That confirms the wisdom of your choices!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.
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.