AIRBNB SEO: THE #1 STRATEGY To Increase Your Views, Rankings, and Booking Rates

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If you're in a position where you feel that your Airbnb listing could be performing better inside the platform, you're probably right! It can and should be.

I want to walk you through a strategy that helped me increase my Airbnb rankings with only a day and a halves work.

That may seem like a lot of effort, but Airbnb SEO is the consistent practice of improving your listings search performance within the Airbnb marketplace.

This means paying attention to and improving your listings' impressions, click throughs, enquiry rates, booking rates, conversion rates from within your messages, and more.

It's what I consider foundational to my business, especially when Airbnb is such a large portion of it.

You don't want to build your house on a poor foundation, right?

Before using the first version of this strategy (we're now on the second), my listing was constantly sitting on the 4th-6th pages, and even the 12th page at one point.

However, after careful consideration of what was working for my competitors and modifying my listing, I saw a positive effect within a few weeks and landed on the first page (picture below)!

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Since then, our strategy has evolved and will continue to improve because every day, we're learning more and more about the Airbnb search engine.

After running multiple tests, collecting tons of data from Rankbreeze, talking to users, reading a gazillion article's from Airbnb themselves and watching countless videos from the engineers working on the inside...

We've started to unlock what the really important ranking factors are for Airbnb.

Before we dive into the 4 steps, let me fill you in on why you'd even want to 'search optimize' your listing.

(Feel free to jump around via this table of contents too.)

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What is Airbnb SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Airbnb SEO is the practice and study of enhancing your search visibility in the Airbnb search engine through a variety of factors: an analysis of your competitors, optimizing your listing(s) to compete better, and simultaneously pleasing Airbnb's internal metrics.

In the world-wide-web, there are plenty of search engines.

The most popular being Google.

You may hear that Airbnb is similar to Google's search engine and I'll be the first to say they're only 5% correct.

The basic concept of the two search engines are comparable.

Google uses a bot that crawls the internet and renders pages that it doesn't control.

On the other hand, Airbnb, controls the content on their site (for the most part) so it's an internal search engine with many layers they can monitor inside of their users accounts.

When it comes to supply, Google doesn't suffer from any limitations and a piece of content can be viewed an unlimited number of times.

Whereas Airbnb has a limited supply of their properties so a searcher can't be served a listing when it's not available.

Because of this, the comparison between Amazon and Airbnb is a much better one.

To give you a better example, here's what happened when one of our listings was booked for an entire month...

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That's right, we actually lost search visibility because our listing wasn't available to be booked during that time.

But hey, that's the trade-off right?

Yet with our new strategy, we bounced back stronger than ever (more on this below).

Why Optimize Your Airbnb Listing?

If you've asked yourself the following questions, then you're in the right place:

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• How do I increase my views on Airbnb?

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• How do I boost an Airbnb listing?

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• How do I rank higher on Airbnb?

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• Why are my Airbnb listing views so low?

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• How can I improve my search impressions?

You don't have to pay attention to the process below... but you should, if you want to see improvements, because after working on dozens of listings and measuring the effectiveness of this strategy...

I can't stress enough about why it's worth taking the time to set this up properly.

Even before you need it.

The best approach is to be proactive with SEO because the results are not immediate. We typically see results in 20-30 days.

Also, if done correctly, you should see something similar to this in your "views" on Airbnb and your rankings:

Before we start step #1, I'd like to mention that this isn't a replacement for great hospitality. 

It's in addition to it.

Hospitality should be your number one metric to measure. Although on the flip side, we know you can't get more hospitality points if your listing isn't getting any views or bookings.

So, let's get started!

Step #1: Create & Measure Your Optimization Goal

The first step is to see where your competitors are and to find your one "optimization goal" within them.

There are 3 parts to pay attention to:

A) Find Top Earners In Your Area

Track down the top properties in your area pulling in the highest yearly revenue. We use AirDNA and other services to get this information.