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Brian Bates 10/14/2021
The vacation rental industry has grown rapidly in recent years as homeowners around the country discover the many benefits of turning an investment property into a rental. Websites such as VRBO, FlipKey, and Airbnb help fledgling investors market their homes and condos, letting even inexperienced owners transform their unoccupied summer vacation home into year-round passive income. These websites are also a great channel for established property management companies to expand their prospective audience and drive additional bookings, but why surrender part of the earnings to Airbnb when you can bring said audience directly to you?

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A professional property management website, complete with a clean and sleek interface, easy to browse listings, and evocative and helpful content can help you draw in potential guests and keep them coming back again and again, and proper search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are how you will rise through the search rankings and get them to your site! In order to truly take advantage of the full benefits of SEO, however, you’ll need to create a variety of high-quality content to fill out your website’s pages; below, we’ll discuss the types of content you’ll want to include and why!

Target Key Rental Terms with Specific Rental Listing Pages

When searching for a vacation property, many travelers begin with a broad search keyed to their area of interest—something like ‘Los Angeles rentals’ or ‘vacation rentals in Orlando.’ To skyrocket through the search rankings for these terms, you’ll want to create individual pages targeting all the various search terms that apply to your rental listings. Start broad, with pages targeting high-level terms like the previously mentioned ‘rentals,’ ‘vacation rentals,’ ‘rentals in (area),’ ‘vacation rentals in area,’ and so on and so forth. Next, dig into specific property types such as homes, condos, townhomes, villas, cottages, etc. You may not see a big difference between these labels, but each is a separate term you can rank for on search engines! Finally, you can create pages dedicated to specific amenities offered throughout your rental portfolio. Do you have properties with a fireplace, fire pit, beachfront access, prime locations downtown, or any other desirable feature? A page for each feature means guests can find exactly what they want, while you can earn search engine ranking by targeting these terms!

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Be Thorough with Your Property Details

We’ve all purchased a product online that, when it arrived, completely failed to meet our expectations. Whether it was a complete lack of details, purposely misleading information, or simply outdated or inaccurate descriptions, the feeling of disappointment probably left you scrambling for a refund and never wanting to deal with that vendor again. When it comes to property pages on your site, you’ll want to be highly descriptive but accurate, ensuring that when guests arrive, what they get is exactly as advertised!

Each property page should include—in addition to professional photos—a lengthy description that highlights all the property’s features. Include details such as: the number of bedrooms and bathrooms; the types of beds available in each bedroom; whether bathrooms are en-suite or shared; the availability of kitchen appliances and dishware; living room décor; extra amenities such as fireplaces, complementary Wi-Fi, or smart TVs; parking details; and the property’s proximity to local hot spots and attractions. Don’t oversell the property, but make sure guests understand all its many charms! Most important of all, you want to ensure that the content is unique. Even when you host multiple properties in the same condo community, copying descriptions of amenities is a big no-no and can wreck your SEO efforts—be creative!

Show Guests How to Have Fun

Many guests already have a reason for visiting your area, but that doesn’t mean they know everything they could possibly want to see and do. By creating content pages detailing local activities, attractions, and even shops and restaurants, you can showcase a variety of exciting options that potential guests may have overlooked—possibly getting them to stay with you longer or to return in the future! These types of pages serve as a great permanent resource for you to direct inquisitive guests, but they also can help draw in additional bookings from those searching for activities; after all, if your site is where they found good information on hiking, the perfect rental from which to access the trails is right there as well! It’s important to keep in mind that while a guest is staying with you, they aren’t there for your property, but the experience it provides them in your area. Treat these informative pages as part of the complete vacation experience you have to offer, and you will find success.

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Reach Out to Your Audience

While the previous content articles about attractions and activities in the area are meant to serve as a permanent, unchanging source of information, creating a blog on your website will enable you to reach out to your audience with time-sensitive offers, seasonal information, and other spur-of-the-moment content intended to entice guests to your area. A blog is a great way to drive engagement both on your site and through social media, as you can share these articles among your followers to generate buzz and additional views. Additionally, search platforms such as Google prefer to see websites that have continuous updates, and a blog is a great way to keep content flowing in without growing stale.

The only restraint to what you can write about in a blog article is your own imagination, but some ideas include highlighting upcoming local events, discussing your favorite restaurants (and petitioning your audience to share their own!), describing the perfect summer getaway to your area, or even showcasing beautiful properties in your portfolio. The sky is the limit—perhaps a hot air balloon tour is on your list of things to write about—and you’ll find your search engine ranking soaring with your blog view count.

Keep Your Tone Friendly & Helpful

Throughout your writing, you’ll want to maintain the proper tone. Vacations are about as many things as the people taking them: escaping the norm, having adventures, injecting fun and excitement, or even finally—FINALLY—relaxing after a long, difficult stretch of everyday hardships. Your job is to show that you can provide guests with what they need, and to do that, you’ll want to keep a light, playful tone while delivering accurate information. Immerse your potential guests in what your area has to offer through vivid detail but keep it relatable and fun. After all, if they can see through your eyes, they’ll be clamoring to book a stay and experience it for themselves!

Hopefully these tips can help you begin the process to creating your own website content. While it’s far from the only way to make your business stand out, great content provides the steppingstones from which effective vacation rental SEO can emerge, not to mention the lasting impression that it can create with guests. If you need assistance creating quality content to market your rental properties, Bizcor is always here to help—reach out today!