The search phrases people use to find your property

[paolo]

In another thread, Alan made this point:

I tried two searches in Google. “Vacation property in South West France� and "Self catering property in Monflanquin�. In both instances two of my Holiday Rental Companies (French Connections and Areca) were on the first page and in some cases they were pointing direct to my property.

That confirms the wisdom of your choices!

But for a fuller picture I would do more searches, using permutations of phrases like ‘vacation property’ along with different location names – village name, nearest town, area, department, region.

You should find that the American sites are more prominent for searches that include the word ‘vacation’. And if non-UK English speakers are not a market for your location/property type, just use the ‘English’ English terms.

I use Google's pay-per-click programme and it gives me a spreadsheet showing which phrases are used most often that show my pay-per-click ad.

With pay-per-click you specify which search phrases you want to target. When someone types that phrase into Google, your ad is shown on the right of the page of results (simplified explanation).

You can see how many times your ad has appeared for each phrase, and this tells you which are the most used phrases by Google users. (Note: it only includes the phrases you have specified, so there may be good ones I have missed out).

Anyway, to get to the point of this post, here are the most popular phrases for my ad, with the number of times the phrase was used in the last three months. Provence is the region's name, Vaucluse is the department (like a State), Luberon is the local area, and Menerbes is my village.

provence rental..................3,423
provence accommodation.....3,200
provence rentals.................2,463
provence self catering..........803
accommodation in provence...720
provence house rental...........699
provence vacation rentals......676
provence holiday rentals........283
provence holiday home..........191
holiday rental provence.........189
provence holiday homes........151
provence accomodation........107
self catering in provence.......100
lodging in provence...............75
holiday rental vaucluse..........69
vaucluse rental....................64
menerbes house rental..........42
vaucluse accommodation.......37
accomodation in provence.....30
provence vacation homes......25
luberon accommodation.........23
vaucluse rentals...................19
luberon vacation rental..........18
holiday rental luberon............17
accommodation in luberon......12
holiday rental menerbes.........12
vacation rental provence.......12
luberon vacation rentals........11

There are variables which makes this a guide only, but it's interesting to see the relative strengths of each geographical step, as well as the popularity of the accommodation phrases.

Are there phrases that are missing? Which do you think are the phrases an English speaker might use to type into a search engine to find rental accommodation? Let's try to get an authoritative list, then we can do some interesting things with it.

[Christine Kenyon]

Thank you, Paolo, for once again sharing your expertise. It was fascinating to see your list of key phrases. As an "English English" user I would suggest that the phrase missing is "holiday cottage" as that is how many of our English guests find our sites. And your "Luberon houses" would qualify as holiday cottages.

Hope this helps.

Christine

[paolo]

Christine,

That's interesting, I have actually deliberately left 'cottages' out - my assumption is that British people don't call property in France 'cottages'. Do you think that they do?

To me a cottage is a thing with a thatched roof and a smoking chimney that you only find in Britain. But as you can tell by my name, I'm not completely British myself.

Any feedback on this gratefully received - do you search for 'cottages' outside the UK?

[Darren]

Holiday cottage, is a popular searchable term, I've also found Cottage holiday KW has also brought me some success. I'm not sure if this the case across your Europe.

I've always thought the term 'vacation' was only used within the US but many of the Eastern European countries use that term rather than 'holiday'

I think both Overture and Google give you a good idea of the type of traffic specific keywords provide, but they tend to be very US related.

Have a look at this keyword tool, which looks at Overture and Wordtracker results, and can be based on Country.

Darren

[paolo]

Darren,

I've been using this one, which is Overture's UK search check:
http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/sear ... uggestion/

It's supposed to tell you how many searches were performed (not sure on which engines) in the last month in the UK.

I was surprised by the high number of 'vacation rental' searches - about 4,000, as against 28,000 for 'holiday rentals'.

I was also surprised by a few of the results on this and I don't trust it. Some of the searches look too weird or mis-spelled to have been used the number of times it says.

I'll check the Digitalpoint one. I've been using that site to monitor my sites' rankings for certain searches - a sad and frustrating way to spend your time...

[Darren]

Paolo, I think that the Overture one is results from their own PPC service, which covers Yahoo, rather than number of clicks on the search engine.

Not 100% sure so don't take my word

Darren