Camber Holiday Cottages: a website and SEO programme for a holiday letting business

The challenge

Holiday letting is a crowded corner of search. Guests compare booking platforms, other agencies and individual owners, and they often decide in a few seconds which listing to click. For Camber Holiday Cottages, the site was already showing up for many relevant searches. The opportunity was to turn more of those appearances into visits, and more of those visits into bookings.

That meant working on three things at once: a site structure that helps guests find the right property quickly, a technically clean site that Google can understand, and search listings and pages that give guests a reason to choose Camber Holiday Cottages over the alternatives.

What we did

A site organised the way guests search

Guests rarely start with a property name. They start with a place, an occasion or a must-have feature. The site groups properties by area, with separate sections for Camber, Rye and Winchelsea and Pett Level, and by collection:

• Style, for guests who already know the kind of place they want
• Occasion, such as short breaks in each area and seasonal stays like New Year
• Features, such as number of bedrooms, hot tubs, sea views and pools

Each of these collections gives a guest a quick route to a shortlist, and gives Google a clear page for a specific kind of search.

Search strategy and keyword mapping

We mapped the searches that matter to the pages that should answer them, so each important search has one clear page rather than several competing ones. This included looking at where competitors show up and the site does not yet, to find gaps worth filling.

Technical SEO and index clean-up

Holiday letting sites collect clutter over time, such as media attachment pages, PDFs and near-duplicate URLs that Google can waste effort on. We are cleaning that up, alongside canonical tags, the XML sitemap and structured data, so Google spends its time on the property and collection pages that bring in bookings. You can read more about this kind of work on our SEO services page.

Better search listings and calls to action

When a site already ranks, the title and description in the search results do a lot of the selling. We are rewriting titles and meta descriptions on priority pages, adding short FAQ blocks that answer common guest questions, and making availability and booking calls to action clearer on the pages guests land on.

Content hubs for planning a stay

People planning a trip search for more than a property. We are building content hubs around where to stay in Camber, planning a stay, Rye and the nearby area, and seasonal campaigns. These pages help guests plan, and they link to the right properties and collections so that a planning visit can become a booking.

A smoother booking path, especially on mobile

Many guests browse on a phone. We are working on the journey from search to booking so it is quicker and clearer on mobile, using the same approach we take in conversion rate optimisation: find where people drop out and fix the biggest problems first.

Tools that save the team time

We also look after the site day to day. That includes fixes to seasonal collections and a custom banner manager we built for the site, so messages can be managed in one place rather than page by page.

How we work together

We meet the Camber Holiday Cottages team regularly to agree priorities, review what has changed and plan the next round of work. Seasonal demand shapes the plan: pages and offers for busy periods need to be live and working well before guests start searching for them.

What other holiday let businesses can take from this

• Organise around how guests search. Area, occasion and feature collections often matter as much as individual property pages.
• Fix the basics before adding content. Clutter in Google’s index can hold back the pages that matter.
• Treat search listings as adverts. If you already rank, better titles and descriptions can bring more guests through for the same position.
• Plan for the season early. Seasonal pages need to be ready before demand arrives, not during it.
• Make booking easy on a phone. A clear route from property page to availability matters more than extra features.

If you run holiday cottages or another visitor business, our websites and rebuilds and SEO services are a good place to start. If you are on the Kent coast, see our page on Folkestone and Hythe, where we cover seasonal demand in more detail. You can also read how we helped Mocketts Farm Cottages with their website.

Services used

• Website design and build
• SEO and local SEO
• Conversion rate optimisation
• Ongoing site support

Book an initial 30-minute call

If you run holiday lets or another booking-led business, tell us a little about it in a short form, then pick a time for an initial 30-minute call. We will look at how guests find you and where bookings are being lost.