Five factors that will determine the success of your Airbnb

When it comes to successfully promoting your Airbnb, it’s all about professionally presenting your property in both a physical and digital realm.

This is where Airbnb ranking factors or search-engine optimisation (SEO) have important parts to play. For those unsure of what those mean, basically these factors have the power to control where your property appears within the platform’s search results – the higher up you are, the better.

Sadly, most listings that aren’t found on the first few search pages are unlikely to receive many (if any) guest inquiries. So for any first-time or long-term hosts, it’s in their best interests to do all they can to secure a prime position on the platform.

To get you started, below are some key factors and pro-tips to consider when assessing the effectiveness and overall success of your Airbnbs.

1. Click Through Rates

“Click Through Rates” (CTR) means the amount of times guests click on your listing in the official Airbnb search results.

Many may assume that having a high number of views will contribute to successful CTR results. However, it’s a little more involved than that.

A guest has to interact with the booking calendar for it to be counted as a click. What any host wants is someone to not only click on their listing, but to stay and browse for a while before ultimately clicking book now!

Pro-tip: Make your listing click-worthy by creating distinctive image thumbnails that will grab potential guests’ attention.

2. Acceptance and commitment rates

This is specifically referring to the number of guest bookings you accept, reject or cancel.

It’s no surprise that your decisions as a host are constantly compared to other hosts on the platform, therefore you should think carefully before tending to guest booking requests.

There are instances where you may need to reject a guest due to bad ratings and reviews on their part. Although, if you are rejecting and cancelling on more guests than other hosts in your market, this will significantly lower your search ranking as Airbnb will consider this unacceptable behaviour.

Fortunately, Airbnb do provide a little leeway and acknowledge that sometimes there are legitimate reasons for doing so.

Pro-tip: Manage guest expectations by clearly outlining things in the House Rules section of your listing. This will hopefully deter any “wild” travellers and help reduce your number of rejections. Second, avoid cancelling on guests at all costs.

3. Listing copywriting

The type of language you use on your listing and profile has more influence than you may think.

When searching for a property, guests are looking for listings which appeal to their needs or preferences such as “high-rise apartment” or “ocean-view house”. Therefore, hosts need to ensure they are enticing potential guests by using wording that is going to catch their attention.

Pro-tip: Think carefully about the unique features of your place and incorporate them in your listing title or description and be sure to avoid using unusual terms or vocabulary.

4. Message/booking response rates

The amount of time you take to respond to a guest’s message and booking request can also impact where your property appears in search results.

It’s almost guaranteed that guests interested in booking your place will have questions.

Whatever you do, don’t dismiss guests’ inquiries no matter how simple or complex their questions are. Being labelled an unresponsive host isn’t a title you want, especially since Airbnb will notice and red flag you resulting in an instant ranking drop.

Pro-tip: Respond to all guests within a consistent, 24-hour timeframe to ensure your listing is top of mind.

5. Featured image

The main purpose of this factor is to entice potential guests to click to your listing.

For this to happen, your property needs to leave a lasting first impression. So if you have a hot property, don’t be afraid to show it off with an attractive and show-stopping feature image.

Make sure that image is realistic as you don’t want guests to misinterpret aspects of your place.

Pro-tip: Achieve this by reaching out to professional photography services who can provide a selection of high-quality images of your place. You can use rotate through these images to constantly refresh your listing.

William Crock is Co-Founder and Director of Hometime, which a Sydney-based property management company for the short-term rental market exclusively using Airbnb. So you could say he’s an expert when it comes to Airbnb listings!