Upgrading Your Hotel Website: 5 Engagement Driving Strategies

Intro

Refreshing your hotel website is the key to driving engagement in a competitive hospitality landscape.

As hoteliers battle it out to compete against Booking.com and the industry's greatest threat, Airbnb, offering customers a seamless site experience, could help you build credibility and increase conversions.

With this in mind, we’ve put together a guide on how to upgrade your hotel website to attract target leads.

Include Social Proof To Build Credibility

Reviews drive success in the hospitality sector. A whopping 91% of consumers now read an online review before making a purchase, and the hotel industry is no exception.

Thanks to popular review sites such as TripAdvisor, which allow past customers to comment on all aspects of their stay in a hotel, potential leads are now able to read up on hotel hygiene, food quality, and more before making a booking.

When it comes to your website, ensure that you’re embedding the best reviews on the site for viewer discretion. Including social proof in your site design tells a customer that you’re confident about the experience you can provide as a hotel.

Why not send post-stay questionnaires to past customers in order to prompt a positive testimonial for your website?

Responding to all feedback, whether it be positive or negative, is essential if you plan on marketing your hotel as a customer-first business. Use your reply as a chance to rectify a complaint and create a new selling point for your hotel.

Optimize Your Content Keywords For Search Success

In order to compete against popular online booking sites such as Booking.com, ensure that your website is SEO optimized. This ensures that your hotel appears high up in a location-specific search result and attracts more traffic.

Keywords are critical to SEO success. Without the right keywords, search engines will not display your website in a list of relevant results for hotels in your area.

In order to optimize your website’s keyword use, first research the phrases that are most likely to be searched for by your target demographic.

With these phrases in mind, create content that naturally ranks for your desired keyword. This could be a blog post, a keyword-inspired landing page, meta-tags, or within the descriptions of your services.

The key here is to start easy and work your way up the keyword difficulty scale. Trying to rank for the phrase ‘hotel in London’, for example, is extremely competitive and is unlikely to earn you the top spot in SERPs. Instead, rank for specific, long-tail keywords such as ‘pet-friendly hotel London’ for a chance to drive traffic.

Prioritize Accessible Site Navigation

Navigational accessibility plays a crucial role in your online booking success. If your hotel's website is easy to navigate, users will find it easier to select the deal they are looking for and checkout with ease in just a few steps.

In order to compete with one-click booking features on competitor sites such as Trivago and Hotels.com, your navigation system should offer a direct path to the checkout, clearly highlighted calls-to-action, and accessible buttons above the fold that appeal to a diverse range of customer abilities.

In a study of more than a million top-ranking home pages, experts at WebAIM found an average of 51.4 accessibility errors per website.

When upgrading your hotel website, ensure that you tackle any potential accessibility errors in order to offer all viewers a positive booking experience.

To monitor your navigational accessibility, why not A/B test multiple versions of your website? A/B tests highlight any potential accessibility errors before your site goes live, offering you the chance to change colors, fonts, or button sizes that may impact the user experience.

Use Guest Data To Influence Site Personalization

Site personalization is an important factor to consider when upgrading your hotel website.

Returning guests expect personalized offers and communications from hotels they have visited in the past. This could be in the form of a discount on their same-room package for a different date or an offer to enjoy a free treatment in an adjacent spa. These personalized offers help customize a guest’s experience with your hotel and encourage them to book a stay once again.

The question is, how do you introduce an effective personalization strategy that attracts new leads to your hotel website?

Start by leveraging as much guest data as possible from your hospitality POS system. Modern-day point-of-sale technology creates a profile for each and every converting customer, which includes details about their booking preferences, location data, purchasing habits, and more.

Using guest data to your advantage, you can craft an ideal customer persona. Use this customer persona to influence your site design, offers, and communications. This will help you generate content that engages the right leads and offers them a booking experience tailored to their needs.

Optimize Your Image Sizes For Speedy Loading

Last but not least, take a long, hard look at your website visuals. A hotel website is full of high-quality images and videos that all represent the best features of your hospitality experience.

This said, high-quality image files are also well known for slowing down a site’s loading speed due to the fact that the files are so heavy. This means that it takes longer for a search engine to crawl the page, in turn harming your search ranking.

The average consumer will wait just 8 seconds for a website to load before they bounce to a competitor.

In order to combat this, ensure that your image and video files are compressed for speedy loading. While it’s important to maintain quality, we’d recommend keeping all image files under 20MB for the best results.

Wrapping Up

Driving engagement in the hospitality sector is no easy task. In order to compete against online booking giants, regularly refreshing your website design is crucial.

From including social proof to optimizing your navigation for search accessibility, there are plenty of ways to improve your brand’s credibility as an industry player.

Our advice is to target your niches. What can you offer that generic online booking giants can’t? Lean into these strengths, and you’ll create a website that attracts target traffic in no time.