Market Page SEO
TurnKey’s Market (alternatively “Destination”, “City”, “Location”) pages were our biggest driver of organic traffic, ranking for the location + vacation rentals search terms that make up the largest search volume in the vacation rental industry.
These were also our most-competitive keyword set, where we were competing both with name-brand sites like Airbnb, VRBO, Expedia, and TripAdvisor, as well as with established local domains.
Austin market page: https://www.turnkeyvr.com/vacation-rentals/texas/austin
Strategy
As Product Owner of the TK website, I was in charge of our SEO strategy and roadmap. There were 6 pillars to our SEO strategy for these pages:
Content - provide relevant, human-written, high-quality content, fresh when possible
Longtail keyword breadth - expand the terms the page is able to rank for by going after high-value modifiers, e.g. pet friendly vacation rentals austin
Performance - pages should load quickly, including on mobile and poor connections, pass Core Web Vitals test
SERP Optimization - improve click-through-rate in Google with focus on testing title tags and meta descriptions, taking advantage of Schema.org rich snippets
User Metrics - improve user metrics that Google incorporates in its algo, in particular with a focus on A/B experimentations on Bounce Rate
Links & Domain Authority - drive relevant, high-quality, organically-earned links from external domains, a siloed link structure on the site, and creating content nodes through links with the TurnKey Blog.
Here are some of our key SEO projects on Market pages:
Market Categories
Many searchers add home-type modifiers to their location searches, like nashville rentals for large groups, pet-friendly rentals in san diego, and monthly rentals port aransas. By adding new category sections that surfaced homes within that category we were able to rank competitively on these terms. For users, the category section conveyed the variety and breadth of TurnKey’s rental inventory, and the sixth tile provided an easy way to jump into an area search with that search criteria pre-applied (example Austin monthly rental search).
Fresh Reviews
Reviews can be an SEO goldmine, UGC that’s clearly human-written and rich in keywords and supporting terms. And if you have a good, steady flow of reviews, these can be used to provide fresh, always-updating content on a page.
We built a system that automatically pulls in the latest five-star reviews in a market, updated daily.
For users, this section also provides validation for our brand promise of exceptional service, and by dating the review we’re able to show the user that real guests are consistently having great experiences in our homes.
Market Attractions
Another important set of location keywords modifiers were sub-locations or “attractions.” These are keyword like vacation rentals near disneyland or LAX vacation rentals. When TurnKey had enough inventory specific to a sublocation we would typically spin up a new location page for it, but many of these terms did not warrant a new landing page given TurnKey’s domain authority.
The Market Attraction feature was powered by a relational object in our CMS that took a Name, latitude, longitude, and Market to create. The latlong provided the search center, so that when a user clicked on the attraction tile they found themself in a search centered on that attraction (https://www.turnkeyvr.com/search?lat=34.161471&long=-118.167819&place=Rose%20Bowl%20Stadium&guests=2) while the Market told the website which page it should appear on.
Market Articles
Working with the Marketing team, I identified the most important markets we needed to build keyword relevance in via blog content marketing. From there, we created Topic Clusters by interlinking the pages, sharing link value and boosting each page’s relevance.
Within our CMS, we built a new Market Article object that took a Title, Snippet, Link, and Market so that non-developer users could add, edit, or delete (via the UI or mass-upload) articles on Market pages.
Market Schema FAQs
Working with Marketing, we identified a selection of the most common questions about TurnKey, in particular focusing on our value propositions and differentiation from standard STR listing sites.
On the SEO side, we marked these up with Schema.org FAQ markup, which gave us an expanded rich-snippet in search results. The increased SERP real estate and visual prominence improved our CTR from search:
Market Body Content
Your standard evergreen topic content, commissioned through marketing and editable via our CMS.
Featured Rentals
Our Featured Rentals were used to show off TurnKey’s most photogenic properties, conveying our brand’s luxury offerings. By pulling in a large snippet of the unit’s description and regularly updating the featured list, the feature also provided fresh SEO content.
Targeted Link Building
While TurnKey’s Marketing team worked to build domain authority through our blog, I managed the targeted link building toward market pages. I worked with a number of agencies over the 3+ years, but our most successful and long-standing partnership was with Citation Labs. CL was able to build hundreds of high-quality, organic, earned links back to our market pages, focusing on a quarterly list of target markets that I provided.