It is no secret mobile search has become more popular over the past decade. With the popularity of smartphones and mobile devices there has been a noticeable and consistent increase of time spent online with these devices over the past ten years. According to a study performed by Comscore in 2017 over half of all digital minutes are now spent on mobile. These are all potential visitors to your website, searching, clicking and navigating the web while on the go.
While the study shows significant time is still spent on desktop browsing, it is important for your site to effectively convert on both (which can be done quite effectively with a mobile optimized website.
Google’s focus on mobile is becoming more and more all-encompassing. With their experimentations on a mobile first index as well as the booming Accelerated Mobile Pages project, it is clear the growing focus on mobile friendly websites across all industries is not going anywhere. While this trend spans every industry, each one is affected in its own unique way and comes with its own set of challenges and opportunities.
Every hotel website should prepared for increased mobile traffic. When your site is optimized for mobile traffic, it will get better treatment in search results than sites that are not. It will be vital for your business to know what the trends are in mobile search and how that can affect the travel, tourism, and hospitality industry. In knowing these trends, you can plan an optimized mobile strategy for 2018.
How Travelers Research on Mobile
A growing trend we have noticed in the digital landscape is that more users are conducting their initial research on mobile, then revisiting the site on desktop to continue research or reserve their room.The reason for this is that most mobile users are on the go and are not in a position to make bigger financial commitments (imagine pulling out your credit card on the train to work and reserving a $200 hotel room – it is possible, but the idea makes many individuals uncomfortable). Because of this behavioral trend many sites will see higher traffic coming into their websites on mobile devices, but the conversion rates will be much lower than visits from desktops, This can be seen by the examples below, taken from a diverse selection of our clients between September and November of 2017.
