Heads In Beds Show - Google Is Leaning Into Vacation Rentals Even MORE With Structured Data?!

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul dive into how to build an annual marketing plan including a scorecard, budgets by month, media breakdown and setup a plan to make sure guest and homeowner marketing stays on track. Part II of II! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketinghttps://support.google.com/hotelprices/topic/12028304https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/vacation-rental🔗 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? Just another fabulous Monday.

We probably did an episode and a half prior to the show talking. So now I guess it's good to talk about the vacation rental space a little bit here. It's a fun time of year, I think. This is that January, February time. It's a little bit of signing season left on the owner side. A little bit of the guest inquiries are starting to increase as people are starting to plan those summer getaways, maybe a little spring break getaway in some of those beach markets. So I always thought this was a fun time to start to open things back up again, the end of January, early February time. But yeah, how are you doing, sir? How's the week going? To start? Yeah, pretty good. We have to spill all the tea first and then we hit record. The things we say cannot be recorded. So I totally get why

that's the case. No, it was a good weekend. It was obnoxiously cold here. So I didn't make my way out to the golf course, which was frustrating. And I said to someone last week when I can't make my way out there, I just get a little cranky. I just feel like I was robbed of something that I enjoy, which is always the best, to be honest with you. But that's life, man. You don't always get what you want as the song lyrics go. So when you don't get what you want, sometimes you get what you need. And what do the people need today? A podcast about schema.org markup.

That was pretty good. That was one of my favorite ones. I was happy with that one. Oh, man. I just ruined it by pulling people out of the listening experience there. All good. So let's see here. This is a pretty interesting one.

Let me recap maybe where we're at here because the listener doesn't maybe exactly know schema or they go, that sounds like another language. From my knowledge, it is an English language. Yeah. Although it is a different language in some way. So there's now schema.org. I don't know when I first heard about this. I feel like when I first got started in SEO, I don't remember hearing about this.

And then it wasn't too far after. So it might predate like 2013, 14. But for a long time now, there's been this kind of standard towards working for what Google calls structured data, which is a way to basically give information to Google. And it used to be, barred the way you had to like markup actual like text on a page. Now you can do all the do this through scripts. So the ability to deploy schema.org information to your website has gotten a lot easier. But think of it this way, right?

Google is out there crawling pages nonstop all day, every day. And they don't always know maybe, or they feel like they could know better the exact content of a page. So what, okay, I can understand the text on the page maybe and read some of the information, but it'd be better if I see a page with five addresses to know exactly which addresses like your office address. So schema.org is a way to tell Google or to give Google maybe a bit of a hint. That's one way to think about it. Cause it's not like a check Mark in my mind of yes, you're good. And it's always going to show up this way. Red, no, you're bad. It's never going

to show up that way. There's more of a, Hey Google, I'm trying to tell you and hint to you exactly what this page is about. This page is a blog post. You can mark up a blog post as having blogpostschema.org markup. This business is a dentist office. And I can tell you because I'm telling you the category, it's open from nine to five, Monday through Friday. And you can actually mark up all that information and give it to Google in a very structured way. Perhaps that's why they call it structured data on their side. But the markup language is schema.org. And the way that most people deploy it is through this markup language called JSON-LD, which is basically like a little script. It's basically like a little, again, exact way to format the text and information. So you tell

Google what's it about. So that's the history from my layman's perspective as like one that's toyed around with this stuff for a long time, but maybe I don't know all the exact origins of it, of structured data and schema.org markup. Now, until recently, though, this hadn't really impacted our world that directly. Like some of the things that I talked about, like marking up a blog post as a blog post or calling it a page, or hey, here's where our office address is.

If you had an office address, here's what type of business we are. Those were all little things that we could do. They were like in our SEO checklist. They've been for some time, but I'll be straight up with you. I don't know your perspective on this, Paul. I've never done that and seen some huge lift

in working for a job. No, it feels like one of those things that we do on a checkbox to say that we've done it, but I've never looked at it and been like, man, that site was dragging along the bottom and not doing anything until I got that schema.org markup in there. Then I put it in there and it was like straight to the moon. I've not felt that myself personally, but I'm like, Hey, why not take every advantage we can get? It doesn't take much time. Let's go ahead and put the markup on there as a way to give Google the best hints possible as to our site, what we're about, and so on and so forth. So maybe it has helped us indirectly.

Or maybe there's been situations in the past where we're ranking number two, and then it's like a little bit of a tie, and then I get up to number one because of this schema.org markup. But recently, you flagged this for me a little while ago. We wanted to actually wait, by the way. We caught this, I think, the day or day after it was published. But we wanted to wait because we wanted to get some data on this entering our world. So how did schema.org enter the vacation rental world very

directly and talk through this link that I'll put in the chat about the vacation rental structure data page that is now on the Google search central website. Yeah. And this is something that I think it aligns well with all the things that Google has done in trouble and going back to Google hotels, like Google hotels was the big, and it does. I think I remember doing a little presentation back at TNS and going through the history and it goes back to flight tracker back in 2013 and 2012 and stuff like that. So they have, they've got a lot of, they acquired a couple of little aggregators of data and here we are. But the one thing that's always been, I would say missing, is that you can't specifically say

vacation rentals. It's accommodations. And talking about accommodations, you could indicate you're a hotel, maybe a resort, but there wasn't really any granularity past that. And I think that's because we're talking about a full business as opposed to an individual unit. And I think it probably took a little additional work to figure out what was happening there. But And I think it probably took a little additional work to figure out what was happening there. But now we have specific vacation rental structure data. And that's been in place end of October and beginning of November is when they started to roll that out. Maybe a little later than that. But really allowing you to ensure that your properties have the ability to show up in the vacation rental search. Now, there are definitely

some things that you have to do. You have to opt into some items. You have to make sure that you're following all the vacation rental policies. I think you still have to run through or have access to Hotel Center, which is a little tricky. I wish they would separate that out a little bit. I don't think Hotel Center is as user-friendly as some things are with Google. And that's something I hope they'll refine over time. But really, it is. It's about being able to give all that data right in that maps view. Talking about some of the parameters we're talking about here, obviously the type is vacation rental. And you can put your brand in there. Put the type being an accommodation. For those people who are

partial homes versus full homes, you can actually put in whether it's the entire place or it's a partial type of thing. You put your beds and baths in, you put your pricing in, you put amenities in. The fact that you can add in, they have air conditioning,

an airport shuttle, balcony, beach access, child-friendly. And all of this then has the opportunity to aggregate within that rich result within Google Maps there or Google Vacation Rentals, which is kind of hidden under that Google Maps, I would say, profile there. So it is. I think it's exciting in that you can highlight not just your business, which is very helpful too on And those organic results, we've all, I think we've all seen the rich result with, Hey, you've got your, the, the pin on the map and the, and that result

for the locality of it. And then you've got a phone number in it. Those do happen. Having images show up in an organic result in line is pretty cool. There are some things there that I really love about those rich results when they're coming into play. But I do, I think that this has truly been an area where we've been in limbo. In most cases on the vacation rental side, if you wanted to put your rentals on Google, you had to find a third party. Some API, someone that's going to connect to your property management system, someone that's going to need to help facilitate that work to actually get your rentals within Google results.

Now, this really takes away that third party middleman potentially. I think you're still going to need someone to probably help you set it up, maybe understand it and manage it initially. But it is if for the right, for the savvy business owner, for the savvy biz marketer, anything like that, this is an opportunity to really control a little more of your yield management, a little more of your revenue management right between the, on the Google side of it. I don't know. There's a whole lot to be excited about. Now, as we take it into practice, we'll see. I'm not seeing it a whole lot yet, but that's where I want to hear what you're seeing on the front lines where you actually

have some people who have implemented and maybe are seeing some results down there. Yeah. So we've had some clients. The reason that we didn't do this right away is I was like, this has been our little heads in bed show podcast list for a minute since it popped up last month. I guess it's been about maybe almost two months now at some point. I think it came out like December 3rd, 4th or something like that. We record this towards the middle end of January. And I was like, let's get some data on it. Let's see if we can get someone to actually get added in this system. Let's make sure it works properly. Once we get the markup on there, can we actually get a client's website to show up in this?

And then we'll click the rates are we expecting? Are we going to get some traffic and so on and so forth? So we've actually had the chance to do one kind of integration. I'm putting this in air quotes. We did one integration ourselves, which included us pasting a JSON LD script onto a property detail page. That was pretty fancy. And then we did a

second time with a client that actually had like development team. And they did across a much wider set of properties. So the first one was actually just a single property website. A client actually sent it to me as soon as it was flagged and was like, Hey, can you do this? And I'm like, you'll be the first one we've ever done. But if you're willing to figure live with us, maybe making a mistake or two, or we're figuring this out, because this is so brand new, we'll obviously put the code on there for you. And we didn't even charge the client just as a way to test it and see if it could work. So that client is now getting some data. And the data maybe isn't as strong as I would hope. To your point, it's this is all a

good idea. I'm so glad Google is recognizing the fact that we are a different type of product, right? So if you go look at the required fields for the vacation rental markup, you'll see very different stuff that you might have typically seen for the hotel markup, or even just any type of markup. So they actually require just give you that required list of data really quickly. They want to know the location. They want to know the contains place occupancy. How many people are slept in that property, which again, might be something you hear in the hotel world, but not usually as commonly. Usually in the hotel world, you want to know like the number of beds or like the size of the beds is a little bit more important in the hotel world. In this case, you could have an occupancy type and that type could be, that

number could be 30. Maybe you have a vacation rental that sleeps 30. We need to know where it is. We need to know the name for the property. They call it an identifier, which for in our world, I always think like most properties have a name, that sort of thing. You have to give them an image. So like an image thumbnail or something like that. And they really want eight images in total, a minimum of eight photos, one of the bedroom,

one of the bathroom, a common area. And again, they just prefer eight images in total on this kind of markup and then lat long so they need to know where it is physically like on a map they're going to show it on the map and then a little bit of intro the text like a name or the text of that intro as well so they have what does that say eight fields in total and then they have a bunch of recommended ones i'm not going to list them all off if you click on the link in the chat you'll see a lot of the type ones the one that kind of caught my eye you can give them a street address optionally so you don't have to give the chat, you'll see a lot of the type ones, the one that kind of caught my eye, you can give them a street address optionally. So you don't have to give the street address, you have to give latitude, longitude, but you don't actually have to give the exact street

address. You can call it different things. So for example, you call it an apartment, a cabin, a chalet, a cottage, a villa, a vacation rental. So I feel like that's so common in our industry is that we use the term vacation rental, but that's not necessarily exactly what these often are. In some markets, cabin is the dominant term or whatever the case may be. I always like Hilton Head, by the way. They try to be the classier beach in South Carolina. And there's no condos in Hilton Head, Paul. I don't know if you've ever been down that way before. They're all villas. They're not condos. So I made the mistake one time. We don't have a client in Hilton Head today, but there was one period of time when we had a client in Hilton Head. And I said condo one time talking about a landing page. And the look he gave me was like this guy from

Myrtle Beach, absolute brutal. It looks good kill. But anyways, all right, way off topic there. You could give, for example, your brand, you could start to give people your check in time if you want to, hey, you can check in at 3pm, you can or check in at 4pm, you can check out at 11am, you can get that down to the details. And then a bunch of other stuff, but the property is a crib or not, whether the property has a kitchen in what's included in there. So you can really get in the nitty gritty, a really full, comprehensive implementation of gritty. A really full comprehensive implementation of the schema.org markup would be really time consuming.

So the one that we did and the one that a client of ours did was a little more basic. It was like images, property name, how many people it sleeps, a few other fields from the optional ones we were able to check off. But maybe it wasn't as comprehensive

as they wanted to be. And perhaps that's maybe why we're not seeing the results that we want to. Because at this moment to me, it's really unclear. Okay, you do the search, you see this kind of block show up. There has to be SEO within that block, right? There has to be some logic, one would assume, of how a property shows up higher in the block versus lower in the block. And that's all foreign to us at this moment in time. There's not any documentation or anything

that I can detect from my perspective of why a property would rank better within the search results of Google versus not in there. So that's a mitigating factor so far. I'm going to pull some numbers, but go ahead, some thoughts that you have on that. Yeah, and I do. And I think that going into how the signals that are going to help something rank higher or lower,

I do think that latitude, longitude, because in everything that Google does, they do make a point of making sure they've got you on the map accurately. My guess is that probably signals a larger role than maybe we would think or hope. Yeah, I think that's something that I've seen it just with just the property manager, general business listings, Google business listings, where I'm not showing up when I search for, let's say Seattle vacation rentals for whatever reason. Well, that's because technically your business is mail located or your Google business listing is located in Bellevue or in Renton or something like that. So if you do that

search, then you're showing up number one, but because you're not technically located there. So I have to think that's probably playing a factor there. But it is, I told you, just looking at some of the results that we're seeing, I'm not seeing a whole lot of those rentals. Now, I think I spot checked like 50 in different areas and stuff like that. So not a whole lot of early use here. I guess that's where once we start spot checking them

and seeing more people using them, I'm interested to see if the result itself changes within the Google Hotels, Google Vacation rentals infrastructure there or within that area, because right now everything still looks basically the same. We're sorting by price, we're sorting by beds, we're sorting by baths, we're sorting by all those things, sorting by the location. But I do, I just, I have to think that as we're providing and feeding in more of this data, some of those factors, whether it's address, maybe it is going to be address. I think it'll probably be lat long. That'll probably be a defining factor there, but that's where

when an evolve starts, I think that's, that'll be the other thing is watching a Vacasa, watching an evolve, watching maybe a home to go, or the one that I see showing up more frequently is blue pillow, seeing if they start to put some schema markup in and if that improves their results. They may be some of those big aggregators or big OTAs for lack of a better term. Maybe the first ones to try to implement this to see how much does it move the dial. I don't think Airbnb is going to do it on every individual listing and roll it out like that, but you can probably roll it out a little more systematically if you've got millions and millions of listings that you're trying to put those out on. Yeah, I think that

seems to be, location just always seems to be a big marker for Google. And I think it's because they put so much of an emphasis on local search. My results in Minnesota are far different than your results most times in Myrtle Beach. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes you think about the whole concept of local SEO versus general SEO a little differently sometimes, I think. Yeah, it's interesting. The one that I've got live that was like the single property page, I'm looking at some of the data now. They actually really don't break down the data in an appealing way. Like you can't see, for example, like how many times it showed up. I'm assuming this all just gets globbed into search a google search console like impression traffic but i can't do a

breakdown showing vacation rental they do give you a sense of what if you have any issues with the markups if you go now to search console in this profile under enhancements there's a tab called vacation rental on that tab they're telling us that we have one valid item no unvalid items invalid items i should say so there we go a pat on the back we did it properly there you go i do want to see though they said that you can improve the appearance of your item by including aggregate rating additional type and review fields which again are not required fields but are recommended fields so we didn't do that and they weren't necessarily happy about that from a data quality perspective but there's no real data breakdown one thing that was interesting to me as well i think we submitted it on

the 10th it got indexed on the 20th So it took about 10 days for Google to actually process this page, process the markup and start to show valid, like the first valid checkmark that we got was on the 20th of December. So like I said, this is the first one that we did. When I go to a little detail page that's within Google, within like the Google vacational search block, I was able to find them to your point that was a little bit deeper in the search results certainly wasn't on page one. So criticism on our side, perhaps from that CEO side of things, we haven't done it properly there. Or maybe it's because we haven't, again, perfected the exact setup there. There is a website link to go directly to the property manager's website. This property manager does use a PMS software. They use owner as,

but they're not listed under any like booking links. So I don't see anyone trying to get their traffic interestingly for to try to actually get them to come in and book off their website. So the only link really available is to the website. So that kind of makes it an advantage. With the other client that I'm testing right now, they are one of the booking links, right? So they are one of the people that is actually trying to get

some of that traffic coming out here. So they're not the property manager directly. What they're able to do is obviously a little bit different in that regard. But I'm just poking around and looking at some of these things. And I'm with you. If you go to the About tab,

sometimes you can see a website link, but it's often to an OTA. Like this one that I'm looking at here, it goes to booking.com. Whereas the one that we set up is actually going directly to the property manager's website. I did note in the documentation, this is my fault. I didn't realize that we could do this. They actually do say it's fine for us to use UTM parameters to mark up like UTM source, Google UTM medium or campaign. I'm sorry, UTM source, Google medium would be like search and then campaign could have been like vacation rental search block or something. I didn't do that.

So let me do that. And then I can at least get some of the data back in Google analytics of how many people are clicking. But right now, I can't imagine it's going to drive a lot of traffic, unfortunately, because the link is just so buried. Like it's so deep. Like if you go to the very bottom of the little card there, or you have to go to the about tab, or you have to see there's five buttons at the top and one of them says check availability.

But if they're not running ads, or if they're not one of these partners then it's oh do additional searches we can't find anything that you may wish to contact the property manager directly or something like that but yeah and that's the i think that's still the i think that is still google's not understanding the shopping behavior or the kind of the consumer behavior of a vacation rental versus a hotel. Because they can get away with, you just go right into that. I think there's too many clicks in the process. I think that's always going to be one of my complaints there. But it is, you need to take two or three clicks to get to either a rate or to get to the property landing page. And then who knows how you are, the business website, and then who knows how long you're going to go from there. So I think there's just some, they when they can take that

booking off that first click, when they've got maybe three different room types, or four different room types that all are coming through the GDS, the global distribution system on that side of things, I think there's just a little more, it's more streamlined for Google. They don't have the, I wouldn't say they're walls per se, but you have to go through more. The PMS system in the vacation rental space just is not clunky, but it's not as streamlined as a, let's go back to a maestro or something like that on the hotel side they just they're running a little more not as uniform no yeah goodness right the data coming in and that's why they need to do all these optional fields is that every vacation has a lot of those optional fields right where it's does it like a hotel is going to have a standard across

200 rooms and it's every room has the tv every room has a dryer right not much in that regard now some layouts are going to be different. The bed configurations are going to be different. But we have a client who's more in that space, in the hotel resort space. And she told me that one hotel that they manage has 20 room types. And to her, that's like pure chaos. And I'm like, we have a client who has 500 properties under management. They have 500, not even 500 room types, but they have 500 unique pieces of inventory that might need to be marketed and advertised. So that's, yeah, I think you're right. I think Google doesn't necessarily understand this market very well. I get the sense that looking at the search results and how it works and the fact that you don't

really go to the property manager's website directly. I think what they're trying to do is ingest all this data and then flip on the model that they had flipped on with Google hotels for a while, which is that you pay per click or you pay, there was different bidding you could do in the past where you could bid on. If someone did a seven night search, you would bid like a dollar amount per night. So if someone did a seven night search, you would bid like an $1 amount per night. So someone did a seven night search, I want them to come to my website and willing to pay $1 per night they search. So I'm willing to pay $7 basically to get a date search valid person over to my website, which if they convert, that's a reasonable fee. And then Google Hotels is also experimented with commission models where

you pay 10%, which is a very different model than Google's 99% of Google ads, of course, are just CPM or CPC, right? You're paying per click or you're paying for views. So very interesting that Google had played with these different models. But nowadays, when you run hotel ads, it's pretty much all just back to the regular plain Jane CPC model in an auction. And you have to provide the feed. But from there, it's Yeah, we're going to get you clicks there. And it's almost like a shakedown to be honest with you in the hotel resort world, where it's like, hey, you better run Google hotel ads on your brand name and make sure that you're

going to your website. Because if you don't, they're going to do a search on your brand name, and they're going to go to an OTA. It's almost worse than a branded search in some way, because they probably feature and give the OTAs like a nicer looking appearance on the box itself. Like when you look at the box of a hotel, go search whatever your favorite hotel is in a big city. And you'll see that if the hotel is not actively making an effort to run ads, then it's good. You're going to head out to booking.com or Expedia or one of those more hotel specific OTAs.

So it's, yeah, it's messed up when you think about how they're actually doing it on the hotel side. And you have to think they're trying to figure out ways to do it the same in our world, in the vacation world. It is.

And I think that the fact that they plugged into all of those property management systems early on in the hotel space, that was to their benefit, certainly. But you just, like, I go back to, like, why is Google killing things off? Why are they doing the domains? Why are they doing some of this stuff? I truly think that Google's running into is like some, are they going to be able to buy servers? Yeah, absolutely. But I think they're running into some server issues where they're just trying to figure out how we can, I'm sure they would love to put all 8 million or 7

million rentals that are available in the world right now, right in their search results. That's a lot of, that's a lot. Seeing how much work we're putting in here just to the schema markup, that's a lot of work, much less being able to import all those in or do something like that. I just think that they need to do a little more work on presenting this information. And I think the timing is unique in the fact that we're going to see generative search coming out too. So how does all of this play into some of the weird

generative search results we're seeing right now as well? Well, if they have the data in theory, you should be able to go to generative search, say I'm looking to go to Destin, Florida on these dates. Can you show me the best five bedroom homes? And if they ingest all this data, it should be very easy to get that type of information from them. Now the real unlock potentially for a property manager could be, and a lot of people have said this over the years, there's always clickbait that's, and I actually got blocked by Nick Huber on Twitter. I don't know if you follow him on twitter because he said something to the effect of google is going to kill airbnb and i was like no that seems very unlikely the brand loyal like

airbnb could disappear from google's index tomorrow and there'll still be a very healthy large company in the world they built so much brand loyalty and stuff like that they are a search engine just like amazon is a search engine your bnb is a search engine for people who consider vacation so that's just a dumb thing that google could kill it. And I'm the Google guy, right? I'm the one who's let's run ads, let's get SEO. And I'm like, that is only ever going to be a fraction of the demand that you probably need to completely satisfy to get a full calendar, right? Like it's very hard to market in this world without doing Google, I would argue, but it's really hard to market only with Google, right? That's not a successful path either in my opinion. But anyways,

I sell that to say that at the end of the day, if Google can ingest all this data, make it very understandable on their side, they know exactly what's what they have a database of 800 homes and destined today. And in the few years, it's 2000. And in a few years, it's 10,000. And then it's Oh, God, of course, you have to list your vacation rental on Google and give them all this information. That's where traffic comes from. That's where bookings come from. I could see that happening. But I think it's going to eventually become a model where you have to figure out how they're going to make money at that, how they're actually going to structure the deal and all that kind of stuff. Is it going to be CPC? What's the structure of

it going to be? And there has to be a lot of parameters there. And at this moment in time, as we record January 2024, I see a compelling reason to do the markup in the same way that I led this episode with. There's a compelling reason to do any kind of markup because in theory, you're going to get a little bit of free traffic from this. You're going to get some visibility. People might find your property. They might click on that block and get it in there. But I don't think based on what I'm seeing today, that this is going to be anything in the next four months, five months, six months, a year. That's, oh man, 5% of my bookings are coming from this markup and from the system. I think a lot of consumers are now just trained to do a search, click on the ads,

click on the organic results. And I think a lot of them are just skipping over this block because when they go in there, they don't seem, they don't see nearly the same depth or breadth of selection properties as they do when they go either to an OTA and they don't get the same kind of deal as when they go to a property manager's website. So there's like a poor incentive built in for the traveler. And if the traveler is not going to buy into it and they're not going to click on it, then actually I think Google is best served down the road, potentially removing it. Like I would bet on this being removed just as much as I would bet on this being a huge thing for bookings down the road. Like I could go either way at this point. If I was a betting man, I don't know, give me minus 140 on this getting removed.

Because I think that's fairly likely because it's what Google does to your point. Like Google kills anything that's not high revenue producing, high margin, easy for them to do. Nothing about this is easy for Google to do, adjust all this data. They're going to have to eventually police it, keep it clean of scams and knowledge in mid-sites. They're going to have to make sure everything works. It's going to need a whole team of infrastructure to support it if they have 6 million listings on Google Vacation Rentals, just like Airbnb has 6 million listings on their platform.

It's one of those things, if I could round us out here on this update on Google Vacation Rentals, I feel like people expect us to have a very nuanced take on how it should work or we should have a lot of data or, oh, why wouldn't we be in there? And yet the data is clear to me. People still click more on the regular organic search results or paid ads than they do on this block. And when that changes, I'll change mine too. But let's get this out there. Let's see how this goes over the next few months. The data I'm seeing right now isn't indicating to me that this is something that you're missing out on a ton if you're not doing it, do i think it's something that if you are doing you should expect some massive lift of traffic that wasn't there before i think this is incremental tiny bit at best no i

think it is i think you should make sure like that your web team knows about it and is actively working on maybe a solution i could tell you a story yeah yeah so one of our clients a new client actually we brought this um to us as well and i said oh is awesome. But we didn't build your website, we're gonna have to go to this back to your developer and ask them to build it. And the developer tried to talk them out of doing this. I'm like, obviously, like they were willing to pay. And the developer was like, No, I don't think it's a good idea. This may take time. I don't really see and I'm like, what are you talking about? What is the downside here? There's no downside. It costs nothing from a advertising perspective. It's going to give us some extra traffic. This isn't a huge

property manager for properties, but someone that actually gets good revenue from their properties and is willing to invest. And I'm like, Hey, I think it's a good idea. It's new. Like I said, what I just said a minute ago, I can't guarantee you this is going to give you a lot of bookings. Let's give it a try. Like this is new. And what's the downside of it? And the developer spent many emails talking us out of it. And I was like, really flabbergasted by that. I'm like, yeah, so to your point, sorry, cut you off. Your web team should be excited about this. Your web team should be like, look, new stuff we can build that's going to help you and not going to cost you more money. From an advertising perspective, that sounds awesome to me, right? Like we're trying to jump on this and try to see how many we can do this. So should it be a end of Q1, Q2 type of goal? I would hope so for most people.

Again, and it depends on where you're at in your business and do all that stuff. But if Google tells you to do something because it's going to help benefit your business, and we are certainly Google skeptics at a deeper level, but at least value for Google business listing for stuff like this, things that are going to help your website perform better or do things like that. Boy, I would certainly be trying to invest in that again. And then it's done. If it doesn't have statistically significant improvements. Cool. But I would rather be forward thinking and future thinking and kind of future proofing my business for if at some point it does like there could just be a switch that flips.

And we've seen that before where things change. And I think we're in the midst of a period where we're going to see, we've already seen dramatic shifts, three core updates in the last quarter. That's insane. A helpful content update. Google's doing a lot behind the scenes. I mean, with AI isn't driving this particular part of it, but it's driving a whole lot of everything else. Staying on top of this, putting it on your roadmap, whether it's today, tomorrow, next month, before the end of the year, I think that's important. And then trust that it's in place, but verify. Actually take a look and see if you're seeing any reporting. Make sure you put those attribution points in so that you can understand what traffic's coming from these clicks as opposed to just your general Google business listing or your website or stuff like that.

Put the parameters in place, but I think it's going to be something that we're going to continue to talk about. I think we'll come back to this maybe in six months and say, okay, this is part two or this is part three. This is some of the results that we're seeing. This is whether it's the search results themselves, or hopefully it's results that some of our partners are seeing that are, they're just knocking it out of the park because we did this. Yeah. It's a, people want to make these like bold proclamations all the time about Google entering a space and it's going to ruin it. And I'm sure I remember a while ago reading articles about Google is now in cars and Google is in hotels. So we do searches or sorry, jobs. So when you do a search, you can see I was looking at my hotels tab still, you'll see like job listings show up

in Google, you'll see car like if you do a search for used Subaru for sale, like you'll see car listings showing up. And I don't know, like car gurus, those types of sites seem to still be doing pretty well. So is some traffic going to get sopped up by this like a sponge? I think so. But let's tie in has taught me the secret to happiness is making sure everyone has the right expectations before we proceed with certain things. And I think that that's what this should be. Have the right expectations going in. Encourage your development team.

Encourage your marketing agency to take a peek at this. We're trying to take a peek at this and see what we can do here. But also put it into context. I don't think this is like the game changer that some people are making it out to be. And I'm excited to see where it'll go. And perhaps this will flourish and potentially be another three, four, five, 10% traffic bump, I think would be awesome if our clients could see that extra traffic coming in, because it should be pretty high quality. But let's let's hold our horses, so to speak on the actual effectiveness of it. If someone's trying to make it seem like

this is a huge deal. I don't know if I can quite get there yet. Yeah, that's 32 minutes on one little news thing from Google. I think that's plenty. I think we did pretty well. Awesome. If you made it this far, some markup that would take you no time, really doesn't, it's not new. It's not experimental. You don't have to go to your developer or anything like that. All you got to do is open your podcast app of choice. You click five stars, you leave a sort of view and you say how awesome the podcast is. Cause when people do that, Paul, more people can listen to the show. More people hear our thoughts on this more advanced nuance topics, right? Google vacation rentals. That's a pretty niche topic. I don't think a lot of people are out there talking about it. We are because we

know the vocational manager listening is going to benefit from us. You're welcome as the song goes. Appreciate the listener making this far. Again, we have some fun with this stuff. So hopefully you guys do as well. If you're listening, we always do appreciate the reviews. If you subscribe, you rate your review, it makes our whole day and we'll catch you on the next episode of the Heads and Beds show. Thanks so much.