As you’ve probably heard, Google recently made an announcement stating its intention to use mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal from April this year.
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.
1. Check Your Mobile Optimisation Status and Identify Usability Errors
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:
- Important areas of your website which cannot be crawled and indexed because they are blocked
- Unfound pages (404 errors)
Find the source of these crawling errors, and be sure to unblock or block as needed to resolve them.
2. Check Site Speed
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.
3. Analyse Your Visibility in Mobile Web Search and Identify Patterns in Traffic Behaviour
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.
- Are the most popular queries in mobile search the same as the top queries in desktop search?
- Does your mobile audience search for the same information in the same way as your desktop audience, or are there different patterns of behaviour?
- Which queries are generating lots of click-throughs despite not ranking well? Conversely, are there any that rank well but have low click-through rates?
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:
- Which pages are generating the most mobile traffic and bookings
- Can you identify any pages with a higher than average bounce rate?
- Are there any patterns and similarities between mobile user behaviour on these pages and desktop user behaviour on the same pages?
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!
RELATED PAGES AND BLOG POSTS:
- Mobile Website Checklist
- Social Media Sharers Go Mobile
- Mobile Email Optimisation For Beginners
