Why You Need a Mobile-Friendly Website
For your hospitality company to be found, your site needs to show up in the first few pages of search results. This may seem like an obvious statement. However, Google’s newer updates make this more difficult.
If your website doesn’t have a mobile-friendly (responsive) design, people won’t spend time on your website. In the USA smartphone ownership is at:
- 68% of all adults
- 86% of adults 18-29
- 83% of adults 30-49
- 87% of adults in a household earning over $75,000
The use of mobile technology for vacation planning has grown by 48% in the last year.
If you don’t have a responsive theme, your site may never show in the search results. The newest update from Google gives higher rankings to a mobile-friendly website, either a responsive or mobile-only design. It penalizes those without.
This is based on what percentage of your traffic comes from mobile devices. If your company gets most of its traffic through desktop searches, it won’t affect you. However, travel planning continues to go increasingly towards mobile.
Better User Experience
Creating a mobile-friendly website benefits your customers. Non-responsive designs are frustrating for users. They are difficult to navigate and read.
Users have to enlarge every page to read the content. People click the wrong links because the print is too small for a user’s finger to select the option they want. If your website is annoying to navigate no one is going to stay on it.
Short Time to Capture Attention
Most visitors won’t stay long enough to get frustrated by a difficult-to-read site. You only have about 5 seconds to catch your reader’s attention on a website. This is why you need a compelling headline and easy-to-read information.
Those five seconds won’t be used to read anything when the visitor realizes the site isn’t mobile-friendly. Instead, they’ll take one look at the page and leave.
As more and more travelers plan their trips on a mobile device, hospitality companies need to change their sites accordingly. If companies want to appeal to a large portion of travelers, making their site mobile-friendly is the first step.