Which of these content layouts is better for SEO?

[lina]

I'm working on a new section of my website with travel guides for specific cities. Each city will have 5-15 hotel reviews.

For SEO purposes, would it make sense to have ten hotel reviews on one page, or give each hotel review its own page? Each review will be 200-500 words and have one or two photos.

I feel like as a user, I might want them all on one page, but I suspect that's not the best route to go to for rankings. That said, I know nothing about SEO, so would appreciate any advice you might have.

[EditorialGuy]

I'd worry less about SEO and more about competition. You'll be competing with scores of booking and travel-agency sites, not to mention review sites like TripAdvisor and content farms like Wikitravel.

IMHO, a better strategy would be to focus on a handful of destinations that you know really well, build "best of breed" sites about those destinations, and driving your own traffic to your hotel pages instead of trying to outrank the likes of Booking.com, Hotels.com, and TripAdvisor or the hotels' own Web sites.

[Planet13]

+1 EditorialGuy

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The first thing I would do is figure out how you are going to make your site MORE USEFUL to visitors than the competition.

Back to the original question, if the reviews are only 200 to 500 words, then I would tend to put them all on one page and use AJAX to have a "show more" button

[lina]

My website is a niche site about a particular place. It gets good traffic and ranks highly in Google search. I already do some hotel reviews on the site's blog, but am now organizing the reviews (and adding more) into city guides for each of the few cities that I cover. I feel that I have a pretty good understanding of the market and my competition, but I don't really know the best way to format those pages.

Planet13, how long would a review need to be to warrant its own page? And do you mean have a small blurb about each hotel that you can click to show more?

[Planet13]

If all the reviews were about a single entity, I would put them all on the same page.

I don't know what the technical term for it is, but there is a way to show just the first paragraph (or two) of the review and a show more button that STAYS ON THE SAME PAGE but expands and allows more of the review to be shown.

Some of the popular review sites (think of the ones that review EVERYTHING) have that feature. I am guessing it is ajax of some kind.

[Planet13]

By the way, you answered your question yourself:

"I feel like as a user, I might want them all on one page, but I suspect that's not the best route to go to for rankings."

Do what is best for the user, in my humble opinion. Make one AWESOME page that the user will want to share / link to / like etc.,

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If you really want to rank a page for a review of a single hotel, then make it VERY HELPFUL to potential guests. What could you provide that other sites with reviews by guests don't already provide?

[lina]

Most of my competitors and similar type of sites seem to have hotel reviews on their own page so I figured there must be a reason.

I feel like as a user I don't want to click to more pages but I also don't want to be confronted with a wall of text. I have been told that some of my pages have a high bounce rate because I have too much content on them, so I am trying to figure out ways to make the information more accessible. I'll look into what you are suggesting.

Many of my hotel reviews already rank pretty highly, all things considered (top 10 for hotel name + review, top 20 without review). My feeling was that I'll never rank for terms like "CITYNAME hotels" but have a better chance ranking for "HOTELNAME CITY", which made me think that separate pages might be better. I'm not really banking on getting a lot of traffic via the hotel reviews, they are just part of a larger project.

[Rasputin]

some of my pages have a high bounce rate because I have too much content on them

I doubt if too much text would cause increased bounce rate in most circumstances, assuming the subject is one which requires significant amounts of relevant content (eg 'how high is mt everest' needs few words, 'hiking trails near mt everest' would need lots of words)...

... but more important, bounce rate alone is not a very useful metric. Sites can have a high BR and do well if they are providing all the info required. I prefer BR along with 'time on page' as a guide ( ie I investigate pages that analytics says have high BR AND low time on page, but don't worry if BR is high but most people spend 3+ minutes on the page)

Re the original question, i would give them separate pages if they are genuine, unique and substantial reviews with something unique to offer (typically if you have actually visited the hotels) or keep them all on the same page if not, or if the text is rewritten affiliate site text.

[lina]

I do visit all of the hotels (they are real reviews) and take several photos, which are original and my own. I also compare walk-in rates to website rates and online rates, which you won't find on most other review sites.

And thanks for your advice about bounce rates. I just looked at my analytics and I have one page with a 92.55% bounce rate, but the average time on page is 5:14, so I guess they are reading the whole thing. My most popular page has a bounce rate of 70%, but has a average time on page of 4:35. So I guess that's not so bad, right? My site has a lot of informative blog posts and I can see that someone who is searching for one of my topics might read the post and not click through to anything else because the post covers everything they need to know. In fact, I was worried I had too much information on some of them.

[Planet13]

Hi Lina:

Glad to hear you visit and shoot your own photos.

Maybe you can do both?

Have individual pages for the hotels, but include a separate synopsis of all the hotels in an area on the main destination page?

On the main destination page, I might have a table with a brief comparison chart of the hotels, maybe their contact info, and one or two sentences about the hotel, then a link to the individual hotel page.

On the individual hotel pages, I would really, really look to add as much USEFUL info as possible. I think the comparison of walkin rates to online rates is a good start. But I am sure there is more out there.

Also, I would allow comments / user input on those pages so that you can get as much info as possible on those pages.

The thing is, just make the destination pages AND the individual hotel pages as useful as possible.

[EditorialGuy]

Question: Do you stay at the hotels? If not, you're writing descriptions of what you've seen, not reviews--in which case you might want to provide readers with a source of ratings and reviews by paying guests, such as a "Reviews" page for the Hotel Widget at an affiliate partner's site.

I agree with Planet13 that individual pages for the hotels are the way to go--maybe with an introductory page that organizes links to the hotel pages by star category, theme, etc. I'd also suggest erring on the side of more information, rather than less, with a good selection of original photos (not just the boilerplate publicity photos that every booking site is using). There are a zillion sites competing for rankings and readers with 300- to 500-word hotel descriptions, so why not stand out from the crowd?

As for listing rates (walk-in or otherwise), that's trickier than it used to be, because rates are often determined by supply and demand for a given night and type of room. (Hotels, like airlines and cruise lines, often use yield-management software these days.) Even when a hotel's rates aren't bouncing around in real time, keeping up with rate changes can be a nuisance in terms of site maintenance.

[lina]

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll get to work on this.