Bit embarrassed to ask this question, but will ask it anyway!
I have done some quite reasonable basic SEO for clients in the south of Spain with small sites and had reasonable success. My wife and I came to the Pyrenees in the south of France to take over and run bed and breakfast in a lovely old farm and some self-catering accommodation in one of the pastures (with my continuing to do a bit of work for clients too). We are running and developing the place for friends who are away 3-4 years. They had an abysmal site, so we designed one to together: http:www.loubetaspyrenees.com/ (I have given the French version because it's what I am most concerned with - there is an English version in case I can tempt you to a holiday here!)
It's been very well received by users, so that's great. We have the place on about 12 agencies amd almost all link to our site, so it serves as a good showcase.
Here's my issue (for the French site): It went online 11th Feb and is already doing well for more "long tail" searches, and for more local and specific searches, but is proving slow on our prime search terms. The prime market is French, and they key terms are "Gîtes" for the self-catering accommodation, and "Chambres d'Hôtes" for the Bed and Breakfast. Our key Geographical term for the French market is "Hautes Pyrenees" - it's a departmental area.
In Google.fr We are around result 100 out of 600k results for "Chambres d'hôtes hautes pyrénées" and aren't in the first 200 for "Gîtes Hautes Pyrénées". This is a competitive market and we are competing with optimised and long-established agencies but still hope to do better.
I know I am losing from poorly constructed title tags cannibablising the results, but cannot see how to solve this:
Home Page Title tag: "Gîtes et Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées | les Baronnies"
I have two main pages on the Gîtes:
Gîte for 2-3 people Title tag "Gîte dans les Hautes Pyrénées pour 2-3 personnes en les Baronnies"
Gîte for 3-9 people Title tag "Location Gîte dans les Baronnies Pyrénées pour groupe 3-9 personnes" ("Location" means rental)
Google understood the above and put us no 1 out of over 1miillion results for a search for a gite for 9 people in the south west of France ("gite sud ouest 9 personne")
And 2 pages for the Bed and Breakfast:
B&B in the farm building: "Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées dans une ferme restaurée"
B&B in gite apartments with sitting rooms: "Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées avec salon et terrasse"
I am not sure how to handle the titles for the Home Page and for the 4 subpages - sounds silly, but have you any advice on how I might handle these titles better? I thought of using more general terms on the Home Page ("Holiday accommodation in the ..."), but on such a small site (18 pages in each language version) I feel that would be unwise. It seems I must try to find some way of differentiating the titles on the other 4 pages so that i am not cannibalising but where there are so few alternatives I am not sure how!
Oh dear, sorry this was so long!