7 Secrets To Achieving A Top Converting Holiday Rental Website
Even if your holiday rental website is receiving an impressive amount of traffic, how do you ensure your customers are converting?
Whatever your desired conversion – whether it be making a holiday booking, downloading a resource, or making an enquiry – you need to have a succinct and clear set of steps to turn your visitors into leads and customers.
Pivotal to achieving a high conversion rate is having a website that not only looks attractive, but works as a fast and well-designed engine, and gains your visitors’ trust from the moment they arrive.
With this in mind, here are our top 7 secrets to achieving a top converting holiday rental website:
1. Is your website unique?
One of the top ways to convert visitors into customers is to give them something they haven’t seen before – a unique and memorable name, appearance and design that’ll help you stand out from your competition.
Domain name
One of the easiest ways to check your website is unique is to use snippets from your website, wrap them in quotes, and then google them. Does your brand name come up top? Or are there duplicates? Namech_k is also a great tool to check your domain and usernames are available if you are starting this fresh.
Content
From the moment a user ends up on your website, you have 0-8 seconds to make a positive impression and clearly delineate what it is you do. So clearly state the benefits of your service, and get them excited. Try using a blink test as way to ascertain how likely your website is to convert.
Design and imagery
Whether you recruited a designer, agency, or designed your website yourself, there are some simple design principles that you can follow to improve customer experience and boost your conversion rate. These include:
– Following Hick’s Law – less is more
– Leverage the rule of thirds with homepage imagery
– Choose your colour palette wisely
– Optimise your CTA design and positioning
– Pick quality imagery/ feature your best holiday lettings
– Trialing video (this is particularly useful if you want to improve time on page)
2. Functionality
A quick and simple way to test your website is to input your website URL (homepage and a deep page, such as a blog post) into PageSpeed Insights. This will demonstrate your website performance on mobile vs. desktop, and suggest optimizations to make it faster.
Page speed can have a huge effect on website conversions, and can vary greatly according to device: mobile, tablet or desktop. For a deeper understanding on UX and what is working well on your website, we’d recommend integrating your web design with Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.
3. Conversion path
Holiday rental bookings are a tricky market for conversion journeys, as audiences will often want to filter for, and compare, a few different properties before they make a decision. Whether this be to save for later, get in contact, or make a booking, your website needs to be well optimised to encourage your users to take the desired action of each page.
Think of this in terms of “what do I want them to do next?”. For instance, if your visitor ends up on a specific property landing page, what information is available, and what will encourage them to make a booking or enquiry?
Here is a great example from Ocean Cottages:
It is simple, specific and non-elaborative. The conversion path is therefore very clear!
4. How do people behave on site?
Knowing what your visitors are doing on site is paramount to tracking conversions. Some of the best tools for analysing this include Google Analytics and Hot Jar.
Instead of just knowing how many visitors your website is getting, Google Analytics allows you to assess where they are coming from, how long they are on page, how many pages they are visiting, how they found you (was it organic or direct search, or social media?) and what percentage are converting – and this is just to name a few!
Hot Jar is a useful tool that offers a suite of qualitative data about what your audience is doing on your website. This can be a quick win for vacation rentals, as it clearly demonstrates how to improve your site’s user experience and performance, especially if visitors regularly miss a feature or regularly leave your site from the same page.
5. Integrate SEO into your website
Integrating SEO into your holiday rental website happens all the way from URL structure to your images’ meta descriptions. Fundamentally, you want to tell search engines exactly what it is you do/offer, and so attract visitors searching for your services.
Do some research around keywords that apply to you via platforms such as Keyword Planner, Answer the Public, and the autosuggest feature on Google. There will likely be hundreds of searches that you want to rank for – but find a few very specific variants and work around these to begin with.
To find out more about SEO please see our blog posts:
Alternatively, please feel free to contact us to find out how we could work with you to integrate SEO into your holiday rental website.
6. Increase Trust
One of the top secrets to achieving a top converting website is to have a high degree of trust. Some of the best ways to exemplify trust on your website include:
– Good customer reviews and testimonials
– Social profiles that are active, engaging and have a large following
– An attractive, well-functioning website
– Authentic imagery
– Excellent customer service – particularly when sending personalised emails and phone calls
– Partner brands
– A secure and efficient holiday booking software
7. Split Testing
Sometimes the smallest change to a website design can create a big increase in conversions. However, how will you know if you never test your theory?
One of the simplest methods is to perform A/B tests throughout your vacation rental website, for features you believe have a big impact in conversions. A few examples include the following:
– Navigation bar
– Login and sign up buttons (or any other buttons)
– Text font and size
– Colours
– Images
– Forms
– Headlines
You can find a quick list A/B tests to run on your website on the Kissmetrics blog. For more information for A/B testing during a promotion/ holiday period, see this post by ConversionReview.
If you are interested in trialling our channel management software for your holiday rental website, please request a free demo below! 
andy
Holiday Rental Business
Search
Categories
Guides and Resources
What next? Check out our latest guides.
How to deliver a world-class guest experience
Delivering a world-class guest experience is key to both attracting visitors, that they return regularly AND recommend your property to others. Here are eight tips to help you deliver an exceptional guest experience.
15 ways to increase your bookings
Are you looking for ways to maximise your online bookings and increase your profits? With the right strategies, you can make the most of the holiday season and super-charge your occupancy.
