Overview

The Holiday Ferret is a holiday and vacation holiday listing site where property owners feature their site with the aim of receiving bookings from customers.

Problem

There were several problems with the Holiday Ferret

• The site was badly coded and parts of it didn’t work.  The site had been built by a contractor who had disappeared.
• The site had no SEO at all.
• The site only featured two properties and these were only there as they were friends of James Curl, the owner of the website.

To make matters worse, a month later and the domain hosting company was hacked, and the whole site was destroyed.

SEO Solution

While owner James Curl toyed with the idea of purchasing a script, Link-Optimise set about raising the site’s profile and conducting a link-campaign set around the following terms.

• “Free holiday property listing site”
• “Free holiday rental site”
• “Free vacation rental site”

Initially this was carried out pre-farmer update using press releases and article submission sites.  This was joined by reporting travel and tourism news stories on their sub-domain, press.theholidayferret.com

The site, which at this time simply showed an “under construction” page with a link to the press site, appeared on page one for the first two terms.

James Curl bought a script and we helped him establish it on the web.  As Mr Curl is a web designer by trade he elected to do an email campaign to encourage property owners to upload their properties to the site.

To help the properties appear on search engines, we put together travel guides for the site, which were then used as article submissions on article submission sites, and the press stories were also ongoing.

Competition

The holiday rentals market is highly competitive and we found page 1 results one week only to be page 3  a week later.

The SEO for the Holiday Ferret is currently ongoing with man of the travel guides appearing on the first page of google for the following terms

• [Destination] holiday rentals
• [Destination] vacation rentals

Conclusion

What this has taught us as SEOs is that understanding the nature of the industry is essential.  In the holiday rentals market, there are two sets of people to promote a website to: The property owner and the holiday maker.

This has influenced our way of looking at SEO problems and has helped us considerably in making key decisions on how to SEO websites in certain markets.