Every manager wants to get millions of organic visitors and direct bookings, but every year Vrbo & Airbnb get bigger, and cost of Ads go up. My thought was if you can't beat em join em until I saw what this property manager was doing.
The last seven years I worked at a channel manager and managers and managers kept telling me how they didn't want to pay Expedia & Booking.com 20%-30%, but they produced bookings. Then I found a managers website that not only didn't need OTA's but was actually beating OTA's with 150,000 in organic traffic worth $350,000 a month and got me very. interested in how they were doing this.
The problem with most vacation rental websites is that they all look the same and have the same content, similar user experiences, & try to compete for the same keywords. The internet is a copy machine and as channel managers came along they took all the same content from your website, standardized it, enriched it so Airbnb, Expedia, Booking.com, & Vrbo. Meaning these sites now had richer listing content than your own website's listings.
Besides having better content they also had a lot more of it. A property managers website has 25, 50, 100, or maybe 500 homes in a location where Vrbo & Airbnb have thousands.
How Do I Compete?
You compete by changing the game instead of just putting the same listing content that you put on Airbnb & Vrbo you create content around everything your guest may need to plan a trip not just a place to stay.
The key is providing great content guiding your guests on
How to get there
Where to Eat
What to Do
Local Attractions
Experiences
Guides for traveller personas like families, groups, events, or outdoor enthusiasts.
All of this content then links back to listing content on your site along with rentals that are nearby these activities or are tailored to certain guest personas.
This is how anna maria drives their traffic. This allows them to rank for more keywords such as Anna Maria beaches, Anna maria restaurants, or anna maria transportation. It also helps them rank for high competition keywords such as anna maria island, anna maria rentals, and things to do in anna maria.
Here’s examples of all the destination content they have on the site.
Where Do You Start?
You want to start by writing content that people are already searching for. You can do this by using google keyword planner or a number of other tools such as SeoMoz or uber suggest that estimate the number of monthly searches for a keyword. These tools can also show the competition which is also how hard it is to rank for them and the average cost per click. This will surface opportunities for lower competition keywords that have a good amount of traffic.
We are offering complementary destination keywords analysis if you don’t want to do it yourself.
Here’s a video of a keyword analysis for Destin.
Creating Content
Writing all of the blog posts can be a large task, especially if writing isn’t your strong suit. Luckily there are tons of freelancers that can help you create this content pretty affordably. Upwork can be a great place to find freelancers to write copy with reviews and examples of their work.
We also have a number of freelancers we can recommend if you reach out.
The most important part of hiring a copywriter will be to know what topics you want to right about, how long they have to be, and ensure they are optimized for SEO. I would also suggest using a tool like uber suggest to make sure everything is optimized for seo.
Getting Traffic
Once you have built up your library of destination content you are going to want to make sure it is easily accessible on your website, guest app, and added to your pre stay email journey.
Sharing on social media can be a great way to get the word out. Traveller and rent by owner groups can be a great way to share posts. Asking other local businesses or destination marketing organizations to share or backlink to your content can work well, especially if you mention them in your posts.
Boosting posts can also work to get more traffic but you will have to pay. You can target can also target these to people who have already visited your site, past guests, or people that look like past guests.
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