Choosing Key words

[newstart]

I have a holiday cottage in omagh Co. Tyrone and my website ranking has dropped.
Im trying to choose keywords as part of a campaign to get to rank but competition for the key words is high.

Anyone got any advice?

cheers

 

[S-Marketing]

My advice is forget about doing your marketing online if competition is high. You could fill the place offline and spend less in the process.

 

[newstart]

You reckon I'd be better focusing on local advertising aiming at thes like of people comeing to visit relatives, local businesses who might have specialists comeing to work for a few days, that sort of thing?

 

[S-Marketing]

I always go for offline over online because thats what i know. If you came to me as a client I would be looking to build mutually beneficial alliances with local businesses. There are loads of ways of doing this, and most of them are.free.

Examples could be to approach local wedding venues offering your accomodation to their clients, partnering with a local sports car hire company to join forces to offer a weekend break which includes car hire and somewhere nice to stay, or partnering with a local fishing lake to offer accomodation to their clients.

The important part is that the relationship needs to be mutually beneficial. The three examples above are ones I've worked on for clients, but the list of possibilities is quite literally endless.

 

[terryuk]

Dropped how many positions from where? Has any work been done lately?

I wouldn't get dis-heartened yet, if you're targeting your local area (county tyrone) I wouldn't say it's too competitive for what I would search 'holiday cottage tyrone' but you need to keep developing your SEO efforts.

For keywords I would look at what your competitors are targeting, and you can use the Google Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool for some idea of what keywords to target and estimate search volume.

 

[WebProfitsConsulting]

I have a number of clients that have suffered recent organic ranking drops as a result of the numerous Google updates. I've advised some of them to switch their funds to PPC which is far more predictable, if it's setup and managed correctly. Given you're targeting 'local' search terms I would expect competition to be relatively low on both organic and PPC. For a quick burst of traffic that you can test to see if it converts for you, go and grab yourself a free £75 adwords voucher and have a look to see if it flies....you have nothing to loose.

 

[Codefixer]

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For starters

1. Don't just go for the more competitive trophy terms
2. Target a broad range of keywords, events, areas, attractions/places to visit
3. Build plenty of content around local attractions and events
4. Partner up with local businesses, cross promote and sell.
5. Try and get listed as an accommodation on Golf courses websites and those type of sites where they are trying to help their users with local info
6. Reciprocal non competing business partnership links can certainly work in this market done right
7. Use PPC, can work really well for this market
8. Make sure you're website is 100% both in terms of on site SEO, marketing and design. Great pictures, good content about the cottage the location, the attractions
9. Advertise in some niche directories, and local business sites and top UK directories

After all that's done, your sites authority should be improving and you should start to rank for the more competitive terms. Also look at Google Places, or whatever it's called these days.

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[newstart]

Thanks for your help, the site dropped from being in the first 3 pages of google to near enough out of site. Ill try your suggestions.

 

[jassonwater]

I have a holiday cottage in omagh Co. Tyrone and my website ranking has dropped.
Im trying to choose keywords as part of a campaign to get to rank but competition for the key words is high.

Anyone got any advice?

cheers

Try to get help from google, Google have lots of tools to provide you good key word and use the Quality content and key word to do the promotion, try to include the place name in the key word and content its help you to get traffic to your site

 

[fisicx]

Thanks for your help, the site dropped from being in the first 3 pages of google to near enough out of site.

Whoops...

That sort of indicates that Google has thrown out all your links. Have you been doing or have you paid someone to do linkbuilding?

As suggested, you would be far better off advertising in the holiday cottage directories.

If you really want to rank independently, use phrases that people search for:

'self-catering holiday cottage tyrone'
'family holiday cottage tyrone'
'traditional holiday cottage tyrone'
'walking holiday cottage tyrone'

And similar long tail phrases.

The SEO specialists may well tell you that nobody searches for these phrases but you only need 1 or 2 visitor per day who subesequently book to make it viable.

 

[webgeek]

Dunno why you'd want to abandon short tail SEO and short tail combinations, unless of course you're working on a shoestring budget.

Terms like 'self-catering St. Andrews' can take a considerable amount of time to get to the top (or considerable monthly budget, but less time overall). Once you've ranked well, the ROI is sweet.

However, if you've been penalised, then you really would need someone clued up on penalty recovery to help get out of the hole. Until then, those accommodation directories would get you some short term sales to help keep cash flowing.

 

[bizrep103]

Try using a tool called seo scribe