If we want to get you enquiries and bookings then we need to get people to see your property advert, this means we need a website that gets a lot of visitors.
We then need to display your property in its best light and give potential guests the information they need to be able to take the next step in contacting you.
It's not an easy thing to do and it has taken us some time to get this right, but we've managed it and have sites ready to generate enquiries and bookings for you.
How To Build A Website That Get's Visitors
There are really only a few ways to get visitors to a website, you either pay for visitors directly or you invest in more indirect methods like search engine rankings and social media sources.
Directly paying for visitors is expensive. Buying adverts on Google can run up large bills depending on what search terms you want to advertise on.
Likewise paid ads on social media sites, in magazines and newspapers, and TV adverts can also end up being highly expensive.
How big can these advertising bills get? Expedia (who own VRBO) and Booking.com regularly spend around $6 billion a year each! (That's one reason why your commission levels keep going up…)
Obviously it's impossible to compete with that kind of spending, nobody is going to 'out advertise' these bigger travel websites.
So for our websites we had to get smart, and play a longer game.
How We Built Websites That Drive Enquiries
Not having a multi-billion dollar advertising budget meant that we had to go down a different route to build up our websites.
Luckily I, the founder, used to be a search engine optimisation (SEO) consultant, this is someone who helps websites rank higher in search engines like Google. My experience meant that I had a head start on what would be needed to get high search engine rankings.
Our initial websites were built with search engine optimisation firmly in mind and we have maintained and improved them a lot over the years.
One of the biggest factors in how Google ranks websites is how much it 'trusts' the site. Links from other websites can establish trust but what also helps, and is nearly impossible to shortcut, is the age of a website.
An older site that has been well maintained and has never done anything 'dodgy' is going to be far more trusted than a brand new site, or one that is constantly changing its name or content.
Our four main websites have all been live and updated for over 14 years now.
This gives them a level of trust that many other sites just can't match.
A Focus On Relevant Visitors
When you are ranking in a search engine the more generic a term is the more visitors it gets, but the less targeted the visitors are.
For example, the search term 'villa' may get 10 times as many visitors as the term 'villas in portugal', however people searching for 'villa' may want to find a villa in any country or they may be searching for a football team.
If you are advertising your Portugal holiday home then a searcher typing in 'villas in Portugal' is far more likely to be interested in your property advert over someone simply searching on the term 'villa'.
Taking this concept further, someone googling 'rhodes villa' is probably going to find your advert for your luxury Rhodes villa far more interesting than someone simply typing in 'villas in greece'.
The more targeted a search term gets the lower the number of searchers will be, however these searchers will be far more receptive to your property advert than someone just browsing everything.
These targeted visitors are where our sites excel.
We have top search engine rankings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo (if anyone still uses that?) for these more targeted search terms.
Location terms for towns and resorts are key areas for us. We also do really well for searches including terms like luxury, cheap, or for villas with pools.
Whilst we can't match the sheer volume of visitors a six billion annual marketing spend can drive to a website, our lower numbers are still very high compared to many other sites and are way higher than what most individual home owners could generate on their own.
Our website pages that list available properties get over 30,000 views a month which results in over 10,000 individual property advert views every month.
Lower Onsite Competition Helps Our Advertisers
Hopefully you can already see why our focus on relevant search engine visitors can deliver a lot of interested eyeballs on your advert, however we have one more advantage that helps our advertisers even more.
We actively limit the number of adverts / properties we list in any one area.
We call this our 'Regional Property Limits' and we have an article discussing it in more detail.
For now just know that we will not take an unlimited number of listings in any one area.
Let's say you have a villa on Corfu, with a listing on our website you may have 60 other properties that also list a property in that same area.
If you advertise with VRBO then you will most likely be competing with 3,000+ other properties all on Corfu.
There could easily be 50 times the amount of properties that you have to stand out against.
I'm sure VRBO get a lot more visitors to their website than we do however how many of their visitors are specifically looking for a property in Corfu? It's going to be a very small fraction of their overall numbers.
Of that much smaller number who are looking for a Corfu holiday property they now have over 3,000 options to sort through, further reducing the chances that anyone is even going to see your property, never mind send an enquiry or even book it.
That's why our listing sites really work to drive enquiries and bookings.
Our more targeted approach means that overall visitor numbers could be 5,000 times lower than somewhere like VRBO's numbers yet still drive a similar number of eyeballs to your property advert.
Listing Website That Work For You
As you can probably tell, we are in this for the long term.
We've kept out sites up and running for over 14 years and now have them ready for you to take advantage of.
We're not claiming to match the visitor numbers of some of these multi-national corporations that spend billions a year on advertisings, but we have carved out a highly targeted and specific niche in a number of countries.