Webinar Recap: Vacation Rental SEO: How to Increase Online Visibility & Direct Bookings

Wondering why your vacation rental website doesn’t seem to be performing? You’re not alone, which is why we held a webinar on this exact topic.

On September 25, 2024, Lodgify Content Marketing Specialist Miquelle Radich and SEO & Content Manager Alberto Fernández joined forces to discuss vacation rental SEO. More specifically, Alberto presented what he’s coined “the Quiet Website Syndrome”—the reason why so many vacation rental websites simply aren’t seeing traffic or direct bookings.

Of course, that’s not all: Alberto also shared practical tips for how you can cure your site of this ailment, boosting your online visibility and direct bookings in the process.

Wish you had been there? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered: You can find the full webinar recording as well as highlights from Alberto’s presentation and our Q&A session below.

Don’t see the form to download our SEO Checklist? Click here.

Webinar recording

Webinar recap

The webinar began with an introduction to our speaker, Alberto. Alberto is the SEO & Content Manager at Lodgify, where he’s been working for nearly five years. All in all, he has over seven years of experience in SEO, making him the perfect person to speak on this topic.

Next, Miquelle briefly introduced Lodgify and its main offerings, after which Alberto began his presentation, starting with an explanation of what he calls “the Quiet Website Syndrome.” How can you tell if your website is suffering from this syndrome? If your site isn’t getting any visits or direct bookings, chances are the Quiet Website Syndrome is the culprit.

But, as Alberto explained, you can dive deeper into this issue by looking at the four ways potential guests can find your (or any) vacation rental website:

• By searching your brand name
• On Google Vacation Rentals
• With long-tail keywords
• With related organic content

Alberto explained each of these methods and shared tips for how your business can maximize each. Then, the presentation switched gears to the SEO basics all vacation rental businesses should be aware of in 2024, including:

• How to optimize your page titles and meta descriptions
• Creating organic content to promote your site
• Link-building’s role in improving your site’s trustworthiness
• The growing importance of forums to SEO

To wrap up his presentation, Alberto shared the five key SEO mantras to follow in 2024:

Finally, we ended the webinar by answering our attendees’ questions, some of which are included below!

Ready to start working on your SEO? You can find the SEO Checklist Alberto shared during his presentation here.

Q&A session

Do you recommend creating a blog on my website to post related organic content?

Alberto’s answer: The more ways you create for people to land on your website, the better. You don’t have to do a blog, per se—you could also create a list of landing pages covering different topics. For example, you can create a folder on your website about things to do in your specific location, and then a drop-down menu with five to 10 landing pages to cover the most popular queries.

Just make sure to keep your content updated. This is another mistake I see very often. Things change over time, and Google really appreciates the freshness of content. So, every year, go back to your content, review it, and make sure it’s still relevant.

Also, whether you do a blog or landing pages, make sure that every page is targeting a specific topic so that Google thinks your content is good enough to show for the relevant search query.

What if my niche is time-sensitive? Can I change my long-tail keywords?

For example, here in Ecuador on the coast, whale watching is from June through October, and turtle nesting is from September through December.

Alberto’s answer: Once you have a page and you have content for that set of keywords, don’t change it, because it takes time for content to rank well. Instead, create alternative pages. Use your best keywords for your homepage and other main pages, and then add some secondary pages to target those activities that you can do during the low season so you can still drive traffic during that time.

Another thing to keep in mind is seasonality. The search volume for specific keywords varies a lot throughout the year. For example, during peak season, there’s a lot of people searching for “vacation rentals in Marbella” (a summer destination on the coast of Spain), so your website is going to get more traffic during that time. And in December, you’re probably going to get less traffic.

Does that mean your SEO is bad? Maybe your positioning in Google is exactly the same—it’s just that there are fewer people searching for your keywords. That’s why it’s important to understand your position for the keywords you want to be ranking for.

Why do searches for my brand name always return results for my listings on Airbnb and Booking.com, but not for my website?

Alberto’s answer: In this case, I would ask a few questions:

• What is your band name? Is it generic or more niche?
• How long have you had your website? Sometimes Google takes some time to “index” new sites (put them in search results).
• Have you checked Google Search Console? If not, check your website traffic and the keywords people are using to find you on Google. You can also see more technical elements here, like whether Google has indexed your website.
• How much content do you have on your homepage? If you just have a banner and booking button, Google considers this “thin content,” which it doesn’t tend to rank well. So, add content related to the keywords you’re trying to rank for.

Want more tips to help improve your website’s rankings? Check out our SEO Checklist! You can also learn how to verify the ownership of your website in Google Search Console here.

For link-building, should we link back to the sites that link to us?

Alberto’s answer: The main value is if they link to you—you don’t get extra value by linking to other people. (In fact, you want to be careful not to link to a lot of people at once, because that can be considered spammy.) If you do a link exchange, though, I would space them out by a few weeks so it doesn’t look like a handshake exchange. But if they link to you, that’s where the real value is.

However, Google always says to do whatever is useful for the user. So, if you’re writing a blog about the top 10 restaurants in your area, for example, including a link to those restaurants makes sense. Your visitors might want to read the menu or see how to get there. So don’t obsess about the links you include—just make it natural. And put the majority of your effort into getting other people to link to your website.

Want to see the rest of the questions we got? Check out the webinar recording!

Recommended resources

We mentioned multiple free tools in the webinar, including the following:

• Google Search Console for help understanding how your site is performing in Google search results
• Ubersuggest and Moz Keyword Explorer for keyword research
• ChatGPT for help coming up with content topics

And here are some additional Lodgify resources that can help in your SEO journey:

• SEO Checklist
• 9 Simple SEO Tips for Your Vacation Rental Website
• Webinar Recap: Finding the Unique Selling Point of Your Vacation Rental

You can also learn more about how Lodgify can help grow your vacation rental business with a free 7-day trial or demo call!

Don’t see the form to download our SEO Checklist? Click here.