A Little History of Airbnb SEO
There are very few industries that have seen the same level of consistency over the past decade as Airbnb and short-stay rental hosting. Even after a global pandemic, more and more people have found themselves in need of Airbnb management, meaning that there’s a lot to be gained by being at the top spot of Google for those SEO keywords. However, it also means a lot of competition, and as innumerable new businesses step up to offer their own style of Airbnb hosting and management, many businesses that had once dominated in the rankings found themselves starting to lose their stronghold.
The Client
This particular client came to us in 2020 with a goal of improving their traffic and increasing their presence in the Melbourne Airbnb rental market. Luckily for them, Trafficon as a company had started by working with a number of businesses within the real estate and short-stay rental space, meaning that the entire team had explored the Airbnb management space extensively, and had a good idea of how to help.
With that said, a campaign like this is by no means easy. the landscape of Airbnb property management had changed quite considerably, and with a lot of growing travel restrictions at the time, we knew that we had our work cut out for us.
What We Did
With very few homeowners in a position to lease out their properties in 2020, we instead started planning ahead, and focused on building our client a new website that would allow them to hit the ground running once the restrictions of the time were lifted. This ended up working in our favour, for as many other businesses in the field paused their work with agencies, it allowed our newly built website to grow and develop faster than it may have otherwise.
Unique content is vital on any website, but when you’re trying to sell people on the idea of opening their homes to short-stay guests, it’s important that you show you understand the space. So, working with the client, we set to work on building out a comprehensive content plan on which pages needed the most emphasis and where our time was best placed. With a focus on local knowledge coming from our experience as an Australia-based agency, we built highly optimised pages that went into the finer points of what makes different areas absolutely perfect for the Airbnb market with an aim of showcasing to homeowners and landlords the true value that their property could hold. This, coupled with an ever-growing keyword strategy and a strong, adaptive SEM campaign, allowed the client to achieve fantastic wins in a relatively short timeframe.
The Results
As a result of our work, organic keyword rankings went from next to nothing in the top 100 as of December 2020 to a peak of 973 in June 2023. More importantly, however, were the specific ranking increases themselves.
To this day, our client is a dominant force in Melbourne Airbnb management, taking the top spot for most major keywords within the space. This has allowed them to maintain a steady flow of new clients, each providing them with a large recurring income thanks to their business model.
