Lesson 17

What Should the Website of a Travel Agency, Museum, Hotel or Visit Center Look Like

A website in general is a representation of your company or organization on the Internet. Therefore, it must be flawless both in terms of design and from the technical side.

The design should be entrusted to professionals or use ready-made templates. In any case, your target audience should like the appearance of your site, and the navigation should be simple and convenient.

In technical matters, you should figure it out yourself. After reading the materials in this lesson, you can evaluate the quality of your site and improve it if necessary. And if you have a person responsible for the site, you can control his or her work.

  1. Security.

Security is very important. In order to protect the data stored on the site, you should use the secure HTTPS protocol. If you use the HTTP protocol, your site is at risk and you need to obtain a security certificate. How to do this is described in detail here.

  1. Loading speed.

According to statistics, if the loading speed of a site exceeds 3 seconds on a computer or mobile device, most users leave it.

Accordingly, “slow” sites are less indexed by search engines and displayed lower in search results. You can check the loading time of your site and get recommendations on how to improve it by following this link.

Just copy your website’s URL and paste in the appropriate field. Then click the Analyze button.

  1. Mobile version.

Since back in 2018, the worldwide share of mobile Internet users was 52%, your site must certainly have a mobile version. Many sites can be adapted for mobile devices. If this is not possible, you need to create a separate mobile version of the site.

Read more here.

  1. Optimization.

In order to increase the chances of a site appearing on the first pages of search engines, it is necessary to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can do a full site check and get a SEO analysis of each page, indicating errors and recommendations for their correction. Follow this link and proceed as in the previous paragraph.

  1. Multilingualism.

One of the undoubted advantages of any site is its multilingualism. If you expect to attract a client from far abroad, you just need at least an English version of your site. This will be helpful for your potential foreign clients, and allow search engines to index your site for English-language queries.

  1. Images.

No site is complete without images. It is necessary to use only high quality photos and pictures. The size of the images should correspond to the design of your site, and the file size should be minimal yet maintaining high quality. There are several free and paid online resources which can compress images, that is, reduce their file size without losing quality. Here is the example of such resource: https://www.iloveimg.com/en/compress-image

  1. Contact information.

The site should have as complete contact information as possible – not just one phone number. Address, zip code, e-mail, links to all social networks, landline and mobile phones, WhatsApp, etc. This helps to increase the trust of visitors. Also, a map with your exact location and directions for public transport helps a lot. Be sure to indicate your work schedule on the site so that the clients know exactly when to contact you.

  1. Content.

The content used on your site must be unique and copyright. Modern search engines easily find sites with stolen content and lower their search results. Also, the content should be interesting to your target audience. If visitors do not linger on the site pages, this also lowers its position in search engines.

Regularly test your texts on the target audience. Find out what is interesting for them and what is not. Keeping that in mind, create exclusively copyrighted content. In addition, check your texts before publishing them through uniqueness checking services, for example this one . Update your content periodically.

  1. Analytics.

 

Site analytics is also very important for its success.

The most convenient way to do this is using Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics. These resources will give you an understanding of how effective certain advertising channels are, what social networks work better, what is happening on your site, which devices are popular, from which countries are visitors and what languages they prefer, etc.

Contact your developer with a request to install Yandex Metrica or Google Analytics on your website. For a competent specialist, this is a matter of 5 minutes. But do not try to do it yourself if you do not understand the site’s structure.

After the counter of one of the above-mentioned resources is installed on the site, you need to learn how to use these new analytics capabilities. The materials presented here will help you: Yandex Metrica School, or Google Analytics Academy.

Yandex.Metrica’s Webvisor is good at helping you to understand what customers do and how they behave on your site. More about Webvisor here.

  1. Traffic.

Even if your site is perfect, this will not ensure its maximum traffic. You have to take care of your site traffic yourself. There are both online and offline methods for this.

Offline methods include placing the site name on print ads, brochures, business cards. You can also use the QR code leading to the site.

Online methods are links to the site on all social networks, as well as on third-party resources such as maps, guides, media articles, popular blogs, etc. The more links to your site, the higher it is in the search. But you cannot buy links or exchange them – search engines watch this and punish such sites.

Below there are Google recommendations on what you should not do with your site:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769