SUBMIT 2.0

Once I stopped thinking like a property owner, and started thinking like a small business owner that wanted to increase their sales, I realized that SEO was one of the most important strategies I had in booking myself solid, and it was the foundation for all that I was going to do.

The foundation of your SEO strategy is keywords. At the simplest level, keywords are the words that your renter will sit down and type in the search engine when they begin their vacation rental search. Since over 80% of all research now starts at the search engine level (as opposed to people going to bookmarked sites), this is a critical concept to understand.

For example, a renter might type in “Lake Front Vacation Rental, Pocono Mountains, PA”. A vacation rental that uses those exact key words is likely to appear at the top of Google’s free search results (If you only had vacation rental, Poconos” you are less likely to appear because it’s not very specific and there’s a lot more competition). You want to research and identify high traffic keywords and keyword phrases so you can reach the highest number of renters with your web site / ad listings.

Selecting Your Keywords

To define what renters are searching for, put yourself in their position and start brainstorming words they might use when looking for a rental in your area. Keep in mind terms like “Lake Front Rental” are going to be extremely difficult to rank for, and more importantly those broad phrases really don’t tell your renter much about your property. You want to be as specific as possible, so a better example would be: “Private Lake Front Rental, Lake Michigan” or “Vacation Rental Condo With Pool 10 minutes to Disneyworld”. The trick is to help your renter find what they are searching for!

Say you have a ski rental in Copper Mountain, CO Here are some key words to start with:

* Ski Rental Copper Mountain, CO
* Ski Chalet Copper Mountain, CO
* Copper Mountain Ski Chalet
* Vacation Rental Copper Mountain, CO
* Ski-In Condo Copper Mountain
* Copper Mountain Ski Rental

I could go on with dozens of variations of all of these. What you will need to do is decide what are the best phrases to target for your business. You also want to include common keyword misspellings and keyword variations to maximize your traffic. (IE variations on the above would include “Stow” as a misspelling).

Once you have determined potential keywords that people are searching for, head on over to Google or Wordtracker’s free Keyword tools, type them in, and see what kind of traffic these searches get. These tools will also provide you with additional variations of your keywords based on actual monthly Google searches. You’ll be amazed at what comes back, there are word combinations that I never would have thought to use, but were bringing in 45 searches per day (and I now rank very highly for those terms!).

Once you have defined your keywords, there are strategies you will need to follow about how to incorporate them throughout your site and all of your online efforts. This is the foundation for all of your online work. Learn how your renters are searching for you, and you’ll be miles (and bookings!) ahead of your competition.

Jayne Brodie is the author of the “Booked Solid Blueprint”, a popular guide designed to help vacation rental property owners boost their bookings. She also offers a broad range of consulting packages to help you boost your bookings fast.

Source: Ezinearticles

Filed under: Web-Site-SEO