For warm weather-reliant vacation rental companies, no matter what, your website traffic is about to increase exponentially with the approaching busy season. To ensure this increased traffic turns into more bookings for you, here are a few steps to make sure your website is ready to convert the hordes of visitors into leads and customers.
Review Your Website’s Search Feature
One of the top reason’s people leave a website is because of bad navigation. When visitors find a site confusing, too complex, or inconsistent, they become frustrated and angry, which is the last thing you want to happen.
With the upcoming influx of visitors to your vacation rental company’s website, you want to ensure that your pages are user-friendly and easy to navigate, especially your rental search feature. To make sure this is working smoothly, consider the following:
- Send out surveys to home owners to evaluate the usability of your search features. (This will not only provide you with helpful feedback, but will also show your homeowners you care about their homes getting found more easily.)
- Get friends and family to test out your rental search feature and give you their honest, unbiased opinions.
We encourage you to take the feedback and make any adjustments to make for a smoother operating experience for your website visitors, increasing your chances for more bookings.
Make Sure to Have a Mobile Friendly Website
Today, more than 80% of internet users own a smartphone, and according to a 2014 market review from comScore, consumers are multi-screening now more than ever, accessing business websites on their mobile devices as well as their desktops, so the transition between the two needs to be seamless for your vacation rental company’s website! After all, even if people aren’t booking with their mobile device, they often begin their research on a mobile device, so it’s important for them to easily find you.
- Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly by using Google’s easy Mobile-Friendly Test to analyze and report back to you if the page has a mobile-friendly design or not.
Google will actually be rewarding websites that are mobile-friendly with better page rankings than those that are not easily navigable on mobile devices, so it is important to make sure your site is ready. Read more, here:
CTA’s
While your blog posts and social media engagement may have helped to get visitors to your website, the approaching busy season is only going to increase the flow of traffic. Making sure these visitors stay on your website is the next step. Be sure you have clear, attention-grabbing calls-to-action (CTA’s) to take visitors to the next level. The benefit of a good CTA is that it invites the user to do exactly what you want them to do, instead of just hoping that they will on their own.
- Use CTA’s to link to form pages by promising downloadable content offers. Present these offers in the form of eBooks in exchange for your visitors’ contact information. You will not only gain a strong lead this way, but will also become a valuable source of information for that visitor.
- CTA’s linking to home search pages are also immensely effective, as they are like street signs, guiding visitors to the houses they are potentially looking to rent.
Be sure your CTA’s are attention-grabbing, enticing, and link to the pages you want your users to go…and then place them on your website and in your blog posts.
For more information and internet marketing tips, visit Paveya’s Vacation Rental Marketing blog.
