The choice of holiday rental listing sites is huge and getting bigger all the time. With so many different sites to choose from how do you know which ones will work for you?
The truth is it depends on your property and its location. You’ll need to discover for yourself which ones work for your niche area.
Luckily we’re here to give you a few tips to help you make the best choice for you.
1. Think about your keywords
If you’ve conducted your own research into search engine keywords you should already know the best keywords for your holiday rental website. Make a list of each one that you are targeting and think up some others that you would also expect potential customers to use when searching for accommodation like yours. If you’ve never conducted any keyword research now’s the time to do so. You can use Google’s free keyword research tool . With this you can quickly find the keywords people are using to search for accommodation like yours. Enter a few words and phrases you would expect people to use and Google will tell you what people are actually using and which are used most often. Make a note of the ones with the most searches that apply to your holiday rental. The more targeted the better.
2. Test out the search engines
Open up Google, type in your discovered keywords one at a time and make a note of the listing sites which appear high up on the first page of the search engine results. Now repeat this process over and over until you have gone through the whole list. As an example you might type in “holiday cottages in Somerset” followed by “holiday rentals South West”, whilst making notes of the listing sites and highlighting any which consistently reappear.
3. Research your findings further
Now you’ve got a shortlist of the listing sites which constantly appear high up on the first page for search terms targeted to your holiday rental, it’s time to look a little deeper at the quality of the listing sites. It’s likely that these sites charge for advertising which is why they’re appearing high in the search engine results pages. These charges will give them a good budget for SEO which in turn benefits their customers.
Make sure you assess the competition on each listing site. Have a look at the holiday rentals that are already advertising for your location. Are there lots of properties similar to yours? If you can find good quality sites, that do well in searches for your keywords, and have a low number of competing adverts for your location, you will be more likely to generate enquiries and bookings.
Check the quality of the adverts and choose the sites which allow you to add plenty of information including images. It’s also good if you can add a link to your own website so that potential customers can click through to it for further information. Be sure to fill in as much info as possible to gain the most from each of the sites that you decide to use.
See a rise in bookings thanks to your research
By conducting your own research and choosing the right keywords and phrases it’s possible to source the most appropriate listing sites for your holiday rental property. By all means add your information to free directories too, just for the back-link, but if you want to generate plenty of enquiries and bookings we highly recommend you also include your Holiday Rental on a few of the paid listings which do well for your area.
A very useful blog post this. You might like to add that it is a good idea to also look at the ‘competition’ on each listing site. If one site has hundreds of properties similar to yours, in your location and another has much fewer, it could make all the difference.
Thanks Martin. That’s a very good point. We’ve updated the post to include something on this.