Why can I not find rentability.com when I do a search on either Google or Yahoo. I have tried a number of different terms – holiday rental, holiday rental world wide, holiday homes etc.

Hi Caz, I’m not sure whether you mean in the “ads” section of the Google results page or the real “organic results” section, so I’ll try to answer both questions as well as I can.

We probably aren’t showing up at the moment in the paid ads section for those terms (the column of links down the right hand side of Google’s search results page) because we are in the middle of a transition in our marketing strategy with Google ads. If you’d checked a week or two ago you would have generally found us one of the top three advertisements for those terms, but we are currently developing and testing a new system which will make our pay-per-click marketing much, much more effective. Very few travellers actually search for such a broad term as “holiday rental” – they are usually much more specific about what they want and our new system is designed to leverage this. Developing the new system involves working with Google to connect directly to their server systems and it’s is rather complex – I admit it’s taking us a bit longer than we expected to get this online. We are improving the system though and hope to have something working soon. It’s unlikely that you will ever find us marketing very heavily using such very broad terms, though even now when I did a test search for the terms “vacation rental listings” we were second in the ads.

Organic search results are the main “real” results that appear when you do a search. Again, you are very unlikely to find us listed using very broad searches, but if you try more targeted and realistic terms we do a bit better. I just tried affordable disney villa , for instance, and we are second in the returned results, for holiday home advertising we’re fourth. It’s worth bearing in mind that we have only been open to the public for a few months, and achieving high organic search rankings is something that unavoidably takes time. Nonetheless one of our main focusses at the moment is improving our organic search positioning and we expect it to greatly improve over the next six months.

Our strategy, like everything else we do, is to try to re-think how search optimisation should be done. It’s no secret that in terms of capitalisation, we are a small mouse in comparison to the giant lumbering cow of our major competitor. There is no way we can compete in spending power with the $160 million of investment that HomeAway have. Our advantage is that HomeAway are using their money to attempt to maintain the status quo in the industry, whereas we are trying to change things. They have to maintain their enormously high prices in order to justify their investment – we looked at their standard business model and realised there was a better, fairer way. They have paid large sums of money for businesses with very outdated technological foundations – we are able to move very quickly to build technical innovations that they simply can’t match. Take a look at our new page layout system (see here or here for examples) – we think our system allows our customers to make the best looking advertisements in the industry – light years ahead of anything from the mainstream competitors. We are now planning to bring the same technical agility to bear on the problem of optimising our search results. I wish I could tell you what kinds of things we are planning, but I’m sure you’ll understand why we have to keep these things secret from our competitors for the time being.

Many thanks for that Josh.

Caz