The Role of a Website in a Resort’s Success
Resorts are designed to be a relaxing getaway for visitors—from the food to the rooms, entertainment, and amenities, every aspect creates a wonderful experience for your guests. While the experience at the resort itself is important, of course, a guest’s experience with your brand starts before they step foot inside.
Read why a well-crafted website is important for your resort’s success, not only to bring in business but also to create a wonderful experience from the minute someone starts planning their trip.
Your Website Is Your Resort’s First Impression
Unless someone has visited your resort city before, they’ve likely never seen the resort with their own eyes. Out-of-town visitors depend on what they can learn online to decide where to stay during their trip. Especially as a resort (versus a hotel where they just spend the night), guests need to be sold on what the experience is like before they book.
Resorts are a luxury, and your website should convey that. Just as a guest would expect a clean, modern, and tastefully designed resort aesthetic, they expect a modern and visually appealing website. This helps show your resort’s ambiance and conveys professionalism and trustworthiness knowing you invest in their experience from the beginning.
Your Website Is a 24/7 Sales Tool
Your website plays many roles—serving as a resource for information, showcasing the experience, and ultimately working as your nonstop salesperson. When done correctly, your website won’t just show people what it’s like to stay there but also motivate them to take the next step and book their stay with you.
If someone can see what rooms are available and can easily book online, they’re more likely to take action. First, though, your website needs to sell them on everything that makes someone want to stay there. That’s why it’s so important to showcase your unique features, amenities, and experiences so they have all of the information they need to make a buying decision.
Key Elements of Effective Resort Web Design
Now that we’ve established why it’s important, the next step is to discover how to do it effectively.
Clean and Intuitive Navigation
Similar to the importance of the layout and signage at your resort, your website’s navigation needs to be easy for people to use and quickly get the information they need most. The navigation should include the most important pages for information about rooms, amenities, food, activities, entertainment, and how to book your stay. Along with a clean navigation, the layout should be well organized in a way that intuitively guides users through the site and ultimately leads them to book. This includes content that flows down the page, links and buttons throughout the page as it relates to the content, and calls to action at the bottom of pages that takes users to the logical next step.
Mobile Responsiveness and Design
Having a mobile responsive website is critical for all businesses, but especially for those in the travel and tourism industry. People aren’t often (or at least probably shouldn’t be) planning their next trip at work on their laptop or desktop computer. They’re at home or on-the-go browsing and booking their stay, then checking out all of the events and activities on their phone while they’re there. At Evolve Creative, we ensure resort websites are fully responsive across devices so your guests can have a seamless experience with a mobile-first design.
High-Quality Visuals
A key part of motivating people to book their stay is to enable them to imagine their experience at the resort, so high-quality visuals—not JUST the design—are important. You need to capture the beauty of your resort with stunning images and videos and place them across the website to help paint the picture before they book. A visually-driven design also impacts user engagement and conversion rates, making it not only attractive but effective.
Clear and Compelling Content
While the design and visuals set the mood, the content is what actually speaks to your users. Before you start writing website content, we recommend getting to the bottom of who your target audience is (we call these ‘user groups’) and what they want and need from your website. From there, you can write clear and compelling content that resonates with your audience(s) and clearly describes all of the information they’ll want to know both before and after they book.
Along with serving as an informational resource, your content should include clear calls to action. You don’t want users to reach the end of a page and have to figure out themselves what to do next, you should motivate and guide them to take the next step and book.
Building Trust With Website Visitors
As mentioned before, a well-crafted website conveys professionalism but also helps build trust, especially for visitors who are not already familiar with your resort. You can also build trust with visitors by highlighting features such as testimonials or reviews. This could be written testimonials, videos featuring guests, or reviews from Google (or another review platform). This helps give you a form of ‘social proof’ and credibility from people who have been there before.
Creating a Seamless User Experience
This is a no-brainer, but no one enjoys a complicated experience online. Your website loading slowly or making guests jump through hoops to book ruins the user experience and may prevent them from taking the final step. That’s why aspects like fast loading times, an easy booking process, and other interactive elements on your website are so important and can lead to higher satisfaction and more bookings. So it not only needs to be visually appealing, informational, and compelling, but it also needs to function well to increase satisfaction and more bookings. That’s why every piece of the process—from content to design, development, and pre-launch QA testing—is essential for a great resort website.
The Importance of SEO for Resort Websites
Having a highly optimized website isn’t enough, people also need to be able to find your website. What good is a stellar website if it’s not showing up when your target audience is searching? This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.
Reaching Your Target Audience
SEO for your website essentially means that you’re doing the many things that let Google know your website is a quality match for the people who are searching for what you offer. By optimizing your website, you’re more likely to show up for the results you want to be showing up for, and you’re able to rank higher in those search results.
One way we make sure your website is optimized is through the content. We start by conducting keyword research to see how people are searching for resorts and other lodging options in your area. What phrases are they using to search? We’re then able to incorporate those phrases and the keywords people are using throughout your website content so Google knows to match you with those search queries.
Local SEO for Resorts
Any company that’s a location-based business needs to prioritize local SEO, especially destination businesses like resorts, and most especially for those in northern Minnesota. This means that you’re not just including resort-related keywords in your content, but also local keywords (like your city, area, etc.). Northern Minnesota is home to many wonderful resorts, but that also means the competition is fierce. If you’re not appearing in search results, it could put you out of the running altogether.
Evolve Creative takes a content-first approach to building a website, and we integrate local SEO strategies to help boost your website’s visibility in search results. That means we can write content that not only sounds nice but is also researched-backed and strategically written to help you show up among (and ideally above) your competitors.
Successful Resort Websites Designed by Evolve Creative
At Evolve Creative, we have over 20 years of experience creating memorable brands and websites for resorts across the country. Some of our favorite resort websites we’ve recently worked on include Kohl’s Resort, The Wild’s Resort, Clear Vue Resort, and the Community of Minnesota Resorts websites.
If you are a resort owner, are thinking about purchasing a resort or need help rebranding your resort and creating a digital marketing strategy for your resort, let us know! We’d love to bring our years of experience to your resort and help you reach your business goals.