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Tips for Advertising Your Vacation Rental Property

Cape Cod vacation rental property owners often overlook simple things that can be the difference between booked and unbooked weeks. Below is the secret to advertising your vacation rental property online via paid and free websites as well as some advice about offline advertising.

These tips are geared towards owners of Cape Cod summer rentals, but they can be applied to vacation properties anywhere.

Be aggressive - seek out all the places where you can advertise your property. There are many free and paid online services where you can advertise your vacation property and gain some bookings. The most important thing about your listings (both paid and free) is that they show up in Google.

Paid services: You need to first establish your advertising budget and select only those paid services which have a good reputation for “return on advertising investment”. For the local Cape Cod area the HomeAway Network (HomeAway.com, CyberRentals.com, A1Vacations.com and GreatRentals.com), Vacation Home Rentals, VRBO, and WeNeedaVacation all have a decent track record with the property owners I know and help. Remember, the longer you keep your paid listings running the more visitors you will get from Google.

HomeAway

Vacation Home Rentals

VRBO - Vacation Rentals by Owner

Tripadvisor

Free services: There are many places to advertise your vacation rental for free like the Cape Cod Summer Rentals section at CapeLinks and other sites like CraigsList or Kijiji can be very effective and if you are aggressive and crafty enough with your listings they can often outperform paid services. Some free listings may only run for a short period of time and may require relisting often or periodic editing to keep your ad up on the site. All of these sites will show up for Google searches, but the free listings that expire quickly without letting you reuse the same URL (web address) when you update will be short lived and will drop out of the Google index quickly.

When you add your property to different websites don’t be lazy, vary the text you use to describe your property. Do not use the exact same text descriptions on each site. If the site gives you multiple fields to fill out, take advantage of it. The more text and the more unique that text is across your listings will lead to more visitors and ultimately more weeks rented by you in the long run. This is the thing most often overlooked by property owners and is really a very simple way of increasing your exposure.

Take some time to gather your ideas for these unique property descriptions before jumping in to add your property. Using a text editor like notepad, write a few different titles and descriptions to use on the different sites. Also write some good keyword rich amenities and nearby attractions paragraphs. Mentioning nearby attractions will include these keywords in your text which is great for obtaining visitors from internet search engines.

Detailing your property’s amenities is also a great source of good keywords for your ad text. Like bbq grill, hot tub, swimming pool, internet access etc… If possible try to link your listings together. Not every one linking to every other one, but linking them something like listing A to B to C back to A or some other random pattern. The more links you can get to your listings the better your online exposure will be, but don’t over do it.

While adding your property to each site make a note of the sites URL (link) and any login info you will need to edit your listing later on. It may also be handy to jot down the length of time the ad will run for each site. Notice how the editing functions work as you enter your information and create your listing. This will come in handy later when you need to edit your property information.

Pay Per Click advertising: You can also drive eyeballs to your online listings by purchasing PPC advertising from Google Adwords or other similar services. The thing to remember here is to refine the keywords that you target. Don’t just bid on “cape cod vacation rental”. That search is much too broad, it will cost you alot of money and you will not get the right targeted visitors.

You are better off choosing keywords like “town/village name rental”, “nearby attraction rentals”, “rental close to nearby beach”, etc… Also target the specific weeks that you have available with keywords. Something like “cape cod rental week July 4th”, “cape cod rental second week August”. You may not get as many clicks as “cape cod rentals” but the visitors will be much more likely to rent because they much more targeted to your property. Plus, it will cost much less to use highly targeted long tail keywords rather than simple broad range keywords.

Offline advertising: As far as advertising your property in guidebooks, newspapers, etc… Don’t waste your money. This has been a loser for many folks I have talked with. Usually the person picking up a guidebook is already here and likely has a place to stay already lined up. They might look for a restaurant or maybe a hotel, but not a weekly rental. There is the chance that the guidebook may be brought back home and referenced at a later time, but don’t count on it.

If you need help marketing a Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket area vacation rental property contact me. I have managed several online rental property campaigns for my clients over the years. You can also advertise your Cape Cod Rental for free while you are here.

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