Neil wrote in to submit their Costa Del Sol rentals site for review by the Affiliate Doctors ahead of a full scale launch they have planned for January 2010.

“Hi

I thought I’d let you guys do a full examination of our new website if you’re willing to help!

The website is www.costadelvillas.co.uk

The idea behind the website is to allow holiday home owners the chance to advertise directly to holiday makers looking to rent property in the Costa del Sol, without the need to use an agency.  Although there are a lot of other websites that are offering the same service, not many are concentrating solely on one destination.  We also plan to offer a more competitively priced advertising package than our competitors.

Although this is not strictly an affiliate website, there are certain sections that will promote various affiliate programs including flights, car hire, travel insurance, airport parking, airport lounge passes and transfers.  There’s also potential to promote extra products such as travel books etc. further down the line.

We are still in the early stages having launched on a very low profile in March this year.  We aim to steadily increase our natural traffic over the next 7 months and have a full scale launch in January 2010.

Please take a look at our website and pass on your honest opinions and recommendations, it will be gratefully received.”

Here’s what Dan had to say:

Dan

Hi Neil.

As you say, this is not really a traditional affiliate site.  The site is driving visitors toward enquiring about individual villas, rather than passing them on to merchants’ sites.  But … ignoring that …

I noticed the homepage has a pagerank of 2 & Yahoo’s reporting 100ish inbound links for me, so you’ve obviously been doing some bits of work.  I’d be interested to know how much traffic you’re getting, and if you have a process for measuring that & using the information to improve things.  Doing that is probably more important than any other advice I could give.

Anyway – onto some specific points.  I’ll apologise in advance for this MONSTER LIST OF BULLET POINTS.  Do dig through & hopefully you can pull some quick wins out from here!

HOMEPAGE ARCHITECTURE

The site looks good, fairly professional and trustworthy.  One easy addition to the header would be something orienting the visitor & getting your proposition across.  ‘374 Great Value Villas Across the Costa Del Sol’ as a rough example.

The main priority of someone landing on the homepage, and the most valuable action they can take from your point of view, is to narrow down to a specific location.  You don’t make this easy.  Here are my suggestions to improve that:

1. Shift your ‘cross-sell’ items (car rental, cheap flights, advertise, property) to the foot of your content area.

2. Use that space on the right to text list your locations (each linked).  Make those links ‘Malaga Villas’, etc instead of just ‘Malaga’, as the ‘villas’ bit is very important anchor text for you.

3. Your ‘About Us’, ‘Help / FAQ’, ‘Contact Us’ stuff could easily be moved to the header area – top right – to free up that important space on the left for things that are going to make you money.

4. I also suggest moving the ‘search’ box on the left-hand side up into the ‘Holiday Makers’ section, where it really belongs, and removing any dropdown options with zero results.

GENERAL LAYOUT & OTHER ARCHITECTURE

1. On individual villa pages, link the villa title back to itself (as a blog generally does), that gives you a bit of extra relevant anchor text for nothing.

2. URL structure is great across a lot of the site, but for the individual villas it’s just a plain ‘/home/view/number’ format.  Not huge priority, but if you could stick the location or villa name in there it may help.

3. Your ‘owner registration’ page is quite long with no real reason (could easily fit the same info without need to scroll) & gives no indication of which are required fields and which aren’t.  Not a major priority, but would be nice to make it easier at some point.

4. On the main site, your title tags are in the format [site name] – [page specific text].  I’d switch that around so that your page-specific text is the first element.

5. Your search pages all have the same title tag, even though some are location specific.  If you could make the malaga section ‘Malaga Villas’ instead of just ‘Search Results’, that should encourage more people to click through when it does appear in search engine result pages.

6. Some pages have breadcrumbs, some don’t.  At the moment, your ‘photos’ pages have the ambiguous link ‘Back to home’ as the main action at the top of the page.  If I’m looking at a villa in Malaga, I’d suggest there should always be a breadcrumb ‘Villas > Malaga Villas > [Villa Name].  If I’m looking at photos of a villa in Malaga, I’d suggest ‘Villas > Malaga Villas > [Villa Name] > Photos’ or something like that.

7. Another minor note: you have pricing on the site both for villas & for ad space, but you don’t say what period this is for.  40 per week? per month? per year?

CALLS TO ACTION

1. Your ‘search’ buttons are presumably quite important to you.  Instead of putting them in the same brown as the rest of the site, putting them in a contrasting colour will make them stand out & draw visitors eyes to them without them having to hunt.  Rebadging them as something like ‘Find A Villa’ instead of just ‘Search Now’ may also help.

2. Your ‘travel guides’ section is a great idea.  But… once you’re in there, it’s quite difficult to get back to searching for villas.  I’d recommend adding a ‘Find Villas in Malaga’ link (etc) to the end of each of these guides, rather than just leaving people at a dead end.

3. Your ‘late deals’ section is a good idea, but only has a single item in at present.  If that area’s empty, there’s a nice opportunity to just put some affiliate links in to another ‘last minute’ type site.  Again on that page, you’re linking through the text ‘info’, whereas you could be linking through the text ‘Alhuarin el Grande villa’.

4. The ‘enquire about this Apartment’ button at the top of each villa page is a nice idea, jumping down to the contact box.  The contact box itself doesn’t note which are required fields & which aren’t.  It turns out ‘telephone’ is a required field.  I tried this a few times and you can get the impression you’ve submitted an enquiry when you haven’t.  If you leave the ‘number of guests’ fields blank, it refreshes the page with no error message.

5. When an enquiry has been sent, that’s the perfect place to ask the visitor to do something else.  At the moment they’re left at a dead end ‘enquiry sent’ message.  It would be simple here to cross-sell your ‘car hire’ and ‘cheap flights’ links; ask the enquirer to send the link to a friend, etc.

6. You also have a blog with a good amount of content.  You feature the call to action ‘Find villas’ in very faded text, top-right.  I’d guess the majority of people are landing on the blog on individual post pages.  On some of these you’ve added relevant links back to the main site, but on some not.  Instead of leading straight from post content direct to ‘Write a comment’, it’s always worth inserting a call to action button there pushing visitors across to your villa enquiry site.

OPPORTUNITIES

1. Add some more affiliate pages.  The site concentrates on villas, but you may want to try some secondary pages. eg. there’s a ‘Malaga Villas’ section.  Might be worth trying a ‘Malaga Hotels’ subsection to see if you can get any traffic?

2. ‘map’ is quite a popular term for any area, and usually not hugely competitive (other than the standard google map they throw in there).  Adding ‘Marbela map’, ‘Malaga map’, (etc) pages could get you some extra relevant traffic for nothing.  ‘[areaname] photos’ is another easy way to get some extra relevant content that people genuinely want to search for.  You can use this additional content to funnel people from search engines into your site & then onto your villa booking pages.

3. Robots.txt: there’s nothing in here other than a sitemaps reference.

4. Presumably you have a couple of hundred villa owners signed up here.  Have you asked them each for a link?

5. I noticed some of your inbound links come in from blog comments you’ve made elsewhere under the name ‘Steve’.  If you’re going to comment on other blogs, why not use the name ‘Steve @ Costa Del Villas’.  As the ‘name’ is the element that usually links back to your URL, there’s a chance the anchor text will positively help you & it doesn’t take any extra time.

6. It feels like there’s a good opportunity to link the blog & the main site together a bit more.  I found the blog by chance – there’s very little opportunity to reach any of that relevant content from the main site.

7. The blog links back to the primary site with the anchor text ‘Villas’.  It feels like you should be using your main anchor text there!

8. It looks like you only have 1 actual affiliate link on the site at the moment (‘jet2′).  Your car hire & other flight links aren’t affiliated.  If you’re getting any clicks on those at all it’d be worth signing up for the relevant programs.

9. After visitors have been on a holiday through you, it’s very easy to ask for a photo & a quick review.  Even if you’re just using these as blog content when things are quiet, this gives you some extra content for nothing.

Hope that’s useful & doesn’t come across too negative.  Would love to know how the site’s doing & hope you make it a big success!

Dan.

Editor

Thanks for sending in your site for review Neil.  Hopefully you’ll be able to take the advice forward to use in your big Jan 2010 launch, and a big thanks to Dan for such an in depth review and analysis of the site.  Would be great to hear your thoughts below …