I set up an online/offline programme for a hotel a couple of weeks ago and that coordinated approach is really bearing fruit. Compare last August with this and online bookings are already six times higher. Six times. And that is without measuring the increase in telephone enquiries for weddings and Christmas. I thought I would share some of the techie side here. Regular readers won’t be surprised to know WordPress lies at the heart of the new online presence. However it is used much more as a simple but very effective CMS rather than a traditional blogging platform.

First I identified areas where the hotel is already successful and then others where I could drive more revenue. Then I created WordPress pages for each of these categories and filled the templates with a combination of static, but still easily changed, text and photos and a wp-query call to blog posts for that category.

I also made sure the permalinks were structured webaddress/category/post.

Combined with the ability to optimise titles and descriptions for every post and page and we have a very SEO-efficient set up.

Then I write conversational, but targeted and regularly updated content.

The results have been very encouraging.

I use Google Analytics and the Mint stats package both for inspiration and to gauge progress and so far they have shown a really good bounce rate. More than 80% of visitors go on beyond their entry page.

In fact some read nine, ten pages and it is great to see them land and finish on the booking page.

The hotel uses BookAssist for much of its online fulfillment and I am talking to them about how we better track the paths our lookers take when they go on to book. I’ll keep you posted.

I love it. Watching the booking numbers climb over the last few weeks has been as much of a buzz as scoring a byline used to be.