7 Essential First Steps for Promoting Your Holiday Let Website

“Why is my website not appearing in Google?”
“I’ve setup a website, but I’m not getting any enquiries. Why is that?”

Setting up a website is just the first step in promoting your holiday rental accommodation. There are certain things you need to do afterwards to make sure your website gets noticed.

Here are seven essential steps you should take to improve your marketing and make sure your website is seen by the largest possible audience.

1. Get your own domain name

If you are using a website builder you will most likely have been given a domain name that includes the name of the company you are using e.g. http://paradisevilla.promotemyplace.com/.

Rather than stick with this, we highly recommend that you buy your own domain name instead.

1. It looks more professional.
2. It could help with your with search engine rankings, because you can include keywords such as your property type e.g. villa or cottage and its location.
3. It allows you to ‘own’ that name. So if you decided to move away from the website builder in the future you will be able to take your domain with you and will therefore retain your search engine website rankings and the traffic coming to your website.

2. Submit an XML sitemap to the search engines

It can take several weeks for the search engines to index a new website. Just imagine how many websites are created throughout the world each day and how many Google needs to index. It’s not going to be an instant process.

Submitting a sitemap can help speed up the process and it ensures all the pages of your website get indexed properly.

The first thing you need to do is verify ownership of your website. Then submit your sitemap. Follow these two steps to submit to Google:

1: Verify you own your website

2: Submit your sitemap

And here’s how to do the same with Bing:

1: Verify you own your website

2: Submit your sitemap

3. Set up Google Analytics

This will allow you to see how many people are visiting your website and where they are coming from, among other things, so that you can track your marketing efforts and see what’s working.

You can do this here – https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008015?hl=en&topic=1726909&ctx=topic

4. Take care of your SEO

Keywords can drive more traffic to your holiday let site. Once you’ve decided on the best keywords to target, sprinkle them throughout your website in a natural and readable manner. Making your website search engine friendly is half the battle – if you win this you stand a good chance of improving your traffic.

5. Start creating backlinks

These are external links pointing back to your site. Stay relevant – try listings sites, forums relating to holiday lets and sites such as Twitter and Facebook as well. Regular link building is a good way to help your website, but you shouldn’t focus on getting too many all at once – it can look suspicious.

6. Advertise on some listing sites

This is a great way to get more traffic. Find out what the best listings sites are, and then set up a new advert for your holiday rental on each one. This should have a great headline, quality photos and plenty of information about the property. Some sites will allow a direct URL link back to your website – add this in if you possibly can.

7. Get mobile friendly!

Nowadays we are just as likely to access the internet via a smart phone or tablet as we are from a laptop or desktop computer. This means you should make sure your website is mobile friendly and can be easily viewed on a small screen. This expands the size of the audience you can expect to access. They won’t all come back later when they’re in front of a desktop computer.