High quality content on your hotel website is essential to getting more direct bookings. It should be visually appealing, unique, search engine optimized, and engaging.
A good place to start is with high-quality photos and video that capture your hotel in its best light. These will help travelers imagine themselves staying at your property.
1. Visually Appealing
A beautiful aesthetic is an essential ingredient for high-converting hotel website content. It can also help to stimulate positive perceptions of a property’s service quality and increase bookings, according to researchers.
Aesthetics are known to influence consumer behavior in many industries, but they have remained under-examined in the hospitality sector. A recent study from the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University examined how a hotel’s website photographs affect consumers’ expectations of the hotel’s service quality and their intention to book.
The study found that consumers were influenced by aesthetic characteristics of the hotel’s website photos, particularly the composition and arrangement of them. These qualities are particularly important in a digital context, where consumers rely on hotel websites to evaluate product quality.
In particular, the researchers observed a significant interplay between classical and expressive aesthetics in influencing perceived quality, suggesting that both can be used to promote the product’s image. Classic aesthetics refer to aspects of design, such as order, legibility and symmetry, while expressive aesthetics encompass more hedonic features such as originality, fascination and colour vibrancy.
To maximise the effects of the aesthetic effect, the researchers recommend that sales and marketing teams take care to choose images and video that have both classic and expressive aesthetics. The combination of these two elements is thought to help stimulate the halo effect.
Visually appealing images and videos can help to convey the sense of a hotel’s ambience and atmosphere, and can be a key factor in driving direct bookings from online travel agencies and the GDS. However, the researchers warn that hotel managers should make sure to test such materials on target audiences first to ensure they have the desired effect.
2. Unique
Content on your hotel website is more than just a place to list your rooms, amenities and services. It’s a chance to engage with guests and create strong relationships with them based on quality, original content that is consistent across the site.
There are many ways to accomplish this. One of the best is to create high quality images that are visually appealing and search engine optimized. This will help boost your ranking and get more direct bookings from your website.
Another way to create the most effective content is to use your local knowledge to produce articles about your area and its attractions. These are often the first things that a visitor will look for when considering where to stay.
These articles are also a great way to get your hotel name in front of potential visitors and customers. They can be particularly effective if they are a well-written and informative piece of writing that features high-quality photos.
As a bonus, these articles may be linked to your own social media channels for even greater visibility and engagement. Using a social media scheduling tool, such as Hootsuite or Buffer, is an easy and cost-effective way to create engaging and consistent content across your social channels that will keep your fans engaged.
The most important thing to remember when creating your own content is that it should be relevant to your brand and target audience. Having unique and informative content that ties in with your hotel’s brand and personality will make it more likely that guests will return to your website and book your hotel again.
3. Search Engine Optimized
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a hotel or restaurant website to increase the number of visitors it receives from organic search. Ideally, a well-optimized website will appear on the first page of search engine results for relevant keywords and phrases.
In order to achieve this, your hotel website needs to contain high quality content that will satisfy users and search engines alike. This can include anything from hotel descriptions, reviews and testimonials, to articles on local sightseeing and entertainment, travel tips, guest stories, and upcoming events in your area.
One of the most important factors in achieving a high SEO ranking is keyword research, which is the process of identifying what your target audience is searching for and framing your content accordingly. This includes the use of primary and secondary keywords that are relevant to your hotel, as well as long-tail search terms for those looking for specific products or services.
Another important part of a successful hotel SEO strategy is ensuring your website loads quickly. This is crucial because slow websites make it difficult for people to find what they’re looking for, especially on mobile devices. Having a load time of under two seconds can improve conversion rates by 7%, and decrease the bounce rate by 40%.
Other factors to consider when it comes to hotel SEO are ensuring your pages have a good, logical heading hierarchy and that they’re structured in an efficient manner for both users and search engines. Also, ensure that all page titles, meta tags and URLs include your targeted keywords. Finally, be sure to use appropriate fonts and images on your site for a professional look.
4. Concise
High quality content on a hotel website is crucial to creating a good user experience. It helps visitors to understand the property, find out about amenities and features, and book their stay.
Whether you are writing your own hotel website copy or hiring a professional to do the job for you, you must ensure that your content is concise and informative. It also needs to be SEO friendly and engaging, so that you can rank higher in search results.
One of the most important factors in achieving SEO-friendly hotel content is to include a focus keyword in your H1 tags, as well as in other places throughout the page. The key is to make sure that your keywords are relevant to the topic of the page and that they appear naturally within the content.
Another key factor in creating concise hotel website copy is to have clear and concise descriptions of the different rooms, suites, and facilities available. For instance, the hotel pool, restaurant, and meeting room facilities are all important points to highlight.
In addition, your hotel website should have beautiful, high-resolution images. Studies show that over half of all hotel website visitors will not book a stay if the photos are not of high quality.
You can add alt text to your images, which helps search engines to index them. It also helps screen-reading software to read the image properly.
It is also essential that you use proper headings to create a structured text. These should be arranged in a way that helps readers scan through the page and get the information they need quickly.
Getting your hotel website to load quickly is another important aspect in hotel SEO, as it will affect how fast you can convert visitors into direct bookings. Research shows that more than 70% of mobile users expect a website to load in under two seconds, so be sure to optimise your site accordingly.
5. Engaging
High quality content on your hotel website is a great way to build your brand’s reputation and get more direct bookings. In fact, according to a 2019 survey by Fuel Travel, a hotel’s website is the third most important factor in a customer’s research, more so than travel review sites like TripAdvisor.
The best way to create engaging content on a hotel website is to create original content that reflects the unique personality of your hotel. This will encourage guests to return again and again, building trust in your hotel and its brand.
For example, you can share stories of your staff and what they do at work or post photos of different hotel amenities to showcase the variety of things guests can do while staying at your property. Videos are also a great way to capture guests’ attention and help them envision their stay at your hotel.
Instagram is a social media platform that’s fast becoming an essential part of many hotels’ marketing strategies. It offers a wide range of ways to share content, from the traditional posting of photos and videos to the latest trend of creating Instagram reels.
Whether it’s sharing your hotel’s stories or promoting new rooms, Instagram is one of the most powerful social platforms to drive traffic to your website. In addition, it offers an effective way to respond to negative reviews from potential customers.
It’s also easy to find influencers who can help boost your hotel’s visibility online by sharing content on their own social media channels, boosting your reach and increasing your brand recognition. Influencers are people who have a large following and a strong online reputation, which makes them an invaluable marketing resource for any business.