5 Ways To Boost Your Airbnb Listing Rankings | Tim Hubbard

If you have your listing on Airbnb or VRBO already, or any listing site, I'm sure you've been thinking, I think about this all the time when I'm staring at my listing. Does this title make a difference? If I change the cleaning fee, does it make a difference? If I add better photos, does it make a difference? What is going to make a difference so that my listing ranks number one? That's what we're going to talk about this week. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard. Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. We all want our listing to be number one online, right? But. But if that was a secret that Airbnb or any of the listing sites were willing to tell us, then all of our listings would be there. So they don't tell us this, right? So I want to give you five things this week that'll help boost your listing online. Now, I don't know Airbnb's little secret for their perfect search algorithm, but I do know the things that they want, the things that they're asking for. And let's just get right into it. And if we want to break this down right, there's not someone on the other side of the. Of Airbnb looking at our listing. I mean, there's millions of listings. There's not someone saying, okay, this person didn't put this photo in and they didn't do this. No, we're talking. We're adding information the machine is looking at, right? And the machine uses these algorithms to determine where our property should be ranked. And for any of those that you don't know, if you're new to this, basically we're talking about if you open Airbnb and you plug in a city, the first properties that pop up, that's where we want to be. We want to be at the top of Airbnb's list. And so these things we're going to talk about are going to help us do that. The first one might seem obvious, but I see so many people not doing it, and it's just filling out all the sections on your listing. So Airbnb has a lot of different sections on the listing. A lot of times I see people just put in a quick listing description. They leave out the neighborhood, they leave out a section that says other things to note, another section that says guest access. There are quite a Few different sections, and we just want to make sure that we're filling all those out. If you think about it, if there's two listings that are exactly the same, everything's the same. The reviews are the same, the property's the same, the photos are the same, and this machine on the back end is looking at these two listings. But one of them, one of the two listings doesn't have one of these fields filled out. In other words, the machine's going to think this property is less complete than this property. And who do you think our friendly machine at Airbnb is going to give priority to? It's the one that's more complete, right? So that's. That's the first tip. Just make sure that you're filling out all of the sections on Airbnb or VRBO or whatever listing site you're using now. One of the sections is our listing title. That is a very important one. But I already did a whole episode on that. It's episode 118. So if you haven't caught that one, go back and check it out. Got some real quick tips for you to make sure that you have a good title on your listing. So, next thing. And this is sort of in line with filling out all the sections, but this is my second tip. And one of those sections, in my opinion, and to me it seems very obvious, is much more important than some of the other sections. And that's the safety section again. If we have this machine, a robot, looking at two properties, and one of these properties has all the safety items checked, these are things like having a first aid kit, having a fire extinguisher, smoke detector is one of them as well. But having a fire extinguisher, we like to put ours in our kitchens. Carbon monoxide detector and a smoke detector. So having those four items checked on your listing is going to help Airbnb's machines, their algorithms, know that your property is safe. And safety is huge, right? So make sure that you have all those safety features filled in. There's also a spot to leave a note under one. You might not need a carbon monoxide detector, for example, if you don't have gas in your property. But you can leave a note that says why you don't need that carbon monoxide detector. So make sure you're filling that out. Number three. And this is one that I heard recently, I hadn't really thought about. But we all know that our photos are super, super important online, right? I recommend having a professional take professional, professional photos. So we've Talked about photos quite a bit, actually. We have a couple other episodes on photos. One is episode 70, which are must have photos again that I don't see in a lot of people's listings. And they're easy to add. So check that one out. And then episode 91 are things that you shouldn't do with your photos. So photos are really important. But this is a different tip for you this week. This is having higher quality photos on your listing. Now that seems very obvious, but we can have a high quality photo that is in a large size. For example, when our professional photographer in one of the cities that our properties in and takes our photos, he sends it to me in two versions. He sends me a web version which is the same high quality photo but with way less. It's a smaller file size. And then he sends me the original file size, which often is like three times bigger. So by uploading a larger file size with your photo can be the same photo, but it's going to be higher quality. If it's a bigger file size, that again, if you think about it, Airbnb's algorithms or machines are going to be looking at this thinking, okay, here's a set of photos that are 1 megabyte, for example, that we used to take with our old smartphones. You know, there's a very low file size. Now the new smartphones take some really big ones. But if you upload that smaller size photo versus one that, say 10 megabytes, their machine is very likely going to think this is just a better photo. Right? So make sure you're using higher quality images. Check out those other two episodes if you haven't. Pictures are really, really important. Another thing, real quick tip before we get to item number four to boost your search ranking is make sure you're putting descriptions in your photos. That is another section on the listing site, right on the listing setup. If you have a bunch of photos and one has descriptions but the other one doesn't, then it's gonna be less complete. And if it's less complete, the algorithms aren't gonna like it as much. Those listing descriptions are also a good spot to share more information with our guests. Remember, our guests oftentimes aren't reading all of our listings, but they're very often looking at all the photos. And it's very easy to see quick descriptions in the photos, so make sure you're doing that. So one other quick tip on photos is make sure your thumbnail is the best. We all know that the first photo that everyone sees is the Best. But you also have now the way that the listing sites are designed. Airbnb and vrbo, you see the main photo, but you also see a couple other photos. Right next to it are title photos. So make sure that those are representative of your whole listing. You don't want to have four pictures of your kitchen, for example, if you have amazing other places in your property, because that first section is likely going to be where what your guests are going to use to determine if they want to spend more time on your listing or not. Okay, so on to item number four that I think I know is going to help boost your search ranking on Airbnb. And why do I know that this one is going to help? And that's. That's because Airbnb tells us. Right. And that's monitoring our listing. One of the pieces of monitoring our listing is responding to guests. So I'm gonna talk about that under super host status. Superhost is a big piece as well. But just monitoring your listing. Airbnb changes things all the time. They add features. Now you can, you know, talk about the type of appliances you have and get very detailed. And so they add these features all the time or amenities. And if you're not updating them, then they're probably going to think that you're not as concerned with your property as maybe you should be. And when I say they, again, I'm talking about the machines. Right. They want to see that you are taking advantage of what they are providing on their listing sites. Again, they just want it to be as complete as possible. So a lot of these amenities and options that come up on Airbnb, they'll ask you for an additional bit of information. You don't want to just leave it on there. It's. You can either fill it out, yes or no, or if it's something you're going to be writing, but you just want to make sure that you've taken care of that question or new option that they have available. So Airbnb just. They tell us that if we're doing certain things, if we're updating our pricing, another big one, and that's another piece of monitoring. I recommend using Price Labs or pricing tool. That's going to do that for us automatically. But the more you update your pricing, that is going to help as well. You know, depending on our. Our policies and our descriptions and all these things that are all affecting us. And Airbnb tells us us that. Right. It is a little more difficult to know if by changing these things, it's actually helping our listing. We're going to talk about that in the very near future. Conversion rates and, and how we can know with a little more certainty if these changes are actually affecting us. So that is to come in another episode. But for now, just remember, the more you monitor your listing and update prices, update photos, update anything that Airbnb is asking of you, the better you're going to rank on their search algorithm. So let's get to the fifth one, and this is a little more obvious. This is their superhost status. If you have super host status, or VRBO's version of this is called Premier Host, either of these designations are going to help your search ranking. It's something that clearly tell us. Right. How much it actually helps us. Well, that. That one's a little harder to figure out, but it definitely will help. And there's even a search option where when potential guests are going in, they can click Super Hosts versus you know. So only listings show up that are super hosts versus ones that don't have. And I know I've used that feature myself, especially traveling a lot in South America and in Asia and quite a few places where maybe their Airbnb game isn't quite as good as Europe and the US So I've used that myself. And by checking that Super Host status button, it's going to eliminate everyone that's not a super status. So we want to achieve that, but it can be a little difficult, especially the more properties we add, the more and more difficult it gets. So they have four metrics that they use for that one is response time. How quickly are we getting back to our guests? And they want to see 90% or more of our messages responded to within 24 hours. So that is one of the metrics reviews. We know that reviews are super important. They want to see an average review score of 4.8 or more out of 5. So that one is super important as well. I would say if we took away all the metrics, reviews are probably going to be the most important, important, right? Cancellations. They don't want you canceling your guests reservations. That's inconvenient for the guests. And while they do have our side as hosts on a lot of things, they have our guest side, too, as they should. And so they don't want to see a lot of cancellations, less than 1%, in fact. And I think that has a top number to it. It's like three or five. It's not very much. So there are ways to have your reservations canceled if you, if you have a guest that you don't feel comfortable or safe hosting to make sure you contact Airbnb and they can help you get that canceled without being penalized. The last one is the amount of stays. And this is again, like they want to know that you're active and that you're using Airbnb and you're staying up to date with things. So the more you do that, the more reservations you should have. Right. So they want to see that you've had at least 10 stays or 100 nights booked with three or more stays. So make sure that you're getting some reservations and hopefully you are because we know that short term rentals can be so much more profitable than long term rentals. Right. That's why we have this podcast. That's why I've been investing in short term rentals for a long time and I will continue to. If you've listened to podcasts for a while, you know that I still also like long term rentals. I just like real estate in general, but I've found short term rentals has been one of the best ways. And one last thing, some of these tips and some of these things just came up because we started a membership group which has been a lot of fun. You can check it out. Rested investor clubhouse.com rested investor clubhouse.com It's a very entry level group, but we meet once a month. And one of our last topics, we're reviewing listings. So we reviewed some of our members listings. We which was awesome. I think we all learned a ton. I learned a ton. And some of these things that we mentioned here are not happening on the majority of people's listings. So you can stay ahead of the curve if you make sure you do these five things. And just to recap, make sure you're filling out all the sections. You want your listing to be as complete as possible. You want to make sure that you've got all those safety features. If you don't have a first aid kit or a fire extinguisher, make sure you get those. Want to use higher quality images so larger file sizes, that is, make sure you're putting in the descriptions and filling out all the photo sections as well. We want to monitor our listings all the time, make sure we're adding any new amenities and we're answering all the questions that Airbnb asks of us. And then we really want to try to achieve that super host status. And that is done by having an Average review score 4.8 or more, responding to over 90% of our guests messages within 24 hours, having a very low, almost non existent cancellation rate. Just a handful of cancellations per year or less than 1%. And then the last one using Airbnb and getting reservations with them so they have a minimum review score there. So hopefully you guys got some value out of this. Remember, we're talking to machines and the only way that they know that our property is better than the other is if it's more complete and we're doing what they ask. So until next time, I hope you're doing really well out there. Thanks for tuning in again and I'll see you soon. Cheers. If you're looking for a ton of free resources, well, you can check out the links in the show notes or head to our website, restmethods.com where you'll find free guides, house rules, and my ebook on finding the best short term rental properties. Thanks for tuning in.