Bar within hotel appearing in place of main hotel listing

[merlin_1234]

My client owns a hotel with multiple outlets inside - all food and beverage, a couple of bars and a restaurant.

One of the bars (frustratingly) includes the name of the hotel - i.e. "The Hilton" & "The Hilton Bar". The issue is the bar is now appearing in place of the hotel for all branded keywords - both as the knowledge panel and above the main hotel in the 3-pack.

The hotel has significantly more reviews (around 100 vs 2000) both at 4.6, and has received a lot more attention over the years, both from an optimisation and traffic perspective.

Interestingly, even when we add "hotel" to the keyword, it still prioritises the bar (no knowledge panel in this case, but it still appears above the hotel in the 3-pack).

We had an issue at the end of last year where someone created a duplicate listing of the hotel, which started appearing in place of the original. That listing had zero reviews, no interaction, had only been up about a month etc. I'm wondering if there's something fundamentally wrong with the main hotel listing.

We've been back and forth with support but they've been no help. Trying to think of anything else we can possibly do to force a change - would heavily deoptimising the bar listing do something?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Lluc]

Is the bar, restaurant and other outlets marked as "located in" the GMB Hotel property?

 

[merlin_1234]

They are not, no.

All of the markers are set within the hotel limits though, and the addresses all align. As far as I knew that's the only signals we can send, connecting the dots is up to Google (i.e. there's no manual entry for that)...or is there something else I could do there?

 

[Lluc]

Hi @merlin_1234 , here is a thread about the "located in" edit. New Feature: Manually Add "Located In" to a GMB Listing

I'm not sure it will be enough to get the hotel profile ranking instead of the bar profile. Schema markup would be something I would check/implement if you do not done so yet.

Also, it might help to do a citations revision and verify that there is no incorrect information in the main travel directories (Booking, Tripadvisor, hotels.com, etc).

My final recommendation would be to contact your Google Hotel Ads account manager and let them know that an incorrect GMB listing is appearing and as a result, Hotel Ads are not been displayed. I've found that this is the fastest way to correct GMB profile visibility issues with hotels. (Forget about GMB support).

P.S. When did your visibility issues begin? 8th of February or 20th of March by any chance??

 

[merlin_1234]

Hey @Lluc - thanks a lot for your reply.

I didn't know that could be manually submitted, that's a great addition in any case, so thank you! I actioned that and the Bar listing actually disappeared overnight - alas it's come back now.

Citations are as good as they'll ever be - we do regular audits for the main listing. The hotel is submitted on all the main OTA's as well.

I'm exploring that final option - thanks.

Actually this started occurring around the beginning of March - why do you ask?

 

[Lluc]

Hi @merlin_1234, Google Hotel Ads support should be able to help you.- If the correct hotel listing is not shown in the K.P., then there are no ads! If they can't solve the issue I would recommend posting in the GMB Forum.

Regarding visibility, I was just wondering about the date because we have several hotel listings from different clients in different locations that have experienced a "loss of visibility" on those two dates (but this is only shown in the Performance report in GSC). It is difficult to evaluate the impact on revenue at the moment...

 

[merlin_1234]

Thanks @Lluc - we're still investigating but appreciate the help. If we don't get anywhere I'll repost in the GMB forum.

No loss of visibility on those listing for us on those dates my side. Just looks like a random blip in this case.