One mistake marketers make that makes Google mad!
What is the biggest most common mistake vacation rental marketers make? It’s pretty scary!
When vacation rental owners are marketing their properties all too often they copy and paste their rental descriptions from one VR website to all their other vacation rental listing sites. Are you doing that too?
Owners and property managers BOTH do this without a thought of what it does to their own vacation rental website rankings and their other marketing sources.
Stop it! It’s killing your profits!
Vacation rental owners are really not marketers by trade or else they’d know not to do this.
They are busy people with many things going on in their lives and they want to save time,therefore they reuse one property description across all of their paid and free vacation rental websites like VRBO, HomeAway, Flipkey etc.
The problem with using the same vacation rental description on every website is, Google will hate you for it! Oh No!
You never want to be on the wrong side of Google. Google takes this stuff serious.
Google users don’t like to find “duplicate content” when they click on different links while searching for something.
As a result of pissing off Google, they will kill your website AND listings ,burying their bodies on page 54 of their search results, where no one will ever find you!!!
Scared? YOU SHOULD BE! Its your money we’re talking about here!
If you want to maximize bookings and get all you can from your advertisements, then you need to always (I mean always) use original content for your website and on every “VRBO” listing site you’re on.
Geez…. don’t kill the messenger. I can hear you groaning from here. Your complaint probably sounds like this “it was hard enough to come up with one description let alone two or three!
Trust me I feel your pain but… there is relief. The problem owners and property managers have with creating original content for every rental listing site is obvious.
It takes time to create great content and who has any free time these days?
Posting vacation rental listings and uploading your property pictures onto different rental websites is a daunting task, one that no one really wants to do. . Then…. whats the answer?
You have two options:
1. Write the descriptions yourself (the hard way)
2. Hire a ghostwriter to partner with you on this task! (the easy way)
Adjusting your ads today will increase your profits tomorrow. It’s something you can work on right now to boost bookings improving what you already have.
If you’re prepared to deal with all the DIY challenges more power to you, we’d still like to help. You can find some useful blogs to help you learn how to create content when you sign up for our newsletter!
However if you’re like most vacation rental owners, you really don’t have the time to do it all. I advise you to hire a professional for these types of things.
Why,you might ask me, should I hire a professional to write my property description?
The reasons you should hire a professional to write your vacation rental website and marketing content are bountiful.
If you want to know why, be sure to subscribe to my blog to get my next piece:
5 Rock Solid Reasons How Copywriters Make Me Money
Great advice. I run a regional listing website (Cairns Holiday Homes) and I write all the copy and take the majority of the photos myself. However, I have had some owners cut and paste my copy and put it up on other websites. Not sure whether that damages me or the other website. I suspect I get hurt by this because the copied copy was put up on far larger websites with far greater authority than my own.
What about photos? If I do a google image search of my photos, some of them are attributed to sites like Stayz or Flipkey even though I published the photos first and each photo has my copyright in the metadata.
Are identical photos also likely to put me on the wrong side of Google? I do now keep control of my photos and do not knowingly let my owners use them elsewhere. I give the explanation of duplication of photos being a thing that Google takes a dim view of but I suspect my owners think I am being mean not to let them use the photos. I would appreciate your view on this.
Hey Nick! Thanks for stopping by!
Ok, here is what you should check. Take the first few sentences of your descriptions that are found on YOUR website and paste it into Google, then see which site comes up in the first spot of Googles search result. This varies, a few weeks ago I did a test on 2 sites, one was outranked by VRBO for their own descritption while the owners website was on the second page of Google…another owners website did outrank the big sites, so its best to check your situation.
In regards to the photos at the moment I dont see it being a problem with Google (but that could change)
The bigger issue here is that the owners who are using the same photos as yours, can secretly steal some of your guests especially if their rates are lower than yours. I wrote an article about it here http://villamarketers.com/sneaky-vacationers-bypass-managers-booking-vacation-rentals-by-owner/
if its helpful please comment and share it. Nick please let me know what your findings were after running that test.