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.

Individual landing pages should be created and designed with the aim of making the site as easy to use as possible for your potential guests. The easier the site is to use the more likely they are to proceed with the site and get to the booking stage.

Part of making your landing page easy to navigate is ensuring your sales messages are in areas of the page where they are most visible to the user. Where you decide to put key links and promotional offers is crucial to success with your website.

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.

This habit of internet users demonstrates how it is often difficult for banner advertising to be successful as they usually appear on the right hand side of the page or along the top – as highlighted in green in the heatmaps.

This problem also needs to be considered when creating landing pages for your hotel advertising campaigns. If you put your sales messages in the areas of the page where they will be missed by users, you will be losing out on precious bookings for your hotel.

It is essential that users cannot miss links to pages you want them to navigate to. Everything you want your visitors to see and all calls to action should be included in the main body of text - this will guide your visitors through your hotel site and lead them to making a booking with the hotel.

To find out how Motive can ensure you are optimising the conversion capability of your landing pages, talk to our Hotel Team.

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.

Hoteliers are now developing their own proprietary websites rather than relying on 3rd party distributors to attract visitors to their hotel.

Hotel sites need to keep up with consumer expectations and provide content rich visual experiences, plus up-to-date information and offers that will entice them to book with the hotel.

That said, a hotel website must still conform to the necessary conventions of good website design and usability. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the visual elements of a website, forgetting about the needs of your user and the technical elements needed for a successful sales and marketing tool.

When designing a new hotel website you must balance key usability requirements to ensure a booking, with the technical elements that will enable potential customers to find your website such as:

Usability Features:

• Relevant content portraying your brand experience online
• Uncomplicated, logical navigation
• Simplified booking processes (see our online reservations software demo) with real time availability and pricing
• Video tours/virtual tours/image galleries
• Calls to action/marketing messages
• Brochure downloads

Plus the technical elements such as:

• Well constructed pages that allow search engines easy access to your text content
• Optimised keyword rich content
• Navigation that can be searched and indexed by search engines
• SEO friendly URL’s
• Site maps to assist search engines to index your site

A common error with hotel website design is to overuse Flash imagery which will not be picked up by the search engines, and poor navigation which will deter potential customers from booking with your website.

A void appears to have emerged between web designers and those involved in online marketing. On the one hand you have designers understandably excited about the visual possibilities of a website and on the other you have marketers obsessed with keeping the search engines and users happy.

In order for online success, hotel websites must merge these two requirements together to produce an aesthetically pleasing website that is structurally sound and SEO friendly.

Ensuring that the site follows the correct coding structure in the first stages of the site being built will also prevent the site
from having to be re-designed in the future which would incur further costs.