Category: Search Engine Optimization

As you’re probably aware, SEO is a critical marketing channel if you want your vacation rental website to grow and book more stays in 2016 and beyond. Typically, clients want to rank for highly competitive keywords like “Myrtle Beach rentals” or whichever area you’re working with. While this is possible, it’s a long path to success and requires a long investment period in terms of time and money to see it through.

However, there are other low volume, low competition keywords that you should want to rank well for within Google and Bing. Those keywords being: Your Property Name.

If you brand your properties with short, easy to remember names, you’ll want to make sure you capture anyone who’s looking for that rental in Google. For example, the Flamingo House in Holden Beach is rented by Brunswickland Realty. This house is unique in its design and color and generates a fair amount of people looking specifically to stay in it during the busy booking season.

When searching in Google for this, your guest may use the house name followed by the area like so: “Flamingo House Holden Beach”. Here, Brunswickland Realty is doing a great job! The URL for the property ranks at the top of the page with organic search, Google has generated a Knowledge Graph snippet for the query and is showing reviews and business information.

How To Outrank The Big Listing Sites

The primary reason that you want your property pages to rank well in Google Search is to not bleed branded traffic into the big listing websites. If a guest is searching for your homes, don’t let them get distracted! If you’re not careful, you can find your searches for rental properties that you manage falling into the large web traffic bucket that is VRBO/HomeAway/Flipkey/Airbnb.

Why is this a big deal? Well, while the big listing sites can drive you a lot of traffic and bookings, they also aren’t always looking out for your best interests. Getting a potential guest onto VRBO.com for your area means that you’re now competing with dozens of other properties, managers and price points. Simply put, it is also easy for your guests to leave the property listing and get distracted and book elsewhere. With changes coming in 2016, your guest isn’t served well either (traveler fee, anyone?).

To best outrank big listing website, keep the following tips in mind when designing your website layout:

Best Practices For URLs

Ideally, you want short URLs that show the name of the property in the “slug” portion of the URL. Let’s look at a few examples. In some recent website launches, we’ve also tweaked some of our URLs to include the area, view or neighborhood in the URL as well. On larger websites (think: 250+ properties), this is a solid option to organize your property pages in a logical fashion.

Create SEO-Friendly Title Tags

Next up is the most important on-page SEO factor: title tags. Simply put, title tags are the most important element that we can work on from the SEO end to help improve rankings for these property pages.

Typically all of our title tags for property pages are generated based on the name of the rental business, the format the client wants to see in search results and the property name. It’s usually a formula of all three elements that allows for us to setup this title tag templates.

Letting Bots Crawl Your Property Pages

Before Google or Bing can do a good job of indexing and showing your property page URLs, they need to be able to crawl the pages. Put simply, crawling is the act of connecting together all of the many billions of documents (pages) on the web. Use Google’s robots.txt testing tool to make sure that Google can see your property pages in search. Double-check the cached version of your property pages using a site: command and make sure both the rendered version and text-only cache are readable.

Going The Extra Mile With Schema.org Markup

Coming soon to our latest vacation rental websites is Schema.org markup. Schema.org is the standard language of the rich-snippet future of search engines. Recently, large listing websites VRBO and HomeAway have integrated Schema.org review markup into their listings results pages, earning the star markup from Google for this change. To make a great solution, we’re working through some great updates to our booking engine website code that’ll allow this markup for new websites. Making your website look great in search is an ever-evolving process. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out on Twitter.

When it comes to scoring big with Google, link building needs to be one of your most frequently used strategies. Optimizing your website for search engine results that put you on page one can be as basic as having high quality websites linking back to your site. Sounds simple enough, right? It can be if you take the right measures and consistently work at it. It’s truly an ongoing journey. Using these link building ideas and tactics can yield huge results.

Continue reading “6 Tactical Link Building Ideas That Work”

Is your website looking a little dated lately and in need of a fresh, up-to-date look? Before embarking on a website redesign project, here are 10 mistakes to avoid that will have an impact on the SEO of your site:

Continue reading “10 SEO Mistakes Managers Make When Redesigning a Website”

Recently, Google has taken to updating the local search algorithm to include new changes to their search results. A recent speaking engagement with the Brunswick County Chamber left us scratching our heads! After only a few weeks, a presentation that I’d prepared about local SEO had to be regenerated with brand new screenshots, updated changes and more. It goes to show you that search engine updates are always around the corner and you never know which elements are going to change.

Recently, I gave the local SEO presentation again at the Myrtle Beach Chamber on local search engine optimization. In a competitive market like Myrtle Beach, local SEO is really important. Hotels and resorts like Sandy Beach Resort and other in the Myrtle Beach area rely on local search. I’m happy to report that I’ve updated the slides to include certain elements of the Pigeon update and how it may affect your local search.

Check out the full presentation below and let me know if you have any questions about the local search algorithm and how the updates may have changed your organic traffic.

If you are using Google Analytics (and who isn’t, right?), you have been noticing for quite some time now, an increase in the dreaded ‘not provided’ term. Google has been on a mission to encrypt all search data and if the trend continues we very well may see keyword data 100% ‘not provided’.

This decision has left a lot of website owners furious – and with good reason. Keyword data can provide you with valuable information, especially informing you of the organic keywords that are driving traffic to your website.

We know, it stinks! Well, we are here to tell you it isn’t as bad as you think. In fact, we want to pass along a few tips to you that could help you survive in this ‘not provided’ world.

Using Goal Tracking in Analytics

Whether Google provides organic keyword data again in the future, or not, website owners should be focused on other metrics. Keyword data is/was valuable for providing you the terms with which users reached your site, but what were these users’ actions once they found your site?

As a website owner, you should know what action you want users visiting your site to take. Is it a sale, a download, a form completion, or to view a certain page on your site? Most all actions a user performs on your website can be tracked within Google Analytics. At the end of the day, tracking these actions are a much better tool for measuring your site’s success than traffic from keyword terms.

Inside the Administration panel of your Analytics account, you will find Goals. Once inside Goals, you will create a New Goal – and with a little coding you can track most anything.

Once you start collecting data from your goals, you will become much better equipped with information on how to improve your website than keyword data ever provided you.

Use Filters

Logging into Analytics and seeing that 79% of your keyword data is being shown as ‘not provided’ is never a good feeling. We have a little tip for you that can help make that data a little more useful.

Analytics also has a Filter feature in their Administration panel. Once in there, add this to a New Filter. Over time, this will show you the landing pages for each of the ‘not provided’ referrals. This will not provide you with the exact keyword that brought the traffic to your site, but if your content is well optimized, as well as your URLs, you will have a very good idea of what terms the users were using to find your site.

Google Webmaster Tools

Most website owners are aware of Google Analytics, but not as many are using Google Webmaster Tools. Now is a great time to jump on board!

You will find some valuable keyword data related to your website in Webmaster Tools. Just go to Search Traffic > Search Queries.

This data only goes back a limited time, but you can also use some of their filter options to see things like web vs. mobile. Also, this data is very valuable because it will show you impressions, clicks, CTR and Average Position.

Join the PPC side

I know, I know — the last thing you want to do is hand Google over some of your own money after they’ve stripped away your keyword data. I get that! The fact is, paid advertising space on search result pages is increasing. If Google is paying more attention to it, chances are you should too!

Once you start using Adwords, Google will show you the keyword data coming from paid search. This will give you a solid idea on which high volume keywords are really converting for you. That will then give you the knowledge to use towards where you want to focus your website, specifically in the organic SEO world.

We have been aware for a while now that Google has been moving away from keyword data. We can either kick and scream, or jump on board. Its time to stop focusing on old school keyword data, and start focusing on providing our customers what they want when they visited our site in the first place. Use these tips above, but remember — provide your customers with the best user experience.