Increasing traffic to your hotel website

Increasing traffic on your website isn’t the same as improving your conversion rate – but it is incredibly valuable to hoteliers.

Improving your conversion rate means a greater number of bookings for every visit to your hotel website, whereas increasing traffic leads you to a wider range of potential guests. Increasing traffic is just as valuable, only in a different manner. We want lookers to become bookers, but we need them to BE lookers first.

We all want high conversion rates. If every visitor to your website booked a room, everything would be fine and dandy, and you wouldn’t be reading this article at all. As it stands, the average conversion rate for hotels is around 2%, now while we can improve that to a certain degree, increasing traffic can provide an enormous boost to business for your hotel.

It stands to reason doesn’t it. 

With 100 visitors you are likely to gain two bookings. With 1000 visitors you are projected to gain 20 bookings.

Obviously we can never have too many bookings, but we’ll talk about improving conversion rates another time! 

4 ways of increasing traffic

As it stands, you have four different methods of increasing traffic to your hotel’s website. They stand as:

• Paid
• Earned
• Optimised
• OTAs 

Paid

In a general sense, we are looking at any form of paid marketing campaign that you engage in. Be it adverts via Facebook, Google Hotel Ads or any other number of possible channels.

They are powerful tools. You appear to thousands of potential guests across the internet. All it takes is a single click for you to gain more visitors.

The downside? They are a paid channel. Powerful to be sure, but you are now locked into constantly paying for this marketing, otherwise visitor rates will fall. With the right management skills they can remain cost effective, but they are difficult to balance without the proper experience.

Earned

Earned media is another term for your publicity.

Anything published about your hotel that you did not commission yourself is known as earned media. This is from customer reviews, highlights of local areas, new stories – anything at all.

It’s also extremely valuable, as guests and consumers trust the words of friends and family when it comes to bookings and products. In fact, a survey by the minds behind HubSpot Research discovered that around 50% of surveyed people put a great deal of belief in relayed first-hand experiences.

The downside? It is hard to control and even more difficult to gauge. You know the phrase “everyone knows what they say about you, apart from you yourself?” Aside from reading your own reviews online, your public appearance is influenced by hundreds of personal anecdotes told between friends and family every day.

We can exercise some control over them via our customer review interactions, but sadly there are always people who will fail to be satisfied – so make sure there are as many guests pleased as possible!

Optimised

Your online presence requires full optimisation in an attempt to increase traffic to your website. We’re talking about:

• Website
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Readability
• Email marketing campaigns
• Up-to-date blog posts
• Social Media 

Anything that gives you the chance to grab attention will begin increasing traffic. SEO will rank you higher on search engine result pages (SERPS) giving you a chance to compete with those paid advertisements we talked about in the first section. Email marketing campaigns will intrigue customers, especially if they read them during Monday afternoon blues while they dream of the perfect holiday. Social Media will give you the opportunity to engage with previous and potential guests, share reviews, and promote your brand.

The downside? It can take a lot of work depending upon your current state. But maintaining these qualities is far easier than building them from scratch.

Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)

We have mixed feelings when it comes to the OTAs, but like it or lump it, they can be extremely valuable in driving traffic.

By all means, customers can and should find your hotel on these websites. With thousands of guests browsing for their dream destinations every day via Booking, it would be foolish not to be listed on them.

As the customer journey unfolds, those canny customers will be researching your hotel by themselves, finding your hotel website via Google search (which is why we optimised our SEO earlier!)

That’s the moment when we claim a direct booking through a visually powerful website, and an easy-to-use booking engine. No commissions paid – and you avoid brandjacking!

Ready to increase traffic?

It’s just a small step on the road to running a successful hotel, but a necessary one. After all – what’s the point in increasing your conversion rate if you don’t have enough visitors to make it worth your while?

Your reach comes first, then your conversion rates – then some top-quality hotel service that offers guests the experience of a lifetime. In turn, they will tell stories to friends and families and you will have received some more earned media! It’s a cycle!

With the right strategies, increasing traffic to your hotel website is simple. Make sure that your hotel gets the coverage it needs today.