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

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

In this episode (part two), 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!🔗 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 Conrad here, welcome back. This is part two of the episode that Paul and I did about the Google helpful content updates and what it means for your vacationational business, the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between. If you haven't listened to part one, there's some

important context there. So you may want to go back one episode and check out part one. Otherwise, we're going to go ahead and roll part two of our conversation right now. Sticking on that display side of things and jump back to the pop-ups and interstitials. I think it is, those are, those can be obviously very helpful. And for our purposes, I think vital to maybe making sure that we can use email marketing and get more of those emails coming through. Looking at the Google guidelines, they say, as a review, if you are running any pop-up email newsletter, ebook, anything like that takes up more than a third of the screen, which I hope nobody is doing because come on, let's just think about this from a user experience perspective for a second. But, and thinking about that,

takes up more than one third of the screen and activates on the first click from Google, you are in violation. I think that's the key part there is that making sure that there's some type, you're doing something on the site before that pop-up comes up or whether it is the five second delay, whether it's only X and 10, because that's the first thing everybody's going to say. It's just X and 10. If it's the first click, you're still going to get violated. It only happens when we scroll down. Still in violation there.

I think that timeframe being what it is just automatically gives a little, maybe to the benefit of G4, now you're seeing an event come in, a first session or a scroll or something like that might be something Google's trying to help us with on the analytics side of things, just to pop more events, maybe to get something happening there so that, I don't know, maybe they're trying to help us out would be a first, but Google might be in the assisting game at some point here. But I do, that really struck me with, okay, the first click from Google coming into play, how are we really measuring that and how can we improve for that? Hopefully OptinMonster has the solution there, but I guess it is.

Did you see anybody who you thought, or have you seen anybody with a pop-up that in your side of things, I assume it isn't happening, but I've seen some bad pop-ups out there. I'm wondering whether or not they're being affected by the health content update. What are your thoughts there? Yeah. Again, I can't point to a lot of examples of that where there's not a lot of other pieces simultaneously that I feel might be impacting. So I think if you're pop-up only, you're in good shape. I think if you're pop-up plus the annoying ads, plus the, like you described the bad content, plus it's like, again, it's this idea of not all your cards come off the table in that one move. There's like multiple moves that I think flow into that. So that's my assessment of

it is that it's never a one trick pony, so to speak with regards to the pop ups. And I think that it's a very worthy trade off, even if there was some kind of small negative downside of it. I think it's worth it because you convert the traffic you get so much better by having an email pop up on the website that it's worth it. We have we have every once in a while that we'll have a client that hates pop ups doesn't want to do them. And even though I make my best case, I go in there and show them numbers and data and I get on the phone even and try to talk to them about it. Every once in a while, we just can't get there with a client. And so we have a few clients that have these little slide up modals that are a lot less,

they don't really impact your ability to like scroll or use the website or anything like that. And every time we have some like 1% half of 1% opt-in rates, and I'm just going every month we're giving, we're just not getting potentially a bunch of leads that we could have gotten because of the way that we have this set up. So yeah, that makes it a little more challenging at times. So yeah, it's one of those things. I think it's worth the trade off if you do it right. And again, the tool I'd recommend is OptinMonster for sure for that. Definitely. Now here's pop quiz question for your kinder. I'm going to throw you off course here a little bit.

Oh yeah. It's not an outline. All right. Is word count a ranking factor for Google? No, not to my knowledge. No, of course it's not. However, I think we get into that. The, it is, and we've talked about short content versus long content.

It's writing the content for the user. That's the key. It doesn't have to be four pages long and have images on top of images and video inlaid and all that stuff. I think making sure certain extent, maybe chat GPT and AI content writing is contributing to this a little bit because it is. You're maybe saying, I want you to write more content, longer content, stuff like that, where I don't think it's any less unique or anything like that. But just having more content does not make it more useful. And you may have people abandoning readers, travelers, anything like that, abandoning the site and abandoning the process before they find an answer. And Google knows when people aren't engaging with sites, if they can tell when, if they can tell if someone doesn't have clear personal observations from a blog post or pictures with them or a point of interest from a blog post, top five restaurants in the area. If three of those restaurants are closed, Google knows that. They know the context there. So it is. I think the long, short content,

not as important as just putting the right answer, putting the right information that people are looking for there. What are your thoughts on, we've talked content probably to death here a little bit here, but anything you want to throw in there on the helpful content versus more content versus quality of content? I guess this is where the nuance part of doing SEO for a long time really helps you. Because I remember we did an SEO audit on a site a little while ago, and someone had filled out all the like Yoast target keywords on a site, which is like a concerning sign for me, but I dug it and i started looking and they basically i don't know who told them this but i i think actually yoast does this a little bit they were

like oh you should have x number of words on the page or something to that effect it's like you should have 500 on the page actually i think yeah i think they do we use typically use rank math so i don't actually see yoast other than when we inherit it sometimes from another developer or something like that sure but anyways so this person had gone and put 500 words on the contact us page because they said, this is the contact us page. We were getting like a red traffic signal from Yoast because of this thing. And they wouldn't put 500 words of content on the contact us page. So much content that the contact form, the reason that you would go to the contact us page was pushed down and you couldn't see it much. And I was like, okay, there's no purpose for this. Like the contact us page might

not rank for anything. It might potentially rank for like name of a case journal company phone number or like how to reach out to company name. But I'm like, for the most part, they're just going to Google the name of the company. And if they want to contact you, they're going to click a little contact thing in the navigation or in the footer. I'm like, I'm just like, this is unnecessary, basically. And in fact, I bet it's hurting your conversion rate, because your form is so far down the page, especially on mobile. So that just comes to mind when you explain what you just explained. Doing what I just call, that's like classic checklist SEO, right? Let's just make a list of things that sound like they might be the right thing and say,

let's make sure there's at least 500 words of content on a given page can lead to some pretty bad outcomes and some pretty negative things from a conversion user experience and SEO perspective. Like you're just polluting the content or polluting the web with more bad information that doesn't really add any value. And you're right. Certainly in chat, GBT and any AI content writing tool, it's very easy to generate content now so much cheaper and so much more straightforward than it used to be before. We used to have someone that we would assist that would assist on our team, sometimes writing

title tags. And that was their job. Now an AI can do that. We don't even need that person to do that anymore because AI can write title tags pretty effectively. But AI can also just write any garbage you want. Someone can click a button, it can generate garbage, or it can generate stuff that sounds decent, or it sounds reasonable enough for you to put on your website. And now that's very straightforward for people to do. So yeah,

that just came to mind, this idea that someone would put a bunch of content, excuse me, on a contact page when not only was that not helping, it was actively hurting their efforts to convert more people and get more guests on the door. That's wild. I think it's really, the focus still has to be EAT or EAT, however you're looking at it. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness,

trustworthiness. If you're keeping those things in mind, the content should fall into, it should fall into a good path for Google or any of the other search engines to make sure that's not where you're in. You're not being affected in that area specifically there. Stop writing content because you just think it's going to rank.

I think we're going to say it's all the same type of thing here, but it is. Don't just talk about the top list. Don't just talk about generally high level things. Talk about the why, because again, it's answering a question. It's making sure that you are showing expertise. You are showing that authoritativeness. Now, there are other ways you can do that with link building and other items there as well, but it is like Google actually has, they have a link. We can put that in the show notes here, but 12 content quality questions Google lays out for all publishers. And some of those questions, is your content primarily written for

human or search engine readers? Does your content provide unique and valuable insights that are not readily available elsewhere? There's your authority there. Would you be happy to share content with your friends, family, or colleagues? Again, that trustworthiness there. I think Google, they give us the tools. And I think we just, we were so set in our ways that, oh, we got to write with keywords. We have to write with this. We have to go for the links. And those are good. But sometimes you just have to peel that onion back a little further and say, this is what we're writing about. This is who we're writing for. This is the end goal of the content that we're looking for.

And I think maybe when we put together that content strategy, that content marketing strategy, we aren't exactly putting that reason behind it. It's just I got to do a podcast. I've got to do a blog post. I've got to do an infographic. I have to do an advertorial, whatever it is. We're not thinking about what we're actually doing because I just know these things are important and we have to have more things and more helpful items. Is it really that helpful? Yeah. I guess what goes into your thought process is you're trying to put together

that quality content and how making it more qualitatively beneficial for those travelers or for anybody who's going to hit those sites. Some of the things that I saw that seemed to work well from the update was actually giving like extra context around the facts. So I think some of our writing before was very fact based. It was like, so if it was the best restaurants post to that example, it was like, here's the address, here's the information, here's when the restaurant opened, here's the website, here's the phone number, here's three of their most popular dishes. So I think that type of approach is obviously far superior than what some of our clients would do before, which is yeah, Cooper's is good. We like this place for fork and fish and we like this place. And then we'll put that on a page and be

like, why doesn't it rank for best restaurants? It's that's not nowhere near comprehensive enough to rank better. But I do think what can work well going forward, just from what I've seen anecdotally, is this idea that you give them all the facts and then you have a section underneath that's here's our take on this. Here's paul's commentary paul the grilled cheese here with tomato is unbelievable that's the thing you gotta have that's my favorite or if your kids come here always sit in this side of the restaurant because they can see this thing out the window and it's cool i think that idea of taking information and then having i'm really bullish on that as an idea from like a as a way to make yourself stand out because one thing that the big sites can't do and the bit with the one

the sites that seem to get hit the worst is they're trying to do this at scale, right? They are trying to do this and they're trying to generate 5,000, 10,000 different pages about the best restaurants in location and that's what they're after. But that's not really, again, like this update showed us, that's not really what Google is wanting to do

or what they're after, right? They want to do something where it's show me something that's actually better than the other resources out there and you're not going to out authority trip advisor so the idea that you could link build past trip advisor is of course a fallacy you can't do that but you can't out information trip advisor i think it's not that hard to do so necessarily because trip advisor can be a little bit chaotic it's very aggregated ranking systems right yeah it's not here's paul's take on it and paul's an expert because paul's lived here for years. And he knows this restaurant and that restaurant are the best for these 10 reasons or whatever the case may be. So I think that's an example of something that I saw pop up some of the

sites ranking better. They had unique layouts in some cases that were trying to blend facts and just basic data with opinion and it was like first person point of view opinion. So I think that's a angle that we're not currently exploiting, but we could exploit. And I think it's a more practical example of what eat actually looks like in the wild and not just this nebulous idea of authority. I don't know. Getting to someone else I follow on Twitter frequently will be like authority. It's just called links, dude.

Like you just need more links and sites that have the most tend to have a little bit more power. So if you can be, if you can be focused on a specific area, which is I think best for your vacation rental business anyways, and you can build a lot of links so that you're an authority, that's a pretty lethal combination, in my opinion, to having a lot of success. It's when you do one and not the other is when you typically have some level of problems or some level of concern around actually building the organic traffic, for sure. I would absolutely agree with that. And even with, I think, a couple of weeks ago,

maybe a month ago now, Google had said link building isn't in the top three for SEO, the top three ranking factors for SEO. Yeah, it might not be. And maybe it's less important than it was three years ago, four years ago, five years ago, but there's still authority. When Google sees two sites, three sites, five sites linking back as opposed to 50 sites or a hundred sites linking back to you, who do you think is going to get that extra SEO boost there? I think it's pretty straightforward. They can say they're raising or lowering the value of link building, but it's still an important part of the overall process. It's so easy to refute the idea that it's not important by just going to the search results. You don't even need to argue with someone. Just be like, what's your market? Okay, You're in XYZ area. You're in Destin, Florida.

All right. Let's go ahead and go into Google and do a search and let's see who ranks in the top. That's not a big OTA site. Cause we'll see, we'll see five OTA type style sites in there. So show me the other five. What are they? What are the local sites? And then you're like, oh, okay.

This guy's been around for 20 years. He has a DR of 72. Okay. This site's been around. That's okay. So let's think about it. If you could just write a good piece of content and rank on Google without the links, then wouldn't this search result be showing that? Wouldn't there be lots of examples of sites hanging fruit, right? We got to pick the stuff that's a little bit easier to rank for, get some momentum, become an expert in a few things that Google will start to show us some love for.

And then we can branch out. We can go a little bit higher up the tree, higher up the food chain, so to speak, from like a conversion value or traffic value perspective. But the idea that you could make some kind of valuable article or piece of content or information about a competitive keyword out of ranks, vacation rentals, and just get that to snap your fingers and go to the top of the search results without any links is come up. That's ridiculous. Otherwise, you'd be able to point at examples of sites that are dominating Google without links.

And you can't do that. It just doesn't it doesn't exist. That's not real. It's a unicorn. No, and you're and you're you brought us right into the next the kind of this final point here is it is it's not just the individual page. It really is site-wide it's domain-wide. So Google says it on almost every article that they write about regarding that is, although they grade on individual page level, they will penalize at the host level. So if something's wrong at your main root domain

and stuff like that, it's going to filter down to every other page that you have. But I think the site that, sorry, the site that we worked on that seemed to have the most negative impacts to this update had almost 4000 blog posts on it. So like 4000 pieces of content, and it seems like a lot of them suffered. So this idea that like, they weren't evaluating each page one by one, they looked at the site and they went nope. And they obviously the way their algorithms run. Again, otherwise, you would see sites where sections of the site just dominate and then sections of the site do very poorly or you see fluctuations.

Oh, this subfolder did well. And that does happen a little bit, but it's not impossible, especially if they're targeting very different types of keywords and things like that. But for the most part, as goes the site,

as goes the rankings, right? It's gonna, you're gonna lift up and you're gonna benefit. The whole site typically is rising up or the sub date is gonna stab you in the back aggressively and you're gonna see the whole site lower it's, I just rarely see it go the other way where Oh yeah, we kept these rankings, we're still doing great over here. But then these it's almost like they're on a string attached to each other, there

can be a little variability in the but eventually, like the string catches up. And if this one's falling down like a rock, it's going to drag the other ones down with it. And if this rankings are going up, it's going to bring everything else up with it that's my analogy i never thought of that before but that's the way i think about it so what is it all all tie all ships rise or all ships rise together all the ties are up with high tide yeah i think that is it's certainly you do you don't want to once you start to be an expert of all you're an expert of none that's the other side of that so it is you want to make sure that you are being focused on the travel side of things. So you're not trying to, you're not trying to run a travel directory with a restaurant directory, something like that. Or if you are, you're being

very explicit in how you're separating those things out. It is, it's good to have content, have that content out there, but making sure that it is, it's supplemental content to the overall experience of the site there. And I think that's something that I haven't seen TripAdvisor in any of those screenshots, but I do wonder if they perhaps weren't affected by the helpful content a little more because they are so varying in all their offerings there. It is, I think, because they have so many links and they have so many other things that are working to their benefit. It is, I think, because they have so many links and they have so many other things that are working to their benefit. I do. I wonder with some of those listing type of sites and stuff like that, where is that break even of, where do I break into a new niche? I think about

on our side of things for Venturi, it is, we do those little micro sites for the owner side versus the guest side. And I think that kind of works. It doesn't hurt us from an SEO perspective. I don't think you have to do that aggressively in a lot of different areas where you're breaking down the travel, the activities and amenities and stuff like that into their own niche site. But it does make you think about how you're putting that into the hierarchy of the website, putting that into the sitemap, creating that sitemap and creating that experience so that people are finding what they need, keeping the expertise where it needs to be, keeping the authority where it needs to be. And, and, oh, yeah, we have to think about conversions and getting those bookings in through here too. Oh, it's so much fun to be doing what we're doing.

Yeah, it's there. There's always always a balancing act i guess that's the truth maybe that's where we can wrap today as we've done 40 odd minutes and we can probably go 40 odd more on this update but it seemed like the thing to be keeping an eye on is number one to the site that we were that we're working on that i think had the most negative impacts from this update the site owners actually yeah this happens like she's been in the game for a long time so to her this wasn't a shocking revelation it was something that i think she's taking very even keel because yeah the next update could could go, yeah, all those multi-topic sites that we crushed, that's what we want. It turns out that this was bad and we're going to

see it benefit. So put any site into Ahrefs or SEMrush that's been around for a while, and you see these swings up and down, right? There's no site that just started here and just like stair steps its way up to success, right? There's always like an ebb and flow. There's always an up and down, unfortunately, with some of these algorithm updates. So this may be the way to end it is to think about all the ways that you can diversify your traffic. And this is rare, but I have had this conversation a few times, maybe a few dozen times in my career, where a client comes to us, they're like, I want more direct bookings, but they're already getting a lot of direct bookings. And it's they're almost they hate the idea of using Airbnb,

or they hate the idea of using an OTA. And I tell them like Google kind of has you by the neck a little bit here too, right? Like they control a lot of your traffic and a helpful content update could come and hit your site, whether it's fair or unfair, that could happen. Again, there's no one who could prevent a Google update from impacting a site. There's not an SEO on the planet who could promise you that. Excuse me. So if that were the case, you basically, instead of being beholden to Airbnb, you're beholden to Google. Again, it's not common, but that can occur. That same philosophy would apply. So I think diversification is the key here. And even if you have a lot, even if you're high 90% direct bookings, which again, we have a handful of clients that fit into that bucket,

because they've been around a long time, they've done a lot of marketing, they have one market that they do well, and etc. It might behoove them to be like, just like that could that could that didn't hit me, but it could have there's a reason that it couldn't have hit my website. And I could have lost my rankings that I've worked so hard for. Maybe I should be diversifying and doing other types of advertising, marketing, et cetera, and other channels, or even leveraging the OTAs a little bit further so that I have that channel open to me so that I can constantly market the property. So if I owned a vacation rental management company, even though I would be pushing hard and working very hard every day to work on direct and building that brand equity and

all those pieces, I would never not have my properties on Airbnb. For example, there would be some price increase, there would be some lack of availability for my prime dates, I wouldn't just be free for all season on there. But even if I had a lot of direct bookings, I would never pull it off those platforms. Because why not take the visibility? Why not take the eyeballs that people might then come back to your brand. And maybe that's the very last thing that I'll end on here, which is that you don't really care about the Google helpful content update that much. If you have a loyal audience of people that want to come back and stay with you again, right?

And the one thing that can't hurt you, barring your domain name getting seized or something insane like that, that basically never happens is that people want to stay with you specifically. The Google update doesn't really bother you that much, even if you were hit by it, because people go into Google and they search for Conrad's cool cabins and they want to stay with Conrad's cool cabins and that's the place they want to go to. So brand awareness and brand loyalty is the most underrated component, I think, of this whole marketing game that we talk about all the time. And if you have that, you've won and the algorithms can hurt you. They can get a punch in here and there, but they can never take you out because you have people that are seeking

you out specifically. And that's always the powerful position to be in from a marketing and brand standpoint. Spot on. Perfect bow on that one. There's going to be more core updates. There's going to be more helpful content updates. There's going to be more updates that are going to probably put your website in a spot where it wasn't as good as it was the week before. But the key is you're not going to lose it forever. If you make sure that you're continuing to communicate to Google, I'm writing for people. I'm not writing for robots. It doesn't matter. That is not my focus. That's all you have to worry about. From the SEO side of things, yes, work with a good web company. Make sure all the onsite is in good shape, technical SEO is in good shape. But as far as content creation, just make sure you're continuing to

write for humans. Everything else is going to take care of itself. These core updates will come and go. And hopefully you'll continue to see a strong website and strong organic presence. And again, it's more keep focusing on the branding side of things and that brand marketing, because that does that alleviates a lot of this pain here. And hopefully nobody feels this pain, but it might happen again. So let's just keep on listening to us. We'll give you some tips and tricks to make sure you're staying ahead of this. Awesome. Thanks, Paul. That is great. We'll put a bow on this one. I wanted to say, I really appreciated you helping me with the book podcast that we did last week because that did well. People checked it out and we got a lot of

people interested. So I'll put a link again in the show notes to the book podcast that we did last week because that did well. People checked it out and we got a lot of people interested. So I'll put a link again in the show notes to the book podcast. That'll just be my promotion thing from here on out is we're just going to make sure that people know about the book. We spent a lot of time putting it together. So Mastering Vacational Marketing is, as the time of recording this podcast here today, about to be released. So if it's not there on Amazon now, it should be there on Amazon in the next few days. But if you get on the pre-access list, the link that I'll put in the show notes, obviously I'll email you directly and you can go check it out the day that it's available for purchase. And that should coincide well for the VRM event here coming up as well this

month. So yeah, appreciate you as well. Thank you want to thank you again for that one. Appreciate you listener if you made it this far, because that was a pretty deep episode. I may have split this one in two parts now that I think about it, but all good. And we will catch you on the next episode and the next iteration of the heads in bed show. Thank you so much.