6 Ways To Get More Traffic To Your Hotel Website 

While the power of a hotel website is common knowledge, many hotel owners take it at face value but don’t do enough with it. A website attracting more traffic will boost your booking numbers directly. Therefore, we recommend you take it seriously. 

Few go the lengths of mastering the art of website management, which is why there are so many dull, barren business websites on the internet serving little purpose.

Your hotel can thrive, but if you are not managing your hotel website deservedly, you are losing an opportunity.

In this article, you’ll learn about the importance of driving traffic to your hotel website and the best practices to do this. With these practical tips, we are aiming to support you take the advantage of your hotel website.

Why Should You Want More Traffic

Many businesses invest in a website because they feel obligated to do so, then feel like they have accomplished their goal and leave their site to gather dust in a lonely corner of the internet. But, unfortunately, just setting your website up is not enough. 

A hotel website is more than an item on a “things to have” checklist. It should fittingly represent your hotel. There is no limit to what your website can achieve if you know what you are doing. It doesn’t matter if you are fully booked for the foreseeable future or just starting to get an attraction. There are countless benefits to having a busy website. 

More Traffic Means More Bookings

This one won’t surprise anybody. More eyes on your website mean more people are likely to seek your hospitality. Therefore, a visit to your website can be considered the first step of your sales funnel. You need to increase your visitor numbers to get enough bookings even when all visitors don’t arrive at the end of the funnel.

Of course, the conversion rates will also depend on how effective your marketing strategy is. However, as long as a percentage of your digital visitors turn into real-life visitors, you are doing good. 

Direct Reservations Will Increase Revenue

We cannot deny the importance of online travel agencies. Each year, around 50% of hotel bookings are made through OTAs. But even if they can and usually will help you reach new potential customers, they also take a considerable amount of commission. 

Meanwhile, direct bookings made through your website empower your business drastically. So even if OTAs are providing a valuable service to your business, you should still aim to steer your customers in your website’s direction.  

How To Get More Traffic to Your Hotel Website?

Traffic is good. We have established that. Now that we are done with the whys, we should get down to the hows. This is a fairly complex subject with countless approaches each company can adopt, but some methods have proven their effects in the past. 

Integrate A Booking Engine

You can increase traffic by providing different services through your website. An essential service your website can provide is allowing your potential guests to book their stay in your establishment through your website. 

This seemingly convenient but straightforward service will encourage people who otherwise might be booking their stay through OTAs to visit your website. This will increase the traffic to your website and also drive profits up. As we have said, you don’t need to pay a commission on bookings made on your own website.

Incentivize Direct Bookings 

Now that you have integrated a booking engine and can take bookings directly, you should ask yourself why people should use it. Why should people leave their OTA apps and make their way to your website?

A study showed that 92% of average shoppers always look for a deal when they are shopping. So encourage directed bookings by saving the best deals for your website only. Or maybe offer special services for the guests who book through your website and make them feel more welcome in the vicinity of your establishment. 

Choose Your Keywords Right 

This is a big one. SEO is a subject that can have countless entries of its own on this list. It is a mandatory marketing tactic if you want to get your website higher on Google search results. So it directly correlates with the traffic your site is going to get.

The first step to improving your SEO game is choosing your keywords effectively. Target specific keywords that your potential guests might use while looking for a hotel to stay at. Then make sure that you include those words on multiple pages on your website to rank higher on Google searches. 

But how do you determine the keywords you are going to target? Your keywords must have good volume, which means they must have high numbers of people Googling them every month. They must also be relevant to your establishment.

Keywords that are relevant and have high volume are easy to find. But to gain a competitive edge over other hotels, your keywords also must be carefully chosen to be specific to your hotel. You can’t just choose “good hotel” as your keyword and expect results. You will compete with every single hotel in the world. Aim for a bigger share of the searches like “hotel with a good spa” or “hotel with a nice view.”

Link Building and Interlinking

Yes, we are still talking about SEO. But, to keep it short, link building and interlinking are two other essential methods you will need to have a good grasp on and utilize.

Link building is the process of getting a better place in Google search results by having other websites link to your own. You can achieve this by having quality content on your website, like informative blog articles that will make other websites link your content as inspiration or a source. 

Interlinking is another method you can use, which involves having content that includes links to your website. By utilizing interlinking, you can increase the session duration of your customers and the number of pages they visit. 

These methods will inevitably grant you better traffic through Google if implemented correctly.

Optimization is Non-Negotiable

47% of visitors expect your site to load in 2 seconds at most. And that’s not because these people are exceptionally impatient. That’s just how the user experience in most standard websites is. 

If you want to stop those people from clicking off and decreasing the traffic to your website, you need to optimize your site.

Minimizing the HTTP request is a good start if you want to decrease your load times. Every time you load up a site, an HTTP request is made for each site element, like images and scripts. So, convert your images to smaller files and keep the unnecessary elements to a minimum. 

If all of this goes over your head and you don’t want to bother yourself with it, our team is ready to help you out.

Good Old Paid Ads 

If you want to supplement everything you have learned in this article or are looking for immediate and consistent results, paid ads will do you well. While the initial cost will be higher than some other methods and has a variable conversion rate, paid ads usually promise an instant return on investment.

Paid ads will include your standard display or search ads, and they have unprecedented variety. These can be your typical banner ads that display on a website or video ads that play before a YouTube video. The payment method for these ads will vary, but a popular choice for hotels is PPC or pay-per-click ads that you only pay for if someone clicks on them to visit your website. 

But it is pretty common knowledge that if you want to improve conversion rates, search ads are the way to go. By only targeting the people who search for your services, you are wasting minimal money on ads that will provide you with suboptimal results. 

Remember: Search ads only allow for text, so you better have a good 15-word hook. 

Key Takeaways

Focus On Quality Traffic 

Keep in mind that not all traffic is created equal. So while you are getting more traffic to your website and maybe even seeing new bookings left and right, you must still strive for a better conversion rate. 

By now, you probably have a good idea of the target audience based on the past guests that have visited your hotel. Next, reshape your marketing plan to target your own audience to achieve improvements in your conversion rates.  

Manage Expectations and Stay On Course 

Like any other form of marketing, a hotel website is an investment. Of course, it is possible to see a quick return on investment and increase bookings quickly, but you should still manage expectations. Aiming for a gradual and stable increase in clicks will result in more lasting, healthier traffic.   

Don’t get discouraged if you are not getting the website traffic you want immediately. Instead, be patient and keep persisting. Striving for a busier website will benefit your hotel in the long run.