5 Ways to Boost Your Vacation Rental SEO

For any marketer, the ultimate goal of SEO is to rank high on search engines and increase traffic to a website. For vacation rental managers, it is one of the most effective ways to increase bookings. However, many property managers are not sure where to start when it comes to improving SEO on a vacation rental website and as result, the properties are harder to find in a web search.

For those that aren't aware, SEO or search engine optimization is made up of a number of factors that all contribute towards the ranking of a website. The stronger the SEO, the higher the website will rank on a Google search, which in turn means more website traffic and booking leads.

The relevance of your vacation rental website is determined by SEO on-page and off-page factors, if you're not sure what we're going on about, you can read about these factors in our previous article here.

Meanwhile, we're going to go through 5 ways to boost your vacation rental SEO:

Blog about a popular topic

By keeping on top of vacation rental industry news or travel trends, you can then create blog posts that are about popular topics likely to be searched. A handy tool to help you find out what's popular is Google trends. When typing in a search query e.g.'vacation rentals', it gives you a history of the interest over time, regional interest and related searches. From this data, you will be able to find out what kind of keywords to use in your content to increase SEO.

Feature on someone else's blog

A great way to boost your vacation rental SEO is to write a guest post on another industry blog and vice versa. Through guest blogging, both websites have their content promoted to a new audience and have a source of new content for their own website visitors. For some tips on how to start guest blogging, read our previous post here.

Share links

Now after all your hard work creating blog content, make sure to share it with your target audience or other vacation rental professionals. There are so many traveller community forums and LinkedIn groups out there to share your blog content with and build links directing to your website. However, it is important that what you are sharing is informative and not purely promotional, otherwise you're more than likely to end up in hot waters with the group admin.

Keep social media updated

A social media network that is often overlooked is Google+. Since it is a product of the largest search engine in the world, it should definitely be considered when boosting your vacation rental SEO. Imagine your Google+ account is an extension of your vacation rental website, if both are packaged with the right keywords e.g. beach rental in Koh Samui, it will increase chances of Google pairing the two together and strengthening your SEO efforts. As well as using Google+, make sure that all of your social networks are updated with any new blog posts as this will further strengthen your search relevance.

Ask an SEO professional

Unfortunately SEO doesn't provide instant results so it may take some time noticing an increase in website traffic. To insure that your website is fully SEO optimized, it may be worth asking a professional to assess the structure of your website. That way, they can help you implement keywords, improve your domain name and advise you on building external links. Find out about our vacation rental SEO services here.

There we have it, 5 of the many ways to boost your vacation rental SEO. Do share with us any of your experiences with SEO or thoughts in the comment box below.

If you are in the market for a vacation rental software, channel manager or website, consider using Kigo. You can contact one of our vacation rental software experts at [email protected] or on the phone Europe: +34 93 1980 697 ‧ USA: +1 646 652 0489 ‧ Asia: +852 8199 0013

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