Develop the Right Strategies for Your Hotel Website

With more customers booking their travel plans online, it is critical to have a great website. This requires monthly upkeep, a clean look and engaging content to drive more visitors to your site and customers to your hotel.

There are a few key points to consider when designing a hotel website. From a visual standpoint, the website should be attractive, but it is important to keep images at the optimal size so they do not slow the site down. Hotel industry websites attract many visitors and being able to respond to their requests in an agile manner is a must. Keep it simple and clear so that visitors can find what they want. A direct connection to the reservations engine and on-site search functionality are important features to be included on the home page. Visitors should be able to manage their account, search for destinations and make reservations easily.

There needs to be a good catalog that allows the visitor to search by brand, destination, activities, interests and more. The internal search must be fast and precise to find the different hotels that fit a specific search. Today, more people do a search for a hotel in terms of the amenities so the catalog must be able to accommodate this.

Hotels are constantly changing so make sure you can update the catalog database in a timely manner. If your site includes multiple hotels, consider including all the hotels you manage in your catalog.

Having a quick, easy-to-use website with a great design isn’t enough to increase bookings. Internet marketing is critical to bring in additional visitors and customers. By utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising (PPC) campaigns, companies can increase traffic to their site. With Royal Holiday, a company with more than 70,000 members and more than 180 destinations worldwide, WSI has been using a PPC campaign to attract potential new members that can go through the sales process on the site to become new members.

In terms of SEO, competition in the hotel industry is very strong for general terms. This means that using a word like “hotels” is too general and will not increase positioning in website searches. A general search is often not useful, but by knowing your current customers and your product, you can profile more specific search terms that are being used by your potential customers. Identify your target market and use keywords that are most used by that market. If your site operates internationally, it is important to have local domains for every language being used.

In addition to getting people to the site, keeping visitors on the site longer is important. The goal is to have visitors stay on the site for more than three and a half minutes. In normal season, every visitor browses an average of three pages per visit.

Getting people to visit your site isn’t the final step. People that search for hotels online find so many offers that when they land on a site they expect to find the exact content they were searching for that solves their information need. If the content is not precise and directly linked to the search term, the visitor will abandon the site. Therefore, it is important to make sure the content on the site is relevant. Instead of relying only on globalizers like Expedia, rework the contents of your site so that it includes the content customers are searching.

Many hotels, especially smaller ones, do not have a good back office process so that even if the site works fine and the search marketing strategy brings them new prospects, they lose them. Hotels can keep these potential customers by improving the way they answer the phone or follow up on customer requests submitted through the site’s contact form. When WSI redid the Royal Holiday website, we installed a live chat feature so visitors could reach a human customer service representative immediately.

Also consider alternative strategies to reach new customers. Royal Holiday utilizes their electronic newsletter. Email marketing through an electronic newsletter is a great opportunity to reach your customer base with a cross selling strategy. For example, a customer that has used the site to book vacations in beach and golf resorts might be a good prospect for a cruise vacation. You can reach the customer through email marketing and direct him or her to the site so he or she can see the full offer from the company. Social media can also be leveraged to contact customers. Most people use social networks so inserting PPC advertising on these sites can attract followers to the social properties, which in turn can direct traffic to the website.

For any website and Internet marketing campaign, persistency and consistency is critical to building a brand. Stop-and-go campaigns are not effective; SEO and social media require consistency and knowledge. Websites need constant improvement and updates so keep this in mind as you move forward.