When your efforts to drive traffic to your website are successful, but your attempts to convert visitors into guests fail, it can be hard to figure out what you’re doing wrong. Your digital marketing and social media posts are compelling, so why are your web pages not performing well? This is where Clear Sky Tourism comes in.
An effective website audit, competitive analysis, and a clearly defined target audience allow us to create a website strategy designed to convert. Here we explain how Clear Sky Tourism can help you convert website visitors into loyal guests to optimize your bookings.
Website Audit
Website audits examine your website performance to help identify issues so we can increase conversions with a website redesign. The audit both improves traffic and allows you to meet your target conversion goals. We identify conversion issues, find opportunities, and determine where most of your traffic originates to understand visitor behavior. This also helps us understand why the links you use on ads and social channels miss the mark once visitors arrive.
We’ll consider the following:
- Forms you’re using to collect contact information
- Engine performance used to search room availability, travel times, etc.
- Your payment process to see if this impacts booking abandonment
- Your booking platform
- Design and layout
- Landing pages
- CTAs
- Navigation
- User experience
- Overall site performance, such as how long it takes a page to load when a link is clicked
Once we discover issues, we can make recommendations to improve.
Competitive Website Audit
Next, we perform a competitive website audit. This helps us understand your competitor’s online strategy and identify opportunities to improve your website. Our audits include a SWOT analysis based on the following:
- Strengths: We look at what they do right, like better navigation, prominent calls to action, faster loading, or a more accessible booking system.
- Weaknesses: We look for things they are doing wrong and find ways to improve them on your site.
- Opportunities: We look for things missing from their website that you can include on yours.
- Threats: We look for higher rankings or smarter keyword strategies helping competitors outrank you.
With our research complete, we can find new ways to create a more responsive, user-friendly site to improve conversions.
Target Audience
Your target audience goes beyond “travelers.” You need to create specific guest personas to inform your website design and develop pages that address the needs of your target audience. You also need to understand what drives your visitors to your website to ensure these are the channels your ideal personas tend to frequent. Otherwise, they’ll be disappointed once they land on your web pages. Finally, understanding your audience and where they come from helps you create optimized landing pages that provide the information visitors need to convert them into guests.
To identify and create target personas, we can:
- Research and gather data on existing guests to create an accurate set of personas
- Identify actionable personas that are actively seeking accommodations to increase conversions
- Solicit feedback from guests to understand what attracted them to book
- Consider how to apply personas to specific areas of your website to increase conversions
- Test landing pages, layouts, calls to action, etc., to find the most effective methods that contribute to conversions
- Improve the way you collect guest and visitor data so you can create accurate personas
Understanding your target audience allows us to optimize your website to appeal to their needs and drive conversion rates. Perhaps more importantly, it will enable us to overcome the challenges your website presents to specific personas. For example, if you cater to elderly guests, we can ensure the CTAs and buttons are more prominent and easier to spot.
We can also create clear step-by-step instructions that quickly walk them through the online booking process. Providing clear contact information on each page allows them to book directly with your reservation desk via phone instead of being forced to use your online booking system.
Optimize User Experience
Once we understand your guest personas, we are primed to optimize their user experience. As described above, we want to eliminate the obstacles visitors encounter on your website to create a user-friendly experience, including:
- Creating a design that quickly identifies and resolves the needs of visitors
- Incorporating chatbot technology to provide instant assistance for visitors
- Reducing the occurrence of popups that might distract or even frustrate visitors
- Providing testimonials and reviews to help improve visitor confidence
- Creating persuasive CTAs that not only encourage conversions but also lead guests to the appropriate pages to resolve issues
- Improving navigation that makes it easy to address pain points like finding your location, touring your rooms, determining room availability, finding pricing, etc., so visitors can choose to book once they have answers
- Utilizing personalization based on past visits
- Improving speed to reduce booking abandonment
- Providing several different payment options
- Posting clear and easy-to-understand cancellation policies
- Including alternative methods to book with a prominent reservation phone number or email contact
These design features create a streamlined booking process while ensuring the needs of each guest persona are met.
Optimize Messaging
Personas also help optimize messaging. We will consider where visitors come from and ensure that landing pages make sense to them. For example, if a visitor clicks a link on a social media post about a special offer, the page should explain the offer in detail, show the expiry date prominently, and have a CTA leading to the booking page. On the other hand, if they click a link on an ad about your romantic getaway packages, the landing page should list what is included, the price, and a CTA leading to the rooms available with links to book the rooms.
We ensure visitor expectations are met with optimized messaging and easy-to-use pages, including:
- Recognizing visitors who have visited your site in the past to help create a personalized experience
- Remembering passwords to make it easier for past guests to book without entering their information all over again
- Using effective CTAs on every page
- Providing contact information for your reservation desk so visitors can call in their reservations instead of being forced to use your online booking system
- Keeping your value proposition front and center
- Using testimonials and reviews on each page to instill trust
- Using A/B testing to create more and more effective headlines, CTAs, and actionable content
- Improving images to quickly create a visual that highlights the beauty and comfort of your accommodations
Optimize Your Google Profile
Google Business Profile (GBP) is a free digital marketing tool that Google uses to simplify user experience. By optimizing your GBP, we make it easier to convert guests because they see what they need to make a quick decision, including:
- Single room rates per night
- Double occupancy rates
- Minimum length of stay restrictions
- Detailed taxes and fees that apply to all rates
- Discounts or promotions for multi-night stays
You can direct queries directly to your booking page so they can look at your rooms without struggling to find what they need from your home page. (Mind you, we will ensure visitors can easily see what they need on your home page). Google profiles also show your exact location, so people can judge whether you are close to the attractions and places they wish to visit. You can even set up a booking button right from the Google search page and instantly provide reviews and star ratings to help inform guests of your appeal.
We will ensure your page is claimed and all the relevant information is available from the SERPs. We will list your attributes and amenities so people can quickly decide if you have the services they need, such as room service, pet-friendly, a pool, etc. Your highlights are also right there, helping you stand out from the competition and reducing the risk of people clicking on a competitor’s link instead. Everything is available at-a-glance, including your class rating. You can even include businesses operating inside your hotel, such as a Starbucks or a boutique.
GBP also allows you to post images and videos that people can view to get a feel for your hotel’s “vibe,” along with posts about upcoming events, local weather, improved amenities, vacancies for last-minute bookings, etc. We will build a question-and-answer section for things like whether your hotel is kid-friendly, whether you offer room service, tours, etc., and encourage guests to leave reviews to improve your ranking. We can also help answer questions posted under your questions and answers section and respond to negative reviews that can impact your rating.
When you get your digital marketing strategy right but your conversions disappoint, you need to rethink what your website offers. Clear Sky Tourism has the expertise to identify issues and provide recommendations to optimize your website for conversions. From there, we can execute the improvements so you are primed to convert website visitors into loyal guests.
With Clear Sky Tourism, convert website traffic into actual bookings and loyal customers through effective digital marketing.