Most effective listings sites?

OTA = Online Travel Agency, which means those sites that sell the booking and take the payment for you.
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ourinns
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Post by ourinns »

As you say, you get the high rankings by being listed with commercial sites. However, I think that it is still important to have your own site simply because it's expected these days.

I don't know about others, but in our case it increases our rentals significantly. Over the summer, about 30% of our bookings came from our own site ie it effectively increases our income by about 50% over the summer. Over the whole year, it brings in about 20% of our bookings (around a 25% increase in overall income).

In our own case, having mascamps.com will cost us something like £50 over the coming year and it's far and away our most profitable £50 of marketing spending. The place we get most of our bookings from (commission based) cost us about 1000€ and brings in a similar level of bookings to our own site.

I don't deny that keeping the website current can take a good deal of time but, for us, it's time well spent.

The free sites are useful as a starting point but can make you look amateur. After all, it only costs about £50 a year to get a proper domain name and webspace.


Arnold
alexia s.
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Post by alexia s. »

" Over the summer, about 30% of our bookings came from our own site ie it effectively increases our income by about 50% over the summer"
Arnold, that is only true if you wouldn't have booked those weeks anyway through the commercial sites.
It isn't the cost of a personal site which bothers me, it's the time spent maintaining its listing position.
I don't know if everyone(=most people)expects a personal site today. (I refer people to the free one I put up one morning. It doesn't rank anywhere!)
Best,
Alexia.
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Alan Knighting
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Post by Alan Knighting »

Alexia,

Although I am in a very different location from you and my properties are quite different in nature from yours I find myself in a remarkably similar situation.

I don't want to generate lettings throughout the year, I am registered as a Micro Bic and I prefer to keep my rental income with those limits.

I use the commercial rental sites only, four or five of them, and I carry out an annual review and plan forward for the next twelve months.

I don't have a personal website although I keep promising myself to create one. I might create one over this winter but only because it might be nice to have. I can't see any real value in having one. Even in the unlikely event of it producing 50% of my bookings they would represent less than 25% of my total bookings (more than 50% of my guests are returners) and they would simply be instead of, and not in addition to, rental site bookings. At the end of the day, my approach is working for me.

My view towards Search Engine Ratings is a simple one. An individual website doesn't have a cat in hell's chance of coming first in response to a search "Vacation Villa in Provence" no matter what the site owner might sensibly do. Even if it did, it wouldn't be there for more five minutes and, even if it did, it wouldn't make any worthwhile difference to bookings. It's just not worth the time and effort for me when one considers the returns.

I can get top of the list anytime I like by searching on my own name. Go on, try it now. Do a Google search on "Alan Knighting" and see what you get. I'll put money on it that the first page is nearly all me, but who is going to do that?

It's all "horses for courses" and there is no one right way. Every owner will do what works for him/her. It's when it doesn't work that one has to do something about it. In the meantime, if it's not broken don't mend it.

Alan
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Post by ourinns »

As we're not running at 100% occupancy yet, our site does, in this instance, represent a 50% increase in income (or close to) for us over the summer as the commercial sites wouldn't have filled us up (we're very large, so it takes some doing to get us full). Over the remainder of the year, the 25% income increase also applies as we've rooms spare most of the time outside the summer.

I don't know if it's anything to go by but the only bookings we've received that have completely filled us up have all been by way of our own website. Those on their own have clocked up more than 5000€ of income.

I don't really worry about our positioning to be honest. I don't think that it's something to get hung up on. All that's really needed is a full description of your place and the area you're in: that alone will almost certainly hit the bulk of the keywords that people might use to find you.

We find that people expect us to have a website but then that might be a side-effect of us attracting those kind of people.

It doesn't really have to be a paid for site that you have although I do think that having your own domain is definitely worthwhile (it's only £10 a year or so for a .com) and you can point that at your existing free site.

Ironically, the free sites can rank quite well (it will take a while for your site to get into the rankings though).



Arnold
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Alan Knighting
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Post by Alan Knighting »

mascamps wrote:As you say, you get the high rankings by being listed with commercial sites. However, I think that it is still important to have your own site simply because it's expected these days.
Expected by whom? I would like to know. In the last 6 years I don't recall any of my enquirers or my renters expecting me to have a personal website. So I ask again, expected by whom?

I know you think that your hotel and restaurant is in direct competition with my self-catering properties (you have already said so) but I still do not agree. I think you have entirely different targets from me and you are in a different marketplace from me. My guests come to me for the very reason they do not want to be in an hotel and they do not want me to provide food. In the extreme, my local camp site owner doesn't think he is competing with P&O Cruises but they are both in the holiday industry.

The time may come when I have to have a personal website because my guests insist on it. Until then, it will remain an unnecessary but attractive luxury.

In fact, I am seriously thinking about developing my own personal website during this winter but don't hold your breath, it may not happen.

Alan
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paolo
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Post by paolo »

Welcome to the forum, evabal! Image
I disagree with "you should choose the listing sites that come up for your searches for similar properties in regions your property ist". It is NOT neccesarely true. It is very much depend wher you are (not your property BUT you) located. Search engines (especially Google) have a lovely way to keep tab on your location and the ways you are doing searches. (They do this in many ways but I do not want to be technical). I am based in Canada and my apartment I want to advertise is in Hungary. If I enter "Budapest vacation rental" Homelidays does not even came up in the first 5 pages.
I get the same results in the UK and I don’t see that as an argument against choosing from the listing sites that rank best for the likeliest searches.

Obviously a surfer is unlikely to click on a page about Maui when looking for something about Budapest, so these rogue results are irrelevant.

The top 10 results for the search ‘budapest vacation rental’ are highly relevant – 6 major listing sites and the rest are Hungarian local sites.

You are assuming that people are finding your homelidays ad by searching on that phrase. They are not, because it does not rank well for that phrase. Try ‘self catering hungary’ – homelidays is no.1 on Google for this phrase, or ‘self catering budapest’ – no.3 on Google.

If you are not getting as many enquiries from your vrbo ad, the most obvious reason to me would be that your target market is more British than American. An American would never search for ‘self catering’, but would search for ‘vacation rentals’, thereby finding vrbo high on page 1.

By contrast ‘self catering’ is a very popular British search phrase for accommodation.
In fact my apartment is listed on many sites that I did not get 1 single enquieries from but I am sure it helped my ranking. (# 1 on MSN and #2 on Yahoo.
For which phrases? Ranking doesn’t mean anything unless it is ranking for a phrase.
Paolo
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paolo
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Post by paolo »

mascamps wrote:I had a lot of places he'd not come across (and a lot of them very effective ones too) simply because we'd both used a bunch of different keywords in our searches and had both come at it from a different direction.
Getting a comprehensive list of keywords is an essential part of the process of finding the best listing sites. If you only find half of the potential phrases people will use, you will not find all the best potential listing sites.

The first step is brainstorming (and talking to your neighbour as you did could be considered part of that) to get as many ideas for words or phrases on your list as you can think of. Using the Google, Overture and Wordtracker keyword suggestion tools will broaden this list. As will nicking ideas from your competitiors' Keywords tags. Then a brief pay-per-click campaign using all your keywords will tell you which ones are really being used.

It's not perfect, for example you may not think of including the word 'charming' in any of your phrases, so you may miss out on Alexia's guest. But then again, how many people per year will search with this word in the phrase?
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Post by evabal »

Paulo: I appreciate your reply.
If you are not getting as many enquiries from your vrbo ad, the most obvious reason to me would be that your target market is more British than American. An American would never search for ‘self catering’, but would search for ‘vacation rentals’, thereby finding vrbo high on page 1.
So far I only had 1 booking from England, so I do not think that is neccesarely valid. Most inquiries came from Italy, and Spain and Australia, and the ones from USA (VRBO). I am not sure what is the translation for the homelidays keywords neither of those languages.
Obviously a surfer is unlikely to click on a page about Maui when looking for something about Budapest, so these rogue results are irrelevant.
I wish you would of get the sarcasm the sarcasm (humor) from my post. You can not think for a moment that I would take that seriously.... Obviously Maui and other irrevelent locations came up because of link exchanges on various sites that people use in order to boost their rankings.
For which phrases? Ranking doesn’t mean anything unless it is ranking for a phrase.
Budapest vacation rental, budapest apartment rental. It sound good to me, although so far (since August) only one booking came directly from my page.
Try ‘self catering hungary’ – homelidays is no.1 on Google for this phrase, or ‘self catering budapest’ – no.3 on Google.
Now that is interesting. I never thought of that. I will certainly include them in my meta tag and ins ome of my "editorial".
Thank you. On the other hand Google brings up Homelidays for those word as #1 in England but certainly not in Canada but it IS in fact on the first page. As I said before google keeps a very good tab on people (location, searching behavior, etc.)

I think we are just very different, how we approach this subject and I respect your opinion.

Alexia, Alan: I very much agree with you. You certainly have to be comfortabe with anything you, and must have your own reasons to do it. If your own website would not make sense or you think you would have no time to maintain it that it is sensless and could make more harm than good. Nothing is worst for Internet marketing than "half baked" ideas and "abandoned" sites. I think both of your listing sites are very informative. If you think that some additional photo and description would help you can create even a one page "flyer" type" of website ath tyou can direct your potential guest for further info. If you get all the bookings and you feel the website would be an additional burden that certainly do not do it.

Eva[/quote][/code]
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Post by paolo »

Hi evabal,

'self catering budapest' is just an example of how people may be finding your homelidays more than your vrbo ad. If most of your enquiries come from Italy and Spain, that may be because homelidays has a multilingual site. Australia, I don't know, but there are reasons for everything on the internet.

What is your method of choosing your listing sites? You say you chose homelidays because people were talking about it here. What if there was a site that could perform 3 times better for you than homelidays - how would you find out about it?

On the localised search - if you use google.co.uk, yahoo.co.uk, etc, you should get the same results as someone in the UK shouldn't you?
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Post by evabal »

Hi Paulo:

I very much agree with you on using the method of entering key word into serch engines. I have no doubt about that. I am only saying that it should not be the final and clear indicator of site placement. With all honesty as you may see I only charged 280 EUR for a week (small apartment) to begin with my advertsising budget was a big consideration. As I am so far happy with Homelidays and it would be way to early to write off vrbo (end of Season shall not be the indication) I certainly will use the key word method. I still think that is very valid what I said that "checking from your own location is not neccesarely the best indicator." You proved me right by giving me the heads up with "self catering apartment" that was not even in my search terms. (Now you should see my meta tags and the new description, thanks to you :) ) I am still hoping that Google will pick-me up eventually and I would get a reasonable placement, especially because of my site address, which is very relevant.



I would love to read more comments about adword placements. I just read some articles about how the competition keeps clicking on ad placements, so that scares me with my small budget. With all respect business practices in Hungary are still in the kommunist era.
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Post by ourinns »

Alan: it's not the competition amongst hotels/B&Bs/self-catering that dictates whether or not to have a website. It's just that a lot of people simply assume that you do have a website these days (although I do accept that there are a sizeable chunk of people who don't use the net to book places). However, I do accept that in your own case there wouldn't be much point in having one as you're effectively at 100% capacity anyway due to your microbic limitation. When/if we reach a similar 100% occupancy, I honestly don't know what we'll do as clearly our own website will be directly competing with listings that we have. I guess we'll have to look at where we appear relative to those listings and balance the cost in our time vs the cost in money for the advertising.

Paolo: You're right of course about needing a comprehensive list of keywords and both me & our listings partner think we have. However, what we were doing on our searches was looking for places to list which, of course, requires a different set of criteria to find them. What I found very strange about that was that our two lists had almost no overlap at all and yet both lists contained sites that have proved to be excellent places for the other to be listed on. We were (or so we thought) using similar criteria in our searches but perhaps not. I say "perhaps" because our opposite number has been building his list for 5 or 6 years whereas I did in about 18 months.

Our little exercise was interesting for me in that it showed just how important it was to develop a list of keywords for our site and then work through the various permutations of that to find places that would in turn give us a good placement. Haven't gotten around to doing that completely yet but we're hoping to do that over the winter.

I'm not sure that you can rely on using yahoo.co.uk from, say, France coming up with the same results as yahoo.co.uk from, say, the UK. Very hard to prove either way though as there would be so many variables (eg what if you set your language preference to Spanish and do the yahoo.co.uk search?).

Evabal: I wouldn't worry overlly about the competition clicking on your ads and bankrupting you. They're not going to have the time to do that when it would cause you most damage as they'll presumably be busy dealing with their own bookings then. Also you can set a limit on your advertising spend.


Arnold
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Post by Alan Knighting »

Arnold,

I fear I may be coming over as someone who is anti personal websites. Nothing could be further from the truth. In my business life as the managing partner of a law firm I wrote the firm's website and a very large Intranet. Both were information based (our sorts of client don't choose law firms through the internet) and both were very popular in their own ways.

Naturally, you can't get access to the firm's Intranet (at least I hope you can't) but you could look at how my work has been developed since I retired. The address is http://www.watsonburton.com/home.aspx if anyone is at all interested.

I feel sure I should have my own personal website if only to square the circle of marketing, but I'm lazy.

Alan
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Post by evabal »

Alan: It is a nice looking, clean site. Of course people do not "book lawyers" through a website but I think maybe they check some info on it after an intial meeting. Each website has to determine what the purpuse of it. (It could serve as a brochure to provide further info, it could be an advertising tool for companies who do not do business over the Internet, it could help drive traffic to your business site, it can be a "store" for even vacations or can be almost all at the same time.) I di dnot get from your posts that you are up against websites! I totally understood your point you were making.
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Post by Alan Knighting »

Evabal,

Thank you for the kind words.

Perhaps I should view a personal website as being "all things for all men" and get on with creating one for myself.

Alan
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Post by ourinns »

No, I didn't take it that you were anti-personal sites per se. I've seen a whole lot of websites over the years that are there just because people think they should have a website and who haven't thought beyond that.

You're a good example of a case where there'd be no point in you having your own website. It's not going to increase your business because you've hit 100% in effect and, unless a lot of your bookings are from commission based places, you're not going to reduce the cost of picking up reservations with your own site.

I was going to say that we're a bit unusual as we're not here that long (therefore running at less than 100%) and have a high percentage of our bookings via commission based places but perhaps that isn't unusual? Does anyone know?

Anyway, the combination of those two things makes us having our own website a good move for us. We get more bookings (on average 25% more) and the more bookings we get direct, the less commission we pay. To take a very simple example, the three biggest bookings we've had this year (representing 100% full with meals for five days) would have cost us between 250€ and 900€ depending on how and where they were booked through vs "nothing" by being booked direct.

As regards your former site, I really welcome the arrival of such sites and particularly the relatively recent arrival of the ability to contact directly one's bank manager, solicitor, etc.

If you do get the urge to run up your own site, the "instant website" from www.1and1.co.uk is brilliant value at all of £2 a month. Marketed as a starter package but the 250mb is more than enough space for us (add another £10 or so per year for a domain) and has all the usual facilities too. I've no links with them except for them billing me.



Arnold
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