77% of people check TripAdvisor reviews before booking a Hotel & I am one of them. Unless I have a specific hotel in mind, I usually just view the top 5-6 hotels on TripAdvisor and give it a quick check over for reviews & pictures etc. So even though you may not rank #1 in the Google search results, at least try to rank at the top of directory sites such as TripAdvisor.
Some Initial Tips
Before I go into the three main points on how to rank higher, I feel obliged to give you a few tips on how to optimise your listing:
- Make sure all your information is correct. This includes phone numbers, website link, email address, physical business address etc.
- Include as much information and visual content as possible. Create a description that includes your keywords/services and remember to add pictures and videos too.
- Encourage customers to leave reviews” The more positive reviews you get, the more people will trust your business!
Now let’s gets started with what you really came here for!
How to be #1 on TripAdvisor: Quantity, Quality & Recency
There are 3 factors that determine your rank on TripAdvisor:
Quantity of Reviews
Quantity is a strong factor for reviews, it helps show customers that 1. A majority of the time you offer a good service & 2. People are willing to share their experience online. Unfortunately, if you have only just created an account on TripAdvisor for your business, you might have some catching up to do. Work out an average of how many reviews your competitors are getting each month, and put in place a strategy to achieve slightly more reviews each month so you will either gradually catch up or stay at the top.
Quality of Reviews
Now, before you shoot off to send every historic customer a review request, just let me finish! Yes. The quantity of reviews is important, but only the high rated reviews will leave you at the top of the page. For example, you get 50 reviews a month but your competitor gets 75, 40 of your reviews are 5* rated but only 15 of the competitor reviews are 5* rated, the likely chance is you will rank higher than your competitor, because your overall count of high rated reviews outweigh the competitors high amount of ok-ish reviews.
Recency of Reviews
Reviews slowly decay over time, so it is important from both a ranking perspective and a user perspective to get reviews evenly throughout the week, month and year. Would you trust a two-year-old comment about a hotel? Most likely not, because since that review the hotel could have changed management or even raised/lowered its standards. If viewers can see a long timeline of positive reviews, it really helps persuade them to choose you over a competitor.
Not only will you be ranking high on TripAdvisor, some businesses are lucky enough to get a listing in organic search specifically for their listing. There is no confirmed answer on how to get a listing in google search results like the one below, but by following all of the steps above I am sure you will have more of a chance than anyone else.
One final tip
Make sure you have chosen a specific category for your TripAdvisor listing. A friend of mine has a listing for his Indian restaurant but had only selected ‘restaurant’ as the category. The listing was ranked #64 for restaurants in Brighton. But when I searched in the Indian restaurant category on Tripadvisor, they were nowhere to be seen. As soon as I fixed the category issue, they jumped to #2 for the ‘Indian restaurant’ category.
This is important because many of TripAdvisor’s category pages rank well for searches in Google, resulting in a high amount of traffic that will come across your listing. For ‘Indian restaurant Brighton’, Tripadvisor ranks #1 in organic making it a popular page which a high level of traffic.
I hope all of these tips have helped. If you have any questions regarding TripAdvisor, feel free to leave a comment below or send us an email.
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