Heads In Beds Show - Choosing Content Topics To Build Your Vacation Rental SEO Strategy

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellClearscope AhrefsSemrush🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show, where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host, Conrad. And I'm your co-host, Paul. All right, Paul. So this week, we are talking about SEO. So SEO can be one of those things that people have lots of different opinions about. My frame, as we kind of get going here, is that SEO isn't really actually that complicated. I

actually think there's only four areas to SEO, right? There's technical, there's keyword research, there's content, and there's link building. And I've talked about that previously, both on this show, and I've talked about it in other arenas and areas before. And what I said to someone the other day on a call, I was like, if your SEO agency or SEO company is not doing all four of those things, at least in some measure, like they're not making progress on those four things, then I suspect they're not actually doing what they need to be doing to grow your organic search traffic. But the topic today is how to choose a topic that your guests care about and that has SEO potential. So it's easy to come up with keyword ideas. It's much harder perhaps to come

up with keyword ideas or topics that you could write about on your website that have a guest intent and have SEO potential. So number one, first of all, how you do it today. And number two, what's your perspective on finding your keyword? That I'm doing well, I'm doing well. It's a, it's a beautiful day here. So, uh, you know, on, on finding SEO keywords, I do, I think that that was something when I was in the traveler side, that was really one of the biggest struggles, pain points, really understanding the area, understanding the location that we were going after. And then really, again, trying to find something that was like you're mentioning, going to

be relatively, you know, something that the travelers will enjoy, something that's going to actually get some traveler interested because it is, it's so difficult in some cases, looking for the, on the PPC side of things, it's easy. You know, people looking for lodging, people looking for accommodations. That's, that's, that's the low hanging fruit here. But what, how can you relate it back to the area? How can you relate it back to something, an activity, something that someone's going to do? So having the right tools to be able to find those keywords and do that keyword research is critical. Kind of just piggybacking off what you said on the ease of SEO, I would agree. Whenever we hired on a new content writer,

that was the first thing I said is, don't think about writing for SEO. Don't think about writing for the search engines. Really, write good content. Good quality content is good SEO content. We can sprinkle some of the best practices in some of those technical side of things. But if you're writing good quality content, that especially with some of the recent updates from Google with quality content guidelines and stuff like that, that's what people are looking for. They want the search engines want readable content. So you have to find that content that travelers are going to be looking for. And, you know, obviously for me, my favorite tool for that is SEMrush. I know that you

have a slightly different tool that you prefer, but ultimately it's really fine. It's, it's finding the tool that helps you look for the content strategy. That's going to help you succeed there. So yeah, I think tool wise, this is to me as like a Chevy versus Ford, you know, Pepsi versus Coke kind of thing for me. I have Ahrefs, but honestly, I think if you pick either tool, you're in a good spot. I don't think there's a significant difference between the two in terms of like data quality and things like that.

And over time, most software platforms tend to actually converge and offer pretty similar features and things like that. So, you know, one example that I like to bring up quite a bit is this idea of when you start to research topics, I always find this in every destination because this is one thing that might be true in every destination, which is the idea of weather. So I always find this keyword, right? Weather in destination, weather in North Myrtle Beach will have tens of thousands of searches, right? And in any sort of keyword tool that you look at, whether it's SEMrush, Ahrefs, you know, Google Keyword Planner, or the current version that

you're able to get with very minimal data inside of it, it'll tell you that it has tens of thousands of searches. The problem is that if you were to rank for this type of topic, you know, weather in destination, even if you rank number one, first of all, your click through rate is going to be trash basically, because you're not really going to have enough traffic coming in to justify, you know, making any sort of effort to rank there. And then you have some of the most competitive, you know, authoritative domains in the weather vertical going after it. So like, is your local vacation rental company going to be more relevant than the weather channel for a weather related search?

I would bet my bank account that that's not actually going to be the case. So I always bring that example out early on. We're talking to clients. It's kind of like a, hey, this is an example of something that you may see that has high volume. And you could argue that maybe has decent intent, especially if they're searching out of market, they're searching for weather. That's a reasonable assumption that someone might be planning to come to your area.

I doubt they care about the weather if they live in Charlotte in North Myrtle Beach, unless they're planning to come to the area. So like you could connect some dots behind in your head to see why that might be a good piece of content or information to have on your website. The downside is that there's just no real strong path to you getting to ranking for that piece of information that that keyword, and nor is there really much value, even if you were to rank for it, I find that even if they're considering planning coming there, the next step isn't for them to then click on your website and search for vacation rentals and things like that. So, you know, I don't know if you tried to like rank for keywords like that in the past, but regardless of what tool you use, you know,

where you ended, I think that ultimately the path that you have to go down to have success is you have to pick the right topics and it has to be, volume has to be a consideration, but it should not be the only consideration that you have when you're building that content strategy. Right. Correct. I think that's something that we were always trying to find the best mix up. Yeah. You want search keyword volume, but a lot of those tools also give you some, some competitors, how many competitors are out there.

So what's the competition. So we were always trying to find that, that right marriage of, okay, high enough, search keyword volume there. But then the competition, you know, is it an easy keyword to go after? Are there very few people going after that keyword or utilizing that keyword right now? So kind of trying to go in there and then making sure you are choosing those right words. I mean, so often we had people say, well, why are we not going after vacation rentals? Why are we not going after hotels, lodging? Because we were working with more than just the vacation rental space. Well, that's really not something we maybe want to send them to the blog page, but more, we really want to have that optimized for some of your main pages, your rentals page,

your homepage, places where people are going to have a clear call to action. The blog, we want to make sure that the people who are finding the blog pages for the content creation side of things, that they are going, you know, it's going to be a longer path for them. They're going to find you for those interests, things to do. Hopefully not weather, but if it comes to that, sure, that's certainly an option there. But really making sure that you're drawing up kind of that content path, that website journey that someone's going to go through looking for, okay, top 10 things to do in the Smoky Mountains,

top three things to do in Myrtle Beach, something like that. You're going to have to give them a path of how they're going to get ultimately to that conversion page you want them to go to. So I think that also kind of goes into the thought process of as you're doing that keyword research, you know, where do you want to take people? And what are those keywords that you want people to land on, on specific pages, if they're those pages are showing up organically for you? Yeah, I always call this like studying the SERP or reading the SERP. And I think it's actually a skill that a lot of SEOs don't have, believe it or not. So they go and look at a keyword, let's look at restaurants as an example. I think it's actually a skill that a lot of SEOs don't have, believe it or not. So they go and look at a keyword. Let's look at restaurants as an example.

I think that's a good one that's pretty broadly applicable. And they do a search for best restaurants in, you know, Destin, Florida, let's say. And they see a list of the pages ranking and they don't actually go and click and evaluate what those pages are actually doing. So best restaurants in Destin, Florida, I don't even need to search and I know what it's going to look like. It's going to be list formats of restaurants in that market, obviously. And it's typically going to have a good amount of photos.

It's going to have a link to menu. It's going to have a link to reviews or it's going to have reviews on the page, a la Trip Advisor. It's going to have a snippet or an example of content from the restaurant. And it's going to be a pretty long, detailed list, right? You're not going to rank a, I don't care how authoritative your domain is. If you go put a three best restaurants in Destin, Florida up there on that keyword, I'd bet my bank account you're not going to rank for it because you're not covering the

topic, what I like to call comprehensively. A lot of people will say like word count, like, oh, SEO needs to have a certain word count. I don't really believe that at all. Some content needs to be more in-depth and comprehensive than other content. If you were to try to write up a topic that's a lot more simple, like let's say you were to do a review of a specific restaurant. Well, you may actually be able to rank okay for that.

It's going to be hard to outrank the restaurant itself, of course, if they have any decent SEO going on on their side of things. But you could probably rank like number two or number three for like X name restaurant review or hours or pricing or menu if you built a restaurant detail page. But you have no chance of ranking for best restaurants in destination when you have a two, three, you know, linked thing, unless for whatever reason, you're in a unbelievably remote destination where there's only two restaurants or something like that. But if you look at, if you look at the depth and the comprehensiveness that a, that a

site like TripAdvisor might have, you probably need to match that. And in some cases you may need to beat that with better, like you were going back to your earlier commentary about better quality information, better quality content. The sites that rank have that sort of capability. You're not going to have more domain authority than a big national site. So you have to be on relevance. That's your only play. If you make a page that's less relevant or less comprehensive than TripAdvisor, and you're thinking from Google's perspective, be objective and think about it from Google's side of things. Why would they ever show your piece of content to a searcher? How is that a better result than showing like a big national, you know, Zomato or TripAdvisor

or one of these types of sites for a restaurant query. So you have to make your resource, you have to make your page better than those other options. And if you haven't done that, then I think it's unreasonable to expect or to want or to demand that Google actually show your page over the other options out there when your information is clearly not superior, right? Like, yeah, there has to be, you know, we talk about it with like uniqueness of properties, there has to be evidence of superiority, there has to be some logic or some path that you can point to that says the reason that my restaurant post is better is that I went and actually took pictures of the restaurant, I went and actually put the full menu on there, I went and actually took out, you know, what their favorite dishes and I put it on the page,

like, that is a better resource than these national sites for those reasons. So I think that's a phenomenal example of being objective, what I call reading the SERP. Like reading the SERP is actually looking at the search results and seeing what type of content is there. And then to your point about why are we not writing about lodging or hotel or vacation or content on the blog, the only type of content that might rank for that is maybe like a, you know, 10 best cabins with private pools in the Smoky Mountains. Like that type of like listicle content might work on a blog, but everything else, read the SERP, look at the actual results. And when it's nothing but

homepages and search results pages, don't make a blog post about that, right? Like you're going down the wrong path here. You're putting a, trying to put a square peg in a round hole. It doesn't work. Like Google's too smart to kind of get through that and sort through that and show the page that you want them to show. Right. I mean, the only time that I can think that that would be semi-effective is if maybe you had need in 10 specific cabin units, but that's how you would do it. I mean, highlighting your own specific rentals or something like that, your own specific units, because you do, again, thinking of how Google sees results and they want to serve up that best answer possible. If you're looking for the top 10 cabins, hey, you probably don't have the top 10 cabins.

Even if you're the best of the best, that's just how it's going to go. So really, you want to make, I mean, if you want a blog post that is talking about the top 10 cabin lodging or cabin destinations or something like that, then you're going to have to include competitors. You're going to have to open up a completely different strategy that just doesn't seem all that effective unless you're in a very cooperative destination. And there are certainly some vacation rental markets that are very collaborative, cooperative,

and might be interested in having that type of link-building strategy between partners or competitors where you might see in that local space. But that is that that's certainly something that I have. I've seen it once or twice, but that's that was kind of the vein in which that content was written. It was, hey, we got 10 cabins that are just underperforming right now. We want to put them and kind of create that top 10 destination getaway blog post. And from there, was it effective ultimately?

Not exactly, but it's another piece of content that we can certainly put out there on those blogs. And it does. And by rights, it's an opportunity for those lodging keywords to come to the blog. But do you ultimately want to get them where we want to get them on the site to and get them to that conversion point? So I just think there's better ways to write that content, to put that content out there and to, to make sure that again, the, the search engines are finding you for the right terms with the right intent at the right time, driving them to the right page. It's, it's those, it's those one-on-one best practices that right content, right time, right place. And if you get them there, hopefully you've got the right funnel, sales funnel, website,

whatever that is, that's going to drive them down to that conversion point. Yeah, that's a good point. And so let me dovetail into, like we talked about, there's actually keywords that have negative SEO potential, in my opinion. So you kind of touched on it, but I'll just go through some of these relatively quickly. And then we'll get into the better examples that I think we were kind of dancing around here a little bit. So give you one of the ones that I often point to is like campgrounds. So campgrounds in area in destination is usually a keyword you don't want to publish, like maybe you could rank number one for that keyword. And you can link to those competitive campgrounds to your point a second ago. But you probably don't want to write up all the competitive,

you know, campgrounds in your market, and then drive that RVer into staying there instead of actually staying in one of your vacation rental homes or cabins or condos or whatever type of flavor of inventory you're actually trying to market. So that's an example. I think there's actually keywords out there that if you were to rank for them, I believe you might actually be repelling a guest, not actually attracting a guest in the right way. But flipping to the good side of the page for a second, the things that actually do matter, we've touched on a little bit, but these are content pillars that we've typically had success with. Things to do, you said it a

minute ago. I mean, it has to be the most obvious one, right? It is the vanilla ice cream, the Honda Civic of content, right? You need to have that things to do. And then of course you can build modifiers off that, right? Things to do with kids, things to do with pets, things to do, you know, when it rains, things to do in fall, things to do, you know, when it rains, things to do in fall, things to do in winter. We've done all those different content pillars for some of our clients because they are typically very research driven, you know, folks looking for that type of thing. They're looking for, you know, things to do. They're looking to go to your area. It's not going to usually capture in the wrong people. Like we were talking about earlier, the locals

that just want the weather are going to go search things to do in Myrtle Beach. They're going to look for, it's mostly kind of a more visitor intent. And it's really an amazing way. We'll talk about this on future episodes, of course, but going back to our four pillars for a second, it's a great way to do link building because as you write about other area things going on in the community in your particular destination,

you're now building a little bit of goodwill potentially by promoting the local attraction, whatever flavor that happens to be where you're based. And then you can use that equity that you're building later on when you actually try to get links from them. But again, a teaser, we'll save that for a future episode or something like that. So yeah, things to do, events, it's a lot of work, but events can drive a lot of traffic. So some of our clients actually have dedicated events calendars. We just built one out for a client recently, one of our mutual clients that's based in Arizona. And she wants to promote the Super Bowl coming up, Super Bowl coming up in February. She's trying to make sure she sells out her houses during that timeframe, not just sells them out,

but sells them out as the highest possible rates. So we're putting all the Super Bowl information front and center on the homepage. And then we're putting all the properties and homes that are available right next to that. She's trying to make sure that she's getting top, top, top rates. We're trying to drive as much traffic as possible. Now we're not going to rank for like Super Bowl 2023 information, obviously. That's impossible from an SEO standpoint for this particular site. But it's another like relevancy layer that we can slide in there. And you can rank for events that are much less competitive. So like some of our clients have ranked for, you know, local art, you know, things happening or library events that are happening or things that are happening in the

community. You know, chili cookoffs, we that are happening or things that are happening in the community. You know, chili cookoffs, we've ranked for that before in events modules or concerts or things like that. And we've driven lots of traffic that way. So events can be a lot of work because obviously you have to maintain it. But if you're willing to put the work through to maintain it, I think events can be a solid win. We touched on it earlier, but best restaurants and then anything outdoor like activity related. So in a beach market, you know, the best beaches are best place to go have a

beach picnic or something like that. Best hiking trails in a mountain market. For ski trails, it could be the best ski trails or the best snowshoeing trails in a mountain market. So there's lots of different angles that you can go down. But what do all these keywords have in common? Forget the actual topic for a second. In my view, which is that they overlap with your core target guest market, and they can drive links in what I call guest consideration traffic. Like you said earlier, not all traffic is equal. You want traffic that has guest consideration. They're looking to stay somewhere. They're looking for a place. And that's the type of thing that you want to attract. So I don't know if you have other

concepts on the back of that. I took some of the good ones, the easy ones. Maybe you have some other ones, things to do, events, restaurants, best beaches. What's your perspective on that? I think the other thing, I mean, you covered all of them there. You covered the big ones that I think are really tangible and low-hanging fruit, I think, for most of our hospitality space. But I think the one thing that we also found success with was seasonal, making sure you're putting seasonal, top spring getaways, top summer getaways, fall, winter getaways because certainly that's something where people usually aren't going to search by month per se but people are definitely starting to plan their fall getaways or their spring getaways or summer winter getaways or you know trying to keep some of that seasonality in the in the conception there and it does make it certainly a little more targeted niche and not that evergreen content but if you're building it all, all the seasons out,

then you kind of have more topics that you can build to. And certainly there are things in different markets that people are going to be able to do based on the season. You know, I'm, I'm not going to go skiing during the summer in, in, in a lot of the, in maybe some of the mountain markets just kind of depends on how good the slopes are. But, but that is, that's certainly something where it gives you some more topic opportunities, gives you more blog posts that you can write. And there are, taking into account that there may be some more seasonal events in there as well. That's something that you put the event page in there, you put top fall events in your blog posts, you're getting a lot more equity built up with the search engine so that Google will or Bing will start to see you as as the expert.

And we're all looking for that expertise, that E-E-A-T, those SEO principles. So making sure expertise is there. You keep putting that quality, high quality content out there for seasonal events, seasonal anything. Google will start to understand that you're the local regional leader there and will reward you. And it's obviously that slow process, but there's going to be a reward at the end of it is the key.

Yeah, I think I need to rant for a second, actually, on that, because I was at Darm in the summer and a speaker who I have a ton of respect for, who's very intelligent, got up and did their session and I thought it was a great session. And towards the end, she was saying, why would we bother to create blog content when I look at the analytics

and people who come to the blog don't convert? And I was like, I kind of bit the tongue or whatever, because I have a lot of takes on this, obviously. But now I'm giving myself a platform. That's right. All right. So here's my takeaway. If that has been your opinion in the past, or if you've seen that in your own analytics, you may be, if you're this deep in the show, thank you for keeping on listening. I'm hoping for helping in some, in some regard, but the re okay. So here's the reason that maybe I can sell this clip to people in the future. So the reason that you want to make that content, Paul just touched on it, but I want to expand upon

it is that you need to be an authority. So if you're trying to rank for vacation rentals in destination, that's the money keyword. We all agree that that's where, if you could rank for that keyword, you're going to get traffic. You're going to get benefit from that. You're trying to rank for vacation rentals in destination, that's the money keyword. We all agree that that's where if you could rank for that keyword, you're going to get traffic. You're going to get benefit from that. You're going to win. All the sites that look at that rank for those types of keywords are sites that create content. And it's very like local sites, not talking about Airbnb or Vrbo or things like that, right?

They're playing a different game. They have a different strategy. You cannot compare your approach locally to a national site. It's just, again, it's apple and oranges. But if you're trying to build local authority in the eyes of Google or any search engine, and you're trying to create information and you're not creating information about that market, why would Google, again, perceive your site to be a better value of information? So yes, you kind of do the blog

content. Most of the traffic, the overwhelming majority of traffic coming to the blog is not going to convert. They're not going to sign up. They're not going to book with you. That's facts, right? So let's get that out of the way and not pretend that people coming to the blog are ready to book. That's not the goal of it anyways. The goal of it is to make your site as relevant as possible so that over a wide set of keywords, imagine a distribution of keywords, some have massive commercial value to you. Others have low, others have perhaps none in some cases, but the ones that matter, you're not going to get those unless you show how you're relevant, unless you show what actually makes your website, um, like you, like you were saying expertise, you know, authoritative and trustworthy about a destination. So when we, like when we, we took a

site, we talked about it before. I think we have a case study coming out on the site at some point in the future, if not just email me and I can send it to you. But we have a site, a case study that we took a site from literally page 10. They started with 10 properties. They now have 90 properties. They're number one. They just hit number one the other day for their area name plus vacation rentals. Now, what have we done the whole time? The site actually wasn't in bad technical shape. So the answer to our four pillar strategy was technical. Like I fixed it in afternoon, really wasn't a big deal. Then we researched the keywords. It was all obvious stuff like we're talking about. This is a a beach market so we did things to do events

you know best beaches all the like hiking trails in the area things like that we did stuff like golf cart rentals we did stuff like how to you know best seafood restaurants or things like that where to go fishing so we built tons of content we found the keywords we built tons of content I think we're probably up to at this point know, two a month for two or three years or up to 60, 70 assets at this point, 70 pieces of content. But it hit the first page well before we got to that number. And then we built a bunch of links. We built the content and then we built links off the back of the content.

And we became an authority from zero to Google doesn't even care about us. Basically, we're on page 10 to number one. And it was, it wasn't necessarily a mystery. Like it was all very straightforward. The only thing that we did was execute. I think that's what people maybe don't understand sometimes with SEO. And I dislike when I encounter people who have all these opinions, but haven't executed enough to like tell you that their strategy would work.

So to counterpoint that speaker, I saw a dorm who, again, I have a ton of respect for. So if she's listening, I don't mean this as this person, but my counterpoint to that would be show me a website that ranks. Well, that's a local website, not a national, not an Airbnb or Vrbo. Show me a local website that ranks well, that doesn't have content, that doesn't do a good job of content that doesn't at least, or that doesn't have, maybe it has a ton of age to it or something like that, but find me like a one page plus search results, plus properties, detail page website that ranks well in a market. And you can look in markets unless there's just no competition or this website happens to be like the oldest one that's been around for 20 years and everybody else is new um i bet and i did this in the market that we're

talking about here i crushed the people that were way older than us i absolutely crushed them because they were sitting there like they're lords they weren't making any content they're building any links and we came up behind them like a banshee and we took their spot from them and the reason that we did that it wasn, it wasn't a mystery. It was because we had to go from not being relevant to being very relevant. And we did that through content and links. So I just wanted to go down that point for a second because I think that's a very logical reaction to be clear.

Why would I make content when that content itself doesn't drive conversion? That's a good question to ask. But I wanted to break it down and say, well, you're building this authority so that you can get to that next stage. That next stage is Google rewarding you on all these money keywords, but they're not going to do that rental intent keywords, things like that until you've established some base level of like content and links to actually go from. That's the, I mean, it is, it's, it's the, it's the long play. It's, it's the explanation of the long play and it's tough it's tough. Are you ever going to drive a lot of e-commerce from your blog? No, you're probably not. Unless it's a different business type where you can write content that's going to drive that type of search intent. That's not going to happen with where we are. So I think that when you're looking at that SEO play, it's going to cost, if someone's doing it right, they're going to charge you a good amount of money to do it. But there is the value and you can't look at it in a short sighted term of,

you know, three months, six months, nine months, and just say, I'm not getting any e-commerce conversions. I'm not seeing, I'm not seeing the right traffic. I'm not seeing any traffic. It's happening behind the scenes. It is. and that's where being able to report on it going into ahrefs or going into semrush and being able to set that project up and track over time okay yeah you started right down here at the bottom you know we page two page three page five page ten and being able to show that growth and be not just show the growth of you know growth of hopefully your overall keyword set, because hopefully you are adding new content as well, but making sure people understand and identify that those high intent keywords. Yeah. They started off in page two. Now you're number two. And if we play that game of the breakdown of, of number of clicks by organic position, we know that that second page to number

two is a huge jump. Second page to number 10, nine, eight is a huge jump. So any changes you're making, any content you're building, it will build into the long-term success, but it's difficult when you're not seeing, when your main KPI on your marketing channels is what's my conversion rate, how many bookings, what's the revenue, you have to give SEO a different KPI. And I think that's something that as an agency, it's easy to give people opportunity. Okay. So number of keywords, placement, all that, you can do projected traffic, projected cost to acquire that through advertising. But to be able to put some type of number along it so that people can say, OK, yeah, I'm not getting bookings through, but I'm still seeing the value of the efforts. And long term, again, it's multi-touch points for people to book.

Hey, I started planning my summer getaway during the winter. I read your blog. Then I came back to look for rates. Then I looked for your brand. And I mean, it is. The strategy is all there, but sometimes we do. We have to paint that picture for people and tell that story so that they understand this is the path people are taking.

This is why we're doing this. And if we do, if we need to put a number, put the quantitative behind the qualitative, then that's on us to do as well, to be able to present the value of what we're doing too. Yeah. I think two things. Number one, if you want to look at a metric that I think is pretty indicative of the second thing, which I'm going to say, which is progress, impressions in search console, I think is a pretty solid number to look at because even when the clicks aren't there, the impressions are sliding up over time. If you can look at the site that we took from dead to top, the whole time, even when the rankings weren't always moving in big chunks,

even when the clicks weren't always moving in big chunks, the traffic, AKA, that's what is going to lead to the conversions. The impressions kept sliding up over time is that every month we would typically have, I mean, it was a beach market, so it would go down seasonally, but as far as progress, like we showed, so that's, that's my thing. If you're hiring a SEO company and they can't tell you what their four-step plan is for technical, keyword research, content, and link building, and they can't show you progress, then I think you should fire them. But that's my take. So if they can say, hey, here's what we're doing in each of these four areas.

Here's how we're addressing them. Here's how we're making progress. And they can show the progress in terms of search console impressions, or they can show you like, hey, we're ranking here. They throw in a rank tracker. And I think you're on the right path, but you're completely right, it's going to take time. I just think that's an unsatisfying answer for a lot of people. So I like to paint a little bit of extra context, context around it, which is that impressions of search console are

metric that I think you can reliably look at, and generally tell if you're headed in the right direction. And then number two, your SEO company, even if you're not on page one doesn't mean they're doing a bad job. But if you're not on page one, they better showing you, they better damn well be showing you progress because progress at least indicates where you need to go from here, where you need to go going forward. Yeah, that's, that's exactly the key. So I think, you know, I think we did a decent job of covering it, we talked about the following things. So just to recap real quickly, it's topic that your guest cares about that has guest intent, traffic potential. You're doing keyword research to actually find those keywords. There's tools like Ahrefs, there's tools like SEMrush, there's tools like Keywords Everywhere. Test them all,

find out what works best for you. Again, I don't really think you're going to get terrible data from any of them in my opinion. If you have an SEO team, they should probably have both, like just to be able to compare both most likely. Create a comprehensive content. So when you go and make that content, I'm not saying it needs to be 800 words or a thousand words or 2000, it needs to comprehensively cover the topic. Now, sometimes that means that the post is 2000 words. Again, best restaurants and desks in Florida is going to be comprehensive. We use a tool called ClearScope for that, which we think does a great job, but there's other ways to approach it. Make your, make your content actually visually interesting. You touched on it earlier by making quality.

Quality is a tough word sometimes because you don't really know what it actually means. But for me, it's like images, graphics, videos. These are all interesting things that make the content better because you're writing about a restaurant and you're giving additional information about that. And sometimes I see posts or content that's targeting the right content, the right keyword even, but it's boring. And your content can't be boring if you want people to actually read it. It has to be engaging. It has to be interesting. And then measure your progress over time. Whether it's you, someone on your team, an agency, what are they doing in this area?

What keywords are they looking to research? And then are they showing progress? Is their impressions growing in Search Console? Things are slow and this is going to take time. We touched on it, but over the longterm, the sites that win have that sort of, you know, energy and effort to them. They put that forward, that effort,

and that's how you're going to get to the top from a content creation standpoint. So anything else you want to add or does that hopefully button us up to a decent spot? I think we buttoned up that. So we kind of went full loop there pretty well, I would say, for the first time around going. All right. Well, thank you so much.

This is the inaugural episode, you know, together. I guess if you don't want to count the little intro one that we did. So if mom, if you've listened all the way through and Paul's mom, if you listen all the way through, thank you. We appreciate it. No, I'm just kidding. Email us if you have any questions or if there's topics you want to see us cover all on myself on future episodes. We can just email me, Conrad at buildupbookings.com.

Paul, do you want to give a different email? Paul at Venturi.com. That's fine. And then we will be back next week for another episode. We plan on keep to keep diving into these digital marketing topics. So again, thank you. If you have a podcast app of choice, reviews me the world to us, if you leave a review screenshot, email it to us, maybe we could send them something. Is that what you're saying? I think so.

But yeah, thank you. Thanks so much for listening. See you on the next show.