5 Tips To Boost Your TripAdvisor Ranking S4E3

Welcome to season four of the Boost hospitality podcast. I'm back again to show all hospitality owners how you can turn lookers into bookers, get more heads on beds and increase your direct booking. This season I've got something very special lined up. The Boosterly website was recently voted one of the top 10 UK hotel blogs out there. After asking you guys, I realized that so many of you haven't actually read the blogs. You said that you prefer audio as a way of learning about new tactics and tips to get in more direct bookings. So what I'm doing this season is I'm going to be providing the audio version of all of my blogs that.

Are on the Boostly website.

So it doesn't matter whether you're on the computer in the car getting ready for breakfast or changing those beds. I can show you how you can increase your diary books ranking. Let's get on with the show.

Today's episode is all about the five tips to boost your TripAdvisor ranking and to take your business to the next level. As always, you can find the written version of this podcast by going to www.boostly.co.uk and in the search, look for top five tips for TripAdvisor. All right, let's begin. Isn't it exhausting trying to keep up in this world of constant competition? Potential guests are continually looking for top rated properties and these are the people you want to attract to your accommodation. Did you know that approximately 95% of your customers will check a review about you before booking at the property? Where are these guests going to? The answer is TripAdvisor. Right now the most popular online review website is TripAdvisor. Little side note, watch out for Google and Facebook. The TripAdvisor popularity index is influential because the closer your ranking gets to number one, the the more likely you are to be chosen by a guest when they search for your accommodation in the area. How do you get to number one? How do you get into that top five? How do you get into that Top 10? Those. These are the people that get seen more. I've got five little tips that you can do right now that will help you shoot up the rankings. Alright, Number one is the quality of the reviews. One of the first and most straightforward methods is to set your guest expectations before they even set foot through the door. So inform potential guests of what they expect with reviews. So basically the best way to sum up this is those reviews that you get that are one or two sentences are great, but doing no one any favors. If you can Get a paragraph, two paragraphs where they mention your keywords, your key selling points. For example, if you're a family friendly, pet friendly farm in Yorkshire and they mention about, you know, pets and family friendly, the farm and Yorkshire, then that is going to be key in you going up the rankings. Number two, the number of reviews. So make sure you receive a lot of love from your guests. And by love, we mean reviews. Don't be afraid to get creative when appro. When approaching people to write a review, it can be as simple as providing questionnaires in your rooms with a quick remark. Being proactive when it comes to acquiring reviews will start you from the right path. So something that I did is we had a welcome letter. And in the welcome letter, at the very bottom of it, we would hand it to the guest, they would read it, and at the bottom it would say, please leave a review on TripAdvisor. Now that's all well and good, but you got to give them a little bit of an incentive. So what we did was everybody that left a review between January to June, at the end of June, start July, we would put all names into a hat, pick out a winner and give them a free stay the next year. So the way that we would phrase it, because TripAdvisor are very cautious about this, basically a profit got in trouble in the past because they were saying you had to leave a positive review about what was on TripAdvisor to get around that and to keep your business safe and so you don't get any bad pr. What we would do is we would say, please leave a review on TripAdvisor, good or bad. Everybody who does so will get put into a hat and then we will pick out a winner in July and you get rewarded into a stay. So you've got to give an incentive. People aren't going to take time out of their day to go and leave a review. You need to give them incentive. It's so easy to get a five star. It's so easy to get a one star. It's the two threes and four stars that, you know, need a bit of encouragement. So if you can get five, five stars, but then you can go and get 104 stars or 100 freestyles, it all helps. And you know the TripAdvisor look at the number of reviews, the quality of the review. Okay, number three. Always remember, recent reviews hold more values than the old ones. I do a lot of marketing reviews for Boost Lee and I look at people's marketing and you can always see how up to date people are getting reviews because when the last one was left, if you've got haven't had a review in the last three or four or five months, try and get new ones. And again, it's just a case of asking the last one, which is, you know, sorry, number four, which is an obvious one. Just give a good service, you know, end of the day you can't polish a turd. That's why I always say if you're providing a good service, people will want to leave reviews and leave good reviews. Look at your last 10 reviews. If seven of them are mentioning something the same thing, that's wrong, then that needs fixing. If at the last 10 reviews there's one thing that some things gone a little bit wrong, that's just one out of 10, that's fine. But if seven things are talking about the water pressure or they're talking about the noise, then that needs fixing. But if you provide a good service, and I'm confident everybody who is in my world does, then you will get good reviews. And finally, it's really as simple as just ask, ask your review, ask your guest to leave reviews. The problem is so many of us don't, okay? And the most important thing is that when a guest does leave a review, take your time out to respond. That is one of the key things that TripAdvisor wants that so many people don't do. And a little tip, be careful how you word this, but when you are responding to a review, mention in there that it always pays to book direct. Now you would be amazed at how many people read the manager's response. If you can put in there the benefits of boosting booking directly, then that will go a long way of in the long term getting people to call you directly instead of going through these OTAs. Okay, that is five simple steps to boosting your TripAdvisor ranking. I would love to find out what your ranking currently is on TripAdvisor, so please reach out. You can get in touch with Twitter, Ostlyuk, Facebook, or if you prefer the old school method of email, it's Mark. My name is Mark Simpson. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you back again soon for the next episode of the Boost Hospitality podcast.