Heads In Beds Show - Do Automated SEO "Audits" Provide ANY Value?

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad dive into "automated" SEO reports that agencies send you - do they even matter at all? They discuss how and why these reports work and what value you can get from them. ⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellFirst click, linear, time decay, and position-based attribution models are going awayGoogle Ads Tests AI To Help You Create AdsRR Summit: People, Places, Planet🔗 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. Hey there, Paul. How's it going today? Good.

How are you, Conrad? Good. Sorry we missed a week. We are at a little hiatus there. Let's call it a vacation slash travel slash can't get things back on track. But glad to be back with you today. We are into April now by a decent margin. And you were sharing with me all kinds of fun things that you're excited about,

including watching your beloved Timberwolves explode a little bit and all kinds of fun stuff. But yeah, what's on your mind right now? What's going on? Yeah, it is. It's going to be for the videos that I'll have on LinkedIn, maybe at some point, we'll see in the future. I'll post there again at some point. There's sun, we have very little snow. It's happy times. Now, we live at the bottom of a hill. So Lake Manzi is about to flourish here as the rest of the snow in the neighborhood starts to come down. But no, it does feel like spring.

We've had rain. It's one of those things that I like to be outside. I like to garden a little bit. So we're getting to that time of year where we're going to have a little bit of fun. But how about you? We just had Easter. Did you have any fun celebrations, anything like that for you? Nothing too bad.

Unfortunately, when our trip returned, part of the reason we couldn't get done last week is everybody got sick. So everyone's got it better now. That's the good news. But yeah, it wasn't necessarily, part of the reason we couldn't get done last week is everybody got sick. So everyone's got a better now. That's the good news. But yeah, it wasn't necessarily the most pleasing week off there coming back and then everybody getting some kind of illness. So is what it is. But yeah, it's cold here. I don't know what happened.

I don't complain too much when I talk with you about cold. It's a lot better than me. But I thought we were out of it. And then I was watching like even it was similar weather here as it was in Augusta this weekend. The Masters weekend as well. We were both watching that. And that was brutal. Like the rain, the cold. weather here as it was in Augusta this weekend, the Masters this weekend as well. We were both watching that. And that was brutal. Like the rain, the cold, it just went, came out of nowhere, went from 85 to 45 in the

matter of a day or two. So hopefully that's like the last little cough of the system here and we've, we'll get into the good stuff. I hope so. That's it. And I think that we're at 50. I think we're going to hit the seventies this week. That's it.

Oh, it'll be well done. I am just waiting for a couple days where we can we've got a nice little backyard so just to be able to go out there and not swash through the snow ish a little bit of ice a little bit of green grass a little bit a lot of brown grass a lot of mud from the dog right now so it's an adventure every time we go outside but that's spring in minnesota i'm used to that so yeah you know what else is an adventure every time we go outside. But that's spring in Minnesota. I'm used to that. Yeah. You know, what else is an adventure?

Trying to keep up with all this marketing news going on. I don't know if we missed a ton while we were gone, other than just, I don't know, more AI stuff. There's always more going on there. The core update continued to roll out. Anything have your attention over the past few weeks as far as like marketing news and notes and updates? It is. I think it's all the AI stuff, certainly.

Core update continues to, I think it just wrapped up in the last, maybe the end of last week. So keep an eye on those numbers. Certainly, I think that's important. But I try to keep up with as much of the AI stuff. I think my focus the last week or so was more on the image side of things, just how incredible some of those, some of the mid-jour journey and some of the other digital AI created imagery has been, and to see some of the prompts that people are putting in and what they're getting

out is pretty incredible. Yeah. I think that's every week now for us. Yeah. Yeah. One thing I'm going to slide in here as well. I'll put a link in the show notes to this too, is that Google is getting rid of some of the attribution models that you had to use. I was a big, I was a big position based. I liked the 40% credit at the end, 40% at the beginning, and then the rest spread out in the middle. And those are going to go away July of 2023. So the new default, this all kind of coincides with the GA4 thing, which we will do a future episode on, by the way. But yeah, keep an eye out for that. A lot of our clients forwarded those emails over to us in the past few weeks around, hey, do I need to change anything? And the answer is no,

there's not much you can change. These models are just going away. They're just letting you know that they are going away. And we just kind of have to roll with this new data-driven attribution. Like I said, I'll put a link in the chat for people to explore that further. I don't know if you saw that as well. Yes, I did. That was, I think the emails have been moving over. We're switching you over. You don't have to worry about it.

And I think that as always, everybody's concerned. Do I really have to worry about it? Is Google doing another bait and switch on us? Yeah, I would agree. It was always nice to be able to compare the attribution models. Even if you were, I love the beta project that they were doing at one point where you could be able to easily synthesize all of your channels by source medium and to be able to compare by different attribution models. Just to see, I think, especially on the booking side of things, there's a lot of touch points there. on the booking side of things, there's a lot of touch points there.

And to be able to really draw that back to do it with a multi-touch conversion, although I don't know where that report is going either in the G4 model. I, oh, I have so many concerns, but that's another episode for another day that we will worry about at that point, I think so. Yeah, yeah, it will. It's, I guess the challenging part from a data perspective is like, why? Okay, Google's moving to a new product. It in these better ways these three better ways okay all understandable things in some respect but yeah the part that does have me frustrated even though i do some things about ga4 it's hard for me to say that but that has been the case is like why are you taking away things that i use all the time that's the frustrating part a little bit

there too and this is one such example of that getting rid of these different models or way of looking at how conversions occur if you're not familiar with those it's basically just the fact that people don't come in and just click on your website and book right away right there's an owner side it could be months but even on the guest side it could be days or weeks of someone coming in i looked at an example the other day in the old multi-channel funnel report of course this could be going away here in a few months and it was a person who went to the website 52 times before they booked and that's like not that uncommon. Like that does happen.

And that's going away a little bit. So who the heck, what channel, what marketing activity do you give credit to in that scenario? I can't even begin to fathom in my head. And I think at one point they clicked on an email, a social post. I don't think they came in on PPC. That's my memory. But it did come in off organic multiple times,

multiple direct visits, and then they came in and booked eventually. It was like a $10,000 booking, but it took three weeks and 52 visits to actually get them to click the button. That was always my favorite visualization in Google Analytics, especially on the booking side. It's just not as pretty, not the same numbers on the owner side, but on the booking side of things to be able to see a million dollars in revenue come through and to be able to break that down and see, holy cow. Yeah, some people came directly to probably in a branded search or

something like that but a lot of people are taking 20 30 but between the time lag that 50 days or the 50 touch points along the way or 30 40 touch points direct and then buy those emails and then social posts it's it is incredible to see those customer journeys. And I do, I hope that we can create that same visualization within G4. I would expect to be able to, but I don't know. It's, it is, that's, those are the things that I, and I think it is probably our homework in the meantime, as we're getting ready to do that G4 turnover is look at ways that we can help people visualize that data that they're going to be missing is initially when they make the switch. Yeah, exactly. So we'll definitely cross that bridge

when we get to it. The bridge is coming up. We can maybe see it there in the horizon. It's not like, oh yeah, you'll get there eventually, but it feels a little bit closer. Yeah. One thing we also try to help clients communicate a little bit more, switching gears a little bit, is this idea of SEO audit. So our topic today is kind of like, I don't know the exact title at this moment in time. Obviously you'll come up with one when we put in there. But the working title I put in my notes a little bit is, I have an automated SEO audit. What do I do with it? It's like premise that I'm thinking of here. So this happens, this has always happened. This isn't a new thing. These tools have been out for years at this point. But we were you and I were talking before we hit record around the

fact that there's a lot of SEO companies out there, some reputable and know our industry well, just randomly out there spraying and praying proposals or spam or like trying to get a contract or something. And it's, hey, we crawled your website and we found all these problems and we're going to let you know about it in this PDF document. And we joked a little bit before we hit record about how frustrating it is to deal with these documents because they are often nitpicking at things that really don't matter at all. I mean, the property management equivalent of this would be a competing property management company driving by perhaps a property that you take care of, and them saying, there's a single piece of grass that has fallen and is sitting in the middle of

the driveway. How dare you? How dare you? That's basically the level of detail that some of these automated SEO audits dig into. So I thought we'd spend just a few minutes today talking about, okay, we've also shared a little bit that we're empathetic to the property manager on the other side who's getting this report and saying, this thing says there's a bunch of problems. Don't you trust this thing? What's wrong with you guys? Are you paying attention? And so on. So it's a valid discussion, we wanted to dive into a little bit of both sides of the equation, what matters, what makes an impact, what doesn't, so that we're not worrying about a single piece of grass in the middle of the driveway, perhaps, instead of focusing on the fact that

like, the house is in good condition, and it's clean, and the door unlocks and things that really matter, and maybe not so much the little tiny pieces that don't matter. But paint that context around SEO and the actual technical makeup of a website, and how important or not important some of these things actually are, I guess, maybe high level your experience with these automated SEO audits? Are they a good thing? Are they a bad thing? Or are they just a tool that can be wielded in both good and bad ways? I think that's probably the best description. It's, I think if you know how to use them effectively, yeah, sure. They can be good. And I think it's understanding what the levels of concern that you have to have. And I think every, you, there's not a lot of context for someone, for, again, if you're a novice on the website side of things, you don't know what is a problem.

I don't expect a lot of the professional managers to be web experts behind the scenes who really know what's a bad error, what's a good error, what's okay, what's acceptable. And it is. I think, yes, I'm looking at an audit right now for a site that has 20,000 warnings on it and 1,200 notices and 300 errors. And I'm not that concerned about it because, again, you can highlight a lot of areas here. You can highlight a lot of things that, yeah, seen in some of these site audits have very little impact on the overall performance of the website or the overall performance within the actual organic placements or SEO side of things. So I think audits are a better visual to be able to track. Again, certainly if you're starting with an audit and then working towards certain action items, yeah,

that's a good way to use an audit. But I don't think that's how they're being used in a lot of cases. I think that most of the point it is, it's to try to attack. I remember someone who literally fielding one of those, again, back on the traveler side in Broken Bow. And they had gone by and they had snapshot. First of all, they had taken pictures of the property, the signs and everything like that. And then they went through and did some search, random searches and said, where are you here? And where are you there?

And then presented a site audit with all these errors. I'm like, okay, sure. Where are you for those? But it is, you can paint a really terrible picture with some of these tools, or you can paint a really great picture and give some great visibility to what the perceived performance of the site is. I think that's the other side of things. You use Ahrefs, you use SEMRush, you use any of these tools.

Everything is on their own scale. Moz, the domain Moz domain ranking. That's it's great. But what factors in there? Is it universal? Is it something that S Srush has their own? That's the other question out there of if you run in this same site through the same audit, through three different audits for three different products, what does it give you across any of those products? I have some thoughts on this one, certainly. It is. I think it's just too's, it is, it's just too often yield wielded as a sword, just something that

you can just poke holes at. And I think that's silly. That was the, that was kind of the context. And that's what made me want to bring it up today is it was used as a sword by a competing agency. And look, I put out a post on LinkedIn a while ago about this and I'm like, compete with us. That's fine.

This is, Hey, I'm a capitalist baby. Like you want to go compete with us and offer a better service or pitch our clients. I think that's fair game. So if they want to use these tools to do nothing I can say or do is going to stop someone from doing that's for sure. However, I do think they often frame it in a very misleading way. And that's kind of the frustrating part. What I dislike, and I talked about in that post previously was the people who market through FUD, which is fear, uncertainty and doubt. And they're like, these are things that are their problems, they're causing fundamental flaws in your website. And I was likening it previously,

before I did my analogy of the single piece of grass in the driveway as like the equivalent of what these issues are to like your car, if you turn on your car, there was like 87 check engine lights going on, you'd be pretty concerned, you'd be like, am I even gonna be able to get ready to go? Whereas so it's almost like the tool makers themselves, Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc, like you described, make the tools look in a way where you do want to pay attention to them, because we're drawn to the idea that there's a problem or there's an error inside of our website or inside of our business or something like that. It's something that we want to plug up and fix. So there's even like some psychology behind the way that these reports

actually work, but the mechanics matter, I would argue a lot more than the psychology. And like you said a minute ago, the thing that ultimately matters is the results. So this is actually one of my page speed things, but I'll bring it up here. Cause these reports will cover page speed issues. And it's my classic go into Google in a competitive market, put in the top local ranking website, let's not VRBO, Airbnb, etc, who's on the first page and run them through one of these audit tools. And what you'll often discover is that they have SEO issues popping up or they have mediocre or not great page speed numbers coming in. And yet somehow they're ranking on the top of Google. So there must be something else at play, i.e. what we believe and what we've proven to be the case, I think now over and over again, which is that it's really about content on page SEO and links.

If you're doing those three things well, maybe there's little other tiny pieces that you might have missed along the way. But those are the pillars that actually move you forward. So when you're getting an SEO audit, if someone ever got an SEO audit like this, and it was done this way, I would have a lot more admiration for the fact that they're pitching our client. But if I was trying to fry a client away from a competitor, I would do something a little bit more like this. We don't do a lot of this type of cold outbound, by the way, we get typically plenty of inbound enough where we don't have to. But if I was going to do it, this is how I would approach it. And it would be, here's the content they're posting, here's why it's suboptimal, and why I'm saying that. So in this example,

it would be like us running a grade, a clear scope report on your things to do page, and then me putting your content in there and then saying, hey, you did a things to do page about Destin, Florida, but you didn't include these 10 subtopics. That's like a very legitimate use case for using a tool to aid your understanding or your comprehension of how a site works, running it through like the automated SCM report, which is what this particular client happened to get. And then notating the fact that somewhere there's a button that doesn't have like it's an image and it doesn't have alt text on it. It's just such a silly, it's just such a silly, non nothing burger, if you will, in terms of like things that actually matter on the site. And I would bet my bottom dollar and I bet my bank account that this SEO agency that's sending out these reports and using this FUD to

try to get people to come over their way, isn't actually going and fixing those things that that person were to sign up. Not at that level of detail. Maybe they do what we do, which is they fix the things that actually matter. And they let the bygones be bygones or they let the small issues fall to the bottom. But I would bet my bank account that we could put their site or one of their case study sites into one of these tools and find dozens, if not hundreds of errors popping up there. So I'm putting this in air quotes that most people can't see. Errors that really don't move the needles. That's like our high level, I think, frustration from these things is that it's always done with the frame

of like you said, using it as a weapon, trying to make you look bad if you're the current SEO provider, or honestly, just trying to scare the client. It's not really done in like the best interest of the client or what's optimal for them.

It's done in the best interest of let me try to sell you something usually on the other end of it. And just to add a delightful twist of irony, many times, not in this case, the person wielding the report doesn't even understand it. So they can't even tell you what the actual problems are inside of the report itself. So if a savvy SEO is sending you this report and trying to scare you a little bit, again, I might have a modicum more, a shred of

respect for that tactic, although I think it's a poor one. But the fact that they put a rookie salesperson on the phone with these people, and they're like, yeah, man, we've got 100 issues, we got to fix them. And they couldn't even explain to you one issue and what it actually means is really just like the piece of whatever, the cherry on top, if you will, of the crap Sunday that is these automated SEO audit strategies. And it is. So I will tell an anecdote on this one because this is,

we essentially had white labeled to larger manager an SEO package that was two hours a month meeting with me about SEO. And I did. I generated these extensive 250-page reports. Really a lot of data in there. And we went through them painstakingly. So here's the thing. This is how I know that a lot of this is just like we did.

We set goals. That's the way we got a value out of it because it is. I can talk SEO with the best of them, I think, but holy cow, I was pulling out a lot of hairs trying to stretch just the amount of time and discussion because it is. But I think we would both acknowledge SEO is just not that action-driven a process where it probably would have been more beneficial in some cases for me to take that two hours, write some content, get some backlinks or something like that, as opposed to actually meeting with them and trying to talk through these extensive reports that said page speeds,

it's about two and a half seconds here, could be two seconds, which would give you a lift from notices to warnings to notice. It's wild. So so i do i think that's where the nature of some of these reports and i think even that's it that's where at least they do they try to program you a little bit into you've got your high level errors you've got your warnings stuff that made that you got your notices so they try to color code it, I would say, to make people understand what really needs to happen. But then it is, it's, it's, the other side of that is, is who is going to take care of it? So you've got 300 errors on the site. Are you going to fix those 300 errors? Because my assumption in after you've done this site audit, you're going to send me over, you've sold me on your services. You better be able to run that exact same audit in six months or three months or nine

months or whenever that is. And I should see zero errors or I should see whatever, an acceptable level of errors, a margin of error for errors. That's not going to happen. And I think that is, and you addressed it right away there, is that who's actually going to take care of this? Because if you've got, I think we would acknowledge, and it gets down to the what data is making up these reports. Again, you run that same site through a different report, a different audit.

Are you seeing the same errors? Again, do I have to run a different audit to give you the right number of errors because it's just, we're all still, even if you're custom debbing something just to be completely optimized for SEMrush or Ahrefs or whatever it is, it's going to change. The algorithm they use is going to change, something like that. Don't be, and I think that's the other side of it is don't become like hostage to these audits because they're not ultimately going to, it is unless they're the actions you're taking from the audits are driving better performance. And we can't say that certainly

because there's other things we're doing behind the scenes as well. Yeah, it is. It's very difficult to say one-to-one, okay, I made this change. Yeah, if you clean up some 404s and some server errors, you're gonna make some improvements on your overall performance.

But most people don't have those type of fundamental errors. I think that's where these errors, even if they're high-level errors, how many of them actually can move the lever? A handful? A dozen? Maybe? Again, if it's worse than that, maybe then you do have some bigger problems. And that's something that needs to be addressed. But I don't know. I brought it to that point.

I brought up our SEO spreadsheet audit, which is okay, these are the things that matter. And there is actually 152 lines total in this spreadsheet. However, about a third of them are like notes and things like that. So if I were to actually count the issues that we check, I think it's on the order of maybe 100 issues that we might check. And these are all manual checks. Some of them take a second, some are a little bit more in depth. But like, these are the things that matter. So I thought I'd maybe go over this really quickly, just the category names, I won't go through every single individual item, we'd be here all day. But also, I also believe that the work and I always share this with clients who

reach out and are interested in us doing this project for them to do any kind of technical SEO only project for them. I believe that the value of the work is us doing the audit. So I don't mind giving away this template for free. So if you email me Conrad, C-O-N-R-A-D at buildupbookings.com, I'll give you a blank version of this template for free, because there's nothing in here, I believe, that's particularly proprietary or anything like that. I think the value in doing this is, in fact, going through and looking at the issues. And then, like you said a second ago, the most important thing is correcting the issues, not just flagging them, right? There's a lot of SEO companies out there that I think will do that kind of work for you. Actually, they will do an audit. There's people that do this for

a living, they do audits for a living. And then they just hand a document over and they say, okay, your dev team will fix it. You can hire me again, if you want me to look again, once you fixed it. But that's essentially the scope of their engagement. And very few clients in the short term rental vacational space have dev team that they can even hand this thing off to in the first place. So generally, my frame on this is that it's better to fix 60 70% of the actual, you know, issues than to fix some other percentage of the issues that you can't actually do anything about. So knowing that there's a problem, and it's in a spreadsheet somewhere, but not actually do anything to correct it is probably a waste of time and energy.

So the things that we focus on, we look for is the site crawlable and accessible. So those are things like, is the site actually, you know, up and indexed in Google, these sound like simple things, but you'd be surprised how often we find problems. Is there a bunch of broken pages? Is there a way for Google to find new pages? AKA, is it submitted in the search console? Do we have a site map? Do we have a robots.txt file that's not walking Google?

These all sound like simple things, but that's the first thing we check, which is basically, is this accessible? Is this findable? The next thing we check is just around like site maps, basically. So it's just, are we submitting all the right pages to Google? Do we have a sitemap in there? Do we have a separate sitemap for images? Do we not have a separate sitemap for images?

How are we submitting it? And is Google accepting the fact that we're submitting those pages? So that's most of section two. Then we dive into like edge case kind of examples. So this doesn't come up a lot. In fact, I would say 90% of SEO audits we do, this section is completely blank. But does the site have subdomains? That can complicate things quite a bit if they do? So if that were the case, we'd want to take a peek at that.

Is there any other weird like architecture issues that I should be aware of or multiple domains or multiple subdomains? There's a whole section there on that. Then we get into more of the, I would say the semantics of like how the site's actually put together. So is there breadcrumbs available on the site? Does that work? How did the URL structure of the site work?

Is there folders? Is there not subfolders? Is it more of a flat site where everything is just domain.com slash URL? Or is there more of a structure to the site where it's domain.com slash, you know, rentals slash property name or domain.com slash search slash pet friendly rentals or whatever the case may be. So we go through that. We have different layers on that, which again, if you're interested, I can send this over

to you. Are the URLs themselves SEO friendly? This came up a few times recently with an SEO audit that we did where the URLs were not really, they were all smushed together. Like they weren't actually using delimiters, like little dashes in the URLs. Some were very long. They had a bunch of like ugly words in them and they were just hard to clean up. So that was, that's a key part, I think, of things that, you know, matter.

And the funny part, I've tweeted this a long time ago. I can try to dig out the tweet, put it in the show notes, but just I'll rephrase it and you'll understand where I'm coming from, which is that all the things we've talked about so far in this SEO audit are checking, not necessarily if something is just binary there or not there, but it's also how well is it working? So my tweet that I shared a while ago was basically, the gist of it was checking to see if a title tag is 80 characters or not is something that a computer can do pretty well. Hey, this title tag is or is not between 60 and 80 characters, let's say. Check see if a title tag is 80 characters or not is something that a computer can do pretty well. Hey, this title tag is or is not between 60 and 80 characters, let's say.

Checking if the title tag is set up correctly is actually kind of hard to do with a computer. It's possible, like it's possible some of these audits tools to know a little bit about it. But for example, it may not know that if more people in this market search cabin rentals versus vacation rentals, that your title tag and what you're actually going after should say Gatlinburg cabin rentals, not Gatlinburg vacation rentals, because one gets 30,000 searches a month, and one gets 2000 searches a month. If we were optimizing for the vacation rentals keyword, we could probably pass an SEO audit or SEO tool on that keyword. The trouble is, that's the wrong keyword to focus on. If you're in Gatlinburg, you want to focus on the cabin rental keyword, because that's what has volume. So that's the nuance that like, I think

we're a little ways in, but that's the nuance that I wanted to get at here a little bit, which is that a computer may not know your strategy. Automated crawl from SEMrush may not know what keywords you're going after and why. They may not know that you want to include the brand at the end of every single name of your, at the end of every title tag. And your brand happens to be long because you're called Conrad School Cabin Rentals or something like that. So it's really challenging and thought impossible to actually fit your keyword plus the brand in a 60 character

limit or something like that. But does that mean that you're going to get rid of your brand or your keyword? Probably not because you want both those things inside of it. So again, everything, and I'll keep going just talking about it because it touches on the next few things. But the next piece in there is after URLs is about like titles, metas, and headings. So the actual mechanics of the way the page is put together, do we have an H1? How's that look? Are those set up correctly for success? Do we have additional structure on the page for let's say a blog post? Do we then show H2, H3, H4? Do we have a title on the page? Is it rendering properly? Again, is it not just over a certain character account, but is it set up correctly? Are we going after the right keyword?

Those are all really important considerations. Some sites that we spend the most time on that section, just going through the metadata to make sure it's actually firing correctly. And most importantly, going forward, it's going to continue to fire correctly. Also have notes in here on the page content itself. Is it, can Google access it? Are they having any issues with it? Structured data? Are things in good shape there? Then we get into some smaller pieces, but are the images themselves SEO friendly? This is where I think you get into things that don't always necessarily matter, but to just make sure we're not uploading 50 megabyte images that happens sometimes.

So we have a check in here for, are the images ideally 150 kilobytes or less? We see this quite a bit with some of these PMS template websites where the photographer sends the property photos, property manager uploads them straight into, pick your PMS of choice, doesn't matter. And they're 30 megabyte images

and it's like, oh my God, that's terrible. So that's again, the kind of thing that might be flagged on a SEO audit somewhere. But the actual work is going in compressing. In some cases, we've had to compress 1000 images, resize them, and then re upload them into the PMS that takes forever. But it's a worthy SEO tactic for sure. Is there all text, it's a small thing, it can help if it's possible to do sometimes we have tools that can be at our disposal, like rank math actually has an sort of an auto alt text tool based on the caption, the photo and things like that. There's probably some AI solutions around the corner where this might be a little bit easier. But that's something that we check

then once the site's live, do we have any duplicate content issues? Do we have any social sharing issues? So does the page have the right tags for open graph, things like that link issues, search console, we do a check there, sweep everything there is everything indexed. And then our bottom section is on page speed. Sorry, that was a very long diatribe. And I gave a few examples throughout the path there. But I wanted to share with you like, I'm imagining someone listening going, okay, you guys told us what not to focus on, what should you focus on? And I think it's the things that are inside of our audit. And by the way, to be clear, we will run Ahrefs audit sites on our own client sites, and it will give a score, it gives a percentage score of yourself healthy,

the site is 0% being terrible, 100% being perfect. And it will flag, it'll flag things for us that we go in there and look at. So we're not like all automated SEO audits bad, all manual checks good. I think there's a blend of when you want to use the automated check versus a more manual check, depending on a site migration is a great time to go do a manual check. When a client's new, we do a larger manual check and so on. Like day to day, it may not make as much of a difference, but those are the things that I focus on. So anything that I missed there or things that you think are important to, or what are your thoughts there? No, I think it is.

Those are, and then the other side of that, those are actionable. I think that's the other side is whenever you do look at these audits is what is actionable and what's going to take a lot of costs. I mean like a technical cost or it is, if it takes 10 hours of a web services company's time or it takes that like is that worth it it is what is the value like it is i think that's something especially as there's there's more support cost tied to support hours and things like that which i'm not gonna fault anybody for doing that for getting the value on what they're doing but it is if it's

going to take 10 hours or 15 hours of development work or something like that to make a very small impact on the overall SEO of the site, what does that trade-off look like? Is that something you can invest somewhere else? And that's where knowing and I think making sure that you are trying to do some due diligence where if you're talking to that salesperson

and asking maybe a couple of questions that we're bringing up here. Conrad, that was a great checklist of some of those small questions that you can ask. You can peel a few off of that, but that's going to that next level of who is going to really respond to and having a much better playbook of, okay, yeah, you've identified 300 errors and my site score is 50%. Okay, cool. But what's the goal for me then? Is it to get to 75%? Is it to reduce it to 100?

Like, as with anything that we're doing strategically, it's setting those expectations of what is good, what is acceptable. And I think that's where audits do nothing from that. And that's where it is. That manual audit is so critical in saying, yep, we took the site audit we've got here. And then we're going to look in and try to view all of these things, review all of these things, take them down to that next level. Wonderful.

This is what's really impacting me though. So I do think that it is, these are, these are, it is where I don't want to be anti toolstools. The automated tools, there's value. It's just understanding what it's actually telling you. And if that does mean that you're bringing that to someone else, I think additionally, the web services companies that are receiving these audits and are saying, okay, these are the errors. Yeah, we can take care of that for you. Yeah, we can take care of that for you.

I think it is you should be very receptive to making these changes and saying, not even trying to spin it up. We do have your back. We're watching out for you. It's not, that's not the issue here. It's that impactful, the impact that these have on the actual site, give a true rank there.

So I think that we can all learn from these, but this, it's not a red flag. It's perceive it's proceed with caution. Don't be so scared that your site is going to break or you're going to lose your booking engine or you're going to lose something like that. That's not going to happen unless it is something so egregious that, I don't know, I can't even think of a good example where I've seen anything so egregious that I would say, oh my goodness, you have malware on your site that got hacked somewhere along the line.

That's the only thing I can think of is that someone has disregarded manual action items from Search Console that we've talked about a couple of weeks. That's it. So there is. There's nothing on a site audit that should really scare the living bejesus out of you there. But I think there's just, there are some items that if you're prioritizing those, regardless of being an audit or just your checks or your initial build or your initial launching of a new website, you'll be in good shape. I, while you were talking, I was remember, I was recalling the, I think it's called the triple constraint of project management. And it's basically this triangle and it's scope, cost, and time. People may use different terminology to describe this, but it's basically what's the scope

of our engagement or of our project? What's the cost, like the actual dollar cost or like human cost? It could be hours, time, et cetera. And then how long is it going to take to actually do the thing that we're trying to do? And I think the trouble with a lot of these SEO audits that we're just talking about here is that they just completely, they pretend this doesn't exist. They're like, oh, we can fix every issue because we have an unlimited scope. We have an unlimited amount of time or a finite amount of time to fix this problem. And we can spend as much as we want to fix it. And of course,

that's not the real world that I don't know what fantasy land that person lives in, but it's not the one that I live in where we have to consider all these things. So that's the thing. There's fundamental flaws on our website. Go to buildandbookings.com and you might find a little flaw here and there, but we seem to rank pretty well when you search like vacation rental SEO ahead of like all these other competitors are going after the same keyword who don't, we don't have used footer websites, links on websites, just as a little ledge there. But it was one of those things where when you're focused on the the right the things that matter right like in this case like if it's the content itself if it's the like you were saying the on-page structure we're going after the right keywords we're building

links those are the boulders that like you need to push forward to get the rock from wherever it is over to where it needs to be the the little seo issues we're talking about here are the grains of sand that you might encounter as you're pushing that boulder from where it is where it needs to be. And then there's probably like midsize issues that are like rocks the size of a basketball or rocks the size of a golf ball or something like that might get in your way where you might need to occasionally move them. So you can keep pushing your boulder. But the boulders of on page SEO and researching the right keywords and building high quality links to your website and actually formatting the content into your website. Those are the big things you actually need to push forward. A lot of this other stuff is really just that and whatever analogy we want to draw,

whether it's the single grade of the grass one, because it reminds me of what a property manager might think of as an unreasonable request from a guest, right? Oh, there was a tiny bit of grass left in the driveway when your guys came by and cut the lawn. And there's people that would complain about that. That's what we're talking about here, right? It's just a non-factor. They could be in a 10 bedroom luxury oceanfront house. And if someone's picking at that, I think they're focused on the wrong things. Sure. In a perfect world of time, scope, and cost, the lawn care company would go in with a vacuum and clean up all the little grass snippets so that there was nothing there. And yeah, in a perfect world of a client, if they ever gave us that, haven't encountered this client yet, who gave us unlimited costs and said, I'll spend

whatever it takes. I want to get a hundred out of a hundred. I'll text every single menu button, go through every little thing. Then sure, I'll do it. We'll do anything for the right amount of money. I would tell the person that's stupid, it doesn't make sense. But if they wanted to, I would do it for the right, the right approach there. But it's not optimal. I think that's ultimately to come back to the reason that we get a little bit, it grades our gears a little bit, if you will, is that some of these solutions are focusing on things that are completely suboptimal. And it's not going to lead to a better outcome to you, the client. And most of the clients we work with are looking for the right outcome. And the right outcome is usually getting more traffic, getting better rankings on the keywords

that matter, getting more direct bookings and actually impacting their bottom line. So much of this is just non-bottom line impact makeup and stuff that really just doesn't matter. And that's where it just can get a little bit frustrating when you're doing the right thing and you're moving the boulders forward and you've got someone yelling at you about a grain of sand that's somehow between there and where you need to go. That's my high level thoughts on it. I plan to send this episode, by the way, if you made it this far, it might be because I sent this to you and you're either a current client or you're thinking about becoming a client. And it's hopefully my friendly way of

saying not ignore this, but here's the reason, here's the way that we should think about this report. So if you get this report and you've listened to this episode and you are a current client or someone that's considering it, hopefully you understand that there's some nuance to this. There's some layers of complexity here. And certainly technical SEO health is like a top priority for us internally when we're working with a client on an SEO retainer. But it's something that we always place in the context of scope, time and budget, all those things. And we also place in the context of what's going to move the needle. And we're fine letting a report say that we have a few issues here and there. When we're looking at the numbers go in the right direction we're looking at traffic grow we're looking at rankings get

better we're looking at a client that's making more money those are the things that we're a lot more focused on than a random menu button not having an alt text on yeah what else did we miss anything or should we put a button on this one and hopefully this was a friendlier rant than some of our other ones that we've had before i think overall we were like we didn't go too dark i mean i think that's good we probably have to shift that a little bit here we can't be the nice guys but no i think this is it and we've got next week coming up then i think we've got got our rent responsibly presentation webinar coming up too so that'll be yes now that's we'll drop a little plug for that right here just making sure that anybody who is listening try to catch catch those webinars. Those should be exciting and enjoyable. And I think the theme and topics are related to sustainability. So obviously that's important

in the space right now. Yeah. If you're listening to this in April of 2023, just to get the data over your way. And a lot of people do listen the first month or so, so that will be valuable. In eight days as of us recording this, so April 18th, the 19th, 2023, please do join us for the Rent Responsibly Summit. It's called people places planet. I think that's a great name. And we have a session live session that we're recording at that time. We have a bunch of different topics and it'll be fun. So if you have a chance to join us, we would certainly appreciate that later here in April.

If you're catching in the future, then maybe we'll figure out a way to post that link, like the link to that in the show notes later on. If you happen to be listening to this after that event has actually occurred, but we definitely appreciate that. We won't do a review request this week. Instead of the review, forget the review, go over,

like I said, we'll put a link in the show notes to what this looks like. Now the submit link, you can sign up. It's completely free. It's a virtual event. You don't need to go anywhere.

Just get your PJs on or whatever the case may be. Crack open a beverage of your choice. Sit back, listen to us talk about a sustainable marketing strategy. I think that one's going to be really fun. So yeah, for sure. Excellent.

Okay, let's put a button on this one for right now. so much for listening we appreciate it we will catch you hopefully there at the live summit if not then we'll catch you on a future episode and we will talk to you everybody soon thanks so much for your time paul