Improve your gite website
The gite booking season for 2008 is more or less finished now, and it’s time to turn your thoughts to 2009. Apparently bookings are down this year, and if the state of the economy is anything to go by next year will be no easier.
So now is a good time to make sure your holiday-rental website is ready to attract the customers for next year.
I’ll assume you have already taken care of the content – nice clear pictures, easy to use menu system, nicely written text etc – without these you are doomed to failure. Try and look at your website as if you were someone wanting to book a holiday – if the site looks poor you will struggle to make people think your property is great.
Having taken care of the basics there are a few SEO (search engine optimisation) things that you can attend to to make yourself more visible in the search engines – google in particular. Before you start you need to know what phrase(s) you want your site to show up for…
Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and type in a couple of general phrases eg holiday Dordogne, gite Dordogne, then click ‘get keyword ideas’. When these show up, change ‘Match Type’ to ‘Exact’ instead of ‘Broad’. You can now see how many people searched for these phrases last month, along with a long list of alternatives.
Look down the list. You are best choosing a search phrase that (a) is appropriate for your property! and (b) has between 250 and 750 searches per month – any more and the phrase will be very difficult to show up in google for.
In my example I searched for ‘Dordogne gites’ and one of the phrases listed was ‘gites in the Dordogne’, with 260 searches each month. Even better, when I search in google for ‘gites in the Dordogne’ there are no pages that have that exact phrase, so you are in with a decent chance of ranking for that phrase. Of course you need to choose a search appropriate to your own site! The examples below use this phrase.
To improve your ratings for this phrase do the following:
1) Change the title of your page to be ‘Gites in the Dordogne’ – you can change this in the code itself, or using ‘page properties’ (or similar) in your website software. These four words. Don’t use the name of your property as the ‘title’ unless you think people actually search for the property by name.
2) In the ‘description’ of your page type something appealing – ‘Lovely gites in the Dordogne, set in beautiful countryside only two miles from a 13th century town’ type of thing – this description is usually used by google as their description, so it needs to be something to catch the google users eye.
3) Use the same phrase – gites in the Dordogne - in the main heading for your page (usually an <h1> heading if you are changing the code directly).
4) Make sure your home-page includes at least 500-700 words of relevant content. You want the words ‘gite’ and ‘Dordogne’ to appear once or twice, not more. DON’T USE THE SAME PHRASE LOTS OF TIMES!! Do try and use related words as well – holiday rental, cottage, Perigord, etc
5) Include at least a couple of pictures, with ‘alt’ (alternative) text including related words e.g. photo of our Dordogne gite
These few small changes should make a big difference to how well you rank in google.
The other aspect of making a site rank well in the search engines is to have other sites of a similar nature link to your site. This is a whole different challenge, but to get started why not find someone in the region with a property that is different to yours – if you have a large villa, and someone else has a cottage, agree to each link to the other persons site. It’s a win-win situation that is overlooked by most site owners. (We can sometimes help with this, just let me know if you are interested).
If possible you want the actual link to your site to be descriptive and using the same words as your ‘keyphrase’ – hence ‘click here to see gites in the Dordogne’ is much better than ‘to see gites in the Dordogne click here‘.
Hopefully if you make these changes now they will take effect before the 2009 holiday rental booking season gets underway – good luck!!
Good tips. We get about 40% of our rentals directly from the likes of Google and have spent a lot of time polishing the website. The importance of content - lots of relevent words, I mean - is, I think, becoming greater. Search engines are becoming ever more sophisticated in looking at what the site actually contains.
Which is good news for those actually trying to advertise a particular product who have found themselves burried by a whole pile of irrelevent, but nicely optimised, other sites.
Google are getting forever better but they still have a way to go in helping the small business who know nothing about website development to get found rather than the sites made by webmasters.
Our friends run a car hire company out of Bergerac airport and searching for ‘Bergerac car hire’ shows 140,000 results - but there are only four ‘real’ car hire companies in Bergerac in the first place (and they are the only one of the four on the first page of google).
So still room for improvement I think.