3 SEO Tips for Holiday Lets

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for holiday lettings businesses can often go overlooked in favour of channels designed to drive immediate traffic at a cost. SEO is harder to scale due to the slow growth nature of the channel, but time well invested can pay dividends in the mid to long term and with many businesses not being able to service short-term arrivals due to COVID-19 there’s never been a better time to invest in SEO.

Many companies see the channel as an alternative to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising as they share the same space, the search engines on which in-market users often turn to in order to find their next holiday. Smarter companies see it as a channel that works alongside PPC, with paid media helping you identify keywords that are likely to convert traffic into sales for your site and then building landing pages to match. 

1 – One Landing Page, One Topic

Don’t confuse Google. Don’t create a page for every single keyword. Group keywords by perceived user meaning & semantics. 

Google knows that Pet Friendly & Dog Friendly are keywords with a large overlap. 

Google knows that Child Friendly & Family friendly are keywords with a large overlap. 

Google knows that Party House & Celebration House are keywords with a large overlap. 

If you create both a Pet Friendly & Dog Friendly page for your website you are competing with yourself & confusing Google at the same time. It will be more difficult for the search engine to correctly determine which page is relevant to the users search, and if it can’t figure that out – then you won’t win ranks! 

Create keyword & subject clouds of secondary keywords that relate to your primary keyword when you start to build pages and make sure to include them in the same places you might include your primary keyword. 

2 – Internal Links Matter

Backlinks are when a different website links to a page on your website, competitive search terms may need a significant number of backlinks to break through to the top 10 positions. 

It’s important for your own website to utilise links to help Google understand which pages on your website might be related, and how they are related. iPro makes destinations very easy in this regard, due to our breadcrumb links in search results but your own custom landing pages will benefit from both including internal links & having them directed to that page.

If you have created a Dog Friendly page for a key destination then make sure to include a link to that page from the Destination Page, and potentially every property that meets this criteria by adding it to one of the description fields. ‘This property is part of our Dog Friendly Cottages Collection’, with a link on the ‘Dog Friendly Cottages Collection’ repeated a few times throughout the site will help Google be sure which page YOU consider to be your primary page for that keyword. 

3 – Pay Per Click is NOT the Enemy

Ubersuggest or any other SEO toolset will help you identify the Search Volume on a given keyword alongside the suggested Cost Per Click (CPC) for that search term. Now go & search your target term on Google and make a note of any Ads you see and ask yourself the following:

• Does this company offer similar destinations to ours?
• Is the quality of our portfolio inline with the competitors? 
• Do we feel that people searching for this term would convert on our site?

If you’re answering yes to the above questions then this traffic might be for you! Is the Paid Difficulty score higher than the SEO Difficulty score in Ubersuggest? If so then this step is not as fruitful – however if the Paid Search Difficulty score is lower than the SEO Difficulty score you can use PPC to ‘trial run’ the success of traffic through the page by launching a small ad campaign focusing on that term. 

This combined with the Search Queries report from Google Analytics will help you to understand if there are any additional keywords for inclusion, and will help provide a proof of concept that this traffic is valuable for your business before you spend time & effort on acquiring backlinks.