over how your website can cater to Google’s algorithm in more detail later, but for now, remember that having a good SEO helps people find your website and can drive traffic to the products and services that your business provides.
Why is Serviced Apartment SEO Important?
According to a survey conducted by ‘Backlinko,’ the top result in Google receives 31.7% of all clicks.
Many web users are content to click on the second, third, or fourth result. However, if your website does not appear on the first page of a Google search, it is likely that people will not find it.
What does it mean to have good SEO and how does my website get there?
Before we can improve your website’s SEO, we must first understand how it works. Below are the ways in which Google’s algorithm communicates with your website.
Crawling
Crawlers or ‘spiders’ (internet bots) examine webpages and follow links, discovering new pages for search engine indexing.
Their job is to identify new pages and recognise dead links.
It is critical to keep your website updated in order to attract crawlers.
Indexing
An index is similar to a web page library, with information on each page. After crawling the websites, the search engine will categorise them based on content, page, and author, and will create an archive of these web pages, which will be shown to the user based on their needs.
When you use Google.com to search, you are only searching Google’s web index. Microsoft Bing, Yahoo!, and Baidu are also popular search engines.
Ranking
A search engine’s algorithm ranks websites within its index and organises organic search results based on relevance.
For example, if a user searches for “apartments in London for short-term rental,” the search engine will look through its database for web pages that display apartments listed in the London area that are available for short-term rental. The search engine will then display these pages as the most relevant content to the user.
Keywords, categories, and tags can help a website rank higher than its competitors, because the more relevant the search engine believes the page is, the higher it will rank on the results display page.
What does Google’s ranking look for?
Google will rank websites based on two factors:
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is designed according to how relevant your page is to the user’s search query. In order to have a high ranking over your competitors, you should make internal improvements to your website, focusing on the copy, design and user experience of the various web pages available on the internet.
Factors that can improve your on-page SEO include:
- Internal links
- URL optimisation
- Title tags
- Images
- User Experience
- Meta descriptions
- Headlines
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO relates to changes to external sites which directly influence your own website. This means that there are no changes to your own website, but other websites which link back to your own can make your site look more relevant to a search engine. If other websites promote you to their audience, your content will be exposed to a bigger audience, appearing trustworthy and increasing your ranking in search engines.
Off-page SEO methods include:
- Reviews of your services on other websites
- Social media collaborations, tagging and engagement
- Link building (hyperlinks to your webpage, from another website)
- Guest posts collaborations (mutual blog posts)
- PR & Marketing building
What is on page SEO?
Improving your on- and off-page SEO is extremelly important to your website, as it can help you reach a wider audience and appear more reliable. The following are some suggestions for improving your SEO for the serviced apartments sector:
Step 1: Find relevant and appropriate keywords.
Businesses must balance the importance of words that rank highly and words that are unsaturated in order to optimise their SEO.
One of the most effective methods is to use Google Ads’ Keyword Planner. This tool allows you to investigate potential keywords and select the best ones based on factors such as search volume and ranking difficulty.
After you’ve chosen your keywords, you should effectively incorporate them into your content.
Step 1: Find relevant and appropriate keywords.
Businesses must balance the importance of words that rank highly and words that are unsaturated in order to optimise their SEO.
One of the most effective methods is to use Google Ads’ Keyword Planner. This tool allows you to investigate potential keywords and select the best ones based on factors such as search volume and ranking difficulty. After you’ve chosen your keywords, you should effectively incorporate them into your content in order to rank higher on various search engines.
As an example, consider the following:
• Meta title: Book a serviced apartment for your next business trip.
• Meta description: Roomspace serviced apartments offer flexibility, central locations and co-working spaces, perfect for hybrid and office working.
• Blog/Page title: Why Do Business Travelers Book with Roomspace Serviced Apartments?
What key phrases should you employ here? Your keywords should be determined by three factors:
• Search volume estimation
• Relevancy
As a result, we would suggest using keywords like “hybrid working for business travel”, “co-working spaces for short stays” and “serviced apartments in [London]”.
Of course, these will not be applicable to every page, but there are numerous websites and plugins available to assist you in determining the best keywords for your content and target audience. For web pages and blog posts (like this one! ), our team employs Yoast SEO (WordPress) as well as sites such as Ahrefs, Google Ads, and Wordstream.
Step 2: Increase keyword density
To improve your website’s SEO, you should increase the number of keywords you use across different pages on your website. We recommend sticking to between 4-6 keywords on each page, but this depends on the amount of text on the page, as well as the relevancy of the keywords.
When building a new page, you should keep the following in mind:
- Build a page with keyword rich content, using your keywords and appropriate synonyms throughout the page.
- Include keyword-rich headings that explain why your page is relevant and trustworthy from the start. Increase the size of headings and subheadings in the text to indicate to the search engine which parts of the text are headings and subheadings.
Step 3: Other ways to improve SEO
Experts believe that the following will also enhance your organic search ranking:
- Update your website’s content on a regular basis, both visually and technically. Whether your website requires new apartment photos, a more comprehensive enquiry page, or a calendar with availability dates, make sure you are constantly improving it. This will not only ensure that the search engines continue to notice your page, but it will also improve your user experience and encourage increased engagement on your website.
- Minimize page load speed, to prevent users from exiting your page. If your page is taking too long to load, users will click off your site and likely go to a competitor’s page.
- Consider compressing the files on the page (reducing their storage size), minifying Javascript, CSS and HTML on the site, and caching your webpages to reduce loading time.
