The right marketing levers for your site

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The website of a hotel is the first window of the establishment for a future customer. It is important to know that the visibility of the hotel plays a major role in the reservation. When a customer visits your site, it is the first travel experience you offer them through the site and your world.
A study conducted in France in August 2017 revealed that 80% of hotel guests booked online and 52% of them did so using the hotel's website directly.

The design of your site

The design is the beginning of a good visibility. Indeed, in order to provide the visitor with all the details he is looking for in a single glance, the site must be attractive in terms of design but also functional and fluid in terms of information. This is what we call the customer experience.
This involves several points such as theuniverse of your brand. It is necessary to immerse the visitor in the heart of your hotel while highlighting your little extras that can set you apart from the competition.
The attractiveness of a site at first glance comes from 70% of the photos. Attractive, they go hand in hand with the text content! Mixing history of the establishment or factual description, your homepage must reflect your identity and your values.

Optimization of the booking process

One of the most important points of a website is the reservation and how to optimize it. This involves several steps, the first of which is the action button (CTA). Keeping the user on the site while maximizing his reservations. The presence of action buttons on the site also allows the user to navigate more fluidly by offering shortcuts to other pages. The homepage, for example, is an excellent way to highlight the strengths of the hotel while offering a link to get there more easily.

The importance of the organization and structuring of the menu also allows the user to navigate with the most important information and can allow a purchase tunnel to the booking engine.
One of the last ways is to highlight the reservation by room on the rooms page. This booking action will also require clear and concise information about the features and services of the room and/or the hotel. So think about being concise, using keywords, even pictograms that allow to hit the eye more easily.

Referencing or how to improve visibility

To improve your visibility on the Internet and especially on Google, SEO is your tool.
The visual content is essential on a website, but to boost your SEO do not forget to use alt tags.
"An alt tag allows you to indicate to Google the content of an image through keywords. These keywords are used to reference images in search engines and therefore help increase the visibility of a website." This can also generate more traffic to the site via Google Image.

Other than visual content, there isalso textual content that is crucial. Having dynamic content allows Google to value this content. Updates are therefore necessary via the addition of offers or news for example, new points of interest, a page on the neighborhood or tourism etc.. Know that search engines value sites that offer new content. Of course, upstream, the content must be relevant as the geographical indicator, the services of the hotel ... but also the keywords corresponding to your establishment will help you enrich your site.

At the same time, think about adding internal links at the bottom of the pages such as a link to the Rooms page at the bottom of the Services page. This allows you to have a site optimized for users and also joins the fluid navigation. A better structure of the site improves the indexability of the website via this internal linkage and promotes the popularity of your pages.

The loading time

The loading time of a site is also important to keep users on it!

The standard speed of loading a web page is 300 to 500ms. A speed of 100 to 200ms is excellent. On the other hand, if your web page takes more than 600ms to load, then it is a bit slow, and you should think about optimizing your site to improve its capabilities.

To have a fast loading time, there are some little tricks to have;
The first: the weight of the photos. Indeed, a heavy photo slows down the loading of a page, so think about optimizing your visuals to make your site more fluid.

"A faster site will improve your conversion rates. A faster site will improve your ranking potential. A faster site will improve the user experience and reduce bounce rates. The speed of your site is part of your brand and plays into your reputation."

To test the speed of your site, you can use PageSpeed Insights, and you'll get the result of the loading speed on mobile and desktop.

The mobile responsive

In the same way that loading speed allows you toincrease your conversion rate, the importance of mobile responsive is paramount.

The traffic of internet searches is nowadays mainly done on mobile. As a result, your hotel's website must be optimized for all devices but especially for cell phones / tablets

As part of this optimization, you must ensure that the design and all pages of your site displays on all mobile devices and that there are no display problems or loading times.

Language

The languages and the choice of languages on a site is important to reach a wide range of customers. It all depends on your target. Even if we find many sites in French and English. Know that the addition of other international languages according to your customers is always welcome.

It is therefore preferable toanalyze your clientele to propose a translated site that will allow them to better understand the information and descriptions of the site in order to better book.

It also sends the message that you understand that these people have a different culture and different needs while traveling at your hotel. You are giving them the image that you can better meet their needs.

Photo gallery: 3rd most viewed page

Because a picture is worth a thousand words, the photo gallery is the 3rd most visited destination on your website.
The goal is to have a quick overview of the hotel's universe, so create a gallery of about 20 photos. Know that more than 30% of direct bookings come from the room pages.
Hotel photos produce an emotional response in the visitor that consciously and unconsciously influences to book: it is a real marketing asset.

Each photo is an opportunity to present a solution to meet the needs of customers but also to sell an accessible dream .
If the quality is not there, visitors will not waste their time trying to decipher what you are offering them in terms of service and may visit another site.

Tip: Hire a professional photographer

Photography accounts for 60% of the decision to book a hotel.
The importance of expert knowledge (lighting, angle of view ...) can help you. Because a photographer specialized in the hotel industry will know how to highlight your hotel and its specificities. Thus, the photos with the camera are more qualitative. For example, for the zoom, beyond 10X on a smartphone, the definition of the image will be deteriorated because it is not an optical zoom and the stability of a smartphone is much less powerful than that of a camera.
"Our research showed that conversion rates increased by 15% when hotels used high-quality images, compared to hotels that used low-quality or minimal photos on their website."