Your website is your main marketing tool but how do you make it stand out from the crowd? Without getting too technical, we’ve come up with a few hints and tips to help you stay ahead of your competitors and top of the search rankings.
Know your market
It might sound obvious, but find out what your guests want. Do your research. Ask questions. Why do people book your property? What do they expect you to provide for them while they stay with you? How long do they usually stay for? What groups/party sizes book most often, and when? And, what do they like to do when they’re on holiday. Once you know this information, it will be much easier to plan your web content and target them accordingly.
Keyword research
SEO keywords are the key words and phrases in your web content that enable people to find your website organically via search engines. You need to know what these keywords are in order to understand where you get most of your traffic from. Google Keyword Planner is a good, free tool to help with your keyword research. It’s important you understand and use keyword themes in your content nowadays, however, not just the same keyword.
For instance, if most of your guests find your website by searching for “wedding venue Yorkshire”, then you must of course include “wedding venue Yorkshire” in your page title, headings and content, but don’t fill your page with repeated mentions of it. Talk around the theme. Talk about castles, stately homes, marquees, local caterers and photographers who all play a part in your ‘theme’ – you get the idea.
Create good, useful content
Once you know your target audience and your keywords, you can create more relevant content for your site. Content is Google’s number 1 ranking factor. It should be in-depth and interesting. The more detail you include, the more Google likes you, and the higher you rank. Here are some tips:
- Headlines should be catchy and engaging. Focus on your guests’ needs and be concise.
- Your main copy should lead with your Unique Value Propositions (UVPs) – ie: what do you offer, and what makes your property so attractive. Back this up with reviews/testimonials from previous guests to reassure browsers you’re trustworthy. Then, include a call to action (eg a “Book here/Book now” button).
- Write with your keyword themes and keywords in mind but avoid thin content. Don’t just create a page stuffed with keywords; it must be content that has real value to your guests to be deserving in Google.
- Check your spelling and grammar!
- Avoid duplicate content. Duplicate content refers to content that is similar or identical and is found at more than one URL. Search engines don’t like to waste time searching round the same pages and will punish you for it, by pushing you down the rankings. But watch out, it’s not all as obvious as it sounds … eg you may think you only have your content on one page of your site but Google reads all these as different URLs and therefore duplicate content would be flagged: www.yoursite.com | www.yoursite.com/index | http://www.yoursite.com | http://yoursite.com | https://yoursite.com etc.
- When you link to relevant internal pages within your website or to external websites make sure you link from relevant keywords within your text rather than “click here”. It’s also important to get external sites to link to you. The best way to do this is by producing good content that they want to share.
Communicate visually
Content doesn’t just mean text. Images and videos provide rich content for visitors to your site and can be key influences in the decision to book. Please invest in decent pictures for your website. Make sure file sizes are small so as not to affect the page load time. A page that loads slowly can negatively effect your website’s ranking, as well as seriously hack off your visitors! If you need it, Pixlr is a good, free image-editing tool. With videos, the rules are more or less the same. Make sure they’re worthy and well shot – they can still, however, be home-made as most mobile phones have decent video facilities nowadays. Just upload your video to YouTube, then embed it in your website. One point to bear in mind, however, is that search engines can’t “see” images or videos. So, it’s important to include a text description of them, which search engines will pick up. For images this is done in an alt tag, a description of the picture, using keywords where appropriate. For videos, YouTube allows you to upload a transcript or if you prefer you can describe the video content.
Evolve
It’s a good idea to think of your website as a work in progress – search engines are always evolving and changing how they create their rankings. Therefore, by association, websites should do the same. It might seem like a lot of work, but all that’s described above can be achieved with little tweaks here and there to your existing site. And, it’s worth the effort. All these tools, if used correctly, should send more traffic to your website. And, more hits means more potential guests, which equals more bookings!
