Recently, Google announced an update to its search algorithm designed to boost original, helpful content and devalue low-quality content.
NB: This is an article from Reknown
It’s part of a broader, long-term initiative to improve the quality of search results and give greater visibility to content written “by people, for people.” While we don’t yet know how big the impact will be on search rankings, it presents an ideal opportunity for marketers in the hotel, hospitality, and travel tech space to re-evaluate content strategy.
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In the relentless hustle for clicks, some of us have acquired habits intended to boost search visibility which could now have the opposite effect.
Google provides a series of questions to help assess the quality of your content. Here are four questions I think are particularly applicable to the travel and tech sectors.
1. Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines, rather than made for humans?
As marketers, we produce content for two primary audiences: customers and algorithms. According to Google, some of us have ventured too far in the direction of algorithms.
This is certainly true in the hotel and travel tech space, where so much content marketing is heavy on keywords and light on helpful, original information. In fact, Google calls out the tech space as one of the sectors most likely to be affected by the update.
It’s a bit ironic given that Google has had a major hand in creating the problem. Search results today are dominated by paid ads, by huge companies with massive reach and by Google’s own products. For small companies, often the only way to show up on the first page is to buy advertising. But the Google Ads product has become so complex and expensive that marketers struggle to manage effective campaigns. And so often the platform seems to prioritize consuming ad budgets over generating qualified clicks.
Read rest of the article at Reknown
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