Hotel Website Makeover: Yorkland Hotel Toronto
6 Comments
What does a good hotel website look like?
Keith, a reader from Toronto, Canada, sends us his hotel’s website for our next review – and from a marketing perspective, there is a lot of great stuff I see.
Because this is going to be a largely positive review, it’s important I review the guidelines of this series: this hotel is not a client of Gradigio, and this review is not part of any type of sales pitch. The purpose of these reviews is to let us explore hotel internet marketing in a real-world environment.
Website Analysis
(Click image for full size review)
When one of their website visitors clicks one of these buttons, they arrive on a landing page with relevant content…
Click image for full size review
What I like about this website
- They provide relevant messages to each of their core target guest personas
- Contact information is prominent & easy to find (especially the phone number)
- There is usually a next step on each page (important for getting visitors to take action)
- The strong calls to action don’t feel too pushy
What I would add
The website development team did a great job with the design, so I suggest they focus now on building a powerful web presence.
- Base your SEO optimization on hard data. It looks like the website developers have made an attempt at on-page search optimization, but the keywords chosen don’t make sense looking at the results from my research tools. I recommend beginning with the free research tool from Google, and choosing to optimize for words people actually search for.
- Make pages easy to save, share & print. I personally like the widget provided by AddThis.com – which includes all the major functions visitors need to spread your content.
- Add a little more social media integration. Plan a hotel Flickr strategy…and invite your guests to participate. Embed updates from your blog or Twitter updates. A great website is one that is frequently updated with fresh content…and it’s even better when guests help produce that.
Take-away questions for anyone:
- Am I targeting unique guest personas on my website?
- What is the basis for my search optimization efforts?
- Is my page content focused on the reader instead of the hotel?
- Do my pages have a clear call to action?
- Once on my website, is it easy for visitors to book a room?
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Great review Josiah and thank you for your blog!
On that case I definitely agree with you but I would add the following things:
- You are selling a HOTEL online: your landing page does not display a single room or hotel-related picture! Marketing on lifestyle and soft attributes is great but do not forget what your core profession is!
-I would personally display more large HD pictures focusing on the hotel experience and the destination (not the hotel product alone), and of course, as Josiah recommended: launch a Flickr Strategy as a complement (which is great for gaining notoriety + SEO).
-Rich media such as short video clips is also great and could be used for other purposes in a viral online strategy.
-Finally, I would recommend adding more relevant content to your customers: giving informations about your hotel is important but: helping the customer organizing its stay in the destination would be even better and would help raise your conversion rate: online concierge, calendar of upcoming events, google maps mashups with “the concierge’s recommendations around the hotel” etc.
All in all: try to shift from using the web as an advertisement platform to offering real added value to your future customers! Hotel business is all about service: why not offering a glimpse of the quality of your service online?
I hope that i didn’t make too many english mistakes!
Brice from France
These are all very good points, Brice – I appreciate you sharing them.
It’s important web designers remember to not get carried away with stock photography. Smiling faces is great, but can become meaningless. As you said, the purpose is to sell rooms, so the more hotel photography the better.
I also think the hotel could do a little better job of producing more destination content. One hotel owner I’m working with in Istanbul personally publishes all the “insider” places he finds on a special blog:
http://www.istanbulinsiderguide.com/
Hi Josiah
Great review and by following your and the commenters’ comments I’m getting a lot of food for my hotel website revival:-) Thanks!
Added question
Now you have been playing around with the Thesis Theme, would you recommend incorporating a hotel website in a blog with Thesis setup rather than vise versa incorporating the blog in a static website?
Glad you’re enjoying this series, Guido. To answer your question: it depends on the hotel. It is definitely possible to build a hotel website around a blog – which Todd Lucier explains here:
http://www.tourismkeys.ca/blog/2008/12/in-2009-ditch-your-website-and-focus-on-blogging/
It is Really good artical posted by you. Website Analysis is so nice. web site designed is so nice, but Yorkland hotel website is better designed to any other web site. thank you very much for it.