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

Cyberrentals / HomeAway/ WVR Pricing

I've been out of commission for the last few days ( due to a family bereavement), so I am a bit late noticing that the WVR group have announced a new deal for owners of vacation rentals : you can now advertise your vacation rental home on 4 WVR sites ( Cyberrentals, a1vacations, greatrentals and HomeAway) for an annual cost of $299.

This is another sign of how WVR are beginning to excercise the leverage they have since acquiring Cyberrentals, a1vacations, greatrentals and Holiday Rentals.com( one of the leading European holiday rentals sites ). The intention is that, at some point, owners will only need to maintain their listing on one site and changes will automatically happen on the other listed sites.

On the face of it, this is a welcome development for vacation rentals owners : getting exposure on multiple sites, with less effort and reduced costs is a good deal. However, a lot will depend on how effective these multiple listings are in generating bookings.

Cyberentals went through a tough time after the merger, but seems to have bounced back (see the comment on the COHR review here for Cyberentals ). It remains to be seen how much WVR plan to build on the historical strength of the Cyberrentals brand, or will be be submerged into WVR ?

It also begs the question, why not simply merge all the sites together ? (Although $299 per year would be expensive for listing on just one site.) If all 4 of these sites list essentially the same properties, they will only be differentiated by the renters they attract.

When I first launched Compare Owner Holiday Rentals , I started with the idea that I would sell "bundles" of listings on multiple sites. My idea was that I would negotiate volume discounts from the different vacation rentals sites and then sell a "bundle" of listing on, say, 3 different sites to vacation rental owners. Indeed, I had conversations with some of the folks at WVR about this concept, but for a variety of reasons, it did not go ahead.

I wonder will there now be appetite among WVRs competitors for something similar to this bundled concept ? Or will there is a move for more consolidation amongst the smaller / medium size players in the vacation rentals market ? Smaller sites will certainly need some way to combat the marketing muscle of WVR.

Regards,

Kevin

How many links to your Vacation Rentals site ?

I was prompted by a post on the www.laymyhat.com forum to check how many sites have linked to Compare Owner Holiday Rentals . There are a number of tools you can use, but the particular tool that was mentioned was http://tools.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ . This tool allows you enter up to 4 urls and it will tell you how many other sites have linked to these urls.

Compare Owner Holiday Rentals currently has 3275 sites linking to it, indicating a presence in the "average" range, although not bad for a site that has only been around for a few months. However, we have a long way to go, with leading vacation rentals sites such as VRBO and Holiday Rentals having 265,000 and 209,000 links respectively ! Presumably, many of these links are from vacation rentals home owners who have listed on these vacation rentals sites.

However, is all this linking a good thing ? There has been a lot of talk amongst SEO experts that reciprocal linking in particular has fallen out of favour with search engines when determining the "importance" of a web site in search results. Is it worth the effort to continue to build links ?

Although relevant one-way links, (with the right anchor text) are clearly best, my view is that relevant reciprocal links are still a useful way to build up the presence of your vacation rentals site. Although the direct traffic they bring will be minimal, there is still evidence that they will have some positive impact on your search engine results (particularly on MSN).

Also, there is lots of software out there to help minimise the effort involved, although I have personally found that active participation in much of the automated link exchange tools is quite low.

Personally, I have had good experience with free sites such as www.linkmarket.net and www.link2me.com : although the number of links you can exchange per day is limited, they have some nice features that make the process relatively automated.

Regards,

Kevin

Free Vacation Rental Listings Sites

Free vacation rental listings sites come in various forms.

I have noticed an increase in the number of vacation rental sites offering extended free trials or free listings in the past few months. Most of these are new sites that need to build up the number of vacation rental homes advertised on their site, and they offer anywhere from 6 months to 3 years free. Once established with a strong pool of potential renters visiting each day, the intent is to begin charging vacation rental owners for their listings.

Some examples of this type of site are villaholidayhomes.com and www.tenant.com , though there are many others.

I wonder if any research has been done to see how many of these sites successfully move from free trials to paid listings ? This is a area I plan to research later this year, so let me know if you have any information or thoughts on this subject.

On the other hand, some of the established vacation rental sites continue to offer free trial listings. This is a "try before you buy" model, with the intent being that you should be sufficiently impressed by the level of enquiries and bookings for your vacation home that you will go ahead and pay for a listing at the end of the trial period. Trial periods are usually between 1 and 3 months.

Some examples of these type of vacation rental sites are Homelidays and VacationHomeRentals .

However, there are also some sites that offer permanently free vacation rental listings. These are funded either by advertising ( e.g. Google ads) or offer the opportunity to upgrade your free listing to a paid listing.

Examples of these sites include VacationRentals411 ( which allows you to bid for position on their search results ) and holidaylease.com .

Finally, there are also sites which offer free classified listings. The most famous of these is Craigslist, although US FreeAds Vacation Rentals Classifieds is another popular example.

With all of these free options, why would anyone pay for their vacation rental home to be listed on a vacation rentals site ? The answer lies in the fact that most free vacation rental sites will generate fewer enquiries and bookings than the paid sites. However, it's still worth listing your vacation rental home on several of these free vacation rental sites : after all, what do you have to lose ?

For a list of some of the better free vacation rentals sites, visit Vacation Rental by Owner Forum and sign up for the free Vacation Rental by Owner Newsletter

Regards,

Kevin

Spain Holiday Update

Well, no sooner had I posted my comment that Spain Holiday.com had not yet contacted me, when I received a very nice email from them, with some comments and corrections on the review. Fairly unexpected for a saturday evening !

I've updated the review and it's now live : read my review of Spain Holiday.Com and let me know your comments !

Regards,

Kevin

Spain Holiday.Com Review

I've just posted a review of spain-holiday.com on Compare Owner Holiday Rentals . This is the first Spanish holiday rentals sites I have reviewed. I've also just realised that I have now completed four European focused reviews in a row, following on from reviews of Abritel , Holiday Rentals.com and Villarenters . It must now be time to move back to reviewing some of the US sites : please post a comment if you have a suggestion.

Spain holiday.com is the largest holiday rentals by owner site focused exclusively on Spain ( and the Spanish islands including the Canaries.) By focusing their marketing on one geographic region, they can carve out a niche that differentiates them from some of the larger sites. ( For more on this topic, see my article on the profitability of the Vacation Rentals by Owners Industry ).

I contacted Spain Holiday.Com to solicit their feedback on the review, but so far no response. I have had good feedback on them from other sources, so perhaps they will get back to me in due course. Also, I have not yet solicited comments from holiday rentals owners who have used Spain Holiday.com, but will do so in the next few days : in the meantime, if you have any comments on them, please feel free to post your comments here.

Regards,

Kevin

Poll : European Holiday Rentals .. the voting has begun

Looks like there are a few people who have stopped by to vote in the European Holiday Rentals Sites poll on Compare Owner Holiday Rentals (COHR). Our visitors include many of the webmasters and owners of the holiday rentals sites listed, so you have to discount the fact that some of them may vote for themselves, but hopefully we will get a decent trend of which holiday rentals sites produce the most bookings for owners of holiday rental homes in Europe.

As expected, www.holiday-rentals.com has gotten off to a strong start, and Portside Promotions is also receiving some votes, but I am surprised by the fact that several owners have voted for "none". What are we to make of this ? Is it that these owners don't use holiday rentals sites, possibly using their personal site or rental agents for bookings ? This seems unlikely, as such holiday rentals owners would probably not bother to visit COHR.

A more likely answer is that these votes indicate these holiday rentals owners get most of their bookings not from a European holiday rentals site, but from one of the US Vacation Home Rental sites. However, are these votes being cast by holiday rentals owners or perhaps the owners of the US sites themselves ?

In any case, please feel free to specify the name of the non-European site when you are voting. It will be interesting to see if many European holiday rentals owners rely primarily on the large US vacation rentals sites for their bookings !

Regards,

Kevin

Poll : European Holiday Rentals Sites

I have posted a poll on COHR, to determine which European Holiday Rentals sites gives the most bookings. You can find the poll here : European Holiday Rentals . Just scroll to the end of the page to cast your vote and you will then be able to view the results.

It will be interesting to see which sites get the most votes. Based on the Alexa traffic rating, you would expect www.homelidays.com and www.holiday-rentals.com to be the front runners, as they get the most Alexa-certified traffic. However, according to the latest Vacation Rentals Traffic figures we did, sites such as www.click4holidayhomes.com and www.holidaylettings.co.uk have higher average visitors per listing.

Which site works best for you ? Post your and vote or leave a commen here !

Regards,

Kevin

Cyberrentals Leads US Vacation Rentals Bookings Poll

Although vacation rental home owners are interested in many things when selecting a vacation rental site on which to advertise their vacation rentals, the most important factor is : will this vacation rentals site generate bookings ?

A few weeks ago, I added a poll to the Compare Owner Holiday Rentals site on the US Vacation Rentals page, which you can find here :
http://www.compareownerholidayrentals.com/us_owner_rental_sites.htm

The poll asks which US Vacation Rentals site has given owners the most bookings.

To vote, just scroll to the end of the page !

As I write, the leading US vacation rentals site in the poll is Cyberrentals : somewhat surprising, given that Cyberrentals received a lot of criticism after their acquisition by the WVR Group. It appeared that, at least for a while, they lost their way and visitors to the Cyberrentals site were down dramatically. Over the last several months, traffic to Cyberrentals seem to have recovered. When we did a review ( http://www.compareownerholidayrentals.com/review-cyberrentals.htm ) although the comments we received from vacation rentals owners about Cyberrentals were somewhat mixed, they indicated Cyberrentals was on the road to recovery. You can view the comments here :
http://www.compareownerholidayrentals.com/comments-cyberrentals.htm

Regards,

Kevin