Smoky Mountains By Owners is a regional vacation rental-listing site for the Tennessee Valley and surrounding area. This region has been one of the most visited vacation areas in the United States. 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 Smoky Mountain area 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 hundreds of specific communities and have set up the pages and Meta tags to be SEO friendly for each and every community in the Smoky Mountain area. With this laser precision approach, our search engine ranking will climb very quickly. 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.
As mentioned above, we have set up several hundred 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: “Chalet Village Gatlinburg Tn”. We have a page optimized for “Chalet Village” a community in Gatlinburg, Tennessee and all the listings in Chalet Village have local attractions and restaurants showing on their listings. This lets the search engine know this page is ABOUT “Chalet Village in Gatlinburg, Tn”.
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 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 “Tennessee Vacation Rentals”. With more and more listings coming onboard, this site will soon be the “expert” website for marketing in the Smoky Mountain area.
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 Tennessee Valley and surrounding area.
Much work has gone into the website to leverage Social Media. On the general level, guests can promote the property they like on their social media. The owners also are 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.
Partnered Social Media Advertising. 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, the Smoky Mountains and specific cities we cover 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 a great way to get traffic instantly.
Direct Social Media Advertising. There have been huge gains in how and why we run ads on social media. The good thing is this is instant. The minute the website is launched, we have social media ads ready that target your guest. This allows us to have our website and your listings seen instantly by a hyper-targeted group of people who are using social media. There are many new options that make this an extremely effective advertising program. With hundreds of thousands of guests that have stayed in this region that are being promoted to through social media, this is a strong way to market this website. We use this heavily!
The good thing about Social Media is; it’s ready now. We are able to drive traffic on day one through many paid ad campaigns. We are able to filter guests that are actively looking for a rental and bring them back to our site. Our followers will continue to grow over time on our social media pages, but we do not have to wait for them as we are able to target them through ads. We also leverage our partners' followers creating immediate traffic on your listing.
Here's a link to our page, as well as groups we've created for specific regions!
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 Smoky Mountains, 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. Please feel free to use our videos to help market your vacation rental. You can copy the URL from our YOUTUBE Channel below.
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 is an easy way to drive traffic immediately to the site. We use the communities as the basis for our pay per click advertising. There are many searches on a monthly basis for these communities in the Smoky Mountains. 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.
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).
