If you really want to pump up your bookings and add value for your renters, you can look at adding a local Activities Page to your web site or blog. The reasons to consider this, are, you guessed it, search engine optimization and interest to your guest.

You’ll stand out from your competition because you’re offering guidance to them and providing local knowledge. And for most vacation rental property owners, most of the knowledge already exists in your head or in a notebook, you just need to re-purpose it into a web page!

Here’s an example of an Activities Page I developed. There were several goals for this page….

1) To demonstrate value to potential renters showing “local knowledge”
2) To increase average length of stay from 3 days to 4 by educating renters about all there was to do within an hour of the rental property
3) To rank for relevant key words related to vacation rentals and travel within the Bodega Bay and Sonoma County area.

This Bodega Bay Vacation Rental Activities Page is actually quite lengthy, covering everything from dining, to bird watching, to golfing, to bakeries. All things local.

As an added benefit, Google loves relevant outbound links, so I rank well for my targeted keywords because my information is deemed of value by the search engines.

Of course, there are tradeoffs to any choice…in this case it’s the time and effort required to set up the activities page. However, I have found great value in my this page….it’s one of the most visited pages on the site. Not only do our renters comment on how helpful the information is to them (some show up with it printed out already!), I also rank very well for my targeted keywords as a result. Building your activities page is not really hard to do, it just takes focused effort. You’ll actually save time in the long run, we point renters to that page as well in our confirmation emails to help them plan their trip.

Have fun with it!