Our OwnerRez Hosted Websites are highly optimized for speed, performance and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in several different ways. All images and webpages are served over thousands of global Content Delivery Network (CDNs) edge locations on every continent and are optimized for long caching. And our Hosted Website pages are minified and designed to display beautifully on mobile, tablet or desktop environments.
There will naturally be some slowness over slow networks, but by using aggressive caching and reducing document sizes to bare minimums (as OwnerRez has done) the impact of such latency is mitigated, especially for requests after the first request.
It is not normally possible to compete in the search engines against the vast advertising power of vacation rental listing channels such as Vrbo and Airbnb - your website normally builds repeat business from guests who first find you via the channels, and then book directly for later visits. Ordinarily, you will rarely if ever have guests who find you via a simple Google search.
So what can OwnerRez users do to optimize their Hosted Website for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Keep reading for some helpful ideas.
Best Practices
All OwnerRez Hosted Websites are designed automatically to be able to be effectively discovered and indexed by major search engines, such as Google. While not usually necessary to perform any special SEO optimization, there are commonly available tools that can assist in that process, such as the following.
Other important suggestions include the following.
- Be sure that the Title and Lead fields for each page are populated for your Hosted Website.
- Meta descriptions are the short summaries of text you see on the results page in Google so really make those words count.
- Headlines in the body of your property description should be descriptive, not just a property name. This is your opportunity to sell your property to guests.
- Be sure to include all property amenities.
- Run the OwnerRez Listing Quality Analyzer to check for errors and recommendations for improvement.
- Some OwnerRez users have had search engine success in smaller markets, by creating unique and relevant local content on a Custom page or Blog on their Hosted Website. This might be a regularly-updated calendar of local events; an index of local attractions with links out to their own websites and links back to your site from theirs; reviews of local restaurants; or many other possible ideas. Google places a high value on this.
- Establishing a business profile presence on Google is helpful and they may email you monthly Business Profile reports that include the top Google search terms. Be sure to include those top search terms on your website.
- If possible, optimize property images to a smaller total size for improved load times.
- Include captions for all images to sell your property's experience.
- Avoid additional scripts and custom fonts if possible as these can slow load times.
We have not found any commercially-available SEO services to provide any useful value, but, if you do desire to engage such a service, they generally want to place entries in the HEAD area of your website. This is accessible on the Head tab under the Theme & Layout button in your Hosted Website settings.
Structured Data
OwnerRez has added Google Vacation Rental Structured Data, a standardized format for providing information about webpages and classifying their content to all OwnerRez Hosted Websites. This structured data allows potential guests to see more about your OwnerRez Hosted Website, such as the name, description, images, location, rating, reviews, and more, in search results. In other words, more Google juice! We all need more of this as we maximize our SEO (search engine optimization).