How LiveRez Gets You More Bookings
LiveRez is designed to help professional vacation rental managers increase their bookings.
One of the key selling points of LiveRez’s vacation rental software platform is its ability to get professional vacation rental managers more bookings. Here are some of the ways LiveRez helps managers increase their bookings:
Rank Higher – LiveRez-powered websites are specifically designed to help you rank higher in search engine results. Simply put, ranking higher in your desired searches means more travelers visit your website.
- Read “Why SEO Should Matter to You”
Convert More Often – LiveRez-powered websites are designed to offer travelers the fastest and easiest way to book a property online. Through our 3-click booking process, travelers can search, shop and book a property – all in just three clicks. This proven process helps create extremely high conversion rates on all LiveRez-powered websites.
Book Online – Travelers want the convenience and security of booking their vacation online, anytime day or night. With a LiveRez-powered website, you can ensure that visitors to your website have the ability to close the deal online. It’s a common fact: once someone books, they stop shopping. LiveRez ensures that you never lose a customer because they couldn’t book online.
How to Put Your Properties on the Map…Literally
As a professional vacation rental manager, you may have fielded this question once or twice: “Where is the property located?” Sound familiar? By embedding a Google map of each property on its respective property listing, you can give your guests exactly what they are looking for. We’ve outlined the steps for doing this below.
Step 1: Go to Google.com and type in the property’s full address (i.e. 6206 N. Discovery Way, Boise, ID 83713). This should bring up a map.
Step 2: Click on the map. This should pull up a new page.
Step 3: Just under the search bar, to the right of “Get directions” and “My places,” will be a small box with a link icon (see the picture below). Click on that link icon.
A Look at Conversion with LiveRez-Powered Websites
The heat map in this picture shows where visitor clicks are concentrated. Look at how most of the clicks are focused on the search box.
Getting travelers to your website is just half the battle. Getting their business once they arrive is just as important. At LiveRez, we pay special attention to how well our websites perform when it comes to conversion.
Wikpedia defines conversion rate as: “The ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers and content creators.”
In terms of a vacation rental management company’s website, the end goal (most desirable requested action) is for a visitor to book a property. With LiveRez-powered websites, this process takes only three clicks, with the first click being especially important because it launches the potential guest into the booking channel.
The image to the right demonstrates just how good LiveRez-powered websites are at invoking website visitors to enter the booking channel. As you can see by this heat map (typical of LiveRez-powered websites), visitor clicks are highly concentrated on the search box on the front page. Combine this with excellent average bounce rates, which greatly outperform industry standards, and you have the makings of a high-conversion website.
Online Booking: Top 6 Reasons Why It’s So Important
Does your website take online bookings? The ability to take online bookings (or web bookings) is an especially powerful tool for vacation rental managers.
One of the key things that sets LiveRez apart from its competition is that it offers a complete dynamic website with an online booking engine that is completed integrated with the back office (reservation system and trust accounting). One of the major inspirations behind LiveRez was to make vacation rental managers fully operational online and give them the ability to take online bookings (just like hotels).
We all know that online bookings are important and can help take a vacation rental business to the next level. But, it’s easy to forget the specific reasons that make online bookings especially important. Following are the top 6 reasons why the ability to take online bookings is so important.
1. Convenience – With online booking, travelers can shop AND buy right there online. With sites that do not take online bookings, travelers have to contact the management company to make the final purchase – an added inconvenience that in some cases can detour travelers from booking.
2. Available 24-7 – Because your website is up online all the time, travelers can make reservations at any point during the day, especially outside of your normal business hours. You and your staff have to sleep some time, right? Well, your website never does, so giving it the ability to take online bookings means at least one member of your sales team is working around the clock.
Carolina Beach Realty: Your Gateway to Pleasure Island
Carolina Beach Realty's partnership with LiveRez.com has allowed the business to dramatically increase its web presence.
Carolina Beach Realty
Location: Carolina Beach, NC
Website: CarolinaBeachRealty.net
Quick Quote: “In the two years that we’ve been dealing with LiveRez, the rate of growth in our business has doubled and our revenues have increased tremendously. I really attribute a lot of that to the presence LiveRez has given us on the Internet.”
Imagine taking a trip back in time – to a place that’s family friendly, with uncrowded beaches and where a business really hangs its hat on true customer service.
It’s not a dream – it’s called Pleasure Island. And with 45 years of experience in the area, Carolina Beach Realty has the inside track to a wonderful vacation there.
The company offers a wide variety of homes and condos for rent, ranging in size from one to seven bedrooms, with a variety of ocean front and ocean view properties, and at prices that can fit a wide variety of budgets. Its selection of properties is among the largest offered on the small island.
SEO Case Study: Cocoa Beach Best Condominium Rentals
Cocoa Beach Best Condominium Rentals experienced dramatic increases in search engine placement, website traffic and web bookings in just its first few months with LiveRez.com
When Sheila Hobart of Cocoa Beach Best Condominium Rentals signed up for LiveRez.com’s SEO/SEM service, she had a clear plan in front of her for the customer demographic she wanted to reach – she just wanted a little helping getting her company in front of them.
After working with LiveRez.com SEO/SEM Manager Sam Martin to nail down her target audience, Hobart let LiveRez.com’s SEO/SEM service design and execute a custom plan.
And, in just a matter of weeks, Cocoa Beach Best is starting to see results.
“Our website is hitting its targets, and our numbers look good,” Hobart said.
In just over one month with LiveRez.com’s SEO/SEM service, Cocoa Beach Best’s search engine placement for seven strategic keyword phrases increased by 316 percent. On May 19, Cocoa Beach Best had an average search engine ranking of 75 among those seven keyword phrases. But, as of July 1, its average ranking has increased to 18.
Want to Learn More about Adwords? Sign up for our Free Webinar
Are you getting the maximum level of efficiency out of your Adwords campaign? On June 29, LiveRez.com SEO/SEM Manager Sam Martin will offer some hints and tricks for maximizing your Adwords campaigns. Martin will provide tips on keyword strategy, ad copy, campaign structure and more.
Interested? Register here.
Repeat Guests – Keep them Coming Back
At last week's VRMA East event, there was a wonderful discussion on Repeat Guests. In a recent industry study, it was determined that it costs 6x to acquire a new guest vs. booking a repeat guest.
That is some serious money. I can add from experience, that the multiplier is much higher in the general eCommerce industry.......more like 10-15x.
Holding on to your guests and keeping them coming back is not rocket-science according to the recent discussion at the VRMA conference. It is about making it a priority, and starting the sales process for the next visit, the moment they book with you for the first visit.
The guest experience was broken into several stages, with ideas on each stage.
- Pre-Arrival - find out why they are coming, who they are bringing
- Arrival - 'welcome home', let them know how happy you are to see them
- Stay - treat them like family
- Check-out - provide special offers
- Post-Stay - stay in touch with emails, newsletters, offers
In my April Webinar, I will cover each of these areas in detail. Please join us for this event on Thursday, April 23. See details and chance to sign-up below.
Webinar: Repeat Guests - 9 Ways to Make the Most of Guest Relationships
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HomeAway Online Reservation Announcement – What is it to your vacation rental business?
HomeAway Offers New Reservation System is not exactly news to those of us who follow the vacation rental industry closely. But the press announcement is out today and it seems good time to pontificate on what this means.
The Good:
Attention, publicity, and more recognition of our industry. This enables a large portion of vacation home inventory to potentially be booked online. This may spur interest in vacation homes across all kinds of travelers. HomeAway will continue to be a good sales & marketing channel for vacation managers.
The Bad:
Competition - one of the advantages the vacation manager enjoys over the 'rent by owner' has been the ability to offer an online transaction. A question comes to mind (let me know if you have the answer) - as a vacation manager, how do I synchronize a calendar with HomeAway to allow me to take bookings? Sounds like you have to use the HomeAway reservation system to be part of theonline bookings on HomeAway.
The Ugly:
Lots of individual, lots of individual home, lots of one-on-one transactions, lots of $$'s, ............ this could create an environment with more fraudulent activity and undermine the credibility and trust we are trying to build into the vacation home rental industry. Especially as it pertains to online transactions.
A comparison also comes to mind. A spent several years working fro an eCommerce solution named Infopia. Infopia provide small online retailers an eCommerce engine that allowed them to sell via their own website and via eBay. Starting see where I am going? Vacation managers have a brand (a valuable sign of quality & trust) on their own website, but no identity on directories, such as HomeAway. Just like online retailers have an online store with a brand, but are just another supplier for an 'I got it on eBay' - even with branding efforts.
Which of these online retailers were most successful ? The retailers who saw eBay as a sales & marketing channel.
Which of these online retailers were least successful ? The retailers who saw sales on eBay as their goal - they lost their brand, competed only on price, and could not build their own business. They became completely dependent on eBay.
An interesting analogy I think.
Ralf
LiveRez
The Potential Dark Side of SEO Tricks – Link Buying, Domain Buying
Now this guys looks like he knows his SEO facts.
If you are like me, and most of the vacation home rental managers I talk to on a daily basis, you are always looking for an edge to get visitors to your website. In the spirit of getting an edge, I ran across a great educational post about walking the fine line of kosher SEO tactics. Beware the risks.
Dirty SEO tricks you should avoid by Rich Cherecwich
Stay clean and say 'No' to bad SEO practices. My advice.
All the best.
Ralf
www.LiveRez.com
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