Vacation Rental SEO: The Basics
The Importance of SEO for Vacation Rentals
Getting into the nitty gritty of online marketing for vacation rentals can be equal parts confusing and alarming. However, if there’s one thing you should learn about and get right when setting up your own website to take direct bookings for your vacation rental, it’s SEO. It’s a powerful way of getting the attention of more potential guests, all without spending a dime.
In today’s blog, we’ll dive into what SEO actually is and then we’ll give you a rundown of the accepted SEO practices to boost your site’s search engine rankings and kickstart your online marketing efforts.
What is SEO? A Brief Explanation
SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is an umbrella word encompassing all of the various ways to improve your website’s search engine rankings and get you more (unpaid) traffic, straight from Google search results.
There are a variety of factors that affect your website’s search engine ranking, including many that are not under your control, but using SEO improvement strategies can help you boost your ranking (and ultimately increase your short-term rental’s bookings) without having to pay a cent. And while there are definitely ways to pay your way towards the top of Google’s rankings, SEO is more concerned with organic and unpaid ways in which you can dramatically increase the number of impressions and views your site receives.
Strategies to Improve Vacation Rental SEO and Search Ranking
#1: Perform a Keyword Analysis and Implement Keywords in Important Places On Your Site
Keywords are the bread and butter of SEO. A keyword is anything that someone might type into their search engine, like “cabins in Breckenridge” or “Park City vacation rentals”. Google does a miraculous job of finding these keywords just about anywhere on the web, and then using its magic to provide results that best fit what search engine users are looking for.
The first step to establishing an SEO strategy is performing an analysis of the keywords currently being searched for by your target market. For vacation rental websites, it’s quite simple: most people are searching for a specific type of vacation accommodation in a specific place. If you're managing rental cabins in Lake Tahoe, for instance, it would be a great idea to implement the words “Lake Tahoe cabin” into key places on your site, like your title tags, site meta descriptions, copy on website pages, and under headers that are used to organize your site’s information.
You can go much further in depth with keyword research using tools like the Keyword Magic Tool in Semrush or Wordstream’s free keyword research tool. This can help you to hone in on your target keywords and give you a good idea of how easy or difficult it can be to rank for each of them on sites like Google.
#2: Create Vacation Rental SEO-Friendly Content and Pages On Your Site
When travelers use search engines to narrow down their options for a vacation rental, one thing they typically love to do is soak up as much information as possible about their potential accommodation. This is why, even if you only own one vacation rental property, it can be beneficial to establish a website to market it on. Although you can fit long descriptions into your Airbnb or Vrbo listing and rank on those websites, content creation allows you to go even further and utilize your target keywords to gain access to your market of potential guests directly through Google.
One way to do this is to start a blog aimed at travelers in your area and mention short-term rentals anytime you can. Although this is a lot of work, especially if you’re not a writer yourself, it just multiplies the amount of times your target keywords will appear on your website when it is indexed by Google and other search engines.
If you don’t have the time to run a blog, dedicate a few hours each weekend to creating new, informative website pages that you can direct guests to if they have questions about the home or the available activities in the surrounding area.
#3: Utilize Social Media for Off-Page SEO Benefits
We’ve written about the benefits of using social media to market your short-term rental before, but there are a few additional advantages to social media when it comes to the realm of vacation rental SEO. For one thing, using your keywords in your social media posts is a great way to increase your reach and impressions when people search on social media. Additionally, linking your social media posts to various pages on your vacation rental website is a great way to boost your off-page SEO.
Google doesn’t just take into account your site in isolation when it indexes information. It also looks at where your site is linked to on the web to analyze and decide where you should fall within search rankings. So not only is it a good idea to link to your site in this way, it’s also helpful for links to your site to appear in other places across the web, like on local tourism websites.
More Tips for Savvy Short-Term Rental Owners
There’s a lot to vacation rental SEO–far more than can be covered in one blog post. However, if you haven’t heard of these helpful strategies, it’s important to start now to level up your online marketing and help you land more bookings from guests.
Searching for more ways to improve your short-term rental bookings? Take a look at our data-driven breakdown of short-term rental channels or our blog on how to improve your guest experience.