Your hotel website is an integral piece of your digital marketing toolkit that should always be maintained and kept up to date. Throughout the customer journey, we discuss the importance of using your website to keep travel shoppers well-informed about all that’s going on at your hotel. This could range from highlighting new special offers and recent renovations, to keeping people in the know of all the notable events happening in your local area!
If potential guests arrive on your website to find outdated events or offers being promoted, this will decrease their trust in your hotel and they will look elsewhere for accommodations. Keeping your website up to date will increase your SEO performance, help you develop local partnerships, and establish your property website as a reliable source of area information.
At Leonardo, we always want to add fresh, new content to your website to accomplish these goals. Learn more about why it’s important to send us website updates and edits on an ongoing basis.
Provide High-Quality, Fresh Content for Your Website
Search engines are always looking for the most up-to-date and accurate information that answers a given search query. In this ever-evolving digital age, sites that haven’t been updated for a long period of time will be considered outdated and irrelevant in the eyes of search engines.
Fresh content also lets search engines know that they should re-visit your website and re-evaluate its position in search engine rankings. With that being said, you shouldn’t update your website just for the sake of providing fresh content. The best strategy for rising higher in search engine results pages is by always prioritizing high-quality, informative content that your target customers are actually searching for.
For example, if you’d like to target more corporate travelers to your hotel and find that the local golf courses are a huge pull for this target market, it might be worth creating a page that outlines the top golf courses people are searching for in the area, along with helpful tips for planning a day out on the fairway!
Keep Your SEO Strategy Top of Mind
Your website is built with a specific keyword strategy tailored to your property’s unique story. When making updates to your website, it’s important that you don’t change anything that may negatively impact your SEO strategy.
For example, changing the page names or navigation structure of your website can result in broken links, directly impacting user experience. Changing a page name without setting up the proper redirects will also create a brand new URL, which has no previous SEO value.
Check out our article on How Website Edits Impact Your SEO Strategy so you know what elements to keep in mind when making any changes to your website.
Increase Travel Shoppers’ Trust
Your website is a go-to resource for travel shoppers who are looking to learn more information about your property, and we know that a lot can happen at the hotel and local area after you’ve first launched your Vizlly website.
Promoting expired hotel packages or outdated property and local area information can result in distrust, make people leave your website, or foster unhappy customers. For example, if you’re promoting a local area shuttle that has since been removed from your services, your guests will find this inconvenient once they arrive at the property. Ensure that any hotel and local area information on your website is always up to date so that travel shoppers are well-informed about what to expect when they stay with you!
Promoting popular local attractions and businesses on your website is also a great way to establish partnerships. An up-to-date website is a great tool to leverage when looking to create backlink opportunities or hotel packages partnered with local attractions, restaurants, or events.
Effectively Execute on Your New Updates
With any updates to your website, ensure that you’re properly executing on the changes to effectively reach travel shoppers! Promote any new deals on your Offers page or include a “Featured Offers” section, ensure new menus have updated links, and update outdated photos with high-quality images that accurately showcase your hotel’s great features.
Thinking about making some updates to your website? As a Vizlly with SEO customer, you can utilize your dedicated Success Team to ensure that your edits are effectively executed on your website. Our SEO Specialists can look for potential keywords to optimize a new page, and our Content Specialists are experts in writing optimized content to help drive traffic to your website. We can also ensure that any updates made will not negatively impact your SEO strategy. Simply combine and send all of your edits and we can work on executing on your requests based on our best practices!
Don’t hesitate to reach out to your dedicated Success Manager for expert advice and tips on the best ways to implement changes to your site. If you’re thinking about executing on any edits yourself, make sure to ask your Success Manager for a Vizlly training session beforehand, so we can provide you with all the information you need to successfully update your website.
Written by Stephanie Sulit, Content Specialist Team Lead