The Cheapest Way to Market Your Vacation Rental?

I’ve been thinking about SEO for vacation rentals again. I know it’s a popular method for promoting your place, because it’s free, easy to do and pretty successful.

Or is it?

In case you haven’t heard, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a technique for making your site appear prominently on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc).

Let’s start with the free bit. Tweaking the tags and the pages and collecting links are great free things you can do to improve your search engine position. Nobody charges you for these so yes, they are free.

The problem here is that this tweaking takes time, and time isn’t free. If you have a business then you should be accounting for the time that you spend. Even if you don’t do this, it’s easy to see how SEO work sucks up a ton of time.

Is it easy to do? I think it’s pretty easy to create links from Squidoo, or digg or forum posts, but once you’ve got a couple of these from the easy sites, it starts to get harder.

If you’re busy on a forum, you can easily collect a lot of links. 100 links from posts on the same forum aren’t really worth much more to Google than one link. So where do truly valuable links come from? From other people’s sites. It’s good if they are buried inside lots of relevant content, and it’s even better if the number of these links grows over time.

So I’d say these types of links are hard to get.

As for success, it depends on factors such as search volume and competition.

You’ve got to choose your keywords really, really carefully to be successful. Vacation rentals tend to have a lot of competition on search results (don’t forget SEO is a popular method, like I said).

Even if you’ve done a great job of choosing your niche it’s pretty hard to translate that into a long tail keyword that come top on search results. Maybe your niche is “I’ve got the only 8 bedroom house by the water in Vancouver and I’m only targeting married couples with 16 children”. Do people type that phrase into Google? I doubt it.

So where does that leave us? As I said, I’ve been thinking about this and I reckon that SEO can be tough for your vacation rental website. It certainly isn’t free. I’m sending some tips to my vacation rental subscribers later today and you can catch them too if you sign up for my free guide.