Why do we believe that a widget can be very useful, while we have a website with design and usability problems or that doesn't convey anything? Or a bland engine that hasn't been improved in ages, doesn't use CRO techniques or whose subliminal persuasion messages are non-existent or wrong (e.g. sense of urgency in green and positive reinforcement in red -the opposite of what it should be-).

In the hotel sector, we often see how self-styled "SEO consultants" lead hotels to make real mistakes with their online marketing budgets.

Often, these professionals are more interested in selling their own services than in advising the hotel correctly. Either out of ignorance, or out of interest (or both), the hotel ends up investing resources in useless actions or with a very low return on investment.

In this post I want to highlight some aspects of SEO and other online marketing techniques when applied to a hotel website, and the low impact of these actions, as opposed to the most important factor for a hotel website, conversion.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is a set of techniques and methodologies that we can apply to a website to increase the percentage of visits that end up making a direct booking, that is, to increase the conversion rate.

The average conversion rate of ecommerce in Spain is 1%. This figure can be extended to hotel websites, which are nothing more than a special type of online shop.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is a set of techniques and methodologies that we apply to a website to increase conversion, i.e. the percentage of visitors who make direct bookings.