SEO tips for landlords

Landlords need to know SEO basics

Not everyone needs to be a search engine optimisation expert (Justin Walmsley is just one such SEO expert) but it helps if you have a basic understanding of SEO if you have a business and you get business through the internet. 


Here's why:


Recently, I have started helping a family member to start generating further bookings for their flat in Frome, Somerset which they rent out when they are not in the UK to supplement other marketing of the property. The flat is already being marketed on three sites which specialise in holiday rentals, namely Cottages4You, Holiday Rentals, Holiday Lettings and AirBnB.

But, the bookings from the major rentals sites are disappointing overall. The site which is producing bookings is Holiday Rentals. The others are not. The owner complained to Cottages4You about the lack of bookings and they came back with a message which suggested he changed the photographs of the property to get more bookings. The problem not being addressed was that nobody was getting to the property's page on the site, so having different photos was not going to make much difference.

Furthermore, what was particularly interesting was that Cottages4You (owned by Hoseasons), according to the local area manager of the company, "spends millions to guarantee that Cottages4You is at the top of Google".

Of course, the member of the family owner of the flat does not care what Cottages4You spends on Google. They only care about the bookings for their flat; which are none.

I decided to take a look at the different sites by looking at the underlying code of the website (you can see this by 'right-clicking' the web page and clicking the 'View page source' link which appears) which can tell you a lot about how each website is likely to be viewed by search engines.

I looked at one aspect of each site and that was the keywords which they use in their photographs of the property which can be found by looking for a code which reads 'alt='. This is a 'tag' which helps search engines to identify the image and relate the keywords in the tag to the content of the web page (i.e. if your content is about a bedroom in a property the tags in the photograph on the page should be relevant to the content on the page).

In short, it was clear that Holiday Rentals had done a better job. They had made sure the webpage for the member of my family's property was optimised for search engines to know the relevance of the content to the search terms used by potential customers looking for a property to rent. The optimisation of the webpage on Cottages4You was pretty much non-existent when it came to the tags in the images, as was it for the other rental websites.

The tags on the photographs are not the only aspect of a webpage's search engine optimisation which will bring in relevant visitors to a page. There are many more details which need to be addressed to make help grow the visibility of the pages on your site.

However, it is a good indication of how much business you are likely to attract if you use one of these online rental specialists. If they don't do the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO) for your property on their site, how can you expect to get any bookings? Search engines look for web pages with relevant content to the search term being used.

To get your property noticed on these big websites relies much more on the internal search engine being used on the site than search engines like Google and Bing being able to find properties on the site. If I was a property owner wanting bookings, I would prefer to find it through Google or Bing than through the search engine on Cottages4You, for example.

That's why it's important it's important for landlords and landladies to know some basic SEO techniques.