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Grow your business with SEO: Our Guide to supercharge your bookings

January 10, 2024

Grow your business with SEO: Our Guide to supercharge your bookings

by Alana Barbosa | January 10, 2024

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How to get more bookings from your vacation rental website and grow your business with SEO

Why is SEO important?

Direct bookings are profitable, commission-free, and a great way to build long-term relationships with guests.

Publishing your website is the first step. But once your site is live, you need to attract plenty of traffic in order to increase your chances of getting booked, and one of the best ways to do this is through SEO.

SEO helps increase your bookings and revenue by making it easier for potential clients to discover your properties.

Download our SEO Guide to supercharge your direct bookings with a watertight SEO strategy and start growing your revenue.

Download your SEO guide in ebook format

Why you need a direct booking website

Instead of relying entirely on third-party booking sites (which often take a large commission for each booking), direct bookings allow you to keep 100% of your profits.

Having your own website means guests can come straight to you to reserve a stay, and you’ll earn more for each booking. Guests who visit your site can view all your properties side by side and choose which one to book.

You’ll have more control over your business as you own all your content. As well as earning more from each booking, you can build long-term relationships with guests by collecting their details and communicating with them directly.

Build a professional vacation rental website in a matter of clicks with My Website. Upload all your listing content, add your branding, and start getting lucrative direct bookings. Get started with My Website!

Website SEO: the basics

You’re probably familiar with the term SEO (search engine optimisation), which is the process of making your website easier to find and access through search engines like Google.

Just like you optimise your OTA listings to get more views and bookings, you need to optimise your website to increase your reach.

There are many components to SEO, and specific tactics are always changing. However, the basic components of good SEO are:

Keywords —Using words and phrases relevant to your target audience (the people most likely to book your properties). Ranking for certain keywords means you’ll appear higher up in the search results and have a better chance of getting clicks.
Content quality — Search engines prioritise websites with original, well-written, accurate information.
Website structure — Your website should be structured logically with an easy-to-navigate menu, and pages should have a fast loading speed.
On-page optimisation — Using relevant titles, descriptions and images can improve your search engine ranking.
Off-page optimisation — When other websites link back to yours, this boosts your credibility and helps you rank higher.

To really increase your online visibility and attract more qualified traffic, you need an effective SEO strategy incorporating these components. A good SEO strategy will improve your search engine rankings. Appearing higher in search results exposes your properties to a broader audience actively seeking accommodations, ultimately driving more bookings.

Download our SEO Guide now to create your SEO strategy and start boosting your bookings!

Maximise your direct bookings with an SEO-friendly website

It’s time to take control of your business. Instead of relying solely on OTAs, create your own website to get more commission-free direct bookings where you can build strong relationships with guests.

You don’t need to spend time and money designing your site from scratch. Use My Website to create a beautiful website in minutes using all your existing listing content.

Once your website is published, use our SEO Guide to grow your bookings and revenue and get discovered by more travellers…

If you’re ready to start getting lucrative direct bookings, build your website today!

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About the Author

Alana Barbosa

Author

Preferred+ Software Partner 2026

Frequently asked questions

Rentals United is a vacation rental channel manager built for short-term rental hosts and property managers. Rather than replacing your property management system, it plugs directly into it, syncing your listings in real time across 90+ booking channels, including Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, and Expedia, Homes & Villas By Marriott Bonvoy, all from one dashboard. With AI-powered analytics, and guest communication tools built in, it automates distribution and helps you grow bookings without adding complexity to your existing workflow.

A vacation rental channel manager — sometimes called a short term rental channel manager — is software that connects your listings to multiple booking platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, keeping rates, availability, and reservations in sync so you never risk a double booking. If you’re updating calendars manually, missing promotion opportunities, or leaving bookings on the table because a listing isn’t optimized, this is exactly the problem it solves. A revenue-first channel manager like Rentals United goes further, using AI-driven insights and multi-rate pricing to help you win more bookings on the channels you already use — properties using multi-rate pricing have earned up to 3x more revenue

No minimum size required. As a channel manager for vacation rentals of every size, Rentals United works for hosts managing a single property up to enterprise portfolios — it’s part of a network of 403,000+ properties connected worldwide. Whether you connect directly through Rentals United, through your existing PMS, or via our channel manager API, the platform scales with you, so you can add channels, features, and properties as you grow without switching systems.

Getting started is straightforward, whether you connect directly, through your existing PMS, or via API. After signing up, Rentals United’s onboarding specialists personally import your listings, connect your booking channels, and recommend the right channel mix for your portfolio. You’ll get strategic setup guidance on pricing and promotion features from day one, plus ongoing support from a dedicated account manager to keep your distribution and revenue performing as you scale.

Every Rentals United account comes with a dedicated Account Manager and access to channel experts who know both the platform and the short-term rental industry — not just generic technical support. Beyond one-to-one guidance on optimizing your channel mix, pricing, and promotions, you’ll have access to Rentals United’s knowledge base, API documentation, and ongoing performance reviews, so you’re never troubleshooting alone. Enterprise clients are also backed by SOC II-compliant security and operational reliability.

Rentals United takes data security seriously, protecting both your business data and your guests’ personal information with encryption, strict access controls, and regular security audits. Enterprise accounts are backed by SOC II-compliant infrastructure, the same standard referenced for our operational reliability, and our systems are built to align with GDPR requirements for handling guest and property manager data across Europe and beyond. Every integration, whether direct, through your PMS, or via our channel manager API, follows the same security protocols, so your listings, rates, and reservations stay protected no matter how you connect. If you have specific compliance requirements, such as industry certifications or data residency needs, our account managers can walk you through Rentals United’s security documentation before you get started.