Vacation Rental SEO: 1.6k Traffic Increase in Just 6 Months
If you were about to book a vacation, what would you do?
If you’re like 90% of internet users, your first step is to conduct a search on an engine like Google.
After all, search engines are the quickest and easiest way to find travel information, including airfare, hotels, and – the focus of today’s case study – vacation rental companies.
Whether your vacation rental service is big or small, generating consistent organic traffic through search engines is the #1 way to drum up new business.
The only problem?
SEO (search engine optimization) is a complicated process, and the competition in the vacation rental space is undoubtedly fierce.
Without an airtight strategy and a reliable way to build high-value backlinks, outranking your competitors may seem impossible.
Such was the case for a client we recently worked with.
They’re a reseller of Disney Vacation Club timeshares, and they were having an extremely difficult time improving their visibility on Google.
That’s when we stepped in, and the results speak for themselves.
Stay tuned to learn how we achieved a 1.6k increase in organic traffic in 6 months, as well as ranking for 841 relevant keywords.
The Client: A Timeshare Resale Broker
Our client runs a service where she helps Disney Vacation Club (DVC) members buy and sell their timeshares.
She’s an expert real estate broker with over 35 years of experience in the industry, and she has a real love for the Disney parks.
Her clients can’t say enough good things about her, and she boasts a flawless reputation online.
The problem?
Her website wasn’t ranking on Google for vital keywords related to DVC timeshare reselling.
As a result, a huge chunk of business was going to her direct competitors.
If she wanted to compete, she needed to find a way to outrank them, which was far easier said than done. Her team dabbled in some simple SEO strategies, but none of their tactics gained any traction.
Our client knew she needed professional help if she wanted to reach the top of Google’s results pages.
That’s when she did some digging online to find a reputable digital marketing agency to handle her company’s SEO.
After seeing our name pop up a few times in several ‘best SEO services online’ articles, she decided to check out our reviews and testimonials. Due to our vast amount of experience with countless niches, she decided to reach out for a free SEO consultation.
During the call, she expressed her desire to start ranking for important keywords related to Disney Vacation Club timeshare resales.
Her goal was also to increase the amount of monthly traffic her website was seeing, as it was minimal at that point.
Once we had a solid grasp of her goals and current SEO performance, we decided a HOTH X campaign would work best.
Getting set up on a HOTH X campaign
HOTH X is our fully managed SEO service. Each client gets connected with a dedicated campaign manager who uses a combination of all our SEO products to form a cohesive strategy.
For each client, we always consider:
- Their niche
- Their direct competitors
- Their target audience
This ensures that we always provide a unique strategy completely tailored to the client’s needs.
Our timeshare reseller’s niche was Disney Vacation Club timeshares, and their competitors were other DVC resellers. Their target audience consisted of DVC members who were avid Disney fans and regular vacationers.
Also, every HOTH X campaign begins with a comprehensive SEO audit.
The SEO Audit: Looking for Easy Wins While Tightening Things Up
Doing SEO is like building a house; if you don’t nail the foundation, everything will fall apart later on.
An SEO audit is what helps you establish a rock-solid foundation for what’s to come. It’s where we closely analyze the website’s current performance on search engines to determine if there are any major errors.
At the same time, we also look for easy-win keywords, which are keywords the website already ranks for, just not in the top 3 positions.
If we find any keywords ranking in positions 4 – 30, we will optimize the content to get it ranking higher in just a few weeks.
A principle of SEO is that it’s always easier to improve a keyword’s ranking than it is to start ranking to begin with.
During the initial phase of the audit, we gained access to the client’s Google Search Console and Google Analytics accounts. We then looked for things like:
- Indexing errors
- Duplicate content
- Broken links
- Slow loading speed
These are things that will wreak havoc later if we don’t solve them now, which is why we tackle them first.
In this client’s case, their website didn’t contain many errors. However, we were able to uncover quite a few easy-win opportunities that we would capitalize on through link-building.
The Strategy: Building Links to Key Timeshare Pages
In analyzing the client’s SEO performance, we quickly found out why they were having trouble ranking higher: they lacked authority.
Google will only rank authoritative websites in the highest positions, and backlinks from reputable sites are how you build authority.
Therefore, we knew the website needed lots of authoritative backlinks in order to start ranking higher and generating more traffic.
Through a combination of targeting link insertions and guest posts on relevant websites, we were able to build links with high DR (domain rating) scores like this:
DR is a metric that measures a link’s authority, and it’s on a scale of 1 – 100. DR scores of 50 and above are considered stellar, just like the two links you see here (which are two of many that we built).
The Results: 1.6k Boost in Traffic, Ranking for 841 Keywords, $1.5k Traffic Value
The links we built started to bear fruit within 6 months, and the client’s traffic immediately shot up by 1.6k!
Also, we finally got her site ranking in the top 3 for crucial keywords directly related to her business:
Our client’s website is now one of the top results on Google whenever someone searches for DVC resales, which is exactly what she wanted to happen.
Besides that, the website’s traffic continues on an upward trend:
Do you want to achieve similar results for your timeshare business?
HOTH X is the way to make it happen, so don’t wait to get in touch for a free SEO consultation today!
