New website design, slideshow, gallery, photography and contact forms helped The Semiramis Hotel to increase site visits and bookings.

Brief & Results

The owners of The Semiramis Hotel, a small family run hotel in Cyprus, approached Spotlight Multimedia in April 2009 complaining of low bookings and very few email inquiries at a time of year when these should have been at a maximum. We found less than optimal search engine optimization for their existing web site and made minor modifications to the contact forms until the go-ahead for a new website was received in Late May 2009. This gave us the opportunity to set Google Analytics site usage software in place to monitor the number of visits they were receiving with their existing web site.

We designed and developed their new site within 3 weeks - early June 2009, and optimized it for search engines. The graph above shows the changes in the number of visitors to their website from the beginning of April to the end of August 2009. This shows a dramatic change in the number of visitors to their web site from mid-June onwards. Search Engine Optimization or SEO aims to increase ranking for Google and Yahoo etc. so that a relevant search will yield the website in the first few pages of a search. Typically, internet users will not plough through endless pages of search results and only accept just the first few results as indicative of what is available. At the time of writng, a search for 'Platres Hotel' (platres is the mountain resort in which the hotel is located) yields results in Google for Semiramis Hotel on the second page of results. This is the case after only 3 months from the time of the SEO. The platres region is a mountainous area of Cyprus that has two seasons for visitors (summer - to get away from the heat and winter - for skiing) and has many other notable hotels, all competing for bookings at a time of reduced visitor numbers in general. The hotel itself reported increased bookings that correlate well with the website visitor numbers.

Methodology

Website: We designed a crisp modern feel to the website with appropriate colour scheme, fonts and a new Javascript/CSS based slideshow to highlight the various aspects of the hotel. We identified that for a site visitor trying to decide on a hotel to stay, the most important aspect of a website is that it shows demonstrative features of the hotel. This is achieved with an illustrative gallery so for the hotel we created a stylish mootools based gallery that is easy to use.

Photography: The importance of having stylish photographs that demonstrate the best features of the hotel cannot be overstated. We visited the hotel and took high-resolution photographs inside and out. We chose the best and included them in the gallery.

SEO: The original website was not optimized for search engines. In particular, Google search engines use particular features of the site to calculate importance and ranking and these were overlooked. We corrected these shortcomings and added various other information and features to optimize ranking.