How do you market your vacation rental? If you’re like most owners you’ve posted your property on popular directories like HomeAway.com and VRBO.com with the occasional post on Craigslist (when time permits!) and that’s all. These sites are great, and are essential marketing for any VR owner, but why stop there? I’d like to introduce you to an easy and sustainable marketing avenue that has the potential to introduce your property to a whole lot of new eyeballs. This idea isn’t new or groundbreaking, but it is (IMHO) extremely underutilized by self-managed VR property owners. The idea is to catch those folks who are using search engines to find properties in your area to stay during their next vacation. Create a dedicate site…just for your property.
Websites are easy, cheap and effective!
Mind you, creating a website doesn’t have to be hard. It will take some time, but we aren’t looking to win any awards here. I won’t discuss the process involved in creating a website here, but I do want to discuss some of the key points that make this such an effective marketing tool.
People are searching for your property on search engines – they just don’t know it yet. Take a moment and think about the way you search for things online…. it could be a bowling ball, a shower curtain or the nearest dry cleaner. What are the words you use, the details needed to find exactly what you want, the locations (if necessary). All are specifically tailored to bring back that small piece of information you need to proceed on whatever project you’re working on in that moment. Your potential renters are doing the same thing. Will your Home Away, VRBO or Craigslist listings show up in a search result? They might, but given the fact that there are hundreds or thousands of properties listing on these sites in your area chances are good that you don’t have a prayer.
To illustrate my point, I want to direct your attention to our own Maui Vacation Rental website. Look at it…it’s not spectacular, there are no flashy doohickeys or Flash anything. It’s just a one page website, with all the vital information our prospects need to know. They can see high quality pictures, check our calendar, inquire for more information and even read some great quotes from our satisfied customers.
All-in-all this site took about 5 hours to create, but you know what? The look isn’t all that important. It’s the keywords. The results that our site comes up for in the search engines. Can you guess what our primary keywords are? I’ll tell you…it’s “Cheap Maui Condo” and we’re #1 in all major search engines. We’ve been #1 for that precious keyphrase since we launched the site in 2007. WE GET 50% of our bookings from our website! We do still carry listings on HomeAway.com, but we dropped our VRBO listing over a year ago. Why? Because our $8/month website brought us enough bookings to cancel the VRBO subscription and spend the money on other things – like high speed internet (which in turn has raised our bookings).
Now, you’ll notice we aren’t trying to rank #1 for “Condo” or “Vacation Rental”, this is because we wouldn’t get any bookings from these keywords (and they’re probably out of most of our leagues). We translated our business model into a succinct keyphrase. We have a condo, it is cheap and it is in Maui……”Cheap Maui Condo”. Some folks say that the domain is the #1 most important item when trying to rank for specific keywords. Still some say it’s the title tag. And, still others say it’s the links coming from other websites. I’ll save the search engine theory for others in the profession as it’s been discussed and debated 1,000 ways from Sunday. I will say, however, the congruency of every part of your website is key. Give it a relevant domain, title tag and text and you’ll be on your way to gaining visitors from the search engines.
There are plenty of other reasons to post your own website. We use it as an FAQ, a single point of contact, a reference for more information, a dedicated email address and even a central calendaring function (through an embedded Gmail calendar).
Listen, if you’re still on the fence about whether or not to create a website for your property, STOP. Just do it. Get some help, read a book, research online. Whatever it takes. It’s cheaper than any vacation rental directory over the long run and you’ll reap many, many bookings and in increase in your bottom line for years to come.
Note to self: Does a successful, dedicated website increase the value of your vacation rental? The built-in marketing and long-term booking source would be a nice addition to a prospective buyer. Must write future blog post on this very topic 
Happy Renting!
[Ron]
