Heads In Beds Show - Navigating the Aftermath of a Google Update [Part One] For Your Vacation Rental Website

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

In this episode, Conrad and Paul chat about Google's recent Helpful Content Update(s) as well as Google updates in general and how they impact your organic search traffic, approach to SEO and what to do if you're "hit" by one!Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellGet On The Early Access List For Conrad's Book!Google Search's helpful content system and your website🔗 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. Hey there Paul, how's it going today? We've spent most of the morning just commiserating the downfalls of our respective football teams. I've still got baseball to cheer on a little bit here for the next, hopefully, I'm not going to say how long, but a period of time. I hope a little longer than not, but yeah,

it's fall and it's the fun time of year where I guess we're hitting conference season. It's a lot of people doing a lot of fun stuff and Google just taking names along the side here. It's just, it's a fun time to be in marketing as it always is. How are you doing Conrad? Yeah, I'm doing good. And you're right. It's not boring. There's lots of stuff to watch. And I'll sum up our conversation that we will have record one of those one day, and then we'll release it on a separate channel. I think we joked about doing heads and beds after hours one day, and we can do sports talk on there. So here was what the funny part. So the, of course, Patriots get blown out and it's a total disaster and everything's going sideways. And then there's

a little 40 minute break after the game. And then the Celtics preseason game comes on and there was a drew holiday to Christopas Porzingis dunk. And I was just like, you know what? Everything's going to be fine. We can't have it all. You can't have it all in life, but we can have this to put all the Patriots stuff away in the closet. I should have popped on the Celtics hat today or a Celtics shirt today for the recording and just been like, what football away in the closet. I should have popped on the Celtics hat today or a Celtics shirt today for the recording and just been like, what football? The NBA is starting. I'm going to watch that because there's nothing to watch good on Sundays unless the Celtics

have to be playing on a Sunday. So that is good news. Like you said, you've got baseball. I've got my NBA this year. And it's the pinner hopes on that because it ain't going well the other direction. But yeah, doing good. To your point about weather real quick on Sunday, we headed out yesterday to go golfing at one of our favorite golf courses around here called king's north and we head down there get on the range at right about eight o'clock or t-town was like 8 20

and it was a nice uh 54 53 degrees so that is pretty cool here for the fall weather here in the carolinas and all the people here vacationing because that's a popular time to come golfing here in the fall on vacation we're wearing shorts and they're short sleeves because you can tell they weren't packed. And we were we were there in pants and we had our little quarter zips and like shells on. And by by nine or 10 o'clock, you take off the shell by 1030. The quarter zips gone and you're at least in pants and a polo. So it's still great weather down here. But yeah, the first three shots of the day fell well short and we're like my dad and I're like, Oh, yeah, we're not used to playing in the cool weather. So we had to calibrate ourselves a little bit, but we'll get it locked

in for next week. So we are we almostrate ourselves a little bit, but we'll get it locked in for next week. We are. We almost hit the cold freeze this weekend, the hard freeze. I think we were in the 30s overnight. So it's, but it is. I'm used to this. If I don't play one round of golf in the 40s at some point, it feels like a lost season almost. We did joke real quick.

We did joke real quick about times that we would play back home in Massachusetts when it was very cold outside. And every once in a while you'd play and the ground would still be frozen in the spring and you would hit that drive and it would just like skid it would just go like crazy and just there was a few holes that we played number seven in particular on our home course there was this long par five and you get there in two in the in that spring time frame if you like hit the little ice pocket and it was just like just like firing down there if you had a good drive so yeah unique opportunities that we don't typically get here. As far as frozen turf, even when it's cold, the turf never freezes. That's for sure. That's, you know, it doesn't freeze either. That's my transition. You know,

it doesn't freeze is the Google search results are always shifting around. So we can walk into today's episode you put together outline together today. And I think you did a great job on it. So I'm excited to dive in navigating the aftermath of Google updates. So maybe you could zoom back maybe a month or so I think is appropriate in this case, because there's been multiple Google updates. You could set the stage a little bit, Paul, for what happened, what were the Google updates that occurred? What is a Google update? What are they trying to do? And how does this impact the vacation rental manager out there who's trying to get more organic traffic to their website? Absolutely. Google core updates, Google content updates. Usually Google does these big ones a couple times a year,

three times a year. It really depends on a lot of different things. But you can also just know and understand behind the scenes that Google is updating every day. The algorithm is being updated in a pretty substantial way every day. But these big core updates and the big helpful content update that just came up in September, they are, they usually we see pretty big shifts in placements in where you're at. And you may lose placements, you may gain placements, you may lose play just areas, whether you're on the first page, second page, third page placements. second page, third page placements. And it is, there's something to be said for more updates coming through in the last month or two. It's not really that surprising given what we've had coming through the last 12 months. We've had ChapGPT, we've had BARD, we've had all this AI content. And Google's also working on that generative search experience on the back end of everything as well. Beta in that behind the scenes. Some

users are soon seeing that. Obviously, we've got some access there and we test and try things. But those core updates, it is. It's really Google trying to make the big substantial changes. Like I said, usually about two, three times a year. In 2023, we've had one in April. We had one in August. And then we have another core update that just started rolling out, I believe, over the weekend or today. So we've got another two weeks of core updates of weather here for the end of the year. The helpful content updates are some that have been a little more recent. And I think that's something that prior to 2023, I don't remember a whole lot of helpful content updates happening

I think it is it was just generally we're putting a focus on SEO organic technical SEO on-page SEO all these other things but really Google's made more of a push on the helpful content side of things I think as a response to chat GPT barred more of this AI content really coming into the system. So yeah, generally, these are the big ones. These are the ones that when a core update hits or when a helpful content update hits, SEMrush, Ahrefs, all these industry experts are really going a little, they keep the sensors on high because they're trying to see how much volatility is happening within the rankings. Is it specific sites? Is it specific types of sites? Is it specific verticals, niches, stuff like that? So usually it does. It has a very specific area that it's hitting, I would say.

Travel and hospitality, it seems like we pretty consistently get hit on these core update side of things and helpful content updates. But yeah, there's usually some pretty significant traffic changes, whether they're swings up or swings downward. I know you had some experience with some of the traffic differences there, but I guess generally, how have you seen any of the core updates that have happened? Have you been impacted? What does that look like for you? I think we joke about it sometimes because we've talked about core updates previously in different episodes. And I've always said,

sometimes there'll be a core update and I don't notice anything different in the main search results that we might look at for our top 20 clients or so. And then there won't be an update or there won't be a named update. And then I'll be like, that was a lot of shifting that just went awry here

or changed around. But in this case, I think it did seem to impact our search results a little bit more than normal, meaning specifically the one that rolled in September. I can't speak to the one that's rolling out right now. I guess TBD, maybe we'll do a recap or review of that in a little while, because it seems like Google has paid a little bit of attention to the travel related search results. So real quick, to your point, yes, we did have a client that we're working with that was hit pretty aggressively, I would say, by the helpful content update. And it

was a site that's very multi-topic, so they don't just cover one area, or they don't just talk about one type of travel even. We connected in our original context of vacation rental marketing, and they had written about vacation rentals before. But the content that they write is pretty diverse. That seemed to be something that they were targeting, just from my research and looking at a lot of sites that this one site competed with. There was a lot of sites that did that same thing. So in other words, I think you did a little bit worse on this update if you were more like a national brand a la Casa writing a bunch of different areas content. I don't mean anything negative towards the Casa. I'm just saying think of that model as an example of one that might have been

more diverse and broad. Whereas area name vacationrentals.com actually seemed to do just fine. Or even we had some clients that benefited pretty nicely from the update, because it seems like what Google is trying to do is get away from sites that claim to be an expert in everything and try to maybe focus on sites that are either very high authority, like high brand sites. So one site that I think did very well during the update was like Condé Nast Traveler to give like a specific travel hospitality example because they're seen as this authority and branded to travel in general. So that's an example of one.

But and then the sites that seem to also do well that we work on are like very deep talk topics are very deep sites about a single area. So we have a client that's in this tiny island, we've talked about it recently. And they have, I think they've been working with us for a few years now, I think we just recently crossed 100 blog posts about this one small island. And so it's we've gone deep into every little look and cranny best restaurants, best this best that where to go rent a kayak, this hiking trail that hiking trail, we've really done a good job, I think of covering up the content, because we've just been at it for so long. And that site did really well during the update and is now outranking like Trip Advisor and some other large brands about certain informational content. And their core vacation

pages have mostly remained untouched, which is good, because they were ranking very well. So yeah, there was good and bad here. I'm not going to sit here. And I know some people will be like, Oh, I only ever work on projects that go up. That's definitely not the case with this one. It seemed to hit some sites that we're working on. And it's unfortunate because I don't think that the content quality is bad. I don't think these sites were bad sites. I don't think that we were putting out bad stuff in some cases, if it was our content or clients that we work with, but it certainly was the case that Google, and that's how it can work, right? Google just decides this type of site is not what we want to show in the search results. And therefore, because you are this type of site, we are going to penalize you basically and lower

your traffic and increase the traffic of other ones. So not the greatest, I think, update for our general kind of client base that we work with for the most part. But there are exceptions and carve outs of people that did well. But it was interesting, even people that did well seem to have modest increases. And people that did poorly did very poorly, significant drop offs in traffic from the organic perspective. So yeah, it's, it's unfortunate. I don't, you don't know where to go from here. There's a lot of experts that kind of have their take on it. But I think it meshes pretty well with what I just said there, at least for my observations, and what I saw do better, what I saw do worse, but I'm curious your perspective. Absolutely. I think that's something

that I didn't realize any of a whole lot of the chatter until I looked at Reddit or I looked at Twitter. I looked at Facebook and some of those things and started seeing people put the screenshots up there. And yeah, it's pretty, pretty stunning to see drops. Some 10 percent, 20 percent, some like 60, 70 percent. And it is I think everybody's got some got their own ideas and beliefs as to why specifically areas but looking at that is that the nice thing is when you have so many people talking about it you start to try to put together some of the reasons as to why on the experience side of things or why just on the content side of things people saw those the rank the droppings

rank ranks and the drops in the rankings there so it is i think we can just jump right into some of those observations that that people have been seeing out there and just see because it is i think a lot of these relate to really when you're putting the putting the pages together when you're putting a website together when you're putting these landing pages together it is this is stuff we about a lot, but looking at it from the perspective of not just how does a traveler engage with this, but how do the search engines see this, understand it, and really put together a usability profile? Because I think it is some of the examples that I saw of the sites that performed poorly.

It was that there really wasn't a whole lot of the, you're talking about specifically your, the niches, the multiple niches. Yeah. It's people who are trying to be the master of three different items or four different items there, or it's using a pop-up, but not using it the right way or doing stuff like that. There are some pretty seemingly innocuous actions that you can take or that have been taken that really made a really big impact on the site. So let's just hop right into it. Talking about aggressive ad practices. I think we've all been on a site, maybe a news site, maybe something like that, where the expectation is that you are putting good content out there on a news site.

That should be what's happening. But a lot of these sites, and I know because we work a lot to get a lot of our ads out on those sites through display networks and through stuff like that, it's not a great experience. People are auto-playing those videos. People are having a video follow you down the page, having banner ads really all over the place, breaking up the content and not giving people, the users, the end user a good experience. I think that's something where, yeah, we talk about balancing that user experience a lot, but with everybody running the ad networks behind the scenes and trying to generate that revenue, there really does have to be that balance. And I think generally, if you were a bad actor in that to start with, you're probably not

going to change your practices. You're probably going to keep trying to push more of that ad revenue coming through. But it is. Have you seen examples of in our space having some bad ads on the website generally? Or is that something that you think is maybe not as impactful for our side of things? Yeah, it's pretty uncommon, I think, in the vacation rental management side that you would have any sort of ads whatsoever. But again, the clients that we're working with that did have a pretty big impact does

have a good amount of ads on the site. And they use one of the most popular programmatic media ad platforms out there. So it's not like they were using they were doing anything different than a lot of other sites. I guess I'll say this, though, it's interesting that a site with let's say 10 display ads on a single page would get hit. And then you go to Reddit, which won a lot during this update. And it's slammed with not only ads, right is a very ad heavy experience now. But it's also slammed with forced registration. Like when you go to Reddit now, they want you to register to read any content on the website. So that that piece of it, I struggle with a little bit too. I feel like the experience of a handful of display ads is much

better than the Reddit experience. Also, when you open it on mobile, it tries to force you to open the app instead of just letting me read it in the browser. And like some websites are just crapping the browser, like you're trying to scroll and it's like getting your download the app. And it's just not a good experience. I'm surprised Reddit did so well, given what you just said there with regards to the distance between clicking a link in the Google search results and getting to informational content. I feel like Reddit is probably a bad example of that and yet it absolutely rushed this update and did phenomenally well. So yeah, I'm with you. I think that there are sites that take it too far for sure. And I have some

sites and we've talked about this before that I poke around with for fun more than anything. And I pretty much put ad sliders all the way to the max because these sites aren't ones that I poke around with for fun more than anything. And I pretty much put ad sliders all the way to the max because these sites aren't ones that I have a ton of emotional connection with. And I want to get as much extra capital and money out of them as possible. And many of those weren't because they were small single topic sites. So they seem to do well. In fact, one of the sites that I had benefited tremendously from this update. And I have that thing on AdSense slammed to the max on ads. Maybe it's just there's a line. And if you take it over that line, it's not like a it might be a little more binary than we're thinking, which is this idea of, oh, keep the ads reasonable. There might be some line where once you cross it, it's oh no, ad heavy site.

And that's negative 20 in the mysterious Google algorithm point system that neither of us understand. And then that's the thing that does it. But I would say this, the interstitial piece is a little more common amongst our clients. And we do that to be clear, we put email pop ups on the website, the software use calls opt in monster. And we love that tool because it gives you so much control over when that pop up comes up a five second delay or when they go to exit the page, etc. And we find that most of our clients never have any issues with the pop up, even during the quote unquote interstitial update from a while ago, clients that were begging us like take it off the site, like we're very worried. And I held firm on that. I'm like

the way we have the setup, I'm very confident that it's not going to have any impact. And also, it's easy to close if you do want to close it. So, you know, if you take it too far, again, I think you might get in hot water there. But if you have a single email pop-up like most of our clients have and what we typically recommend and set up for people, I think you're in perfectly fine shape

and nothing I've seen has indicated that taking that off is going to help you from a rankings perspective. And some of our clients collect literally hundreds of emails every single month off those. So taking that off would really hurt them from a revenue and email marketing standpoint. Correct. Correct. And I think there are, there's some additional notes there. What stood out to me is it's that observation of pushing for that one sentence paragraph

and repetitive photography to increase that page length and add more ad spaces. Same thing, stuffing the above the fold area with leaderboard banners and auto-playing video ads. That's good for the ad revenue side of things. But again, that user experience, that's not going to be, that's not going to be good at all. And seeing that some of the examples here, ad densities as high as 28 to 32%. Come on. There's some common sense type of stuff here too, that if you're doing some of those things, you got to know that at some point along the lines, even if you hadn't been hit before, Google is going to come get you. Bing is going to come get you at some point. So maybe some of these are, oh, that just makes too much sense. Why

was I doing it this way previously? Yeah. It's tough because you look at a site like Forbes. I think I've done screenshots of them before where we joke about it on mobile, but it's show me the content because there's a modal coming up the bottom of the screen And it's like subscribe to Forbes, pay us 50 bucks a year, whatever. Then there's something on the top of the screen. And it's like download our app. And that pushes the content down. Then there's a display ad above the headline, but like below the menu and that map pushes. So I'm like, Oh, I can see two lines of actual content here. And yet they seem to do well, no matter what the update is. So it is seems like a little bit of a scenario. I saw this tweet. I don't I'm not gonna credit it properly. So I won't try to say who it is, because I don't know if this was

the person. But basically, it was like, if you're a small crappy site, you seem to do fine. If you are a huge brand site, you seem to do fine, ever in the middle seem to have issues. And I was like, oh, the site that we got hit the worst was very much in the middle. It was like, it was a middle of the road in terms of brand awareness and that sort of thing. But saying it was a middle of the road site, I think it was actually a good site. But it was almost like Google being like, oh, if you're a tiny site that covers one thing, yes, you're good. Because you're supposed to be an expert in that one thing.

If you're Forbes and you're these massive Condé Nast traveler type sites, great, you win too. And then everyone else in the middle seemed to have a lot of volatility. So that is frustrating a little bit because it's not the right feeling that I get when I look at some of these sites. Some sites that cover multiple topics do it very well.

Specifically, we work with a lot of travel bloggers as part of our link building process. And a lot of those travel blog type sites got hit. Even when it was all original photography, we have a client that we've worked with before, or that's bought links from this travel blogger before. And this person goes all original photography travels to every destination writes up first person experience point of view of this restaurant and this place to stay and this attraction and this landmark. And they just got shellacked during the update, just absolutely slammed. And it was like, they were really bummed about it.

And I was like, this happens. It'll come back. Keep doing what you're doing. Like, it is what it is. But they have some of these checkboxes checked. And it just seemed like Google was very indeterminate. Again, like I said earlier, with who they went after. If you fit into this bucket, they really didn't care about the content quality.

You were just going to get a haircut with regards to your traffic. And there's not much you can do about that, unfortunately, at times. So no, and that's, we know that'll happen, but it is, I think the other side of that, not just the ad side, cause that's par experience we'll say, but it is optimizing for that usability. That's that number two. And especially I think on the blog post side of things, they really some, there are some great suggestions on how people overcame that or maybe weren't affected as much. Jump links down to anchor text. That's something that we really focus on those a lot with our

calls to action on just landing pages, just making sure that people are getting to that area that we want to. But again, when you're thinking about some of these longer blog posts that I know you and your team are writing over there, being able to get people right into that section of the content that they want to get to or using that table of contents on a blog post, making sure that you're continuing to use it and not hiding that from people after the fact. But it is, I think, especially when you're writing more of that long form content, as opposed to 250 words or 200 words, you do want to give people the chance to find what they want to find within that content there. Oh, and we talked about usability a lot. But is that something that you are using right now on blog posts to help with that user

experience on the sites? Yeah, I think the blog design is key to actually creating the type of content that people actually want to consume, because something can be very long, but it doesn't mean that you can't break it up in a way that makes it easier for people to get to what actually matters. So I'm bullish on that for sure, using the design of the blog post, and we had a client that we're working with, it's using a template site from one of the more popular PMS companies. And I don't think it's a bad template site. But we can't add new plugins, which is very frustrating, because I'm like, just to tweak a few things, have this heading do this way. You mentioned table of contents, I like those ideas from a presentation perspective as well.

And we just can't tweak anything. It's just so, yeah, our blog posts don't look great. They're just like a long thing with lots of images, lots of content. We can't even adjust the size of the text. These H2s are like huge and they take up like a third of the page, which I don't like. So little things like that make a difference, I think. And with Google updates, like sometimes they're just, they're not looking at each site, right? They don't know whether you're an expert or not.

They're guessing. Their algorithms are basically very advanced ways of guessing and trying to figure out who actually is an expert and who isn't. And I think usability and design and layout make a huge difference with regards to how the user sees it. And if the user sees it poorly, then Google might see it poorly too, right? They're trying to mimic and recreate what a user might feel when they look at that page. If that piece is something that the vocational manager should probably not worry about it much, I think the design and layout of the content is something they should spend a lot more time worrying about, how they can make it look a little bit nicer and do a good job at it. And some companies in my

mind do a great job at this and others aren't quite as solid. But if you don't have to monetize through ads, then you're actually in a pretty advantaged position with regards to you can't mimic the UGC content of TripAdvisor. You don't need to monetize with ads like many of the travel sites like Condé Nast Traveler do. So you have this nice little niche that you can occupy with regards to writing up the best restaurants or the best things to do or the attractions or the landmarks or that sort of thing. That's, I think, what we help with a lot is writing up that type of content. And then our ad is the fact that number one, we're getting people to the website. And then we're putting them on a retargeting list because we know now they're interested in going to that

destination. And number two, the ad is check out our vacation rentals, which is what they want to do anyway, since they're actually considering a stay or a visit to our clients destinations that they're working in. So that's the good part, I think, is that you can set up pieces and components on your end that makes your vacation website a lot better. But you got to have a little control and flexibility. Maybe that's just a warning sign there. If you know you're working with a template provider on the vacation rental website, PMS side of things, and they say, Hey, just use our template and it's cheap or free, or it's included as part of your subscription, but you can't tweak anything, I would just be a little cautious of that and realize that if you can get a little bit of

control over design layout, or work with a designer who can tweak things even a little bit, I think you can take a template from like a C minus experience to at least a B plus a minus experience without a ton of effort. But it just takes a little bit of thought and a little bit of strategy around how you actually want to lay out the content and how it looks for sure. Hey there, Conrad here. Thanks so much. We're going to go ahead and split this one into two parts because it was a long conversation and we want to make sure you listen to everything awesome about the helpful content updates. So we appreciate you listening to this one. Stay tuned next week and we will drop part two in the feed. Thanks so much.