Driving More Online Bookings: SEO Techniques to Maximize Your Website's Visibility

There are multiple ways to bring traffic to your website and increase the number of online bookings you receive. No matter what your business model is, you can use social media, paid advertising, or email marketing to get customers to book an hour of your time.

However, all of this comes with its disadvantages. For instance, social media marketing can be constrained by your reach and email marketing only reaches existing customers. Any type of paid advertising campaign, whether on search or on social media, only brings bookings as long as you keep paying for ads.

An alternative to these three channels is increasing your search visibility with SEO and receiving organic traffic from Google search results pages. This strategy has a drawback as well — it requires a lot of research before implementing it.

But what you get in return is a constant and more or less predictable stream of online bookings with an ROI that is potentially higher than with the other methods.

This guide will walk you through SEO strategies that make driving a booking or an interview on your website a breeze.

What is SEO Visibility?

SEO visibility or search visibility is an approximate measurement of the percentage of views your page receives on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for a particular keyword.

Your business’ web pages will be shown by Google for specific keywords, in some cases dozens of them. If a particular keyword has around 1,000 monthly searches, and your website has 750 people from that number who see your page in the search results, its search visibility is 75% - which is great.

Another page on your site may be in 20th position on the SERP, so only 3% of users end up seeing it.

While you can measure search visibility for specific keywords, you can also measure the overall search visibility of your website. This metric shows the average search visibility of all the keywords important for your business.

What is the Purpose of Website Search Visibility?

The search visibility of your website is a quick and easy metric that you can use to gauge how well your website ranks for all keywords that are important to you. If you see it drop, it’s a sign that further investigation is needed to improve your website and increase traffic.

It does have its limitations, though. The biggest limitation is that you have to set up the right keywords to track search visibility — otherwise, the metric becomes uninformative. For instance, if your business is accounting consulting, and you track keywords like “accounting software,” the search visibility will be low.

This is because it won't reflect your business’ success, and you shouldn’t be ranking for that keyword anyway.

Once you stop including irrelevant or overly complicated keywords, search visibility will be a great way to quickly estimate how much potential traffic your site has compared to the competition.

Quick tip: to remove keywords you’re measuring search visibility on in bulk you can filter the list by keyword difficulty (KD) or traffic volume.

Deleting keywords with a KD that’s too high for the moment may give you a better picture of what your search visibility is for the keywords that matter at this stage. Not tracking search visibility on keywords with low KD and low volume may prevent false positive results where your overal score is impacted by ranking high on keywords that don’t bring in too much revenue.

You can delete or add keywords that make sense for your business manually based on your own judgement. But to speed up the process, you can run your website through a specialized SEO tool that can compare it with competitors and add keywords based on what your site lacks.

Implementing SEO Techniques To Get More Online Bookings

What SEO tips can you use to increase the number of bookings in your business? Let’s discover nine strategies that will take your SEO for online bookings to the next level.

Analyze Your Current Rankings & Search Visibility

The first step towards creating a powerful SEO strategy that can get you more online bookings is analyzing your website as well as those of your competitors.

You can do some analysis with free tools like Google Analytics, but the heavy lifting is only accessible via specialized SEO tools like SE Ranking’s website rank tracker. The tool can pick up your site, track its positions for hundreds of keywords in dynamics, and provide a detailed report alongside the generalized view in the form of a chart.

You can see website search visibility for the site as a whole and for each keyword you’re tracking.

The tool also allows you to compare your website with competitors for each keyword you’re tracking. In this dashboard, you can further analyze each competing link with a set of other tools.

Use a tool like this to analyze where your website currently stands and see if it needs improvement. If it does need some improvement, your current search visibility value will be a reference point to measure your strategy against.

Conduct Keyword and Competitor Research

Next, in order to improve search visibility, you should do keyword research and also research the websites that compete with you for keywords. Here’s where you start.

• Gather a list of the keywords you currently rank for
• Run it through keyword research software to find similar keywords
• Run your website through a similar tool to find any other keywords you might have missed
• Do another search to find long tail keywords related to your niche, typically questions
• Group the keywords to assign to every page
• Plan on creating new pages if you have a keyword group that won’t fit any of the existing pages
• Gather basic data on the keywords like keyword difficulty (KD) and potential traffic
• Based on that list, decide what you’re going to focus on. 

The best SEO tip here is to try to optimize the easiest keywords first. That means going for the keywords with the lowest keyword difficulty, and the highest potential traffic and commercial intent. It’s not always possible to find those, so gradually increase KD and decrease traffic numbers until you find a list of 20-50 keywords you can work on without being overwhelmed. 

Then, analyze the SERP for each of those keywords — this is the only way to figure out an optimization strategy.

The first step is to understand the search intent — what exactly is the user looking for? It may be an informational request (looking for a specific guide, learning about a topic) or a transactional one (making the purchase right away). It may also be commercial — in this case, the customer is in the middle of the funnel and may be looking for services but not yet ready to commit to a purchase.

You can understand what people want from a keyword by reading the best-ranking articles and doing a bit of brainstorming on your own. This should give you a couple of ideas of how to improve your page and make it better than the competition's.

Then, do some technical research on the pages that rank well for those keywords. You’re interested in the content on the page, like the number of keywords and the length of the text. You also have to know the number of backlinks the website has or its domain authority (DA).

If you can get access to historical ranking data, it can bring great insights. Look for pages that have recently moved from low to high positions on the SERP and analyze what they’ve changed.

In the end, you’ll have a brief description of the SERP for each keyword, like the one below.

• SERP is mostly informational articles
• The average content length is 1300 words
• The content is very structured and contains a lot of images
• The main keyword is used twice
• The average DA of a domain is 35

Optimize Your Website Based on Keyword and Competitor Data

An analysis like this basically shows you what Google wants to see on a page to rank it for the keyword in question. With that information, you can create a page that’s better than all the competition in all of the key areas.

Include all the relevant keywords in the text of your page. Remember that you don’t have to add more keywords, this won’t improve your ranking and can actually worsen it. What matters is including them, with the most important ones being a part of the title or headings.

Then, improve the content on the page. To be on the safe side, you can follow the format you already see on the SERP — it’s definitely what users are okay with seeing as Google serves it there. Make sure to make the content better than what the competing sites offer.

To do that, you can go deeper into the topic, explore related topics that weren’t talked about, or add more interactive materials.

Include Valuable Content

This SEO tip is mainly useful for informational and commercial types of keywords. There, you’ll most likely create an article, a review, a blog post, or something similar.

When you do that, make sure you’re providing a high-quality read to your future customers. Pack the page full of industry knowledge, including imagery, videos, or interactive elements.

The kind of value you provide should be in line with the search intent for the keyword you’re targeting.

Even on purely transactional pages, you can give your readers value to improve the chance of getting an online booking. People who are ready to book your time are mainly looking for confirmation that you can provide them with great service. Prove it to them by adding testimonials, case studies, or review ratings from sites like G2.

With all types of content, you should always make your call-to-actions (CTAs) clear, easy to follow, and captivating.

Obtain Valuable Backlinks

Not all keywords can be won with just on-page improvements, though. Google’s next best way of figuring out that your site needs to be high on the SERP is the number of backlinks it has. Other websites pointing to yours serve as a signal of trust.

But not all backlinks are created equal. The more trustworthy the site pointing to yours is, the better the link is. The easiest way to understand how good a site is in terms of the backlink profile is to use approximated scores like DA, DR, and others. The higher the score, the better the site.

So naturally, if you see a lot of websites in the SERP with a rank of 30-40 and your site shows as a ten, your chances of ranking for a competitive keyword are slim.

Here’s how you can improve your DA or DR score and get valuable backlinks.

• Write a guest blog for an authoritative site
• If you run events, get backlinks by publishing announcements on large event sites
• Collaborate with prominent influencers or industry experts
• Run a press release or find another way to get published in news outlets
• Find articles or blog posts that review companies from your industry and ask to be included
• Do competitor research and reach out to sites pointing to your competitors

It may take quite a while to get all of these links, but once you do, it will be much easier to have your pages rank well for any keyword.

Enhance Your Website with Event Schema Markup

Being visible on the SERP is just a part of the story. You want the people browsing the search results to actually click on your site.

One way of doing that is by making it to the top three, or even first position. The first position is found to have a higher CTR, with the next positions steadily decreasing.

Another way is to make your SERP entry more interactive with Schema markup. Schema is a special type of code you can add to your pages to display additional information on the SERP.

In most cases, your events will be displayed as a table like in the example below.

That might catch somebody’s attention, but not as much as a large SERP feature like this one.

Typically, these will be shown only for large events, no matter how well you optimize your site.

Take Advantage of Local SEO

If your business requires a location, for instance, you run a drink & draw place, you may have to improve your local SEO as well. When you focus on a specific area that you want to work in, you need a slightly different approach. Here’s what you’ll need to do.

• Add quality pictures to the GMB account
• Add correct NAP (Name, Address, Phone) info to the account
• Consider adding a 360 tour of the interior
• Add menu items
• Build citations with consistent NAP
• Encourage reviews and Q&A
• Actively manage reviews
• Create local SEO content
• Build local links

Also, make sure the event page has location-specific details. Even if they don’t make a part of the keyword, it’s a good idea to include them to signal to your site visitors that you’re a local establishment near them.

Optimize the Loading Speed of Websites

We’ve covered keyword research, content, and off-page optimization so far. There’s another important element of on-page optimization that may influence search visibility — site speed.

As a part of the Core Web Vitals update, Google deems website loading speed as a small ranking factor. Furthermore, excessively slow-loading websites can discourage users from accessing them.

You can check how well your site performs in that regard by using the Chrome Inspect tool and going to the Lighthouse report. It should produce a quick evaluation of your website.

The tool also gives you all the necessary tips on improving your website.

Streamline Your Online Booking Process

The last step of your journey is improving the conversion rate on the page.

Even if your page has a good DA, ranks well on SERP, and provides great content, it doesn’t guarantee you a booking if you haven’t worked on earning it. Here’s how you can try to do that.

• Start with choosing a reliable online booking system like TIMIFY
• Make the booking button clearly visible
• Create an easily understandable CTA
• Keep the booking form simple to avoid abandonment
• Set up an automated appointment reminder.

And with that, you can safely say you’ve added another great marketing channel to your portfolio.

Summary

So, is it worth creating an SEO strategy to receive more bookings for your business? You might not need to if it’s a one-off event since SEO for online bookings takes quite a lot of time to start working.

But you need to book appointments constantly to keep your business running, so boosting online visibility with SEO is a great strategy.

It will decrease your operating costs because even if it does require an initial investment, sitting in first place on the SERP is almost free — you’ll only need to monitor your positions and update the content from time to time.