Increasing Search Visibility For Your Listing
How Do You Get Your Property Listing Seen?
Vacation home owners list their properties in hopes of gaining more exposure for their rentals. As with the arduous search for a life mate, we’ve all heard that “getting out there” is the first step. So it is with the often challenging world of securing guests for your vacation rentals. Listing is a homeowners’ way of “getting their rental out there”. But, of course, listing your vacation home is just the first step.
Optimize Your Vacation Rental Listing
Property listings require cultivation. Many homeowners listing their properties may not realize that how they create their listing affects how likely it is to be seen. This is because search engines use algorithms to internally rank the relevance of web pages including your property listing page. Here are some tips towards optimizing your vacation rental listing:
- Write a thorough, detailed description. A single line isn’t good enough.
- Use many keywords that describe your property (e.g. near the beach; close to outdoor activities; center of Nashville; ocean view, beachfront, etc.)
- Use formatting to make things easier to read:
- Use bullet points.
- Separate paragraphs.
- Don’t turn your description into a ‘Christmas tree’. Take it easy on colors and bold font. Search engines like Google will penalize you if your description looks ‘spammy’.
- Upload multiple high quality photos and add descriptive tags.
- Complete your owner profile. Not only will this make the transaction more personable, it will enhance your page ranking as well.
- Include all appropriate interests and activities near your property.
- Include amenities including ones unique to your property.
- Create a website – this will help broaden your exposure.
- Link your account with your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
- Be social – share your listing and website on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks. The more popular your page is, the higher it ranks.
- If your property is in another country, try adding some description in the local language of that country. So if you have a villa in Madrid, add some lines in Spanish.
If you follow these simple steps towards making your listing as pretty as possible, the more likely it is to be viewed by prospective guests. Remember that the more visitors you have to your listing will contribute to the ranking of your page by search engines. Increased bookings should follow.
