When developing your marketing campaign for your vacation rental, you need to have your keyword master list ready to go!
The keyword master list is something you should have at the very beginning before launching your online rental business. It brings you clarity by guiding you through every part of your vacation rental marketing.
A list with your campaign keywords will help you to save money, increase ROI, target the best travelers and avoid costly mistakes. It’s frustrating and a waste of your already limited time when you have to go backwards to do something over, that you could have done correctly if you had the right information from the get go.
If you’d like more guests to book direct with you – a keyword list is your first step toward booking direct success!
Below I’ve listed 12 reasons why all vacation rental hosts and companies need to compile a list of targeted keywords.
1. Choosing Your Domain Name
For example, I often suggest for vacation rental hosts and agencies to consider choosing a domain name that includes one or more of your target keywords in it. Leveraging a keyword domain can give you a boost in getting your website and inner pages found in search results.
Owners, if not informed, may realize the benefits of a keyword domain later on in their process. It definitely complicates matters when you want to change your domain name after you’ve been launched, so get this one right from the beginning if possible.
There are caveats to all of this, I explain more about it in my free ebook “All About Domain Names for Vacation Rentals.” You can download it instantly using the link above.
2. Social Media Exposure
When you’re armed with a keyword master list, you’re able to use your keywords in your social media marketing in the form of hashtags ie #miamibeachrentals. Your hashtags are indexed by Google and remember, social media sites are search engines too.
Using keywords in your hashtags is a smart way to get found. Wanna know more about how to use hashtags in your vacation rental social media marketing? Visit my Hashtags for Vacation Rentals blog where I give you more examples and resources.
3. SEO For Vacation Rental Websites
You’re keyword master list will be used to optimize your vacation rental website. SEO, is the first step to winning on Google. If your website isn’t optimized, it’s gonna be a ghost town. Google, Bing and other search engines won’t know who to show your website to. By optimizing your property website pages, with keywords people are actively typing into search engines, you’re tapping into an existing conversation that’s happening online – like, right now!
Knowing which keywords are the most relevant and important to your vacation rental success will help you create a high yielding website that’s aimed at drawing in the right travelers from Google who are looking for what you’re offering.
4. Save Money On Google Ads
When you’ve optimized your vacation rental website with keywords specifically matching the keywords your paying for in Google Ads, the “cost-per-click” is cheaper. Google’s job is to be the world’s greatest “matchmaker.” They match people who are searching, with websites that offer them what they are looking for. If the keywords you’re bidding on are not relevant to the landing page you’re sending them to, Google will charge you more for each visitors they send you.
They look at it like – we’ll send people to your website for the keyword your bidding on, but because the keywords are not contained within the page content or the meta tags it’s likely not relevant, thus the user experience might not be good, so they charge you more per click.
5. Rank Your Google Ads Higher
Another benefit of using your keyword list to improve your Google ad “quality score” is that Google will reward you for providing their users with what they were looking for. As mentioned above you’ll pay less per click but you can also earn yourself a higher ranking in their search results. Google’s quality score is all about relevance.
6. Understand Your Customers Needs
Seeing a well researched keyword master list in black and white, is like being able to the read the minds of your customers. People go to Google and type in what they’re thinking, what they want to know and even some of their concerns. When you know what’s important to your customers you get a better understanding of your buyer persona.
From my research I am able to see that customers are sometimes concerned with the safety of a particular destination. Here are a few search terms that helps us understand the travelers needs and concerns.
is new orleans safe, is new york safe to visit, is miami safe to visit, is cancun safe 2019, is ixtapa safe to visit 2019
7. Create Purpose Driven Content
Now that you know the needs of your customer by reading the keywords they use, you can solve their problem and give them the information they are looking for. Creating helpful content that solves people’s problems is the first step to creating an effective content marketing strategy for your vacation rental that converts visitors into customers. It’s all about value! People will often ignore you when you try to promote something. But, when you help answer their questions, it’s the total opposite, they are open, welcoming and more receptive to your advertising.
In the example you can see safety is a concern for travelers. If someone does not have a feeling of safety they will not visit. Safety is a primal need and this should be addressed. It’ll help you to get found online by travelers considering visiting but who might be fearful.
You can write an article like “Is New Orleans Safe?”
In an article like this, you might want to assure them that it is safe (if your destination truly is). You can also provide some tips on how to stay safe on any vacation. This is traffic that you would not get by competing for popular property keywords alone and you can reference the article whenever you need to address this question to a potential guest.
8. Fuel For Your Vacation Rental Blog and Content
When I’ve discussed blogging or content marketing strategies with agencies and owners, they often ask, what should I write about. Sometimes, they spend time writing about what they think people want to know. You can end up writing about things very few people care about and get very little interaction on your articles.
When you have a keyword list, you don’t have to think about what you should write about. This lack of information can get hosts stuck. Get yourself unstuck by knowing what your travelers are seeking and give it to them. After reviewing your keywords you can create a list of common questions people ask and put them into your content marketing schedule.
If you have a writer on your team, send them your list of keywords and have them create the content for you. This will allow you to create purpose driven content that your travelers are seeking, while allowing you delegate some of your content writing while you continue to work on other areas of your vacation rental business.
9. Keep Tabs On The Competition
In business it’s good to know what the competition is doing. When you’re able to track your keyword ranking results, you’ll also see how your competitors are doing. You can see where they are, what they’re doing to get there and spark ideas of how you can make improvements to your own vacation rental marketing.
10. Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants
Vacation rental businesses with limited funds need to make a big impact with a small budget. After evaluating the keywords on your list, you may determine that there are some keywords with some pretty stiff competition. It can be difficult for your site to appear in searches for competitive keywords if you’re website is new, or currently performing poorly.
What you can do is, leverage those keywords on strong website giants, like YouTube, Linkedin and others. When you post your optimized content on high authority sites you can increase the visibility of your videos, articles, press releases and more by infusing the keywords from your list into giant content websites. Oh BTW… VRBO, HomeAway, Airbnb are all giant websites, you can also use this technique in your listings description and titles. But if your goal is to get more direct bookings carefully consider which keywords you will use on listings sites.
11. Track Marketing Results
With a properly researched keyword list you’re able to track the results of your vacation rental marketing plan, without it you’re blind and have nothing to shoot for. Maybe you’ve tried different ways to market your rental properties but you’re uncertain how well your money and time are being spent. With a keyword list your able to put a magnifying glass over your marketing, and see at any moment, how you’re ranking for certain keywords.
12. Accountability, Growth & Damage Control
Using a keyword list keeps you and those in charge of your vacation rental marketing accountable for results. Tracking keywords on your list will encourage you to create goals to achieve higher results. You really get motivated when you track your progress.
This is true even if you don’t like what you see. If you notice your website rankings dropping, you know this will affect your revenue negatively. So, you can investigate any issues with your site and marketing to prevent a loss of revenue.
Create a keyword master list and track your results! I shared a list of the best SEO tools for vacation rentals they’re all designed to help you research and track your keywords, SEO and overall marketing efforts.
I hope this article helps you promote your vacation rental business with greater success!
Have Questions? Contact Us. We’re Happy To Help!
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