Engage with your visitors
There are many interactive and innovative ways of communicating with website visitors and guests. ICT Total Solution will be happy to discuss potential options with you. A hospitality website is not just about pushing information out to visitors. It is also about gathering visitor or guest news and views on a regular basis. Why not provide your guests with the tools and facilities to share information or even upload their photos and comments to your site? Why not provide a community area? An effective way of engaging with both visitor and returning guest is via an online Blog (personal diary). What is a Blog?
In its basic form, a blog is nothing more than a collection of articles, thoughts, journal entries or bits of information posted to a web page or a collection of web pages. It is really the content of the blog that makes a blog valuable, engaging and personal.
Guests have long known that the local area knowledge that an innkeeper possesses is one of the things that make the stay valuable. Consider how many times you have sent guests to some local restaurant, waterfall, scenic spot, antique store or other valuable experience that they never would have found if not for your suggestions. Why not provide this knowledge to potential and incoming guests by way of your own blog. If it is in your area, make a blog posting (an article or story) about it. It doesn't take long, one posting a week or more and pretty soon you have a huge collection of postings about your area, all attracting search engines and people leading them to your establishment. Content is king for any website so a blog is a great way to keep your website updated and relevant to all visitors throughout the year.
Blog Benefits
- Search engines favour fresh content and a blog is an easy way to continually provide fresh content.
- Search engines favour one topic per page, and this is how blog content is often arranged.
- Human visitors favour information they can trust with a personal touch.
- Potential guests favour establishments run by knowledgeable innkeepers.
- Guests like information about the area they are visiting or contemplating visiting.
- Promoting your area not only brings more guests to your door, it brings more guests to your area.
- Promoting businesses in your area means they are more likely to recommend you.
- In many cases, links from blogs are seen as a link from an external website which carries more weight with search engines than a link from within your website.
- People read blogs because there is value in the words, but often skim read websites. Blog postings that read like articles are more often read and can help engage with visitors and inject personality and warmth into the most basic of websites.
- Visitors will return to your website frequently to read your Blog. You can then position marketing and promotional material for them to also read.