Is Your Hotel Website Mobile-Friendly? Google’s Next Algorithm Update is coming this month

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Do you remember the last time you landed on a site that wasn’t optimized for mobiles?  Frustrating isn´t it.  From zooming in to view content to trying to click on tiny links.  Most likely you just clicked off this website and carried on searching.

Well Google realized how frustrating this whole experience is and decided to change their algorithm accordingly, so when someone’s searching on a mobile device, Google will position first sites that are easy to read, make navigations and links easy to tap, have images appropriately sized for the device, and more generally, make information easy to find.

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At the moment, Google advises you which sites are mobile-friendly in their mobile search results however, from the 21st April, they’ll be actually rewarding and penalizing websites for their mobile experience.

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So how can you check that your website is not going to penalized from the 21st April?

Enter your website’s URL into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and it will tell you if you’ve got a mobile-friendly page or not. If the website you entered passes Google’s test, you will see a green banner indicating the website is mobile-friendly. If the website does not pass, Google will let you know the page is not mobile-friendly and give some reasons why.

Many of the common reasons why a website isn’t mobile-friendly is because:

  • The content is wider than the screen: This requires users to scroll side-to-side to read the page.
  • The text too small: This means the user must zoom to read text on the page.
  • The links too close together: On a smartphone, links should be easy to tap with your fingers — this means that the links should be big enough and in natural location to tap. Most smartphone users hold their phone in their right hand and tap links with their thumb.
  • The mobile viewport isn’t set: This is a little more on the technical side of things, but the mobile viewport controls the width of the page for the device. If your website displays a desktop landscape when smartphone visitors land on your page, then the viewport is not set for mobile on that page. This is an extra special case where responsive design comes in handy — responsive design will automatically adjust the viewport based on the device.
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If your website is not optimized, no worries.  Hotelient can provide your hotel or resort with a number of options to get you up and running quickly.

Email us at info@hotelient.net for more information.

About the author

John Kearney has over 20 years of Hotel Sales and General Hotel Management experience working for both Independent 4 & 5* Hotels & Resorts as well as with Intercontinental (IHG) and Radisson SAS for Hotels based in London as well as across Spain.

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