Guest blog post by Daniel Weisman

The question on everyone’s mind these days is, “how can I use SEO to get more rental bookings?”

The idea of Search Engine Optimization is that ranking highly in search results will lead to increased traffic and sales. While reaching the top of the Google search results seems to require black magic, keep in mind that it’s magic you already know: promotion. Doing SEO for vacation rentals and real estate mainly requires applying the promotional skills you already have to the tools available on the web.

The original references for all things SEO can be found here and here. For an approach tailored to vacation rental marketing, here are 5 steps to creating an SEO strategy:

1. Define Your Goals

As with any marketing campaign, SEO requires clear goals in order for you to work at it effectively, assess your results, and develop your strategy. Remember: Your ultimate goal is to book more rentals and increase your bottom line; NOT to be number one on Google.

The value of the #1 is intangible, but ROI is a reliable metric of success. Keep track of the time and money you spend on your SEO efforts, and you will be able to calculate the return on the campaign based on increased bookings.

Good SEO Goals:

• More bookings from search results
• Increased site traffic
• Lower bounce rate

2. Build a Website

You can’t have SEO if you don’t have a website! If you’re starting online marketing from scratch, then the first thing that you’re going to want to do is build a website. For vacation rental owners and property managers, Web Chalet, a new company, provides hosting and industry-specific site templates. Their product provides a quick and easy way to get all of your important information on a website with your own domain name and branding. For those who want more customization, wordpress.org offers a free solution for building robust websites.

Think of a website like a shop. You want a great location (domain name), an attractive façade (design), and a great product. Choose an address that’s easy for people and search engines to find. For example, if Paul owns a vacation property in Lake George, then he will be better off with a domain name like LakeGeorgeVacationRental.com rather than PaulsPlace.com. Be obvious and descriptive, and make it clear exactly what your site has to offer.

In addition to making your shop easy to find, you also want to make it inviting and pleasant. Make your site easy for people to navigate and you will be rewarded with love from the search engines and bookings. In their webmaster guidelines, Google esplains, “Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.” Keep things simple with clear content and easy navigation.

While we’re on the subject of building sites, we should talk about keywords. Keywords are the phrases that people search to find your site. Before you create any content for your site, think about the keywords that potential customers would use to find you. If I were searching for a rental in Lake George, than I would probably enter “Lake George vacation rentals,” or “Lake George cabins.” These keyword phrases are much narrower than a term like, “vacation rentals,” and they target more relevant traffic. You can do keyword research on Google by using the wonder wheel and related searches tools.

3. Provide Valuable Content

Search engines try to provide users with the best inforamtion, so make sure your site contains highly relevant, up-to-date content. Be sure to include a well-written description of your rental, high-quality photos, an availability calendar, guest testimonials, area information, pricing, and contact information. It’s also a good idea to keep a blog on your site with regular updates about the property, changes and improvements, area news, and special offers. The search engines like to see that a site is actively maintained.

If you already list your vacation rental on sites like FlipKey, then you may not need to create and update entirely new content for your site. FlipKey provides owners with widgets that display the booking calendar and guest reviews, among other tools. You can easily install these widgets on your site and keep all of your information up to date just by managing your FlipKey account.

4. Promote Yourself and Your Site

Even the best shop can fail if no one knows about it. You need to go out and do the legwork to get other websites talking about your site. Most of all, you want to get other websites to link to you. The search engines see these links back to your site and have an easier time finding your content. How do you get people talking?

Listing Sites

Most listing sites, like FlipKey, will provide you with a link to your personal website. You want to list on some of these sites anyway, so make sure that you take advantage of their authority and provide them with a link to your site.

Chambers of Commerce

Chamber of Commerce sites are good places to get noticed on the web. Join your local Chamber and make sure that they include a link to your website in their accommodations section.

Destination Marketing Organizations

Find the local destination marketing or visitor and convention bureau website and see what the options are for getting your site listed. Sometimes all you have to do is ask. You may also find local travel guide sites and directories – if they are ranked highly in search results, then it’s worth talking to them about getting a link to your site.

Local Bloggers

Bloggers are a tougher community to crack, but also a valuable community to be a part of. Think of blogs as your shop’s neighbors. Many of your customers are going to have lunch at the restaurant next door and then ask for a recommendation for a place to shop in the afternoon. If you’re friends with the maître d’, then he’ll recommend your store and not your competitor’s. Get to know the bloggers who write about your area and they will be happy to recommend you to their readers.

Social Media

As I wrote in my article on Social Media for Vacation Rental marketing, Facebook and Twitter are great platforms for promoting your property. As with bloggers, these sites are all about being social and not about hard-selling. Claim a Twitter handle and a Facebook page and get involved in conversations that interest you. You’ll meet some interesting people and find some great supporters to spread the word about your awesome rental.

5. Track Your Progress and Adapt

Finally, make sure you’re tracking your progress. There are plenty of tools available for keeping track of website traffic, but the industry gold standard is Google Analytics. You can create a free account and install Analytics on your website just by following Google’s instructions.

Once you have Analytics up and running, it’s easy to get carried away with the numbers. If you want to see how your SEO efforts are doing, then you will want to pay attention to the Search Engine traffic, which you can find under “traffic sources.” There’s a lot of information to take in here, but if you see the traffic generally trending upwards, you’re on the right track!

About the author: Daniel Weisman is a Social Media Specialist at FlipKey.com, which features more than 100,000 vacation rental properties around the world.  You can read more of his writing on The FlipKey Blog and connect with him on Twitter @flipkey.

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Ten of my favorite real estate search experiences on line today.

Regional Brokers

BlueRoof

Movoto

Sawbuck Realty

Webdigs

Big Brands

John L Scott

Windermere Property Point

National Brokers

Redfin

Regional

Estately.com

HawaiiLife

International

Century 21 Canada Real Estate

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Wordpress is a remarkable piece of software that only grows more powerful every day. Case in point – Premium Wordpress Themes can take a blog and transform it into a online magazine. Choose an even more specialized theme and Wordpress can become a Contact Manager too.

Many agents I talk to are starting to use Wordpress to build single property web sites for their listings (see Do Single Property Websites Sell Homes?). This is especially powerful when it’s done with a one-click install and 100 site (unique URL) hosting limit with a MediaTemple Grid Service account. Only $20 a month! And companies like Realivent have even designed plugins and templates to help make this easy to do (see Using Wordpress to sell Real Estate).

AgentPoint is a web development company based in Australia, that’s taken the idea to a whole new level though.

They’ve built a series of complete custom web sites for broker Fruit Property in Wordpress. And, while not a radically new idea; I think you’ll agree, the results are pretty impressive.

Check out the branch office sites for Fruit Property Geelong or Fruit Property Applecross.

On the whole, the site doesn’t look much different from any other broker website, but as you start diving into property searches and viewing individual listings, your realize the enormous amount of customization that went into transforming these sites from a typical Wordpress install.

In order to accomplish this; they built a number of custom plugins. From the email sent to me:

• Real Estate Plug-in: This is the main plug-in and works without our Agentlog System and displays all of the agents property listings. It also controls search results, pagination, property pages, print pages, email listings, email to self, mortgage calculator and many more features. Also includes Lightbox image gallery for individual photo galleries. The plug-in uses many settings such as company id’s and office id’s from our agentlog system. (we can have thousands of offices added), it also includes how many listings in search results, google analytics code, google maps codes and other basic settings.
• Featured properties: Allows user to create featured listings or have this automatically load from database.
• Latest Listings: Brings in latest listings (6 of each). The plug-in has a number of controls such as whether to display sales, lease or both types.
• Property clouds: Brings from database all suburbs, and suburbs grow in size if they have more and more listings within a particular suburb.
• Email subscriptions: A site user can subscribe to sales or lease email subscriptions, this sends them latest listings added to system. The plugin has a number of settings such as back days, html, text formats and send times and dates.
• RSS feeds: for sales and lease listings.
• Team Pages: We also developed a plug-in that allows all team members to have an individual page complete with all of their own for sale lease, under offer, sold and leased listings.

Now, these installs still rely on AgentPoint’s proprietary Agentlog listings management software to manage the properties on the backend, but as you can see, all the display on the front end is done through Wordpress. Pretty cool stuff.

The upsides to the building your broker site in Wordpress are numerous; for the same reasons it’s caught on as the blog platform of choice for most bloggers. You have a vibrant, active community of developers constantly creating new features, and a codebase that generates standards compliant web copy which is naturally optimized for Search Engines.

I’d love to see AgentPoint release (or even sell) some of these plugins to brokers in North America. Or, at the very least, for more brokers (or enterprising developer) to pick up the torch and try and duplicate what they have accomplished.

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