Vacation Rental Managers (VRMs) have waited a long time for good news related to Google Search. For several years, OTAs and big-name listing sites have been able to outperform VRMs for organic positioning on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Prominent VRMs watched helplessly as their rankings slipped further down SERPs in spite of costly SEO initiatives.

However, the game has changed.

Google has made significant changes to their SERPs which are now allowing savvy VRMs to take back their rightful place on Page 1.

With a renewed and expanded emphasis on local search results, Google’s changes have caused OTAs and listing sites to scramble to improve visibility and explain substantial decreases in traffic to investors and shareholders.

As a result, VRMs have a much awaited chance to take advantage of these changes and beat the OTAs in organic search, but proactive action needs to be taken. According to Google, there are specific steps you can take to quickly push up your rankings.

First, assess your current visibility. Here is a step-by-step guide to see what users see in the new Google SERP format:

1. Go Incognito. Right click on the Chrome browser icon, and open “New Incognito Window.”

2. Search for “[Your Destination] Vacation Rentals” (Repeat these steps for your top keyword phrases).

3. Note the company listings that show up as an “Ad.” The companies that are displayed here are bidding for these search phrases using Google AdWords. Google recently eliminated the right column of ads and is now only displaying three to four ads in this section, which has resulted in an increase in costs. (See Marketing Mix for a recommended AdWords budget).

4. Below the ads, you will see a Google Map with Local Listings. Your primary goal is to work your way into the top three spots displayed.

5. Under the map and local listings, you will see another group of results that are based on the Google search algorithm with which you are more familiar. We previously referred to these results as the Top 10 Organic Results.

6. Below the Top 10 Organic Results, you will also see three or four more ads from Google AdWords.

7. Scroll back up to the map, and click on “More Places.” This will link to a map that shows local vacation rental company listings.

8. The criteria for ranking higher in this section is entirely under your control. Optimizing this area will allow you to improve your visibility and quickly gain more conversions from Google Search than ever before. Take a look at the information displayed here.

• Reviews
• Address
• Phone number
• Hours

According to Google, these Local results appear for people who search for vacation rentals near their specified location, and you can improve your business’s local ranking by using Google My Business.

5 Ways to Improve your Local Ranking on Google SERPS

1. Can’t Find Your Business? Improve your Info.

Providing and updating business information in Google My Business can help local ranking on Google and enhance your presence in Search and Maps. Local results favor the most relevant results for each search, and VRMs with complete and accurate information are easier to match with the right searches. Make sure to enter all of your business information in Google My Business so customers know more about what you do, where you are, and when they can contact you. Provide information like (but not limited to) the physical address, local phone number and category.

2. Verify Location(s)

Verify your business location(s) for the best opportunity to appear for users across Google products, like Maps and Search. Prioritize the location that is closer to the actual location of your rentals.

3. Post Accurate Hours 

If you provide 24/7 service, add it. While conducting research, you can easily see the phrase “Closed now” on many local listings. If you are open for extended hours for calls and/or service, make sure travelers on Google see it. Entering and updating your hours lets potential customers know when you’re available and gives them confidence that when they travel to your location, it will be open.

4. Manage and Respond to Reviews

Google has added a section on its reviews page that highlights reviews from other websites such as Booking.com, among others. For VRMs, this is an area that is rapidly advancing. Spreading out reviews over Google, TripAdvisor and HomeAway will provide enormous dividends in the very near future. Google’s goal in adding third party reviews to their search results solves the problem of travelers searching for reviews from multiple websites. And this new feature is linked with Google maps, which offers multiple benefits.

Interact with customers by responding to the reviews, across all channels, that they leave about your business. Responding to reviews shows that you value your customers and the feedback they leave about your business. High-quality, positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility and increase the likelihood that a potential customer will visit your location.

5. Add Professional Photos

Adding photos helps travelers see the type of homes you offer. Accurate and appealing pictures show potential customers you are professional and that your business offers what they’re searching for.

How Google Determines Local Ranking

According to Google, local results are based primarily on relevance, distance and prominence. These factors are combined to help find the best match for a search. The following information is provided by Google.

Relevance

Relevance refers to how well a local listing matches what someone is searching for. Adding complete and detailed business information can help Google better understand your business and match your listing to relevant searches.

Distance

Just like it sounds – how far is each potential search result from the location term used in a search? If a user doesn’t specify a location in their search, Google will calculate distance based on what’s known about their location.

Prominence

Prominence refers to how well-known a business is. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and search results try to reflect this in local ranking. Adding your proximity and partnerships with local landmarks or well-known brands that are familiar to many people can improve your prominence.

Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings can improve a business’s local ranking. Your position in web results is also a factor, so SEO best practices also apply to local search optimization.

For the first time in years, Google has made changes that favor the local VRM. With just a few steps, you can reclaim your rightful spot in organic search results.

By Amy Hinote, Editor-In-Chief, VRM Intel

By Matt Renner –Test Your Knowledge. Here’s a quick test, see if you can answer these acronyms without Googling them.

What is your CAC? LTV? ACV? ROR? ROA? Negative churn? CHS?

Do you know these for your B2B business as well as your B2C business? Do you know how they directly impact your top and bottom line revenue? Can you pull up a dashboard and share it with your entire leadership or executive team right now?

If you know what these acronyms stand for and why they are important then you are already one step ahead of your competition.

If you do not know what they stand for, why they are important, why you should pay attention or how they directly affect your top and bottom line, well…I would say, “Houston, you have a problem.”

Of course, if your name is Houston, then I would just say that you have a problem.

But if your name is Houston and you know all of this, then I apologize.

More on acronyms later.

Know Your Situation

In any business, smart decisions are driven from having a clear vision and mission, experience, discipline or operating system and data. Today, business owners have access to more data than ever before (thanks Captain Obvious) and sometimes this can be paralyzing. It is amazing to me how many business owners and operators do not know critical data points regarding the drivers of the biggest revenue channels in their businesses. They don’t know their internal core Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to determine the health of their own rental portfolios and things of this nature.

When I hear this, I will sometimes challenge them a little bit, asking why they don’t focus on these things and if they feel their business deserves better. Then they’ll start to open up and ask what data they should I focus on, which KPIs are most important, what levers should be pulled and how to align compensation with the most important KPIs or objectives.

To that I would say, “It’s not about how many, it’s really about which ones you choose and how often you review them.” What’s important is you do actually choose your KPIs, create a repeatable operating system and review them with extreme focus and discipline.

An Idea

Maybe you have been running your business for many years and you’ve done well, but are now under attack by the onslaught of startups, guarantees, technology, marketplaces, platforms and changing consumer behavior…or the sheer energy of the millennial and next generations. Or maybe you are the next generation millennial (myself included here) and are trying to compete with those who have been there, done that and figured all this stuff out. Whoever you are and whatever your situation is, I think a smart idea to consider is to model your KPIs off an industry that has significant benchmarking data and proven success metrics in place…that are publicly available.

Just an idea, but what if you started thinking about your business KPIs like a SaaS business?

SaaS stands for Software as a Service. Think Salesforce, Box, TRACK. These are SaaS. Cloud-based software delivered via the internet. Why should you consider this?

Try This Experiment

Go to Google and type “acceptable churn rate of vacation rental homes” or something to that effect.

I did this and I couldn’t find anything in the top ten results that even had a graph or a chart of relevant, up-to-date data on this. There was nothing. Does that mean no one is talking about it? That’s what it signals to me.

Now go to Google and type “acceptable churn rate of SaaS.”

There are at least three pages of acceptable benchmarking, up-to-date studies by numerous SaaS companies and thought leaders who share the acceptable churn rate of SaaS businesses. In fact, the only thing I saw in the SERPs that was remotely close to property management was a Quora question that was asking what the acceptable churn rate was for property management SaaS companies.

Yikes!

I don’t know what your numbers should be. I don’t know what’s good or bad in your area. I am, in fact, not an expert at retention of homeowners at a property management company. I am, however, somewhat of an expert in the subscription marketplace and SaaS business arena and I think they parallel each other. After all, if you land a homeowner and that home is worth $30,000 a year to your business and if you keep that homeowner from leaving your business for ten years, 90% of your revenue is going to be made after the first year.

The same can be said for marketplace and SaaS business. After all, aren’t they all subscription businesses? Isn’t the owner subscribing to your services?

So why not model yourself after an industry that clearly has the customer acquisition and churn model figured out? Couldn’t you apply these concepts to your business to get clarity around which levers you need to pull and how to prioritize the most important tasks or objectives in your business to focus on…like reducing owner churn?

I think the answer is yes. Now let’s talk about how to do this in a practical, methodical way. Remember, these things don’t change overnight, but with thoughtful reflection, detailed planning, dashboarding and transparency, and a willingness to hold and be held for an accountable, testing and selective focus, you can create repeatable systems – with great data – to improve your business and achieve sustained growth.

Select Your KPIs

Think of your mission, vision and core values as the destination. Think of KPIs as the GPS to that destination. If you choose the wrong route, data and KPIs to focus on, you will have to recalculate more frequently. Choose the right route and you will arrive at your destination faster, with less wear on your tires and with more gas in your tank. (I feel my metaphor game is strong right now.)

As the chief sales hacker for a marketplace (ResortsandLodges.com) and SaaS company (TRACK Hospitality Software) for the better part of eight years, I’ve had the privilege of working with many of you, as well as many resorts, hotels and lodging companies outside of the VR space — 99% of which I would say are independent small businesses. There are some common things I typically see in the best run independent companies and vice versa — commonalities I see in companies that are struggling to survive.

One of the main commonalities of top performing companies is they identify the key KPIs that are core to the success of their business, they align their objectives around them and they display them and review them with ferocious discipline and tenacity.

Here are some KPIs around which you might want to build your internal operating system. You may want to change the actual nomenclature of the acronym if it doesn’t make sense for you, but I think the concepts are the most important pieces to take from this. I’m focusing on B2B, which in your case is your business relationship with your inventory suppliers, aka your homeowners.

ROR

Renewal of Revenue (ROR) tracks the retention of your revenue. It is arguably your most important metric if you have traction in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). If you only have five homes, retention may not be as important a factor as new customer acquisition. Think of it this way, if you retain 80% of your revenue per year, you are churning $2 million on every $10 million. It should be easier to close a contract renewal than to close a contract for a new customer if you are doing your job right in customer success. Put a keen eye on ROR and put repeatable processes in place to be able to predict the health of your revenue base. Then track your ROR like a hawk. This really goes hand-in-hand with bookings, of course, but you can apply it in multiple ways when thinking of your owner renewals and repeat guests.

Tips for ROR Reporting and Dashboarding

• Segment the revenue channels of your business
• Determine your baseline goals for ROR
• Dashboard and review daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually
• Align compensation with your goals and objectives
• Perform frequent performance reviews with your Owners. Develop a process, train it into your people and stick with it for best performance. If you can, force compliance.

ROA (Renewal of Accounts)

In the SaaS business, we look at, not only ROR, but also Renewal of Accounts (ROA). This metric means different things for different businesses. For example, we work with a company that purposely shed several hundred homes and condos that were not very profitable, drove down their Average Daily Rate (ADR) and were problem owners. But once they got to the number they wanted, they focused on driving higher revenue and expansion on this smaller number of homes, retaining these accounts (owners/homes/condos) and acquiring new owners with similar properties to the highly successful ones they wanted to retain.

Too many whales, not enough fish…An ocean needs a healthy mix of both. So do most businesses.

You can add new properties and big earners to your inventory — a great idea. But if you add one home that brings in $40,000 per year and lose ten homes that collectively bring in $40,000 a year, you have decreased your inventory quite significantly even though you maintained the $40k. You might think “no big deal, we didn’t lose any money.” But If you fail to retain the one property for $40,000 the next year, you no longer have the ten to make up that revenue. Having a good mix of whales and fish is generally a good idea.

Again, it depends on your objectives, but if your goal is to not churn your owners, then you need to make ROA a core KPI.

Tips for ROA Reporting and Dashboarding

• Segment homes/owners and report on them together and separately
• Determine your baseline goal for ROA
• Dashboard and review weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually
• Consider making this a selling point with new owners if the results are outstanding
• Align compensation to your goals and objectives (not just for your executives)

ACV, CAC and LTV

What is your Average Contract Value (ACV) today? If you’ve been in business more than a year or two and have over $1 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), you likely have found your ACV sweet spot. Get focused and go after it…or change your model if it’s not working and go upstream or downstream.

If you know your ACV, and you know with predictability the following KPIs, your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), ROR and ROA, then you should be able to predict with some level of confidence what the Lifetime Value (LTV) of your customer is and how long it will take to payback a new customer acquisition. This will guide you in making compensation decisions with your sales and customer success teams who will be aligned with these goals and numbers. It all works together.

If you can pay back your customer acquisition cost in SaaS in twelve months, you generally have a scalable business that you can grow organically. If you pay it back in six months, you are going to grow faster, and if you can pay it back in three to four months, then you should be in hyper-growth mode. What are these metrics for your business?

Again, set goals, benchmark, report, review and align compensation across your company to these goals and objectives.

If you want to know more about these things, I recommend following @saastr on Twitter.

While you’re at it go ahead and give me a follow too @socialmattr.

CHS

Do you know if your customers are healthy? How do you know? How do you proactively find out? Is it a system that can be trained and repeated by your people? One idea you should consider is creating a Customer Health Score (CHS). An owner with a low CHS is less likely to renew. Wouldn’t you want to know if four months into a one-year contract, an owner is experiencing issues with one of your customer success agents? Or if they don’t think their expectations are being met? Of course you want to know this, but it can’t be done ad-hoc. You need to create a system around this and drive compliance. It’s to everyone’s benefit, both internally and externally.

Tips for Creating a CHS

• Identify what a healthy customer looks like, what are the factors?
• Review all the reasons customers haven’t renewed in the past
• Rank the reasons in importance
• You can apply weight to these factors if some are more important than others or keep them all equal in weight.
• Perform regular account reviews and record the CHS in a software program like your ERP/PMS or CRM.
• Find out what CHS score leads to the highest retention and lowest churn rates
• Set your goals for where you want the customers to be health-wise
• Identify customers with a low health score and perform tasks to increase these
• Dashboard, review and report on this daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually

Negative Churn

This might sound bad, but it’s not. It’s actually good. If you have negative churn that means you’re growing more than you’re shrinking. (Captain Obvious strikes again.)

The way you achieve negative churn is quite simple. Here is a brief math equation:

• $1,000,000 Gross Revenue Business
• $100,000 Revenue Churned
• $300,000 New Revenue Acquired

In this case your Negative Churn is 20%.

In layman’s terms you grew $200,000, because even though you lost $100,000 you added $300,000 in new business. (For more information on negative churn and why it is a powerful KPI, I would recommend following @ttunguz on twitter.) What you want to do is track negative churn on gross revenue, cash and accounts. You may want to apply this KPI to your B2B and your B2C business.

If you don’t have negative churn, your business is contracting. Businesses are like beautiful flowers (harp playing in the background), if they’re not growing they’re dying, and we don’t want that, so get your numbers figured out, establish a baseline of where you are today and where you want to go tomorrow.

Tips for Creating Negative Churn

• Set your growth goals
• Identify your key KPIs…I like the ones I’ve just described
• Each KPI should have very specific tasks that need to be executed consistently and at a high level to come together and achieve the ultimate goal of negative churn, or in other words, growth. Use tasks like account reviews, product reviews, in-person meetings, performance reviews, etc.
• Dashboard, review and report on this daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. The more you review it, the more it becomes a part of your daily routine. If it isn’t visible, then your people won’t be thinking about it and executing on it.

Conclusion

These are some ideas for KPIs based on what we track and report on daily, weekly monthly, quarterly and annually in our own business. They are the same KPIs used by some of the largest, most successful SaaS companies in the world. Since implementing these key KPIs, internally, to achieve our goals several years ago (along with aligning our compensation plans, job descriptions and seats on the bus), we have seen over a 20% net increase in our own retention rates and have been experiencing record growth.

Perhaps these concepts will work for you and help you keep more of your owners, grow your relationships and confidently invest in new objectives. Maybe they’ll help you launch your rental business like a rocket into hyper growth!

Houston. Rocket. See what I did there? See how I tied that back together from the beginning? See how I pointed out the obvious again? Aren’t KPIs a little obvious too?  Well, in that case, I think we all need to be captains.

Ahoy.

By Matt Renner, VP Sales/Partner, TRACK Hospitality Software and ResortsandLodges.com

By Cory Falter — The strategy for finding success in the hospitality industry and using online dating apps is strikingly similar (believe it or not). For example, when considering marketing strategies you want to attract, convert, delight, and ultimately have a customer forever, right? Well, the same can be said when you’re looking for love – maybe not the forever part, but we’ll get to that.

Whether in business or love – it all boils down to what your goals are. Do you want someone who is going to go the distance with you? Or, simply a passing fling? We’re thinking for business, you are looking for long term success. That’s why in this post, we are breaking down two popular marketing strategies and how one is like Tinder, while the other is like Match.com.

CONTENT MARKETING VS ADVERTISING

Advertising, in today’s comparison, is likened to Tinder. The goal is to blatantly promote and draw attention to the service(s) or good(s) one is selling – while it does have a fairly long and colorful history in our society. Advertising strategies are pulled-together and slick, essentially it’s your “magazine smile”. It’s can be hard to show how well-rounded you are through just an ad.

There’s always a time and place for advertising, but it’s not the only method to put your message out there. This is where content marketing comes into the picture.

Content marketing can be best compared to Match.com – it’s more than a fling. Content marketing is a marketing strategy that emphasizes building relationships through creating and distributing useful, relevant and valuable content. You’re using all you have (not just your looks) to develop a long-term relationship.

Definitions are vital, but let’s highlight some clear examples to further explain the main differences between content marketing and traditional advertising, and how they specifically pertain to the hospitality industry.

Show Not Tell

Advertising is about telling an audience a message. Content marketing is about showing audiences what your message means and how it will solve a problem or provide a needed service.

Any marketer in the hospitality industry can talk, talk, talk all day at its audiences, but the organizations that successfully show what they can do are the ones that ultimately win.

How often do you see, read or hear advertisements claiming to be “the best” at something? Claiming to have the “lowest rates,” “comfiest beds” or “most delicious food.” How often do you yourself believe that message? Right, not often.

Audiences have been saturated with those types of messages and many are no longer receptive to them.

Your messages have to be authentic, and they have to show. The content has to be relevant to your audience, and it has to come from the heart – seriously.

Audiences have become wise to the tricks that have been used the past few decades, and they no longer wish to receive those messages. A receptive audience is key for promoting any message, and the most receptive audiences will be those you are trying to genuinely help solve a problem for.

Show how you will solve a problem. For instance, many of your guests are vacationing families looking for a hotel that is close-by to all of the attractions, is kid-friendly and an expert in local tourism.

Rather than saying those things outright, your hotel’s content marketing team can post a blog on the website detailing the top 10 most underrated or unknown attractions in the area, and then promote the blog across social media channels. Each of the 10 attractions can be attractions kids love that are relatively close to the hotel. In one blog your hotel has displayed that it’s close by to the fun, aware of and knowledgeable about the interests of children, and a clear expert on local tourism.

Commitment Instead of a Fling

This is huge – content marketing requires relationship nurturing. Hoteliers and their respective teams are already aware of the importance of return customers and the impact they make on the bottom line. Well, content marketing helps attract, acquire and nurture those return customers. It’s all about building a relationship – which always takes time, but is very effective in developing deep and meaningful relationships with your guests and groups.

Advertising throws a message out there, or a one-liner shall we say, and hopes it sticks. Think back to the last time someone threw you a one-liner… did it stick? Maybe, maybe not. Works sometimes and not other times. Even if audiences go for the advertising bait, there’s a strong chance they won’t be return customers. Once the fling ends it’s simply over.

Content marketing utilizes tools such as social media to build relationships with the audience. Relationships are a two-way street, so rather than spitting out the sales message, content marketing seeks to listen, to ask questions, find out what problems the audience has so we can later solve it for them. Content marketers are showing their commitment to the audience, and when the audience feels that commitment they become return customers.

Personal Rather Than Impersonal

Typically speaking, advertising is a message meant for a huge audience. Unfortunately it’s not possible to adjust the big advertisement to suit the specific needs of the different people within the audience.

Which is exactly where content marketing comes in. Rather than deploying a picture of a generic white family of four at the beach across all of the advertising channels, content marketing gets more personal.

Early on in the content marketing process the hotel’s audiences have been clearly defined. Meaning there is a guest persona for each type of guest. Included with that persona are details on the types of messages that resonate with the persona, and the needs of each persona.

Armed with that crucial information, content marketers can curate the appropriate message for each individual persona, and deploy those message on the fitting channels.

Think about it, your hotel likely has a variety of guests – young couples, families, LGBT community, wedding parties, meeting business, staycationers, etc. etc. Each of those groups has different needs and it’s your job to discern the differences to host them as flawlessly as possible.

Even before you get to the hosting stage, it’s your job to discern what they need – need to know, need to decide, need to have, need to do – and how you can meet those needs for them.

Develop a downloadable guide that details the best strategies for hosting an engaging meeting experience, for example. Over time develop social media posts related to meeting business that will drive your meeting audiences to your site to check out the downloadable (free) offer. To get the offer, an email was entered. Now you have a high-quality lead you can nurture into eventually becoming a customer, and likely one that stays loyal for years to come.

This isn’t to say there’s no need for advertising. Advertising has a time and a place. As detailed throughout, content marketing works in more specific and detailed ways, and is crucial for asserting your property as the property who cares, listens and problem solves.

So, do you want your marketing to be more like Tinder or Match.com? Your value lies in your ability to make life easier for people. Do that, and you’ve won. Truly help and nurture your audience and your bottom line will thrive. Utilize content marketing to reach the fullest potential imaginable.

About Cory Falter

As Chief Creative Officer for Lure Agency, Cory has a motor that idles at full throttle. After spending the first half of his life professionally racing dirt bikes, he decided to take his obsession for competition to the most extreme sport of design and marketing. As Creative Director and Strategist, he has crafted award-winning campaigns for notable travel and hospitality brands including: Benchmark Resorts & Hotels, Personal Luxury Resorts & Hotels, Hilton Hotels and Ritz-Carlton. As a native San Diegan and San Diego State University alumni, he founded Lure Agency on the notion that life without passion, is shallow. It’s the agencies most valuable resource and it inspires them to dig deep for their team, partners and clients.