French Life-expat France

Many (most?) people start their search for a holiday by using google or one of the other search engines. Because of this website I get a rare insight into what people actually search for - my statistics show me, each day, what several thousand potential travellers have searched for and how they found the site.

So I thought I’d offer some useful advice, because a lot of people are getting their searches wrong! What do I mean by that? Well, searching in such a way that the results shown won’t really be what you are looking for, or will only be a small sample of what you are looking for - which will stop you finding your ideal trip.

To keep it useful, any phrases referred to below have found our site in the last 30 minutes - they are not invented.

Searches in google and the other search engines tend to fall in two camps - long and short! ‘Short’ is people who search, for example, for ‘France’ and hope they will find what they need. ‘Long’ is people who search for, perhaps, ‘Condom France Languedoc Roussillon’.

The first is simply too wide to be useful, although many people each day search simply for ‘France’. The second, well - Condom (a quiet bastide town in the south west France) isn’t in Languedoc-Roussillon! This happens very often that people search for things that just aren’t related. Be sure of what you are asking for!

Here’s another similar one - ‘Thiviers Dordogne France hotels’. Looks fine…but just a minute, why have all those words? There is, as far as I know, only one Thiviers. Pages about Thiviers and hotels in the town will doubtless contain those two words. But ‘Dordogne, well perhaps, but ‘France’ probably not.

Remember that only webpages containing all the words in the search will show up. So a search for ‘Perpignan France hotel’ will include no pages that don’t actually mention France.

People outside France very often add ‘France’ after a place name when searching for it. But if you live in the UK and search for, say, Bristol, would you enter ‘Bristol England’? I think not.

Here’s another one just came through: ‘rustic cheap gite provence’. A sensible attempt, and clear what someone was looking for. But three of those words - rustic, cheap and gite - have common alternatives eg good value, holiday cottage etc. I would guess that ‘rustic’ is quite an unusual word on a holiday gite website, but what about ‘cheap’?

We are all perhaps looking for a cheap holiday, but will the owner of the gite be marketing it as cheap? remember, if the word ‘cheap’ isn’t on the webpage, the search engines won’t list it. I can’t be sure, but I’d be surprised if ‘cheap’ appeared on our own gite site.

Anyway, I won’t go on, I’m sure you get the idea. When doing your holiday search (or any other internet search) try and think of two, perhaps three, words, that you are confident will appear on relevant sites. Try and avoid very long searches and very short searches. and try and avoid duplication eg ‘Dordogne gite or cottage for holiday rental’.

According to google, 75 % of searches are ‘long’ and an incredible 50% are actually unique searches that no one has ever searched for before.

One last comment - most gite owners will refer to their ‘gite’ on their website. Most people searching will type ‘gites’ (plural) eg ‘Dordogne gites’. And the singular and plural will very often give different results, so yet again you might be accidentally eliminating 90% of the possibilities for your perfect holiday before you’ve even started!