Selomar Hotel, Scarborough is run by a lovely couple, Ken and Irene who were recommended to me and phoned me in November last year wanting some help with online marketing. The website you see is the design I inherited.
We approached the task in three passes. Basically, three lumps of money and three amounts of time spent doing what I do to help build traffic to websites and to improve the conversion rate from that traffic.
We didn't do everything I suggested, by any means. To some extent with a hotel once you've filled it that's all you need to do, so it was a bit like using a racing car to go shopping. So we never got to first place in Google for Scarborough Hotel or anything like that, the hotel filled up well before then.
I think I'm a little limited in what I can say about what we actually did do. There are, I think, about 300 hotels, guest houses and B&Bs in Scarborough and presumably everyone wants the top position in Google, so it doesn't seem right for me to detail what I did to help the Selomar Hotel. All I might say is we did what I always do, which is to look at what people are searching for online, then build pages to match, make sure the site is search engine friendly, and then work on making the site attractive and persuasive for people. I improved many of the photographs, for instance. Many of the general Scarborough photographs are my pics anyway. That 'we are here' picture on the first page of the site works nicely I think.
Another tack to take is to try to differentiate the business. Just writing about the business does that, and my PR background helps me spot things to write about and ask the right questions. As an obvious example, Selomar Hotel is licensed and has a bar, so I wrote about about that and now if you search for "scarborough hotel bar" we are (as I write) on the first page. I sought out interests and differences. One of Ken's interests is golf, so I wrote about that. Et Voila, a first place position on the subject. Every hotel is different, and writing about those differences helps to match holidaymakers with what they want and, in the end, everyone's happy.
Anyway, I don't know if this is fair because it's a seasonal business, but from comparing November to May, Google traffic is up 1,255%. 20% of our traffic is from a source I won't divulge but it's obviously a great source and we found it using the principles I've outlined.
Comparing this month's traffic to last, Google traffic is up 20%. And to two months ago, up 120%. These figures always confuse me, so here's what I mean. If traffic two months ago was 250 visitors to the website from Google, it's now 542. That's more than doubled in two months.
Here's another one for you. Google defines the 'bounce rate' of a website as the percentage of visitors who arrive and basically, turn tail and leave straight away. They might be put off by what they see, or they might arrive because somehow your site is coming up under some search term that's misleadingly bringing people to you looking for something you don't provide. Writing clearly about what you offer solves that sort of thing. But of course your site needs to be attractive and to lead people in and create a great impression. Anyway, in December the bounce rate was 39%, two months ago it was 34%. One third of people arrived and, within a few seconds, left again. Now it's 4.6%, possibly one of the lowest bounce rates I've seen.
I should give credit to Ken for pushing for better text, and for providing a great basis for the new text.
Selomar invested £800 in my time.
The real thing came through today. Quite spontaneously, Irene wrote this: Hi John just thought I would keep you up to date with our progress, we would like to thank you for what you have done for us we just can't keep up with the people wanting to come to us. It is our best year yet and have you noticed we are the top on ***travel site name*** and with that and the good web site, people are desperate to get in.
It kinda makes it all worthwhile doesn't it?