How Hotels Can Increase Both Website and Foot Traffic

Hoteliers have the unenviable task of attracting more customers in an increasingly digitized marketplace. With travelers venturing to corners far and wide, for business or pleasure, a pivotal factor in their decision-making comes from extensive online research before any booking is made.

This presents a duality for hoteliers; they can promote their hotel online and tell compelling stories until the end of time, but if their efforts aren’t leading to tangible business, they could be considered wasted.

As such, hotel owners must educate, persuade and engage more prospective travelers with all the features and benefits of their hotels, while actively nurturing them through a winding and complex customer journey from online discovery to check-out time.

This sounds easier on paper than in practice, and with good reason, because this is far from a linear or straightforward process. With competition fierce and changing consumer preferences, hotels must target two types of traffic: website and actual foot traffic. The tips outlined in this guide will give hoteliers food for thought when approaching this challenge, giving them ample ideas on how they can get their hotels in front of the right people at the right time, and encouraging more people through their doors.

Create a ‘Shop Window’ That Converts

Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices

With most online traffic now coming from mobile devices, mobile website optimization has now evolved into one of the most important drivers for success. Your hotel’s website must deliver a fast, seamless, and responsive experience across all screen sizes, including desktop and tablet, because a fair chunk of searches exist on these devices too. However, mobile must take center stage.

Ensure that the site loads within three seconds as per Google’s Core Web Vitals criteria, offers easy menu navigation, is spaced correctly, and contains responsive features where images, text, and buttons adjust accordingly. Consider all ‘stages’ of the customer booking journey and ensure this process works flawlessly and is straightforward on all devices, but particularly mobile.

The aim is to make the website experience positive from the outset, and as mobile users will make decisions quickly, any obstacles are likely to make them ‘bounce’ from the website before long. Test, optimize, refine, and update your site so that the mobile experience remains secure, fast, and easy.

Invest in Professional Visuals

For the most part, visitors are drawn to a hotel’s features, and as such, websites should reflect that user intent throughout every page.

Hoteliers should invest in professional photography and videography that showcases the premises authentically and meaningfully, capturing all the essential features, from spacious rooms and amenities to catering, dining, and leisure add-ons.

Websites can accommodate various video file formats, but global photography equipment reseller MPB explicitly recommends using WebM and HTML5 video formats for embedding them on websites, as these offer smaller file sizes for loading, meaning that these shouldn’t affect website load speeds. If hosting on third-party video-sharing sites like YouTube, MP4 video files could be sufficient, offering a healthy blend of quality and size compression.

As for video and visual content itself, hoteliers should consider creating virtual walkthroughs or tours, which can give guests a ‘sneak peek’ into what a potential stay could look like. Transparent content like this builds trust and reassures guests of their choice.

Converting Website Visitors to Paying Guests

Direct Booking Incentives

The hotel and hospitality industry often hinges on the involvement of online travel agents (OTAs), which can be preferable for some guests booking long-haul or extended trips. OTAs may craft an experience and pitch to potential guests that means a booking is made via a third-party system or person, and the guest never visits your website.

However, not all hotels will have such agreements, and many travelers will invariably visit the hotel website before finalizing their booking. As such, adding a few essential quirks and features to your site to maximize conversion rates will make a profound difference. These include (but are not limited to):

• Exclusive rates
• Direct booking discounts
• Membership promotions
• Price-match guarantees
• Group savings
• Unique packages not found on OTA platforms

Whatever the incentive, the value proposition of booking directly through your hotel website should be clear and direct. When executed correctly, this can help a customer’s decision-making process.

Make Experiences More Personalized

Never underestimate the value of creating personalized guest experiences. Offering prospective guests the chance to make their experience unique and tailored to them is a great way to foster relationships with your audience, which is an important factor in modern marketing.

This can include:

• Room selection features
• Accommodation packages
• In-room amenity additions
• Targeted offers
• Possible add-ons they may not have considered or forgotten

An influential factor in helping guests make decisions is to leverage personalized ads and remarketing strategies that could steer them back on track towards conversion. For example, if a guest has visited your site but not converted, consider initiating Display Ads and personalized emails that remind them of their booking journey. This can be surprisingly effective at bringing past visitors back on board, particularly if ads and campaigns can be aligned well.

One of the most effective skills to have in helping you craft meaningful hotel marketing and remarketing campaigns across your digital channels is understanding how search engines crawl and index websites. So many opportunities lie in your site’s metrics and data, including what people are searching for, and what intent lies behind those searches (i.e. commercial, transactional, navigational, informational, or local).

Not only can this help you structure your site content in ways that guests and search engines value, but your keyword, click, and impression data can inform what you use for offline content.

Keep Engaging Customers Post-Conversion

Robust Content Marketing Strategy

If recent search engine algorithm updates and AI’s continued evolution and influence in modern search have taught us anything, it’s that relevant content remains a must-have.

As with any industry, hospitality venues and hotels must develop rich, valuable, engaging content that serves a beneficial interest to their audience. As with the search intent categories mentioned earlier, content can satisfy those key aims, such as:

• Informational content that answers common visitor or traveler questions (e.g. blogs, FAQs, articles, how-to guides)
• Local or navigational content that offers insights into the surrounding area(s) (e.g. things to do, areas to explore, must-see attractions, partnerships with travel guides, magazine features)
• Commercial or transactional content that satisfies the intent to buy (e.g. service and product pages, paid ad landing pages, directory listings, guest blogs, printed flyers with discounts)

The above list is just a small snippet of content formats that satisfy user and search intent, drive organic traffic, and position your hotel as a local resource worth visiting. Particularly when aligning website and offline content marketing goals across other channels like social media and email, your marketing strategy becomes more watertight, consistent, and valuable.

Ask for Reviews and Use Them as Conversion Tools

Statistics show that online users consult reviews before making purchasing decisions, and certainly in the hospitality industry, the weight that reviews carry is, to put it bluntly, immense.

As such, it’s in hoteliers’ best interests to integrate reviews throughout the website and across their digital footprint. Spotlight and encourage reviews on your Google Business Profile (GBP), trusted third-party portals like TripAdvisor or Trivago, and social media profiles. Promote reviews and testimonials in targeted posts, content, and emails to create meaningful trust signals and reinforce social proof in your hotel brand.

Respond publicly to all reviews, however positive, and use them to answer common questions or concerns if not already addressed. Consider incentivizing reviews for guests so they can obtain discounts or offers for future visits.

Make Hotel Marketing Easier

While these tips above are sure to help you bolster your website traffic and improve the quality and quantity of your bookings, the reality is they won’t happen overnight, and they will take time. As with any marketing strategy, expecting immediate success and improvements is ambitious.

However, with the help of marketing and sales software, point-of-sale software, and best-in-class hotel management systems, hoteliers can identify pain points and opportunities to strengthen the bridge between online interest and real-world visits. It’s important to remember that the digital and physical impressions you make must work in harmony, and by extension, your website traffic will improve, and the bookings will come.

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