Brittany and Pays de la Loire – France

I was surprised to get a response from Brittany Ferries when I complained about them on Twitter. This should be a normal PR activity for all businesses though.

Find out how Brittany Ferries dealt with my issue on Twitter and why this is an important lesson for your business

Do you need a personal website to market your holiday rental property or are holiday rental listing sites good enough to deliver the return you need for your money? I answered a question similar to this the other day and think the answer is YES.

My 10 reasons for having your own website to market your holiday rental property

As a french property owner you are constantly competing for bookings with other owners in your area. In times when demand outstrips supply you should all be able to co-exist happily, but the number of available rental units has been rising steadily and exchange rate fluctuations and economic crises are conspiring to dampen demand too. Internet searchers will usually look at a number of properties before choosing those to enquire about, so how do you increase the chances of your property being one of them?

Find out how to stand out from your competition by putting testimonials on your website

If the location of your french business is important to your website visitors (for example, if you are selling or renting holiday properties or if you have a shop or office that people need to find) you really need to show them very clearly WHERE YOU ARE…

Find out why it is important to show your customers where you are, and how to do this on your website

It"s nice to help others out by linking to their site, or to link to useful resources for your website visitors, but be careful that you don"t “leak valuable link juice” from your site in doing so. This could reduce your search engine effectiveness and mean that your competitors get your traffic.

Find out how to link to other websites without reducing your pagerank

Have you seen the number of results that get returned when you search for "holiday rental property in brittany" or "loire holiday rental" or "gite near la baule" or any other phrase that includes a combination of "france", "brittany", "holiday" or "property"? How does your site stand a chance of getting a decent ranking and therefore being noticed? Link building is one activity that could improve your ranking.

Find out how important link building is for your website and how to go about getting more links

Make sure there is a clear and obvious way for people to get in touch with you wherever they are on your website. Failure to do so could result in lots of potential bookings finding their way to somebody elses website.

Find out how important it is to be easily contactable and how to fix it