With so many other hotels and resorts vying for your guests’ attention, one of the biggest challenges of any property’s online marketing campaign is how to drive a steady stream of traffic to their website. And of course, not just any traffic, but high quality relevant traffic: travel consumers who are interested in what you offer and are ready to book.
In today’s blog, we’ll look at some key ways you can boost the quantity and quality of the visitors to your hotel’s website.
1. Optimise Your Site For Search Engine Success
As you know, optimising your website for search is a crucial first step in driving organic traffic and climbing the search rankings. SEO is a long-term project which requires constant management, but here are some basics you need to get right first.
- Make sure you have a good domain name (the name of your resort) and consider investing in a few more related domain names that your guests may be looking for. For instance, if your primary market is guests looking to make the most of the fantastic local surf spots, you might choose goldcoastsurfresort.com, goldcoastsurfhotel.com and other related domains.
- Your content should be keyword driven, but not keyword stuffed. Think about the kind of long-tail search terms your guest personas are likely to be searching for and focus your content around these phrases.
- Don’t forget to include keyword-rich metadata with your site photography so Google can recognize what the image is about. Your title text and alt text for each picture should be optimised with keywords too.
2. Make Great Content a Priority
Engaging, helpful and informative content serves two crucial functions:
- It helps people interested in properties like yours find your website
- It converts them into guests
Publishing high quality content that is of genuine value to your guests will help your website rank for a wider range of long-tail keywords. Thanks to the rise of voice search, targeting longer, more colloquial search phrases has become important, and Google rewards websites that address these more specific search queries with higher rankings. As an example, you would have to compete with the Online Travel Agencies and other major travel brands for very broad and generic keywords like “central Brisbane hotel.” Something like “family hotel near Brisbane West End”, however, is far more targeted and more likely to secure you higher rankings in the SERPs.
One of the most effective ways to naturally incorporate lots of these more targeted keywords into your website is to create content tailored to your guest personas. What motivates their spending? What are their behaviours, interests and pain points? Use everything you know about your different personas to guide your content creation.
Once you’ve created great content, your work isn’t done. Google favours fresh content in the SERPs, so update your website and social media accounts regularly with new photos, videos, blog posts, and any other interesting and helpful content you can think of.
3. Be Social
The importance of a social presence when it comes to helping your guests find you online shouldn’t be overlooked. Your guests are using social media to search for travel inspiration and read the firsthand experiences and reviews of friends, family and likeminded people from all over the world. Did you know that 83% of travel consumers are motivated to go on holiday after seeing something on social media and video sharing sites like YouTube?
Social Media Marketing Tips:
- Focus your efforts on the platform most of your guests are using. While a Facebook presence is pretty mandatory for every online business, if your core market is millennials, you should seriously consider Instagram too.
- Drive engaging user-generated content by running regular contests and competitions with room discounts and special packages as prizes
- Use Facebook Insights and other social media monitoring tools to find out when your guests are most likely to be online. Focus your social activity during these hours to maximise engagement
- Incorporate viral topics and trending hashtags into your content to achieve wider reach
- Link back to your website throughout your social media pages
- Be open, responsive and ready to communicate with past, present and prospective guests
How does your hotel work to drive more traffic to your website? Let us know in the comments below!
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- 6 Marketing Mistakes Your Millennial Guests Hate
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