With the hotel industry developing so fast, hoteliers shouldn’t neglect the importance of creating a website for their hotels as well as their occasional redesigning. Starting a hotel marketing campaign, hotel website plays one of the most significant roles as it gathers all your audience online. Can you show me those willing to wander from hotel to hotel in search of an ideal place to stay or an ideal price or whatsoever? There is no point as it all can be done while sitting at home or at a lovely restaurant by the cup of coffee. The hotel website is where the first impression is born. Show the hospitality of your hotel right on the screens of potential customers.

To be among those top destinations of where to stay in your city, make sure your website is a combination of something that looks impressive and feels user-friendly. So what makes a good hotel website? Read on and be ready to uncover lots of secrets of creating a successful hotel website.

Top website goals:

Whether your website visitors are planning a business trip or they have chosen your city as an ideal destination to spend a weekend with their families, imagine they come to your website. Obviously they want to find an ideally located hotel with attractive conditions, services and prices.

Prior to giving your hotel an online presence, make sure you understand the key goals of the whole hotel website development process:

1) Make them notice your hotel website.

2) Make them interested in what they see and motivate them to go deeper into it.

3) Convert interested website visitors into hotel visitors, in other words – your clients.

What happens when they see your website

When you first land on the website, you cannot but make a decision about its visual appeal. It is your first impression about the website, be it positive or negative. And this is a guiding factor which determines whether you will leave the website or go on browsing it. An average website user does the same. Spending every precious minute on your website, a visitor may find out a lot about your hotel and its services. Make sure you do not scare your visitors by excessive design elements or boring website appeal.

Color selection is a key

Plain colors would suit here more than elsewhere. Too much bright color is not a good idea here. Consider using one main color here and playing with its variations. If you have a large hotel, adding a bit of classics would enhance it with a stylish look and elegance. Using calm tones will add a homely tinge of warmth to the hotel website.

Usage of images

When it comes to hotel websites, visitors want to see how your living rooms, conference halls, wedding halls look like. Presenting lots of nice high-resolution pictures of luxury rooms is the best way to show your attractive offers. It will give visitors a good idea of what they can expect inside.

Don’t let your visitors burst until they find what they need

If the visitor fails to figure out what is what on the website, then even great and impressive design does not make any sense. The reason lies in poorly developed website functionality, be it due to someone’s incompetence or vague idea of how to make it clear and simple for an average website user to navigate a website.

One of the most important navigation features of a hotel website is to provide visitors with a clear description of hotel location, room size or whatever they are curious about. Some of them may be preoccupied with finding the largest room for the whole family, room with lots of plugs, Wi-Fi connection or some other features. You have to be prepared for different questions your visitors might have.

Modern hotel websites have to be dynamic and tailored to the needs of a modern website user. Build your website in such a way it is easy for everyone to find what they really want. This way the potential customer won’t leave your website until he books a room. Just make your guests feel like their needs are cared for on your website. Don’t confuse visitors with too much information and excessive elements they do not need at all.

Hotel Website Registration

If you want your visitors to register on your website, you should be aware of the key principles of creating successful web forms:

• Offer registration as an option, don’t make it obligatory. You can make it necessary only for booking. Explain all the advantages of filling in the forms for visitors to make a choice on their own;

• Avoid asking for unnecessary information as too many odd questions can make a visitor change his mind;

• Make sure your web form is easy to fill in and won’t take a visitor too much time;

• Security plays a significant role as you will be asking for some personal information such as cell phone number, email address, etc. Take care of the security of your website in a proper way in order to protect your visitors’ data.

Avoid Online Reservation being a headache for visitors

Imagine you are planning to visit another country or city. First and foremost you must be sure that your room will be waiting for you and no one else will take it. That’s why you have to be able to book this room in advance directly from your place. Reliable online reservation system is one of the most important features your hotel website should have. However, it should be convenient for your website users and therefore be enhanced with the following features:

• 24/7 service work for users to make reservations at any convenient time, be it day or night;

• Make calculation automated for you to considerably save your time and make fewer mistakes or avoid them at all which is of course preferable;

• Make sure the customer receives a confirmation e-mail on time. Provide them with all the booking details. This will make the reservation process a way faster and much more convenient;

• Show the price for tour is a simple and attractive way;

• Do not try to hide some extra charges. Be specific while describing them;

• Test your website to make sure there is no broken functionality and various website bugs;

If you want to make your online booking system as user-friendly as possible, just make the users select the dates and they will get a list of all the available options together with images and pricing.

Hotel Website in Multiple languages

As your hotel is a destination for people from all over the world, you have to adapt it to their needs and particularly to their native languages. Creating a website in several languages will give a better experience to your visitors making them feel at ease while browsing your website.

To make it happen you will have to translate the website into a couple of languages. SEO optimization should be taken into account as well, considering optimization principles for various countries.

Hotel websites are to make friends with mobile devices

Quite more often than you could have thought, people use mobile devices to look for hotels and all the necessary info they need for good travelling experience. That’s why it is extremely important for you as a hotel owner to take care of a user-friendly and the highest quality mobile version of your website. As mobile devices require extremely easy usability, please consider the following while making your hotel website mobile:

• Simple site structure to make the reading, browsing and booking as user-friendly as possible;

• Make sure your mobile website is fast-loading allowing the visitors to browse your website even when being in a hurry. It would be great if its size does not exceed 20KB;

• Mobile compatibility requires simple design without excessive elements like too many images or videos.

Make it Top

Targeted traffic is what hoteliers are looking for. Search Engine Optimization is one of the best tools to direct traffic to your hotel website with astonishing results. If properly optimized, be sure your hotel will be a #1 destination for tourists to stay in your city. As statistics shows, top 5 results get 88% of total clicks. Starting a SEO campaign on an unprofessional website with poor design appeal won’t bring any good results. The website should attract visitors but not scare them away. Only this way search engine optimization could turn effective.

If you want to do it right and optimize your hotel website in a proper way, there are a couple of key concerns you should take care of:

• Analyze the keywords selection. The usage of special tools and techniques will help you determine what people type in to search for hotels on the web;

• Make each landing page optimized for hotel keywords. Ideally these should be different keywords;

• Integrate hotel keywords within the page code. Naturally describe title tags, description tags, meta keywords, URLs, ALT tags, headings, etc;

• Here comes creativity – quality content writing. It should be emotional, action-provoking and answer customers’ questions. When writing, think about informative value of your content rather than search engines and this is a key;

• Don’t forget about link building. Of course it can be terrifying, confusing but it is an essential part of site optimization. Google now mainly considers trusted links. Effective link building is the final stage which brings high value into the whole process. Owning a hotel website, you could start submitting it to hotel-related or other kinds of directories. Create a company blog and have some experienced writer run it as well as run an article marketing campaign. Your activity in hotel industry forums would be a plus. This strategy is full of various and effective ideas. Just figure out what you are capable of and what you need to accomplish those you are not.

Hotel marketing in Social Media environment

A well-built social media marketing campaign could become an effective tool of attracting new visitors to your hotel. It is one of the most critical ways to search for potential customers as well as interact with existing ones. Moreover, social media has an enormous impact on search results.

What you need to create an effective Social Media strategy is first of all to figure out which destinations are mostly crowded with your target audience. By destinations I mean of course Social Networks which belong to a global social media environment where you can reach your target audience. For successful hotel marketing consider the following: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, Foursquare and some other. Know some more worth attention? Then do not leave them without attention either.

Inside the Hotel and Beyond

As you cannot expect your visitors to stay within the hotel only, they will be looking for some other places to go and see around your city. User-friendly interactive map would perfectly help them figure out what is located nearby: which restaurant, shop, spa-salon to drop in. This would give your visitors a better experience from browsing a website.

I hope you enjoyed the article as much as I enjoyed writing it. This is what makes a good hotel website with all its time and money investments. Some things can bring some confusion but then just go to someone who can solve it until your head bursts out from misunderstanding or probably lack of experience in accomplishing something like that.