We have been investigating the winners and losers in terms of which Villa brands are achieving good Search Engine Optimisation results; that is, being found naturally in the Search Engines. We have limited our research to Google, Yahoo and MSN, these are reported to account for over 85% of all UK searches. We have also limited our research to the 50 main keywords or phrases that include the word Villas.

One of the conclusions of this research is that irrespective of how large a business you run, or how large your annual SEO budget is, you are not guaranteed a page one appearance for a particular keyword or key phrase, major villa brands often find themselves sidelined by individual private villa or apartment owners who are able to achieve a top 5 page one ranking, often more by luck then judgement.

The search engine natural listings results data shown below was gathered 13th & 14th February 2008. We have recorded the villa holiday brands or sites that were fortunate enough (or skillful enough) to achieve a page one natural listing on one of the three major UK search engines; msn.co.uk, yahoo.co.uk and google.co.uk. Many of you involved in the UK Villa Holiday Market would argue that there is only one UK Search Engine that matters.

Brands that achieved page one listings for a particular keyword or keyphrase on more than one Search Engine are colour coded to aid identification. On the first table below two brands achieved multiple search engine listings "James Villas" and "Villa-in-Algarve.co.uk".

If the brand is a long standing traditional Villa buisness, we have referred to it by its common name ie "James Villas", other sites are referred to by their domain name.

You will find a Summary of findings at the foot of this page.