When you have a holiday let to promote, it’s incredibly important to make sure as many people as possible see it. One of the best ways to do this online is to promote it via its own website. However, it’s not as easy as simply taking photos of your holiday rental property and adding content and instantly you will start to receive lots of enquiries. You have to know how to drive traffic to your site in order to maximise your chances of making more bookings.
So here we have some of the best methods for doing just that. How many of them are you using?
1. Use listing sites
If you haven’t already done so, you should definitely think about advertising your holiday accommodation on one or more holiday rental listing sites such as HomeAway, Holiday Lettings or FlipKey.
It’s also worth considering advertising on smaller listing sites that are specific to your location or accommodation type e.g. ski chalets, pet friendly accommodation etc. These niche websites are often cheaper than the general ones and sometimes free. You can find out which listing sites will give you the best results for your holiday let with just a little research.
Make sure when you do create your advert that you add a link back to your own website. It’s well worth doing because every link counts as a vote in the eyes of Google and can help with your website search engine rankings. It also gives you the opportunity to send potential guests to your website for further information.
2. Get into social media
Social media is an incredibly powerful way of connecting with your potential audience. You can connect with past guests as well as future ones, and give your holiday let a personality it wouldn’t otherwise have. By using sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest you can engage with people who may be interested in renting your property for a period of time. It’s a good way of promoting last minute special offers, as well as introducing people to the local area and the attractions it has to offer. Put simply, it’s another way of enticing people to find out more and then being able to send them through to your website to help close the deal.
3. Start blogging and guest blogging
Adding a blog to your website is a good way of ensuring you add fresh content on a regular basis. You can blog about all kinds of subjects, including the local area, all the things people can see and do when they come to stay, past guest feedback, and what improvements you have been making to your accommodation that new guests will enjoy etc. However a word of warning, if you start a blog it’s important to maintain it – there’s nothing worse than landing on a website blog only for the last post to have been published 6 months ago.
Perhaps an easier solution for those who don’t have the time to maintain a regular blog is to guest blog. This is where you offer a blog post to the owner of another blog, on agreement that you can include a link to your own website in the ‘about the author’ section at the end of the blog post. Many bloggers are only too happy to have such posts on their website. Think of relevant blogs you can write for that would attract an audience that may want to stay in your holiday let.
4. Learn about SEO and use appropriate keywords
There’s plenty you can do to ensure your website naturally draws in more visitors from the search engines too. Think about the words and phrases people are likely to type into a Google search in order to find accommodation like yours online, then include these in a natural manner throughout your website content, focusing primarily on the homepage. Look into your website analytics as well so you can see what words and phrases have pulled in the most traffic. But don’t overdo your keywords or force them into your page content, just ensure they are inserted naturally throughout your text whenever you make updates or add new pages.
By working on all these areas you should increase the chances of your website ranking higher in the search engines, which in turn should increase the amount of traffic your website gets, which in turn should convert into higher bookings for your holiday rental – both in the short and the long term.
Leave a Reply