Optimize Your Vacation Rental Website (Yourself)

In war, a strategy to winning is “knowing your enemy”

Travelers are definitely not your enemy but you still are kind of at war, at least it feels like that for owners coming into the VR business for the first time, or for those who had a shift in their business and are now getting into to marketing their vacation rentals more.  

This feeling is especially present in those who start out in my town, The Vacation Rental Capital Of The World, Orlando FL. The competition is fierce!

But, even with odds like those, we still help both owners and property managers break through the barriers assisting in getting their vacation rentals found online.

If you wanna be successful at renting your vacation rental, you’ll need some “intel” to help you see your target, otherwise you’re shooting blindfolded.

Thats why I recommend every owner create their own keyword master list. Read about that here 

If you don’t have one, there are some cheats I can share with you to get some basic intel that is common with most all marketing.

I’m going to share a short story about an owner and how we used the intel I discovered in my research as a part of their vacation rental marketing strategy.

Did You Know?

The golden rule of real estate also applies in the online world.

I learned through my research that Location, Location, Location is something deserving of strong consideration when devising your vacation rental marketing plan. 

Google reports that 20% of searches on Google are related to location. This number is projected to rise even further with the growing use of mobile devices, GPS, and the new mobile apps being developed every day.

Here are a few actionable tips you can implement today in your vacation rental marketing. When you write your content, include the general location like the city or town of the property.

Also include other main areas and the distance between them and your rental within the website content and the SEO tags in your site. 

If you don’t have these location names within the content of your website there is no way for Google or Bing to know that you are located there and that means you just won’t get those visitors searching by location and based on Google’s stats, that’s a pretty significant amount of travelers using location in their search.

A Short Story About Oliver

Oliver Ballhatchet is the owner of a beautiful property in Davenport Fl. He is bringing his vacation rental property into the market to contend in the toughest vacation rental marketplace in the world Orlando Florida.

When thinking about targeting vacationers you have to think like the one who is searching in Google.

In my work with Oliver and his property we had to make some decisions,

1. How can we make Oliver’s property and marketing message be heard with all of the noise coming from the “The Vacation Rental City”?

For those of you who have been here to Orlando Florida, you may remember that Disney is not actually in the Orlando area. It’s really located in the Kissimmee/Lake Buena Vista area.

But travelers tend to forget the name Kissimmee or Lake Buena Vista. Maybe because they are harder to pronounce, and that might be why Disney and Orlando have become what people know and remember.

However there are travelers who are familiar with the real location and they search for “Kissimmee Vacation Rentals” and “Lake Buena Vista Rentals.”

Trying to compete for Kissimmee or Lake Buena Vista as opposed to Orlando might be a better angle to take if you’re looking to find a niche.

I do recommend finding a niche as I mention in my previous SEO video about long tail keywords. You can watch that here

Oliver’s property is not located in neither Orlando or Kissimmee. It’s actually located in a town called Davenport which is still very close to Disney but a bit further out than staying in Kissimmee. Most owners who have properties in Davenport want to go for the terms Orlando and almost want to hide that they are in Davenport.

In this competitive market, we have to go for the low hanging fruit so that we can get our client’s website the most traction as fast as possible. So we decided to embrace the Davenport location so much that we even included it as part of the domain name.

http://www.solterraresortdavenportfl.com

Why did we do that again? Check out the video link above but the marketing strategy is going after keywords that have lower competition that can provide us enough traffic to carve out our piece of the pie.

Here are a few takeaways:

Using keywords and phrases like these

• Close To
• Close By
• Near
• Near To
• Nearby
• “In”

Using state abbreviations

• Florida FL
• Texas TX
• California CA

Leverage your property location

• Community
• Resort Name
• Subdivision

Mention Neighboring towns and cities

Infuse the names of landmarks and attractions

• Theme Parks
• Monuments
• Popular Places

Mention common names for the area

• • Eastside
  • Downtown
  • District Name

Zip Code

Put the zip code of your property in either the contact us section of your website or in the footer area of your site.

 

What do you think of these SEO tips? Comment below