Hotels have the opportunity of generating up to 60% higher revenue from direct bookings than from OTAs and other sources. This makes having a great direct booking strategy in place mandatory for any hotelier. Knowing where you’re excelling or where there are opportunities is half the battle and you can win by monitoring and discussing the right KPI’s for your property.

In this post we’ll discuss the KPIs that matter most for hotel SEO campaigns and why. We will look at how AI is an added layer to the search landscape and how we can combine all the metrics that matter to tell the holistic story about your business growth and how you an use that story to increase your occupancy rates!

How is your hotel website ranking and performing in traditional search and AI-driven discovery?

Right now we are in one of the most transformative eras in search engine optimization. Historically, SEO campaign efficacy was measured by tracking keyword rankings, organic traffic and conversion metrics through platforms such as Google Analytics, Ahrefs and Google Search Console. But what happens when you add the AI Overviews and LLM’s like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude into the mix? 74-83% of searches on Google that trigger the AI overview will end with no click to an external website. But the potential customer has seen the brand and been given the information they seek. So how do we measure this?

Currently traditional search engines like Google and Bing are the only companies providing reporting on their platforms. None of the LLM’s at the time this blog was created offer anything of the sort. So you would have to rely on third party vendors that are at best guessing based on what they think would be happening. Spoiler alert: they’re usually way off when it comes to verifiable information in traditional search so we do not put too much stock into those numbers.

Getting an accurate measurement of AI citations right now is not reliable or feasible. Even if you were to compile a list of sample prompts and check them in each platform the issues facing you include; 

• Having a limited sample size that can’t be scaled
• Personalization for actual people using these LLM platforms giving them a completely different answer
• Inconsistency in outputs where you may rank 1st, 2nd or 3rd for the same prompt

So then what do we do? For most businesses your focus will primarily be on commercial queries such as “Red and white sneakers for women” as opposed to informational queries such as “how many days in March”. In these instances LLM’s are running a process called retrieval augmentation generation which is where it performs a search as part of it’s output versus relying on trained memory.

So if you monitor your SEO rankings on the traditional search platform that the LLM is using you’ll have a more robust idea of what’s going on. At the time of this blog post this would be Google and Bing, as Brave does not offer any tools that would assist here. 

The manual method should not be used and treated like gospel but it is good to spot check your brand. You have other metrics like referrals from the platform to gauge your performance as well. 

What is your share of voice?

This metric is really useful when you combine it with revenue and demand data because it helps give you context of the broader market and evolves the conversation from a property specific focus. For example if your sales are down but over all your share of voice has increased this is an indicator that you’ve grown year on year. It would then prompt you, if you have not already, to check into demand changes in your region and segment. The benefit here is that decisions can be made with the appropriate market context, this typically leads to better business outcomes.

What KPIs and goals should we monitor in our analytics platform?

When you’re growing your business with a strategic Hotel SEO campaign you should be monitoring enough data points to uncover the full story. We need to be able to identify what is changing, why it’s changing and if it’s moving in a negative direction we need to have ideas on what to test. If they’re moving in a positive direction we can identify what to double down on.

You don’t need to report on every single click action but the below is a pretty well rounded set of metrics that help determine what the property’s performance is in the current market. 

• Organic visitors and sessions – are we attracting more qualified traffic from search engines?
• Booking engine clicks and funnel progression – Track every step of the booking journey so you can monitor drop off points. If you get a lot more people to the booking engine and they drop off after the price comes up, that is a reason to call your revenue management team, not your SEO team.
• Completed bookings and booking conversion rates
• Average booking value
• Purchase revenue
• Booking conversion rate
• Revenue by source/medium/campaign: Understanding the buyer journey and any shifts here is incredibly important
• Engaged sessions: Are people looking through more or less pages than before? How does this tie into other purchase behaviors to determine whether this is a positive or negative shift.
• New vs Returning users: Hotels and resorts can determine quite a lot from whether users return or not. Often we have found pricing and offer issues resulted in less users returning. This allowed our clients to pivot and recover more leisure customers that they would otherwise have continued to lose.
• Room type and add on product performance: Which rooms and add ons perform best? This can lead you in a direction of running tests of page layouts that present those money makers to prospective guests

Combine KPI’s to give context

Looking at any KPI in isolation can make it a vanity metric because it’s not giving you any holistic context as to what is happening with your business. The combination of two or more metrics paints a clearer picture which gives you a deeper understanding and it leads to better sales. 

We must remember that hotel SEO campaign performance is affected by factors outside of SEO. You have issues like seasonality, change in local events, pricing, unusual weather events and more that need to be considered.

For example if you have a drop in conversions but you have more traffic, rankings and clicks to the booking engine then we have to take multiple KPIs to paint the picture that then brings up the right questions. Sometimes you get unexpected results.

We have many times seen an unexpected decline in room sales but organic rankings, traffic and clicks to the booking engine were up. When we reviewed deeper with our clients it turned out there was no inventory for their guests! We had filled it all with group business. This has happened countless times over the last decade that Ormi Media has been the go to SEO company for many hotels and resorts across the globe. 

As you can see it’s important to track a multitude of factors and understand how they work together to tell the full story.

The goal of reporting is to understand what is happening in your business and why. When you combine visibility and website behavior with metrics like demand and seasonality the data becomes significantly more actionable. That is the approach that Ormi Media takes with our Hotel SEO campaigns. We want to take the full picture and identify the growth opportunities to grow your business with you.