You need a blog on your direct booking site. Here’s how to do it right.

What would it look like if you were driving traffic to your direct booking site with more and more organic leads? 

Would you have to rely less on Airbnb and VRBO for bookings? Would you be one step closer to building a vacation rental brand you’re proud of? 

Blogs may seem old school, but you need them to increase organic traffic. 

Blogs are long-form content that 

• increase visibility 

• attract guests 

• provide value 

• establish credibility.

So why do you really need a blog for your vacation rental business? And how do you blog effectively to market your business? We’ll go over all of it here so you’re ready to jump right in and get your blogs working for you. 

Why do you need a blog for your vacation rental business?

If you want to build a vacation rental brand, you need to nurture the guests you have and help more guests find you. Blogs are an excellent way to do both of these things and more:

• Provide value to your audience

• Demonstrate your expertise

• Build the know, like, trust factor

• Boost SEO 

• Earn more organic leads

• Drive traffic to your website

• Provide content to share in your emails

• Provide content to post on social media

Long story short, blogs are super valuable for building your business – every business should have a blog. But what’s the best way to do it? 

How do you blog effectively for vacation rentals?

When you write regular original content that your ideal guests want to see and you’re doing it right, you’re providing value to the guests that already know you and you’re helping new guests find you. So how do you do it? Here are some things to consider when blogging for vacation rentals.

Know your audience

Who are your ideal guests? Do you have a guest avatar? Understanding your target audience allows you to be a lot more strategic and effective in all your marketing, including your blogs. When you speak directly to your target guest and not a vague everybody, guests can more easily picture themselves staying with you, and you’re one step closer to a booking.

If you don’t have a guest avatar, start with this free guide that will walk you through creating an Ideal Guest Avatar step-by-step. 

Plan your content

Once you know your target audience, do your research. What are your ideal guests searching for? What are they wondering about? What will help them plan their trip? What will make them want to stay with you? 

Plan your content topics in advance. Consider keywords you might want to rank for, what guests are searching for, seasonal content, promotions you’ll be running, etc. Content calendars can be really helpful. I love planning monthly so I have content ideas ready to go. You can always adjust your plan if something else comes up that you want to write about, but having a plan goes a long way in making sure your content actually happens.

Make sure your content is compelling

It’s great to have lots of content, but you need to make sure it’s really engaging. Some things to consider including:

• Engaging headlines

• Informative content

• Variety of topics 

• Visually appealing

• Storytelling

Overall, make sure you’re speaking directly to your audience, providing tons of value on a variety of topics that hit at exactly what they want to know.

Optimize for SEO

To make blogs work for you, you’ll need people to be able to find them, including new guests (and homeowners). The way they’ll find you is by searching for certain keywords and relevant information. Before posting, make sure your blogs include relevant keywords and optimized meta descriptions and title tags. 

Keywords can go in the headers within your blog, in your title tag (which is the title that shows up in the Google search results), and in the meta description (which is the description that shows up in the Google search results).

Promote your blogs

To use your blogs most effectively, don’t let them just sit there on your website. Share the heck out of them! Share in email, newsletters, social media, Pinterest. This is natural ready-made content for you to share. You’ve already done the hard work of putting together the long-form content. Now take snippets to share with your subscribers and followers. 

Once you’ve directed them to your website to check out your blog, they just may start clicking around to view your properties and book. 

Blogging for Vacation Rentals

Ready to start implementing the strategies above to enhance your vacation rental blogging efforts? I’m rooting for you! Consistent, high-quality content drives bookings like nothing else. 

Want help planning your content or need someone to make your vision a reality and translate your ideas into 1000-word blog posts? Let’s chat!

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