SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. And it is very important for the growth of your rental business.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. And it is very important for the growth of your rental business.
We analyzed several sources and could not find a comprehensive guide designed specifically for rental businesses that would help them rank better in search engines.
So, we wrote this post.
At the end of this guide, you will know:
Search engines are an excellent source of free traffic. Google, the most popular search engine, gets 8.5 billion searches a day, which equates to 99K searches per second, and over 2 trillion annual searches. If you can attract even a small portion of that traffic to your website, you will have a great number of bookings.
The Consumer journey starts with search engines. 87% of consumers start their product searches online. If your rental business is not optimized for search engines, your chances are slashed greatly.
Search engines bring quality traffic with a better conversion rate. SEO drives over 1000% more traffic than organic social media because most search engine users come to the site with purchase intent.
Increasing your ranking on Google search can increase your rental traffic severalfold. Because 92% of global traffic comes from Google Search.
With SEO, you can get stable organic traffic is key for sustainable growth. When you promote content, you get only a short burst of traffic. When you rank better in search engines for organic keywords, you will get stable traffic that will gradually increase over time.
SEO enhances your competitiveness. Let’s be honest, SEO is not easy. And it takes lots of strategies, good-quality content, consistency, and good character to rank higher. But all those are worth it. Because only 0.63% of Google searchers will click on your site if it appears on the second page.
Builds trust and authority in the market. One study, involving 1,100 survey respondents, found that the majority of internet users trust the information they found on Google. Trust levels increase with ranking. People automatically assume that the higher the website on Google search, the more reliable it should be.
SEO is a cost-effective option for growth. This is because the most wholesome source of traffic is usually organic traffic. And you cannot obtain that by simply flexing your money. You work for it genuinely, and you reap the benefits. Also, when you invest in SEO, it goes a long way. It is not like getting a short burst of traffic which is the case with paid ads.
Increases your rental business visibility. The main purpose of all marketing strategies is to make ourselves visible to customers. SEO is one way to do it. SEO helps you show up in search terms relevant to your niche. For example, if you are offering bikes for rent, it helps your website appear when someone searches for “bike rentals near me”, “Bike Rentals in [area name], etc.
Improves user experience. If you want to improve your website for a better user experience, simply do SEO. It is because search engines rank your site based on how well your website is structured for internet users. It is like killing two birds with one stone. You unconsciously improve things while you try to achieve something else. For example, you use clean templates, increase the speed of your website, fix erroneous pages, remove outdated content, post quality content regularly, and structure your website for better readability and visuals, which is required by search engines.
Now, we know why we need SEO for our rental business.
The next step is how to set it up.
Do not be all over the place. Try to target a few quality keywords, and build your SEO strategies around it.
There is a proverb that says “You can’t hold two watermelons in one hand”.
That is exactly what we mean.
If you are renting gardening tools in Austin, TX, you may want to target long-tail and Geo-targeted keywords such as:
Please note: It is not a complete list. Try to guess what you would type in a search engine if you were looking for gardening tools in your area. And build your keyword list based on that assessment. You can also target nearby towns in your keywords if you cover those areas as well.
Keyword research tools help you to take a more organized approach to finding keywords as they display search volumes of each keyword in a specific area.
Keyword research tools are best for:
There are several keyword research tools that you can use for free or with paid membership plans.
Paid tools :
Free Tools:
No matter what type of SEO strategy you use, you won’t succeed if your hosting is prone to downtimes and slow performance.
Did you know that page speed is the primary ranking factor for both desktop and mobile search results?
Faster-loading websites are more likely to rank higher than slower-loading sites.
Thus, use web hosting that has reliable servers with minimal risk of downtime.
Note: Reservety uses cloud-based servers with a backup to prevent website interruptions and downtime.
Some business owners care about the looks of templates and ignore their SEO potential.
Unfortunately, beautiful templates usually have heavy files that drag down the performance of websites due to slow load time. All of which negatively impact the website ranking.
Can’t decide which rental template for your rental website?
We recommend Reservety as it provides beautiful, lightweight, and SEO-friendly templates as part of the rental software package.
Some sites by default start with HTTP. However, it is not considered safe anymore if it has missing “s” at the end.
Why? Https indicates that the website uses a secure encrypted server to share information. And search engines like secure sites!
Steps to convert rental website URL from HTTP into HTTPS
Do you want to get an SEO-ready rental website with over 200 features without a hassle? Sign up with Reservety, and have the team build it based on your business model and design preference.
To optimize your rental website for search engines you can do On-Page and Off-page SEO, we will describe each method individually.
Let's focus on-page SEO for now.
On-page SEO are strategy you can use on the rental web page (internally) to improve the site's ranking.
Here are the popular on-page SEO techniques:
It helps search engines to know what your website is about.
It should be less than 65 characters long. Otherwise, search engines will trim them to fit the search results, making them look and sound strange.
The site title and tagline are two things that summarize what your website is about. It should be short, sweet, and right to the point as those will be the first things customers will see when your site appears in the search results.
If you are a Reservety user:
Adding site titles and taglines is super easy. Your new dashboard will have convenient input fields to enter them.
If you do not want to go through the SEO settings, Reservety will do it for you at no charge.
When you post a rental product on your website:
You can create a blog section on your rental website and publish unique articles relevant to your niche CONSISTENTLY.
We put heavy emphasis on the word consistently here, because posting quality content on your website regularly shows your website lively. Search engines give preference to active sites, not the dormant ones.
Make your content helpful for the community. For example, if you are renting utility trailers, you can publish articles such as:
Those are just a few article ideas you can share with the community. There are thousands of other similar topics you can write about.
Meta titles are the headings of the content that name the pages or posts, and meta descriptions come under the meta titles and briefly describe what the content or a page is about.
When you search for something on Google, the search results come up with a list of sites that display meta titles and meta descriptions as shown below.
Why are they important? Meta titles and descriptions serve as previews of the content that tell people and search engine crawlers what the content is about.
Reservety users can:
Tips for better Meta Titles:
Tips for Meta Description
You should break down your large text with headings and subheadings to make the whole reading experience easier. And help search engines better understand the content of your text.
Did you know that only 16% of internet users read the whole text, the rest just skim through the text and read the parts that interest them the most.
So when you use proper headings it is easier for internet users to find the parts they need. Headings and subheadings are also ranking factors as they directly impact the user experience.
Tips for using headings for a rental business:
This is one of the overlooked strategies. People include the images just for the looks and visual illustration but often forget to optimize them for search engines.
Search engines crawl and index your images improving your ranking in search results, and increasing your chance to appear in Google image searches.
Steps to optimize your images for SEO:
According to Google, URL structure is important for the success of your ranking. The company recommends using descriptive URLs that have relevant keywords on them which will help users and search engines to understand what the link is about.
Google does not recommend using non-ASCII characters or long ID numbers in the URLs, which can be confusing and unreadable.
Add internal and external links.
Any SEO expert will recommend adding internal and external links within content as they have the potential to improve user experience and search engine ranking.
What are internal links?
Internal links are hyperlinks that you use to direct readers to different pages of your rental website.
Internal links are important because:
What are external links?
External links are also important for your rental website because you can enhance the user experience by referring visitors to authoritative external sources so they can find value there.
External links are important because:
Tip: Never point external links to sites with less credibility or sites that are spammy. If you do, you will not only lose the trust of your customers but also decrease your ranking on search engines.
User experience will depend on many things. Some of the areas you need to pay attention:
After doing on-page SEO steps, you can connect your website to major search engines that are popular in the country.
The first step is connecting Google as it is globally popular. The connection process is simple.
The following is the step-by-step guide to adding your website to search engines: Google; Bing
Off-page SEO is things you do outside of your rental website to improve your ranking.
Why is it important?
Off-page SEO activities such as backlinks, good reviews, mentions, recommendations from experts, social engagements, and shares are fundamental for Google to check the popularity and trustworthiness of your rental website.
If your rental website has a huge number of social followers, backlinks at authority sites, and plenty of good reviews, search engines take that as a positive signal to bump your position in the search results.
Here are a few Off-page SEO strategies for your rental website:
Backlinks are very important so I made this section a little longer.
As its name suggests, those are links to your websites that appear on others’ websites.
If you have paid attention, in this article, I used several links to others’ websites to either connect you with better information or indicate the source of data.
When I do that, the mentioned websites earn a new backlink, a good reputation, and more importantly boost in their search engine ranking.
Long story short you need quality backlinks.
Experts recommend using stats in articles to gain more backlinks. It turns out people do not link to a site simply because it has good quality content, they link you to the stats you shared on your content. So be the source of unique data!
2. Write longer posts.
According to the source, long-form content gets 77% more backlinks than short content. That means writing articles with more than 1000 words with unique ideas and information can garner more links to your website.
3. Do guest-posting.
You probably have heard about the benefits of guest posting for SEO. If you haven’t, you should look into it.
Guest posting is writing a good article and publishing it on other websites, hoping to get traffic from those sites.
And another benefit of guest-posting is backlinks. So, try to publish your articles on reputable websites that have higher authority in a niche that is relevant to yours.
4. Consider the “Broken Link Building” method.
Broken link building is a popular method of building backlinks by finding broken backlinks in other websites, writing quality articles about the same subject, and contacting the site owner to replace their broken links with yours.
The method is a win-win for both sides. You earn a backlink by fixing other websites' broken links.
You may read this guide to learn the steps of the broken link-building method.
5. Do an outreach.
If you have written an article that will supplement others' content or support their claims with more details, you can reach those sites and ask them to link your website.
Not every site will say Yes to your request. 5 out of 100 is still the winner.
The things that will help you to increase outreach conversion.
6. Use the SkyScraper Technique.
Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, used this technique to increase traffic to his site by 110%. He did it in just 14 days.
Here are the core steps of the technique.
You may get more details about the technique here.
One of the off-page SEO tactics for a rental website is reaching out to local influencers such as bloggers, celebrities, or experts in certain fields to promote your business.
When you get mentions from influencers, you are not only getting direct traffic but also increasing your credibility for search engines.
You will be surprised to find some rental websites solely rely on social media engagement to increase their traffic.
Here are some tips to increase your social media followers so that search engines can recognize your business as reputable and grant your business a higher ranking.
We highly recommend adding your rental website to reputable platforms such as
If you try to add your rental website to other business directories, make sure they are high-authority sites.
Adding your site to unreliable sites will not boost your SEO ranking. Instead, it will damage it.
Have you ever searched for a new business on Google with keywords like “Cleaning service near me”, “Trailer rentals near me”, "Party rentals in Orlando, Florida", "Cabin rentals near Sierra National Forest", etc?
If you did, you have seen the search engine come back with results like below.
These results are the product of Google Business Profile.
For example, if you add your bike rental business there, it will appear the same way when people in your area search for nearby bike rentals.
Another cool thing is that once you add your business, Google Maps also features your business with directions.
Convinced it is a good route? Here is a simple guide to add your business.
Also, consider the following tips to get optimal results from Google Business Profile
Reservety handles your website, bookings, inventory, and payments — so you can focus on growing your business.