Welcome to Boostly Podcast Season 11 Episode 120. This is a recap of my Facebook live where I showed testimonials on how your website drives bookings.
Here's the audio for this episode:
Here's the video for this episode:
Timestamp
00:00 Start
02:30 The importance of website reviews
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Visual – YouTube
Audio – Boostly Podcast
Transcript from the Episode
I think over the last five years, I must have done well into the 1000 website reviews is something that I was doing regularly when I first started just to sort of highlight the importance of a website and the homepage in particular. And I've been looking at some surveys and some sentiment studies done by the likes of your travel and skift and looking at some really important blogs by the likes of Neil Patel, etc. And it keeps coming back to something that I see so many people not doing. But it has massive ramifications for those that do.
What people are looking for on your website
Now when somebody lands on your website they're looking for several things are looking to see that you are a trustworthy business. So tools such as i-prac, and a certification will be able to help with that they're looking at you have nice properties, you know, good photos, etc. And what they're looking for is they're looking for testimonials. Now, so many people I say do this wrong, they just copy and paste something that came from an Airbnb review or something like that and put it on the website but they do not look trustworthy, they do not look real.
So I've been messing around with a few different types of software. But reviews is one that has been specifically designed for short term rentals. Now I've used Repuso in the past, they're good, nice and cheap, etc. But they are not designed specifically for the world of hospitality. Reviews are, and I recommend everybody go in and check them out. We've recently put them on one of our client websites, Alpine Lodging. And as you can see when you land on the site, the pop up comes up here and it shows all 200 reviews 4.94 in their ranking, which again is is nice, it instantly has that sort of ability to show the user, the guest the future potential guests and this is a business that is very popular. So again, these types of systems and setups cost less than 20 bucks a month. But the beauty of it is is that you can get well into 100 you know 100% return of investment by having reviews on there because the recent study that came out was 87% of people have said that they will go looking for a review of your business. And when they bounce, and when they leave your website, they never come back because once they start that search again they get sucked in by booking.com they get sucked in by Airbnb, they get sucked in by TripAdvisor. And once they go into those sites, then that mousetrap kicks in although recommendable properties.
So again, just for a very minimal outlay, every month will have really big benefits on your direct bookings. So go to reviews.com and go and check them out. Like I say they are, they are one of the only review sites that is actually 100% dedicated to the short term rentals industry, it was created by a host who was having this problem, and it's a really good product.
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