You might be wondering, why Vacation Rental SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is important. If you think about it, how many of us go beyond the first two pages of Google search results? The answer is very few. So, if your Vacation Rental property doesn’t appear in the top results, what are the chances of people viewing it? Next to nothing!
This is why SEO is of great importance. Your property might be a lot better than the competitor’s, however, because it appears too far down in the listings, it gets very few or no views at all. So, not everything comes to those who work hard but rather, we need to be much smarter than our competition. You need a launchpad to showcase your property and SEO helps you in doing that. Not only does it give you higher number of views, SEO helps you stay competitive.
Google or any other search engine is, most of the times, the first-place people look while planning a trip. This is why it is necessary that you appear in the top three results or at least on the first page. How can this be achieved? Well, there are several steps to get the maximum out of Vacation Rental SEO. So let’s find out.
Want to rank highest on search engine? Check out the below slides for some quick tips:
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Keywords research and selection:
The most important aspect of Vacation rental SEO or as a matter of fact, any SEO, is the keyword selection. Search engines are match-making tools. They match the best possible result to a search made by the user. So, if you use the right keywords in your property descriptions, or your website or your listings, you will appear higher in the results.
There are various online tools for keyword research and one such popular tool is Ubersuggest which gives you the stats of the keywords. There is one particular metric you should be focussing on, “competitiveness”.
Draw an analogy with the concept of Unique Selling Point (USP). Competitiveness measures, how frequently a keyword is used in reference to a particular context. An example is, “Vacation Rental Property”. If the keyword is used very frequently, then it is highly competitive. It might be very difficult to appear in the top results using this keyword.
However, if the competitiveness is low, it is similar to having a USP. You will appear in the top results easily. But, this doesn’t mean you can use any keyword but rather, the Keyword needs to be relevant to your property or the Vacation Rental business.
There are several neat tricks to get the best out of vacation rental SEO. However, like the famous Poker saying goes, you need to know when to hold’em and when to fold’em. Overdoing the keyword research can make your results go awry. So, don’t be too repetitive when it comes to Keyword usage.
A picture is worth a thousand words:
What makes people shortlist your property? Is it just the text? Absolutely no! Your pictures and videos are the key contributors to making the shortlists. So, how can you make your images do the SEO for you? You need to optimize them. But what does that mean? Let’s find out.
There are a few things you can do. One of the most important things is to keep the file size low. The lower the size, the faster search engines can process them. This helps in pushing your property higher up in the queue. Some even define the appropriate file size to be 100KB but it depends on the average internet speed and this limit could change in the future. If you use a high-resolution image, try keeping the file size low.
Another thing that helps is the name of the image. Don’t give them a gibberish name but rather, give them a meaningful or a descriptive name, such as, “vacation-rental-florida-condo.jpg”. What this does is that it helps the search engine in match-making. If your image is named as “image 1234” it will not appear relevant to the search engine and thus will not help your placement in the top results.
Finally, you need to make the best use of the description space of the images. Here again, you can use the keywords to boost up your property’s chances. This will help you in appearing more relevant as compared to your competitors.
Property title contributes immensely to Vacation Rental SEO:
Shakespeare once said, ‘What’s in a name?” well, times have changed, at least from the perspective of vacation rental SEO. There is a lot that the title of your property can contribute to the SEO.
Every search result has three components, the Title (Meta Title), the link to the website (The URL) and the few lines of description (Meta description). Most of the times, people don’t read the latter two, however title is read by everyone. This is what attracts the audience to your page. This is what makes them click the link.
How to develop an appropriate title?
Think Local:
Guests want to know about the best places to go, best restaurants to visit, and the best things to do nearby which is why it is recommended to place links to local specialities on your website. These can be local businesses such as restaurants or bike rental companies and so on. You may want to contract with them to put up their images and related marketing material which will enhance the chances of people visiting your websites. The reason is that if someone is searching for a local business, then your property will also be displayed.
As we all know that Social media is an indispensable part of our lives, you need to use it to your benefit. Not only does it bring credibility to your business, it also enhances your SEO.
It is always advisable to use the social media space on each platform strategically. Don’t simply copy paste the content. Keep it unique on each platform because each platform caters to a different audience.
Social media tells you a lot about different segments of your target audience. These are a good representation of people searching for vacation rental properties on a search engine. If you understand what is trending on these platforms, you will be able to highlight your property.
Another form of Social media is blogging. You can maintain a blog of your property and regularly update it with events held nearby. You can even keep your target audience engaged by narrating guest stories or highlighting unique property features. You’ll want to link this blog on your website, listings and social media pages. If this blog gets traffic, it drives up your SEO rakings as well.
Tracking and Monitoring:
You can’t just work on SEO once and then sit back and relax. You need to constantly or periodically monitor your property’s performance. The world around us changes rapidly. You need to stay abreast with what is trending. Every now and then, the trend changes and not keeping up with it might push you behind.
Also, you might have done your best at SEO, however, still it might not be bringing you the desired results. By tracking and monitoring from time to time, you can understand what works for you and what might need to be improved.
There are many SEO tools that help you with the entire process. Further, these tools also generate reports and analytics that help you in tracking and monitoring the performance of your property.
All of these factors together contribute to how high your property appears in the search results. At times, the match-making algorithms use weights for each contributor. The more optimized the high-weight contributor, the higher your property’s appearance will be. So, try to think a little “mathematically” because we are a data-driven world.
As you can tell, SEO requires a fairly high level of expertise, therefore, to get the best results, you might also want to consider hiring an SEO agency. You will be able to accomplish a lot on your own but might lose out on precious time and bookings due to the trial and error process. So, if you can afford to pay an SEO specialist to help or to manage the entire process, you’ll be ahead of the game and the competition much more quickly.
