How to Write your Holiday Lets Advert or Property for Sale for Customers and Search Engines

At ourhouseabroadfrance.com we offer a detailed and highly informative website combined with awareness of the crucial role played by search engine optimisation (SEO).

To help you make the most of your advertising we would like to share with you some of the key tips to maximise your business or property in search engines. You may also find some of the following information relevant to your website.

So how do you make sure your advertisement features quickly in search engine results?

Use Key words in your Content

These are the words that a potential customer uses to tell the search engines what they are looking for.

For example, when someone searches for "Morbihan 3 bedroom holiday home", a web page with that precise text in the property title and/or description is far more likely to appear on the first page of search results than a page with a less descriptive title (such as "Beautiful Holiday Home Brittany"). Using popular keywords and keyword phrases in your property title and in your description will attract the highest levels of traffic and potential customers.

When choosing keywords, put yourself in the customer's position and think of words or phrases you would use to search for a property. You could even do some market research and ask people what words or phrases they used on a search engine when their search led them to yours.

Be Specific in your Title

Your 'headline' or 'property title' is one of the most important parts of your listing. The information you enter for your 'headline' is used on the webpage, in the links to the webpage and in meta data about your webpage which is important to search engines.

It is also very important that you have different headlines for the different websites you may advertise on. Google and other search engines have strict criteria against duplicate content. If you advertise on two different holiday home sites and the wording is the same the search engines will assume they are the same page and will therefore only index one page and not both of them. This means you are not maximising the full benefits of listing on multiple websites.

The most common types of words used in searches that bring traffic to the holiday home websites are location words e.g. 'Charente', rental words e.g holiday home, property types e.g. Farmhouse, and some other important attributes e.g. wheelchair accessible, dogs allowed, pool etc

Provide Location Information

The more information you provide, such as information about nearby local attractions, beaches, ski resorts, golf courses, amusement parks, shopping, etc., the greater the possibility a search engine will show your property page for a particular search term. For example if your property is near Futuroscope then it is important you mention this e.g. 30mins from Futuroscope.

Describe your property and facilities in detail

It's important to fully describe every aspect of your property. You never know what people will search for e.g. antique beds or cool Egyptian cotton sheets. Think about what your customers repeatedly ask for when they email or call you and include the answers in the description of your property.

Use all of the description fields

The various description fields on holiday home websites gives you the opportunity to scatter keywords and keyword phrases throughout your ads. The more keyword-rich text that you have on a page, the more chances you have of appearing in the search results.

Write descriptive captions for your photos

Search engines will search on photo captions for your ads. Again, the more specific you are the better e.g if you type 'great views' into Google, it returns 2,950,000 but if you type 'great views of sunflowers', it reduces it to 304 search results - wouldn't you rather be found in 304 results?

Be unique

Search engines care if your property description is exactly the same as someone else's description. If you decide to 'borrow' someone else's text there is a chance that search engines will note the similarities and may give preference to the original version of a webpage.

Many areas of France have festivals and events going on through the year. If your property is available during these times then make sure you mention this festival or holiday in your description, these could be anything from vintage car races to world music. You could include a few sentences about them, when they occur and how far away they are from your property.

Update often

It is very important for you to regularly update your information. At the minimum you should update your property title or headline. While this is a good practice to keep current and up-to-date information on your advertisements, some search engine algorithms weigh newer information higher in their search results.

This newsletter is meant as a general guide and is not intended to cover everything. If you have found it useful, have any of your own tips you'd like us to share, or you would like to give us feedback, then please do contact us at info@ourhouseabroadfrance.com