The hospitality industry is a highly competitive market, with hotels fighting to attract guests and expand their customer base. Optimising your hotel digital marketing plays a vital role in gaining visibility and driving more customers to your website and, most importantly, completing a booking.
What is image alt text?
In technical terms, alt text (alternative text) is an attribute that is used in HTML when embedding an image in a website using the <img> tag.
Example: <img src=”ImageName.jpg” alt=”Alt text goes here”>
For example, this image from our How Using Hotel Experts Can Boost Your Digital Marketing Efforts article uses the alt text “hotel digital marketing agency team in a strategy meeting.”
Why is image alt text important for hotel website SEO?
There are several reasons why it’s important to ensure you’ve filled in an image’s alt text. Alt text will appear on the page when the image cannot be displayed if the user has a slow internet connection, or when the image file may be missing or broken.
Secondly, alt text is used by accessibility software to help users understand what is displayed on the web page. Many screen readers read out the image alt tags to enable visually impaired website users to build a mental image of what is appearing on your page.
Utilising great visuals on your hotel website is an important element in enticing guests to book, so it’s clearly necessary to optimise your images as much as possible and provide descriptive alt text.
Should I tailor my alt text to humans or search engines?
Since Google has introduced a wave of new algorithm changes in recent months, the answer to this question changes frequently.
However, Google has recently implemented a more people-first approach when analysing and ranking your website’s content. This means that any content on your hotel website needs to be “original, helpful, relevant and written for people, by people” – in Google’s words.
As a side note, if you think your website’s overall content could do with sprucing up to help you conquer Google’s new algorithm, you’ll want to partner up with an expert digital marketing agency for hotels… like us!
We offer various digital marketing services for hotels to help you boost your website SEO, reach more converting customers and increase those all-important direct bookings.
To kick things off though, here are the top five alt-text SEO best practices and tips to boost your visibility in the digital marketing space for hotels.
1. Use specific keywords (but don’t over-do it)
One of the best strategies to attract new customers and boost your hotel digital marketing efforts is to use specific keywords in your alt text. Pay close attention to what your target audience is searching for and include the relevant keywords in your image alt text to draw organic traffic to your website.
However, don’t stuff your alt text with keywords if it’s not appropriate, as Google will actually penalise you for it.
2. Keep it short and sweet
While keywords are important, it is also important to keep your alt text short and sweet. Longer descriptions can lead to lost readership and potentially lower search engine rankings as well. Focus on using concise yet descriptive text that conveys the most important information to consumers.
3. Be specific & use context
The easiest way to add alt text is to think about what the image is literally showing you and provide additional information that may not be immediately obvious from the image alone.
Ask yourself what information would be lost if that image were no longer on the page. For example, if your image shows a couple checking into a hotel room with a view, outline the location and some elements of the room.
Furthermore, if the image you’re adding alt text to contains text, it’s important to add this in too as it will be repeated in the alt tag. This applies to images like logos or sales banners.
4. Avoid using irrelevant adjectives
Sure, your image might show off how beautiful your hotel suite is, but you shouldn’t use the phrase “beautiful room” in your alt text. Instead, you should outline what makes the room beautiful. For example, “Bathroom with a large freestanding bath, twin sinks and rainfall shower”.
5. Know when to leave alt text blank
There are times when it’s necessary to leave the alt text blank, typically when it’s an item on the page don’t offer any value in terms of content. This includes style and layout elements, such as bullets and icons.
It can be annoying when you’re using a text reader to hear the word “bullet point” repeatedly when the page has a bulleted list, and it could quickly lead to an increase in bounce rate.
Digital marketing services for hotels
So, that’s all you need to know about image alt text and how to implement it across your hotel website! Adding image alt text is an easy quick win when it comes to boosting your website’s SEO, but there is so much more you can do to increase visibility and attract new direct bookings. To rapidly achieve that, it’s best to partner up with an experienced digital marketing agency for hotels, like us! Our team is made up of expert digital marketers, web developers and designers with decades of combined experience within the hospitality industry.
We’ll work with you to quickly boost your website’s organic performance and support all of your hotel and hospitality digital marketing needs to boost those all-important direct bookings. So, please get in touch with our talented team to find out more about our wide range of digital marketing services for hotels!
