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Setting Up Your Local Recommendations Guide

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The local recommendations guide on your website is powered by a free Hostfully Guidebooks account that you manage. Enter each place once, and the site turns it into a filterable guide with a map and a dedicated page for every recommendation.

What it does #

Your website pulls its neighborhood recommendations from Hostfully Guidebooks, a free tool for building digital guest guides. You enter each recommendation once, and the website picks it up automatically: a filterable guide page with a map, plus a dedicated page for every single place. Those individual pages give search engines real local content to index, which helps your site rank for the area you serve.

Here is a live example on a HomeRunner site: docovacations.com/guide

How to set it up #

1. Create the free account #

  1. Go to hostfully.com/guidebooks and sign up.
  2. Choose the free plan. One guidebook is all this needs, and there is no cost for how the website uses it.
  3. Note which email address you sign up with. You will need it in Step 3.
  4. Create one guidebook and name it after your company. You can skip the welcome and house-manual sections entirely; the website only uses the Recommendations.

2. Build out your recommendations #

Add each place you would send a guest to as its own recommendation. For every entry, aim to fill in:

  • Category (restaurant, beach, activity, shopping, landmark, and so on)
  • Name of the place
  • One good cover photo
  • Address
  • Phone number
  • Website link. For bookable tours and activities, a Viator link with your referral code works here.
  • A short description, plus a longer one if you have more to say. The longer write-up gets its own page on the site, so extra detail pays off.

Writing tips #

  • Write in your own voice, like you are texting a friend who just got to town. “Ask for a table on the deck” beats a generic blurb every time.
  • Quality over quantity. A soft target is about fifteen recommendations for each area or neighborhood you cover. More is fine if they are places you actually recommend; there is no need to pad toward a number.

3. Send us the account email #

Contact support with the email address the account was created under. We request API access on our side and connect the guidebook to your website. After that, anything you add or edit in Hostfully flows to your site on its own.