Heads In Beds Show - EVERYTHING You Need To Know About Keyword Research

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad give a quick deadline countdown timer to Google Analytics 4 and then explore and discuss keyword research tips and tricks.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellClearscopeSemrush KW ToolsAhrefs KW ToolsKeyword Sheeter🔗 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. Oh, hey there, Paul. How's it going? Just another wonderful summer morning here, starting the week with, I don't know, a great discussion on everything.

We're going to talk a little K2R research here, but we've had our discussions on sports already this morning. So we've gotten our sidebars out of the way. We, our respective teams are doing, well, not a lot because it's summer. So how are you doing this week, Conrad? Yeah, it's the dead zone. So I was laid up sick for most of yesterday,

not feeling a hundred percent. Try to keep the voice scratchiness to a minimum here today. I don't know just that midsummer flu kind of cold thing has found its way into my system. But all good, relatively minor things, all things considered, a lot worse could be going on. So I don't have a lot. So maybe we can dive into marketing minute, you could tell me I think we're our timing is interesting here on a few things. So tell me a little bit what's happening with GA4 and what's up with this deadline here in a few days. Yeah. So we've got nine days left, nine days out. And I found today's research article or probably the biggest headline in the inbox was percentage of people who are using G4 versus who are using universal analytics. So there's's million there's multiple millions of people who are using it

what are we have current sites using in total using g4 analytics versus universal analytics what do you think it is for g4 conrad so percentage of sites using google analytics which are total sites we'll do percentage in a little bit but let's do total right now that are using g4 and total that are using universal analytics all right total on g4 i'm gonna guess it's 10 million oh 11 million that's oh that's pretty good that's pretty impressive i feel good about that we did and you said this before that call and i said don't tell me all right so that was legit that's legit right there that's all right so now how many you have universal okay so in other words how much further yeah i'm leaning towards 10 to 1 maybe a little bit more than that so i'm leaning towards 120 130 million on universal it's that's it's what is this they're saying 28 million so i that's i

that seems a little low for total number of installs for the two i don't know if there's some carry over there crossover there but yeah that's so right now, 28 million, 3 million in the United States right now, it's 3 million, 3.3 million using universal 2.3 million using G4 percentage of the top million sites using G4 or universal analytics is 41%. G4 is 30%. And then the 10,000 most popular sites, 54% for universal 40% for G4. Nobody's switching. So we have 10 days left and almost nobody is switching over. And that's, I don't know. Your math is wrong, by the way. It's not 10 days. We're recording this on Monday, 26th. That's correct. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

Maybe the date of that article is 10 days. That's right. Oh my gosh. I'm way behind that. Yeah. Yeah. So we're four days, five days out. And a lot of misses there. I did see this Twitter thread. They got an unbelievable amount of engagement. And it basically was like, I'm refusing GA for give me other options, basically. And this person was going to remove GA analytics universal off their site and put on Fathom or one of these other products. I have a client using that system and it's fine. It doesn't have all the same features, obviously. But with regards to GDPR compliance, it's actually pretty legitimate. Maybe there's people, you know, of that, like you said, that 10% delta who are actually going towards a different path. And they're

actually intentionally choosing another analytics platform, and they're moving off Google. To be honest, I don't really know why that's the case. I can't imagine most people listening would do that, or that makes sense. But that may be the case, obviously. There's so I did. And I that was wrote it on LinkedIn. But legitimately, there was a partner that we got on the call with. And they said they didn't want to switch over. And this is another agency that they work with in the space. So we're not switching over. We're doing something else. We're using a different solution. And I was pretty surprised by that, just because I don't know if that was a one-off for this individual or a bad day. I don't know. But the idea that someone is going off of Google Analytics completely, just especially if you've had that, I know this particular customer, client, whatever it is, has been using Google Analytics for three, four years. they have a lot of historical data there. So to just throw that away because, and not the individual property manager who's making that

decision, but the agency is making that decision on their behalf. I hope that's not happening more universally because that's just not a decision that I think the agency should be in a position to make there. I don't know. That seems like an ethical, moral gray area there of familiarity. And I don't know. I guess the question to throw over to you is, I know you've transitioned everybody over to G4, but is that a decision you would make for someone or you would recommend making even if someone wanted to make that decision? Like I said, I would have to be really compelled for some reason, like GDPR is the one carve out, I would say, because it's okay.

If we have to put the GA4 container inside of a consent window, and that consent window only gets tapped X percent of the time, 20, 30 percent of the time, then we're missing so much data that I'd rather have a quote unquote worst platform that I can actually see more accuracy with. So that's the only carve out for me. And whatever, like I'm not a blind loyalist. Show me a platform better that works more logically between the two, and I'm willing

to have the discussion. But right now, I think that's going to really hamstring, hamstrung, I can't find the word there, limit your ability to have success with Google Ads or other products by not using this platform. And you're really making your life really hard. And I would ask you what the benefit of that is. And honestly, it wouldn't even be that much of a to do to have both of them running side by side. Maybe you just have GA4 on there and then you have Fathom or something running alongside of it.

I don't think that's a crazy thought process. If you want to explore another option, these things surely won't conflict too much. So I don't think that's a crazy thought process either, to be honest. No, no. And if they were running

in tandem with something else, sure, understandable. I think the idea, exactly. The idea of just not installing a G4 tag. First of all, if you have Tag Manager already on, or if you already have an easy integration, I know a lot of the property management systems just have that quick little pop the UA or the G4. Now the G, G, property unit, whatever that is, that specific identifier. Data stream ID. property unit whatever that is that specific data so that stream id pop that in there's no reason not to at least do it try it see what's coming through hey if you don't like the data after 30

60 days take it off nothing hurting you at that point but yeah and again from the person who is not a fan of g4 this is it seems just it to just completely go away from google especially with all the ai stuff and the generative that the more that's built in with the ai the more that's built in with generative search and the more you know results that are happening that are coming through those specific areas there's going to be more insights that they're able to gather that yeah you may not be able to find the right reports right now. And that will be a pain point in the short term. Work at it again. Try to find those custom reports that you can build because, yeah, I think you will

find yourself behind the eight ball over time if you're, again, not trying, not giving it a shot at the very least there. So that's my look at the toolbox. Yeah, no, it's all good. I think there. So that's my, we'll get off the top box. Yeah, no, it's all good. I think that, so this is your red alert. Definitely move over to GA4. If you haven't already, you pretty much are out of time by the time you listen to this, but limit the damage, if you will, and limit the damage, if you will, on losing data long

term. We've warned you for a while and now the rubber meets the road. So let's dive into keyword research. Another topic where the rubber meets the road with your SEO strategy in some ways. I thought this was an interesting topic today, because I think that we've danced on this before, but I don't think we've done like an exact episode on keyword research. And it's something that I think a lot of people, yeah, there's a lot of different ways to do it. There's you ask 10 SEO trained people, you'll probably get 10 different approaches. And that's fine. Like I think there's lots of

different ways to get to the right answer. But the core of what it is for us when we're putting this together is generally what are your what are the keywords people are actually looking for? What's the intent behind the people that are actually searching for those keywords? That's a very important distinction that we'll go over in a minute. And then what do you actually have a realistic chance to rank for in like the short slash near ish term? I think those are our initial three decision criteria. It's not always based on volume necessarily. It's not always based on the number of visitors that we're going to get or clicks or something like that. Those are obviously considerations, important ones, I would argue, but it matters a little bit more of those other three. So I'd like to go your direction. When did you get into keyword

research initially? What's kind of the way that you approach it today, whether it's owner-centric or guest-centric marketing and how does it tie into the vacation rental manager's SEO strategy? Yeah, that's, I think just just diving into keyword research, really, it wasn't just on the vacation rental site. It was looking at all those different resorts and lodges.com. It was resorts, it was lodges, it was hotels, it was inns and B&Bs.

And I think that gave me that greater understanding of just the variety of ways that people search. It was like, oh, hotels, resorts, that's it. No, there are literally hundreds of thousands of different ways that people search. It was like, oh, hotels, resorts, that's it. No, there are literally hundreds of thousands of different ways that people really turn that inside out. So having a tool, finding a tool, like that's where the keyword magic tool

on SEMrush became my best friend. And the early years of kind of my SEO and keyword research learnings is really trying to figure out where you can go and see those topics spider out from seemingly a pretty straightforward, vanilla word like hotels in or resorts in or vacation rentals in X area. So I do, I think that's something where it is really important to, I've always found it really important to go as deep as possible with keyword research. Again, you can go down a rabbit hole pretty quick. You start with some of those top

level, high level areas, very general, not really long tail keywords, and then going down further into the long tail keywords and seeing how those really piece together a true user story, that true intent of trying to determine at which stage of the buyer's journey someone's going to be in when they need to learn more about the things to do in the area or locations to eat or X, Y, Z. So I think that was really the most fun part about initially getting into the keyword research is diving in and seeing how everything branched out into creating a true content strategy, blog strategy, and just as you're building up the website, the sitemap, and really the entire... It goes so much more than just,

oh, I'm going to pick out 10 keywords and these are going to be 12 blog topics over the next 12 months. No, it's very much more than that. And I think that once you see it for the top level and then you dive down to that next level, it's fun. I don't know. I got really excited about it when I first did it. Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like you're sifting for gold a little bit. You have that mindset where there's a bunch of dirt and junk out there and then you've got this little spreadsheet, if you will, instead of a pen, and you're looking for what actually makes the most sense. And I still do get that feeling too, when you find that, ooh, not a lot of people are going after this. And yet here's the opportunity.

So maybe I'll give a quick story about a keyword set that we worked on a little while ago. I've given the story before, or this example before, but it's the best one that I've come across recently, which is that it's a cautionary tale of not necessarily trusting the tools exactly to do the job that they need to be doing. So here's kind of what happened during COVID, during the recovery of COVID, obviously a lot of our clients were booming in that recovery time period,

especially those who offered more remote type, cabin type getaway offerings, as opposed to the beach resorts were still doing well in many places, but not quite as packed in some others. So anyways, we saw a trend, we looked at people searching for specific information, one of our client sites and the topic seat restaurants with outdoor seating kept coming up again and again. So they'd search a

location, Myrtle Beach restaurants with outdoor seating. And of course, that was the one of the early mornings that we got during that kind of recovery was like, hey, you can actually, one of the most riskiest places for you to be in during the Coronavirus pandemic, like the worst parts of it was sitting in a restaurant where you were unmasked, you were eating and then everything was just circling around you. And I think the science holds up pretty well on that today. To my knowledge, I think that did cause a lot of spread. So if you're outside, like it just dissipates so much quicker, your chance of getting COVID are so much lower. And again, I think that holds up pretty well. Don't quote me, not a scientist,

don't want to get canceled or anything like that. But that's my understanding. So I think there was some logic behind this, even for people who are trying to avoid it as a lot of us were. Anyways, we saw this. And if you went into any keyword tool, look for this, it showed like pretty low volumes, 1020 searches a month. But we can know we went into Google Trends, and we can know and see if people are looking for this topic. So we started pushing these out a lot during like later part of 2021 into 2022. And some of them were doing 1020 30,000 impressions or views a month during peak season, because people were so hungry for this type of information and we had one of our writers was like calling restaurants and being like hey we want to put you on this list we just want to make

sure and then we had restaurants call us back please stop like you're sending us too much like business not us because they were actually getting they were like we were ranking number one where people are searching for that topic and then of course they were going to that restaurant the middle part of that you may say okay how does that tie into vacation rentals is that number one we were tagging them they visited that page we were tagging them with the retargeting pixels so they were getting advertising they were getting media pushed out to them about our company and how great it is why you should book with us of course depending on the client that we were doing it for and then there was of course a hook in the back end too to try to get them to sign up for the newsletter deals discounts specials whatever

the case may be so that's an example i, of maybe a more timely keyword research angle to it. We don't often have those. It's not our primary focus where we're doing newsworthy, almost things are changing by the hour, by the minute, that sort of thing. That's kind of what happened with that particular use case. Since then, by the way, those articles have pretty much flatlined. It's not that no one searches for them, but it was very much a moment in time. A better way to do keyword research, that's just a story of how the tools can be misleading. The better way to do keyword research, in my opinion, is to have a little bit more of an outline and a structure to it, like you're saying. What are people looking for? Again, how does it map well? And what I find a lot of our clients

do is they just overly index on like the rental keywords. Like they obviously want to rank for area name plus cabin rentals, plus vacation rentals, that sort of thing. Totally understand. Obviously, that's the thing that you want to go after. But guess what, you and 10,000 other people want to rank for that particular keyword in Google. So we have to figure out ways in my mind to drive traffic and build the relevancy of the site as we're building out the content strategy. Yes, in a perfect world, we would just write about these four or five different like money keywords, we'd rank for those right away. And we would just dust our hands off and be done with it. But that's not really the way to build a site from the most like complete way to build the site from our experience.

So when we're doing that initial keyword research, I would say the thing that helps us the most now is we have a list like this kind of pre-ordered list of ideas that we can just swap a destination into and start to get a feel for what the search volumes are. But some of those common ones in that list are like things to do, restaurants, attractions, types, keywords. Those are the things we usually start with because it's generally pretty broad information that everybody needs and then we go loud from there so when you're using those tools going back to sem rush they have their pros they have their cons for sure all the tools have the same issue with regards to like data freshness but if you're looking at keywords that have been searched consistently for some time

like restaurants are things to do how do you begin to like or how did you used to pick apart okay this is the one we want to focus on, this is the one we want to focus on. This isn't the one we want to focus on. I think part of it was we were using what we talked about last week, using a little bit of the search volume, using the keyword difficulty. But I think it was really trying to figure out where within the URL or within that the sitemap structure it fit. So it is, was it more applicable for a blog post? Was it more applicable for primary content on an actual sub page or something like that? That was something that it is when we're trying to marry some of those travel plus activities keywords. It was, we didn't necessarily want to send people back to a blog page because there's not always the best call to action

activity to get someone to book. So really trying to figure out what is the best destination location for those pages. And I think additionally, pulling that back in SEMrush, they do have, as you're running your website through a technical audit, any of the keywords that they're showing you, if you're showing up on any of the pages, it's going to show you where you're directing back to. I'm sure it happens in Ahrefs as well, but really trying to figure out where some of those more powerful pages on the site are and how do you supplement, again, supplement areas where they need some help or really try to enhance and make more of a pillar page for specific types of content as well. I think that was really the main primary thing. We're going for the lowest hanging fruit with some of those that are a little less competitive,

certainly, and have the higher search volume. But when you get so into those numbers, that's not necessarily easy. You still have to think about, ultimately, it's the intent. And what intent can we get? What intent do people have to be at? At what stage in that trip planning process do people have to be at? What stage in that trip planning process do people need to be in for this content to really resonate with them and to push them further down that sales funnel? So I don't know. I think that those areas, those metrics are helpful from that

perspective. They give you the idea of where refining a list for maybe 100 down to 50 or 50 down to 10, as far as what are your really key focus keywords there. But I guess, is there something similar or parallel? Do you do something similar when you're trying to put together the same strategy with those tools? I'll give an example. That's what I'll do today. I think if someone's listening and it's all very like, yeah, radical high level, I think it's good to bring it down to a more practical level for sure. Weather keywords are exactly, I think, summing up what you're describing. So on the surface, that sounds like a great idea. Let's go ahead and rank for people searching for weather in my destination. In fact, even better because if they're searching weather, they're probably searching last minute, like last 10

days of arrival. And if it's sunny, like great, I'm going to have a button, they're going to click on my site, and they're going to come in and then they're going to want to book my place because I'm showing them how great the weather is or something like that, hopefully. Great idea in theory, and I've just never got it to work in practice. So it's like on the surface, that lines up well with that drive-to market. Oh, let's go. To be clear, I've tried this. If a client were to be listening, and maybe this person knows who they are, and they're like, hey, you published so much weather pages on my site. I know I was trying to see if it was going to work, and we got some traffic out of it, but ultimately it didn't lead to the right type of traffic. So not something that

I would replicate. But that's a good example in my mind of high value to the user in theory, knowing what the weather is going to be all this kind of stuff. The problem is the search results are like blocking you from doing that on top of the fact that like sites like weather.com and weather bug exists, then all these other weather platforms out there exist, then it's just hard to rank for that keyword. But even if you get a chance to rank for it, you know, that widget at the top is just gonna kill you your ability to actually get any clicks, Google's gonna give the weather to the user before you're able to actually get a swing at them. So I think that's a good example of what you're talking about, where all those

things have to be true, right? It has to be in the right stage of the buyer and guest journey, all this stuff. And then you actually have a have to have a chance to rank for it, there actually has to be clicks out there that are out there waiting for you that you can pick up and grab and pull into your website. Going back to the things that we do focus on that typically do well, some things that these long tail things that do one sometimes do the best for us initially, even on a low DR site in a pretty competitive market. So not things to do in whatever things to do in Myrtle Beach is gonna be hard things to do on a rainy day in Myrtle Beach, sometimes not quite as hard things to do with kids, sometimes not quite as hard things to do at night or nightlife keywords, sometimes not

quite as hard, like not quite as challenging to rank for. This is one that we've done quite a bit for our pet friendly clients that have a lot of pet friendly properties. Again, the keyword that you brought rank for is pet friendly cabins in whatever market. What can sometimes work well is dog friendly restaurants or restaurants that allow dogs in market that can work. Dog friendly activities in market can work well. Dog friendly parks or the best places to bring your dog or those types of keywords in market can work well. So I think it's like you said, it's exactly what you said. It's matching up the intent. But then what I always recommend that everybody do when they're doing keyword research is don't look at everything in the spreadsheet all the time.

Right. Don't just look at the keyword. Don't just look at the search volume and the clicks and all that kind of stuff. That's important. Don't get me wrong. But what I see a lot of people doing, including people on my own team at times, and I have to remind them, you've got to go look at the search results. You have to go what I call study the search results. You've got to analyze the search results and see what's going on there. Because when you do that, what I think you often find is that the content that you produce, it has to have a specific format or look or appearance to it in order for you to even have a chance to rank well.

So let's go back to that dog-friendly example. If you do the post and it's dog friendly restaurants in location, dog friendly restaurants in Asheville, North Carolina, for example, that keyword is great, but you have to format it in a way that actually Google would reward you for that particular keywords. How you normally have to format stuff is more of a listicle format intro. Here's the 10 dog friendly restaurants, each of them with a subheading and then some specific rules and regulations or whatever about bringing a dog to that particular restaurant. And sometimes the best way to actually build some of this content out is you get on the phone and you call and you do the research that a

lot of people are unwilling to do. And we have, again, writers, really talented writers on our team that have done that kind of stuff. And I'm really appreciative of them doing that kind of labor to get that content together and make it awesome, because I think it makes our content stand out and do a little bit better of a job. So it's taking the keyword, but it's also that keyword. There's a person behind that keyword that's trying to solve a problem for the most part, usually. They have their dog with them. They want to know where to go and what to do.

So yeah, we talked a lot even on the last episode about there's metrics, there's domain authorities, all this stuff. Yes, those are all true and there's some truth to it. But if you're not putting a lot of effort into taking that keyword and trying to solve that problem with a solid piece of content for that person reading that particular article or page or topic on your site, then you're not giving yourself a chance, the best chance to rank in my opinion, because you're not doing where someone would click on that result and then want to stay there and give you more of their time and attention, which is the most valuable currency

that someone can give you in order to take that keyword and turn it into something tangible for you on the backside, which is more traffic and ultimately more booking. So that's kind of my like rant on the yes, there's keyword selection, that's important. But you've got to go deeper than just what I see a lot of times, which is the spreadsheets that you're describing are correct. And then people go, okay, now go produce the content, and they just kind of want to go away and go leave and go to another another task or do something else. There's a lot of work to be done in that process to do it well. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other one, just as you were bouncing ideas, the other one, seasonality, like stop spring getaways, top fall getaways, top summer getaways, winter getaways.

Obviously, people are going to travel to different markets for different reasons, for different seasons. And that's another thing that opens, I think, a lot more opportunities up to write different content or refresh content or do things, looking at things through a different lens there. And I did, and on the other side of it, yeah, if you're not actually doing the keyword research yourself and doing the searches and looking at Bing and Google results, and even though Bing's only 2%, it's still of value to know where you're showing up there, who is showing up there. And I still see quite a bit of traffic coming through Bing to sites. I see traffic coming in Google Analytics coming from

DuckDuckGo. I see it's coming from all over and you don't want to discourage anybody who's actually doing these searches from finding your sites there. So I think that's critical. But just doing that competitive analysis, I think what you're going to see more frequently now is some, it is, it's more engaging, not just the content, but there's more design assets to it. There's infographics, there's more interactive pages that you can take that content. And Google's really looking for that more than just the informative answer. It's something that again, once you get more of that interactive content, it's a greater likelihood that someone's going to link back and someone's going to link back and someone's, you know, you're going to get that residual. You're going to get that authoritative scoring.

As Google sees it, you're going to get that extra boost because more people see you as an authority. Boom, it's going to help you out organically there as well. Yeah, your DuckDuckGo note. Sorry, I didn't want to interrupt you. No, it was hilarious. We have a client that's in kind of the Bay Area adjacent to that area. And they actually now are getting more bookings from DuckDuckGo as a search engine ahead of Bing and Yahoo, these other things. So there's a few little pockets of people who are privacy focused.

It's funny that that being like the, of course, where Google is. And then the number two search engine behind Google, of course, being dominant still. But the number two search engine is DuckGo. You got to think more tech savvy crowd. So I remember looking last month and their bookings, it was like 93 or something through Google search, through paid organic, and then there was like 12 through.go. And my eyebrow got up a little bit. I'm like, that's not nothing. And it was interesting to see those kind of numbers come through. But yeah, that's just a funny.go story. So yeah, don't ignore the other search engines.

I'm fine with that approach. You may learn something, go looking at the again, at the search results and other search engines. And sometimes it's easier to rank in some of these other search engines, they tend to being in particular really likes exact match domain. So if you own whatever area rentals.com, sometimes you can actually do a little bit better early on a bang and at least again, get some wins on the board for sure, before you get there. So I want to go down the other angle, which is like this idea of creating comprehensive information. And we've touched on it a little bit. But I think this is part of the approach that makes our sometimes sites, I think, do a little bit better than the competition.

One of our mutual clients that we've talked about on this show before was with another SEO agency last year. And I actually think that their keyword research process was sound. They chose all the right topics. They chose a lot of the right keywords that we would have chosen. They did barbecue restaurants in area. They did here's the best wineries in area. They did all these topics. I think the keyword research where they completely flubbed, in my opinion, and dropped the ball completely was creating that content in a way that's actually SEO friendly. And they didn't really make it comprehensive information. So they took the keyword that was solid.

It was, again, like I said a minute ago, put in a spreadsheet given to a writer or content creator of some kind. And then they put the absolute minimum effort into actually producing the article. 400 word articles, you know, no subheadings, a stock photo back to your comment from a second ago about providing where you can look, we want to provide original photography and use the client stuff wherever possible. It's not often, it's not often straightforward to do that. So we often have to do is go to like other sources, or we have to go to Facebook and ask for permission. It can be a pain to get photos, good photos into an article. But it's worth the effort, in my opinion, because nothing worse than

if you're seriously considering going to a specific restaurant or doing a specific activity, and you go to a blog post that's 500 words, and it has no original photography whatsoever. When I say original, Jenner crap stock stuff that's pulled off that isn't even of the area. And it's just like close up of a steak. When you're talking about barbecue restaurants, I just think you're doing the bare minimum to actually make the content useful to the reader. And I don't think Google is going to reward you for that. We're having to go back, in fact, and take these ideas that this other agency had worked on and rewrite them all. And literally, basically just delete the post. We're keeping the URL slug and all the title. It was actually,

that was the part they did well. The other, I don't know, 90% of the content was just not well done. It just wasn't comprehensively completed. So my philosophy on this is that you're better off when you get that keyword researching, okay, here's the 20 articles I want to work on. I think nowadays you're better off doing one of two things, doing an initial first draft through an AI writing tool like Cuppa or some of these other tools out there, doing an initial draft through that, and then giving it to a human editor or writer to polish it, perfect it, make it good. I think that's a fast track now that didn't exist really even a year or two ago that we're considering working into our process a little bit more. Or you say, okay, I'm only going to be able to produce one

or two articles a month, but they're going to be great articles. They're going to be really solid articles and I'm going to make them efficient and effective at doing the job that they're supposed to be doing talking about a certain topic. I think that's a much better path than what I see a lot of people doing, which again, this agency that I'm referencing is one that we've all seen in the space. I think they did some things well, but then they just cheaped out on the content. They just put in the minimum effort on the content and they came up with stuff that was like the right idea wrongly executed. It's like they got up to the par three, hit a nine iron right in the water. If they just hit a nine, four iron, it would have gone right in the green. That's kind of the challenge that I guess that can exist here

is that when you find the right keyword and all the things we talked about so far, you're like, great, this is my topic. This is what I'm going to work on. And then you still have a lot of work to go actually actually the content production that sort of thing so food for thought as well but yeah i think that's the key is that in our space i think we've seen over time i think seo as a managed service is a very difficult and we've talked about it over and over again how how do you measure it? How do you measure it? And I think so often the deliverable is the blog post, the post itself. So you want to deliver three articles a month or two articles a month. So your deliverable is 36 blog posts. It's not the growth in the SEO. And yes, that should happen over time just based on

the fact that you are adding content. You do have the fresh content. You have all that going on. But I think that there's something to be said from really, as you're saying, focusing on the quality of that content, not just putting volume out there because Google and the other search engines are certainly going to see that, understand that. They're going to value your site. They're going to give you the thumbs up more than just throwing content out there. And again, I think we just have to be very careful with the KPIs that we're setting forth with SEO or we're understanding the value of SEO. It's not just writing 20 blog posts in a year and hoping that helps. No, we have to strategically do put those best practices into place. Put H1s in, put H2s in. Yeah, it probably

is not going to make your formatting and CSS or any like, it's not going to make those jobs necessarily easier, but ultimately it's going to help your site perform better. So it's not always about the visual, how the blog post looks. Sometimes it is about making sure you have an H3 in there or an H4 in there if it needs, if it requires that. And so often I see websites where you're writing content, but you're creating that content based on how it looks. So your H1 is in the middle of the blog post. That's happening here as a visual thing. That's cool.

But let's think about how the search engines are actually going to look at this content, this page, and let's make sure we're aligning it and we're designing it or designing it. And the air quotes, they're pretty heavily there, but designing in a way that the search engines are going to know, understand what the page is about and are going to be able to find it and serve it up to people at the right intent at the right time there. Yeah, I'll shout out ClearScope. That's my favorite tool for kind of taking the initial keyword that you have. So if it's again, the pet friendly restaurants in location, and actually turning it into a piece of content that is what I call again, comprehensive. So you heard me a second ago say, Oh, 500 words is not a sufficient length of content. For some keywords, it actually

is right. The trouble is, you don't know until you actually go again, look at the search results and see what's going on. But ClearScope helps a ton with that. So we love this tool. I do think this though, which is the benefit we get of using this tool has gone down over time because now I think other people have access to it. When we first found this stuff, it was like magic. Like we'd go optimize the page for all the stuff that was missing and we'd see stuff

like shooting up results really quickly. And I was like, oh my God. Now it's of course the effectiveness of everything in SEO goes down to zero given a long time horizon because people abuse it. The worst people, the worst marketers on human earth are all SEO people. But anyways, we still think it's a great tool because the benefit of having this tool in your tool belt is that what ClearScope actually does is it scrapes the top 30 search results on desktop and mobile. Yes, there's a lot of overlapping between the two. For the most part, you get 60 documents or probably 45 actually unique ones put into a set that they then analyze and tell you, okay, yes, here's the keyword that you're

going after. That's true. But here's all the other co-occurring terms that you have to focus on or mention in your piece of content, most likely research for yourself, most likely in order to rank for this piece of content. So instead of thinking this is what a lot, I think the old SEO thought process is I'm trying to rank for pet friendly restaurants in Asheville, North Carolina. Let me also say dog friendly. Let me also say restaurants that allow pets. Let me also say this. Let me also say that it's just Mad Libs, Ad Libs changing around the words of things. Google is so much smarter than that nowadays. Maybe that used to work in like 2005, but it's 2023. So Google is a lot smarter nowadays. And what they're looking for is again,

someone to comprehensively cover a topic. So the additional keywords that you're including are not other variations of the core keyword. It's what are the names of the actual restaurants that you're actually referencing. That's what ClearScope is going to get back to you. Stuff like that's going to help your writer or content producer actually give you the actual topics that you should work on. So here's an example. I'm looking right now in the ClearScope dashboard for a article that we're producing for a client. Excuse me, it's area name plus fishing. So it's like a fishing guide. And the keywords they have to include are the name of the state, they have to include things like flounder, the pier, the name of the pier that's nearby, they have to include near shore versus offshore, they have to include

redfish, they have to include Spanish mackerel, speckled trout. So these are actually the fish species that we're actually going to be talking about in the article, Wahoo, backwater, again, that inshore offshore kind of topic is coming up. So you better cover both those things. Deep sea fishing, there's the name of several bait shops showing up here. So you better have a section on here's the awesome bait shops to go to. Here's the different techniques of fishing. So there's topics you might want to cover fly fishing versus bottom fishing versus inshore fishing, different techniques, nearby locations. So if you were to travel and go over here, you might catch something different. Here's how long it takes to get over here. So you can almost

just tell there's 55 terms that they've actually put into this report. And they're saying that the average word count of the content that's on page one is 1600 words. So it's not really necessarily a massively long blog post to be doing this particular piece that we're working on here for a client. But in order to do this comprehensively, we better have subheadings for all those different things that I talked about area, what species you're going to catch different styles of fishing nearby locations. I didn't see it in this list. I'm actually kind of surprised. But typically, when we write content like this, there'll be a section and it's like license information, like where do I have to go? What link do I have to click on to go buy a 10 day license if I'm vacationing here?

Obviously, you want to follow the law, all that kind of stuff. So again, the idea of keyword research led us to this guide topic, fishing in area name is the keyword we're going after. That's great. But the actual meat and potatoes of what's actually going to be required to take that keyword and get it to thrive is actually making the blog post comprehensive. There's other tools out there. I'm just ClearScope is the one that we've been using now for some time and we're really familiar with. Do your own research, but I'll put a link in the show notes to ClearScope so people can check it out. It's not cheap. I'll say that, but it's a fantastic tool and it's a good way to take that keyword and find other things associated with it. One other thing I will, that's more related to the

keyword research topic with ClearScope is they do a really good job too of giving you the Google ads month by month data in a pretty simple view. So if you put a keyword in there, whenever you hear me refer to month by month data, it means like how many people search for the keyword in April of 2023, as opposed to May, as opposed to June. A lot of tools hide this data or it's hard to find. I don't even trust the data that comes out of some of these tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs. I find they're not very accurate. ClearScope gets it from Google Ads,

is my understanding, like that API. So they're actually able to give you pretty accurate and pretty timely, like where you're recording towards the end of June. I bet May data is already in there, whereas a lot of these tools will take months to update their database and you get stuff that's pretty dated from a number standpoint. So yeah, shout out to that approach there, ClearScope approach, because I think that's the difference between producing content and really good content that is actually comprehensive. And if you combine that with everything you said a few minutes ago, a nice design, all that kind of stuff, that's how you take this seed of an idea. That's kind of what a keyword is.

It's a seed of an idea and you plant it and you let it flourish when you do all these things. When you take that keyword and you put up crap content on it, you could do that 10,000 times and not really have a good outcome. You could put 100 blog posts up that are really well done and actually get tens of thousands of visitors as we've done for many of our clients. I think that's the key. It's the lipstick on the pig. You can put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig. People that read the content, they're going to know whether it's good content or not. And I think that's part of it is that just like you want,

yeah, you want the search engines to find your content. You want that to be applicable to them. But ultimately, Google has said for years now that the best content is content that people are going to, people are going to find answers from. So yeah, Google is going to do what they can or Bing is going to do what they can to try to put together the right answer for the right question. But ultimately, over time, as people are reading it, they have to be a user, a traveler, a someone who's looking for some type of good and or service has to be able to find their answer from your content. And if it's just thinly put together with just,

we've seen if it's fluffy, three fluffy paragraphs or five fluffy paragraphs, yuck, nobody wants to see that nobody wants to read it. Nobody's going to get any value out of it. Give someone something that's going to help them make their ultimate decision of booking a vacation with you, trying to book a getaway, a stay, a meal, whatever that is, but give them the information to make a choice, make an answer. And just hitting a character limit or a word count typically isn't going to do that. You have to give them something more. And again, that's why you have to get into their mindset, really focus on those personas, those user stories of people who are coming to your website, how they're going to make it there, how they're going

to ultimately get to that point of booking a stay with you or furthering that process. Yeah. And ultimately, I think this is a good test of it, right? Two things that I would consider testing. Number one, when you go look at the blog content that you're publishing on your site, whether it's through you or an agency or something like that, would you take that blog post word for word, copy and paste it and put it into a guide that you're about to send a guest who's going to arrive at your destination? That is a very simple way to know if you're on the right path from a content quality production standpoint. So if you produce a piece of content, and it's the best pizza restaurants in North Myrtle Beach, that'd be something that I would have a lot of knowledge about personally. And I read your piece of content. And you don't mention specific if you

don't mention Gino's like we're out like it's not going to happen. You know what I mean? I wouldn't trust to send that piece of content to someone because you're missing out on the best thin crust pizza here in North Myrtle Beach. Anyways, I joke but it it's ultimately if you're talking about, okay, the guidebook is actually sometimes a good way to think about keyword research ideas, because whatever you're including in the guidebook is probably a pretty decent mashup, at least as far as area information goes as to what people are searching before they arrive. Obviously not things like door codes and things like that. But if you're including a section on restaurants, things that do attractions, hiking trails, biking trails, fishing, all this kind of stuff, if you're putting that in your

guidebook, then it's probably worthy of including inside of your blog as well from a keyword research standpoint. So I think that's a good way to think about it too, from a quality perspective. Would I want to take this copy and paste it word for word and send it to someone right now? If not, then what are you doing? Like why bother going through that whole process that we're talking about here at the keyword research to content production process if it's not actually making sense? So yeah, I thought, let's see, we got a little bit left here. I think we got a few more minutes. What else do we want to tie into keyword research

before we continue? Any other tools or maybe myths? I know we started our outline thinking about, hey, what's the benefit of these tools? I think we talked about clustering tools. What does that impact or what's your general point of view there? I think everybody, that's the one thing I'll say.

Everybody's going to do their keyword research a little differently. I think it's the one thing I will say. Everybody's going to do their keyword research a little differently. I think it's the tools you use, the whatever benefits you find out of it, if it is, if it's finding the same keywords and you're going to try to make content cluster groups and pillar content and stuff like that. I have not found that to be the most effective way

for me to formalize the plan for putting something like that together. Again, that's not the way my mind works, but if it does work for you and if that's how you can organize the content strategy and put forth better content as a result of it, awesome. Do that. I think it is. I think the one thing that we do want to talk about is what are those tools that maybe don't provide all that much bang for the buck. And that's something I think we won't limit necessarily to to the keyword research side of things particularly. But I it is I think I have seen other ways of doing the keyword research and I probably have an eyebrow raised more than I should in some of those cases. There's plenty there's more than

one way to solve a problem that you don't have to rip the tree out of the ground. Every time you can sometimes just walk around the tree to get to the, to get a little further down on your path. So it is, what do you think of some of those other tools or strategies for coming up with keywords or putting those together there? Yeah, it's, it's funny. I think that some of the best keywords that I've gotten recently that have been these like relatively high volume, relatively low competition ones where we ranked right away have been using the simplest tool of all, which is called google.com. And this was, I forget when I first heard this, I think this was like, well, Critchlow at a Moz presentation, I watched on YouTube, because I've never actually been to Moz the conference. And he was like,

here's my secret, go to Google and don't hit enter. Basically, in other words, he was talking about autocomplete back when people weren't really talking about autocomplete. And I think that's actually a better tool than a lot of what I see out there as to what you're referencing. So look, I've tried all these tools. And on the surface, they sound great, put a single root idea in here, and then it's going to spit out all the stuff on the backside, as far as Oh, here's the topic. And then here's all the related keywords for that topic. It sounds great in theory, and I've just not really got it to practically work in practice, like I put a keyword in there, and it gives me like some unrelated stuff. It

gives me like nearby areas. So I don't know, maybe for other people in other industries, that stuff makes a lot of sense. But in our example of restaurants, we'll go back to that one from earlier. Like you probably want to have a different page for Myrtle Beach restaurants versus Myrtle Beach pizza restaurants. There's actually different intent there. And you're not going to have one page with the pizza subheading ranking on that. Again, go back to my earlier commentary, study the search results. So any tool that promises like a simple automated solution to coming up with keyword ideas, they're giving you a lot of noise in my experience. And I think you still have to going back to our gold commentary to like you have to sift through a lot of dirt and some find

those little flecks of gold, those keywords that you want to focus on at first. Now look, once you've taken the spot that we're at with some clients, to be honest with you, we've written literally hundreds of blog posts. We've been with them for five, six years at this point. We have to get creative and come up with new stuff because there's only so many angles or ways that we can write up the same stuff over and over again. I'm always open to trying new keywords on those types of clients that we have because we just don't know, hey, we have this little bubble that we're in. We've covered most everything in that bubble that's meaningful from a search volume perspective.

So how do we continually come up with new ideas? But I'm not the biggest fan of these tools. No shade against people who are building them out. I just don't find they work well. In fact, I'll put a keyword cheater. It used to be called something not safe for work, but they've changed the name. I don't know if you've used that tool recently.

I'll put that in the show notes because that is a, I don't think it's free anymore. I think they went to a paid model. Maybe that's why they had to adjust their brand and stuff like that. I don't know. But anyways, it is a you'll see when you get there. So don't open this on your work computer if you have people behind you who are like, what are you looking at? But it's fine. It's not that not safe for work. But basically go into the keyword cheater tool and it will sheet out different ideas that you can actually put

in there. And it'll actually scrapes autocomplete like I was talking about earlier. Put in a keyword it scrapes out autocomplete. and then it'll actually put in the keyword and then go back and run autocomplete again. So it gives you like this recursive sort of function where it's giving you hundreds of different ideas.

Take that and you start to scan down the list. You could put it into a volume estimation tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush. But again, just because it's in there showing zero volume does not mean that

it's actually zero volume. So I find the keywords like or tools like that, excuse me, sometimes come out with better quality than some of these like advanced high AI grouping tools. Like I just haven't quite seen that yet in practice.

So no harm, no foul, in my opinion, with focusing on the things that are, you're finding manually that match your target audience, focus on those topics first until you have some critical mass of traffic. And again, then maybe it's not a bad idea to circle back and do these more general ideas or try other approaches and not necessarily opposed to that. Yeah, that's kind of my thought process on it. Be wary of any tool that makes it seem like this process is just easy. Believe me, I wish that were the case. And the best keywords that you're going to find oftentimes are the ones that took you some time and effort and thought process

to dig through. They're not just waiting for you on page one of Ahrefs when you put in Myrtle Beach and you just look at the top 10 results or 20 results. True. Awesome. Okay. Well, if you don't have anything else, Paul, we will put a bow on this one. That was 45 minutes on keyword research. There was some GA4 stuff at the beginning, but people are going to love it, I feel so. It's what's that line in? Is it back to the future where he's,

you don't know that, but your kids are going to love it. Maybe that's the line here. So yeah, all good. We would love, I think there's one thing that we love more than anything, Paul. And you know what it is?

Reviews. Reviews. When people leave us reviews, we love it. It makes my whole day. I'm not feeling great today. We push through it. Champions persevere when the conditions aren't ideal. You can't wait for perfect conditions. And I am certainly not in perfect shape today. But we hit record. I took a ton of Tylenol here before the recording. So we're flying along here. But we would appreciate it if you made it this far to go into your podcast app of choice and leave a review. I think we've been slowly growing them and the downloads are growing as well. We appreciate you. If you're listening

to this summer and you're a property manager, I know you're busy. So we appreciate these 40 minutes with you about this important topic that is keyword research and GA4. We thank you and we'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks so much.