Visibility For The Vacation Hot Spot

ResortQuest, one of the nation’s leading vacation rental management and resort real estate companies, provides a one stop resource for North America’s premier resort destinations.

It was as early as summer 2006 when Gaylord Entertainment realized a significant number of people were not aware of the vacation rentals professionally managed by ResortQuest. There was as significant lack of visibility in search engines, where so many of their prospective guests were looking for vacations.

“With a strong background in online marketing, especially search engine marketing, I knew how important link building was to search rankings,” said John Ellis, Online Marketing Manager for ResortQuest.

Promoting Destinations, Not Their Business

ResortQuest started to use PRWeb on a small scale, but not in a strategic way. After adjusting a few press releases to emphasize specific keywords, an increase in traffic to ResortQuest.com was quickly noticed. ResortQuest then worked a few more press releases and focused on other specific keywords. The search rankings for those specific keywords quickly increased as well.

“I began to think of PRWeb as the perfect link building tool,” said Ellis. “It gave us complete control of the links, anchor text, and our message.”

The links in the press releases were being recognized by search engines as strong indicators that specific landing pages were very relevant to the specific keywords Ellis was emphasizing. As a result, these pages began bubbling to the top of the search results when prospective customers began their search for a vacation.

ResortQuest has about 20 different locations from Destin, Florida to Whistler, British Columbia. After seeing great success with the early press releases, ResortQuest began issuing a minimum of two press releases per month for each ResortQuest location.

In less than 6 months, ResortQuest went from being barely visible in search engine rankings to having destinations consistently listing in top 10 search engine results pages (SERPs).

According to Ellis, the secret to ResortQuest’s press release success has been the use of newsworthy press releases submitted through PRWeb. The press releases are not written to promote Gaylord Entertainment or ResortQuest. Rather they announce news and events about each specific destination. Examples include, “Spring Beer Festival in Breckenridge, Colorado,” “Family Circle Cup Tennis in Charleston,” and “Hilton Head’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.”

The end result has been a huge success in search engine rankings. John Ellis points out, “Because of the ResortQuest relationship with PRWeb and the quality of our press releases, we are in the top 5 rankings with 100s of quality keywords.”