Travel and tourism has become one of the hottest industries lately, as people’s living standards have improved, the demand for travel has also steadily increased. To serve customers, increase convenience and experience, having a website is an essential requirement. But just having a website is not enough, the website needs to be optimized to increase customer reach and, even more so, remain in the customers’ minds. With extensive experience in designing many travel websites and a deep understanding of customer insights, we would like to share a few of our perspectives on evaluating the effectiveness of a travel and tourism website.
- Beautiful travel websites stem from serious user behavior research:
Any website needs to be designed based on customer insights, this is the primary criterion for evaluating the quality of a website. No effective website is designed based on the designer’s whims or haphazard borrowing from other websites. The first step in creating a beautiful travel website is to outline a Brief to clearly understand the needs of the business and its customers. This will be followed by a brainstorming session between the business and customers to outline a basic website blueprint. Currently, many businesses do not fully understand the importance and often skip this basic research step when building a website. - A beautiful travel website always has a modern, simple design and visually stimulating:
The first thing users see and perceive about your website is the layout design and imagery. This is particularly important for travel websites, as investing in design and imagery needs to be a priority. This is quite understandable, as customers will only choose to use your services when they are truly impressed and fond of the destinations you suggest. Visually stimulating imagery will be the deciding factor for the success of a travel website. No matter how good and useful your website is, if it is designed in a sloppy manner, with an illogical layout and cluttered, users will not want to stay or revisit the website. This leads to a high bounce rate and a corresponding decrease in the website’s search engine ranking. However, there are many factors to assess a beautiful website. - Content on travel websites must be engaging
Along with the imagery, the content also needs to be carefully crafted. First and foremost, the content needs to provide all the information a customer might need. Information about services, contact details is mandatory, and you can also include useful travel-related information for customers such as culture, climate, suggestions for attractions, etc. The content should be concise and succinct so customers can easily grasp the information, but it should also evoke certain emotions in them to make them feel interested and quickly make a decision. - Streamlined and convenient booking flow
To make booking tours and online payments more convenient for customers, most current travel websites need to integrate a user-friendly booking and payment system. This not only saves on human resources for consulting, customer service, or sales, but also makes your website more professional. In the current technology race, no industry is outside of this race. Therefore, if travel businesses do not innovate and update with new trends, they will quickly fall behind. When customers feel convenient in booking tours and making payments directly on the site, it means you have increased your conversion rate and reduced the risk of customers searching for more information and canceling your tour. - Compatible with multiple devices:
The ratio of smartphone or smart mobile device users is steadily increasing. This requires your travel website to be compatible across multiple smart devices to better reach a wider customer base. When the majority of customers search for travel services during their free time on mobile devices, a travel website that cannot display properly on smartphones or tablets will miss out on a lot of your potential business. - Effective travel website needs proper SEO:
Where do customers find your business among the hundreds of thousands of travel and tourism businesses? Your website may be beautiful and have engaging content, but if it cannot be accessed by customers. The answer to these issues lies in SEO, this tool will help your business reach customers better. Through SEO, administrators can bring their website to a higher position in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) with relevant keywords to increase traffic and competitiveness against competitors.
Currently, there are up to 200 criteria to design a standard SEO website, but make sure your website meets the following basic criteria:
Page Title: Needs to be concise, succinct, contain the key SEO keyword, and no more than 70 characters. Note that your website should have the title as the H1 tag – the most prioritized tag in SEO.
Description: The description tag is a summary of the main content on the website (or article) with the criteria: concise, on-topic, succinct, containing the main keyword and secondary keywords, and having effective PR content. Because when customers find your website on Google, this is the short snippet they see in the search results. Note that the description should not exceed 140 characters.
URL: You need to build a URL with customizability, user-friendly and search engine friendly. Avoid using special characters (#, $, %, ~, …) in the URL, it should contain keywords and maintain link depth (no category folders).
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See more: What makes an effective and beautiful real estate website?
The above are some small reminders from us to help you re-evaluate your travel business’s website. We hope that with this article, your travel website will truly be an effective information and sales channel.
And if you are planning to build a website, we are also always ready to provide the best advice for you. Please contact us here.
