How Google Hummingbird Impacted Vacation Rental SEO

After all your hard SEO efforts, it’s important that all vacation rental managers are aware of any changes Google makes that may affect your marketing strategy.

To help those that aren’t aware understand, Google uses an ‘algorithm’. An algorithm is basically a program that searches through all of Google’s pages scanning for relevant keywords. The more related keywords to the search query, the easier it is for the page to be found by the Google algorithm and the higher up the page will rank. For this very reason, it is important that your vacation rental website contains a strong SEO structure.

What does Google change?

Every now and then Google changes its algorithms for searches and a wave of fear overcomes all of us dealing with SEO. But there is actually no reason for this, as the last Google update, Hummingbird, favours good SEO. It focuses on semantic searches like "how to do good SEO" instead of "SEO" and "good" separately by using more data. Google is able to grasp good quality content in a better way.

Some vacation rental managers may remember the effects of the Penguin-update from Google, which was considered the 'Killer-Penguin', in April 2012. It was designed to detect the black-hat use of massive links pointing to sites. If you were not following this bad practice you wouldn’t have been affected by this change in Google algorithms.

How does it affect a Vacation Rental Agency?

If you have followed what has always characterized good SEO; concentrated on high quality content like blog posting or keyword specific landing pages, then the new algorithm will benefit your vacation rental business. For instance, we can see that some of our clients who have added attractive and original content to their site have seen an increase in rankings and traffic to their sites. Hitrental, a Swiss company offering apartments in the main cities of Switzerland, have enhanced the content of sightseeing in Switzerland by creating a dedicated section on their website with city descriptions and events. The events page has been updated with current events in each city. To give you a clearer picture, this is what the increase in traffic and rankings to a vacation rental website looks like:

It is clearly visible that the change has come after the date of the Hummingbird update in August 2013. Furthermore, September saw an increase in website traffic and even more so in October. Evidently, to maintain this upwards trend there is of course a regular SEO effort needed.

Vacation rental management SEO practices

If you need help with your SEO, social media or a beautiful vacation rental website, we can help. Request a demo from our website or call us directly: +34 512 702 104