The Cheapest Way to Market Your Vacation Rental?
I’ve been thinking about SEO for vacation rental websites again. I know it’s a popular method for promoting your place, because it’s free, easy to do and pretty successful.
Or is it?
In case you haven’t heard, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a technique for making your site appear prominently on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc).
Let’s start with the free bit. Tweaking the tags and the pages and collecting links are great free things you can do to improve your search engine position. Nobody charges you for these so yes, they are free.
The problem here is that this tweaking takes time, and time isn’t free. If you have a business then you should be accounting for the time that you spend. Even if you don’t do this, it’s easy to see how SEO work sucks up a ton of time.
Is it easy to do? I think it’s pretty easy to create links from Squidoo, or digg or forum posts, but once you’ve got a couple of these from the easy sites, it starts to get harder.
If you’re busy on a forum, you can easily collect a lot of links. 100 links from posts on the same forum aren’t really worth much more to Google than one link. So where do truly valuable links come from? From other people’s sites. It’s good if they are buried inside lots of relevant content, and it’s even better if the number of these links grows over time.
So I’d say these types of links are hard to get.
As for success, it depends on factors such as search volume and competition.
You’ve got to choose your keywords really, really carefully to be successful. Vacation rentals tend to have a lot of competition on search results (don’t forget SEO is a popular method, like I said).
Even if you’ve done a great job of choosing your niche it’s pretty hard to translate that into a long tail keyword that come top on search results. Maybe your niche is “I’ve got the only 8 bedroom house by the water in Vancouver and I’m only targeting married couples with 16 children”. Do people type that phrase into Google? I doubt it.
So where does that leave us? As I said, I’ve been thinking about this and I reckon that SEO can be tough for your vacation rental website. It certainly isn’t free. I’m sending some tips to my vacation rental subscribers later today and you can catch them too if you sign up for my free guide.
Related posts:
- Welcome Back to My Vacation Rental Website
- The Long Tail of Your Vacation Rental
- Squeeze Guide for Vacation Rental Websites
- The Perfect Vacation Rental Website
- Website Keywords – How Do You Choose Them?
You can share a copy of this post on your own website provided you include a link back to the original. Happy reading!
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February 27th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
I hope holiday home owners are beginning to realise that they can publish their own news and information, at minimal cost, which will draw both search engines and readers.
Provide helpful and useful articles that relate to your local region and people will link to you, they will also send links to friends via email and feature your work in places like Facebook and on Twitter – all of which are the most powerful forms of SEO.
February 27th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Good article. SEO is definitely the basis of any vacation rental marketing strategy.
In my experience the vacation rental market isn’t too competitive if you know what you’re doing and apply yourself a bit.
Additionally, whilst off-site links are important, I’ve found that good internal linking can achieve similar results. I sometimes think the importance of off site links is overplayed (as there’s a whole industry around it)
February 28th, 2009 at 1:12 am
The other consideration is that Google may change its algorithm and suddenly leave you nowhere. This hasn’t (touch wood!) happened to me you , but I’ve seen it happen to other people, so it’s always wise to keep some ads on the go as backup.
February 28th, 2009 at 9:28 am
As Craig says, you’re in a great situation if you’re providing good information which people naturally link to and talk about. Facebook and Twitter are great for spreading the message, although they don’t contribute too much to PageRank/SEO
Gite Guru makes a good point too. There are lots of different vacation markets, and some are more competitive than others. You’ll help yourself hugely if you start off with a property that’s unique. Good internal linking is important too – I think you need to balance this with a good mix of links into your site.
Martha – you are right, and this is a very sensible approach!
July 11th, 2009 at 11:47 am
I think having a flickr account also helps, obviously especially if you have lots of pics of the area you are in. People google somewhere in your area, your pic comes up on page one of search and that brings people to you who have an interest in the area.