Heads In Beds Show - How Long Does It Take To See SEO Results With A Brand-New Vacation Rental Brand?

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

In this episode, we dive into how long it takes (days/months) to see results + page 1 rankings with organic search traffic for a brand-new vacation rental website.Full video with slides - YouTube BuildUp BookingsVacation Rental SEO Guide

Hello there, welcome to another episode of the Heads and Beds show. I'm your host, Conrad O'Connell. Thanks so much for listening. So in today's episode, I wanted to share information around how long it takes to see SEO results with a brand new vacation rental website. with a brand new vacation rental website. In today's episode, we're going to cover what it's like to start with a brand new website and go from nothing to earning lots of organic traffic from Google. So let's dive in. I've often been asked how long does it take to see SEO results with a brand new website or a growing website in the vacation rental industry? And I've always given the same answer. It depends. And the reason that it depends is that there's a lot of factors that may be playing a role in how long it will take you to see SEO results for your vacation rental website. The most obvious might be the competitiveness of the market. If there's lots of different

individual competitors, meaning other property management companies, even owners that are building websites and building SEO value on their website, it may be tougher for you to see results. And if there's fewer people going after your particular destination, it may be a little bit easier to see results. Just to give an example, if you're in Orlando, Florida, one of the most competitive short-term rental markets in the United States, it's going to be very tough to see results in the short term. If you're in a market where there's only one or two other property management companies, maybe a handful of owners, it's going to be a lot easier to see results in the short term. There's a lot of different things that might influence your ability to see results in the short term. The most obvious might be

budget. How much can you allocate to actually building out a great website, making sure that the on-page SEO is solid, making sure that you have sufficient budget for things like content building, links, etc. And all these different things can play a pretty significant role in your ability to see SEO results in the short term. I wanted to record a quick video today to do a kind of mini case study because back in the start of this year, back in January of this year, we started working with a brand new website and brand and a client project that we started working with in January of 2021. So we've had a few months now to go through the numbers and start to see some results from their SEO efforts.

The site was first indexed by Google on January 5th of 2021. That's when we first started to see a little bit of data. And on January 7th, we started to get a little bit of actual organic traffic, right? It just took two days for Google to start to at least pick up some pages in the index and start to get some traffic. Now that initial traffic was obviously very low. You can see here, first day that we got a little bit of traffic, we had 44 impressions. That's the number of times that the website actually showed up in Google search results organically. And we had three clicks. So nothing amazing, obviously. But this was our starting point. When I say a brand new website, a brand new brand, I do mean it. This was literally starting from close to zero as you can get once we got going.

The growth has been slow, but steady throughout this calendar year so far in 2021. This is a screenshot from Ahrefs, and this is the sort of external estimate from the traffic. You can see that there was a placeholder website up back in November. It looked like they kind of picked something up in November, but the actual chart, the organic traffic didn't really start, obviously, until January of 2021, as we discussed. And really, as you can see, over the past eight months or so, we've started to really grow the traffic to the website. And this was all starting, again, on a brand new website, no history, not an established company. They actually started with just a handful of rentals. And you can see, obviously, how they've grown here. This is actually a screenshot from Google Analytics. And what this is taking a look at

is the organic search traffic only channel during that same timeframe. Now, I will say from this timeframe from January to at the time of recording this video in August, they also have been running some paid search campaigns. We've been sending emails to any guests that they have from past guests that have stayed before. Organic has been the number one channel so far, and that's what's driven the most traffic to the website thus far. So recently, we actually hit page one for the main term that they're going after. It's the name of the destination plus rentals or plus vacation rentals. We're starting to really edge into the bottom of the first page of Google for that particular

keyword. And it took exactly 219 days for us to reach page one and start to see organic traffic come to that website. So as you can see, there's this initial bump, we started to get a little bit of branded traffic, both to the property pages, and also as they started to advertise, their name got out there and people were looking for them. They also had some people searching off of the listing sites, people were actually finding their properties on Airbnb and then searching for the name of the property and finding their website directly.

Same with the brand of the brand of the company as well. People were coming off of Airbnb, finding their host profile, and then starting to search their brand. But the win that we had here was a non-branded search. It was just the name of the destination plus rentals or plus vacation rentals. So during this time frame, we were building content. We were fairly active on the blog, posting two, sometimes three blog posts per month. We were working consistently on building links to the website. We'd worked with a few different travel bloggers. We had done some outreach to local businesses.

During this time frame, we were consistently building links to the website. And this is just looking at the direct bookings that came in to their website during this timeframe from Google search. From January to August, they did 57 bookings from Google search specifically, and they did 150,000 in total rental revenue from that. That's about half of the overall traffic and revenue that was driven to the website during these past eight months or so. So I wanted to share these results because I thought it was something worth highlighting if you've had this question before, or you've thought, hey, it's competitive out there in the world of SEO, how long might it take for me to see results? If you have any questions or comments, would love them. Email me, conrad at buildupbookings.com. Thanks so much for

listening.