Are you worried that your Airbnb listing will get buried by the competition? Do you have an Airbnb that has suddenly plummeted in bookings and you don’t know why? If potential guests can’t see your listing, they won’t book it, and if they don’t book it you won’t make any money… is that your worst nightmare?
If this sounds familiar, you need to listen to Episode 5 of the Host Coach Airbnb Podcast where we explain what search rank is, how to track it, and why it impacts your Airbnb listing’s success.
After listening to this episode, you will know the “crystal ball” software to use for tracking listing rankings, along with the exact changes to implement on your listing to trigger the Airbnb algorithm to place your listing higher in ranking.
Tune in to know how to optimize your listing for rank so it is fully booked and maximizes return on YOUR investment!
Topics discussed in this episode:
- Which “crystal ball” software allows you to see and track your listing’s search placement on Airbnb
- The hidden value of reviews and private feedback for listing optimization
- How changing photos and Airbnb’s new AI features can impact listing rank
- Which amenities to prioritize for elevating your listing on Airbnb
- Which policies and subsettings on Airbnb to adjust to boost your listing’s search placement
Host Coach Episode 5 Show Notes:
Today we're going to tell you exactly what you need to do to optimize your listing, to ensure that it stays at the top of Airbnb search. It's fully booked and maximizes return on your investment. Something that might surprise you is that the predecessor to bookings is views. The predecessor to views is search rank placement.
And to maximize bookings, we need to know how our listing is ranking. What do we mean by listing ranking? It starts with knowing where your listing is showing in the search results on Airbnb for any available booking dates and guest counts.
What do we mean by guest count? The number of people that could potentially book that are booking. Every group knows how many people they're traveling with. So if it's just husband and wife and son and daughter, that's a guest count of four. If it's two couples, that's a guest count of four. If it's three couples, it's a guest count of six, and certain properties just don't fit three different couples well. So even if you had a pull out sofa, you can sleep six. That property is not likely to book for that three couple guest count, that six person guest count, as well as a three bedroom listing would.
You can't just search your listing in a standard browser mode in Airbnb to see where it's showing in rank placement, because Airbnb knows that you've been to your own listing before and it's going to falsely show it higher and promote that listing to you.
So what you can do is you can go into private browsing mode or into incognito mode and search your listing that way. For those of you who don't know what incognito mode is, if you're looking at your computer screen, on the top right corner, there are three little dots. If you click on that, there's a dropdown where you can select incognito mode, and this allows you to search without any cookies, without any of Google's special forces, knowing what you've looked at before so you can get a more accurate representation of Airbnb search.
This becomes really tiresome and tedious to search, count, and record your position over all of your available open days and guest counts. So the solution we use is called Rank Breeze. Rank Breeze is an inexpensive software - I call it a crystal ball look into how your listing is performing in terms of the search rank placement.
You know what gets measured, gets managed. Rank Breeze will chart your listing's placement automatically and graph it for you over all of your available booking opportunities. This way you can see, next Friday, next Tuesday, you might be doing really well, your listing might be showing in the 10th position. But, in a month from now, a holiday weekend, for example, you might be showing in a 30th or 40th position. So think about Google. How often do you go past page one looking for a result? Same thing on Airbnb. Your average Airbnb guest only looks at three or four listings in detail before making a purchase decision.
So if you use Rank Breeze and find that your property is in the 30th, 50th, or 100th position, that's goning to let you know that you want to try to do some things to improve that rank and optimize your listing for rank placement.
Fun fact: Airbnb only shows the first 18 listings in an area. So if you're trying to be on page one, like in Google search, you need to be in the top 18 rankings in your market.
Some easy steps that we can start with are our reviews. Yes, if you want to improve your search rank, step one is very easy. It is review your reviews and the private feedback. So anytime a guest stays at your Airbnb, they typically leave you a review that is public, that everyone can see, and more often than not, they will also leave you private feedback. Don't ignore them. Even the good ones that you're excited about, you can learn from, but the bad ones are the ones you can learn the most from , especially if you're trying to optimize for rank.
Understanding what guests wanted and thought you would have or wish you had, gives you an immediate task of "Oh, they thought I would have a blender. Let's buy a $19 blender and make them happy." Pack n plays are a huge amenity. If you have small children, you don't wanna add one more thing to your car to drag to an Airbnb property.
So review your reviews, make a list, and as you hear things more than once, because we do all have the outliers. If you hear something two or three times, that's something to prioritize adding to your Airbnb listing. Updating the listing to show that you have it as an amenity, and even adding as a photo, which leads into the next step to optimize to improve your search rank, which is updating and rearranging your photos.
If you don't have professional HDR photos, get them right now. It's the best $300 you can possibly spend. I like to say that Airbnb is a lot like an online dating site, so your pictures need to pop. People need to want to see more of them. And if you already have great pictures that are HCR quality, amazing, think about rearranging them. If you've had the same photos for two or three years, shuffle them around.
Show the master bedroom or show an in-season photo. So if it's wintertime and you have a snow photo of your chalet, that's what people wanna buy. That's what people are gonna click on, and that's what we want for search rank placement. Airbnb just introduced an AI photo reorganization tool. I haven't used it yet, but I think that might be a game changer because Airbnb knows what it wants to see. So, if it's got an AI that's going to help you rearrange your photos, that should make a big difference for hosts.
So the robots are going to tell us what the robots want to see and hopefully what guests want to see.
Outside of photos are amenities. As your listing starts to generate cashflow, earmark percentage for buying items that are new amenities. And these can be things that you know that you would like to have. Things like outdoor furniture, a fire pit, or really simple things like the pack n play that Culin mentioned.
If you have an amenity wish list, start buying them and prioritize what you're hearing from guest feedback that they would like to have. If you don't have a list and you don't have a lot of reviews from guests to know what good amenities might be, you can always look at Airbnb's list of amenities.
In your host dashboard there's all of those check boxes. If you set up your listing, you remember you clicked off a million things like, yes, I have air conditioning. Yes, I have a kitchen. Yes, I have a sink. Airbnb is continually adding check boxes for amenities that they realize guests want to have. So for example, hammocks popped up a couple months ago and I was like, oh, that's a really easy amenity to add.
So I bought nine hammocks on Amazon or Wayfair. And thenwe installed them at our cabins. We installed them, actually that would be - Culin installed them. And it was easy! As soon as you install any amenity, make sure that you check it off so guests, when they're searching, can see that you have this amenity and that may edge out the competition.
"Oh, I really like both of these, but they have a hammock. I don't have a hammock at my house. I want to stay there." And once you've added those amenities, you can now go back into Rank Breeze and see if it's made an improvement in your search placement.
The next thing that you can do that's really powerful, this is, maybe the most powerful part of re-op optimizing your listing is to look at your policies. Go into your Airbnb listing, and look really carefully at things like your pet policy.
I understand , not every property is set up to accept pets. Most of our Airbnbs do accept pets because it's a huge differentiato. But, some just don't have the flooring to accept it. If you were on the fence about accepting pets at one point in time and you have the capability to accept pets. If you do, you'll see most likely a pretty dramatic change in your rank placement and your bookings.
Another thing to check is your cancellation policy. Airbnb gives us four or five choices on cancellation policies and anything that we can do to be more flexible towards the guest is helpful. If you're trying to move that needle up and improve your rank placement, try to relax your cancellation policy.
Having a guest book and cancel is better than not having a booking book at all. The cancellations are pretty minimal. I also find that Airbnb does a really good job of rebooking cancellations for us. So look at that cancellation lever and see if you can relax it a bit.
Which cancellation policy do you advise listeners to use? We always lead with moderate cancellation policy , but if I had a listing that was struggling with a moderate cancellation policy chaning to a flexible cancellation policy would be a strong lever that we could throw to improve its rank placement.
A must have policty is instant booking. Airbnb really favors listings that have instant booking turned on. They're competing with the hotel industry, right? Airbnb wants the guest to be able to book at 11 o'clock at night, you're in your pajamas, you see a listing you want to be able to instantly go ahead and book that without having to reach out to the host.
And I know how this feels. I was recently booking an Airbnb for my best friend's birthday, and I was between three different places. They were all in the right price range, the same market, and then my favorite one didn't have instant booking. And so I requested to book and I waited. I set a timer. I waited for an hour to hear back from the host because it was my favorite and I didn't hear back. And so I ended up booking my next favorite because I didn't wanna lose the opportunity. Someone could have booked all three of those places and then we wouldn't have had a place that accommodated all of our needs.
There are also a couple of sub settings under Instant booking that have crept in the last, I don't know, six months of updates on the platform. One to really pay attention to if you do have a listing or if you're setting up a listing is good track record. Who doesn't want a guest with a good track record? So most people have that turned on. What that does though is limits any guest who doesn't have an Airbnb review already. So to have a good track record, you have to have stayed in an Airbnb listing and got a good review.
A guest may have stayed several Airbnbs and never got a review. So make sure that you have that good track record. Turned off, even though it's counterintuitive About half of our guests are first time users on Airbnb, and they would never even see our listing if I had that good track record turned on.
Next policy to review is minimum night stays. A lot of people think that they want a three or a five or a seven night minimum stay. When in fact, you want to try to be as flexible to guests as possible. So a way of making your listing show to more guests and rank higher is to accept a shorter night minimum stay.
If someone's coming into town for the weekend, wherever it is that they're visiting, you can't make them stay for three days. So you're just not going to see any of those searches that people are looking for just two nights a Friday and Saturday night, for example, if you have a three night stay required.
The final piece is to try to meet the market. To be shown at the top of Airbnb search results is connectd to your pricing. We've talked about dynamic pricing in the past episodes, but if you are priced way above your competition on a given weekend then you're just going to be pushed further and further down the list.
We need to meet the market where the market is. So, if your place usually books for $200 a night, next Tuesday and Wednesday nigh the competition might be more in the $150 a night range. Hopefully you'r using Price Labs to make those price adjustments.
If you've done all the things that we've talked about so far - you're using Price Labs, you've reviewed your amenities, and you've reviewed your policies, it may be time to lower your base price just a little bit to make sure that you can get back up into that page one status.
And once you're in the page one status, then you can creep your pricing back up. The market's always changing and Airbnb is always making changes, so optimization should be done quarterly. I know that sounds crazy, but you can't just set it and forget it when it comes to Airbnb listings. I say this, but we are absolutely guilty of setting and forgetting one of our listings.
Our first Airbnb listing has just always done amazingly well. It's a small condo in Turks and Caicos. We noticed a fall off in bookings. Yeah. You discovered Rank Breeze. And we're like I'll check Rank Breeze to see why no one's booking. Where were we showing in Rank Breeze? We'd fallen down to like position 30 or 40. And so we had to use these reoptimization tools that we tell all of our clients about.
I looked at our photos and was like, oh, yeah, we need professional HDR photos. I took these before there was that capability on island. So we hired a photographer and took care of that. Amazingly it impacted our bookings. And then I looked at our title, our listing title was Modern Vacation Condo, and I didn't add anything about an amenity. So what differentiates us? We have an onsite spa and people would love to have an onsite spa next to their Airbnb.
So, we changed the title to include Onsite Spa and it took a little while, but all of a sudden we peaked in the correct direction and went back to being fully booked. So, we are not perfect, but we can also testify that these optimization steps not only work for us, but for all of the clients, the hundreds and hundreds of clients that we've helped in so many different markets, in so many different states and countries. So it's the real, it does work.
So there you have it. All the steps you can take to keep to optimize your Airbnb listing to ensure that you stay at the top of search, get the most bookings and maximize returns on your investment.
Do you want to know everything necessary to succeed at Airbnb investing to attain financial freedom? Then keep listening to the Host Coach Airbnb Podcast. Every week, we're here to share systems, mindsets, hacks, and tools to help you and your clients overcome common obstacles and truly succeed as Airbnb investors.
