Naming your Guest House or Hotel for the search engines

I recently stayed at a little place in the Western Cape Winelands whose name included the word “Toy”. It was a lovely, friendly place but did get me to thinking about how difficult it would be to market their name online. Due to the fact that their name includes the word “toy” using their name as a keyword in a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign would yield many untargeted results mostly to do with actual toys.

“Toy” is an extremely broad search term that covers a vast array of products and does not insinuate anything to do with accommodation. This is problematic when trying to market such a place online because you are severely limited by the amount of keywords you can use. You will also receive a great deal of clicks from people searching for completely different products and using your valuable PPC budget on useless traffic. What’s more is that you cannot actually use the name of the guest house or hotel as a keyword in such scenario. You would therefore be losing out on people searching directly for your name or property.

However targeted Google says they are with their traffic and the keywords that trigger each Ad – the fact is that Google aims to make money and lots of it. When their wealth of algorithms are stuck for a highly relevant paid listing result, I can assure you that they will scrape the barrel to show an Ad which can be vaguely justified as relevant. Are they going to show no ad at all or are they going to find a way to show something? The latter of course! Their motto might be “Do No Evil” but that doesn’t mean that they will not try to make more money or push the boundaries.

If your establishment already has a potentially confusing name that alludes to other industries or areas then you will simply have to find clever ways of working around it and have a greater focus on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). But with new places or products be sure to take care when choosing your name and keep the search engines in mind. A rose by any other name might be found less easily on the search engines!