How to Use SEO to Unlock Direct Bookings

Property managers wear many hats. Revenue manager, photographer, check-in agent, leak fixer — you name it, a property manager you know has done it! The newest in this list is SEO specialist.

SEO — or Search Engine Optimization — is an essential part of any direct booking strategy: without optimization, your direct booking website won’t get the eyes you need to boost your bookings. It’s like opening your store on a quiet back street rather than in a shopping mall.

SEO is really just a set of techniques that help your web page show up higher in the search rankings for certain terms. This increases the likelihood of getting more organic traffic, which can lead to more bookings and higher sales. As most guests start their search on a search engine, this is a huge opportunity to reach them at the beginning of their journey.

Sadly, SEO isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Google frequently updates its algorithms to stop people from taking advantage of the system, and make sure that searchers are getting the right results. You’ll need to stay up to date with these changes and adapt your strategy in order to stay at the top of the rankings and bring in bookings.

There are three main strands to a successful SEO strategy:

1. On-page SEO

This involves all the elements on your website that visitors see and interact with. It includes the text, headings, images, and the flow of your site. Ensuring these
elements are optimized with relevant keywords and updated regularly will help to improve traffic.

2. Technical SEO

This focuses on the backend aspects of your site, such as its structure, mobile responsiveness, and page loading speeds. These factors affect both user experience and how easily search engines can crawl and index your site.

3. Link Building

Perhaps the most complicated, link building relies on getting other reputable sites to link back to your website. This not only drives traffic from those sites but also boosts your site’s authority and ranking in search results.

To start improving your SEO today, the first step is to research keywords. These are the words and phrases your ideal customers are searching for to find what you and others are selling. For example, it might be ‘vacation rentals in Miami’, or ‘rental apartments by the beach in Marbella’. Look at your property descriptions, page titles, and content, and make sure that — where it is relevant — these keywords and phrases do appear. You should think about location, property type, target market and amenities as starting points and include these.

Speaking of content, what is there on your website apart from booking pages? Writing blogs, landing pages and simple FAQs should be as important to your direct booking website as great photos. However, when it comes to site content, it’s quality over quantity. Focus on writing
genuinely interesting, useful, and different content that your target audience really wants to read.Guides to local areas, activities, cuisine, history — you name it — will both interest your guests and drive more traffic to your website by showing search engines that it is a valuable resource.

Technical SEO gets a bit more complicated but it’s still within reach for those of us who aren’t SEO specialists with professional resources. This involves making sure that your website is making it easy for web crawlers to access and index your content, so that it can share it with the right searchers. Structuring your website in an SEO-friendly way can help search engines understand your site’s content and rank it accordingly. Keep pages that could confuse search engines and upset your site’s ranking ‘non-indexed’. Improving page load speed will also make it easier for Google and others to crawl your website.

Link building, finally, is often seen as time-consuming and unreliable, as backlinks rely on other websites seeing the value in your page, but with the right connections and high-quality content, getting backlinks on reputable websites will boost your own website’s authority score and visibility. Think about winning media coverage as a way to grow your authority. You can also team up with partners, including other businesses, who might be willing to take your content in return for you doing the same for them but be aware that the lower their search ranking, the lower the benefit to you — backlinks from poorly ranking sites can even hurt your ranking.

Hiring an SEO specialist can be a quick way to improve your site’s visibility quickly but remember that SEO is an ongoing process. Search algorithms change over time, and you will need to stay up to date with the latest tactics. But it’s an investment worth making to strengthen your direct booking strategy and bring in more commission-free bookings.