For any business nowadays, not having an online presence directly impacts its revenue and, more importantly, its longevity. As the tourism industry grows, statistics suggest that close to 700 million travelers will make bookings online in 2023.
With respect to the hospitality sector, most tourists these days spend considerable time searching, reviewing, and booking hotels via the internet, especially through their smartphones.
Consequently, having a website for your hotel is now an essential requirement. It is undoubtedly a mode to inform prospective guests. At the same time, when done right, it can be a vital part of your hotel’s marketing campaign and help build trust among customers.
However, to benefit from your hotel website, it is equally important to invest in its continuous upkeep. The following 8 tips to improve a hotel website are steps that can help boost your online presence, strengthen your hotel’s brand value, and lead to higher profits through direct bookings.
Update! Update!! Updated!!!
Developing a website and then running it requires professionalism. While most large corporations have an in-house team, medium to small-sized hotels cannot budget such expenses. For them, hiring a specialized hotel marketing agency is a cost-effective solution.
Once your hotel website is in place, you must revise it regularly. Keeping the information on the web pages up-to-date, from new room features to changes in restaurant timings, helps keep your guests informed.
Additionally, always highlight the latest five-star reviews. Remember, there is no point in sharing only old feedback. Guests want to know how you are performing now!
Remember, a website can assist you in gaining organic online traffic by ranking higher on Google. To accomplish this arduous task, though, you need to update your blog and pages with relevant articles.
Moreover, a professional digital agency can help increase your online authority by following on-page/off-page white-hat SEO techniques such as link building, keyword use, content creation, social media integration, and more.
Visual Impact
If there’s one thing we can take from the ongoing influencer craze on social media, it is that people love visuals. Whether photos or videos, aesthetic visuals are a sure-shot way to keep the audience glued to your hotel website.
To make the most of the photos or videos you have, work with a marketing agency and incorporate the following tips to improve your hotel website;
- Take bright and clear photographs. Be it an atmospheric bar, your guestrooms, or outside areas, photos should, quite literally, showcase the hotel in the right light.
- Include 360-degree tours of the rooms and property. These tours give guests a real sense of the space, making them more likely to book a hotel room.
- Avoid using amateur photos on your website or social media. Professionally taken visuals have a far more significant influence. However, do not over-retouch the images to the point they look unreal.
- Ask your web designer to optimize all pictures to reduce loading time and label them appropriately for SEO purposes.
Seamless Booking & Customer Care
There’s no point attracting customers to your hotel website if you do not have a seamless booking platform. Firstly, the platform should be easy to use and always show live rates.
Equally important is to have a CTA (click-to-action) button for reservations on all website pages. This makes it easy for the guest to book a room no matter where they are on the website.
Similarly, you should always have a customer care phone number and email address listed on the top of the website. A convenience for the customer, permanently visible contact information allows them to connect with you instantly regarding any queries.
Backend Maintenance
To improve your hotel website, it is pivotal that you indulge in backend maintenance. And quite honestly, this is too technical a task for just anyone to do.
So, as part of your website management, a hotel marketing agency can assist in the following manner;
- Run backups.
- Assist with website security.
- Test overall website user experience.
- Make sure the forms are working.
- Remove any dead links, 404 errors, and server redirects.
- Optimize photos.
- Increase the overall loading speed of the website.
- Keep a watch on your competitor’s website for ideas that work or don’t.
- Manage your social media, cross-linking all the handles to bring in traffic from channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.
- Take care of your TripAdvisor listings, responding to positive and negative reviews.
Connect with the Customer
A hotel website is an excellent opportunity to connect with your clients before they arrive on the property. You can make them feel more involved and comfortable by telling a story about the hotel.
These “personal” anecdotes can include information about the building, particularly if it’s of historical importance, staff interviews, and unique elements of the hotel or the city it is in.
To have a greater impact, keep the content’s tone casual like you’re talking directly to the customer.
Go Multi-Lingual
Hotels situated in non-English speaking countries should, at the very least, have their website in the local and English languages. By doing so, you can capture both the regional customer base along with international tourists.
However, a hotel often becomes popular with clientele from a specific part of the world. In such a case, it is imperative to go multi-lingual with your website and cash in on your popularity with tourists from that country.
For example, the website of a bed and breakfast on the island of Naxos should be available in English and Greek. But if they see regular reservations from Italian tourists, it is worth having the website translated into Italian. Doing so also helps with hotel listings on that country’s regional search engines.
Promote Direct Bookings
Clarity, especially when promoting direct hotel bookings, is one of the top tips to improve a hotel website. Therefore, it’s advisable to have a separate page altogether listing all the deals and promotions on offer.
As mentioned above, it is essential to keep the information on this page up-to-date regarding prices, inclusions, and exclusions. At the same time, having an exclusive page for promos allows you to share it directly with your customers via email newsletters and social media, resulting in more direct bookings.
Analyze Everything
One of the main tips to improve a hotel website is to analyze everything. Your hotel website is a gift that provides unlimited data about your guests and their habits.
So, with the help of a specialized digital marketing agency, you can get the following information from a website;
- Website pages where customers spend the most time. For instance, if it is a restaurant page, you can include more information about the restaurant in your marketing.
- Which links do customers click the most? Again, this tells you what your guests want to know the most.
- Traffic source – These links bring customers to your website from search engines, pay-per-click, social media, or referrals. You can then invest in getting more of these backlinks.
- Keeping track of sessions tells you how many new and returning customers are visiting your website.
- Conversions are one of the most important to analyze. It checks how many visitors ended up booking a room in relation to the total number of sessions.
Once you have all the statistics, use them to work on the sitemap, find and rectify issues, and replicate the features that attract more traffic and direct bookings.
Are you looking to build a hotel website and boost your property’s online presence? Adigital is a leading hotel marketing agency passionate about creating unique websites that can also help manage your social media, perform Search Engine Optimization, and help with email marketing.
