Mini case study: HomeToGo (Berlin)

HomeToGo (Founded: 2014) is according to its website "the world's largest search engine for vacation rentals."

Executive Summary

With half a million monthly organic visits, HomeToGo is dominating the German market as a search engine for holiday accomodation. That is as much as airbnb.de but still behind booking.com. This is achieved despite less backlinks than the two international giants with terrific indexation efficiency: more than half of the pages indexed get at 10 or more monthly organic visits.

Google Trends

Brand search have been stagnating since 2017.

Backlink Profile Overview

• 124k backlinks from 500 domains.
• 96% of backlinks are from pages with little Page Authority.
• 50% of the backlinks are from German websites.

Backlinks with Page Authority of 20 and above (according to ahrefs)

• Skift article about Airbnb Listing.
• DMEXCO
• Gründerszene: Awards Winners Listing 2018
• Merkur
• Sistrix article

Organic Traffic Analysis

HomeToGo ranks for over 120k Keywords for 500k monthly organic visits.

Main Keywords generating traffic:

• Brand / search terms with brand: around 30k (6%)

Broad terms such "ferienwohnung(en)"/ Haus:

• ferienwohnung (4k)
• Places with "ferienwohnung"
• ferienwohnung ostsee (6k)
• ferienwohnung nordsee (4k)
• ferienwohnung norderney (2.5k)
• ferienwohnung berlin (2.3k)
• ferienhaus ostsee (2k)
• hausboot amsterdam (1.5k)

Places:

• borkum (4.5k)

Content Marketing Landing Pages and Traffic

From around 5.3k pages indexed, over 2300 pages each get at least 10 visits per month. This is achieved mainly by creating landing pages for as many cities as possible and optimizing the page for Ferienwohnung + City / Location