Client: Hotel Alexandra of Lyme Regis
For this prestigious hotel website Kathryn, hotel director, wanted to see stable, gradual improvements to their organic traffic and an integration with their existing booking system. With a complete website rebuild and an ongoing SEO retainer, the website had over 100% improvement in organic traffic within 6 months.
With two target audiences, the hotel needs to obtain both local visitors for the restaurant and visitors from further afield for boutique hotel stays. The website caters for both audiences and is fully editable, so amends to menus, events or notices of lockdown closures are easily added.
Website: Booking & Brochure
Hotel and accommodation providers use Property Management Systems to allocate bookings to rooms and guest houses and keep track of seasonal pricing. We have our own PMS, but Hotel Alex were already using another system, so the website booking process integrates with the external system to provide a seamless online experience for guests.
We went through many iterations of this website, with a more content laden design being chosen than initially proposed.
With regular events available at the hotel and in the community, they needed one place to show all these events. The event listings for this site have the option of linking through to all the information on an event page or for the listing in the What’s On area to link to another website for external events.
With thousands of sign-ups to the newsletter, the Sitting Spiritually emails are read by people across the country. It’s important to this business to ensure a flow of new recipients so their newsletter is prominent across the site. It integrates with their MailChimp account to send subscribers directly to their list.
As well as event listings, the hotel also needed a blog space. Under the title of hotel news, they have the blog module where they can add new content to the site with its own page and date, all pulled through into thumbnails on a news page for easy navigation. There’s a similar but separate feature of ‘Things To Do’ in the area, which covers not events but year-round tourist attractions which visitors might wish to know about.
The hotel regularly posts beautiful imagery on their Instagram account, so wanted to show this on their website. Despite Instagram changing their system frequently to try to avoid external displays, the most recent 8 images from their Instagram can be found at the bottom of the homepage and a few other select locations.
SEO
The set up of the website when we started to migrate it to our system was less than ideal, after reorganising and building the site with optimisation in mind we now spend time each month maximising the keywords around the site for new trends, keeping up with the latest Google updates and keeping the content fresh.
Closure Updates
Having just built and launched the website, the lockdown of 2020 happened, meaning the hotel was closed at short notice with little information about when they could reopen. As part of our standard website management, we helped the Hotel Alex display notices of closure and spread this information. We advised them to set up a waiting list when it became clear they would have very little warning of a reopening date so bookings couldn’t be taken, this lined up a customer base to approach for their first few weeks after reopening.