Ensuring that your hotel’s website is optimised for mobile search is essential if you don’t want to miss out on key traffic and potential bookings.
Much has been said already about the rise of mobile search and its role in the customer booking journey, as well as mobile marketing strategies for hotels. This article will focus specifically on mobile search engine optimization.
To ensure your hotel’s website is optimized fully for the mobile search revolution, including mobile-first indexing by Google, you need to cover five distinct areas.
Ultimately these different areas all lead to one thing—a fast loading website which is easy to use on a mobile device.
Responsive or mobile friendly design
It goes without saying that in today’s mobile-first search environment, it’s absolutely vital that your hotel website can be used easily on all devices. A website that has been developed to be responsive simply means that it will resize itself and adapt according to the device used to view it, so navigation menus, photos, text, and buttons all adjust based on whether someone is using a mobile phone or tablet.
Having a responsive website is the simplest way to ensure your website is going to perform well in mobile search, but it’s not the only option. You can also decide to have a second mobile website design, and this website is then loaded when a user navigates to it from a mobile device. You may notice this for sites in which the URL loads as m.hotelname.com (subdomain prefix) or hotelname.com/m/ (subdirectory folder).
Generally, SEO will be easier to implement on a website which is fully responsive as opposed to having a secondary mobile-designed website. When you choose the latter, you end up duplicating many of the URLs that already exist on the desktop version of the website, which can complicate your SEO strategy.
But there are benefits to a second mobile website, which allow you to completely optimize the website experience for the mobile user. You can cherry pick the elements you want to include only on the mobile version, and you can design interactions that are more suited to mobile devices (like larger buttons or sliding menus).
