UK tourist attractions may see a reduction in visitor numbers from May Bank Holiday onwards, as mobile users struggle to find some websites in Google mobile search.
Back in February Google announced on its Webmaster central blog that it would be updating its search algorithm to take mobile-friendliness into account as a search-ranking signal.
“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimised for their devices.
And in the run up to April 21 pretty much every webmaster registered with Google Webmaster Tools will have received an email from Google alerting them to mobile usability issues with their websites.
What does this mean for the tourism industry
For tourist attractions the timing could not be worse. British summer time has begun, the May bank holiday season is just two weeks away and the UK public will be actively looking for days out and tourist attractions to entertain the family and children. And what device will they use to search the web? Increasingly it's mobiles and tablets.
Being found in Google mobile search results is key to being the tourist attraction of choice during the holidays and if your website isn’t mobile optimised you will see a drop in visitor numbers this year.
So why has Google made this change.
The thinking behind Google’s shift towards mobile-friendliness is centred around usability and the idea of serving up the most relevant search results to the right people on the right devices. It makes perfect sense when you think of it like this. Google has always strived towards relevant search results but up until now you could browse and search the web on your smartphone but be served up search results for desktop sites. So there was a dichotomy in search where search results were relevant but not appropriate to the users device.
This is all about to change and it is a good thing, albeit a painful one for many tourist attractions and leisure destinations still using desktop websites.
What does this mean in real terms for desktop sites?
If a significant proportion of your audience access your website on mobile devices they will find it increasingly difficult to find your site in mobile search results. The distinction here is mobile search results and not desktop search results, although there is a school of thought that suggests organic positioning in desktop search will also drop if your website is not mobile optimised.
If you use adwords to market your site, Google’s algorithm change won’t affect your paid listings. Currently the shift is only focussed on natural organic search.
What if your website is not mobile friendly, what should you do
Act quickly but in a measured way. If your content isn't optimised for mobile, it's really important that you start taking steps. After April 21 your site will quite quickly loose search credit. This can be rebuilt over time, but the longer it goes on the more visitors you will loose and the longer it will take to regain your search positioning. Estimates of mobile search volumes for the tourism industry vary, but one thing that researchers from Adobe have discovered is that businesses with mobile optimised websites sites triple their chances of increasing mobile conversion rates.
What actions you should take
This very much depends on the prognosis of your existing website. Your website may be partly there and require minor mobile optimisation. However, if it’s not mobile friendly at all there are a number of options to consider.
- Responsive web design
Responsive websites as the name suggests respond to the size of the screen that they’re viewed on. Which means that the same website content is served up to all devices but is presented in the optimum way for the users screen. - Dynamic Serving websites
Dynamic serving websites serve content to the user based upon what the server knows about the users browser, e.g. if the user is on a mobile device the website will serve up different content to that requested by a desktop browser. - Mobile websites
Mobile websites are separate web sites to their desktop equivalents. In this configuration the users device is detected and the user is dynamically redirected to a mobile version of the desktop site, which sits on a separate URL e.g. mobile.yourwebsitename.com
Google recognises all of these options as mobile-friendly, but favours responsive web design, because responsive websites only have one URL and only serve up one version of the site.
Google mobile update hits tourism industry hard: advice for attractions
All of these actions are unlikely to address immediate concerns over the forthcoming holiday season, they will take time and planning to implement correctly. There are however a number of interim/immediate steps you can take to get you through the forthcoming holidays.
Read our blog ‘3 tips for tourist attractions to get their websites back on track' for more details.
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