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How to Check Your Airbnb Ranking Transcript
John (00:02):
Good morning everyone. Thanks for listening to another episode of Vacation Rentals with John. I’m your host, John, and my mission is to help make learning short-term rentals easy for everyone. Today’s episode is on how to check your ranking on Airbnb. Ranking Hire with search is on every vacation rental marketer’s minds. We all want to be seen and we all want to be booked. How do you know where and how high we show up on search? While this is a tricky concept for some to grasp, I’m going to take a stab at making it simple and easy to understand for any owner. So first off, ranking depends on the input. The input is a couple of things. If you go to airbnb.com, the first thing you’ll see in the search bar is where, that’s the city or town you’re located in. Check in, that’s your check-in date checkout, checkout date and who, how many guests and if you have a pet.
(00:54):
So for the sake of this exercise, I’m going to include Kissimmee, Florida for the where, check-in date, December 24th, checkout date, January 2nd, and who ate guests? Then I hit search. The ranking really depends on all of these inputs, what dates you put in, how many guests and the location you can rank for one search and not the other. So there are almost an infinite number of search combinations and you will definitely rank differently for all of them. This is why some apps that promise tell you your ranking, they’re iffy at best because you will have more rankings for each combo than you can actually track. So here’s what to search for. If you want to search for your rank on a peak season week like December 24th to January 2nd, in our example, enter the week in the date area first on your check-in and checkout dates. Enter the number of guests if you want to narrow it down even further, but you don’t have to do this, but if you want to see your overall rank against all available properties, just enter the number of guests.
(01:54):
If you want to narrow down your search, narrowing it down lets you see among all properties that sleep eight people where you rank for those dates in question. So I’m actually looking at the search that I put onto the screen and I can see the ranking of each property here by the order they show up on on this search query. Now it’s going to change every single day. Why? Because there’s some days that people get booked and that takes a vacation rental off the marketplace. And there’s some days that somebody has an increase in good reviews, bad reviews, responsiveness. So your ranking is actually gonna change every single day. Every day it’s going to change because of the algorithm and booking activity. People get booked by the minute. So if someone gets booked, it will move you up in the ranking and new properties coming online, increase supply and mess with your ranking as well. So reviews and responsiveness fluctuate for every property, and this is going to change the daily rank. Also, my suggestion is to keep a spreadsheet, write down the date that you check your ranking and the search parameters you actually use. So the check and checkout date,
John (02:58):
The number of guests, if you enter that, the city or the resort, if you enter that, the exact search parameters, you put the inputs and then write down where you ranked. And then every time you check those same search parameters, you can see how your ranking fluctuates. So if you check today in your ranking number 16, and then you check next week and you’re ranking number 19, that may be because there’s more available properties now or something going on with reviews of responsiveness is at play. It all depends. But if you check every week, which is my suggestion, you can see over the course of a year how many times your rank actually fluctuated and then you can make your best guess or do some investigating to find out why your rank has changed. I definitely believe checking weekly is enough because you don’t want to be super obsessed about it because other than optimizing your listing, there’s little you can do.
(03:51):
I definitely wouldn’t buy those spammy Airbnb, s e o services because they do nothing at all and don’t believe the promises to rank as no one can actually promise this to you. Ranking is a result of getting just 1% better day over day in these efforts compounding over time because excellence is not an act, but a habit. This same exercise in logic can be used to check your ranking on VRBO and booking.com. So this lesson today holds true on the other platforms as well. Their platforms are definitely more sensitive to some factors than others, but the overall way to check your ranking is still the same. VRBO search screen is actually exactly the same and ask, where are you going? What dates are you going and how many travelers are actually going with you? Same as Airbnb. booking.com is the same too. It says find your next day, where are you going?
(04:38):
Check and date, checkout date, number of adults, children, how many rooms? So it’s, it’s exactly the same. And the way they compile their search, it’s the same. They want reviews, they want book, they want affordability. So what you do on one platform will definitely help you across the other platforms. And you definitely want to check your ranks on those platforms as well if you rely on them for booking flow. Now, I can’t stress enough how many combinations there actually are for how you rank, because if you change the number of guests from sleeps, eight guests to sleep, six guests, your property will still show up. But now there’s way more supply to choose from because now they’ll show every property that can sleep six guests. So it changes your rank every time you change one input. If you put the number of guests to be different or to date to even be a day later, like instead of checking out the second, checking out the 3rd of January, it’s going to change where you rank completely.
(05:33):
So every single input combination is going to result in a different ranking for your listing. So it’s probably best if you want an overall picture of where you rank to leave the dates empty and to leave the number of guests empty. So that will be your overall rank against all properties, which is very broad because there’s so many different types of properties in any city that that might not give you the best measure of your performance, but at least you’ll know where you stand on their on their search. So I would definitely, out of curiosity, just check where you rank against all properties for all dates. So if you go to on Airbnb where just put your city, so Kissimmee, Florida, leave check in, blank leave, check out blank, leave who blank and hit search. And then you’ll actually have to go and find your property wherever it is.
(06:22):
It might be on page two, might be on page 16, but that way you can see where you rank without any input factors. And then you can do this exercise again and instead you can put the check in and checkout dates so you can see for a particular peak season date where you’re ranking or in slow season where you’re ranking. And you can also leave the check-in and checkout dates blank. And just put where you’re going, which is your city, your market, and who, how many guests your place sleeps. So you could put 10, leave the dates blank, put the city. And that will be your rank for how, how well you rank for all properties that sleep this many guests. Now we still want to optimize across all different factors so we could show up higher and higher and higher. This episode is simply to show you where you are, how high you are up on the search results, because first, being aware of where you actually show up will help you measure where you’re going.
(07:17):
If you just want to appear higher, but you don’t know where you actually stand, well, you’re not going to be able to measure what success is and what gets measured actually gets done. Thanks for tuning in today, my friends. The next episode will be on why your base price matters on Airbnb. I want to make learning short-term rentals easy and accessible for everyone. You can support me by subscribing and leaving a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It will just take 20 seconds. Doing this helps promote the show to new listeners and helps me create more of this content for you. Thanks a million. And until next time, friends, stay booked and take care.
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