Your website – is "OK" good enough for you?

When have you last looked at your hotel website – if you have one – with fresh eyes? Are you certain it is selling your hotel – and more precisely selling rooms – as best as it could?

Designing a web site is not rocket science, but there is definitely knowhow needed to make it a great marketable site. When choosing a web designer, choose someone who understands the purpose of a hotel web site. Some designers are so eager to make an attractive site (which is important of course) that many completely ignore the interaction between search engines and web site content; how they must compliment one another.

Text content sells rooms, yet many designers treat it like an after-thought. Text is what search engines see in order to rank a web site. If possible, stay away from flash elements and entire flash web sites – search engines can’t index them, you can’t update them and more often than not they annoy the users waiting for them to load.

FACT
Did you know that average hotel web site converts less than 4 reservations from every 100 visitors; many even fewer. If you have a great site this conversion rate can be increased at least 2 or 3 times. To find out if your site is working for you, just ask yourself how many reservations it generates. A good booking engine will give you the "look-to-book" ratio of your site. If it’s only average, you can do something about it. The fix doesn’t have to cost a fortune and the return will be very cost effective.

If you want to know more about web sites, please contact us here.