Share
/ Blog / Even the Best Vacation Rental Websites Need SEO

Even the Best Vacation Rental Websites Need SEO

SEO Tips for Vacation Rental Managers

A vacation rental website that relies on offline marketing to drive traffic can drain your marketing budget. However, a website optimized for search engines provides marketing in and of itself, enabling vacation rental agencies to reduce their marketing budget while reaching more prospective guests.

SEO is critical to creating a website that's conducive to passive marketing. With an SEO-friendly site, you can rank higher in search engines, drive more traffic to your website, increase the quality of leads, and keep your occupancy rates high.

Here are some tips to apply SEO to your vacation rental website design, so you can enjoy more bookings.

Ensure the Vacation Rental Website Is Mobile-Friendly

According to Search Engine Land, more web searches on Google are done with mobile devices than on desktop PCs worldwide. "It's important to note that this doesn't mean that desktop searches have diminished. Stats on desktop search from comScore routinely show the overall amount has risen from month to month. Rather, it's that mobile searches have been a growing new segment that have caught up and now overtaken desktop search." To ensure your vacation rental website appears in mobile search results, it's crucial that it's mobile-friendly, and "responsive" so your prospective guests can view and book online from anywhere regardless of the device used.

holiday rental websites
Mobile usage is on the rise, and your website needs to accommodate all devices.

Choose a Short, Catchy, Branded Domain Name

In the SEO 101 Guide on Vacation Rental Marketing Blog, the author recommends using a domain name (website address) that is easily remembered and fits on a business card. Where once having a domain name full of popular keywords helped rankings, today "having a keyword in the domain can offer a small boost, but don't stress too much about it. Finding brandable domains about your area can offer up more benefits than trying to find a very-long keyword stuffed domain". For example, timbuktuvacationrentals.com is recommended over something like timbuktu-long-term-vacation-rentals.com.

Make the Layout Easy to Navigate

No matter how much traffic you drive to your website, it won't matter if your visitors don't stick around. Humans have shockingly short attention spans, averaging about 8 seconds, and if your website isn't easy to navigate, people will quickly lose patience and look elsewhere.

Use Social Media

In the coming year, Search Engine Watch predicts that social media will be more important to SEO than ever before. "Greater social signals (such as users sharing your content or interacting with your brand) can help you rank higher, but for the most part, social media serves as a great external channel to generate more inbound traffic for your site." As this trend continues into 2016, posting on social media will continue to grow in importance to search visibility.

Solve a Problem with Relevant Content Marketing

Most businesses strive to run a blog as a means of increasing keywords and improving search engine ranking. However, this has resulted in an oversaturation of generic content on the web, which, in turn, has made content less useful for everyone.

"Find out what condition or problem the user is experiencing, and solve it. That's what great content marketing does: It assesses the user's need and creates a solution. As you solve users' problems, you'll become good not just at ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages) but also in dominating - creating content that is laser-focused on users. Users will love the content because it solves their problems ... because it's relevant."

Woman reading ebook on tablet computer
Blog posts need to educate readers and solve problems to be relevant more than ever before.

Utilize Professional Vacation Rental Website Design Software

SEO may sound complicated, but a vacation home property manager doesn't need to be an expert in website design. By using website-building software and optimized templates, you can build an SEO-friendly vacation rental website that is attractive, responsive on all devices, and best of all, it converts visitors to renters. Most importantly, Kigo vacation rental website templates integrate with other property management software tools such as online booking to save time, boost occupancy rates and control expenses.

Bottom Line

SEO strategies are critical to designing a website that ranks in search engines, drives in traffic, and increases conversions. When designed properly, a great website has the potential to considerably enhance your marketing efforts, while increasing the number of conversions. Kigo can help ensure your website is responsive, easy to navigate, and contains up-to-date SEO practices. Because your beautiful site will integrate with vacation rental booking and management software, it will simplify your workload and help keep things organized.

Having a great website is one of the keys to creating a successful vacation rental business. To learn more about vacation rental marketing and business strategies sign up for our vacation rental newsletter today.

Contact Sales