Hospitality · Nashville, Tennessee
Stay Nashville
A licensed short-term rental company managing 26 listings, whose every single booking arrived through a platform that took a cut of it. The site exists so a guest can book direct instead.
The problem
Stay Nashville had no front door of its own. Guests found a property on Airbnb, stayed, loved it, and then next year went back to Airbnb and found it again, because there was nowhere else to go. Every one of those repeat bookings paid a platform fee on a relationship the business had already earned.
A brochure site would not have fixed that. The thing a returning guest does is search for the property they remember, by feature and by neighbourhood, so the site had to be able to answer those searches itself.
What I built
Thirty-five pages. Twenty-six of them are individual property pages, each with its own photography, sleeping arrangement, and direct booking enquiry. Four are collection pages built around the way people actually search: rentals with a pool, rentals with a hot tub, large-group rentals, and rentals within walking distance of Broadway.
There is also a separate page aimed at property owners rather than guests, because the second half of this business is signing new homes to manage, and that is a completely different argument to a completely different reader.
- 26 property pages, each independently findable
- 4 collection pages targeting real search intent
- An owner acquisition page with its own scroll-driven build
- 115 photographs, placed and colour-graded
- A booking enquiry that arrives as email, with no dashboard to check
The technical work
The site carries LodgingBusiness structured data so search engines understand it is a lodging operator in Nashville rather than a generic business page. Security headers are committed to the repository rather than set in a hosting dashboard: a content security policy, HSTS with preload, frame-deny and nosniff.
Photography was the weight problem. The property images were compressed by roughly 70 percent, about 90MB, with no visible loss on a retina screen, and every image is then served with a one-year immutable cache so a returning visitor never fetches one twice.
One deliberate omission. The business has thousands of five-star reviews, and it would have been easy to mark them up for star ratings in search results. I did not. Google rules self-collected reviews about yourself ineligible for that treatment, and marking them up anyway risks a manual penalty on the whole domain. Those ratings belong on the Google Business Profile, where they count.
Where it stands
Live at stay-nashville.com since May 2026, and still being extended. The most recent work was the owner acquisition page and a set of search-intent collections.
