4 Ways to Increase Tourism Website User Engagement

Your ideal customers are using sources they trust (branded websites, customer and family/friends opinions and reviews online) to influence their who travel purchase journey.

Your tourism website is a critical piece of their travel planning puzzle, and so if and when you do attract your Ideal Customer's to your website, it's essential that you deliver exactly what they need to be inspired to visit your destination, and participate in your experience and come back to your site for helpful pre-travel planning advice and more inspiration.

For tourism businesses, it's essential to have an engaging website because:

• Website user engagement increases the average session duration, or the time spent on each page. This is an important signal for Google, as it demonstrates your authority, and will positively impact your domain's visibility in search engine results for relevant search terms.
• Memorable websites encourage users to return again and again, particularly if you give your Ideal Customers reason to return (like sharing really helpful content, see below!)

Below are some ways you can tweak your website content to create more opportunities to engage your website users.

1. Write Helpful + Inspiring Stories

Your website is your most valuable asset when it comes to publishing content that helps and inspires your Ideal Customer.

Writing blog articles that answer your Ideal Customer's travel related questions is the easiest way to start writing helpful and inspiring content.

Articles are an important content marketing tool because they help to build brand awareness with people that don't know you exist. This is because, if optimised for Google properly, they can appear in non-brand related search queries that your Ideal Customer's are typing (or speaking) into search engines.

Who's doing it well?

The team at Jungle Surfing Canopy Tours and Jungle Adventures Night Walks have created some super relevant and engaging articles for their Ideal Customers on their website.

Implementation Tip

• Rebecca has written a super practical article on what type of content to write for your blog articles to help engage your website visitors >

2. Use Videos to Share Stories

Did you know that 3 in 5 traveller who watch online video use it to narrow down their brand, destination or activity choices?

So, while you are creating inspiring content for your website, think about how you can turn that content into a video, rather than just text and images on the page.

Implementation Tip

• Learn how to use Video to market your business or destination by reading our blog post on Video Marketing for the Tourism Industry >

3. Responsive Website Design

With most tourism sites are now (October 2021) reporting upwards of 50% of sessions being from a smartphone device, and with Google reporting that your Ideal Customers are increasingly booking via mobile devices, it's essential to ensure your website has a responsive design.

Responsive web design is a web design technique that is aimed at providing an optimal viewing experience for visitors — that is, easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling — across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to smartphones).

If you don't have a responsive design, you run the risk of low 'average time on site' data results in your website analytics, which means that people aren't staying long on your website, therefore, not giving you the increased exposure you need to create a conversion.

Implementation Tip

• Given that majority of website users will be accessing your website from a mobile device, you should be thinking about considering having a mobile or hamburger navigation as a default.
• To see whether your website has a responsive design, visit http://quirktools.com/screenfly or http://ami.responsivedesign.is and then type your website’s URL
• Speak to your website developer about ensuring you have a responsive template.

4. Intuitive Design

Designing your website is more than just colours, images and logos.

Having an intuitive website simply means not trying to be too clever in your website design, rather, use what works, based on real data - even though it may be tempting to try and do something unique.

Implementation Tips

• Ensure your navigation is simple, not too many levels of pages in your hierarchy.
  • Main navigation needs to be simple - no more than 6 options (including your Booking Button/Contact)
  • Always use breadcrumb navigation, this helps your users to understand where they are in your sitemap at all times, and stops them having to go back to the home page to 'start again'
  • Use hyperlinks throughout your text so your users can navigate organically via their interests. Intext linking also helps Googlebots to crawl and index your webpages too.
• Ensure you only have 1 call to action per webpage, be single minded about what you want your user to do next
• Contact last, phone number link top right on Main Navigation
• Optimise your footer with quick links to your contact details and enewsletter signup form.