In the move towards mobile-friendliness, implementing responsive design to ensure your hotel’s website adapts to smaller screen sizes is a great start. But it’s not enough.
To really get the most out of mobile, it’s important to include mobile-specific design features which make life easier for consumers and actually drive conversions. Why? Because customers interact with content differently on mobile than they do on desktop. They often engage in what Google has named “micro-moments” – short bursts of activity which they carry out while on the move or during a few idle moments of their day. Travellers browsing like this are pushed for time and prone to distraction, but they’re also open to inspiration.
In today’s blog, we’ll take a look at some of the crucial design features that will provide an enhanced mobile user experience for your guests.
Ensure all interactive elements are finger-sized and don’t need to be tapped multiple times to generate a response. Navigation buttons should be large enough to tap and spaced out enough to avoid irritating miss-taps. Remember, if you frustrate mobile travel consumers who are often browsing in between other tasks, they’re going to bounce.
Scrolling on a small screen is another irritant that turns off those looking to find travel information quickly. Adjust your text, images, and element size on list views so potential guests can easily take in all available options in one glance.
On a smaller screen, simpler is always better. Do you really need to include all your website page’s content and images? Try to pack too much onto a page and it’ll feel too busy and become difficult to navigate. Try a stripped back approach which includes only the most essential info travellers are likely to be looking for. Less vital content can be tucked away in drop-down or pop-up windows, while using a “read more” button is a great way to break up larger paragraphs of text.
Nearly three quarters of mobile hotel bookings happen a week or less before a stay. To make things simple for these last-minute bookers, ensure your “Book Now” buttons are large and displayed prominently on your homepage so travel shoppers aren’t forced to scroll around or move to another page on your website to move through the booking funnel. You should also make sure your hotel’s phone number is “callable” when a user taps it. Again, securing the mobile booking is all about keeping life simple and hassle-free for your users.
As on desktop, high quality imagery is key to getting consumers excited to book. It’s safe to say that attention spans are even smaller among mobile audiences, so carefully select the images which are most likely to engage and show off your property and destination in the best light.
It’s best to avoid small photos that have to be pinched to enlarge. Go for wide, large clickable images where you can, and opt for photo galleries which can be swiped through, rather than navigated by tapping as this generally works better on smaller screens.
If you want to drive more mobile bookings, simply scaling down your hotel’s website to suit a small screen often isn’t enough. Keep in mind the behaviours and needs of your mobile audience, and include design elements which make life easier for them and you’ll notice the rewards as mobile plays an even more important role in the holiday booking process.
Contact your support team today about upgrading your website to be fully responsive!
– 5 Tips For Driving More Mobile Bookings
– The Three Golden Truths Of Mobile Marketing For Hotels
– Is Your Hotel’s Content Mobile Friendly? 3 Key Areas To Check
There’s no longer any argument that the future of content marketing is mobile. That doesn’t mean you should completely drop the kind of longer form content that desktop users gravitate towards, but if your hotel’s strategy doesn’t contain a healthy portion of mobile-friendly content, your booking rates are going to suffer.
To take advantage of all those guests browsing travel deals from smaller screens, it’s important to understand how consumers use their mobile devices and tweak your website’s content accordingly.
So here it is. The three golden truths you need to remember for an engaged and lucrative mobile audience.
Think about when you tend to reach for your phone the most. First thing in the morning for a quick email check? Sure. But also in those idle moments when you’re sitting on a bus, waiting to get called in a dentist’s waiting room, or boiling the kettle.
Most of us don’t turn to our phones with the thought of settling down for an hour’s quality reading time. We’re practically expecting to be interrupted or distracted.
Since your guests could put their phone away at any time – you should put together your content with a short attention span in mind.
It’s safe to say that the internet age has made all of us less patient. We want to find what we’re looking for, and we don’t expect to have to wait for it. On mobile, this effect is only amplified.
Google data has shown that most people are ready to bounce if a mobile site hasn’t loaded within just two seconds, which means two things:
Show guests your hotel’s content is worthy of their attention.
Although online consumers previously preferred to browse their breaks on mobile and book on desktop, these days, over half will start and finish the whole travel shopping process on their phones.
Don’t fall down at the last hurdle: a simple, stripped down and intuitive online booking system that works perfectly on small screens is essential. Have you tested yours across devices?
Your guests are planning and booking their holidays on mobile. If you want their custom, serve them content suited to the medium: lean, engaging content that looks great, leads with the value and loads quickly. Don’t give travellers any unnecessary reasons to bounce and they’ll stick around long enough to make a booking.
Does your hotel stick to these three golden rules to keep your mobile audience engaged? Let us know in the comments below!
– 5 Tips For Driving More Mobile Bookings
– Is Your Hotel’s Content Mobile Friendly? 3 Key Areas To Check
– 3 Steps to Creating a Perfect Mobile Experience For Your Guests
In today’s blog, we’ll look at 4 key ways you can make the most of mobile marketing to reach more of your guests this Christmas.
Building a responsive website creates a smooth, consistent browsing experience for your travel shoppers across desktop, tablet and mobile. Creating this experience for your guests is crucial if you want to maximise your reach online this festive season and year-round, especially now that Google has begun to prioritize mobile friendly sites in the search results pages.
Mastering mobile marketing is all about maximising space. Keep this at the forefront of your mind when you reach out to your guests with your best, carefully selected Christmas offers this December. Ensure your subject lines and the body of your emails are as concise, precise and engaging as possible. Run split A/B tests to discover the content styles that really hit home with your audience.
The finger has replaced the mouse as our chosen navigational tool online, so ensuring calls to action are easy to tap through is essential. If your clickable elements are too small, or too close together, your most important content doesn’t stand a chance of being discovered.
Consider your guests’ journey – from the marketing email or search result to the booking confirmation page. How many steps are involved? Is it as simple as it could be?
Your audience expect convenience and are not going to take extra steps – especially at the busiest time of year – so simplify your booking journey to include only those steps which are adding real value to your guests.
How will your hotel use mobile marketing to reach your guests this Christmas? Let us know in the comments below!
– Start Now: Prep Your Email Campaign for the Christmas Season
– Marketing Tips to Maximise Online Bookings This Festive Season
– It’s Time To Start Thinking About Your Christmas Social Campaigns
The soaring popularity of smartphones across all demographics resulted in mobile searches overtaking those made on desktop for the first time last year, causing Google to include mobile friendliness as part of its ranking algorithm. The search company knows more of its users are mobile than ever before, and are invested in rewarding websites that offer the best possible user experience for searchers on small screen devices.
Scoring ranking points with Google isn’t the only reason you need to make sure your hotel’s website operates perfectly across all devices, though. Just like Google, you should make mobile friendliness your priority simply because it’s what your guests want – no expect – when they land on your website ready to book.
So, what kind of experience are you providing for guests researching their breaks from a smartphone? By now, you have probably incorporated responsive design to ensure functionality across mobile, tablet and desktop, but is your content actually optimised for mobile? Here are 3 areas to check:
Cracking video is central to succeeding at content marketing, and digital marketing as a whole. No matter how much care, creativity and planning you’ve put into your visual content, if you want to make sure your videos catch and hold the attention of your guests, you need to make the mobile user experience a pleasant one:
Since load times are one of the key factors that determine if a guest will stay on your website or bounce, it’s vital to get your content in front of them fast. Captivating images are also one of the best ways to ensure visitors stay onsite, which makes creating great looking images which load fast doubly important to your hotel’s mobile friendly strategy.
People do read text content from their mobile devices, but only if it’s short, to the point and easy to digest.
Is your hotel putting your best face forward when it comes to guests viewing your content on mobile devices? Let us know in the comments below!
– 3 Steps To Get Your Resort Mobile-Ready
– 5 Simple Hacks For Better Content Marketing
– 3 Steps to Creating a Perfect Mobile Experience For Your Guests
Whether you’re just about to get serious about mobile marketing, or want to check if you’re on the right track, focusing on these 3 areas will help you create a great mobile experience for your guests.
The first step to any mobile strategy is to technically develop your website so that is performs optimally on a small screen. You have two options here: you can either create a new version of your website for mobile users, or you can create a responsive site that works optimally across devices.
If you create a new, mobile-friendly website, it’s a good idea to apply AMP (accelerated mobile pages) to boost page load speed. Google has placed an increased emphasis on page speeds in a bid to provide the best possible user experience for mobile users.
When it comes to keyword research for your mobile audience, searcher intent holds more weight than the search volume for any particular keyword. Because of the popularity of voice search, keywords on mobile can hold multiple meanings when compared to desktop users.
Just like any decision you make concerning your hotel’s digital marketing campaign, your mobile strategy should be backed up by solid data. As always, Google Analytics is your first port of call.
The most important engagement metrics to examine to judge the success of your mobile strategy are:
You can then compare and contrast these stats to your desktop metrics to see how large the discrepancies are, and use this information to make informed decisions on the changes you need to make to boost mobile performance.
If you want to create the best possible user experience for your mobile guests, it’s important to run tests on actual devices to identify any potential performance or usability issues when it comes to mobile rendering. Just because your website is mobile friendly, doesn’t mean it offers a great mobile experience across all devices.
Common mistakes include placing buttons/links too close to each other so that they’re difficult to finger-tap accurately on a smartphone, as well as using a font size that is too small and forces users to “pinch to zoom.” A great mobile experience – the kind that drives bookings– is one where every action on your website is easy to perform.
Be sure to run A/B testing to make informed decisions about the function and aesthetics of your website, and use Google’s easy to follow mobile best practices as a guideline.
Mobile technology is only going to keep evolving, and as marketers our job is to change with it, or risk getting left behind.
Does your website provide the best possible experience for mobile users? What do you need to change to improve it? Let us know in the comments below!
– Mobile Email Optimisation For Beginners
– 5 Tips For Driving More Mobile Bookings
– 3 Steps To Get Your Resort Mobile-Ready
In order to maximise mobile booking rates, you need to focus on creating a friction-less experience, include compelling calls to action and tailor your content to engage a mobile audience.
If you’ve made achieving more mobile conversions your mission, here are 5 tips to keep in mind.
Has your hotel’s mobile strategy been successful? What changes would you make in the future? Let us know in the comments below!
– 3 Steps To Get Your Resort Mobile-Ready
– Travel Is More Mobile Than Ever – Join In Or Lose Out
– How To Involve Your Guests in Your Visual Marketing Campaign
In just two weeks, the search company will launch its biggest shake-up of mobile search to date, as it begins using mobile friendliness as a signal when ranking websites in the SERPs. From April 21, sites that have catered to a mobile audience with an optimised site will be rewarded with higher search rankings, while those that have yet to build a mobile friendly site are likely to see their rankings drop.
So what can you expect when April 21 rolls around? Here’s some of the key information we know so far about the algorithm change and how you can make sure your hotel is prepared.
Unsure if your website meets Google’s mobile friendliness criteria? Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to find out. Just use the company’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to evaluate your site’s mobile performance on a page by page basis.
Another quick way to check your site’s performance is to search for it from your Smartphone. If your hotel’s website appears with the label “mobile friendly” under its URL in the search results pages, you know you have Google’s stamp of approval.
Lastly, you can go to Webmaster Tools to access Google’s Mobile Usability Report. This will help you pick up on any insights into practical changes you can make to improve your site’s performance for mobile users.
Google have stated that the changes launched later this month “will have a significant impact in our search results.”
Speaking at a search marketing expo earlier in the month, Zineb Ait Bahajji from the Google Webmaster Trends team has already hinted that the change will have more of an impact on search results than previous much-discussed updates Panda and Penguin. The company has also been working determinedly over the past few years to ensure that it dominates the mobile market across all its manifestations. With this in mind, anyone interested in staying ahead in the online marketing game should brace themselves for a big infrastructure adjustment which will change the way mobile, and possibly desktop search functions all over the world.
Google insider Gary Illyes has revealed an interesting feature of the algorithm: rather than analysing the mobile friendliness of a website as a whole, it will make an assessment on a page-by-page basis.
What does this mean for your hotel?
If your current website has some pages which are optimised for mobile, and some which aren’t, Google will look at the pages separately, and reward the mobile friendly pages with higher rankings. In other words, they will not “punish” an entire website just because a few pages are not optimised.
However, for those of you that have opted for a professionally designed, responsive site, this is unlikely to be much of an issue.
Gary also revealed that the algorithm will operate in real-time, meaning that if your website is already mobile friendly, it will immediately benefit from the algorithm change on April 21. If you take the necessary steps to get mobile friendly shortly after this date, you should notice the benefits as soon as Google picks up on these changes.
With that said, the longer you put off adapting to mobile, the more you risk losing out on guests to your competitors, so getting mobile-friendly as soon as possible should be a key priority.
Although some may resent having to jump to meet Google’s demands once again, failing to cater to your audience’s browsing habits is no longer an option in an increasingly mobile digital landscape.
How do you plan to adapt your website prior to April 21? Let us know in the comments below!
– 3 Steps To Get Your Resort Mobile-Ready
– Are You Ready For Google’s Mobile Search Update?
– Travel Is More Mobile Than Ever – Join In Or Lose Out
Although it does not yet rival desktop when it comes to booking volume, mobile has become a major distribution channel which hotels ignore at their own peril, especially with Google’s mobile update on April 21 looming.
So what do you need to consider if you’ve decided it’s time to join the mobile revolution? Planning your progress around these 3 factors will help get you noticed in mobile search results and convert more mobile browsers into booking guests.
Despite the fact that mobile ecommerce has grown massively in the past 5 years, lots of sites are still poorly optimised. It’s these sites that are likely to suffer a loss of search visibility in the coming weeks, as Google starts rewarding mobile-friendly businesses with higher rankings.
The first step to becoming mobile-friendly is to decide what kind of website you want to create. You have two choices here:
Whichever method Yours truly, opt for, consumers now expect the mobile experience to be every bit as good as desktop.
Although creating a perfect user experience should be a priority across all channels, mobile is particularly unforgiving when it comes to usability errors. Since users are often pushed for time, browsing on the move and of course on a far smaller screen than desktop, it’s essential to ensure they can find the information they’re looking for, and quickly, or risk losing their business to competitors.
There are several important factors to consider here, including font size, spacing buttons so they are away from other touchable elements, and making sure your guests can access information easily by scrolling (and without too much clicking around.)
Take a look at Google’s guide to the most common mobile usability errors and how to fix them.
Since there is still a degree of scepticism among consumers when it comes to data security in mobile ecommerce, it’s important to inspire confidence by providing a payment process that is as straightforward and transparent as possible.
Lots of businesses invest heavily in mobile-optimised websites, only to lose visitors at the final click with an overly complex and time consuming ordering process. Instead, the booking process should be pared down and streamlined to a single page wherever possible, resulting in less abandoned baskets, and more bookings from mobile guests.
Is your resort ready for Google’s mobile update this April? Let us know in the comments below!
– Mobile Email Optimisation For Beginners
– Are You Ready For Google’s Mobile Search Update?
– Travel Is More Mobile Than Ever – Join In Or Lose Out
It’s a trend that is only set to escalate according to data specialists Euromonitor, who predict that around 35% of online travel bookings will be made on mobile devices by 2018.
As you might expect, mobile bookings are growing at a rate far greater than bookings made on desktop. Data from Criteo has shown a 20% increase in mobile bookings against just a 2% growth on desktop. Conducted in the first half of 2014, the company’s Travel Flash Report encompassed data from more than 300 million bookings made worldwide. Smartphones and tablets were found to account for 21% of these bookings, while in-app bookings accounted for 12% of these mobile bookings. A 2015 survey by global advertising network BuzzCity has echoed these findings, with 30% of the 1,500 business and leisure traveller respondents relying purely on their handheld devices to make last minute room bookings.
While it’s true that the majority of travellers still prefer to use desktop to book their holiday online, use of mobile devices to browse holiday brands and plan breaks is quickly becoming the norm. Now that brick and mortar travel agents have lost so much dominance in the mind of the consumer, travel window shopping has moved to mobile, where users can search for destinations and properties, check reviews and bookmark what they like, all within a few swipes of their fingers. With such a prevalent shift in your guests’ online behaviour, you can no longer afford not to be optimised for mobile.
Failing to create a mobile-friendly user experience for your audience won’t just frustrate and turn off potential guests, within just a few weeks it could actually cost you your hard earned search rankings, too. That’s because on April 21, Google is launching a new algorithm which will reward sites that cater to a mobile audience with greater visibility in the mobile search results and penalise those that do not. In fact, because Google only has one index for both mobile and desktop, it’s thought that websites without a mobile-optimised site may also be penalised in desktop results.
However the algorithm pans out in April, one thing is certain: failing to get mobile-friendly -and soon – will mean your resort loses out on all those mobile travellers planning their breaks online to your competitors’ advantage.
Don’t realise too late. Look into implementing responsive design or building a mobile version of your website today.
– Social Media Sharers Go Mobile
– Mobile Email Optimisation For Beginners
– How Mobile Technology Has Transformed Travel
In case you still needed it, this news should be the final push you’ve been waiting for to make a mobile marketing strategy a priority. Your guests are flocking to mobile in their thousands, so it’s essential to create a good user experience for them or risk losing out to your competitors. Now that Google is slowly but surely giving greater visibility to well optimised mobile sites in the search results, the cost of not getting onboard and carving a successful mobile presence for your resort is even greater.
In today’s blog post, we’ll take a look at some ways you can begin assessing your mobile search presence, so you can provide the best experience possible for all your guests planning their breaks on small screens.
If your resort already has a mobile-friendly site, it’s important to conduct a thorough audit to identify any undiagnosed usability issues.
You can start by using Google’s mobile friendly test tool to ensure that all your site’s pages, images, CSS and JS are crawlable.
Take a look at the Google Webmaster Tools mobile usability report, and see if Google has identified any usability issues that could be affecting your site’s performance for smartphone and tablet users. Common problems include flash content that cannot be viewed on mobile devices, too small font size or touchable elements that are placed too close together, making it difficult for mobile users to navigate your site with their fingers.
To see if Google’s smartphone crawler has pinpointed any problems when crawling your resort’s website, take a look at the Crawl Errors report under the “Smartphone” tab in Webmaster Tools. If the report throws up any crawling issues, you’ll see them here. They might include:
Find the source of these crawling errors, and be sure to unblock or block as needed to resolve them.
Page loading time is another important optimisation factor to consider, especially because this is now a ranking signal for both mobile and desktop sites. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will help you bring to light any page speed issues that might be slowing down the user experience on your mobile site.
Don’t forget to take a look at the Speed Suggestions report in Google Analytics, too. You can use this tool to identify any speed issues on the pages on your resort’s website that get viewed the most by mobile users, and then prioritize improving page speed on these pages.
In Google Webmaster Tools, use the “Mobile” filter of the Search Queries report to gain a better understanding of the search queries your audience are using to find your website on their mobile devices.
You can gain even deeper insights into the way mobile users are finding and interacting with your content by analyzing your organic mobile traffic in Google Analytics. This report should tell you:
Under the Audience tab, use the Mobile report to identify the most popular mobile devices among your guests. You can then see for yourself how the pages you’ve already identified as generating the most mobile page views are seen from your audience’s perspective using the Developers Tools Device Mode.
Using the same tool, try searching for your most popular queries to see how your pages appear to your guests in mobile search results, and to gain an insight into your main mobile search competitors.
Do you make use of these reports to identify usability problems and optimise the mobile user experience for your guests? Let us know in the comments below.
At eTourism, a mobile-friendly website is included free of charge with all new websites we create. Happy with your current website? We can help create a website for your existing site too!
– Mobile Website Checklist
– Social Media Sharers Go Mobile
– Mobile Email Optimisation For Beginners