Sometimes, you can’t give it away. Since the launch of Rent a Gite in France, I’ve spent a lot of time optimising the Wordpress theme it uses to make it as search engine friendly as possible. The site offers free gite advertising to owners of french rental accommodation. As a result of the SEO, I’m getting a load of traffic to it through search engines.
Ironically, I’m struggling to get gite and cottage owners to advertise their properties on there, it’s nothing more than a dribble each week in terms of new properties added, despite the gites who are listed reporting getting enquiries and bookings through the site.
It’s only just occurred to me that I probably need to optimise the website for a few search terms that gite owners might search for when choosing which directories to list with, so that’s the plan for the next couple of weeks.
What would you search for if you were trying to find a directory to list with in France?
Go on... click it... you know you want to!
2 Comments
I have to admit to being one of the lurkers who still haven’t posted my Gite to RGF. It’s just getting the time to do it that has been my problem.
I did start creating a listing a few weeks ago, got all the text as I wanted it, then submitted it, got some submission errors and when I went back to correct them all my carefully written prose had been lost – argh! Some form of being able to save a draft submission would make life a lot lot easier.
And to answer your original question about what to search for, terms I would use:
- Free Gite advertising
- Free Gite advert
- No commission holiday home listing
Or variations on a theme
Cheers, Geoffrey
thanks for the feedback Geoffrey, unfortunately the plugin i’m using for the form submission > blog post doesn’t allow for draft saving, but i will suggest it to the plugin author.
there seems to be two schools of thought on how to find good directories… some people do as you do, and search for ‘free gite advertising’ etc, and some people instead search for what they think their customers would search for, and pick off the best directories that way. I’m going to have to try to cater for both if I’m going to grow the directory!