The layout of your landing page is very important in order to keep your visitors there and encourage them to navigate deeper into your hotel website and eventually make a booking.
These heatmaps from eye tracking studies to see where users’ eyes are attracted to highlights how people always tend to focus on the main body of text and don’t really stray away from that.
It is important for hoteliers to protect their brand image online. More and more the Internet is being dominated by your guests – social networking sites, blogs and forums allow users to project their own beliefs about your hotel across the Web. This is fine if the opinion is good, however, it is inevitable that some people will have negative comments to make about the service they received with your hotel.
There is no way of stopping your guests from discussing the experience they have had of your hotel website, however, there are ways of monitoring and reacting to these discussions in order to minimise the damage caused to your online reputation.
You need to ensure that you are leading the way when it comes to your hotel’s online reputation. This can be achieved through basic SEO techniques, ensuring that you are appearing as high as possible in the search results and therefore higher than other references to your hotel.
Another crucial part of your online strategy should be interacting with your guests and responding to what is being said. If a negative comment is posted about your hotel online, the best way to limit the potential damage to your reputation is to react quickly and effectively.
If a guest has talked about a negative experience with you, it is crucial that you can respond and show that customer care is high on your priority list, if they are complaining about either the hotel itself or the hotel website you must be seen to be willing to make improvements in light of their comments.
To find out how Motive can ensure you are promoting the right image of your hotel online. Talk to our Hotel Team.
A major factor in online success is testing. Your hotel website should be tested on a regular basis in order to ensure your clients are being given the best service and your brand is being represented in the most appropriate, professional manner.
Every aspect of your hotel website should be tested and re-tested. Obviously achieving the maximum number of conversions is the main objective for your website and unless it is tested regularly there are countless different ways you could be losing potential business.
The most obvious reason for testing is, of course, to make sure your hotel site actually works. Any issues or faults with your site will be easily picked up by the user, therefore regular testing prevents your potential clients from developing a negative image of your brand. If your website is disappointing or faulty it will give the user a negative image of your company as a whole.
The term testing can also relate to other aspects of managing your website, however. Testing out different styles and approaches with your website will allow you to work out which method works best with your targeted audience.
Cookie tracking and various web statistic packages enable you to track precisely what is happening in the site and react positively as a result.
Try rotating different images and headlines on pages within the site then tracking the number of hits and click-throughs achieved with the different styles. This will help to determine what is the most effective strategy for your site.
Calls to action are key when attempting to guide users through your site; you should try out different phrases and see how it affects your conversion rates.
Success with your website is trial and error. Your website shouldn’t be a static thing that once launched is left alone. You should be constantly updating, adding to and tweaking various parts of the site to meet the needs of your users and maximise the revenue you get from it.
To find out how Motive can help you maximise the potential of your website, please get in touch with our Hotel Team.
In the offline world, booking a hotel and choosing where you want to stay is an enjoyable and leisurely experience. People browse through travel brochures and have long discussions with travel agents over where would be best to visit and which hotel would be best suited to their needs.
Is it possible to recreate this relaxing experience in the online world?
E-commerce is very much driven by ensuring that consumers can find what they want as quickly and easily as possible. However, is this really the route that hotel websites should follow? Perhaps consumers want to repeat the laid back experience they have of booking a holiday offline when they are booking through a hotel website?
It is always important to provide those users who already know what they want with the ability book quickly through your hotel website - with the fewest clicks possible. However, hotel websites need to provide users who are just browsing to come up with ideas of possible locations for their holiday plenty of material to look through at their leisure.
Having pages in the site with pictures, video tours, testimonials and other features will help a user who is still making up their mind to be inclined to book with your hotel. Interactive features that are fun and easy to use will help to re-create the informal chats people have with travel agents – hotels could even adopt a Live Chat service where potential guests can chat directly with the hotel.
Hotel websites with the ability to satisfy bookers who want immediacy and those who want to take their time and deliberate over their travel arrangements will be the most successful.
To find out how Motive can ensure that your hotel website appeals to all guests no matter what they requirements – speak to our Hotel Team.
Most hoteliers now work hard to push potential visitors to their own proprietary website from both the offline world and from various areas of the web. A great pull to the hotels’ website is the ability to offer the best available rate (BAR) and this point is heavily promoted in most hotel advertising.
However, recent research conducted has highlighted the fact that even though hotels are promising this reduced rate through their website, when visitors reach the site this rate is often unavailable. This will do one of two things, either push the visitor away to a third party booking site or alternatively their custom will be lost completely.
This is a huge mistake on the part of the hotels for various reasons. If a consumer is promised a certain price then they expect to pay it, if they arrive at a hotel website and find that the hotel has been dishonest about what is on offer then an instant mistrust of the hotel brand is established. Also by not offering the cheapest rate available on the web, hoteliers are forcing customers to seek out third party booking sites to find the best available rate. Not only does this lessen the impact of the hotel brand on the consumer it also means that visitors are being pushed to sites where the hotel will have to pay up to 35% in commission fees for the sale.
In order to be successful online you should ensure that visitors can get the best price for rooms in your hotel through your own website – this assists in building trust with the customer and also representing your company as a trustworthy source.
This research highlights the critical importance of having integrated online reservations in order to build a good relationship with your guests and avoid paying up to 35% commission to third party sites.
To find how Motive can help your hotel reap the benefits of integrated online reservations, get in touch with our Hotel Team.
When it comes to PPC advertising, it is crucial to achieve a high Quality Score for your adverts. The Quality Score Google assigns your keywords affects several aspects of your advertising campaign, including; how much you pay per click, if your advert shows and if it does, in what position it appears.
Google assigns a Quality Score to each keyword in your campaign. The Quality Score ranges from; Poor, OK, Good to Great.
There are various factors that affect the Quality Score of your keywords. These include the historical click through rate of your adverts, the keywords relevance to the adverts you are running and the content quality of your landing page – i.e how many times your chosen keywords are appearing in the text on your landing page.
A recent addition to how Google calculates your overall Quality Score is the time it takes your landing page to load. This hasn’t been widely publicised and many advertisers are probably unaware that this is now an important factor in the Quality Score.
There are various ways of improving the load time of your landing page. These include:
To find out more about optimising your website to assist your PPC campaigns, speak to our Marketing Team.
Corporate responsibility and an acceptable carbon footprint is an issue that is becoming increasingly important to commercial success for all hotel businesses.
The issue of your carbon footprint has become a global problem and as a result a key trend in how a hotel markets itself to potential visitors. More and more guests are taking the environmental policy of a hotel into consideration when choosing their accommodation. Your hotel will be much more attractive to visitors if you have a clear and thorough strategy to ensure your hotel is environmentally responsible.
Your website is a great way of communicating this strategy with your guests and demonstrating the steps you are taking to reduce your carbon footprint.
A great example of a website that has done this is Intercontinental Hotels:
http://www.ihgplc.com/innovation/
They have demonstrated the changes they have made in and around the hotel to ensure they are reducing their carbon footprint. They have managed to do this in a fun and interesting way that will appeal to potential visitors browsing the site and also be picked up by various blogs due to its innovative and fun usability. The more it gets talked about the more interest is created in the website and the more traffic the site will get, leading to increased bookings.
This website demonstrates how you can turn the often tricky task of becoming carbon neutral to your advantage.
To discuss innovative solutions for your website, feel free to talk to our Hotel Team
A key factor in securing bookings with your hotel through your proprietary website is your online booking system. Expecting visitors to fill in an enquiry form or phone the hotel to confirm their booking could lead to you losing the sale as consumers now expect to be able to easily and securely book their reservation online.
Your online booking system should be easy to navigate and simple to use allowing visitors to book quickly and easily with as few amount of clicks and entering of data as possible – users should also be reassured that the reservation they have made is safe and secure. Therefore, your online booking system must provide accurate real time rates and availability. It is not good for your hotel’s image if people are trying to book rooms with your hotel and then discovering that you actually have no availability. This makes your hotel look unorganised and unprofessional. If people have a bad experience using your hotel website they are highly likely to tell other people about it and in turn they will be put off using your website.
A well structured, user-friendly online booking system will also ensure that users feel happy to come back and use the system again. Repeat bookings are key to sustained success and the easier it is for a visitor to book with the website the more likely they are to return and stay with you again.
Motive have successfully integrated online booking systems into several hotel clients websites. To find out how Motive can assist your online bookings, click here.
When planning the online marketing strategy for your hotel website it is crucial you think like your potential guests. Users searching in Google for hotels will not know the individual URL of your hotel website and will therefore be using generic search terms in order to find accommodation to suit them.
Only around 20% of internet users search for hotels using the brand name which leaves 80% of your target market searching on factors which are important to them when booking a hotel, e.g. special offers, location etc. Your hotel then appears amongst the competition in the search results - unlike offline media, in the online space it is much easier to compare your effectiveness against your competitors in terms of positions in the search results.
Location is the biggest factor in a person’s decision of which hotel they will stay in. They will have decided on the location of where they want to visit before they begin looking for accommodation.
It is essential, therefore that your site is created with SEO in mind – you need to ensure your content is keyword optimised to include the region your hotel is in; your websites technical structure is easily accessible by the search engines plus that your website utilises search engine friendly URL’s.
We have many years experience of building SEO friendly hotel websites, to find out more about what Motive Technology could do for your hotel, click here.
In order to achieve online success with their proprietary websites, hoteliers should have their own blog and update it on a regular basis. Even the big brand hotel chains now have their own blog and in the case of Marriott hotels it is actually the CEO who blogs on behalf of the organisation, highlighting the credibility of this new Web 2.0 aspect of the Internet.
Although the idea of guests being free to say what they want about your hotel on your website is a slightly scary prospect, it is better to have people posting about this on your blog where you can respond quickly and effectively than on another website where you will not know that a negative comment has been made and therefore unable to respond. Unlike the rest of the site a blog can be updated very quickly meaning you can respond to any comments almost immediately this has already proved an invaluable capability for many big brand names.
You are currently browsing the Motive Technology Hotel Blog blog archives for the year 2008.
