One way to think of backlinks (links to your hotel website from around the web) is as a form of social proof for the internet. The more sites that can ‘vouch’ for you in the form of a backlink, the more trustworthy your site becomes in the eyes of search engines. This indirectly leads to better overall rankings.
Backlinks still remain one of the top factors influencing the performance of your hotel website in search, well into 2024. However, as anyone who has carried out link building will know, it can definitely be an uphill struggle. But not always!
We’ve spent a lot of time at Parador thinking about unique ways to acquire backlinks for hotels. So, in this post, I’ll explain some strategies on how you can build those elusive backlinks to your hotel website, including some insider link building secrets from the agency.
What are hotel backlinks?
As I mentioned, a backlink is just a link ‘back’ to your hotel website from another, different website.
Backlink building is the central idea behind off-page SEO (meaning optimization that happens away from your website, rather than on it). More high-quality backlinks bring more credibility to your site, which leads to higher rankings for your important, money-making pages, such as the ones targeting rooms, offers and bookings.
Importantly, the more backlinks a site has, the more SEO ‘power’ a link from that site gives. This is known as domain authority (DA). Domain authority is not a real metric, but it is a useful score provided by SEO tools to help gauge the general authority of sites.
Keep domain authority in mind when reading the strategies below. If you can win a backlink from a site with a high authority, this will be way more effective than having hundreds of meaningless backlinks from random websites. Quality over quantity is the mantra.
Without further ado, here are our top backlinking ideas for hotels.
1. Write great content about your destination
Write great content about your hotel’s destination. Then write more. This is the most effective strategy in the list, for one simple reason: people want to link to high-quality content.
By positioning yourself as a destination concierge through written content, your website becomes a valuable guide to the ins, outs and insider secrets of your location.
Plus, the more original your content is, the more likely it is that other people will want to link to it.
What do people find interesting about your destination? What do they search for? Aside from going out and actually speaking to your guests and front-of-house staff, you can use tools like Answer The Public to help you to gauge the important questions that visitors have.
From there, you can write high-quality content that answers these questions, which can be shared on your email and social channels for maximum exposure. Ideas to use as a starting point include things to do, local events, and history, culture or cuisine in your area.
Other unique angles you can take for backlink-achieving content include interviewing local personalities or characters in your area who also have a web presence. Think of tour operators, restaurateurs, or other local actors with some relationship to your industry. If you were to publish an interview with them on your hotel website’s blog, there’s a good chance you may get a mention on their website, with a link back to your page.
In order to really maximize the impact of your content, you can research the specific keywords and search intents that people are searching around your destination, and optimize your content to align with them (there’s more about this in our guide to hotel SEO). Doing this will maximize the chances that your content will show up on search engines when people search around your hotel.
Whichever way you approach it, a dedicated content strategy for your hotel will pay dividends, not only for attracting direct bookings and building up your clientele, but also for building those all-important backlinks.
2. Submit to directory sites
The second major task for hotel link building is ensuring that your hotel website is listed on as many local directory and OTA sites as possible.
Search engines look at directory sites as a way of validating your business, so even if the specific backlink doesn’t carry much value (for example, as a nofollow link, which many directory sites will classify your homepage link as), they will still be valuable in building up the legitimacy of your site.
Being present on local directory sites is also a large part of local SEO for hotels, so making sure that you have this task set up on a monthly basis is a no-brainer.
If you need help with local SEO and directory submission, our local visibility packages for hotels, travel agents and tour operators are ideal for your business.
3. Link from your social profiles, and post regularly
It may sound obvious, but always include links back to your website from your social media profiles.
While social media links will also be nofollow (aka they won’t count towards the authority of your domain), they do help search engines to see you as a relevant business.
The other backlink opportunity from social media is through your posts. In the event that a social media post from your hotel page picks up a lot of traction, you want to make sure that your website URL is front and center, since these types of posts usually get shared in other places, such as websites and forums (which means valuable backlinks for your hotel site).
4. Check out your local and national tourism department websites
When doing consultations for hotel digital marketing, we always advise our clients to reach out to local, state or national tourism departments.
The reason for this is because you can sometimes post your experiences for free on their sites.
For example, VisitOKC.com is the tourism department website for Oklahoma City. On their website, they have an entire section for ‘Places to Stay’. siloed by accommodation category.
If your tourism department has a similar section on their website, why not send out a charming email explaining that you manage accommodation in the local area, and that you’d be thrilled to be featured on their site?
To increase the chances of getting a backlink with this approach, you could even consider offering special deals or packages for the tourism board, and asking them to feature your deal on their site.
Since tourism departments are actively looking to help out people interested in their destination, this is a win-win situation. Don’t pass on this unique backlink opportunity!
5. Leverage relationships with existing suppliers
Building backlinks is often about relationships, and hotels are at a unique advantage here due to the sheer amount of third-party suppliers that you’re likely to be already working with.
Think about the businesses that provide your cleaning, catering, coffee, transport, or even your branding, marketing and publicity. Are you happy with their service? Probably, because you wouldn’t still be using them.
Why not get in touch with stakeholders at these businesses and tell them how happy you are with the work they’re doing, and that you’d be thrilled to provide a testimonial for their website?
This is one of the easiest backlink building methods for hotels, because almost every supplier will jump at the chance to have a brand new testimonial on their website (which also means an an extra backlink for you).
Like most strategies in the world of backlink building, it’s a win-win situation!
6. Guest post on travel blogs
There are a lot of travel blogs out there, and some of them are very popular. This gives them very high domain authorities.
If you can find travel blogs relevant to your hotel that also accept guest posts, you’ve got a great opportunity to pitch an article to them.
By suggesting a post that draws on your local expertise with a topical focus that will be interesting to their readers, you increase the chances of a successful pitch.
If they accept, you’ve landed an opportunity to showcase your expertise on somebody else’s platform, which will also come with a backlink back to your hotel website.
To find travel blogs accepting guest posts, try Google modifiers such as: “your destination” “blog” “guest post”
Just from the snippet, we can see at least three websites that appear to accept guest posts with a specific focus on Tenerife. If you manage a hotel in Tenerife, there’s a good chance that these sites would be open to a guest post from you, too.
Travel blogs aren’t the only places to look for guest posts. Lifestyle, food and beverage, or hotel business blogs are all potentially good opportunities. Beyond blogs, some newspapers also accept guest posts from local businesses or personalities. Basically, any website that regularly publishes articles relevant to your expertise, and that also accepts guest posts, is fair game.
Pro tip: In general, unless it’s a high quality site, avoid sites that accept paid guest posts. These sites tend to lack in focus, expertise and actual readers, so a link from them isn’t likely to bring much benefit vs the cost you’ll pay for the guest post.
7. Host and sponsor local events
By hosting local events on your hotel premises, you not only foster a connection with the local community, but you have a good shot of getting featured on the event organiser’s web page, too.
If you’re already hosting events, let the organizers know that you’d appreciate being featured on their website. If you’re not hosting events, this could be a good time to start!
Pro tip: if you’re able to host an event organised by the local council, municipality or other local government function, this is a potentially brilliant scenario for your link building efforts. .gov backlinks are among the most powerful, and will provide a significant boost to your site’s authority.
Another angle here is to sponsor events happening in your local vicinity, and asking to be featured on their website as a sponsor in return. Remember, the higher the domain authority of the backlink provider, the more ‘juice’ it will pass to your site, so keep this in mind when choosing which events to sponsor (you can check a site’s domain authority with Moz’s free Domain Authority Checker)
8. Approach local news outlets with press releases
Do you have big news at your hotel? Maybe you’re opening a new facility, or have recently undergone a renovation.
By writing a hotel press release and distributing it to interested local news publications, you’re likely to have an article written about your hotel on the publisher’s website. News articles such as these will almost certainly contain a backlink to your hotel website. This is essentially a form of PR, which bears a strong relationship to backlink building.
Many news websites have strong domain authority, so consider any newsworthy stories at your hotel as a worthwhile avenue for effective backlink building.
An easy way to find news outlets that would be open to publishing an article about your hotel is to open up Google and enter keywords such as: hotel renovation [location], then click the ‘News’ menu item.
This will open up a list of recently published news articles which match your query
In the search above, we can see at least three publications that have recently published news stories about hotel renovations in Greece. Usually, a quick search through these websites will reveal the best email to send PR requests and press releases to.
If the editor considers your story news-worthy, you’ve just bagged a valuable backlink for your hotel!
9. Find broken links
This next strategy is known as ‘broken link building’, which basically means ‘help other websites fix broken links in their content by suggesting they replace the broken link with a link to your hotel website’.
The ‘broken link building’ method is straightforward, but time consuming.
First, look for written content around the web that could potentially mention your hotel, but doesn’t. This could be articles about the best hotels in your area, or the best hotels in your area with swimming pools, or any other unique facility that you provide (the more specific, the better).
Next, scan that content for links that no longer work. You can do this with Ahrefs, which is a great tool because it allows you to filter out sites with a lower domain authority (and hence less powerful backlinks), or with a free (but clunkier) tool like this one.
Links break all the time, usually because of a change in the URL, edits to the page, or even just the fact that a website may no longer even exist. However, with persistence, you will be able to find a list of opportunities which you can then compile into a spreadsheet.
Once you’ve got a solid list of broken link opportunities, the next step is to find the contacts of the authors or the people responsible for content on the websites you’ve scanned.
It may be fairly obvious from the site itself who that is (ideally, there’s an email address given). Other times, you may need to use an outreach tool like Hunter to find the specific contact details that you need.
Once you’ve got the contact, send a polite email letting them know that you’ve noticed a broken link on a certain article, and that you’d like to put forward your own hotel website as a possible replacement. Broken links are bad for SEO, user experience, and generally give off a bad impression to readers, so it’s not unreasonable to think that the content manager would be open to your approach.
Let them know why your hotel is a good fit for the article. You can even include an already-written section of text about your hotel that matches the format of the article, which will make their job even easier.
The best case scenario here is a nice backlink to your site from a reputable source. Broken link building is a numbers game, but after reaching out to a few people, you should gradually see backlinks popping up.
Note that it’s good practice to periodically check your own site for broken links, since they do harm the SEO of your website (which is the entire idea behind this strategy).
10. Keep track of lost links
Backlink building isn’t just about getting new links: it also means keeping track of and maintaining your current backlink inventory.
You can lose links to your hotel website for a variety of reasons, and not all of them will be intentional.
Links can be lost when site owners who have linked to your update their website, refresh content, or even when you change the URLs of pages on your own website without setting up a page redirect.
Ahrefs provides a good way to keep track of lost links, because it has an excellent backlink report tool. They even send you weekly automated reports of backlinks that you’ve lost (and gained) over time.
When you get this report, evaluate why and when the backlink was lost, and take action to address it. This may involve resubmitting listings on directory sites, or reaching out to owners of sites that have linked to you, finding out why the backlink was removed, and taking action to get it back.
Finally, if you’ve lost backlinks as a result of changing a page URL, the best method is to set up a 301 redirect, from the old URL (the one that the backlinks point to) to your new URL. This way, the link ‘juice’ will be passed onto your new page, rather than being funneled into a broken page.
11. Mine competitor backlinks
When you need a bit more inspiration for building backlinks, spy on the sites that link to hotels like yours!
This is a way to assure pre-qualified link building leads, because someone else has already done the work for you. Open up an SEO tool with a competitor backlinks checker such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, and input one or more of your competitors to see which linking sites are common between them.
This will give you a list of your competitor’s common backlinks. Not all of them will be relevant to you, so you may have to do some detective work to figure out the best opportunities, and how your competitors got them.
Was it through a sponsored partnership or placement? Was there an article written about the area which mentioned them? Once you know this information, come up with a plan of action (which will probably involve email outreach) for how you can achieve that backlink, too.
12. Connect with journalists
Do you have a big event coming up in your destination? Maybe your location is in the news at the moment? If so, why not publish some insider info about your destination?
You can count on the fact that journalists will be looking for information about your destination for pieces they are writing, and news sites can provide a big boost to your domain authority. Topics that work well here are visitor statistics, weather, and general local information that journalists writing about your location would find helpful.
Another source of backlinks from news sites is through platforms like Connectively (previously HARO), which connects journalists to industry or area experts such as yourself. The idea is that journalists post daily requests for expert quotations on topics they are writing about (you can set up email notifications to get updates on requests relevant to you), and you get back to them with a short response that fulfills their request.
If the journalist decides to use your quotation in their article, you’ll get a brand new backlink from an (ideally) reputable news website. Great!
However, it’s worth mentioning that the HARO route can be time-consuming. Journalists move fast, and they are often inundated with responses, so you need to be disciplined in monitoring the platform for relevant requests and being amongst the first to strike.
We recommend the former route of publishing useful information on your website already for journalists to find, which makes you visible to researching journalists before they even get to platforms like HARO.
13. Capitalize on unlinked mentions
Unlinked brand mentions are web pages around the internet that mention your hotel, but don’t provide a link.
The idea behind this method is that you reach out to the webmaster of the non-linking site, and ask them to add a link to the mention of your hotel.
You can find unlinked mentions in one of two ways.
The first method requires using Google operators such as “your hotel name” to find mentions of your hotel. Unfortunately, however, this is likely to return lots of OTA and booking pages, as well as pages that have already linked to you. You would have to manually look for unlinked mentions with this approach, which is time-consuming.
A way to narrow this process down is to instead look for mentions of important people at your hotel, such as the business owner, or head chef. If you can find unlinked mentions of their name around the web, this is a possible avenue to ask the webmaster to change the mention into a backlink to your hotel homepage.
The second ways is to use the Unlinked Mentions feature in an SEO tool like Ahrefs. You’ll be able to export this data to a spreadsheet, and get in touch with the website owners one-by-one to see if they’d be open to adding a link to their mention of your hotel.
Start building your hotel backlinks today
As you’ve seen, building backlinks for your hotel’s website involves a combination of strategic networking, leveraging existing relationships, proactive content creation, and more technically-oriented tasks. They can be difficult and time-consuming to achieve, but the pay-off for your visibility and website traffic growth makes backlink building a solid investment for your hotel.
If you’re looking to significantly enhance your hotel website’s authority and visibility, get in touch with Parador today to see how we can help you boost your web presence, reduce reliance on OTAs, and fill more rooms.
