Your Hotel Website Audit Checklist

So you have a hotel website. Done and dusted, right? Well, actually, a website should be thought of as a living marketing piece—and it needs continuous and consistent care. Conducting regular website audits will help you identify areas for improvement, update outdated information, fix broken links, enhance SEO, and significantly improve your website’s performance to boost engagement and conversions.

As a busy hotelier, the thought of conducting a website audit might seem overwhelming and time consuming. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to do everything all at once. That’s why we’ve created a handy website audit checklist that breaks it down into manageable sections you can tackle one at a time.

It’s crucial that, about once a year, you review your website’s overall design and user experience. As timeless as your website design may be, it can become outdated and slow as new technologies emerge and user preferences change.

• Brand Consistency: Revisit your website from a user’s perspective—does it feel cohesive and consistent? Ensure your colors, font, and content are all on brand.
• Design Trends: Review the latest web design trends and consider those that make sense for your hotel, such as virtual videos or voice search. You may also learn that other elements should go, such as special effects that were once cool but now distract.
• Navigation and Usability: How easy is it to use your website? Put yourself in the shoes of a potential guest and navigate around your website. Is it easy to find the information you need and make a booking? Consider accessibility guidelines here as well.
  Bonus tip! It can be difficult to objectively assess the navigation and usability of your own site because you already know it so well! Consider recruiting friends or family members to participate in a usability test and provide you with honest feedback.
• Responsive Design: According to Phocuswire, 52% of guests book from mobile devices, making responsive design essential. And it’s something that can go off kilter every once in a while, so it’s important to check your website from your mobile device on a regular basis.
• Site Speed: Did you know that users expect a site to load within three seconds? Google also favors site speed in its rankings as they want to send visitors to sites that provide a good experience. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how your site measures up and find out where your issues are. If your site is very slow, check image sizes (with an app like Crush.pics), and look for extraneous code and too many patches. If you have an old site, it could be time for a redesign.

A seamless booking process can help increase conversion rates so it’s vitally important to identify any friction along the way.

• Book Now CTA: Make sure website visitors can access your booking engine from every page of your website. Including your book now button in the page header ensures it is never more than a single click away.
  
• Test Your Booking Software: Make a booking from your website and test out all components of making a booking to ensure everything is working as expected. Now do it again from your mobile device to confirm the process is responsive.
• Booking Engine Confirmation Page: Don’t overlook this often-overlooked page! Check that not only is it functioning as it should but that the content is up to date.

Your website’s content includes everything that is customer facing, i.e., all written content as well as images and videos. It must be high quality and up to date. Furthermore, it supports your marketing, UX, and SEO initiatives.

• On Brand: Do the words, images and video form a cohesive brand image and tell your story?
• Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Revisit your hotel’s USP (identify what it is if you’re not sure) and ensure it’s effectively communicated throughout your website in a way that is clear, concise, and compelling—and demonstrates what sets you apart from your competitors.
• Text Density: For SEO, 600 to 700 words per page is considered the optimal amount. It’s a good ballpark guide to ensure you’re providing visitors with enough information without overwhelming them.
• Calls to Action (CTAs): Motivate bookings by using relevant CTAs throughout your content. Well-placed and convenient booking buttons are important but so are other CTAs that lead visitors down the sales funnel, such as enticing them to view a virtual video or read your blog post about the top 10 area restaurants.
• Update Images and Video: Do your photos and videos need refreshing? Are they still accurate? Do they align with your branding? Do they reflect your USP and appeal to your target guests? And if you don’t have virtual tour videos—or any videos—it’s time to create something!
• Content Accuracy: Like your visuals, ensure your content is accurate. Comb through all your pages—you might find an event description for NYE 2019, a closed notice for your now reopened coffee shop, or an offer that’s no longer valid. Don’t forget to check pop-ups!
• Relevant Offers: When was the last time you evaluated your special offers? Take time to analyze what offers are most successful, revisit your guest segments, and create enticing new offers if need be.

Auditing your website for SEO involves analyzing your website to identify any technical, content, or user experience issues that may affect search engine rankings. An audit can also help you identify and correct any missed opportunities.

• SEO Audit Tool: Keep it simple and employ a tool to help you identify what your site is missing, such as Moz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs.
• Internal Links: Adding links within your content to other pages of your site helps keep visitors on your website longer and gives more weight to your content by showing search engines that your site is an authority on that subject. Check and correct broken links while you’re at it.
• Review Backlinks: Links from other sites signal to search engines that you are providing useful and relevant content—unless the backlinks are coming from spammy sites. If low-quality sites are linking to you, politely ask the site owner to remove their link or use (with caution) Google’s Disavow Links tool.
• Remove Duplicate Content: Not only does duplicate content affect user experience, but it will also demote your search engine rankings.
• Metadata: Your backend content—such as title tags, meta descriptions, and image (alt) tags, descriptions and names—is mainly there to help tell search engines what your site is all about. Alt tags are also important for accessibility by providing content for screen readers used by those who are unable to view images.
• Content: Good quality content is your best SEO because it engages your web visitors, builds trust, and gets shared!

• Set Up Analytics: Check that you are monitoring your website metrics. If it is set up already, check for any disparities, which may indicate that it’s not set up properly!
• Website and Conversion Tracking: Consider adding website and booking engine tracking codes to monitor user behavior, which can help you with future website changes.
• Analyze Analytics: Analyze your data! If Google Analytics reports a page with high bounce rates, then it’s not relevant to your visitors and needs a content refresh. Do you have a blog post that has a lot of hits? That’s perfect insight for creating more related content.

• Social Media Links: Add links to your hotel’s social media accounts (including social media icons in the website footer is a common way to do this) and double check they are working.
• Guest Reviews: Does your website showcase guest testimonials and reviews? TripAdvisor says that at least 72% of guests refer to reviews before booking. Consider using a widget that displays testimonials on your website, encouraging guests to stay on your website instead of searching for reviews on OTAs.

Keep your website in tip-top shape with annual audits. To make the process easier, you can chip away at it little by little using this checklist. In some cases, a full site redesign may be necessary to bring your website up to date and ensure that it meets your needs and the needs of your guests. Ultimately, the key is to stay on top of your website’s maintenance so that it always provides a seamless user experience and maximizes conversions.