Plenty of visitors to your site but no guests

We ran a page about weather in Scotland in our web site. We had plenty of visitors to the page - high interest - but no bookings.

We ran another page about our local area, Appin, in the Highlands of Scotland, but again we had plenty of visitors but no bookings.

So should we have a site with plenty of general content, as every expert webmaster says we should? But, you know what, if I were doing it again I wouldf have a small site with only relevant content giving people just what they want.

Vacation rental and hotel site visitors
Most of your web site visitors only look at three or four pages – even if you have 30 or more in your site.

About half move on immediately they open your index page. Your site may not be what they are searching for. But it may be just what they want and you are not giving them the information, that is possible.

The movers spend less than 10 seconds on your site. The ones who stay will note your site and come back for a second visit later if they like what they see.

About 20% of your site visitors will come back for a second look. You can attract visitors with interesting pages which give them what they want. You could build up pages about news of your area, for example. that will bring web site visitors. But they do not necessarily turn into buyers, that is the problem

Web site wreckers
I can prove that you can easily build up useless numbers of visitors who will never buy anything from you. This applies to virtually all web site owners but we have vacation rentals and hotels in mind. Our experience is in holiday homes in the Highlands of Scotland and hotel accomodation in the same area.

I wrote a page called Avoid Speed cameras, Fines and Points on your Licence, and I made this a subsidiary page of a main page called Touring Scotland from Glencoe. This was an experiment to see what would happen to traffic.

We had hundreds of extra visitors to the site immediately it was published. But not a single extra booking. Site visitors increased by 25%.

Qualify your prospects.
If you were a star salesman you would not chase after every customer prospect you can find. That is what amateur sales people do. No, you would be selective and go for what are known as "qualified" prospects. These are the ones who might be interested in buying from you.

So you can get away with fewer visitors but the same high level of sales if you build the following content into your site.

1) Your property and details of it, inside and out
2) Your location
3) Good quality photographs of the area
4) Your prices
5) Your availability
6) Special attractions in the area.

That is all you need. Have a look at one of the pages which builds traffic on our site, but does not lead to any sales.
http://www.bayviewkentallen.co.uk/appin.html

John