What You Can Learn from a Hotel Website Audit
According to one study, more than 75% of people say they make a judgment on a business’s credibility based solely on the design of the company’s website. This means nearly every visitor to your website is judging you based on how your website looks and functions.
Your website is the home base for all your digital marketing. It’s where people go to see your rooms, amenities, and pricing. As such, it needs to really shine. A website audit can help you know where you can improve the overall user experience.
So, let’s uncover what you can learn from a hotel website audit, but first, let’s look at what the audit is.
What is a Hotel Website Audit?
When you do a hotel website audit, you are going through the process of looking at the performance of each of your individual website pages. You are looking for many things, including how well your site performs in search engines. You will learn whether your site is optimized and working well to bring in visitors and keep them on your website.
A hotel website audit is a deep dive into the speed, content, performance, design, and more.
With an audit, you can find ways to improve your website. You can find ways to overcome the competition and provide an excellent user experience. Here’s what you can learn.
You Can Find Errors
The last thing you want is broken pages or broken links on your website. A website audit can help you find errors so that you can fix them.
The problem with errors on your hotel website is that they can cause people to bounce off your site, and you end up losing conversions.
Have you noticed that people are bouncing off your website or not completing their reservations? A website audit can help you find out if errors are causing this.
You Can Compare Your Website to Competitors
One of the best ways to learn how you line up against your competition is through a website audit.
Your audit helps you analyze how you rank against your competitors when it comes to keywords as well as your position on search engine results pages.
Basically, you’re auditing not only your own website but your competitor’s websites, too. You can see a side-by-side comparison and then create tactics to lift your website to the top.
You Can Improve the User Experience
Do you know how your website visitors feel when they land on your website and navigate it? Do they bounce off quickly or stick around? Do you have a lot of errors that keep visitors from finding what they want?
The most important thing you can offer website visitors is an intuitive, effortless user experience. Your hotel website audit helps you find the following items that can affect your website visitor’s experience.
- The speed of your website
- 400 errors on your landing pages as well as other pages
- Links that don’t work
- Broken features that may include your shopping cart, checkout page, reservation buttons, login pages, and more
- A lack of a privacy policy
You will find that when you improve the overall user experience, people stay on your website longer, looking at your rooms and ultimately booking them. (tweet this)
You Can Improve Your Website’s SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical to getting your website to appear at the top of search engine results pages.
Your website audit can help you finetune your SEO by looking for several things. You want each page of your website to be optimized for SEO by including:
- One (and only one) H1 tag on each page – this is the tag that tells search engines what your page is about
- Alt tags on each image – you want to describe each image for accessibility
- Keywords in your title and header tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, etc.)
- Complete meta descriptions that also repeat the keywords in your title
- Canonical links
In addition, you can find places on your website where you’re missing out on a strong SEO. For example, you might find old pages where you used an old tactic – keyword stuffing. Or, you might find duplicate content on your page, which confuses search engines.
Your first goal is your website visitors, and your second goal is search engines. But these two can go hand in hand. By improving one, you naturally improve the other.
By concentrating on the overall user experience, you can also improve your SEO by putting your customer first.
You Can Improve Site Speed
One of the most important things in today’s digital age is the speed of your website. In fact, Google ranks quick-loading websites higher on search engine results pages.
You can learn how fast your website loads by performing a hotel website audit. If it doesn’t perform well, you’ll also know just what you need to do to fix it.
In addition, if you have a slow-loading website, your users are going to bounce off. They won’t wait long (one to three seconds on average) for a website to load. They’ll move off to the competition if your site is frustrating.
You want to audit your website page on an ongoing basis to make sure your site is loading well and quickly.
Hotel Website Audit Provides Areas of Improvement Online
Now that you know the many benefits of auditing your hotel website, you’re ready to take the plunge.
To recap, when you audit your hotel website, you can improve:
- The user experience
- Search engine optimization
- Your conversion rates
- The quality of your content
- The speed of your website
- Your site security and the security of your plugins
Finally, your audit can also show you areas where you can improve website accessibility so it is accessible and easy to read and navigate for people with disabilities.
All of these things work together to make your customers stick around longer on your website, and they make Google happy so your site is rewarded in search engine results pages.
You want to audit your website at least once a year and preferably twice a year. Some things, like site speed, should be audited monthly.
We are your hotel digital advertising specialists, and we can help you refresh your website after your hotel website audit. We help you take your website to the top. Along with your website, we can create a winning social media marketing strategy that also ties back into your website. As website design and redesign experts, we can also create a new or refreshed website accessible to all. And we can also help with search engine marketing, online booking, online listings, and social media marketing. We are here to help. Contact us today for your consultation!
Image: Firmbee.com and Linus Mimietz on Unsplash
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