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Placeable recently conducted a survey of 1000 people, asking them a range of questions related to their online search preferences while on vacation. The results reveal how vacation rental businesses can easily pick up site traffic from tourists seeking information about their trips.
Local listings are often overlooked in the vacation rentals segment, because rental managers and owners fail to see how they benefit them in capturing out-of-town business.
The fact is, listing your business with top online business directories, as well as smaller local directories, increases a business’s web presence and ranks it higher in search engine results pages, which are most definitely NOT just local.
Test the Waters
For example, performing a simple search for “accommodation Lake Tahoe” yields in the results one listing for “Holiday House Lake Tahoe,” and a quick search of local business directories reveals their listing in the North Lake Tahoe tourism website. Comparing competitors’ search results is often a good way of measuring a business’s relative online search performance.
Before booking their vacation, people love to search for accommodation online: a whopping 70% of people going on vacation use a search engine to plan their travel itinerary before leaving home, and many use accommodation sites, sometimes even exclusively.
Accommodation sites such as Booking.com, Hotels.com and HomeAway.com are some of the prominent players in the holiday accommodation sector, and even these are frequently discovered through a search engine.
These ignoring the elephant in the room anymore, these searches are most likely to be done through Google, which currently has a share of roughly 70 percent in search engine queries worldwide.
On Location
Once they have left home, most people prefer to carry mobile devices with them, as evidenced by Placeable’s survey of 1000 people, in which 88 percent of respondents conducted searches using a mobile device while on vacation, as Search Engine Land reports.
Local Business Listings
Getting listed on large online directories as well as local business directories is an important part of raising your business’s search rankings. The more accurate and consistent your business information is across all the directories, the more satisfied search engines will be that your business is legitimate and relevant to people searching for accommodation.
If your listing and website information is not up to date and your site isn’t prepared to handle mobile devices, you may in for a hit to your reputation both locally and nationally. According to the report from Placeable, an incorrect listing of a brand leading to “a bad experience finding a national brand” while on vacation, will impact roughly a third of people’s perceptions of that same brand at home.
Social Media
Although Google will never explicitly say so, Google+ is the most important place to have a business presence as it adds tremendously to your search rankings. Yelp, Foursquare, Bing Places, 411.com and Yahoo! Local are just a few of the larger directories and social media spots on which to list your business.Other Holiday Searches
Other things that vacationers frequently search for include restaurants, holiday shopping destinations, attractions and items that were left behind by mistake.
85% of people used a mobile device while on vacation to search for restaurants and retailers. For restaurants, 65% of travelers will search for an establishment within five miles of their location, with nearly all of them looking for a local restaurant rather than a national chain.
“Shopping holidays” are a primary or secondary reason for taking a vacation for 51% of respondents in a survey by the Travel Industry Association of America. Apparel and shoes are the most popular items purchased by shoppers, with men spending around 10% more than women on average.
Attractions are sometimes searched for once vacationers have reached their destination, unless the destination is the home to a major attraction such as a theme park (the primary reason for the visit).
In the case of items e left behind, people surveyed generally said they would go to the nearest local store to buy them while on their trip, and would not rely on online reviews to make their purchase decision.
Summarizing the above findings nicely, the CEO of Placeable says the survey reveals that national retailers should "optimize themselves locally to capture vacationers searching for non-brand products, services and places."
Alternative Search Engines
When considering paid advertising, the Yahoo Bing ad network accounts for a smaller portion of the impressions delivered to potential customers, but can offer benefits over Google. ComScore data suggests that the searchers on the Yahoo Bing network are likely to spend 5.4 percent more than Google searchers, according to group twenty seven.
While you can’t expect to see an immediate jump in your online presence after listing your business on various sites, your search rankings will improve over time. With 20% percent of searches on Google being related to a destination or location, it’s high time to start capitalizing on the local search action for vacation rentals.