YOUR INTERNET SITE

The internet is becoming more and more vital to the distribution of your hotel rooms. It is said that around 25-35 per cent of any hotel’s reservations originate from a guest’s interaction with the internet. It is more and more important to get your total internet strategy working for you. Although changing all the time, it is generally agreed that up to 75 per cent of travellers now use search engines before making a booking, with most using broad generic search terms. A successful internet strategy will address two major issues:

• Your site needs to be optimised so that the spiders sent out by the search engines pick it up and feature it in the organic search listing. (Google provides guidelines on how to build a ‘crawler-friendly’ site at www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.)
• Your site needs to give each visitor a rewarding experience. This is particularly vital if you decide to advertise your site through pay-per-click (PPC) or pay per thousand impressions (PPM) – that way you will generate the response you want.

The internet has also given independent hotels the biggest boost for decades. Now that internet distribution systems are becoming better understood and there is more transparency, it is possible for independents to use third party sites and their distribution muscle to combat the branded operations. Many independents are now receiving up to 35 per cent of their total sales online, just like their franchise competition. However you have to be careful. There are many traps waiting for the unwary, particularly from agencies charging high commissions and demands for lowest rate guarantees.

The advent of PPC and PPM advertising has also levelled the playing field between the chains and the independents.

Do you need a site? I don’t think that there is any need for much discussion on this subject. If you have rooms to sell then you need a website. The only discussion is what sort and how much to spend on it. You also need to offer an online booking capability.

Fortunately most of the techniques for making a success of a website are the same techniques as those that make direct mail so successful.

• Decide exactly what you are trying to achieve with your site.
• Grab people’s attention.
• Excite them enough to want to make a purchasing decision.

There really is nothing new under the sun.

Techniques for building a great website

After spending a great deal of money to build their web presence, the majority of accommodation businesses coming online are disappointed with the results from their website. It is quite likely that graphic designers and technical developers that have no real marketing experience built most of these under-performing websites.

Unfortunately people do just ‘surf’ the web and you often have no more than eight seconds to interest visitors enough to keep them from clicking off your home page. Even if they do stay, the average conversion of visitors to prospects is as low as one per cent; quite a challenge!

Having reviewed hundreds of hotel websites, I have seen the same mistakes being made over and over. As the internet develops and thousands of sites are added every month, users are becoming very ‘site aware’ and they get irritated with poor performing sites. No one has any patience any more. The most annoying featured are deemed to be:

• pop-up ads
• need for extra software to view site
• dead links
• confusing navigation
• registration to access contents
• slow-loading pages.

This section focuses mostly on the public face of your site rather than the technical aspects of the behind-the-scenes coding. This is also just as vital to get right. If you are interested your web designer will be able to explain the intricacies of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and meta information.

So that you can produce a top-of-the-range website, here are some techniques, in no particular order, that will ensure that you have a website that really performs for you.

Use a professional

It is relatively simple (so I am told!) to produce a basic website. There are good software packages (from FrontPage to XsitePro) that anyone with a bit of know-how can use (as a matter of interest, professionals tend to use Macromedia Dreamweaver but it is expensive; New-view at nvu.com may be a good alternative). And because of their ready availability there are plenty of offers from friends and contacts to put something together for you. Try to resist the temptation!

Developing a good site that sells is not that easy. You need technical skills as well as the ability to write text and graphically design something appropriate to your market. Not only this, you also need some marketing perspective to ensure that you are using all these techniques!

Use a professional who has developed sites that you like and that actually work. You don’t need to spend a fortune and you can have a good site built for around £ 400. If you want your site to be more dynamic, with interactive features such as e-mail capture, then cost will be nearer £ 750.

Clearly differentiate your offer

How many websites have you been to that look the same and have the same functions? People go to your site to look for somewhere to stay or a place to eat. They want to know if your venue meets their needs.

All visitors to your site must have a clear understanding of why you are different and that you are the only solution for them to choose; if it is not clear they will move on to your competitor.

Your differences must benefit the customer. To find out what customers appreciate about your hotel just ask them why they use your hotel, or look at some of the compliment letters that you should have on file. Emphasise your positioning throughout your site.

Register appropriate domain

You should give your site the simplest but most appropriate name possible. The closest it is to what your customers call you the better. Hotels have an advantage, although, for instance, there are hundreds of Fairview Hotels, there are probably not that many in each location. So www.FairviewHotelLeeds.com is a reasonably logical and easy to remember address. You could also leave out ‘Hotel’.

Some points to remember:

• Try to obtain the .com/.co.uk/ extension rather than .org or .info.
• Don’t use hyphens in the address. They are unexpected and confusing.
• The shorter the address the better, but not strange abbreviations.

Choosing your keywords

This is probably the most important thing you can do to ensure the success of your website. Why is this? Imagine a searcher visiting one of the major search engines; he types in a topic word and up come the results, ten per page. If he knows you, then using the name of your hotel might get you into the top ten, so long as there aren’t that many hotels with the same name. But the key to successful searching is making sure that what you offer fits in with what the visitor wants.

To find the best keywords and phrases for your business, ask your customers, or someone outside your business, what they would type in the search engine’s search window when looking for your site.

Optimise each page separately

You must consider the focus of each page separately. Create content-rich pages that concentrate on one or two topics only. For instance, make separate pages for Location, Meetings, Accommodation and Restaurant etc and then try to drive traffic to each page by having different keywords or phrases for each (no more than five each).

If you want to see how other hotels do it, call up their site, click on your ‘View’ toolbar and then open ‘Source’ and look at their keyword meta tag use. Their site may not be working that well but it might help you!

Consider your offer

Obviously, the more specific you can be the better. Using just the word ‘hotel’ is no good since there are hundreds of thousands of hotels. Add specific location indicators such as ‘Edinburgh’ plus some speciality such as ‘no smoking’ or ‘boutique’ etc to make up multiple word key phrases such as ‘meetings Edinburgh’.

Help with keywords

You can subscribe to a site like www.wordtracker.com for help with finding keywords that people are actually searching for. Use their keyword effectiveness index (KEI) to see what the competition is for specific keywords. There is also a free option on http://inventory.overture.com and you can use the Google tool at http://adwords.google.co.uk/select/

Where to put them

When a search engine visits your site it look at the source code of your site (in HTML) not the fancy design. It considers anything that’s towards the top of the page to be more relevant. Therefore the <head> section of your web page is extremely important. Unfortunately all search engines treat Meta tags differently (in fact Google no longer uses the meta description tag). Nevertheless the most important meta tags are the ‘title’ (no more than 60 characters), ‘description’ and ‘keywords’ (fewer than 30 words each), since one or other of them is used by most search engines.

Relevance

Whatever you do, if you put a keyword in the source code, do make sure that it is used in the text for that page. Don’t overdo it or you will be blacklisted for spamming; at least twice will do. In other words, don’t try to outsmart the search engines just because they are computer systems. At some stage they will catch on. Be honest and straightforward and if your site is interesting and the codes are relevant to searchers, you should gain prominence in the rankings.

Update your site regularly

You can make a very static site with no information in it that changes. However this does not take real advantage of the power of the internet. Also, the search engine spiders will see that your site has not been updated for a while and give it less prominence. You need to generate traffic that comes back often and customers that take some action as a result of their visit.

There are many opportunities to include lots of changing information:

• special offers
• calendar of events
• download vouchers
• last-minute rates.

Capture e-mail addresses

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes is failing to proactively capture your visitors’ names and e-mail addresses. This is critical because, once you have them, you can use them again and again free of charge.

As your visitors roam your site they may be impressed enough with your content to sign up to your newsletter or download a voucher. By placing your opt-in box (a form that captures your visitor’s e-mail address) on every web page, you’ll continually remind your visitor to give you their name and e-mail address. Think of different offers to make on each page, but keep them relevant to the page subject. For example on the Meetings page give a guarantee voucher or an opportunity to upgrade a coffee break.

The industry average sign-up rate is around five per cent. If your sign-up rate is below five per cent you need to provide something of stronger value to encourage your visitor. They need a really strong reason to share their personal contact information with you.

Use compelling headlines

It is said that 80 per cent of the success of a direct mail letter is attributed to its headline. It is no different with website copy. The web has brought universal access to photos and graphics, but in the end it’s the copy that sells. The trick to getting your visitors to read your copy is to use dynamic, attention-getting headlines and sub-headlines.

Throughout your copy you should continue to use sub-headlines as a way to break up your copy and to allow your visitor to ‘skim’ your content. Most web surfers just skim the text, so the chances of having your copy read without the use of sub-headlines are slim. People are eight times more likely to read your content if you have a headline.

Exciting content

Many web developers don’t seem to know how to write web copy, which explains why most hotel sites have text that is boring and predictable. Make sure that pages are not cluttered and that everything is clear straight away. Content is more important than pictures.

The most important piece of information is the opening paragraph of the home page. It must be short, succinct and to the point. When writing copy for websites you need to use a newspaper copy technique: put the conclusion first and follow with when, what, where and how. Don’t be tempted to write a conventional story with a beginning, middle and conclusion.

You can also put keywords in the name of the page, e.g. www.yoursite.com/meetings_london.htm. Make sure that the phrase is broken up like this so that the search engine spiders will see them as individual words in a phrase.

Below are some ideas on how to make your text a bit more interesting.

Use case studies

Case studies are a useful way to demonstrate your credibility by proving your ability to get results. They also give the reader a glimpse of the benefits they can expect to achieve if they use your hotel. They answer the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question. This is particularly relevant to meeting room facilities. When you present case studies, use the Problem-Solution-Results format.

Use short words and paragraphs

To make your copy easy to read, use short words and paragraphs. There is nothing more uninviting than a 20-line paragraph that looks like a sea of words. People won’t read it, no matter how interesting it really is.

Break the text into smaller paragraphs with no more then five lines each, and include sub-headings to introduce new topics. Remember that it takes about 20 per cent longer to read something on a computer screen than it does on paper.

Be careful about the font you use and do check and double-check all spellings and grammar. Having got visitors to your site the last thing you want to do is put them off with poor attention to detail.

Use clear navigation

If a visitor lands on your site and gets confused, they are only a short click away from another site. They are very unforgiving and will not waste time navigating a maze. You must provide good navigation of your website if you want to convert your visitors into customers. It is vital that you put most of your effort into making your site user-friendly. A good site map will also help the search engine spiders to navigate your site.

Here are a few ideas on developing good navigation:

Determine the response you want

The reason your website exists is to get response: this might be subscribing to your newsletter or making a reservation. Whatever it is, you need to decide what it is and develop a pathway.

Provide a pathway to your response

Providing a pathway means strategically designing your site to lead your visitors down a specific path that gets them to act. The easiest way to do this is to ask yourself, ‘What is the first thing I want my visitor to do when they land on my site?’

Once you’ve decided that, it becomes much easier to design a site that starts your visitors off on their pathway. At each turning point in the pathway you need to ask yourself the same question, ‘What is it that I want my visitor to do now?’ Then design your site to help your visitor accomplish that thing first.

Provide a ‘closing’page

When you are actually selling anything through your site your closing page should provide an irresistible offer that even you couldn’t pass up. Make sure to remind your visitor of the benefits they’ll receive, the relatively small risk that they’re taking and why they need to act right now.

Navigational tips

• Use the top and left side of the web page for navigation.
• Always allow for a way to get back home.
• Place benefit statements on your navigation buttons.

Use graphics wisely

Many web developers can’t resist using all their technical knowledge on your site. Resist at all costs. Check out all the sites that sell on the internet and you will see that, by and large, they are very simple.

Simplicity and clarity are the watchwords. Don’t use frames and if you really do want to use flash, only do it on part of your site. The search engine spiders really don’t like them. The use of blinking graphics can have its place if you want to emphasise a special offer or point something out.

Using overwhelming photos can also be distracting. In fact photos in general are a bit of a distraction both to the ‘spiders’ and the visitor. They should be used to complement the text not vice-versa.

Reinforce credibility

The average consumer (and corporate buyer) has learnt to be highly sceptical of anyone selling anything. On the internet, scepticism is even higher. Your biggest hurdle to making an online sale will be overcoming your customer’s scepticism.

The following points will increase your credibility and instil a sense of trust and believability with your prospects.

Provide full contact Information

On each of your web pages put your full contact information, including phone number. Make it as easy as possible for people to contact you, since that is really your main objective anyway. Be careful of putting your e-mail address – avoid having your address ‘harvested’ with the resultant spam potential. Using a form for people to contact you avoids this.

Include testimonials

There is nothing more persuasive than being recommended to stay somewhere, even if you don’t know the people concerned. But if you do include testimonials, you must put the person’s name and location plus a photograph if possible. An anonymous reference just will not do. You might have made it up yourself!

You can extract testimonials from letters sent in to you but always check with the sender that they are happy for you to use their details. Far more effective is to contact past guests soon after they leave or as they leave and ask them a series of questions related to your facilities and your positioning.

Provide a guarantee

Providing a strong guarantee tells your visitor that you stand behind your product and that there is little risk in staying with you. It will overcome any initial reluctance to use your hotel since they have nothing to lose. If you have a meeting or conference product this is particularly useful in getting clients to try you for the first time.

There is often a fear that you will be taken advantage of and that guests will say they were unsatisfied just to get their money back. I think this is unfounded but if it does happen, think of all the extra customers you have gained.

Provide a picture of you and your staff

People don’t buy from businesses and businesses don’t buy from businesses. People buy from people, and people who work for businesses buy from people who work for businesses. The more you can include about you and your credentials and successes, the more people will feel good about doing business with you.

Focus content on your visitor

As in any situation where you are trying to ‘sell’ a service, you must ask yourself what it is the visitor is looking for that will benefit them. Consumers are self-centred and are looking for you to solve a particular problem, even if it is just what to buy their partner for his or her birthday. Think about everything from the visitors’ point of view and encourage actions from their standpoint.

For instance, the page title could be ‘Fairview Hotel – book rooms online’. No one is interested in how good you think you are or how many awards you have won (you might use this information if you are trying to reinforce credibility and can use it as third party endorsement).

If you’ve been in business for any period of time you’ve probably heard all the objections you get when you are selling your service. Make sure that you address all these in your text. Additionally you can cover them in a FAQ (frequently asked questions) section.

You will also be aware of the benefits of your hotel that sell best. Highlight these and go back over your copy to ensure that you have used benefits rather than features. At the same time make sure that you rewrite ‘you’ or ‘your’ wherever you have used T or ‘we’. Provide as much useful information as you can, particularly maps and local attractions.

Links

Your website developer must make sure that links will automatically open a second window with the destination site in it, but leave your site up and running. This way you will be able to achieve both goals. Avoid links from any pages that are sales related. Ensure that there are no broken links within your site or to external sites. You can obtain free software to check your links.

You can boost your site’s popularity by the number and quality of links pointing to it. These links must be relevant to your offer so should come from local attractions, guidebooks, award organisations and tourism or local business associations. Find all the sites that you want links from, put a link to their site and then e-mail them to ask if they will provide a link to you. To find who links to your competition just enter ‘link’ followed by your competitor’s domain in your favourite search engine.

Ensure your site loads quickly

Your site needs to load in fewer than ten seconds. If it takes any longer your potential guest will get very impatient and may well give up. Resist the temptation to place a lot of graphics that slow down your site.

• Build your page with the slowest user in mind.
• Build your web page no bigger that 50K including graphics. Your home page should be even less.
• Always use a compression tool to optimise graphics before you use them.
• Make sure your pictures load little by little so that a visitor can see that something is happening, even if slowly.
• Preload the images on your site. As your visitor reads your headline and opening copy, your other graphics will be loading in the background.

Track all visitors

It is vital that you are able to make changes to your site if it is not working to your satisfaction. It is a big investment and it needs to really work for you to get a return on your investment. The only way that you can see what is happening is to take measurements and evaluate the outcomes. Your web developer will be able to sign you up with a good service.

These are amongst the measurements that you should ask for:

Conversion rate

Taking the number of visitors to your site, and dividing it by the number that actually made a reservation, gives your conversion rate. Example: if one hundred people go to your site and five make a reservation, your sell-through is five per cent.

Visitor value

This measures how much each unique visitor that comes to your site is worth to you. For example, if five out of one hundred people make a reservation, and your sale value is £ 100, each visitor is worth £ 5 because 100 visitors equals £ 500 in sales.

Opt-in sign-up rate

Your opt-in rate is the percentage of people that sign up (give you their e-mail address) when they visit your site. For example, if 100 people visit your site and five give you permission to send them information by giving you their e-mail address, your opt-in rate is five per cent.

Visitor statistics

Sometimes visitors arrive at your site and leave from the home page. Over time you will be able to check this ‘bounce’ rate where you compare visitors who stay with visitors who leave straightaway. Also knowing how many first-time visitors come to your site daily is an important metric.

Source of visitors

Knowing where your traffic comes from is also important, especially if they are driven to your site through a paid promotion. Your web statistics package should be able to tell you which search engines your visitor originated from, in addition to the URLs of the websites your visitors came from.

Average visitor time

Knowing how much time your visitor spent on a certain web page (such as your home page) will let you know to what degree your visitor finds your site interesting. It can also tell you approximately where your visitors are jumping off. This metric is important to know for each web page.

Most viewed web pages

Knowing which of your web pages are popular and which ones aren’t will tell you where your visitors’ interests lie, how well your visitors stay on their pathway to the closing page, and what web pages should be dropped (or tweaked).

With all these metrics you’ll be able to answer several key questions about your site’s performance. But perhaps the most important is, ‘How much is each unique visitor worth to me?’ This key metric will drive all your decisions about how much you can spend to acquire new customers profitably. For example, if your visitor value is £ 1, you can’t afford to pay £ 1.20 per click to drive new visitors to your site (unless you’re strategically acquiring new customers at a loss).

How not to be banned

You will probably have read about all sorts of clever techniques that you can use to improve your site rankings on the search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN being the most popular ones). As I have tried to emphasise in this section, the only really effective method is to create a site that appeals to your audience, provides quality content and contains meta information that is faithful to your site content.

The various search engines set up their search algorithms differently and no one can ever keep up to date with how they decide how to rank websites in their organic searches. It is really best not to worry about how to outwit a search engine. Even if you get one step ahead they employ some very clever people and will soon catch up.

To summarise some of the danger areas, you should avoid the following:

• Excessive links: Most importance is placed on quality appropriate links inbound to your site from a wide variety of sites, but don’t acquire them too quickly. Outbound links are less important. Avoid anything to do with link farms that exist solely to trade in irrelevant links.
• Cloaking: This involves creating one page designed specifically for the search engines and another that will appear to the user.
• Doorway pages: Doorway or gateway pages are crammed full of keywords and are designed solely to get higher rankings. Your site will be penalised if you use these.

• Cross-linking: This is where you create multiple sites often with similar, or even identical, content. These are then linked together to increase your PageRank. This is not to say that if you have more than one site you cannot inter-link them.
• Submitting multiple URLs from the same site: If the search engines do not find your site, just submit your index page once. Don’t submit more than one page from the same site.
• Search engine software: Don’t use software that sends automatic submissions or queries to the search engines.
• Pages loaded with irrelevant keywords: Relevance is the key. If the keywords are in your text then you can put them in the code.
• Hidden text or links: Only use text or links that are visible to visitors.

KEY POINTS

• Regularly check the performance of your own site by typing your top keywords and key phrases into the search engines to see if you appear in the top five.
• Tags, links and properly written text are the key components of a website.
• Usability is the overriding consideration.
• Never forget that hotels are sold on the basics of location, facilities and things to do and see. But you must promote the benefits, not just the features.

• Keep it simple, appropriate and clear and you cannot go wrong.
• If you neglect your site so will the search engines; you must update regularly.
• Don’t try to outwit the search engines.
• Don’t expect miracles. It can take months to be found by the search engines so it is vital to be persistent.
• Once you have your site, make sure that you do everything you can both on- and off-line to direct visitors to it.