The Best Airbnb Listing Title to Increase Bookings

A great Airbnb listing comprises of many moving parts, the photos, price, reviews and the list goes on. If you’ve been reading posts on how to increase your Airbnb bookings, then it’s notable that the quality of photos, optimized pricing and great reviews are paramount for your Airbnb business. But as mentioned earlier, there are a lot of moving parts that affect your Airbnb occupancy rate and you’ll see later in this post that Airbnb listing title and description also play a crucial role in your occupancy rate. So read on for our top tips for crafting the best Airbnb listing title!

Why creating the best Airbnb listing title matters

The bottom line for your Airbnb listing is to get bookings. But before worrying about this, you need eyeballs on your listings first. Then bookings will follow. Being in the marketing domain, I’ve learned that a title matters a lot, whether it’s an email title or a blog title.

The title is the sole determinant of whether people are going to click on your email or blog post. Here’re the stats and numbers that support how a title could affect human behaviour:

On a similar note, Airbnb listing title is no different. From a site visitor’s standpoint, he’ll use it to determine if he wants to click on your listing or not. So why risk having a hum-dum listing title?

How to write the best Airbnb listing title

50 characters is exactly what you have for your title.

You have around 8–9 words to draw your audience in and to click through to your listing. To make the best use of your real estate, it’s good to understand how people read. But it turns out that people don’t read, they scan.

What’s fascinating is that because of our scanning habit, we read only tidbits of text — the first three words and the last three words. Knowing this will give you a better understanding on how to write a magnetic title.

Best airbnb title guidelines

But before we dive into writing your best Airbnb listing title headline, I want to prime you with some great titles first:

If you’re starting on a blank slate, it’s good to have a baseline of what makes a great headline. How I set my standard of good headlines is by going through my emails and seeing which email subject titles stuck out to me — especially, the ones that make me want to click.

Here are some of my favourite email subject headlines I found in my stuffed inbox.

The best headlines that I found were from InsideHook and Muse. I sorted them into a special folder in my inbox so I can see their latest headlines.

It’s your turn.

Curate your own swipe file in your email inbox and study them. Sort out headlines which make you want to click and study those headlines. Ask yourself the following questions. What makes this email headline so magnetic? Is it the urgency element in the title?

Brainstorm a list of keywords to use.

Now, you should have a good idea of what makes a good title, let’s get your hands dirty. List out 30 words that you’d like to use in your title. You could also gather some ideas by looking at the reviews and inquiries you get.

keyword research to write great Airbnb title

Highlighted are phrases that contain important keywords that I want to add to my list.

Once you have a handful of keywords to work with, start formulating different headlines for you listing. See if you can come up with 10 variations for your headlines.

The leftover keywords don’t have to go to waste.

Besides the title, you also have a description area within your listing. If you have lots of queries on things like “is it walkable distance to [place]” or “do you have real beds or air beds?’. You can get a sense of what your target audiences are looking for when booking a place on Airbnb. Use that for your bookings-driven title.

The Whiff Test

You should have at least 20 Airbnb listing headlines in front of you. But how do you know which one to use? This is where The Whiff Test comes in handy. Since we’ve already primed our brain to detect what’s good and what’s not, you are ready to sort out which titles will make it to the final round.

There may be cases where you can’t decide, so what you can do is an A/B test for your headlines. A/B test is where you use version one of the headline for one week (given that other listing variables remain constant) and version B for the second week. See which of the two titles yields more views, more save to wish list or whatever metric you choose to measure success.

Handing over to you

Above are the thinking processes that I go through when trying to write the best Airbnb listing title. Crafting a booking-driven title is a low-hanging fruit that can yield high returns. So what are you waiting for?

About the Author:

By day, Kate is a marketer at Silicon Valley. She handles social marketing for Party Squasher– a tool that detects and counts the number of mobile devices as a proxy for occupancy levels inside a short-term rental home. By night Kate likes to hide behind a paperback book and a cup of chai tea.