Why Put Your Whitby Holiday Accommodation on A Large Characterless Agent's Website ?   by Alan Davidson

in Search Engines / SE Optimization    (submitted 2009-09-14)

To invest on search engine optimisation, is very likely to be the best investment you have ever made if your website sells products which are of reasonable value. In this example it's a holiday cottage in Whitby North Yorkshire.

If you, like me, own rental holiday accommodation in Whitby, or any other part of the world, you probably want the highest possible occupancy levels, which equal in return to a high rental income throughout the year. If you are not totally achieving this at the moment, I will explain briefly how I do, and so could you, using Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short.

My own Endeavour holiday cottage in Whitby enjoys an occupancy level of almost 100% over 52 weeks of the year. We are actually spoilt for choice for bookings, often going for short term lets, three or four days rather than full weeks, because these are more profitable. We achieve this occupancy level because my Whitby holiday cottage website is on the first page of Google and all the other major search engines for all the relevant keywords, and so receives hundreds of hits on the website each day throughout the year. The time and effort using SEO to produce this kind of prominent high ranking position in search engines, produces financial rewards that far outweigh the costs of the work necessary to achieve it.

Latest statistics say that 86% of searches on Google are never going to beyond page two. If you think of the World Wide Web as a city, having your website on page one of the search engine in the first 10 listings is like having your shop on the main street, next to the entrance, of the biggest shopping precinct in history, where footfall is enormous. Customers are coming in and out of your shop all the time. Being beyond page two of Google is like being on the outskirts of town where few people pass your shop.

The majority of holiday cottages, flats, and caravan owners usually have a website that is not ranked very well on search engines and so gets very little traffic. Often they rely on bookings from a large letting agent, who takes a percentage fee. These large letting agencies usually, like me, have invested in a website which is ranked highly on search engines. This is good but what lets this arrangement down for individual property owners on their books, is the large agencies usually have large quantities of clients, so bookings are often on the low side per client, along with the tariffs unfortunately!

If you followed my strategy of investing in an effective search engine optimisation campaign on your own holiday accommodation website, you could be competing with the big boys, the large letting agencies, for good search engine rankings and often beating them to better positions with your little old single letting accommodation website!

I was approached by a gentleman with a holiday cottage in Whitby, which provides good value for money in an excellent position. However, in its third year of business, the annual gross turnover was less than £6000 per year from a combination of bookings sources, large letting agency, word-of-mouth and return business. The cottage occupancy levels were increasing slowly each year, but it would take a number of years to produce a significant increase in turnover from this present arrangement. We are now conducting an effective search engine optimisation campaign on this gentleman's website. Although it is costing him almost £2000 per year (paid for by monthly instalments), after the first three months of the SEO campaign, occupancy levels have significantly increased to a level which is now 80%. We are confidently projecting that year two will give his cottage a gross annual turnover in excess of £21,000.

About the Author

Thank you Alan Davidson
Whitby old Fishermans cottage for self catering holidays http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/
Whitby tourist information and news http://www.whitby.uk.net/