Using the internet to market our businesses is becoming more and more important every day. As millions of potential customers are coming to depend on the internet to provide for all of their holiday needs, you need to be sure your property has an online presence to help make it stand out against your competition. These days, you don’t need to be a technical wizard to get your second home online; you just need access to a computer and the ability to email.
Taking your property to an established letting agent is a good way to start, as most will have functioning property databases that are set up in a user friendly way to either allow you to upload your own photos and content, or they will offer a service where they will do this for you. The main benefit of using an established site is that they will already have an established customer base ready for you to take advantage of.
When writing an advert for your holiday home, you need to remember to make it keyword rich (the words people typically type into search engines when looking for holiday home rentals) whilst keeping it user orientated (so you write it for people to read rather than search engine robots). You should talk about your holiday home using its unique selling points (what makes your home a good choice for holiday) and include as much detail as you can, without droning on forever.
Remember that pictures are very important, so choose the images that accompany your advert very carefully. You should try to show as much of your second home as you can and you should try to take pictures on a good day (people are reluctant to choose a home if the photos of it feature stormy skies in the background. More often than not, people will look at the images you provide before they even bother to read what you have to say, so sell it with the pictures first.
If you use a good letting agency website, they will often handle the search engine optimisation for you. One way you can test which agents in your area are doing this most effectively is to Google a few keywords that are relevant to your property and see which sites are topping the search engine rankings. This might mean typing in “holiday homes Devon” into the search bar and looking at results listed on page one. Remember that the top results, which appear on a slightly pink background with “Ads” written on the corner, are likely to be the result of paid advertising rather than on good SEO practice. Though paid ads can also be effective they are less reliable than sites that have achieved a good ranking on their own.
In addition to using a holiday lettings agency, you might consider making your own website. This can be done at little or no cost through an online website building program and it can help increase your profile dramatically. You can incorporate a number of different features, such as a guest comments page (which you should moderate where possible) allowing people to post comments about their stay in your second home. Your own website gives potential guests the chance to read more detailed information about your home and is more likely to convince them to choose it. Having positive and negative feedback will also allow you to improve the features of your property and gives you a window through which to communicate with existing customers.
Social media pages are also an effective tool to help you increase your online presence, so think about starting up a Facebook page or Twitter account for your second home, if you want to give your business even more of a boost. Don’t forget about second home insurance when starting out on a new holiday home venture. Though it might be hard to find 2nd home insurance through a standard provider, it can easily be obtained through a specialist insurer like homeprotect. With homeprotect you can get second property insurance and second home contents insurance with a competitive online quote regardless of your circumstances. As long as your second home is on fixed foundations within the UK, homeprotect can give you a quote.