2.2.2 Maintain Your Profile
Maintaining your profile is another essential part of getting the most out of your LovetoEscape Accommodation Profile.
As much as your content must be unique and original, it must also change regularly to have a profound impact on your Search Engine ranking as well as your bookings and enquiries. There are a few simple steps that you can follow to keep your profile “fresh”:
Changing your Content
Accommodation Description
Holiday Accommodation is constantly changing throughout the year. A family who visit your accommodation in summer might have a completely different experience than a couple coming for Christmas. Thanks to this simple fact, there is always plenty of new information to include in your Text Description which will be of great interest to those looking at your profile.
You may be used to writing about the climbing routes at the quarry near your house or the surfing at a beach near the property. However, these might not always be relevant to Holidaymakers coming at different times of the year. You, like every other holiday property owner, experience a down-turn in bookings in the off-season. This doesn’t have to be the case! You can sell your property specifically for these months by including information about what there is to do at these times. Whether there is a Ski Resort nearby, or you provide dry-suits for winter water sports, there are seasonal changes you could make to your Text Description. From a technological point of view, search engines see these changes as a positive thing and rank your page higher because of that.
It is also a good idea to keep your text description as ‘evergreen’ as possible. For example, rather than saying “The Summer Festival starts on 15th July this year”, you could say “The Summer Festival takes place in July every year”. If you are confident that you will be editing the text regularly, this is less important. However if you are writing your description to last for the duration, you must be careful of these ‘Time-Traps’. LovetoEscape.com is the same: we make every effort to ensure that our site content is Evergreen and as accurate as possible. Another example might be accommodation owners in Perthshire in 2014 marketing themselves specifically towards the Ryder Cup Golf Tournament at Gleneagles Golf Resort. Once this period has passed, the information became false, which affected their search positioning. It is essential to remove all non-evergreen information to maintain the accuracy of the page and not provide false information.
Photos
The same is true for your Photo Gallery. Seasonal photos of the area, such as snow-capped mountains, spring meadows filled with daffodils, or autumnal forests can be just as attractive to Holidaymakers as those summery outdoor shots which every accommodation profile uses. These summer photos are obviously important to holidaymakers as it shows the property in the best light, but a variety of photos ensures that you can attract Holidaymakers at all times of year. Changing the captions of photos, changing your primary photo and reordering your photos are all classed by search engines as important changes to your page, meaning they will see your page as more active and therefore more likely to be accurate.
Booking Calendar and Payment System
There are several aspects within the booking calendar and payments system which can be updated to ensure a dynamic positioning in searches. For example, have you checked when your Booking Calendar Horizon falls? Your Booking Calendar might end before you realise, which may prevent Holidaymakers booking in advance as many of them like to do. We often get emails from Holidaymakers already looking to book a week next year, but who cannot due to the booking calendar not being extended far enough ahead in time. It is important to make sure that this is updated regularly, as well as your dates, current bookings and pricing details.
To make the most of your LovetoEscape.com Online Bookings and Payments System, we highly recommend adding our Booking Calendar Widget on your own site. A widget is a small piece of HTML code which allows you to display your LovetoEscape.com Booking and Payments System on your own site. It updates your Booking Calendar automatically and allows your guests to book and pay for their holiday immediately from your own website. Around 80% of Holidaymakers reported that they would rather pay for their holiday by credit or debit card because it quicker and much safer: you can offer them that facility.
Attractions and Things to Do
It is common for our accommodation providers to find new and exciting things to do and attractions in the area which they had not previously discovered. When this happens, we are sure that your Holidaymakers would be pleased to hear about it. Make sure to add any new attractions you find onto the site and link them to your accommodation profile. This not only increases the degree of cross-linkage within the site, but also registers in search engines as dynamic changes, which will prioritise your page in the searches.
Brochures and Leaflets
Your LovetoEscape.com profile contains an automatically-generated PDF Brochure and Leaflet, detailing the essential information about your accommodation. You can send these by email or post to prospective guests, you can print them out and leave them on your coffee table as a welcome pack, or you can leave them in attractions in your area as a form of publicity. Some owners pay hundreds of pounds to have a brochure created for their property: LovetoEscape.com have built it in to the site for your free use.
Although automatically generated, you have complete editorial control over the contents of your Brochures and Leaflets. You can add or take away information, reorder your details, and add your favourite attractions. For each attraction you can give it a personal rating, alongside a comment about it, and choose a favourite to be highlighted at the top of the list. These PDF brochures and leaflets are scanned by search engines, like all other pages on the site, so updating and changing the information will have an effect on your positioning in the searches.