5 Tactics to Boost Local Traffic to your Vacation Rental Website

Getting Geo-Targeted or local traffic to your vacation rental website doesn’t have to be difficult. As a matter of fact, here we give you five great tips!

Local Search to Local Traffic for the Vacation Rental industry

You may be wondering "Why, as a Vacation Rental Company, should we be concerned with Local Traffic to our website?" and rightfully so.

There can be two ways of thinking about local traffic and local search:

  1. Actual Local Searchers
    This type of Internet Searcher is someone who is searching from a relatively local geographic location. People in your local area are not immune to the desire of having a wonderful vacation; and your rental just might be what they want.
  2. Geo-Targeted Searchers
    Geo-Targeted Searchers are those who might not be local to the area, but they are searching for what you offer – in your area. In other words, their actual search terms, the words they input into the Google search box, will have geographic names in them, such as names of towns and / or cities that your vacation rentals are located in.

Although these are two different types of searchers, perhaps coming from different places, the way we address them both are basically the same… They both specifically focus on Geographic terms.

And what that means is that there are many tactics we can use to highlight geographic search terms, or Geo-Target search terms.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, I want you to consider the growing trend of mobile use. In some niches, the number of people who access websites or search for products and services by mobile is soaring past those who use the traditional desktop. "Near Me" searches are on the rise via mobile. So make sure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly.

Now let’s dive into the Five Powerful Tactics to Boost Local Traffic!

Five Powerful Tactics to Boost Local Traffic to your Vacation Rental Website

NAP Consistency

One of the most commonly-advised tactics is to establish your "official" NAP or Name, Address and Phone Number.

NAP Consistency means your business’s Name, Address, and Phone Number are consistently listed the same across the Internet.

Any time you list your business, anywhere Online, use the exact same spelling, capitalization, wording, etc. for your NAP. If you display your phone number with the area code in parenthesis and a space, before and after number-sets, with a dash between, on your website, like (910) 575 – 6095, then write it that way every time. If you abbreviate "Road" to "Rd." in your address, do it that exact same way.

Consistency is the key, but why?

The reason is simply to build the confidence and authority of identity in the eyes of the search engines.

Although it may be tempting to build out several different websites, with different versions of the company name, all housed out of the same office in order to boost revenue – you’re also confusing the search engines as to just who is where.

In short, don’t confuse the search engines; decide on your consistent NAP and use it on your website, social media, Google Business, Online directories, citations, mentions and in whatever other ways you may come across.

Google My Business

When compared with the alternatives, Google is the number one search engine; everybody uses it.

So using their tools, suggestions and methodologies might be a good idea. And getting a listing in Google’s business suite of "Google My Business" might be a great idea.

On their page, they suggest you "attract new customers" with their listing. Further, it states that "your listing appears right when people are searching for your business or businesses like yours on Google Search and Maps. Google My Business makes it easy to create and update your listing—so you can stand out, and bring customers in."

Google My Business is basically a one-stop-shop to manage if or how your business shows in Maps, the Knowledge Graph, Google+ and organic search results.

It’s important to have as complete a listing as possible, including your NAP, business hours, details, photos and more. You can even see and respond to the reviews that customers have left for your business, as well as using their latest feature, which allows for short update posts.

Citations

Think of Citations like "Mentions." The idea of people mentioning our business or talking about our business brings to mind good things; like word of mouth advertising, authority, trust and in the end – profits.

In truth, that’s really how you should think about it. The fact that the search engines, like Google, are fed a bit by this should be second in your mind.

But yes. Google does consider mentions or Citations, when considering your business. Are many people talking about it? Is it listed prominently in many places? Is it the same place (remember Consistent NAP)?

Sometimes Citations can include your website address or URL, in the form of a link, which is, of course, of added value. However, citations do not need to link back to your website to be valuable. The value in a citation is the mention of your business.

There are basically two types of Citations, structured or unstructured.

Structured Citations

A structured citation is most usually defined as your vacation rental business (NAP) listed in a business directory. Examples of these types of listing sites are Yelp, MapQuest, Yellow Pages, Facebook, etc.

If you go to one of these sites, you’ll notice that each business listing is displayed in the same format (although some sites might allow more information for a fee or some businesses do not fill out their complete information), or structure, from company to company.

Unstructured Citations

An unstructured citation, on the other hand, usually has no pre-set format or structure; is usually free-flow text.

Places you could find mentions of your business might be articles, blogs, wikis and more. These may have links pointing back to your vacation rental website, or they might not.

Remember that even without a link, citations are still a good thing.

Shared Citations

We’ve already noted that having a consistent NAP is quite important. We’ve seen that citations help build verification, trust, and prominence. And here’s where these two concepts come together: Shared Citations.

What this refers to is the fact that not all directories get their information regarding businesses directly from those businesses submitting their information to them. Instead, there are things called data aggregators.

These aggregate and validate data from a variety of sources and then distribute business listing data to many other websites.

Consider, now, that you have submitted your vacation rental website in five different business directory listings. But you’ve not used a consistent NAP; instead, they are each listed slightly differently.

When a Data Aggregator comes across these, which one do you think they will decide is the "real you" to then disseminate across their network of sites? You have control over this, and it begins with consistent NAP.

Geo-Targeted Content & Pages

There is a common saying in the world of Online Marketing: "Content is King."

Although this adage can (and does) apply to a variety of topics, let’s consider it in the context of boosting local traffic to your vacation rental website.

In order to boost our chances of being seen in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) when someone enters in a search term, we need to have pages that actually talk about that topic.

For example, if I were to enter in the search query "vacation rental homes in Destin, Florida," do you think that pages titled "Condos for Sale in Los Angeles, CA" would come up? Neither do I.

However, let’s imagine for a moment, that our vacation rental company indeed specializes in vacation rental homes in the Destin, Florida area. What can we do to help move our position higher in the Search Engine Result Pages for those searchers?

Aside from using the tactics mentioned above (NAP Consistency, Google My Business and Citations), there is the technique of creating pages of relevant textual content, focusing on what you’re looking to optimize for; in this case a page about "Destin, Florida."

You might be thinking to yourself "We already have tons of pages dedicated to this area; all of our MLS listings are of vacation rental homes in Destin – AND they list the address, with the city, etc."

True, but let’s pretend that you have a competitor; I know, crazy, right? And they also have similar types of MLS listing pages.

Who, then, does Google decide gets the better placement in the SERPs? There are a great many factors within the world of SEO or Search Engine Optimization, however in this case, think of it like this: whoever has more relevant and authoritative content regarding the topic in question is going to have a leg-up on the competition.

So then, we need to build Geo-Targeted pages with textual content surrounding the topic at hand.

Here are some ideas of what kinds of pages you should begin thinking about building content around:

  • About [Destin, Florida] page(s)
  • Things to Do in [Destin] page(s)
  • [Destin] Events page(s)

In creating these rich, geo-targeted content pages, you’ll want to make use of this next tactic as well…Structured Schema Data.

Schema Structured Data

"Schema" refers to www.schema.org, which outlines a very specific vocabulary of tags to help you provide the information Search Engines need to understand your content.

If you’ve ever heard of the Google term "Rich Snippet," Schema Structured Data is the same thing (and luckily, Google seems to have moved away from Rich Snippets to the Structured Data terminology).

Without going into too much technical detail here, there are three types of Schema Structured Data formats: Microdata, JSON-LD and RDFa, with the first two being the most popular.

Think of Microdata like HTML tags containing name-value pairs, often surrounding visible content elements on the page, and JSON as a JavaScript also containing name-value pairs, but not visible on the page.

Let’s look at an example of the two most popular formats.

Microdata


<h3><span itemprop="name">Destin Vacation Rental Homes</span></h3>
<span itemprop="description">Destin, Florida's most popular vacation rental home agent.</span>

Here you can see that the name of the company is surrounded by not only H3 (Third-level Heading) tags, but there is a name-value pairing that says the data within this tag block is the entity’s Name. And for the next block it says "This is the Description of the entity."

JSON-LD


<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type":"LocalBusiness",
"description":"Destin, Florida's most popular vacation rental home agent."
"name": "Destin Vacation Rental Homes"
}
</script>

Here you can see that we are providing the same information to the Search Engines as we did in the previous example, but in this one, none of the information will be visible to the website visitor.

In the above examples, we show name and description, but of course there are name-value pairings available for address, phone number and much more.

So one option allows you to mark up visible content on the page, with specific markers for the Search Engines. This allows for double-duty; visibly display information and send markers to Google. Pretty handy, right? Indeed.

With the JSON format, there’s nothing for the end user to see. Why might this be valuable? Consider that you can send to the Search Engines information such as the founding date of your local vacation rental business, the founding location, amenity features – but you probably wouldn’t want to group this information together visibly on a page of your site for the end user to read; it just wouldn’t logically work. Thus the power of the JSON method. And keep in mind – there’s no reason why you couldn’t use both methods. 🙂

Used on your geo-targeted rich content pages (and elsewhere on your site) could give you a very big boost indeed.

Summary

In summary, we covered Five Tactics to Boost Local Traffic to your Vacation Rental Website. These tactics should serve you well in not only getting more targeted traffic, but you should also see a rise in your both your local and overall SEO rankings and traffic as well. Remember: NAP Consistency, Google My Business, Citations, Geo-Targeted Content and Schema Structured Data. And it all begins with the Consistent NAP.

If any of this sounds a bit overwhelming, I can totally understand. Let us help lighten the burden with our SEO Services or you can take a look at our full suite of Vacation Rental and Real Estate Tools.

Article written by Craig Kiessling.

How To Generate Direct Bookings

How to Generate More Direct Bookings for your Vacation Rental website

By Vanessa Humes

Recently HomeAway has let their customers know that they will be changing the way that leads communicate with companies and owners that list their properties on HomeAway.

As one of the last Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) to email leads and allow direct communication with guests before booking, many Vacation Rental Managers are concerned that they are going to lose valuable lead information.

To many owners / vacation rental companies, they view these leads as part of their marketing plan by integrating follow-up and promotion in their marketing mix.

I think back to hotels in the early to mid-2000s. They often used the OTA’s (Online Travel Agencies) like Expedia, Travelocity, and Priceline to move inventory. However, they found that they were training their guests to go to these sites for the best deals. (Sound familiar?).

To add insult to injury, the amount of commissions that were getting paid to OTAs made it a struggle to keep their operations budgets in the positive. And I think, in a lot of ways, it drove down the rental rates as the OTA’s insisted on rate parity and getting the lowest bargains to promote on their websites.  Now, these OTAs have a big presence in the vacation rental industry.

To be completely honest with you, there is no perfect solution. But, it’s not all doom and gloom.  If you are a new company, you probably rely heavily on Online Travel Agencies (OTA’s) to help you fill your inventory.

But I tell you this, you have to have a strong digital marketing presence, look at the cost per acquisition (CPA) of both guests on your website and on OTA’s, and focus on the lifetime value of that guest — with extensive marketing post-booking to ensure repeat guests.

It’s really all about developing your own digital footprint with your guests.

9 Opportunities & Marketing Strategies to Generate Direct Bookings

  1. Property Brand Optimization

    It may seem really obvious, but make sure the Name of the rental and the Address of the rental are Optimized in the Search Results (or SERPs – Search Engine Result Pages) to send traffic to your website.

    Also, be sure to optimize any features that are unique to that rental. For example, we stayed in a home in the Outer Banks that had the pool table from the movie The Hustler.

    When I couldn’t remember the rental company, I was able to Google the "Vacation Rental OBX with pool table from the Hustler," and it came up in the results.

    Same with the name of your property. Say the rental’s name is "Paradise at Penn Cove," make sure you are Dominating the Search Engines for the name and addresses of each property. Having a good URL structure with the name included will help increase those results.

    Vacation Rental Property Brand Optimization showing SERPs

  2. Mine and inform past leads from OTA’s

    If you are like many of my clients, you probably have a Large Database of leads from HomeAway, VRBO, Flipkey, etc. Harvest your leads and store them in an outside database. This can be an export in Excel if you don’t have a CRM.

    Use these databases to enhance your marketing. Make sure you inform your customers that they will save the booking fees (up to 15%) by booking direct on your website. Let them know, for this particular unit, they will get the best deal on your site – guaranteed. Think about using repeat guest specials. What’s their incentive to book with you again?

  3. Invest in an Email Marketing program that allows you to mine your data

    We have a great program that can tap into your historical booking data, help you mine data from previous stays, and help you reach out to people and remarket through PPC and Social Media, your past guests. The message is again, Book Direct and Save, but also Branding.

  4. Make sure you are Generating Leads from your Website

    Request More Information for Vacation Rental PropertyThere are many key points of gathering leads. But the most popular we find on our sites are the "Request More Information" from the property detail page, as well as Send to a Friend.

    Remember, vacation rental guests generally want more information, ask questions, and engage with the company they are going to rent through.

    Vacation rentals have a history of being a little more "high maintenance" than booking a hotel room. People may do a search to find your website to talk with you more, verify rates and best deals, and search out specials.

    Make sure you have all of this information readily available on your site.

  5. Use Remarketing

    Social media and paid advertising (PPC) allow you to stay in front of people who visit your website. You can put tracking on your website (in the code) that stores the pages that a visitor goes to you. Based on the activity, you can serve up ads on Social Media and Display ads through Google’s Ad Network. Use this to increase brand awareness, stay in front of visitors who haven’t converted, and promote deals and sales that can turn a "looker" into a "booker."

    Vacation Rental PPC example in SERPs

  6. Bid on your Brand in PPC

    If you haven’t noticed yet, you will soon find out that not only are OTA’s dominating Organic Search, no longer linking out to your site or promoting your brand on their site, but they are also GOING AFTER YOUR BRANDED SEARCH PHRASES IN PAID SEARCH.

    WHAT?! Sorry, I get a little worked up about this.

    As if your organic search results aren’t pushed down far enough, now we HAVE to bid on our brand names. And we are competing with mega budgets.

    The good news is, if you are that company, you are going to generally pay a lower Cost per click (CPC) than your competitors because you will have a higher Quality Score.

    A quality score is generated by Google by taking a look at the Click Thru Rate (CTR), content of the ad, and content of the Landing Page. You should always be monitoring and optimizing your quality score to ensure you are showing the highest for the lowest possible amount. So those who have a lower quality score, will have a higher CPC and have to bid more than you.

  7. There is still Google Local

    By Google Local, I mean what is known as the "map pack". For many area searches like "Panama City Beach vacation rentals" the map pack will be included below the paid ads, but above the organic search listings.

    There is a science to showing and maintaining rank in the map pack which includes Not hiring a company that does any Black Hat SEO tactics for short term results.

    The best way to get up there (and stay up there) is to have your profile completely filled out and utilize Schema markup in the code of your site. Schema markup is code (semantic vocabulary) that you put on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users.

    Vacation Rental Customer Satisfaction Survey and Google Reviews link

    You should also focus on Getting Reviews. Ask your happy customers for reviews. We also have a great survey program that helps push satisfied guests to Google to write you a positive review.  The first three stars link to a guest satisfaction survey.  The last two link to Google.

  8. Market Moderation

    What does your doctor tell you? "Too much of anything is bad for you" and "Everything in moderation."

    The same with a good marketing mix.

    Sure, if you are a new company, you are going to rely heavily on getting your inventory rented on OTAs. But, that’s not a long-term marketing strategy. You’ll have a tough time keeping owners if all you are doing is renting through OTA’s. They will think they can do it on their own (even if they are wrong).

    Start with the Basics – an optimized website, email marketing, paid advertising, and social media engagement. As your budget allows, start doing more social media advertising, adding remarketing, and hire a professional company to help you out.

    Our clients that don’t rely on OTAs have historically had better return on investments from their digital marketing. Their customers are trained to…Book Direct!

  9. Think Brand

    Don’t forget the power of a great brand and how you can impact that brand on your guests to come back and stay with you. Think of things like giving swag to stay with them after the trip. Also, think about who your brand is and what your brand messaging is.

    Does your guest know this message when they leave and is it something they can relate with?

    Airbnb does a great job of branding to the millennials which a few years ago, we were told were the most un-loyal generation, ever. Today, we see them embrace a cult-like following to brands like Apple and Airbnb. Think of what you want your company brand to be and embrace it.

There is no doubt, the vacation rental industry is evolving into something it wasn’t as soon as a few years ago. Our messages and marketing need to be strong, more precise, and engaging more than ever before. Long gone are the days of mass-mailing brochures and filling up peak-seasons.

Today, each vacation rental has more opportunity and threats than ever before. However, ICND is ready to help guide you through with a strong digital presence in both your website and your marketing.

Email Marketing: 5 Tips to Success in the Vacation Rental Industry

One of the tools we see that is underused or not used properly in the vacation rental industry is direct email marketing. Often, people consider this to be an “old” tactic or their email itself looks like it is from 2001. However, with the proper efforts, email marketing can be one of the most powerful tools in your vacation rental marketing arsenal. But what makes a good email marketing campaign, or even a good email for that matter? Here are five tips you can use to improve or launch your next email campaign.

Make sure you are mobile friendly. We live in a world where everything is at our fingertips in this little device called a smartphone. If your marketing plan doesn’t revolve around this device then you should look at revising it. Some statistics say that over 60% of emails opened are on a mobile device so your design and methodology should revolve highly around mobile. At ICND we are always updating our custom email templates and improving them for mobile usage. In many ways this goes beyond just pixel size.

Viewing Email on Mobile Device

Have the right focus and goals. Don’t try to make bookings with an email. The point of sending an email is to drive traffic to your website, not to make bookings. Although we can attribute bookings to email campaigns through analytics to show the value and return on investment, this should not be the goal when designing and planning. Because of this, you want to make sure your brand is consistent across the board. For example, if your email talks about a specific vacation rental special, when your buyer clicks through to the website they will expect to know more. Whether that is in the form of rental properties, information about the specifics of the vacation special, or how they can receive the discount in the near future, you will need to make sure they know what to do. Focus on driving traffic and let your website do it’s thing.

Create a message. One thing we suggest with our email marketing is to drive a specific message. Instead of focusing on several different topics in one email, focus on one and really drive the message home. This makes sure that your audience knows what you are trying to promote and will allow you to understand what offers your target audience wants and does not want.

Make it a visual experience. Many emails can be bulky with random images and a lot of text. Though you should follow the 80/20 rule with text to images, make your email a visual experience. Take some time to put your best foot forward with your imagery and select things that really capture what you are promoting. One thing to remember is if your email has too many images, it is likely to be marked as spam. You can also add another layer of spice with colors and fonts. This can be slightly tricky when you are designing for 28 different email clients i.e. outlook, gmail, yahoo, iPhones, etc… so if you get stumped, we are always here to answer your questions.

Testing and measurement. When you are done and have everything just the way you want it, don’t forget to test your email before sending. This will tell you if it is going to look right when the recipient receives it through their email client. And if by some chance it doesn’t look right, a view in browser link isn’t a bad thing to have at the top. Also, don’t forget to measure your campaigns. It is all for nothing if you aren’t measuring how your email campaigns are performing.

You can use http://www.litmus.com to test your email campaigns.

All in all, there are many things that go into creating and executing a successful email. These five points, although valuable, are just skimming the surface when it comes to everything you have to do. So if you want to add or improve your email marketing but some of this just seems a little too overwhelming, reach out to us and we would be more than happy to answer questions and start you off on the path to success with your direct email marketing.

Palmetto Vacation Rentals Launches A Newly Redesigned Site

The owners from Palmetto Vacation Rentals recently decided to upgrade their site. Len felt that the site was too busy and distracting for guests. Now it has streamlined specials, easier navigation putting the most important information into the hands of guests. Easier maintenance and administration reduces the amount of time spent supporting the site so the team can focus on helping guests to ‘Find The Best Myrtle Beach Vacation Rentals’

We did a major re haul on their property detail pages as well. As you can see below potential customers have lots of choices.

The top features an option to compare the favorite properties the user may want to compare, and recently viewed properties just in case!

Palmetto Vacation Rentals

They can share this property via social media channels to show anyone the property. If the customer is not quite ready to book and wants to know more information, the option to do so is right there on the page! There is even an option the print the page, and it will come out in a printer friendly format

Implementing these items into a new site, not only makes the site more user friendly, but also drives up the overall conversions.  Take a look at the new Palmetto Vacations site and see what your site might need to be adding to help your guests overall experience.

 

Article written by Tonya Harmati .

 

The Cart Abandonment Mystery: Solved for Vacation Rentals

We can all agree that one of the most frustrating things to see is when a consumer is one step from buying and then for some reason, they don’t. A good majority of the business model in the vacation rental industry is based around e-commerce so having the proper tools for that space is essential in closing the deal and generating revenue. And no matter who you are, we all have issues with cart abandonment.

Cart abandonment in vacation rental marketing terms is when a user gets to a check-out page and then leaves for various reasons.  (There really are not “carts” for the rental industry.)

On average cart abandonment is responsible for over 82% of lost sales every year, that’s a huge number! However, ICND clients have been able to turn that negative statistic into revenue due to some of the tools they have access too. Some clients are recapturing 20% of the abandoned traffic which results to an average of $50,000 per month recaptured that otherwise would be lost; that adds up to $600,000 per year in generated revenue from a simple process.

Automated Emails Bring Potential Guests Back

The magic is in the tools we use and it starts with our booking engine. Our booking engine sends out a “reminder” email, much like Amazon, if the user didn’t complete their purchase.   There could be many reason’s someone abandon’s their booking.  Maybe they want to compare pricing, maybe they get distracted.  Who knows.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: The consumer reaches the “Booking” page and starts entering information.
Step 2: For some reason, they don’t book but the information is recorded and stored in your database.
Step 3: After a certain amount of time, if they don’t convert, the system automatically sends a follow-up email to remind them to come back and book.

But what’s awesome is we offer a back-end dashboard that tracks ALL of these emails:

  • When they abandoned their checkout
  • When the reminder email was sent
  • When it was opened
  • Whether they returned and booked or not
  • Oh, of course, their name and email address
All emails and stats for the cart abandonment are recorded in your back end.

Let’s Make It Easy for the Guests

We all know a user will visit your website multiple times before booking.  That’s just how it is.  So what if we made it easier on them to return and BOOK?  That’s why ICND was proactive to introduce this concept to the VRM industry and the results have been exceptional.

If a potential guest abandons their checkout, we ALSO have a nifty little gadget that shows them the unit they abandoned once they RETURN to the site.

Rentals Cart Abandonment
When a user returns to your site and didn’t book, they get this, sending them down the sales funnel faster.

Seamless Integrations

Our Lead Tracker tool organizes and categorizes leads so they are easy to segment and market too. It will also capture as much information as it can such as name, phone number, and property ID.

This is a simple process to grow revenue and improve your brand’s image by staying in front of your audience. If you’re curious about implementing this strategy into your overall marketing toolkit, give us a call and we’ll show you how you can start growing your revenue and creating more satisfied customers.  Don’t forget to check out our award winning website designs for vacation rental companies as well!

Get Less Abandoned Bookings

4 Quick Wins for Getting More Direct Bookings

By Vanessa Humes

As vacation rental marketers, we work so hard to get visitors to the website and into the booking funnel. We watch them spend minutes on the site (using technology like HotJar) finding the perfect rental and even get to the booking page. But then it happens. The mouse stops moving. The session ends. WHAT?! If this is what you have been experiencing, here’s a few easy things to do, and some more complicated that will help you drive conversions and more direct vacation rental bookings.

1) Add Urgency Features to your booking pages. We first saw these on hotel sites in 2015 like Hotels.com and thought, “Hey, what a great idea. Let’s try that on our vacation rental booking engine”. Since then, it’s become almost a staple. Urgency helps communicate to the visitor that there other people searching on the site, this property has been viewed, or that your dates are popular and you should hurry up and book.
2) Make the booking experience super quick and easy – even on mobile.
By “super quick and easy” we mean less clicks and easier forms. No more than a couple steps. Find your rental, here’s a page to book. Sometimes other booking engines break up the check out into steps, but we don’t. One page, easy to navigate forms, and boom – you’re booked.

3) Give them a deal. Are you hiding your specials? Why? Specials drive conversions, especially when you make them easy to book online. Simple promo codes at check-out are convenient ways to allow for discounts. Or you can add a modal pop-up to collect email addresses and give a specific amount off, like $25. Implementing this is sure to drive conversions and add email addresses to customers who are ready to book direct with you!

4) Send them an abandonment email. If Amazon does it, you should probably do it too and here’s the results to prove it. When a guest gets to the check-out page and abandons the form, we like to send them an email a few hours later. Sometimes people don’t want to do it on their phone, or just want to triple check with their traveling party. So make it convenient and send them an email directly back to book their stay. We also have a pretty cool trigger on the bottom of the site to get them back to where they left off with booking.

Don’t make them think!

So there you have it. ICND is the leader in bringing these great ideas to the VRM industry first. These strategies are proven to help drive direct bookings on your website. You worked so hard to get them there, you might as well put as much effort into having the features to help get them to book with you. For more ways to drive bookings, check out our websites in live action in our portfolio or contact us today.

How to take advantage of Google Search Trends

Google trends is one of the best and most versatile tools available for any marketer out there. There are literally billions upon billions of searches performed in Google every single day. So why not gather that information and use it at your will? You can use Google trends to discover basic data about your brand, your market share, your competition and seasonal trends.

“Google Trends gives you a glimpse into the topics the world is searching for.” The trends begin in the year 2004 and go forward. These trends can be sorted by types of searches (web, image, news, products, or YouTube), geographical areas, time span, and categories, and the tool allows you to compare up to five search terms at a time.

There is a variety of ways you can use Google trends to gather the data you want the most.

When performing a search on Google Trends, you have the option to set four variables or parameters. (default shown in bold)

  • Web Search – Image search – News Search – Product Search – YouTube Search
  • Worldwide – Option to choose a specific Country
  • 2004-Present – Past 7 Days – 30 Days – 90 Days – 12 Months- Choose a Year
  • All Categories – Arts & Entertainment – Autos & Vehicles – Beauty & fitness – Books & literature – Business & industrial – Computers & electronics – Finance – Food & drink – Games

 

For an example take a look at these screenshot. You can see the search term “Charleston vacation rentals” and see the interest over a period of time for that specific search term.

 

This example shows  you the interest over time of the keywords, Outer Banks and OBX. As you can see year over year, there has been less searches performed for Outer Banks. However, you can see people are starting to use the term OBX instead of the full name.

 

 

Understand your competitors

They say, keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. The best way to beat your competitors is to understand them. You can learn a lot from your competitors graphs. If they are doing well, you can research the “peaks” and see how it was created. If they are doing poorly, you can research on what to avoid and understand how to adapt your marketing strategy.

Monitor Your Brand

If you are not monitoring your brand, you should be! When you monitor your brand, you should be looking out for active ways that you can improve your market share and positively increase your brand presence. Google trends can provide you with a detailed report on how you are faring. Just enter your company’s name and it will show you the information of “interest over time” via a graph and data on how searchable your brand on a per year scale.

Seasonal Trends

If you need to write content for your blog, or for your website, understanding seasonality is a critical factor. There is no point in publishing content that your audience may not likely to engage with. Google trends can help you find the most relevant topics for the time of year, you need. This will drive your content creation and give you ideas on what your audience is attracted to.

Building your brand online can be a daunting but rewarding task. Explore the benefits of Google trends and see how it can get you ahead of your competition. If you do not want to be bothered with all this research and data, let InterCoastal Net Designs do the work for you. We have a full vacation rental marketing and SEO team at your disposal.

Give us a call today at 866.249.6095!

 

Article written by Tonya Harmati .

Top 5 Rental Website Conversion Tactics to Boost your Bookings

Do you find your website generating a large volume of traffic but not yielding enough conversions? This is one of the many challenges many vacation rental managers face when it comes to their digital marketing success. Identifying the potential causes of failing to convert those lookers into bookers is the first step into solving this very common problem.

Can you answer these questions that as a marketer or manager should be able to answer?

Think about your online conversion rate.  If you get 1,000 visitors to your website a day, but only convert 2% that’s 20 reservations.  But what if you could increase that percentage to 10%?  That’s 80 more reservations a day you are making online.  This is why website conversion optimization is so important.  We want you to increase your traffic, but we want you to also focus on converting a higher percentage of that traffic.  That’s where the real money is.

It’s important that you have a team that knows what they are doing: where to put things, how to word things, what color to make calls to action.  What makes a person go or stop, and how to funnel traffic throughout your website.  That’s what we specialize in Conversion Focused websites.

 

The Top Conversion Tactics

Conversion Tactic #1: Make it Mobile!

It’s really important visitors can navigate your site from any mobile or desktop device.  Most people are shopping on mobile devices and make their purchases on a desktop.  This is the same with travel purchases. But mobile conversions are on the rise, so you need to be thinking about your mobile architecture and usability for mobile navigation.Incorporate marketing – people open their email, see start shopping

For 30% mobile 80% bookings come from desktop.Mobile traffic is up 200% in the past few years.

 

Conversion Tactic #2: Up Your Elements

So let’s talk about some of those elements that help funnel your traffic.  One of the most important things it to make sure your quick search is above the fold.  Use cool verbiage in your calls to action, like “Begin Your Adventure” rather than just “Start  your Search”.  Use brighter colors to call their focus for book now.

It’s online marketing’s job to get traffic to your site, but it’s usability and functionality that uses some psychology to make them book.  This is a screen shot of our booking engine.

The visitor has landed on the website and began to search.  They could be shopping around for price and availability.  We’ve incorporated urgency into our booking engine.  We show that search has only produced X amount of properties, or 82% of our inventory matching your search results is booked, reserve now, or showing that 22 people have viewed this property in the last 3 hours.  These elements show the visitor, they need to take action before their selection is gone.

Conversion Tactic #3: Make It Easy!

In order to find a property, you’ve got to have the tools to help them.  Having a refine search with popular features is necessary for your visitors to drill down and find the perfect property.  If you’re a hotel, this maybe different for you, you only have a couple room types, but making it easy for them to find those room types, pricing, and ability to book them.

Then you want to make sure you are tracking our searches.  What are your most popular arrival dates?  What is the average length of stay people are searching for?  Do you have a lot of people looking for something that is pet friendly, but only a handful of pet friendly properties.  This could open up opportunities for you to expand your inventory.  Let’s say you get a lot of people searching for 3 BR oceanfront at the <xxx> Resort, but you only have 1.  This could be an opportunity to market to owners there telling them you have the demand, but you need more supply.  Having tangible results from actual searches performed on your website could be a powerful tool to potential owners – especially with the analytics to back it up.

Conversion Tactic #4: Focus on the Booking Page

Take a look at your conversion rates from your check out pages.  This is probably one of the most important pages.  You work so hard to get a visitor there.  Obsess over this rate.  We pay so much attention to the pretty pictures and design, and you may think this is just a standard form.  It’s not.  We’ve learned from improving our clients check out pages and also from looking at what the big dogs do –

  • strip out your navigation,
  • make the form easy to fill out and fit on one page,
  • and easy to fill out on a mobile device
  • have your totals adjust as they add on or opt-out of things like travel insurance
  • make sure they know it’s secure, and make sure it’s simple.

Conversion Tactic #5: Watch the Users and Adapt

Navis is going to tell you a lot about what happens to a lead after they’ve made contact with you or booked, but if they didn’t get there –say they landed on your website and bounced or exited before booking or making contact, you have to take a look at your funnels in Google Analytics.  This is going to be going in and looking at your pages, page views, and conversions from those pages.

Say they land on your specials page, but don’t know how to execute the special.  Well it can result in an exit rather than a booking.  If you see high bounce or exit rates on your pages at any point in your funnel, you are going to want to drill down and figure out why.  You can install more tracking through Crazy Egg heat mapping or watch video clips of visitors looking at your site and what they are doing.  This going to tell if your visitors are getting lost, if they are backing out at the check out pages, or trying things that will help with conversions.  Maybe it’s a call to action, maybe your promo code field is not visible, you have to dig in and see what visitors are doing to help make changes to your funnel.

Final Converting Thoughts

“Beautiful websites don’t generate leads”. There are a ton of fantastic web designers out there that can create a great and beautiful website, but they may not be centered around conversions. We like to call those websites “All flash and no cash”. When you go with ICND,  you are choosing a company that has researched and implemented the elements that will help you increase you conversion rates.

VRM Intel Live 2016!

Stay in the loop.

If you’re like ICND, you hate missing out on industry news.

Your company realizes that vacation rental marketing strategies change drastically from year-to-year (heck – sometimes even month-to-month!). That’s why you need to join us in Wilmington, NC on October 26th for the 2016 VRM Intel Live! Conference.

You’ll get the chance to see some of the top names in our industry give never-before-seen presentations you simply can’t afford to miss!

Just to name a few:

– 2017 Marketing Plans with Amy Hinote

– Cutting Costs and Increasing Profitability with Ben Edwards

– Listing Site Optimization and Independence with Amber Mayer

Click here to get the full schedule for VRM Intel Live! 2016.

Don’t let the competition pass you by.

In an industry that changes as rapidly as Vacation Rental Marketing, events like VRM Intel are of utmost importance. But it’s not simply the fact that you’ll learn new strategies at the conference that makes it so important.

The thing is, everyone who attends will learn these new tactics.

That means that if your company has decided not to attend VRM Intel Live! this year, they are essentially handing over the reigns to all their competitors – who will surely be there.

Join ICND in making sure the foothold you’ve worked so hard to achieve isn’t lost completely due to a single poor decision.

Get your name out there.

But VRM Intel Live! isn’t all about the competition.

You know as well as ICND that getting your well-earned good reputation out into the industry while building new business relationships can be equally important. This conference is the perfect opportunity for that.

Some of the biggest names in the vacation rental marketing industry have already signed up to attend, so don’t miss your chance to meet them face-to-face & in one place!

Can’t make it in October?

That’s perfectly okay! Team ICND will also be attending the VRM Intel Live! Conference in Sandestin, FL on November 30th. It features all of the same presentations and events, so we hope to see you there too!

Click here if you still need to purchase tickets for the Wilmington Conference.

Check out Team ICND at VRM Intel Live 2016!

Can’t attend the conference, but want our marketing advice anyway? No problem – reach out to us via Facebook, Twitter, or drop us a line at 866.249.6095 – we’re always here to help!

ICND scored VRM Intel’s 2016 Best New Vacation Rental Website!

The news is in! VRM Intel has selected its Best New Vacation Rental website for 2016. VRM asks the industry professionals to submit their favorite vacation rental company management website that have launched in the past 12 months to compete for the best. There were several deciding factors that went into judging the best pages. Does the site promote your brand, the destination, and the homes in a professional way? Is the website responsive with great quality photos, descriptions and amenities? Is it easy for the consumers to refine their searches to find the right set of homes, and can you sort the searches in a logical way based on prices, bedrooms, and occupancy? How do you rank in google, and how easy it is for guests to sign up for your deals, promotions, or newsletters? In addition, will the website load fast on a computer, tablet and cell phone. InterCoastal Net Designs came in 1st with www.topsail-realty.com and 5th with www.oregonbeachvacations.com.

Ranked #1- Topsail-Realty.com

Topsail-Realty.com met quite a few of those deciding factors and more. As soon as you land on the page you see a high quality montage of the Topsail area in the header video and featured properties on the homepage

intercoastalnetdesigns

Additionally, it features quick call outs to popular search pages.

 InterCoastal Net Designs

Interactive display for homeowner acquisition that leads to a professionally done property management page!

intercoastalnetdesignsdisplay

Topsail Realty also features a quick search that lets the consumers select quick options like, high internet, dog friendly, and smart homes. The refined search allows for visitors to drill down their search results by area, location, amenities, beds, baths, and price range and also sort by number of beds, occupancy, or alphabetical order. In addition, search results allow property manager to pin properties to the top that need more attention.It contains urgency features which shows the number of people interested (viewed) the property

intercoastalnetdesignsurgency

 

The calendar doesn’t allow you to check dates to arrive that would be outside booking parameters (must call to book partial stays).  This results in less error and confusion for the customer.

Property detail pages were decorated with a split cost calculator, social media shares, request more info forms, reviews Q&A, calendar block out dates,  and a break down of pricing – combines total, but ability to see details of charges.

The booking page is optimized with the ability to add on add-ons at the checkout.

intercoastalnetdesignsaddon

 

Ranked #5- OregonBeachVacations.com

Oregon Beach Vacations came in at 5th place. The header is decorated with a beautiful enticing picture of the local area. We made it easy to help the consumers refine their search to find the right set of homes with the property detail page. It includes the sticky availability search & custom calendar to select availability

 

oregonbeachpropertydetail

In addition, the search results were refined to include urgency features, to let the consumers know how popular the property is, and the percentage of properties already booked. We also made it easy for the consumers to see the ratings of their destinations and the overall reviews of the company

oregonbeachproperties

Vacation rental agencies choose us, because we create websites that both impress and boost your presence with the industry, all while working within various budgets. We will take care of all the details—customer service is what we do best—so you can focus on your organization—what you do best. We design your website to be responsive and mobile. We have a team that keeps up with the latest industry news, so you don’t have to!

InterCoastal Net Designs set the design standard for vacation realty websites. Our commitment to excellence in design and usability, keeps us at the top of our industry and a step ahead of our competitors. Don’t hesitate to contact us to learn about building a custom website for your company.

 

Article written by Tonya Harmati .