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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

• Avoiding the use of redirects
• Keeping the page size as small as possible
• Compressing images to reduce the file size
• Keeping the use of flash to a minimum
• Not having third party content on the page

To find out more about optimising your website to assist your PPC campaigns, speak to our Marketing Team.

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

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.

Having your own blog gives the hotel the opportunity to get its own opinion across to potential guests and with the ability for guests to make their own contributions and respond to your blog posts it works to develop a closer relationship with your guests.

Trading online obviously means that you lose that one to one contact with guests that you achieve in the hotel itself – having a blog is one way that you can recreate this relationship over the internet.

Unlike the rest of the website which needs to remain mostly formal and project the right image of the hotel brand, a blog is a much less regimented area where you can speak on a level with guests and use more colloquial language.

The blog will provide guests somewhere they can ask questions and make suggestions for any improvements they think you can make to the hotel.

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.

If you’d like to find out more about the benefits of blogging for your hotel feel free to contact our HotelTeam