Vacation Rentals Keywords and Google Trends

Getting search engine traffic to your vacation rentals site, whether it is a commercial site with many vacation properties listed, or an individual site for your personal vacation home, can be a difficult and frustrating process. Trying to find key words and phrases that are not so popular that they are just too competitive, but popular enough that you will get a reasonable amount of search engine traffic if you are successful, is getting harder and harder.

There are various tools out there to help the vacation rental site owner evaluate key word popularity, but Google have recently launched Google Trends, which is a very interesting additon to this area.

Basically, Google Trends allows you to see how the popularity of a particular phrase has changed over time. It also allows you to see which cities, regions or languages are most popular for that search.

One interesting use is to compare the popularity of phrases : you can do this by typing in each phrase separated by commas. For example, it you type in "vacation rental, holiday rentals", you can see how the popularity of these phrases compares over the last two years, and that "vacation rental" is much more popualar in the US, while "holiday rentals" is much more popular in the UK.

Google trends is still in it early stages, and it based only on a sample of Google searches, but it looks like it will be a useful tool in optimising your vacation rentals site for the Google search engine.

Regards,

Kevin