Be Booked. Not Overlooked (Part 3)

Well this article has had me running down a BUNCH of rabbit holes in researching. But I hope it has been of value to you and your business so far.

In Part 1 we had a very brief overview of Digital Marketing and Distribution Channels.

Part 2 zoned in on OTA's and Metasearch Platforms.

Now, in Part 3 we start getting into the good stuff. Namely Direct Marketing (your website) and SEO.

Direct Marketing

Website and SEO

First impressions count. And a website will generally be the first sight a potential guest has of your hotel, spa, resort or restaurant. It needs to be eye catching with beautiful, attention grabbing photography to tell the story of the hotel and put the guest in the space you are showing. The photography needs to build desire.

Photography

The photography on the website needs to be carefully considered and curated. I cannot mention how many top hotel websites I have seen that have sub standard photography. This will harm your bookings and branding. The images you use need to not only sell the space and facilities, it needs to enable your potential guests to put themselves in the room, pool, spa or restaurant. This is not done with a mobile phone. A professional photographer will listen to you, understand your brief, use lighting, models, staging and an incredible eye for detail to get you pictures you can use. These pictures also need to be optimised for web use, have keywords inserted into the metadata and be small enough not to slow your site down but still of a high enough quality to show off your hotel.

Copy

The website needs good copy that is easy to read and be translated into various languages to suit the person. This used to be accomplished by the now deprecated Google translate API. Current thinking is to now use something called website localisation. This is a way of not only translating your site, but even changing the images to more suit the culture of the reader. You can read more about Website Localisation here. The words on your website need to be carefully chosen based around your ideal client, search terms, good readability and telling your story. No easy feat. The time needs to be put in to research your target market, look into their web browsing behaviour to discover the words they use and be a story teller.

User Experience

Apart from the visuals and words, you site needs to be easily navigable. This is not the time to be too clever. This is the time to ensure that the user can find their way from A to B with ease. By using easy to use and clear navigation on your site you will reduce frustration the the client and reduce barriers. This will also build trust. By using your site to tell the story and guide the user through the buying funnel you will get a higher percentage of people booking. This leads me to..

Internet Booking Engine (or Online reservation system)

This is a piece of software that allows people to book rooms through your website. This will ideally be embedded in your site, saving people from leaving your site and potentially not coming back. A good IBE via a Channel Manager will also communicate with your OTA and Metasearch site to ensure the availability of rooms, pricing, inventory and restrictions are always up to date.

SEO

This "black art" really isn't. By creating a well thought out site that delivers quality content to users on compute, laptop or mobile consistently and quickly you will rank high in organic (free) searches. Easy no?

It is, but it also is not. Bear with me. SEO is about helping Google and other search engines find, document and rate your site based on what your ideal client is looking for. The better you organise all this info, that easier it will be for Google to help you out.

Site Layout: A website is more than just how good it looks. Whilst this is essential for users, by using excellent photography and site design you will draw them in. But your site needs to be found. And the copy and layout of that copy is so important. By breaking the sections of the site down, and giving them headings (using Header Tags <H1> through to <H6> you tell Google how important those sections are. If you use the keywords you worked out based on your ideal client both in the header tags and in the rest of the page, in a natural way that is easy for humans to read, Google will in turn help you out by ranking your page higher.

Page Speed: Google gives your page a higher ranking based on how quickly it loads and how much data it uses for mobile. This is my biggest bugbear as a photographer. I want to give you gorgeous, huge, high density images to show off your page, but they use a lot of data to render. Google doesn't like that. So it is always a trade off in this regard. Further, all the code in your page also slows it down, especially if it is not efficient. So all code (PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, HTML and CSS) all needs to be as efficient as possible. And definitely no calls to old pages or code that no longer exists!

Navigation: This is not only about how your guest can navigate your site. But also how Google's webcrawlers can navigate it. Broken links, too many links and an inefficient site layout will damage your rating with Google.

Page Authority: Google rates you page on how "important" or authoritive it appears to be. For example CNN.com is known to be a totally legitimate site that continuously provides highly effective relevant information to people who use it. So it is ranked very highly by Google. Now, if CNN for some reason links to your site, Google will rank that page highly due to this. So generating good, legitimate, high quality backlinks from reputable sites will boost your page authority. You can do this most easily by blogging and creating useful resources for people to link to in their Blogs or sites.

Having a highly ranked site will in turn bring your Adspend on your PPC (Pay per Click) down. In the bidding war for the number 1 advertisement spot on Google, Google will take into account your price per click and multiply it by how it rates your page. So if your page is highly thought of by Google you will pay less per click for each click you do get.

This has been a mammoth post with a lot of info. But I hope it helps you to understand a little on how SEO and a well designed site with beautiful photography can help your site be found online. Leading to you being booked and not overlooked.

Part 4 will touch on Social Media Marketing. We will go into how to use LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram to build a loyal following online.