1. Install visitor recording & heatmap tools to understand visitor behavior
Install a visitor recording software like HotJar, Crazy Egg or a similar service then watch how customers use the site and learn what they want. Study how to improve your site, review heat maps to see which specific areas of the pages are being ignored and seen and work to improve your site.
2. Test all forms, phone numbers, and booking engines
Do each of your lead generation forms go to the correct person in your organization? Do you have a system of checks and balances in place to ensure that all leads are received and responded to? Make sure you test your forms at least every month. Test your embedded booking engine or donate forms or any third party vendor lead forms to ensure that their emails are getting to the intended recipient. If you change your email addresses or have a change in staff, make sure you alert your webmaster.
3. Does your Reservation Program reflect the new brand?
Does your Reservation Program reflect the new brand (if not resend them the booking engine headers, footers, and CSS? Act like a customer and go through your reservation process, are the photos all there, is it easy to compare rooms visually by price and # accommodated? Unfortunately, this is usually out of the hands of your webmaster and will need to be done directly by the hotel with your online booking system provider. An easy-to-use reservation system is a key to more direct bookings. Ask your webmaster to critique your reservation or e-commerce checkout process then bring those results to your provider to improve the user experience for your site visitors and you will increase your revenue.
4. Check your Google Analytics and Screaming Frog
Check your Google Analytics year over year, month over month, did your pageviews improve, time on site, visitors to the site, how is your bounce rate. Review Google Webmaster Tools for critical issue alerts on your website. Review your organic keyword placement, where your traffic is coming from and learn what is working and what is not. You can even review how visitors are traveling through the site and where they exit. Launching the website is not the end of your work, it’s the beginning. Make sure your webmaster checks Screaming Frog to ensure that any and all pages are properly redirected.
5. Check your site speed
Check your site speed, optimize images again and look for ways to continually improve your load speed. Are you on a CDN? If your site speed isn’t up to par this might be a great option.
6. Consider Live Chat
If you don’t have Live Chat, add it, you’ll find out how to improve your website very quickly and learn what travelers or your customers need to know to convince them to book or buy.
7. Get the Word Out!
Announce your new site on Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook or whatever social media that you use. Have your internet marketing company write about the new site, do a case study on your fabulous results and post a blog about it.
9. Hire Mannix Marketing for your digital marketing
Yes, your site is not complete when you launch your new web design, to really grow your business, you need digital marketing services. Yes, you can afford this! Let’s chat.
