How the hospitality industry should approach online reviews and citations

We all know that when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), every industry has its quirks but the restaurant and hospitality industry are very much their own beast.

Potential customers can get almost everything they need to make a purchase decision from Google Maps, Google Reviews, Yelp and other review sites like TripAdvisor for these two industries. This makes working with citations and reviews particularly important for places like restaurants, hotels, B&Bs, pubs, cafés, and bars. Today I’ll be talking about some recent research that highlights just how seriously businesses in this industry take citations and reviews and offering some guidance on how to benchmark your business against competitors and take the lead in this field.

A numbers game

In a recent  SEO citations study conducted by BrightLocal (my company), we analyzed citations and local rankings data for over 120,000 local businesses across 26 different industries. In a never-before-seen data slice, we’ve grouped together what we’re calling ‘hospitality’ businesses (hotels, B&Bs, restaurants, cafés, pubs, and hotels)—11,655 businesses in total—and looked at how many citations the businesses ranking top in the local pack have.

We found the average local business in position one has 86 citations.  What you see above shows how seriously this industry takes business listings and directories.  The average hospitality business in position one has 127 citations (that’s an incredible 48 percent more than the average local business, percentage fans!)

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Jamie Pitman

Jamie Pitman is Head of Content at local SEO tool provider BrightLocal. He's been working in Digital Marketing for nearly ten years and has specialized in SEO, content marketing and social media, managing successful marketing projects for clients and employers alike. Over this time he's blogged his heart out, writing over 300 posts on a wide variety of digital marketing topics for various businesses and publications.