Check your competitor site and make yours better

Every time someone asks me where to start with optimizing of their vacation rental website, I always point to one direction - competitors.

There are many things you can do to improve your vacation rental site just by analyzing your competition. To find your competitor all you really need to make a search in Google, Yahoo or MSN for the term that comes close to your mind for your vacation rental home. Another words, what is the most common keyword the average renter will use to find vacation homes in your area? For example, my cabins are in Blue Ridge located in North Georgia. For me, to analyze my competition I have to type something like “Blue Ridge vacation rentals” or “North Georgia cabin rentals“.

Few important points:

1. Don’t use generic words to search for vacation homes in your area.

When you perform a search, try not to do any generic terms such as “vacation homes” or “vacation rentals”.

2. Overly large and government sites exclusion.

exclude from your search:

1. Vacation Rental Portals
2. Chamber of commerces
3. Any government sites

The reason for the exclusion we will tackle later.

3. Apples to apples, cabins to cabins.

If you only have 1 vacation home, you should compare it with results of single vacation rental sites. However, I strongly recommend not to be afraid of management companies who will naturally show up on top because they generally have more content. I’ve seen great optimizations done to single vacation rental sites that brought them up on top of management companies sites. If you are very new to the game, go through all sites on first page and pick similar to yours - with 1 property if you have, but if you only see management companies or multiple properties sites don’t be discouraged and continue digging.

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As of today, January 10 2008, there are few known (or guessed) parameters that believed by analysts of industry can increase traffic. There is a possibility that this will change as search engines are evolving constantly. If this happens - we will have another post.

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Lets take pen and paper, or lets open our Excel and start a new document. We will be now doing a comparative analyzes of competitors versus our vacation home. Once we are done, we can see what we can change and what we don’t have a control over. Lets make 5 columns:
Category
Website 1
Website 2
Website 3
Our vacation rental website

where Website1, 2 and 3 - competitors that came up first in our most common keyword search for vacation rental in our area. And category is our comparative metrics.

Category Vacation Rental 1 Website Vacation rental 2 Website Vacation rental 3 Website My website

1. Domain age.

This is something we don’t have any control over. However it is good to know the age of the domain of your competitor so you will have more clear picture of their vacation site optimization and position. In order to check the age, use the following tool - http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php.

Write your findings to your chart.

2. Page rank of the vacation site

I am sure you heard this term by now - “page rank”. Page Rank or PR is a “heart of our [google] software”. Nobody knows exact algorithm that is the base of Google formula, but you can have a pretty good idea of how PR is calculated reading here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank. If you have google toolbox installed, the PR will be listed in the self titled box of your browser, otherwise you can use on-line tools like http://www.pageranktool.net to find pagerank.

Write PR values to your document.

3. Last time Google cached competitor’s vacation rental site

To find out when Google accessed competitor website last time, click on the link in search results titled “Cached“. Write dates to your chart - or write how many days ago. The date it was cashed is an indicator of how often this vacation site being indexed by search engines. In the best scenario page gets indexed daily and for some sites - multiple times per day. We will talk later about caching and indexing when we discuss google webmaster tools.

4. How many pages are indexed by search engines.

For this exercise I want you to use all 3 most popular search engine sites. To find our how many pages on vacation rental site is indexed, go to each site and type site:www.[competitorvacationrentalsitename].com.

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN

Each search engine will bring different results, so lets record them all.

To insure right amount of counted pages, click on the last number in the paging of the search engine.

Small note: while doing this - notice WHAT pages are coming in first 5 results. The most important page, the higher it will be in the search result. If you can observe it and may be write them down for future references, you can come back to them after your research and do similar research.

5. Title and keywords for vacation rental sites

Warning - this information is only for your education, I want you to be really careful with your findings. Both - keywords and title tags were so much abused by webmasters it is advised now to be very gentle with it - don’t do any “keyword staffing“ or copying from another vacation home website.

In order to see title and keywords of your competitor - on your browser go to View->Page Source. it will open a notepad. In the notepad you will find something looking like

<title>SEO for Vacation Rentals  </title>

<META NAME=“KEYWORDS” content=“Blue Ridge Georgia Mountains Cabin Rental, cabins, blue ridge vacation rental,     

family vacation, family travel, my mountain cabin for rent, blue ridge cabin rental”>

Copy / paste title and keywords. You can do the same for descriptions, just to study competitor.

6. How many websites are linking to competitor’s vacation rental site.

For this category, type to each search engine (see above): link:[competitorvacationrentalsite].com.

This is very important step. Not only you will know who links to your competitor, but you also can see if you can be linked there too. See sites that offers reviews, travel or vacation sites that don’t require link back.

Note: don’t do MSN for this exercise and also notice how google cleaned up incoming links - you will see that yahoo will report much more links right now.

7. Google analytics use.

 This is very optional step. But I recommend you to do it because this is something I believe will tell a lot about your competitor. To do it, open again website source (View->Page Source) and search for www.google-analytics.com by hitting Control-F and copy paste www.google-analytics.com to search box. Some sites are using different web statistic tracking, but I want you to note competitors who does google analytics. I strongly believe that if competitor is using it, you should do too. We will talk about google analytics later on.

8. Canonicalization issue.

There’s something new that Google is encouraging now - canonicalization. To find out if vacation rental site has canonical issue, type in browser site’s name without www and see if it will turn it into name with www. As a rule now, you have to have only 1 instance of domain - with www or without. In the event if you have something like vacationrentalsitename.com/index.html that will be the same as vacationrentalsitename.com - you have the same issue. I will help you to work on it later on, but for now lets just see how competitors are doing in this area, OK?

9. Lets see our table for vacation rental sites comparing.

I used real findings, I will keep competitors sites un-revealing.

Category Vacation Rental 1 Website Vacation rental 2 Website Vacation rental 3 Website My website 1. Domain age 8 years 11 months old years 11 months old 5 years 3 months 2 years 8 months old 2. Last time cached 4 days ago 4 days ago 5 days ago 3 days ago 3. Page rank 4 2 2 3 4.1 Indexed pages - google 192 99 209 23 4.2 Indexed pages - yahoo 286 434 355 22 4.3 Indexed pages - msn 9 97 178 13 5.1 Titles Fill out findings Fill out findings Fill out findings Write you title 5.2 Keywords Fill out findings Fill out findings Fill out findings Write your keywords 6.1 Sites linked in - google 4 4 11 0 6.2 Sites linked in - yahoo 505 510 1240 335 7. Google analytics yes no yes yes 8 Canonicalization issue not fixed not fixed fixed not fixed

10. Conclusion - what did we learn from this analyses?

I am pretty sure by the time you are done with searching and comparing your vacation rental competitor you will have a great idea on how they handle their internet presence. After you done few things you can do right away:

• Rework your title, keywords and descriptions
• Rethink the structure of your vacation home site based on the competitor structure
• See if you can be linked to similar sites that competitor is linked to
• Start something that competitor does - blog, mailing, extra pages for news, etc
• Place your site to google analytics to have control over your traffic
• Create sitemap and submit it to google

SEO is not about tricks and secrets, it is about great websites and useful information. This is constant job and it will probably never stop. But I am sure if you continue working on your content while offering great service to your renters, you will be on the first page and fully booked!

Usability for vacation rental site

Today I want to talk about usability of your vacation rental site. Usability is exactly what you imagine when you hear this word - the science of how to use your site. It is also a science of behaviour of visitors on your site. The more you know about your site’s usability, the more sucessful your vacation site will be, more rental inquiries you will get.

You probably wonder why would you need to know about usability for your vacation home site. Simple - it is a an art to bring visitors to your site, but it is a greater art for them to get interested, come again and eventually book your vacation home. As you feel this is a far subject from SEO, I want to assure you, this is something that will pay off on the long run!

As for any science, there are certain known studies. When visitor comes to any site first time, he/she tends to “scan” pages - not read or browse them. The visitor will have about 5-7 seconds to analyze if this is a site they need and if they can not confirm it right away, they leave and may be never come back. Guess what? We just lost our potential renter.

Here’s few MUST for your vacatin rental website to have:

• Home page MUST be very clear about the purpose of the site
• Home page MUST have location of your vacation rental
• Make very easy to understand labels for each page (Calendar, Contact, Pictures)
• Make information such as rates, contacts are clearly accessible and very easy to read
• Don’t have any misleading information on your vacation rental site
• Don’t post any links to any un-related resources or any other websites that  has no relevance to vacation homes
• Make sure each page has an easy to understand title, so if gets bookmarked will be easy to find (Blue Ridge GA luxury cabin - rates)
• Create good printable version of your vacation rental - this way if they want to have information to be printed, they will have good resource to analyze your rental home
• If possible, make an ability for them to email your site to friends and family - vacation rental hunters are mostly family people who will look for approvals from others.
• Always allow to send you an email - preferably not a text link, but an image or a form. Most of visitors will want to call you right away.

few comments about above. Use more obvious labels all the time. I’ve seen “Virtual Gallery”, “Look inside!” and similar labels instead of simple “Pictures”.  Make your site a professional looking site. Many studies point now that Internet users are more sophisticated then before - they naturally want presentable sites.

Test your vacation rental site in bother Internet Explorer and Firefox, you will be surprise how site that was just so nice in IE will look ugly in Firefox or vise versa.

Happy booking!