Key Takeaways
- Plan content for holiday rental websites
- Make plans for improving your website performance
- SEO for holiday rental websites.
Advice from Lyle Markle, Art Director of Bookster for creating a holiday lets website.
Websites have become continual projects rather than a task that is completed after launch.
Lyle's 3 tips to create a holiday rentals website
It's a big decision to create a new website for your holiday lets from the time, energy and cost to create a website. But it's a necessity to receive commission-free direct bookings and reduce reliance on channels.
So we asked Lyle Markle, Art Director of Bookster for his tips to create a holiday rental website.
Lyle has made PMS websites for years both instant websites, and custom sites, and has a passion for creative solutions that wow guests whilst meeting the hosts needs for turning lookers into bookers.
He told us to focus on:
1. Content for holiday rental websites
2. Improving your website performance
3. SEO for holiday rental websites.
1. Plan content for holiday rental websites
"Websites are all about content.
The most effective websites have content that users want, can easily access and trust.
Content is also important for search engines like Google that use it to decide which websites will show up on the first page of search results.
Produce complete content - don't fill gaps
All too often in custom website design projects, we are presented with a completed or semi-completed design - which we then create content for.
The natural inclination is to ‘fill gaps’ in the design with content.
This makes the content feel disjointed, the user experience disjointed and increases the likelihood that users will bounce away from the website.
Create content in advance
With that in mind - it’s worth considering or even creating your website content before the design phase begins.
If you don’t consider yourself much of an author and the task of creating all that content feels daunting - try a collaborative approach if you can.
It can be challenging at first - but it gets better once you’ve got a bit of momentum. This process will lead to a better end product and your designer will love you for it!
2. How to improve website performance
Continual reviews
Your website is not carved out of stone.
Websites have become continual projects rather than a task that is completed after launch - and so they should be!
Measure performance and test it
There are dozens of great tools to measure the performance of your website - and to test improvements, whether its hosting the website on your own domain, changing the location of the booking widgets or making SEO (search engine optimisation) content improvements.
There is always a temptation to start over rather than fix - fight the urge to overhaul. I’ve seen this too many times.
A website might not be perfect - but that doesn’t necessarily mean its broken either.
Try making iterative, measurable changes to your website - it will save you time and money in the long run.
It’s a marathon - not a sprint.
3. SEO for holiday rental websites
Closely linked with my other tips is thinking about search engine optimisation (called SEO by some).
There are many aspects which affect how well a website shows up in search engines like Google and Bing, including attracting backlinks, and this can have an enormous effect on business revenue through attracting direct bookings.
When a website is not bringing in lots of bookings, some agencies see problems with a website and believe the best solution is to start again. I would strongly recommend against this.
The danger with scrapping one site for a new one is accidentally damaging all the SEO equity of the site. It can take years to build it back up!
Work with SEO experts, or take some time to research how to improve the SEO for your site."
There are lots of resources out there to help you and we can point you in the right direction.
We're on hand if you would like to discuss any aspect of web design, just get in touch.
