Two not-so-new Google web tools that keep vacation rental home and portal owners at the forefront of the industry

Google Alerts

Google Alerts allows users to easily receive customized email or RSS feed alerts for free based on keywords entered and the type of alert selected. Excellent for tracking the competition, following industry news, monitoring the appearance of your own website’s online exposure, and much more.

Why use it?
For maximum benefit, sign up for a Google account to manage alerts. Vacation rental owners and portals should experiment with different keywords since the tool allows a large number (1000 to be exact) of alerts to be managed per account. Have a goal for each alert, whether to monitor the activities of a specific competitor or get up to date on a new vacation rental fraud scam. Try narrowing the alert type (news, web, blogs, comprehensive [a mix of all types], video, and groups) or putting quotations around keyword strings. Most important of all, monitor results on a regular basis and apply what you learn.

Insights for Search

A more sophisticated and advanced version of Google Trends, Insights for Search gives users access to search volume statistics with customizable categories, regions, time frames and other valuable attributes.

Why use it?
Some say that with Insights for Search, a business owner can predict the future. By analyzing key word search trends, one can at least estimate increases in demand based on past increase patterns. This allows a business owner to allocate higher marketing budgets at these key times of the year when the public has actively sought their product in the past.

Insights for Search can also help a vacation rental home or portal owner determine which keywords to include most prominently in metadata and page and listing titles. When entering two or three different features separated by commas, a user is presented with a chart which compares each of the feature’s search volumes for the selected time frame, region, etc. Each feature is represented by a different colored line.

In addition, by analyzing Insight for Search’s top related searches and rising searches in the Search Terms section of the results page, a vacation rental portal owner gains a better understanding of what competitors are offering and are then able to more clearly differentiate their product and brand from the rest.

Posted by on Nov 30th, 2009 and filed under Advertising & Networking, Advice, Tools and Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site

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