As a french property owner, you are constantly competing for bookings with other owners in your area. In times when demand outstrips supply, you should all be able to co-exist happily, but the number of available rental units has been rising steadily and exchange rate fluctuations and economic crises are conspiring to dampen demand too. Internet searchers will usually look at a number of properties before choosing those to enquire about, so how do you increase the chances of your property being one of them?
Aside from making your site clear and easy to use, visually attractive with plenty of good photos and fast loading, one of the things you could do is to place testimonials from previous happy holidaymakers on your site. If you are not asking every visitor for their comments (and the permission to use them on your website) then you are really missing a trick. Testimonials are free, they can be made to look attractive on your website, you can also use them on social websites and as part of your directory listings on other websites. In many other areas of business word-of-mouth is one of the best ways of attracting new customers, so why not use your happy customers to convince your website visitors?
Testimonials can be added to a specific page on your site or can be dotted about any number of pages for effect. You can manage them yourself just by placing the text where you want it. If your website runs on WordPress then there are a number of widgets you can use to manage testimonials on your site.
Plugging one of my own services for a moment, I would like to recommend you take a look at vouchforthis.com. This is a service I created in 2009 to help website owners to give their testimonials a little credibility and to manage testimonials in one place whilst deploying them on any number of websites and web pages.
Holiday Website Tips
This is part of a series of tips that could help improve your holiday property website. Why not take a look at our other useful tips for holiday property website owners :
Location, Location, Location – why it is important to show your holiday rental website visitors where you are!
Outbound Links – why you shouldn’t waste valuable “link juice” when linking to other websites
Inbound Links – why you should build a good selection of links to your website from other french holiday related websites
Be easy to contact – why you need to make it easy for potential holiday rental visitors to contact you
Be Visual – why it is important to stand out from the crowd and add superb photos to your holiday property website
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