How often should I…
Our expertise isn’t in how often you should change out your sheets and towels just as we suspect your expertise isn’t in how often you should update certain elements on your website, that’s where we come in. Many innkeepers want to know how often they should be updating website copy, refreshing their SEO, updating images, blogging, and so on.
To help them and perhaps you out, we’ve compiled a list of the most common “how often should I…” questions when it comes to your website and Internet marketing.
How often should I update my website’s copy?
Search engines like fresh content to index and even small updates can appear to be fresh content but that’s not our way of saying to make small changes to your website every single day to make it fresh. Make it fresh by updating it for the season and highlighting relevant activities or packages. At the very least, you should be reviewing your homepage and major money pages each quarter to ensure it’s displaying the most current information.
How often should I update the SEO on my site?
With Google’s constant changes in how it ranks sites, it can be confusing to keep track and know when to go in and make updates to your keywords or meta descriptions. A perk of working with a marketing company is that they can do analyses on keywords or keyword phrases to ensure your pages are targeting the right term. At the very least you should review your website twice a year once a year to see what keywords are outdated or which ones could be phrased better and develop and optimize new content consistently.
How often should I update my website’s photos?
Like updating your website’s copy, you’ll want to update your website’s photography to reflect the season at your property so no sunny pool photos when it’s a week away from Christmas Day and there’s a foot of snow on the ground. It’s also recommended to update your photography about every two years just as you should be evaluating your website around that time as well.
How often should I blog?
For consistency, try blogging at least once a month. If you can fit that into your schedule easily or enjoy writing the blogs you can up it to two or four times per month. Don’t just write content to write content though. Create a yearly editorial calendar that lays out the topics you want to blog about, some keywords to go with the posts, and when you want to publish the content. This will help keep you on track with blogging and provide at least one new piece of content for your website each month.
With blogging, it can be easy to think of it as a way to reach a wider audience instead of just talking to people that are already familiar with your brand. Share recipes from breakfast or wedding planning tips if you host a lot of weddings. Talking about broader topics or items that aren’t property-specific can help your blog post have better visibility in the search engines.
How often should I update my PPC ads?
You’ll start to notice a theme when we tell you to update your PPC ad copy with each season. Be sure to promote the relevant activities or highlight holidays in your ads. Ad copy can stay pretty consistent for a while as ads are rotated and not shown to every searcher but it is important to go in and monitor your ads at least once a week to make adjustments on ads that aren’t performing well or have the wrong keywords assigned to them. At the bare minimum, go in at least once per quarter to review ad performance.
Testing ad formats is another strategy you’ll want to employ to see which ones give you the best ROI. For example, testing two ads per desktop/tablet and mobile ads to see where your visitors are clicking. You’ll want to make sure the pages you’re directing users to are relevant and match what the ad is saying it’s about and that the copy is written for people not just stuffed with keywords. You don’t want to be paying for clicks that aren’t going to turn into reservations!
How often should I post on social media?
Posting on social media depends on which networks you’re on and how active you want to be. A good rule of thumb is at least 2 – 3 times per week on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Obviously you can do more if you have quality posts, but don’t overdo it by posting 10 times per day. With social media it’s more about quality versus quantity so don’t just post because you think you should post. Using tools like Hootsuite or Buffer can help mitigate the time spent on managing social media as you can schedule posts out in advance to post at certain times when you’re busy making breakfast or checking in guests.
How often should I email my guests?
For a newsletter style of email communication, start with every quarter if you don’t have much time to devote to email marketing or once a month if you want more frequent communication with your guests. You can always supplement these newsletters with last-minute offers or email exclusive offers too.
A note on email communication, keep the messages short and to the point. If you need more room or want to share a recent blog post, give the reader a teaser in the email and then a link if they want to read more. Your emails need to download fast and be read quickly if you want the benefits of email marketing. You should also use photos to break up text and buttons for links.
How often should I respond to reviews?
You’ll always want to respond to poor or negative reviews every single time but positive reviews don’t require responses every single time. If you have the time and desire to respond to every review, it doesn’t hurt and you should be checking for new reviews each week to ensure a timely response. There are also automation tools that help you manage multiple review sites from one dashboard to make responding easier.