How to Craft The Perfect Listing Title | Tim Hubbard

Behind photos and reviews. Your listing title is one of the most important things to attract your potential guests. So we're going to talk all about catchy listing titles this week on the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. 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 Short Term Rental Riches. Here we are, another week, another topic. There are endless topics to help us with our short term rentals. This one is important this week. It's something we do right from the beginning. It's put a title on our property. How are we going to describe our property to our guests? Now I'm talking about the little itsy bitsy title that Airbnb gives us. In fact, it's only 50,000 characters. So I want to give you some of my tips to make sure that you're writing the best title you can to attract the most guests. And the first one is simply use all of the characters. So we only have 50. That is not a lot. And each additional word we include in our title could be the reason that someone stops to browse our listing and hopefully make a reservation. So we want to make use of that whole list. We want to use all words. And now you might feel the urge to abbreviate a lot of words because you want to pack as much in there as you can. I would be cautious with abbreviations if you're going to use them. I would suggest that the person that you're writing this title to, the person you're trying to attract to your property is going to know what the abbreviation stands for. So one that may work. For example, one that I might recommend is simply the W with the slash or with, you know, so Jacuzzi with sunset view or something like that. Just an examples abbreviation. I tend to try to not use too many abbreviations, but we do want to use all of the words, all of the space in our listing titles. I've got six tips for you here. So that's the first one, use all the space. The second one is to speak to your audience. So who is your guest avatar? Who. Who's booking your property? Who's looking at your property? Is it a business traveler? Well, then you might want to appeal to them. Is it someone coming to book a family vacation for a family of five? That's going to be different than the business traveler? So we want to know first of all who's booking our Property, for example, a business traveler. You might want to include words like modern or convenient. Maybe you want to talk about a workspace. You want to fit that into your title somewhere. So make sure you know who your audience is before you start to write your title. So the next tip would be to include your listing's best features. Do you have a house with a beautiful sunset view over the ocean, or a treetop view over a forest or an infinity pool? Are you close to the beach? Are you on Main street downtown? These could all be examples of some really good features that you want to put right in your title. Your best, best features right in the title. And again, we don't have a lot of words, so you got to be creative here. Take some time to play around with this next tip. Don't have redundant information. I see this all the time. I'm searching for a two bedroom apartment on Airbnb and I see right in that person's title, it says two bedroom apartment downtown. Well, I've already put two bedrooms in my search. So you don't need to put that back in your listing title because the people that are seeing your listing title, they've already put in some of those search parameters already. So make sure you don't put in the amount of bedrooms or baths in there. And also not a general location. Let's say you're booking apartment in San Diego, California, for example. Don't put prime San Diego location because someone's already put San Diego in their search. So that's kind of just wasted space there. So make sure you're not repeating information that someone's already put into their search. The next one, and this one takes a little more creativity. But we want to have catchy words. We want to have words that stand out. We don't want to use words like good, great, nice, you know, kind of general generic words. So you want to put a little more thought into it. Maybe Oasis, you know, serene, hidden gem. I like to use words that start with the same letter because I think it's kind of catchy. Now this is just my one of my preferences and we've got tons of different listing titles all across the board, all different ways. We've tried every which way you could think of. But after all the listings that I've put up and all the properties that I currently have, these are my biggest tips. And this is what I read on forums and recommendations that I hear from other places out on the great big Internet. Now, Airbnb and these other listing sites, they're always changing their search algorithm. So it's hard to say with 100% certainty which words and which ideas are helping more. But one thing that is nice is that these titles are not static. You can change these, right? So you can explore with this. So put some thought into the catchy words that you're using. One last tip is that because these are not static titles, they don't have to stay the same. Maybe you have a big event in your area. Try adjusting your title during that booking window before that event. So when someone might be looking to book your property before the super bowl, for example, maybe you want to include super bowl right in your title, that you're right next to where the event's going to happen. Or you might want to explore putting a landmark, something super important right in the title. And if it doesn't work out or you see your visibility drop a little bit, well, then you can always change it, right? So the title's really important. Make sure you're using all that space. Make sure you're speaking to your audience. You know who your potential guest is going to be. Include your property's best assets, your best attributes, the best features of your property. Don't put redundant information in there. Try to use catchy words that are not generic, like good, great and grand or nice. And then lastly, try playing around with the title and try adding in different words before a special event or for a landmark or something like that. Try playing around with it until you have one. It's going to work best for you. So those are my tips. Quick actional episode this week. If you guys are enjoying the podcast, enjoying our our channel, if you can leave us a review, we greatly appreciate it. It's a lot of fun doing these. It's a lot of fun getting all the feedback. And until next time, I hope you have a great day.