Hello fellow vacation rental owners:
I’m not entirely sure what experience everyone out there is having with keeping your rentals booked with the touch economic times, but I am sure about one thing: the two most popular adjectives attached to all search traffic on the Internet are “cheap” and “discount”. In general, everyone likes to think they are getting a great deal, no matter what they are buying. So, they put the word “cheap” or “discount” in front of whatever it is they are looking for, and see what Google spits out.
Realizing this, I did a bunch of research on Google search traffic in the vacation rental industry specifically related to the phrases “cheap” and “discount”. I was not surprised to find that “cheap vacation rentals” and “discount vacation rentals” are two of the more popular search terms in the entire vacation rentals by owner online industry. On our website, http://www.findvacationrentals.com, we put up a speical website section called “Owner’s Specials“. Our customers can log in to their Owner’s Corner and post an owner’s special anytime they want. This immediately places their vacation rental on our special “Owner’s Special” section, giving them extra exposure and helping them to increase their inquiries and bookings. We also make our Owner’s Specials available through a RSS feed, so anyone that finds our Owner’s Specials mini-site can elect to receive instant updates on their mobile phone, or can even have our owner’s specials on their “My Yahoo” or “iGoogle” page automatically.
Yeah, I know. “Cheap” doesn’t sound like something you want to associate with your vacation rental. But these days, I’m not as proud as I used to be. I really need to keep my place booked, and advertising a special so that someone selects my vacation rental versus the many other choices they are going to have is a competitive advantage.
Another thing that owners can do is put the keyphrases “cheap vacation rentals” or “discount vacation rentals” in their actual online advertisements for their vacation rentals. “Discount” probably sounds a little better than “cheap”, but either way it should increase the exposure to your individual listing.
If you are a customer of www.findvacationrentals.com, you can log in to Owner’s Corner if you want to make any adjustments to your listing text.
Cheers,
Jon, Owner, www.findvacationrentals.com
