The article is about the tools and strategies of SEO specialists, marketing, the subtleties of promoting tourism sites.
This is a must read if you have:
- seasonal hotel by the sea;
- year-round hotel by the sea;
- business hotel;
- family guest house;
- you are selling tours, and are also interested in selling accommodation directly through the site. And any competent hotelier knows that selling directly is the most profitable way.
Specific #1. How to promote travel sites based on seasonality
Each hotel has its own opening hours. Resort hotels are divided into year-round and seasonal. The season also lasts differently: for some, the season is in the winter in the mountains, for some it is in the summer by the sea, and for some it is in the autumn and spring in the forest.
Let's take a classic example - a beachfront hotel that is open all year round. But still there is a time period when it is easier to fill all the rooms at fairly high prices in May - the end of September or even in mid-October.
When we talk about promoting the site of such a hotel, you need to understand that this is a long-term issue.
If your season starts in May, then you need to think about search engine optimization of the site in September, and preferably a year in advance.
Firstly, search engine robots need time to evaluate the site, and secondly, the user has been looking for summer vacation options since November of the previous year (as seen in the graph above). Therefore, it is important to prepare an offer and tariffs for the summer season for the next year by December 1st.
If you need to sell New Year's holidays in a hotel, then the page dedicated to this should be ready in the summer of the previous year. And by the first of September, a proposal for celebrating the New Year in the hotel should be ready.
Only in this case, you can manage to carry out all the necessary work, give search engines the opportunity to index the work on the site. Then your page will gain weight, and you will have time to test the usability of the site and work on the visual part of the page.
How to extend the opening hours of the hotel?
If your hotel is strictly seasonal, then you can expand this period by promoting the site.
Think about what you can offer guests in the off-season? For example, in April, a month before the start of the season, or in October, when the nearest competing hotels are already closed and there are few tourists. Keep in mind that not all people take vacations during the season. If you correctly compose a unique offer in your hotel for a specific period of time and your audience, you can ensure that the object is loaded at any time of the year. The main rule is to think about it in advance. Be one step ahead.
For example, you can offer a hotel as a base for retreats, trainings, conferences. Offer weddings with outdoor ceremonies. To have contacts with the local entertainment industry, to offer special formats of recreation: excellent cuisine - organized excursions - SPA - cozy room.
Look at this screenshot:
Shown here is the site traffic for a hotel in the mountains that has evolved from a seasonal resort to a year-round resort. The statistics show that the hotel has stable traffic throughout the year and, as a result, guests and sufficient occupancy.
Specific #2: Website Content
The second feature of hotel website promotion is content. Traveling, tourism is, first of all, content that excites the imagination and the desire to come to you. The user buys rest with his eyes. The hotel website should have beautiful, juicy, bright photos.
Look at the photo in the gallery photos of all rooms, territory, restaurant, banquet hall, gazebos
A person who typed a request for a vacation in a search engine and went to the site should see all the information on this request and maximum answers to their questions.
For example, if a person writes “hotel with a pool” in the search, then he should see a photo of the pool and information on your site: with or without heated water, what is the depth and length of the pool, hours of operation, is the pool included in the price of the room, etc. e. If you want more positions specifically for this request, do not be lazy, tell us everything and even more about your pool.
Mention what kind of water is in the pool (sea or fresh), in what part of the territory it is located, whether the pool is open or not, what it is equipped with, in what year it was installed, from which month it is open and until which month it works, opening hours from morning to evenings. Tell us what is interesting for children near the pool, show it in the photos. Make a short video for 10-12 seconds about what your pool looks like and what is next to it. Show what related services you can offer to a user who is looking for a hotel with a pool. It will probably be an animation in the pool. Or restaurant service near the pool. Be sure to let the user ask a question on this page, make a short feedback form:
And one more
Whenever I think about what to write about on this or that page, I ask myself the question: if I went on vacation, what information would I need. Then it immediately becomes clear what needs to be said, what is missing. Put yourself in the place of a vacationer, look at the site through his eyes.
If you are interested in SEO-promotion of tourist sites, please contact us! Let's turn website visitors into your guests.
Specific number 3. Quick response and handling of requests by hotel staff
Let's say you have a website that answers all user questions and is in line with all current trends. The user went to your site for his search query, and everything that he saw on the site is fully in line with his interests. But there are still questions that you want to ask the hotel employee in order to make a decision. The booking manager (your employee who is responsible for customer feedback on the site) can answer whether there are free rooms for the dates you need, whether it is possible to accommodate two children in the room, if it is indicated that there is one extra bed. Here, another very important feature of the promotion of tourist sites appears: the speed of responses of booking managers in different communication channels. Not only the speed of the response is important, but also the depth and quality (the person on the other end should be very interested). Today, users are no longer ready to wait several hours for answers to their questions.
People are very different - it is convenient for someone to make a phone call, someone to write a letter to the post office. There are those who want to send an application directly from the site, and it will be convenient for someone to write in the online chat on the site, or even directly in the chat from the search results.
And someone will ask you in Facebook messenger if a particular room is free for the month of November, if there is no time to look for this information on the site.
Each of the users of the site (or the hotel page on the social network) is your potential guest. And each of them will wait for their answer for a maximum of 15-20 seconds. The task of hotel managers is to set up and control the speed of responses in all possible sales channels. Unfortunately, if the user does not get a response quickly, they will leave to look for other vacation options. And all your expenses for the site and its promotion will be in vain.
Here it is also very important to write down and then collect together what questions users most often ask, the answers to which are not taken into account on the site. Then from these answers you need to create new pages, fill them with new content.
Specific number 4. Multi-channel search
I want to tell you about one more feature of promoting a tourism website. Now it is not enough for the user to simply go to the site and see the full offer. Before the user submits a booking request from the hotel website, he will make at least two or three transitions to the site from different sources. First, he will find the hotel's website by search query in organic results and get acquainted with the offer.
By this time, he will have already formed some opinion about your object. Then a person will find your advertisements in contextual advertising, in the profile of search engine maps, or directly go to the site by the name of the hotel. This will be the second transition - the user will need to familiarize himself with the offer in more detail and get answers to new questions that have arisen.
And then the user will explore the social networks of your hotel. Look at photos on Instagram. Facebook will look for events and activities that take place and have taken place at the hotel. You should understand that if everything is in order on the site, the interface is modern, the site is filled with up-to-date information, the photos are updated all the time, but social networks are inactive, the trust in your hotel will already be reduced.
If the user finds new up-to-date information about the organization of recreation everywhere, and then also reads reviews about you on independent portals (for example, Tripadvisor, Booking), then the overall impression of the hotel will be positive, and such a user will most likely become your guest.
