How to do SEO for holiday rentals & increase bookings

June 2025

SEO is an essential tool for holiday rentals, but what exactly is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Basically, it’s a set of techniques aimed at improving a webpage’s visibility on search engines such as Google. The higher up your ad is displayed in search engines results, the more traffic and bookings you can get. That’s why holiday rental SEO will make the difference between making your property visible or invisible.

SEO deals with webpage optimisation. It’s so important that SEO techniques are applied on any holiday rental portal, like Holidu, which offers an excellent optimisation service in ad descriptions. However, hosts often neglect their own blogs or websites and focus on posting listings.

Here are the tools you need to apply SEO to your holiday rental. In this article you can learn how to increase holiday rental bookings by reading our tips on how to do SEO for your ads, listings and website. We’ll look at what keywords & links are, and how search engines work, among other things.

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How do search engines work?

Search engines gather all the available information on the internet and sort it according to certain criteria. Among them are keywords, or the words and phrases customers use to search for a product/service, which we’ll talk about later. Search engines work with algorithms, each with its own, so the ranking of pages will vary depending on the search engine.

What do search engines consider? Among other things, how up-to-date content is, internal links, and keywords. There are many search engines, but the most used one is Google. Also, you should know the difference between crawling and indexing, as both terms are very present in SEO and search engines.

Google’s spiders, also known as crawlers, are the robots responsible for crawling content. They analyse it according to keywords and access the links on the websites. This way, they analyse all the pages. Indexing, on the other hand, involves storing the information in their databases once the previous analyses have been approved.

How to do SEO for your holiday rental ads

Select Keywords relevant to your property and use them in your pages

Keywords are the terms that users search for. That is, when someone searches for a holiday rental on the internet, they enter words that summarise what they’re looking for. Some examples would be “holiday rental Almeria,” “house rental Vigo,” “luxury apartment Madrid”… These are the fundamental keywords for SEO on any webpage. With the right keywords, you’ll be more visible on search engines. But how do you choose the keywords?

• Opt for keywords related to holiday rentals
• Use single words and avoid phrases
• Don’t be generic, look for something specific, like “sea views, central”…
• Use variations of the keywords

In the holiday rental field, it’s common to search on Google by entering keywords instead of directly accessing the website via the URL. And the top results will be the ones that grab all the attention of the person making the search. You should be using your selected keywords in your page titles, text headings and main text – but not too much, or else Google will penalise your page for keyword stuffing!

Be active on your holiday rental website or blog

Update it regularly. This will help improve its ranking. Ideally, have a blog and post current content. If you have a website to advertise your holiday home and once it’s published you neglect it, it’s as if you haven’t done anything. It probably won’t even appear on search engines. The only way to find it is by typing the URL directly into the computer.

Use keywords also in subheadings

Of course, you can use keywords in subheadings, although it’s not recommended to use them in all of them to avoid saturating the text. The key is for them to sound natural and varied. You don’t need to always use the same one, variations are also perfectly valid – even recommended. It’s best if they describe your property in as few words as possible like “luxury rental penthouse,” “holiday home Cornwall” or “holiday letting St Ives”.

Incorporate organic links

Organic links are a great tool for online positioning of holiday rentals. It involves adding a link to another webpage to your own. These links should be of high quality and related to your content. They’re also a way to keep your website dynamic. This practice will generate traffic in both directions to your page. However, it’s not immediate, it takes some time. Additionally, it’s necessary to add links from trustworthy pages.

Google Analytics

When optimising your holiday rental ads and listings, nothing beats using Google Analytics. This tool scans websites and extracts performance data. It also generates reports with the results obtained. By using it, you’ll know how to increase the visibility of your holiday rental listing. Integrating Analytics into your website is simple; you’ll get all the detailed information to do so on its web platform. It’s a very comprehensive management system.

Use keywords in your page meta descriptions

When we search for information on the internet, we see information about the pages just below the blue link of each result, that’s the meta description! It’s a summary of what we can find on each page. It’s important to write a correct and attractive meta description so that users decide to click on it. However, it shouldn’t exceed 165 characters, as Google will cut off the information if it’s too long.

Become a reference in holiday rentals

SEO for holiday rentals is the best way to increase the visibility of your holiday rental ads. If you were wondering how to increase holiday rental bookings, SEO is the answer. You don’t need to apply all the available tools, but it’s recommended to use as many as possible. And if you prefer, you can also hire SEO professionals to optimise your website professionally.

Renting out your holiday home isn’t as simple as just posting a listing and waiting. Unlike a physical business, renting out a holiday flat requires work to make yourself visible on the internet. If you’re not visible, you don’t exist. However, things change when you focus on optimising listing descriptions or adding keywords to your website.

By applying SEO tools, you’ll not only get ranked on search engines but also establish authority. A well-ranked page is guaranteed more visits and, consequently, more bookings. Holidu also looks out for hosts, that’s why their holiday rental website is fully optimised for SEO.

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