Your hotel website is the first interaction potential customers will have with your brand. It’s critical that the design and layout draw them in, providing an efficient yet simple experience.
NB: This is an article from Hotelogix
Potential customers will look for information regarding room features and amenities, and it’s critical that they’re able to find it. Additionally, things like numbers and addresses should be constantly displayed in some fashion on the site. Booking should be simple as well. Obtaining the largest number of direct bookings is critical to avoiding OTA commissions, and your website can be the key to this.
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Does your website need some work? In this article, you’ll get hotel website tips and other information regarding hotel website traffic.
What Makes a Good Hotel Website?
A good hotel website will have several key functions that lead to conversions, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty. The following section outlines the main objectives of a good hotel website.
Hotel Website Objectives
An efficient hospitality website design will lead to accomplishing the following objectives:
- Provide users with clear information according to search criteria
- Reassure them about your hotel’s value, quality, and significance
- Make it a treat to stay at your property and experience your brand
- Allow them to easily check rates and availability so they can book rooms
- Allow your brand to stay visible and encourage brand loyalty and the repeat customer experience.
Use the following section to produce the best hotel website design. You can also use these to redesign your current website into something more efficient and useful for your guests.
1. Responsive Template
This means that your website’s template adjusts itself to fit various devices. Mobile devices, laptops, desktops, and tablets should all display the important features of your hotel without any issues.
Having an optimal viewing experience is important if you want clients to complete the booking process. Most travelers book rooms on their mobile devices while traveling, so attention to this element should never be underestimated.
2. Quick Navigation
You should have a website that’s fully functional with no lagging or glitching. Content and images should load rapidly without visitors having to wait.
It’s frustrating when a website takes too long to load, and this can lead to high bounce rates. This makes it extremely difficult to capture visitors and turn them into buyers.
The end result of this is normally a traveler switching to a different website. This is the last thing you want as it has no benefits for optimizing your revenue.
3. Booking Engine
This could be one of the single most important elements of your entire hotel website. A website booking engine allows travelers to check rates and dates of availability. These are usually included in a Channel Manager Package.
The Channel Manager is the tool that allows you to centralize and automate managing various online travel agencies. If your best room rates are advertised on your website, this will end up leading to increased conversions a large majority of the time.
4. Simple Design
Choosing a simple design for your hotel website that makes your brand and logo visible is critical. Every element of your brand is important, and this should always be included in the overall theme of your website.
The design should outline your brand’s goals and concepts. Additionally, features that make your hotel unique, as well as special amenities, should all be included in a simple design.
5. Clear Menu
When you have a clear structure and menu that allows easier navigation, guests have a better experience on your website. Finding the information they’re looking for quickly and easily is vital.
You should also interlink between different web pages that are relevant to one another to make navigation easier. It should never take any more than two or three clicks for a visitor to find what they’re looking for.
6. Professional Pictures
Images can speak volumes for your brand. Don’t be afraid to make your website visually dynamic. Keep your text simple and maximize your keywords. This leads to enhanced SEO results.
Browsers prefer visual stimuli in the form of images and videos that give them a clear picture of what your property consists of. Lengthy room descriptions hardly satisfy the curiosity of travelers.
7. Communicate Directly with Guests
Communicate on a regular basis through social media or your blog to inform travelers of activities and relevant local options. Include any news that might interest them as well.
Use personal words to make connections, and keep the content relevant to your target market. You can do this by describing potential activities around your area. Link them to the corresponding websites to make the experience even easier for them.
Ultimately, visitors will share this content on different platforms, increasing your visibility and search engine rankings. This increases your odds of maximizing your revenue.
8. Multilingual Content
If you want to garner international attention, it’s best to begin with making your website translatable into different local languages of the countries you target. This ensures you a higher ranking on Google and other search engines for each respective country. It also offers convenience to potential guests and motivates them to book directly on your website.
This alone leads to higher revenue because of the lack of paying OTA commissions. Whenever this is accomplished, it leads to higher profits for your hotel in the end.
So what about SEO?
SEO and Your Hotel
If your website is dialled in and operating efficiently, you use relevant keywords, meta titles, alt descriptions, and other on-page elements of SEO, you should garner significant results on search engines. However, there are additional elements of SEO that can help you leverage the power of search engines.
Discovering terms relevant to your target market and crafting blog posts around them brings new opportunities to draw people to your website. When you constantly update your website with fresh content, you give yourself a constant stream of new customers and broaden your target market.
It’s good practice to update your blog weekly. However, there are certain hotels that do this multiple times per week or once per day.
Regardless of how often you post, you should remain consistent in this number. It’s also important to craft blog posts of the appropriate length. Between 500-1,000 words are sufficient for most hospitality websites.
Once you’re able to bring all of the previously mentioned elements together, your website should fire on all cylinders. SEO shouldn’t be a problem, and your visibility should begin to skyrocket. Once this happens, you can count on increased revenue through direct bookings on your website.
