Owners Guide to Making the Most out of Your Property Listing

“Owners Guide to Making the Most out of Your Property Listing” – well that’s really just a fancy way of saying how can you present your property in a manner that is going to get you more bookings. Of course the quality of your property is a factor to those who wish to rent a holiday home, but there are many different aspects with regards to the way your present your property that can almost certainly ensure that you get the bookings you so well deserve.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

I’m sure that you must have heard of SEO and the way in which it can get you bookings, but what can you do to help this process? Rather than simply rant on about the way in which it works, let me first show you that it does actually work. If you open your internet browser and go on to www.google.co.uk, then type in “3 bedroom villa Mijas” the first two hits on Google are from Holiday Rental Homes. What’s more is that immediately under these two listings you can see “Show more results from holdiayrentalhomes.com”, if you click on that you can see a plethora of holiday homes in the Mijas area from our website. How can you ensure that your property rises up the Google rankings like these ones? It really is quite simple, the key is to emphasise and repeat key words linked to your property such as “4 bedroom luxury villa” or “2 bedroom spacious townhouse”.

Here are some tips on how to do this: when you fill out the main details page of your property on our loading engine, under ‘Property Title’ put down these key words such as “3 Bedroom Apartment in Murcia, Sleeps 6”. Further to this, when it comes to filling out the “Brief Property Description” and the” Comprehensive Property Description” it is important to repeat and emphasise these key words again. (See below on writing the description).

Writing the Description

Certainly your description is your own and the way you wish to express yourself about your property is definitely individual, but let’s focus on how to correctly get exactly what you say onto the site in a way to get you onto that first page on Google.

• When we load a property we generally split the “Comprehensive Property Description” into two paragraphs, the first paragraph regarding the property, and the second paragraph pertaining to the surrounding area and local activities.
• The “Brief Property Description” does not show up on your advert and your property page, it only shows up on searches. Therefore you can either copy and paste your first paragraph from the “Comprehensive Property Description” into there, or just give a brief description filled with the key words mentioned above with regards to SEO.
• For example, you may have seen on most of our properties that the description starts with “This 4 bedroom villa” or something to that effect. If you copy and paste your first paragraph into the brief description, by starting it in this manner this ensures that those keywords are in both descriptions.
• If you format your descriptions in this manner , then the only thing left for you to do with the description is to make sure that everything you wish to get across is written down and to ensure that you put across all of the necessary information for people looking to rent your property.

Availability

One of the most important things people look at when they want to rent a holiday home is the availability calendar, has this property owner got bookings or not? Whenever I come across a property which does not have any bookings, the first question that comes to my head is ‘What is wrong with it?’, and then I start to look for the negative aspects of the property rather than focus on what the property offers me. So it is crucial to firstly fill out your availability calendar when you load the property and secondly keep it up to date. Remember that one booking brings two! 

Prices

The price you choose to charge for the rental of your property is of course your choice; however it is very important to firstly ensure that you have at least 18 months’ worth of prices listed and that they are kept up to date.  It is very inconvenient for people to enquire about a property at a listed price and then find out the price has actually risen out of their price range. Another way to boost your bookings is to consider short term rentals under a minimum stay of a week. If you are willing to rent the property out for just a weekend or a few days, this can often attract many bookings especially for people on business trips and couples on a romantic getaway. Remember that any additional information you wish to enter about prices can be added via the Pricing Notes section under the Pricing date bands. 

Images

Images are perhaps the most important part of your advert; it truly gives people an idea of what your property is like on the inside. It is therefore crucial to try and provide very good quality images of the interior as well as the exterior of the property and a few images of the surrounding area and local activities. Remember a picture paints 1000 words; you can get more information across in your pictures that in any other form. NB: Remember that the first picture you upload will be the main picture of your property.

Activities

When you are on the facilities page, and you are clicking on the different local activities available at the bottom, remember to click all the activities that are nearby. For example if you are near a sandy beach, you can click on the majority of water sports listed. The reason for this being the more activities you list, the more of our landing pages your property will appear on. For example, check out our golf landing page.

Last but not least, remember that when you are loading your property to refresh your page (CTRL + F5) and to clear your cache and cookies regularly. This will ensure that all of your changes will take place immediately on your browser so that you can immediately see every change that you have made.

If you encounter any other problems, feel free to contact Holiday Rental Homes Customer Service at +44 (0) 207 096 4244 or email customerservices@holidayrentalhomes.com