Foreign Perspectives

One thing that constantly surprises me with the adverts that we get for the listings sites is how poor some of them are.

Whilst most people will write two or three paragraphs to describe their place and some even run to quite extensive descriptions of both their property and the local attractions, others put as little as one sentence on and don’t bother with a photo either.

Now, it’s possible to get some hits with a one sentence description but realistically the number of hits you’ll get with one sentence is tiny as it just isn’t enough for the search engines to work with. And the search engines do matter because even with listings sites, the majority of hits are generally on the pages generated for individual properties rather than the home page of the listings site. Therefore if your entry is very short then you’re going to get a good deal less business than if your entry is above average in length.

Photos are a different matter. They’re usually not important in bringing people to your place although there’s been a recent trend towards people using image search to find properties so they are more important than they were. However, many people book directly from the advert so it’s a good idea to load as many good photos as you can with any adverts that you place. Make sure that the photo used on your summary page is eye-catching too or your place will get skipped.

In fact, rather than spending time to get the “perfect wording” for your ad, it’s much better to spend the time in making it longer.

One Response to “Why bother advertising if you can’t be bothered to write a decent advert?”