How to build a successful Tour & Travel website in 2024
Tour and Travel business is probably one of those that will significantly if not 75+% rely on online business lead generation to survive so you need to setup your online marketing tools professionally to do the anticipated job for you. One of the key tools must be your company website!
Most of the marketing tools for your Tour Agency will not give you all the freedom to detail all your tours, probably will limit how much description you can attach to your trips but with your website, you have all the freedom to manage your branding, creativity and detail as you will, is it the case with you?
Planning to start or revamp your travel website, what considerations will you have in mind? Personally I would priotize these five factors;
1. Visual creativity
Your website needs to impress at first sight, nothing less! Your website layout design can be simple, easy to navigate yet visually ‘wow’ or appealing to prompt your audience spend an extra minute in there. Use hi resolution images (preferably yours) that will visualize an experience you have given to your recent clients, simple animations and infographics to tell your story with less wording.
Get inspired from some of our recent website design work;
2. Add thoughtful user prompts
You need to easily and quickly guide your audience to the next steps once they have spent a minute reading something by placing action call buttons to prompt them to either make a call, send an email or start a chat for inquiries over what they just read.
Do not make it a pain for someone to look for how to reach out to you or even assume they will look for the contact page, make it easier for them and place the right user prompt options after each detailed itinerary or on a sticky sidebar or something related.
Remember the idea is to give your online audience the best experience on your platform.
3. Detail your itineraries
After you have designed your itinerary detail, do not leave it as an outline for each day. Give sufficient detail to your audience about each day’s activity so as to reduce on the inquiries on the same. Remember to show how exciting your activities are.
Some one planning their holiday’s activity prefers having enough detail so if you do not, your competitor with sufficient exciting activity detail will probably have the business.
4. Blog, Google profile and social media engagement
By now it seems pretty obvious to have an active Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages where you often share your activity and news updates. Just remember to promptly respond to every comment, message and review.
Google Business profile is another important tool you now must look up to own and populate with your company info, services and share activity updates. This profile is likely to rank better than your website especially when the website is new or does not have much traffic.
Lastly, I do not know how to shout this out loud in wording that you need to BLOG. Write about your activities, encourage your clients to share about their experiences and ask them for permission to post them. Write about what’s happening in the travel industry in your country, culture experiences will probably be a good place to focus on if you are starting.
Your blog content will most likely rank better than your itineraries in Search Engines and bring in more traffic to you overall of which you can seek means to convert them to clients.
5. Performance optimization
Ensure your website provides the best user experience to your audience, this will translate to less client frustration of buttons not working, pages loading slow – generally things not working!
Optimize the performance of your website pages, images, especially above-the-fold content so you can retain your clients longer (translates to low bounce rates), more conversions and happy business.
If you are still reluctant on this, just remember your competition is doing so.
You can read more about Optimize your WordPress Website for the Best Performance.
Travel business especially post Covid-19 setbacks is a boom and anticipated to curve upwards, similarly so is the competition there-in amongst the travel agents with priority to the bigger brands and those strategically prepared online.
How prepared are you? are you confident with the visibility and discoverability probability you have given yourself online?
Remember you need to always analyze your website traffic to understand your audience; who they are, their interests and where they are coming from so as to better serve their interests and add more effort to what is working better than the contrary.
Importantly, offer exciting experiences and be friendly to your clients then-after request for their reviews on Trip Advisor, Google Business, Booking.com, Safari Bookings and related directory pages you have listed your profile on.
Do you need professional help on your travel website, reach out to us via email wp@wordpress.ug or Whatsapp (+256) 774-633091
