Many of the guests that walk into your hotel this year will have formulated an opinion on your business before they’ve even walked through the lobby. How? Because of your mobile website.

With smartphones now at a level of total ubiquity, it’s a safe bet that most of your customers have checked out your website before they visit. Some of them will have even used your website booking system to secure their reservation on their mobiles. Your website is one of the most crucial marketing tools in your arsenal, and it’s vital that customers are able to view it in all its glory on the device of their choice.

Mobile optimisation is no longer something hotels can ignore. Here are five ways you can master mobile optimisation for your hotel website.

It goes without saying that if you’re going to optimise for mobile users, you need a hotel responsive web design. This means that your hotel website will be just as accessible and attractive when viewed on a small portrait screen as it is when you access it on your wide-screen desktop computer. A responsive site will adapt in a number of ways to ensure menus, images, forms, text and buttons will appear without the need for pinch-zooming or side-scrolling.

The modern consumer is fairly impatient. If they have to wait more than a few seconds for a page to load, it’s likely that they’ll try elsewhere. Google has also deemed website speed worthy of being turned into an important SEO ranking factor – so it’s certainly worth your while to optimise your mobile site and ensure it’s running quickly and smoothly.

Paid and organic search make a powerful combination, and it’s always worth trying to incorporate both into your overall strategy. But when it comes to mobile, you can’t simply lift the regular ads you’ve been using and hope they translate on smaller devices. Nowadays, you need mobile optimised ads that are more suitable for smaller screens.

Local SEO and mobile website also go hand-in-hand. Location searches on mobile devices have skyrocketed in recent years, so you should make a real effort to ensure your local SEO is on point. Claim all the online business listings you can, and keep your NAPs consistent and updated. Guests searching for hotels in a particular location will be able to find you on their mobiles much more easily if your local SEO is given the attention it deserves.

If you believe you’ve mastered mobile optimisation for your hotel website, and you’re getting great results, it might be time to take the next step: hotel app development. An app will perform similar functions to your website, with a multitude of extra benefits. You’ll be able to collect valuable data and insights, provide a more optimised booking experience and even enhance customer service at your property from your app.