Is your hotel website the best it can be, or you could improve it to get to that point?
In the digital age, your hotel website is often the first impression potential guests have of your property. A well-designed and user-friendly website can be the difference between a booking and a missed opportunity.
But with so many competing sites, how can you make your hotel stand out?
Here are 5 expert tips that will help you with that.
Improve Your Website In 11 Steps
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Tips to improve your hotel website:
Find your hotel website’s purpose
Every website needs to have a specific, clearly defined purpose.
If you try to design a website that does everything – chances are it will do nothing well. It will be confusing for your visitors, and they will leave. And if this happens, you’ll have lost them forever.
To find your website’s purpose, answer the following questions:
- Why have you created a website for your hotel?
- Is your website helping your business to grow? If yes, how? If not, why not?
- What is your main business goal?
- How can your website help you achieve that goal?
The best websites focus on creating specific, strategy-focussed outcomes.
Having this level of clarity in what you want your website to do helps you to make better decisions about the design and the content of the site.
Can you optimise your website so it focuses on a goal that helps your business grow?
Understand your audience
Your website should be a finely-tuned marketing machine that works for you and makes your life easier. To be effective in that aim, you need to have an intimate understanding of the guests you want to attract.
If you’re aiming at everyone, again, you’re going to be marketing too broadly. You’ll be missing the specific group of people who are most likely to book a stay at your hotel. You’ll be wasting time and money on people who aren’t really interested and aren’t a great fit for you anyway.
The best way to understand your audience is by creating a customer persona. This is a fictional character who represents your ideal customer and has key characteristics, wants and needs of your wider market of customers.
For step-by-step guidance on how to create customer persona profile(s) for your hotel, please check out this article on our blog.
Tell an engaging story
This is the key to a hotel website that can double or triple your booking rate in a matter of weeks.
The best hotel websites tell a compelling story.
How do you capture your reader’s attention and make them curious to stay on your hotel website, and explore more? Or even better, enter their email address to stay in touch with you.
The story is the secret to doing this.
Humans have always used storytelling to package up complicated ideas quickly and make them easy to digest. Whether it was cavemen around the fire or religious sermons – stories offer an engaging way to communicate deep ideas quickly and increase understanding.
To effectively implement storytelling into your hotel website, you need to:
- Be clear about the experience you create for your guests
- Use evocative, appealing language and copywriting
- Have a clear identity and a point of view
The best hotels invite their guests into their own stories. Their guests can see themselves enjoying the amazing facilities, exploring the city and tasting the food.
Aim to do this with your website content – from the imagery you choose to the text you write and include.
And if you need help with crafting your story, Juliana Hahn has published an amazing eBook: The Impactful Hotel Storytelling – so give it a read!
Improve your hotel website by paying attention to the words you use
How you talk about your hotel, your guests and your experience can have a huge impact on your customers. Getting your writing right is important because it’s a major part of how you tell the stories you want to tell.
Time is limited, so choosing the right text can make a huge difference to how successful your site is. It can be the difference between communicating your message and not.
If you’re not a natural writer, or simply don’t have time, use a copywriter – it will be well worth the cost in the long run.
Add a video
Travel and video go together hand in hand, as there are few other formats so effective for telling a story and conveying experiences.
Here are just some of the reasons why you should consider adding video to your hotel website:
- Videos are entertaining, easy to digest and engaging – attributes that help them to boost conversions and sales.
- They can help you to develop trust with your customers, and have a big influence on buying decisions.
- They can convey a lot of information, fast. Many users will watch a video rather than read a large block of text.
Aim to create a video no longer than 60 seconds – keep it short and sweet, and help your customers enter the story and imagine themselves staying in your hotel.
Let’s set your hotel and travel website up for success!
Whether you want a brand new site, or to improve your existing one, you are in the right place.
From small, family-owned businesses to travel behemoths, we have worked with countless travel, tourism and hospitality businesses over the years. We’ve taken their websites to the next level – and we can do the same for you!
Get in touch with us and let’s turn your hotel website into a booking machine!
Related articles:
Can You Create A Hotel Website For Less Than 100 Pounds?
Free Analytics Tools For Travel And Hotel Websites
Anatomy Of Effective Hotel Websites
Tips to optimise a hotel website
Until next time,
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