Recently, we’ve talked a lot about the shift in traffic from Hotel Finder to Local Universal, and how we expect to see Hotel Ads become increasingly integrated into the normal SERPs. Along with that shift, we’re seeing the results in the Local Universal 3-pack become much more keyword aware.

Previously, the ranking between hotels (not the ads) were much less dynamic. In fact, we usually saw that the top hotels were ones very close to the city center.

Here’s an example of the old results, which were the same for the following three searches: hotels in dallas, cheap hotels in dallas, and luxury hotels in dallas.

These are all great properties, but not very compelling if you searched for a luxury hotel, right? It looks like that’s starting to change, and we’re glad to see this progression with Hotel Ads. Here are some examples of what we’re seeing.

Hotels in Dallas

The below results are historically what you would see with most destination queries in hotelfinder and other Google sites. All 3 of the hotels listed here are in downtown Dallas, are popular in the area, and have fairly high room rates.

 

Cheap Hotels In Dallas

When modifying the query to target cheap hotels, we receive a list of primarily 2 star hotels, with the average room rate around $60 / night.

Luxury Hotels In Dallas

And here is another, more contextually-aware result set with primarily 4 and 5-star reviews and solid user ratings. While the room rates vary pretty significantly, each of these results is defensibly a luxury hotel.

Key Takeaways

• Core hotel data accuracy and completeness is more important than ever. This includes complete name, description, amenities, etc. Though not pictured above we found many instances of resorts, extended stay, and airport hotels where Google appeared better at categorizing hotels when this was called out in their core data.
• Local Universal traffic will continue to increase and be more qualified than traffic from Hotel Finder. Better matching rich content to search terms should result in higher click-through rates (and hopefully better conversion rates!)
• Results are not perfect. There are occasionally times when locations that are not hotels were in the results. The result sets are clearly both dynamic and a work in progress.