The vacation rental business has become one of the most competitive industries online when it comes to marketing. If you own your own vacation rental website, you will be up against some tough competition. Sometimes you will need to weigh up what exactly online marketing means for your vacation rental.
For instance, if your vacation rental is in Sydney, then your area is 100% going to be competitive when it comes to vacation rentals. Even if you narrow down your marketing to focus on an area in Sydney such as Allambie Heights, you are still going to face some pretty heavy competition. Just type in Allambie Heights vacation rental” into Facebook and Google to get a feel for just how competitive this suburb of Sydney is.
What About AdWords and Other Pay Per Click Campaigns?
Google AdWords or SEO online marketing campaigns are going to be near to pointless for your vacation rental business. Even in extremely remote areas companies such as Airbnb and HomeAway dominate search engine rankings and Paid Search Ads results. In fact, to even show on some of the paid search engine Ads, you will need to be willing to pay in excess of $5 per click.
You can imagine the big vacation rental companies can afford this as they have multi-million dollar budgets that are tough to compete with. However, if your vacation rental is in a remote area, a lot of the time you may be able to show up for an exact match search on AdWords – for instance, let’s take the small village of Matfield, Kent in the United Kingdom.
If someone searches “Vacation Rental Matfield Kent”, and you have this as an exact match for your website, the cost per click could be as low as $0.20. The ROI on this is well worth it considering this search term attracts very few searches per year.
Would SEO Work For My Vacation Rental Website?
The only way you could make sure that your business stands out is by making sure you brand your website with a unique name. Market the brand name on social media and make sure it appears in Google searches at the top by configuring your on-page SEO.
Aside from this, link building and other SEO techniques will usually turn out to be a waste of time. Once again, the larger websites that dominate the AdWords and other Pay Per Click campaigns will dominate the search rankings in most areas.
That being said, using the example of Matfield in Kent above, you can configure local SEO so your vacation renal appears on Google and Bing Maps for local searches.
How About Listing My Property On Several Vacation Rental Websites?
By far the most successful online marketing technique for any vacation rental website is to list the property on as many vacation rental websites as possible. Lodgify provides a great guide that gives people advice on how to list their vacation rental on multiple websites. Check out the Lodgify listing guide here: www.lodgify.com – it is one of the best guides we have seen. You will find Airbnb, HomeAway, Booking.com and many of the other big brand name websites here. The idea is to give your website maximum exposure across as many vacation rental websites that attract the largest portion of internet traffic for this niche.
Getting people to book will not be an easy task at first because your vacation rental listings will begin with zero feedback. It will be a matter of waiting for someone to see that your property is a good deal and book. That may mean reducing your prices and explaining to people that the reason the price is low is because you are looking for your first guest in order to provide you with positive feedback – honestly is always the best policy here!
Conventional Online Marketing Methods Are Not The Best Option For Vacation Rentals
To conclude, most of the obvious online marketing techniques such as Pay Per Click search engine marketing and SEO are not going to work well if you are a small vacation rental business. You will be competing with companies that have millions to throw at their online marketing campaigns on these platforms. Therefore, if you can’t beat them, then join them. Use their marketing budgets to help you gain bookings for your vacation rental property.
