Are you planning to list your Vacation home on Airbnb? Searching for a short and useful Airbnb Ranking Guide? You’ve reached the right place. When it comes to investing in vacation rentals, know that you will be entering a very competitive market. As such, you will want to use every marketing trick and tip to help you stand out.
One of the best ways to do that is to focus on your Airbnb ranking. Just like with Google, there are certain steps that you can take to help your property rank higher on Airbnb. After all, a vacation rental platform is a search engine just like Google.
To help you climb your way to the top of Airbnb rankings, here are several practical tips that you can start to implement right away. Not only will these actions help you to appear higher, but many of these are best practices that will help you to land more bookings too.
Price your listing competitively
Airbnb listings that are priced competitively do better in the search results. What this means is that your nightly rate should be in line with what similar properties in your location charge.
To do this, you will need to know what rates your competitors charge and have a well-thought-out dynamic pricing strategy in place. For best results, it is strongly recommended that you invest in some third-party tool for help as staying on top of changes in demand and adjusting your pricing accordingly manually is too much to ask, even for an experienced property manager.
Enable Instant Book
Hosts have shared that one of the best ways to see quick changes in your listing’s ranking is by enabling Instant Book. The reason for this is probably that Instant Book makes it much easier for guests to finalize a booking quickly, helping to deliver a much better user experience for guests. Needless to say, Airbnb will want to encourage this behavior.
Use a high-quality cover photo
Guests respond much better to visuals than long chunks of text. A high-quality cover photo of one of your listing’s best features will help to grab attention and drive bookings. By getting travelers to stop and take note of your listing, you can also help to improve click-through rates, one of the key metrics that Airbnb’s algorithm values.
Encourage travelers to contact you
While your cover photo and other photos of your property play a key role in making your listing attractive to potential guests, you should still remember to pay attention to the actual written description of your property.
Not only should you focus on words and language that will help to highlight the best features of your property in accurate terms, but you should also think of ways, such as using a short, but catchy, call to action, that you can use your wording to encourage guests to reach out to you.
The reason for this is that the inquiry rate (in other words, how many users contact you about your property) is also said to play a role in a listing’s search rankings. So, even if guests don’t necessarily book your property, getting them to reach out to you is basically half the battle won.
Try to accept most bookings
According to sources, declining booking requests can hurt your search ranking. Airbnb compares your acceptance rate (in other words, the number of accepted inquiries divided by total inquiries) to that of similar hosts instead of simply staring at how many bookings you have declined.
While it is never a good idea to accept bookings if you are suspicious about the guest based on valid reasons, it is recommended that you try to accommodate most bookings. At least, you should reply to every single inquiry, instead of simply letting the request expire.
While on the topic of inquiry rate, it is also a good idea to keep an eye on your response rate. Ideally, you should reply to more than 90% of your requests within 24 hours.
Focus on getting more reviews
The Airbnb algorithm looks at both the number of reviews you have received and the quality of those reviews. So, both these two factors can impact where your listing shows up in the search results.
Irrespective of the search engine, every host should make it a priority to get as many high-quality reviews as possible. It is this type of social proof that helps to show to Airbnb guests that you are indeed credible and trustworthy.
List as many amenities as possible
Similarly to the number of reviews, the number of amenities you have listed also count in your favor. If you can, try to focus on amenities that fewer hosts will have. This will help tremendously with Airbnb keyword search. This way, if they search for a specific amenity, like an indoor fireplace, your listing will be one of the few ones that will pop up in the search results.
Wrapping Things Up
One of the easiest ways to get more bookings is to optimize your listing. To do this, you will need to keep both Airbnb users and its algorithm in mind. The good news is that while it might sound quite technical there is no need to hire the services of an SEO specialist.
From simply changing your cover photo to including a few more amenities to encouraging guests to contact you and review their stays, there are various straightforward actions that you can take to help improve your listing’s chances of ranking higher.
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