Your hotel website gives potential travellers a chance to view the most important aspects of your property. Your website should be creating potential customers to paying guests.
People are not going to visit your property before they stay to ensure it meets all of their needs. Here are some things that every hotel website should have to make that happen!
Be Mobile
In this day and age, you will find that a majority of your potential guests will be booking online, and on their mobile. Your website needs to be optimised for this to happen. Non-mobile friendly sites are now being penalised by search engines and ranking systems, which will make any competitors show above yours a priority. If you aren’t mobile-friendly, make that your #1 on your to-do list!
STAAH Instant Website gives a complete solution. Our websites are mobile-optimised and powered by easy SEO tools. Our templates also include a Google Maps plugin so your property gets the best possible online visibility.
Invest in good quality imagery and video content
For any website, content is key! And this includes imagery and videos. People want to experience your product before they actually experience it. What do the rooms and facilities look like? Where are you in proximity to events and city centres?
Try to have seasonal shots of your property and update photos of the services and dining experiences you offer. Place these images in hero sliders at the top of the page to make an impact. When embedding videos on your website from YouTube, remember to remove the Suggested Videos option – you don’t want your hard-earned user moving away from your site.
Simplify your homepage and navigation
Booking in the travel and hospitality industries can be a painful experience. Making a site’s navigation feel as effortless as possible is one way to make people follow through with the booking on your own site. STAAH Instant Website has a solution to attract visitors with a beautiful & responsive website. Engage your visitors with good content & design. Don’t clutter your homepage – or any page for that matter. Provide only relevant information and in easily digestible bits. Remember you’re dealing with a fickle web audience and have only a few seconds to sell them your story and convert.
Invest in a Good Booking Engine
Don’t make your customers jump through hoops when booking online. Ensure that you have an easy to use and secure booking engine. Then convert your web visitors into guests with a powerful booking engine such as STAAH ConvertDirect Booking Engine. STAAH also has a great widget ‘WatchMyRate’. The WatchMyRate widget displays live rates from five different channels, which can be seen by all visitors, driving direct bookings and revenue for your property.
Remember to make sure your booking engine complies with the requirements of the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI DSS).
Testimonials and other relevant content
Write content first for the user and then for the search engines. Use keywords wisely as well as internal links. Customer reviews should be a big part of your content, so should deals and special events. Have diverse call-to-actions; not everyone is coming to your website for booking.
Formatting your content so it is easy to read on any screen is also a must – use an easily readable font, subheadings, and bullet points.
Still don’t have an official website for your property? STAAH can help you, click here for a free demo.