I'm not Scott, but I went back three pages and didn't find a 'Scott' so I'm assuming the question is for me. I mentioned the high rate of success we have with closing inquiries that come through our website when folks find us via Google.
I hate to admit it, but I have been rather delinquent in finding out and tracking where, why and how these guests find us on Google. All I can tell you is that I will occasionally get direct inquiries that come through our website that appear to have no other source, and the 'kill rate' for those inquiries is much higher than average. We ask everyone, both those making inquiries and those making bookings, where they first heard of us or how they found us. And the majority of those that inquired and booked directly with us through our website respond with 'Google'.
I don't know if that means that they saw us some place else like VRBO, read between the lines and decided to do a search for us by property name, or someone gave them our name and the did a search, or they did a search for our location and the words 'vacation rental' and our website showed up as one of the search results. Honestly, that possibility would boggle my mind, as there are (the last time I checked) roughly 300,000 results for that search on Google. No matter how good one's SEO work is, it's tough to compete with that for attention.
At the same time, I get an email from Google every month telling me something like "86 people found you on Google last month! 'So many' responded with an email, 'so many' clicked on your phone number... etc." Now, 86 people is not a huge number, but when I only need four or six bookings per month (if that), 86 people can be enough to get that one or two extra direct bookings I need and want to fill my calendar.
Google is a mystery to me. I know that if someone has our company or a property name and does a search, they will definitely find us. Even on a blind search (nothing cached, new browser, new computer in a new location) if searching for our name or one of our property names, we usually occupy the first two pages of search results on Google, and at minimum, at least half of the first two pages. But will we show up if someone just types vacation rentals and our location? I doubt it. And yet I get these odd inquiries which seem to suggest it does happen occasionally. If that's the case, I'm shocked and happy about it.
That's why I'm so interested in being on Google Vacation Rentals. It seems to me that there is a synergy that happens when you can be found in multiple places out on the internet. Showing up in more locations builds credibility. Sure VRBO has our listings, and they may feed them to Google Vacation Rentals, but I doubt that happens much... the same with TripAdvisor and others... those sites just have too many 'fancy' properties to promote to try to get traffic back to their site. I don't think my properties are special enough to be the poster boy for any listing site. So I don't expect they actually get into the feed from those large sites to Google Vacation Rentals (I'm not an expert in the mechanics of this, it is just my intuition to say that.) But if I can get my properties on Google Vacation Rentals, with a direct feed back to my own website, which Google is already well aware of, I suspect that there would be a boost for my properties and site on both Google in general, and through Google vacation rentals, as that synergy works its way through the system.
