How to overcome the situation of having lack of content and not updating regularly?

Question

I have already read What are the best ways to increase a site's position in Google?. I have applied most possible things from that page.

This is a hotel website. My client doesn't want to add a blog or articles. Currently it has around 10 pages about details of rooms, hotel features, etc. Total word count of the whole website is just below 10,000 words.

This website will be rarely updated like when changing room price, etc. It is also very minor change.

The problem I have: This site have very limited number if pages and won't be update regularly. But it is a very good site for the users because there are all information in the website which users want.

Is there something I can do special other than what is listed in What are the best ways to increase a site's position in Google?, to overcome the situation of having lack of content and not updating regularly.

Answer 1

I think this is very common for many businesses.

You may try following:

1. Generally, in hospitality industry businesses have more quality photos. So, even if you are not updating content (text) regularly, you can update photos which is simple and quick and still, it will give some signal towards freshness.

2. You may create image slideshow video with key features and upload it on YouTube with an appropriate link.

3. As mentioned in the comment, worth adding testimonials.

4. Make use of Google Plus, do a regular G+ post with good photos and have a bit longer (text) post and place the appropriate link.

5. Encourage customer to write reviews on third party sites, particularly Google local and this will play an important role to boost your ranking naturally.

There are may more ideas, you just need to think in a creative way.

Answer 2

Hmm, how about getting backlinks from sites or improve traffic? I believe there are a few ways to do that (in my own opinion)

1. Write an email to related sites telling them how your content is useful, you will be honoured to have them linking to your site

2. Promote your website in social media and gain traction to your site

3. Use tools to identify websites that are mentioning your brand but are not linking to your website (e.g. https://mention.com/en/). Again, write them an email thanking them for the mention and perhaps linking to your site if your content is helpful to their users

Answer 3

As said by others, testimonials by customers is a good source of non-expensive content that provides social proof to prospective clients. You can add testimonials across the website: on the homepage, on the corresponding product page (ie. testimonials for a particular room type), and even have a section or page dedicated exlusively to list all testimonials.

You say your client doesn't want to add a blog or articles. Is it because it's usually not cheap to produce original, interesting, relevant content? If it's so, and your client is willing to make an smaller commitment and add a blog for publishing cheap* content, you could have a content strategy that takes advantage of all the content already published in the Web. Some ideas, for example:

• translating already existing content and re-publishing it (giving corresponding attribution is just good netiquette, but not an obligation).
• publishing recommendation lists, like "5 [pubs / museums / restaurants / whatever] to visit in [hotel location]"
• splitting already existing pages in more granular content. For example, if you have an Staff page, think about adding one new page for each member of the hotel staff. Avoid it being very thin content. Try to add meaningful content: what does each member of the staff do at the hotel, what are they favourites places in the region, what is their favourite meal, add pictures of them, etc.

*: "cheap" as "not expensive to produce and publish", not as "low quality content".

Answer 4

While your client may not have an interest in writing posts, the return on efforts/investment by adding an events calander for local events can have a decent return as events provide the trifecta of dates, places/geography and social/business activity nouns verbs etc that will boost organic search traffic, and so, potential hotel bookings. Tourist type events are one approach, but large, longer term construction/infrastructure projects are also events that may attract group bookings from trades groups.

Whether using a static site generator or a content managment system, structuring the date/text lines/field formats for consistent input/output can make creation of fresh content easy. Tagging with common terms for categories ie business/entertainment/tourism/holidays may even lead to the hotel being a search engine "authority" (much used resource) locally if traffic ramps up and continously ends up on the site.

Of note, whether a static page site or CMS, a subdomain ie townname-events.hotel-name.com can easily offer segmentation to keep primary domain problem free and independent. With this, if hotel owner can setup small base budget with referal commissions for bookings, then finding a local writer to do the work they don't want to is viable approach.