Royal Oak
Redesign of hotel website to improve customer engagement, brand recognition, and SEO.
I have worked with the Royal Oak hotel since 2006 providing support and design services for the suite of websites. When the hotel, a family business at the heart of the Betws y Coed community, had a rebrand in 2019 I was very happy to be asked to redesign the website.
The marketing team had been using WordPress for the Royal Oak website for a number of years and were extremely happy with the ease of use and flexibility. So it was decided to continue using it for the new website as part of the rebrand process. We created a new responsive theme based on the refreshed brand colour palette and typeface, with a number of features for improved browsing experience.
In collaboration with Sian and the team we rationalised the pages, removing unneeded and unused content. Decisions were based on analytics data of the previous year comparing page visits, landing pages and bounce rates.
We refined elements on each page, to ensure the browsing experience was clean and uncluttered, and to improve SEO for the remaining pages. To increase engagement visitor flow would be guided with a focus on the beautiful location, luxurious rooms and spaces to eat, drink and relax. A prominent book button and other call to action content elements would encourage interaction.
The client wanted to move the hotel website to a new domain name for better brand consistency. The old domain was based on the location - snowdonia. The use of location in domain names was often used to increase the exposure in search results for the location keyword. As other search optimisation techniques became available, this was rendered less important. Thus it was decided to use the name of the hotel in the domain name, with the brand recognition this provides.
It is important that during the move rankings from the old domain are transferred to the new domain. While a relatively straightforward process, it does involve a number of steps in order to maintain the ranking that has been built up over the years. When the new site was ready and live on the new domain, pages on the old domain were redirected to the new site. Together with the 'change of address' form procedure this tells Google to transfer the ranking. Google is more likely to transfer ranking when a page has very similar content and themes.