Case Study - NH Hotels

NH Hotels are a European hotel chain, with over 340 hotels in cities across the continent.

Despite having websites for many of their main hotels and chains, in local and foreign languages, few of their sites ranked highly in the Google results for searches such as 'hotels in Barcelona' or in many cases for a search on the hotel name itself.

Distilled were asked to help improve the rankings of NH Hotels pages for both these types of searches - and in languages of all their main target markets. So as well as covering the search results for 'Hotels in Fribourg' on British search engines, we had to target 'hotels in Freibourg' on German search engines, 'hotels en Friburgo' for Spanish search engines - and so on, covering almost 7500 different search results that could potentially be improved.

An NH hotel called Hotel Nacional in Madrid.

Distilled's strategy approached the situation from two different angles: the optimising of NH Hotel's websites to be more 'search engine friendly', and building links to the main sites to improve the trust that they have with the major search engines.

One major part of improving the client sites was to restructure the information into one single domain for each country - for instance: nh-hotels.de now has details of every NH Hotel, and the information is in German. This had the dual benefit of improving the trust that search engines have in these country-level domains, and also giving anybody a single site they could visit to find information - in their language - on hotels across the continent.

Since Distilled began implementing their changes and building links to these sites, there has been significant increases in visibility for the sites through the search engines. Although the work is ongoing, three quarters of NH Hotels now rank #1 for their name on Google, and 40% of searches for hotels in a particular city shows at least one NH Hotel on the first page of Google's results; for Yahoo searches, this is over 50%.