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Last year when Google released the original Penguin update, around 1% of all Google queries were affected. Despite the small number, many businesses lost their rankings and never recovered them. Businesses even went out of business due to the Penguin update. As I covered in depth last year, none of buuteeq’s clients were harmed by Penguin. In fact, many of the properties I examined actually enjoyed more organic search engine traffic.

Google says that Penguin 2.0 affected a whopping 2.3% of all search queries. This is huge. The SEO community will no doubt hear a slew of horror stories from businesses dropping out of Google due to this update. Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, released more information on their update on his personal blog.

As part of buuteeq’s effort to ensure that we include the best passive SEO technology with our product, I’ll be keeping a close eye on our clients’ organic traffic and search rankings over the next few weeks. Even though it is too soon to make any conclusions (since Penguin 2.0 launched yesterday), as expected, our internal data is very encouraging.

The above graph shows the average percentage of visits our clients have enjoyed Monday to Wednesday this week, compared to last week for the same date range. Penguin 2.0 launched yesterday, Wednesday the 22nd, and as you can see, our clients actually enjoyed more visits after Penguin 2.0.

The above chart shows the breakdown in traffic sources for our clients during the same period. Let’s focus on the Organic slice, which represents organic traffic only from search engines. The first chart is May 13-15, and 45.47% of all visits were from search engines. For the week of Penguin, this number rose to 45.94%–a statistically insignificant (though positive) change.

As expected, hotels using buuteeq to power their digital marketing have not been penalized by Penguin 2.0. I’ll publish a complete report in a few weeks after Penguin 2.0 has had time to do it’s thing. I’ll break down my report by hotel type, region, and language so that you can see a global comparison.

In the meantime, review the guide to Penguin 2.0 that I published a few weeks ago to make sure that your SEO agency or internal team is is practicing quality, safe SEO for your hotel.

Sound off in the comments with any questions.

It must take into consideration various currencies, languages, locations, taxes, pre-existing financial arrangements, pre-sold inventory, various inventory distributors, and more. Getting an online booking engine set-up so that hoteliers can accept direct bookings has traditionally been a laborious process. Many providers charge a commission for each reservation made through the engine, further reducing the hotel’s revenue.

Understanding how online hotel booking engines work can help hoteliers make informed decisions when choosing an internet booking engine to work with.

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How to produce compelling content that can put your hotel in the spotlight.

Content marketing is quickly becoming a tired buzz-word in the SEO community. It is such a popular topic because it is one of the only SEO strategies that works well and is unlikely to be penalized by Google in the future. Despite being a buzz-word, content marketing is something we should all focus on for the foreseeable future to improve our SEO.

Instead of calling content marketing an “SEO strategy”, I should really call it a “marketing strategy”, because producing quality content and marketing it well is simply good online marketing. It helps with SEO, but more importantly, it gives guests quality information, increases your hotel’s visibility, establishes you as a thought leader in your niche, and encourages guests to trust you, making them more likely to book a room with you.

But, as is the nature with buzz-words, “content marketing” is kind of hard to understand. What does it even mean? Well here, let me give you an example.

Yesterday, The Washington Post released a timeline of the ongoing IRS scandal called “Who Knew What, When”. It’s a simple timeline, pulling information from freely available news sources, organized into a visual timeline of events. It’s basically a glorified Excel spreadsheet.

Click to enlarge.

This timeline was easy to make. The information already existed. All The Washington Post had to do was collect it, organize it, and summarize it, while their dev team whipped up a simple interactive timeline.

Their results are impressive. In less than 24 hours, this one article has picked up over 100 comments, over 380 Facebook likes and shares, and has been tweeted over 175 times.

This example of content marketing is great because it was made using freely available information, it was easy to produce, and no one had done it yet. Hotel marketers can do the same thing. They just have to be creative.

True, The Washington Post example was in the news vertical, but the principles work equally well for hospitality too. Swissôtel Hotels & Resorts wanted to create some compelling content their guests would find interesting, so they contacted SEO Gadget, who produced an interactive Ultimate Guide to Worldwide Etiquette, which you can see here. Guests choose a country, and the map then shows them the appropriate etiquette for that country concerning tipping, gestures like handshaking and kissing cheeks, dining customs (think “elbows on the table”), and other dos and don’ts for the specified culture.

This piece of content has been online for much longer than The Washington Post article, which helps explain why it has over 2,100 Facebook likes, 620 Twitter tweets, 340 Google +1s, and has been shared on Stumble Upon an astounding 20,000 times. Open Site Explorer shows that this one article has over 300 backlinks from 90 different domains

Click to enlarge.

Quality content that provides guests with actionable, useful information is evergreen—that is, it remains popular long after first being published, and has a great chance of going “viral”.

Ideas for Your Hotel

So then, we come down to the hard task before us. What kind of content can you make for your unique hotel that has this kind of viral-like potential? You know your property and your area better than I do. Sit down with your staff and family members, and brainstorm some ideas. Here are some to get you started:

• A guide to local customs and sayings.
• A timeline of historical events that happened in your area.
• A weekend trip plan, where you create an agenda of things your guests can do in your area over 2 days.
• A guide to spending less than $50 a day in your area while still seeing amazing things and eating great food.
• A guide to windsurfing, skiing, skydiving, snorkeling, in your area, with directions on who to contact for gear, which places offer the best sights, etc.

Once you have your topic, decide what kind of content you will produce–an infographic, a video, a calendar, a spreadsheet, a map. It could be a simple article, but make sure it is chocked-full of photography and, if appropriate, maps and illustrations.

If you’re not the creative type, you can contact a vendor to write content, take photos, or produce images and infographics for you. We have a list of buuteeq-approved Validated Vendors you can explore. We go to local Killer Infographics to help produce our infographics.

I hope this article helped explain the importance of content marketing for today’s SEO, and gave you some good ideas! Sound off in the comments below if you have any questions.

Google+ updates include a new image-focused design that resembles Pinterest and Facebook.

Each week, the buuteeq team scours the web for the latest news and trends in hospitality, marketing, and tech that hoteliers need to know about to be successful.

Here are the must-read articles you may have missed last week:

1) Google+ Redesign Looks a Lot Like Facebook, Pinterest

2) Top 5 Hotel SEO Mistakes

3) Social Media Strategies: Show, Don’t Tell

4) Writing Content For Responsive Design

5) Is Your Social Network a Puppy or a Dog?

6) Google Tests Hotel Search Campaign with Lots of Photos

7) How Long Does a Brand Last?

8) Mobile Payments Get Serious on Google as Wallet Evolves to Handle Travel

9) HotelTonight Launches A More Visual (And Less Review-y) Take On Hotel Reviews

1) Failure to have a website, or making it invisible to Google robots. Some hoteliers have told me that having a directory listing, or a micro-site on a franchise or brand page, is enough. But clearly, Google wants to see a unique, individual web presence for each business, which means building a domain and building a hotel website for each property you own.

2) Not including the right words on the page. This is a great one, and simply means that you should write about what your guests are searching for. If you’re hotel is in Boca Raton, be sure to have articles about your hotel in Boca Raton Florida, and write articles on your website like “Top 10 Things to Do in Boca Raton, Florida”.

3) Link-building, instead of building compelling content and marketing your website. The philosophy behind this is that if you build your hotel’s reputation online, you’ll end up building quality links as a natural consequence. But if you focus solely on link-building, then you’ll miss an opportunity to build a reputation and online awareness for your hotel–and, you’ll likely attain low-quality links that could actually harm your website. In short, focus on people, not links.

4) Not thinking about the titles and descriptions of your important pages. These are the meta title and description tags that you can edit yourself using buuteeq’s Cloud DMS, if you’re a subscriber. One of the first places Google inspects on your website is your title tag, to see what your website is about, and then your description tag to offer a short, pithy, enticing description to users in their search engine. Write a meta title that accurately says what the page is about, and that includes the appropriate keywords you’re trying to rank for (in example, “My Florida Hotel – Boutique Hotel in Boca Raton Florida” might be an appropriate meta title tag. Even though Google doesn’t rank your website based on what it finds in your meta description, it still may choose to show users this description. This makes your description tag an unique opportunity to convince users in your own words to click on your website. Use it well!

5) Failure to use Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) and other webmaster resources. WMT is Google’s direct connection to you, as I explain in my guide to Webmaster Tools for hotels. It’s what they use to communicate with you when they’ve detected an unnatural link profile on your website, for example, or if they discover that your content has suddenly gone offline due to a webmaster outage. It can provide you or your webmaster will important info about how Google sees your website, so you can make the appropriate changes.

This list is a reminder to us all that, while we could spend days, weeks, or even months tweaking little things here and there, the major issues that impact our websites the most are obvious and relatively easy to fix. While it may be a fun hobby to research the inner-most workings of Google’s algorithm and making experimental changes to our websites to one-up competitors, our time is best spent elsewhere.

See the video below for Matt’s complete comments.

Top 5 SEO Mistakes

Each week, the buuteeq team scours the web for the latest news and trends in hospitality, marketing, and tech that hoteliers need to know about to be successful.

Here are the must-read articles you may have missed last week:

1) buuteeq Teams Up with Choice Hotels International

2) Snickers Catches Bad Spellers With Smart Google Ads

3) Back to basics – Four essentials for any mobile travel strategy

4) The 5 Rules to Pitching a Guest Blog

5) 10 Signs Your Old Marketing Tactics Aren’t Working

6) 18 Sweet Tips For Facebook Page Posts

7) U.S. hotels have given up on extra fees, raising room rates instead

8) TripAdvisor steps up process to include more genuine reviews of hotels

9) Industry first alert: Google teams up with Hilton brand DoubleTree for interactive YouTube channel

Learn exactly what Forest set out to do when he founded buuteeq–to change and improve the user experience of travel, while simultaneously giving hoteliers back their direct bookings.

“We help independent hotels and chains directly market themselves, and connect to guests.”

Trotamundo is the name of the employee perk we give to encourage travel and talk with hoteliers. buuteeq will help pay for an employee’s vacation, to anywhere in the world!

buuteeq is hiring! Learn more about our available positions on our jobs board.

► buuteeq Jobs Board

We’re excited to introduce a new series on the buuteeq blog: Must-read Monday! Each week, the buuteeq team scours the web for the latest news and trends in hospitality, marketing, and tech that hoteliers need to know about to be successful.

Here are the must-read articles you may have missed last week:

1) WordPress is Nipping at Your Vertical: Restaurants, Weddings, and Now Hotels

2) How Do Colors Affect Purchases?

3) A Hotelier’s Guide to Google Webmaster Tools

4) Prepare Your Hotel for Penguin 2.0

5) Fewer Travelers Lug Laptops to Hotels, More Bring iPads

6) The 10 Most Clickable Twitter Headlines

7) Hotel Online Marketing Budget Disconnect: A Perpetual Case of Bringing a Knife to a Gunfight

8) Vacationing Americans Prefer Giving Up Booze Over Mobile Devices

9) 3-Step Guide to Google Hotel Finder