Is your travel website fit for mobile?

The travel industry is experiencing a mini revolution, one which millions of people who use their smartphones and tablet devices to book holidays will be well aware of. No longer are the travel agents or desktop PCs the only method of searching for your holiday; mobile phones and tablet devices are becoming increasingly popular.

If you’re in the travel sector and don’t have a mobile-friendly website, safeguarding your brand visibility for online visitors has never been more important. Don’t know where to begin? Here’s our guide on how to make your travel website fit for mobile.

Does my website need to be mobile friendly?

Short answer, yes it does. While desktops remains the dominant force in the actual booking of the holiday, people booking via tablets and mobile devices has been steadily rising year after year; in 2014 tablet and mobile accounted for 18 per cent and 17 per cent of bookings respectively, according to ABTA. As these figures are likely to grow further in the future thanks to improved capabilities of handheld devices, it is worth getting your website up to scratch for a better chance of taking advantage of a growing audience.

Not having a mobile-friendly website can also hurt your rankings in search engines. When searching on a mobile phone, Google will add a note in the listings that tells searchers that your website is mobile friendly, which will not show if your website is not suited to mobile. This can only help your competitors. On top of this, from April 2015 Google has confirmed that whether or not your website is mobile friendly will be a ranking factor for mobile searches. If your website is not mobile friendly then you can pretty much wave goodbye to great positions in the search results.

Having a responsive website also means there’s more chance of you being noticed. In the case of the responsive website we designed for Powells Cottage Holidays, the number of pages per session on tablet devices increased by 30.4 per cent during its opening period.

If your website is not displaying correctly on mobile, or is incredibly difficult to use, the chances of the consumer persevering is very unlikely — especially if there are more aesthetically pleasing and uncomplicated sites offered elsewhere.

Having a mobile-friendly website will also be beneficial for social media marketing campaigns. For instance, if you have a website that is easy to navigate and access, it’s more likely that the user will be able to find a special deal and then share it on Facebook, Twitter or other social media channels. From the aspect of you promoting on social media, the user is more likely to interact if the website they are being directed to is well designed and user friendly.

How do I know if my website is mobile friendly?

As we referred to in our general mobile-friendly guide, the easiest way to find out if your travel website matches up on mobile is through Google’s test. By running a chosen URL through the test, in just a few moments you will see results stating if your site is friendly for handhelds, and what you need to change to improve it if it isn’t.

How can I improve my website?

Simplicity is key

While relevant content is certainly needed to inform the consumer about your offering, large blocks of text can be off-putting when browsing on mobile. The appearance should be snappy and sleek, showing the user what they need in just the right amount of words. There’s also images and graphics to consider, and while they may look pretty on desktop sites, if they aren’t optimised for mobile they can come across as irritating, no matter how pretty they are.

Put the most important conversion first

In order to make your website as user friendly as possible, you need to consider your conversions and make the most important the easiest to achieve. In the case of a travel website, the main conversion is for the user to make a booking. Other actions, such as requesting a call back or a brochure, are considered micro conversions, but are still important for the overall journey to that bigger conversion. With this in mind, you need to gear website towards these actions, making it easy for the user to make these conversions at every position whilst browsing the site.

Make site speed a priority

Speed and efficiency are paramount in the modern world, so having a slow mobile website is a certain way to detract users. If you have already adopted a strategy of simplicity, your site shouldn’t lag particularly; the main culprits for slow websites are large graphics, videos enabled with autoplay and endless amounts of copy, so be wary of these in your initial process.

If you need help transforming your website for mobile use, the team here at Accord are the perfect people to contact. As a leading digital marketing agency which excels in responsive website design, get in touch with us today to find out how we can help you.

Image Credit: romfromyork (Shutterstock.com) This image has been edited from the original.