Privately Owned Vacation Rental Properties
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Privately Owned Vacation Rental Properties
Emerald Coast By Owner is a regional vacation rental-listing site for the Gulf Coast of Florida and Alabama. This region has become one of the leading places in the country for family vacations. With massive changes taking place in the vacation rental market, we wanted to bring a website to the public that can put the guest in direct contact with the owner or manager of a vacation rental so they may get to know each other and do business together. We will explain our business model here and how we plan to market vacation rental properties in the Emerald Coast of Florida and Alabama to the public.
Rather than being average for the masses, we want to be spectacular for a region.
There are many national and worldwide vacation rental websites available. The problem with having “another” worldwide website is that the SEO world is shifting its focus to promoting on a more local basis. So if a website has listings all over the world, it is not going to be an expert in any one area. It is too broad and not area specific. Having several listings in one location and having locations scattered all over the world will not gain any traction on the search engines. There may only be a few listings in your region; therefore, when a prospect searches your area, your listing is unable to be found. That is a difficult way to gain traction in the SEO world. As a regional website, we have over 800 specific communities and have set up the pages and Meta tags to be SEO friendly for each and every community in the Gulf Coast region. With this laser precision approach, being found on a search engine will be much easier. Along with formatting community pages, we have loaded the system with “local” friendly terms and amenities. As a result, you can promote to your guest the actual restaurants, boat rentals, amusement parks and more BY NAME on your listing. This will also help with SEO as the search engines see one site with so much data in one region.
One of our approaches here at ECBYO is to market at the community level. We feel some visitors return each year to the same "community" or complex, and when they search, they know exactly the place they want to book.
So in support of that, we are creating Sub - Regional sites and Community sites. A sub Regional site in our case will a site just for Destin, Gulf Shores, Panama City Beach and some of the other larger areas. The community sites will be complete listing sites for the larger communities on the Emerald Coast. The first one we launched is Majestic Sun in Destin Florida.
These will do many things for our marketing. It gives the owner or manager another site and listing on the internet for no additional charge or work. It is all integrated thru your listing on ECBYO.COM.
It will also help our SEO. With these site linking to each other and being in the same industry, that will dramatically help our SEO. It is a win win for all involved. Then the guest has a dedicated site to learn more about the locations they love to visit. Review our Community sites here.
As mentioned above, we have set up over 800 communities’ pages for this website. Other sites that service the “world” simply are not able to pay this much attention to any one area. We are working towards SEO ranking in terms like: “Emerald Shores Destin”. We have a page optimized for “Emerald Shores” a community in Destin, Florida and all the listings in Emerald Shores have local attractions and restaurants showing on their listings. This lets the search engine know this page is ABOUT “Emerald Shores in Destin, Florida”.
Breadcrumbs, URLs and Meta Tags are all set up and optimized for the local communities. When you navigate around the site, each page and link will take you to one community or another. This is designed for SEO. It’s also a logical way to find your favorite vacation rental. With many prospects being familiar with these areas, they will find it helpful to have the properties listed in this manner.
Being on the first page of Google for “communities” is a reasonable goal vs. going for terms like “Florida Vacation Rental”. With more and more listings coming onboard, this site will soon be the “expert” website for marketing in the Emerald Coast Region.
Having all the listings posting addresses, copy and links to this website will only help with the organic SEO in the long run. Again, we are not taking on the world; we are promoting the Gulf Coast of Florida and Alabama.
Much work has gone into the website to leverage Social Media. On the listing level, this allows the guest to promote the property they like on their social media. Owners are also able to promote their listings on their social media pages. This creates back links to your listing, helping with the overall SEO and the website in general. Paid Social Media Advertising. Extensive research and development has gone into our Social Media paid advertising. We are able to hyper-target our ads towards guest specifically expressing interest in booking vacation rentals along the Emerald Coast. We are generating large amounts of highly qualified traffic through our advertising retargeting process. The good thing about this is we are able to grow our ad traffic as our site grows. Creating immediate traffic for new listings and not having to wait for SEO is a big advantage we have over other regional sites.
We have millions of social media followers to whom we are able to push out promotions as well as promote individual listings. Having your property promoted to millions of followers is one way to instantly receive traffic and interest in your listing. Co-opting with other social media sites that are already promoting travel, vacations, Florida or Alabama is another focus of our regional based marketing plan. We have partnered with social media pages that have millions of followers in the vacation business. Having them promote your listing is the best way to get traffic instantly.
The good thing about Social Media is; it’s ready now. We are constantly building our followers on our social media pages and increasing our Ad spend. As more properties are added to the site, we simply increase our number of ads and increase our traffic. This way we are not waiting for traffic, simply increasing it as needed.
Social Media Is The New SEO!
Here are some pages we set up that will be promoting the Emerald Coast region of Florida and Alabama:
The use of video is fast becoming the "new" frontier in search engine optimization and is a great user experience. With a focused marketing campaign of the Emerald Coast, we use videos extensively to promote the area and properties on the website. These are short videos which allow us to promote them through social media, and from research, we know online visitors will watch a short video more often than a long one.
We have a separate YOUTUBE channel to promote these videos on a community basis as well as a property basis. Users of our website may also promote their community and property videos through their social media, extending the marketing use of these videos. The videos are set up with SEO rich copy and links back to the website and listings. All providing content for search engines to find and utilize. We also push these videos out through our social media network for millions of users to view. Above are some examples of the videos. Please feel free to use our videos to help market your vacation rental.
Pay per click is directly paying for marketing or “clicks” to get your ad in front of users. This is done through Google, Yahoo and also on Social Media.
With a specific region to market, this will be an easy way to drive traffic immediately to the site. We will be using the communities as the basis for our pay per click advertising. There are many searches on a monthly basis for these communities in Florida and Alabama. This allows our listings to be on the first page of Google and other sites immediately.
This is another reason why a regional site can be successful. Imagine the task of setting up pay per click terms for every city in the world that has vacation rentals. With so few listings in so many areas, this is a daunting task. Marketing one region is VERY manageable and quickly set up for instant results.
Scott Moore
ECBYO.COM has "teamed up" with Scott Moore of italkSEC Radio to get the word out to STOP PAYING SERVICE FEES!
Scott Moore is a nationally renowned sports talk radio personality, featured writer for Scout.com, and an in-demand guest speaker and entertainer.
Scott's show covers the entire Gulf Coast region with these 3 major radio stations. Listen to Scott daily on these stations from 4 to 7pm Central time. Scott will be educating his listeners on how to save money by booking properties on ECBYO.COM and saving the services fees other sites are now charging.
Gulf Shores
Orange Beach
Navarre
Destin
Panama City Beach
May 2017
Destin Billboard @ FUDPUCKERS
We are currently running 7 electronic billboards on the Emerald Coast. The locations will alternate. They are located along 98 from the Gulf Shores/Orange Beach area, Navarre, Destin, and in Panama City. We want to educate the visiting travelers that may have paid too much on other sites to BOOK DIRECT. This way guests will check next time with our listings on ECBYO.COM. This is a very visual way for travelers to get used to seeing our logo!
30A Food & Wine Guide
Magazine Cover
ECBYO Full Page Ad
30A FOODANDWINE is a new publication featuring everything the guest needs to know about the dining and wining experience in the 30A area. With over 30,000 magazines in distribution, ECBYO is marketing to get the word out to book direct with your listings on EmeraldCoastByOwner.com.
We believe when your guests sees our ad in print, it gives them confidence in our brand. There is a simple message we want to send, book direct with our listings and SAVE!
We have seen many negative issues with listing sites offering free trials. Free trials by nature are not going to give you all the bells and whistles a site has to offer.
We believe you get what you pay for. With a free site, or free trial, what is the budget for that site for marketing? Is it “hope”? They “hope” enough people join a free site that sooner or later they will get picked up by search engines and are found. “Hope” is not a business plan.
Then the user has a bad experience and may not receive the leads for which they hoped. The guests may not find a listing that is on free trial, if they do, it may not have all the data a guest needs to make a decision on that rental.
Trust. We want to earn your trust. We will be working very hard to earn your business and market your properties. Once you see that we are doing everything possible to market your vacation rental, we hope you will support us and tell your friends.
We have made a large commitment to make this website an attractive place for owners and guests to do business. We look forward to having you join us, as we continue to work diligently to promote and market your vacation rental(s).
