Airbnb Listing Optimization for More Revenue

The way to maximize the money you make from your short term rental property is through Airbnb listing optimization.

Optimizing an Airbnb listing refers to the set of different strategies and tactics that a host or property manager applies to make their rental show up higher in guest searches. Similar to other search engines, such as Google, Airbnb uses comprehensive algorithms to decide which listings should rank higher when guests look for available properties.

This means that by understanding Airbnb SEO, you can improve your listing’s visibility so that it shows up more frequently and higher in guest searches. This, in turn, increases the chances of guests booking your property, leading to a better Airbnb occupancy rate, more revenue, and higher return on investment.

In this article, we’ll provide you with actionable tips on how to enhance your Airbnb listing as a host or manager, thereby increasing your income and profit.

Table of Contents

1. Understanding Airbnb’s Search Algorithm
2. Optimizing Airbnb Listings for Higher Visibility
3. Enhancing Guest Experience for Better Reviews
4. Dynamic Pricing Strategies
5. Improving Listing Performance Through Analytics

Understanding Airbnb’s Search Algorithm

Airbnb search engine optimization, or Airbnb SEO for short, is a concept borrowed from content marketing and applied to the vacation rental listing platform. It combines the strategies used by a short term rental owner or property manager to have their listing rank as number one on the Airbnb website during guest searches.

The Airbnb algorithms take into consideration two main sets of factors when deciding how to rank different listings:

1. Guest experiences: First and foremost, the ultimate goal of the distribution channel is to provide guests with the best experience possible during their stay so that they’re satisfied and will come back. This means that the Airbnb SEO algorithm is likely to rank higher listings that are better for guests in terms of information, amenities, and pricing.
2. Comparison with competitors: In addition, Airbnb aims to give priority to properties that are better and offer more than comps in the area. Thus, listings with optimized titles and descriptions, that offer more extras, and that have competitive pricing tend to perform better in terms of ranking.

The following is a bit more detailed information on what goes into enhancing the guest experience and being competitive in the eyes of the short term rental website.

Factors That Affect Airbnb Listing Optimization

According to information provided on the Airbnb website  itself, while there are many factors that determine search results, the four criteria with the largest impact include:

1. Quality: Airbnb prioritizes high-quality listings and properties, where quality incorporates things like listing photos, ratings, and guest reviews, rental features and amenities, the customer service provided by the host, and the cancellation policy.
2. Popularity: The popularity of an Airbnb listing is measured through guest engagement. This includes saving the property in guests’ wishlists, guests messaging the host, and—of course—bookings and reservations.
3. Price: Another crucial factor for Airbnb listing optimization is the pricing of a vacation rental. Properties that offer lower rates—including the nightly price and all relevant fees such as cleaning fees, pet fees, and extra guest fees—for comparable properties with similar qualities get ranked higher. The platform wants to ensure that it provides value for money for its guests so that they come back for their next trip.
4. Location: Rentals in better locations that are close to tourist attractions, popular destinations, and public transportation are prioritized. That’s why it’s important to focus on the best short term rental markets when buying a vacation rental. After all, there’s nothing you can do to improve the location of your property once you have purchased it.

Now that we know what exactly impacts the ranking of an Airbnb listing, we can move forward with specific Airbnb SEO tips for hosts and property managers.

Optimizing Airbnb Listings for Higher Visibility

How to list on Airbnb for more visibility and higher ranking doesn’t have to be complicated. There are several easy, straightforward strategies that you can apply to improve Airbnb visibility regardless of your market and property.

Let’s examine what you can do about the three most important components of an optimized Airbnb listing: photos, description, and title.

Uploading Professional, Attractive Photos

In the Airbnb algorithms, a picture is worth a thousand words… or even more. Photos impact your listing in a few different ways.

First, they are incorporated into Airbnb SEO, as priority is given to high-quality, multiple photos. Second, guests are more likely to interact with and book listings with attractive photos. This will boost your occupancy rate, further pushing your property’s ranking.

Finally, guests are likely to write reviews that highlight the match between your listing photos and the reality of your rental, contributing to the listing optimization.

According to Airbnb regulations, the photos used in listings on the Airbnb platform need to be a certain minimum size. Moreover, it’s highly recommended that they be high-quality, high-resolution, and professional.

In addition, important Airbnb photo tips include providing a view of all rooms and all amenities. There’s no point in spending your money as a short term rental property investor on a hot tub or a swimming pool if the Airbnb ranking algorithm and potential guests cannot see it.

Needless to say, the photographs should be taken after your property has been impeccably cleaned, everything has been put in order, and there’s plenty of light.

It’s also crucial that your pictures are truthful. You need to put effort into maintaining the space and furnishings as they are in the photos. If your guests are attracted to your listing photos only to be disappointed with a poorly maintained, dirty rental during their stay, they will definitely mention this in their reviews and hurt your listing.

Meanwhile, if the space or furnishing significantly changes after you first list your property on the platform, you need to update the photos to reflect the new look.

Writing Comprehensive, Enticing Descriptions

The second element of enhancing the visibility of your Airbnb listing is providing compelling Airbnb descriptions.

From an Airbnb SEO point of view, optimizing a listing requires using the right keywords. Guests tend to use certain words and phrases when they look for properties in your market. Using these words and phrases in your listing description can help bring it up in search results.

There are two ways to conduct keyword research. First, you can check out existing listings in your area that rank high and look for common expressions in their descriptions. Second, you can benefit from keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Ads, Ahrefs, and SEMrush to conduct structured keyword research.

Once you’ve found the most relevant keywords for listings in your vacation rental market, you should incorporate them naturally and strategically into the description of your Airbnb listing to optimize its ranking.

Another strategy for improving your description is to make it searchable and navigable. To this end, you can use bullet points and numbered lists to highlight the main features.

This brings us to another crucial point. Your description should be comprehensive and clearly explain what makes your property different from—and better than—comparable properties in the market. Include all amenities, extras, and experiences that you offer as an Airbnb host or manager.

Finally, we cannot overemphasize the importance of your Airbnb listing description being accurate and truthful. Don’t make your property look more attractive than it actually is, as this will backfire. If you over-embellish your listing, guests will definitely give you negative reviews that will hurt your listing and threaten your future as a host or property manager.

Giving Optimized, Persuasive Titles

The third step in Airbnb listing optimization for more visibility on the vacation rental platform is the title. Your listing title should be catchy and descriptive so that it grabs the attention of both Airbnb SEO to prioritize your property and potential guests to make them book with you.

To do this, you should use some of the popular keywords that you identify during your research. Emphasize the location of your rental, especially if it’s positioned close to popular attractions. Also, highlight the most important features and amenities of your property.

Moreover, it’s a good idea to use emotionally appealing words that spark guests’ curiosity about your listing. You can also use emojis to make your title more playful and catchy.

For instance, “Cozy Family-Friendly Getaway in Myrtle Beach 🌴🌴🌴” is likely to attract more clicks and more reservations than “Two-Bedroom House in Myrtle Beach”.

Enhancing Guest Experience for Better Reviews

Airbnb listing optimization includes providing the ultimate guest experience for guest review improvement. How your previous guests review your listing plays a crucial role in how to rank higher and how to get more bookings on Airbnb. After all, this is the most truthful and straightforward testimony to the quality of your property and to your skills as a host.

Here are a few things that you need to pay attention to when setting up your property, listing it on Airbnb, and managing it:

Providing Better Amenities Than Competitors

What distinguishes the best vacation rental properties from the rest—both in the eyes of the Airbnb algorithm and guests—is amenities. This refers to all the extra features you offer in addition to space and furniture.

However, providing competitive amenities starts before you buy an investment property. When searching for short term rentals for sale, focus on the ones with more additional features than the average in the market. This needs to be based on a thorough vacation rental market analysis that considers what the average listing in the area offers and what the most popular rentals have.

For instance, a hot tub and a swimming pool are some of the most sought-after amenities on the Airbnb platform. That’s something that should come with your property as it’s hard to add a pool to an already finished house.

Additionally, after you buy your vacation rental, you should investigate opportunities for Airbnb amenities improvement. For example, things like a heating and cooling system, a fully equipped kitchen, and an outside barbecue area can be supplied to an existing property.

Once you’ve provided all these nice amenities, make sure that they are added to your listing and reflected in your description (and title if needed) so that they can contribute to your Airbnb listing optimization efforts.

Offering Unique Guest Experiences

In addition to amenities, guest experiences provide another opportunity to distinguish your property and yourself from the competition. In recent years, Airbnb has been placing increasing importance on the experiences offered by hosts as guests are more and more actively looking for something that goes beyond basic space for spending their time during travel.

There are an endless myriad of options depending on your area, local attractions, target guest niche, and capabilities.

For example, if you live in the market where you invest and have some extra time, you can organize a tour of the area, offer a local handicrafts course, or provide homemade local meals.

Alternatively, if you lack the time and skills, you can partner with local businesses to offer discounts to attractions, shops, and restaurants.

There are even simpler things you can do to boost guest experiences within your property that don’t cost a fortune. For instance, you can provide popular books, board games, and streaming services for guests and their families to fill the time they spend within your property.

Keeping Your Property Well Cleaned and Maintained

As a vacation rental host or property manager, you become a member of the hospitality industry. One of the most important factors for success there is the cleanliness and condition of your property at all times.

No matter what amenities you provide and what experiences you offer, guests will never forgive you if your rental is not properly maintained and cleaned. While most people are not compelled to share their positive experiences, they are certain to write negative reviews if the house is dirty, not well stocked, has faulty appliances, or exhibits problems with utilities.

In this regard, you need to conduct regular property inspections to check all furniture items, electric appliances, utilities, amenities, and everything else that might get broken or stop working properly. Moreover, you need a professional cleaning service that’s well integrated within your calendar and Airbnb management strategy.

The Mashvisor Multi-Calendar is a vacation rental property management calendar that helps you organize all your calendar activities under a single roof, no matter how many listings you have and how many channels you list them on. You can easily track all bookings so that you can clean and inspect your properties before each guest’s stay.

Having your rental well maintained, cleaned, and stocked is a must for guest satisfaction and more positive guest reviews.

Setting Up Effective Communication With Guests

Another crucially important factor for guest experiences is how well you communicate with them before, during, and after their stay. As a host or a property manager, you have to be available 24/7 to answer guest questions when they are making a reservation, before they arrive, while they reside on your property, and once they leave.

Additionally, there is a great deal of communication that needs to be proactive and initiated by the host in order to ensure that their guests have everything they need for a comfortable stay.

You need to provide guests with instructions on how to get to your property, how to get in, and how to use appliances and amenities prior to check-in. You should also inquire about their stay and ask for an Airbnb review after check-out.

The good news is that this can be done through digital guidebooks and automated email or messaging campaigns, and it does not need to involve manual efforts.

The Mashvisor Unified Inbox streamlines guest communication by bringing all messages from various distribution channels and OTAs into a single inbox. Hosts and managers can use automated messages for proactive communication and auto-replies for responding to popular guest questions.

This helps speed up response time, be available at all times, and provide guests with all that’s needed for their stay, while decreasing the actual time you need to spend on sending messages, reading through inquiries, and typing responses.

Actively Working Towards Positive Reviews

Ultimately, once you’ve done everything necessary to improve guest experience and satisfaction, you have to implement the final step: asking your guests to leave you a review.

In most cases, providing an outstanding experience does not suffice, as the majority of customers—within any industry—do not remember to write reviews when they are happy. But the same cannot be said when they are unhappy…

What this means is that you have to kindly remind your guests that they can share their experience with future guests in case everything went smoothly and as expected.

To do that, it’s best practice to automate a campaign where you follow up with guests a couple of days after they check out, ask about their experience, and inquire about their trip back home. In your message, you can provide an easily accessible link where they can write a review. In return, you can review them as a guest to make them more reliable in the eyes of future hosts.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean you’ll have to put in more effort. Once again, you can use the Mashvisor Unified Inbox to automate communication with guests after their stay.

Managing Negative Reviews

As a host or a property manager, you need to be prepared for the worst. You might put all necessary effort into providing an outstanding property and creating winning experiences, and guests might still write you a negative review, which might be objective or not.

You need to have a strategy in place should this unfortunate situation happen. First, it’s a smart move to learn from your guests’ negative experiences and generate ideas on how to improve future guests’ experiences. Try to take this as constructive criticism and draw lessons rather than see it as a hurdle.

In addition, if you think your guest is not entirely objective and fair, you might try to message them and try to discuss their experience with them kindly. Maybe there was a misunderstanding that you can clarify. Your guest might be actually willing to edit their review and make it less negative if you show readiness to learn from it and correct what you have done wrong.

But keep in mind that some guests might be unwilling to talk and change their reviews, and that is okay as long as you continue implementing the rest of your strategy.

If you can’t convince your guest to change their bad review, it’s important to post a public response to the negative review where you show that you are sorry for what went wrong and that you are actively working on fixing the situation for the benefit of future guests.

At the same time, if you are sure that this review does not reflect the reality of your short term rental business, you can dispute it via Airbnb’s official channels. To do this, you’ll need to be ready to provide more context while remaining in compliance with all relevant Airbnb regulations.

Finally, you need to continue working on gathering more and more positive reviews from satisfied guests to compensate for the impact of any negative feedback. After all, your overall rating is the average of all reviews, and as long as you have a large number of 5-star reviews, you should be fine with a couple of less impressive reviews by guests.

Dynamic Pricing Strategies

As outlined above, your listing’s pricing plays a key role in how it ranks on Airbnb. The platform wants to ensure that potential guests are supplied with competitive rates considering the space, amenities, and experiences that they provide. Thus, you need to build the right pricing strategies for Airbnb to optimize your listing’s performance on the platform.

A core feature of a vacation rental pricing strategy is that it needs to be dynamic. This means that you might need to have a different rate for each day your property is available for rent to reflect changes in demand and supply.

The short term rental market is highly seasonal in most locations, and seasonality refers not only to summer vs. winter but also to workdays vs. weekends and regular days vs. holidays. To stay competitive, you need to continuously adjust your nightly rate to be in line with what other listings are charging at the moment.

Traditionally, your short term rental pricing strategy needed to be built on a solid Airbnb market and Airbnb property analysis. This analysis has to take into account how similar your property is to comps in the area and what rates they are asking for. As you can imagine, this requires a great amount of research and data collection, analysis, and calculations.

But now hosts and property managers can use the Mashvisor Dynamic Pricing Tool, which helps them achieve Airbnb listing optimization with zero additional effort. This feature conducts continuous local market analysis to offer optimal daily rates for your property based on local dynamics, including demand, seasonality, and booking history.

A major difference between the Mashvisor dynamic pricing model and Airbnb Smart Pricing, as well as between competitors (such as PriceLabs vs Beyond Pricing), is that the former is designed to maximize revenue and ROI, while the latter frequently prioritizes bookings and Airbnb occupancy rate optimization.

Another noteworthy aspect of the Mashvisor tool is the ability to put your Airbnb pricing strategy on autopilot. You can enable complete sync between the rates suggested by Mashvisor and your Airbnb listing so that prices are directly applied on the Airbnb website. In this way, you can have your property be competitively priced to rank higher, get more bookings, generate more earnings, and bring more profits while you focus your efforts on other parts of your business.

Improving Listing Performance Through Analytics

The last decade has seen exponential growth in the use of technology and data in the hospitality industry, specifically in the vacation rental business. Indeed, many of the Airbnb listing optimization tips above rely heavily on big data and short term rental analytics, at both the market and property levels.

Reliable, comprehensive real estate data and analytics play a major role in the performance of a vacation rental listing on the Airbnb platform, as well as other channels like Vrbo and Booking.com.

Airbnb data analytics should be used when you first price your property to ensure that the set daily rates are aligned with the local market. It’s important to neither underprice nor overprice your rental as this can lead to suboptimal performance.

When you underprice, you’ll be leaving money on the table as you get bookings but charge guests less than your rental’s value. After all, Airbnb income is the product of occupancy and nightly rates. On the other hand, overpricing will push potential guests away into the hands of competitors, and your revenue will suffer.

However, the role of analytics does not end with launching your pricing strategy. When managing a short term rental, it’s a must to continuously monitor its performance and compare it to comps. You should use this comparison to actively look for opportunities to improve the results of your Airbnb business, and data plays a crucial role in this.

Mashvisor provides all the Airbnb data that property hosts, owners, and managers need to make the best decisions about their short term rental portfolios.

Some of the key data points include:

• Daily rates
• Occupancy rate
• Monthly rental income
• Rental expenses
• Cash flow
• Cap rate
• Cash on cash return
• Investment payback

This data helps investors throughout the process, from finding profitable markets and properties for sale to optimizing the performance of their Airbnb listings.

Leveraging Social Proof and Professionalism

Airbnb has established one more mechanism to establish the reputation and trustworthiness of hosts and their listings: the Airbnb Superhost program. This program aims to serve as social proof that testifies to the professionalism and reliability of hosts who perform extraordinarily and go above and beyond for their guests.

The Airbnb Superhost program has specific eligibility criteria that include:

• Hosting a minimum of 10 trips or 3 reservations with at least 100 nights
• Retaining a minimum response rate of 90%
• Maintaining a cancellation rate of less than 1%
• Having an overall rating of at least 4.8 stars

Enrollment in the program is automatic, so you don’t need to apply. As long as you meet and continue meeting all these requirements, you will gain access to the Superhost badge. However, you will lose the Airbnb Superhost status as soon as you fail to meet any of the above-listed expectations.

Meanwhile, being a Superhost comes with many important benefits. One of the most significant advantages is that the Airbnb SEO algorithm will prioritize your listings and rank them higher than comparable listings of regular hosts. In addition, guests are considerably more likely to book with a Superhost as they’ve already proven the excellent properties they offer and the great experiences they provide.

Getting Started With Airbnb Listing Optimization Now

The most effective way to maximize your rental income and ROI is to improve your Airbnb listing to drive more bookings at optimal rates. Some of the most important steps include optimizing your listing photos, title, and description; offering superior guest experiences; applying dynamic pricing; and securing social proof that you are an outstanding host.

While some of these tactics are easy to implement, others require time to be built. In any case, you need to start working on your Airbnb listing optimization today as improvements in ranking are likely to be gradual, take time, and require ongoing efforts.

If you need some extra help streamlining and automating the management of your short term rentals, check out the Mashvisor vacation rental software. Our channel manager, dynamic pricing, multi-calendar, unified inbox, and Airbnb data will facilitate many aspects of the management process while boosting your rentals’ performance.