TurnKey SEO Growth Results
From 2018 to 2021, we were able to grow TurnKey’s SEO into a major entry in the competitive vacation rental search space, going toe-to-toe with household brand names and travel giants like Airbnb, VRBO/HomeAway, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Booking.com, Travelocity and more on some of the largest-volume, most fiercely-fought over terms.
SEO was TurnKeyvr.com’s largest and most lucrative reservation channel. Without an in-house SEO team, I served as the SEO manager and stakeholder, owning the SEO roadmap and strategy. This was executed with assistance from Marketing and external agencies that I managed.
In 2018, the site rebuild prevented SEO from being a major focus, but in 2019 we were able to devote more resources to optimization and saw those efforts deliver in a major way in 2020.
Organic Traffic Growth and Reservations
Growth in traffic from organic search
Note that vacation rental demand is highly seasonal, spiking in the late spring and summer months and declining through the fall and winter. Comparing our last high season’s peak month, June 2020, with June 2018 shows a 138% increase in organic traffic.
Growth in reservations from organic search traffic, 2018 - 2021
Vacation Rentals Head Terms
As of July 2021, TurnKeyvr.com ranked #3 in Google results for the industry’s major head term, “Vacation rentals”, after Vacasa and VRBO, ahead of Airbnb and TripAdvisor:
"Vacation Rentals” search results as of July 2021
Major Market Search Terms
The vacation rentals search space is highly destination-focused: the majority of the search volume is for location + “vacation rentals” terms, e.g. “Austin vacation rentals” or “Palm Springs vacation rentals”. These “Market” search terms were our major source of organic traffic and reservations and the focus of many of our SEO efforts. We prioritized content strategy and link building for our markets primarily by search volume and home inventory (correlated to conversion rate). We also made sure to focus on under-performing markets, i.e. destinations where for whatever reason we weren’t ranking as high as expected.
By 2021, TurnKey ranked on the first page of Google results for the majority of our 60 major markets, often in one of the top 5 positions. Expanding that list to include our ~140 secondary markets, we averaged either on the first or top of the second page.
Some results:
“Vacation Rentals Austin” - Ranked #1 July 2021
“Nashville vacation rentals” - Ranked 3 July 2021
Port Aransas vacation rentals - Ranked 8 July 2021
Asheville vacation rentals - Ranked 6 July 2021
Homeowner Lead SEO Growth
While TurnKey’s main SEO optimization efforts were directed at growing guest traffic to convert to reservations, a secondary project was to grow Homeowner sales leads for TK’s property management program. This meant developing and optimizing landing pages for the search terms that homeowners were using to find property managers for their vacation homes. While the search volume for this keyword set was far lower than for consumer terms, each successful sign-up was of far higher value for TurnKey, and getting in front of as many Homeowners as early as possible was important to our brand, building awareness and priming Homeowners in their research phase.
Previous to my starting at TurnKey, organic was only a minor channel for Homeowner sales. Most Sales came through the efforts of our local, in-market Sales teams, direct marketing channels like mail, and paid media.
Through our SEO and UX efforts, we were able to grow Homeowner lead gen (“Web-to-Leads” or “WTLs” in internal analytics) from organic search from the low hundreds a month in 2018 to over a thousand per month in 2021:
Web-to-leads (Sales lead gen) from organic search, 2018-2021
Comparing May of 2018’s 281 WTLs with May of 2021’s 1,341, we saw a 377% increase.
Given that other Sales channels were extremely costly and the high value of each successful sign-up for the business, this growth in leads from organic search represented a major boost to TurnKey’s Sales and Marketing goals.