Heads In Beds Show - [Part 1] The Right Way To Build "SEO Content" For Your Vacation Rental Business

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad talk about the right and wrong ways to do "SEO content". It's not about stuffing keywords or writing for search engines, it's about creating useful and comprehensive content. Here's how. Part one.Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'Connell🔗 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, how's it going there, Paul? We're almost racing to the end of summer now, Conrad. I've got vacation coming up next week. We're going to, I guess we got, that really is going nowhere now.

So we're reaching the end. After Friday, I'm done with summer. So that's a weird thing to say when there's actually a week or two left of summer. But how are you doing, sir? How's the week going? How's everything? This morning, I turned on my alarm at 625 AM. I woke up. I took a seven-year-old to school for the second grade for the first time for second grade. So that was good. It was good.

That also felt an end of it snuck up on me. Like I knew it was coming. And then all of a sudden, I was like, yesterday, we're hanging out at the pool. And we looked around at each other and went, oh, yeah, I gotta bring Julian to school tomorrow tomorrow so all good he was relatively happy so go with that that's it is we've got it's coming and we got two weeks but we did the technically we did the school shopping trip yesterday got all the school supplies got a couple new outfits so that was that's the last hurrah and because we because we got the vacation that's we got we're trying to pack everything in we may not have planned this maybe as well as we should have we condensed that that last week or that last three week period into the next four days here so we'll see if this

is another end of summer trip we take in the future or not yeah we'll say i i don't know about the back to school shopping thing because now you can do it on like amazon and stuff my wife bought some stuff on amazon and like when i was a kid where i grew up like back to school shopping was like a whole to do it was like might be the only time all year that i got new clothes now i don't know my wife is like shopping at walmart and she buys clothes all the time so i think that's it doesn't have the same magic as when we were kids like in terms of the access and ability of us just to get things delivered to our door like i don't know i'm oddly nostalgic for this idea that like my mom would go there and she would peel out like a hundred dollar bill and i would get clothes for like

months at a time it's just a very different thing to how things work nowadays that's for sure that is i would agree we again we i grew up in a rural community so it was like an hour to get to a mall so that was like we weren't going there consistently it was a beginning of school year type of thing and we went from sherbourne minnesota up to mankato about an hour away and not even a big mall but it was a place where i could buy clothes and it was always that week before two weeks before packed so packed yeah yeah i'm it wasn't it's not the same now it's in this we're not we're going to target so it's it's maybe tarjay i think it's how they say tarjay right every in minnesota it is we've got to add the tarjay to it so yeah it's sound a little more sophisticated there, but. All good. You know what's sophisticated? Trying to figure out how to

write content and get it to rank in Google. It can be sophisticated. So I think today's topic and what we're talking about today is not back to school and shopping and the decline of the American retail store. Perhaps we'll do that some other day. Maybe. But rather the fact that there is a right way and a wrong way to do content for your vacation rental business. And unfortunately, over the years, I think you and I, Paul, have seen a lot of the wrong approaches. And I think what we've tried to do recently is do it the right way. And I think we've had some success. The numbers don't lie. As the line goes from the philosopher Jay-Z, men lie, women lie, numbers don't.

So I think we've got some numbers to prove that we've gotten decent results from content. So I thought today we'd do a deep dive into what it's like to actually write content, some different ideas and methodologies of ways that you can actually produce some ideas. And then at the end, I will also share, if people would like it, a list of starter ideas, which helps us a lot. We get a new client, we have a list of starter ideas that we can share with folks if they're interested in that. So stay tuned to the end and I'll give you a way that you can access that starter list of ideas. So let's get going. What's kind of your background or experience with content? I guess I'm curious your opinion of it. How do you actually find a content idea? What's like your initial thought process? And then what's that initial

step of getting something from an idea to obviously published on a website? Yeah. So as far as SEO content goes, the way I've done the research has always been to go into some type of tool, whether that's going to the search engine itself and doing a search or going into one of those SEO tools that we both use pretty frequently now, whether that's SEMrush or whether that's Ahrefs. It is just finding a tool, doing and doing research, doing an initial search for the term we're looking for. It is. The nice thing about a lot of these tools is that they have their own tools within the tool to help find keywords that are going to be a little, finding the right topic. Really, we want to find a proven topic. I think that's a number one there and looking through there. But it starts with research. I think if you're just writing content to write content, I think that's one example

of the poor SEO that we've seen in some cases. Just writing because it excites you or interests you. You're not the main searcher. You're not the main audience for this content. So I think it's understanding the keyword you're going after and then understanding the audience that's going to digest that content. But what are your thoughts on just generally how you look at SEO content, keywords, stuff like that? Yeah, I think the way that I think about it is that choosing a proving topic is ultimately a combination of two things. What are people looking for? And what does

my specific audience care about? So if it was a Venn diagram, there'd be a Venn diagram of a billion keywords, right? In a given, but let's narrow it down. Let's say there's a billion people that are searching or a million people a month that might be searching for information about Destin, Florida. There might only be a sliver of those people, a section of those people that are really a fit for what you're offering, your properties, your products, et cetera. And you want to do your best to try to align the topics, the proven topics that people are searching for with what you are actually trying to attract.

Like one thing that, for example, we have a client that we work with that doesn't have any pet friendly properties. He's mostly inside of these resort communities. And most of the resorts that he's inside of managing condo properties and don't allow pets per the HOA. I remember we hired a content writer at one point to work on this account because she's based in the area, which is what we try to do if we can, by the way, different thing that we'll get to here in a second.

And I said, hey, here's the next 10 articles that we have coming up. We need two per month, et cetera. It was all I think pretty clear. And she was like, Oh, wow, I'm surprised you didn't cover anything about pets. And I know everyone likes to bring your bring their dog to the beach and stuff. And I went, that's true. That's you're right about that. The trouble is, in this case, the client doesn't offer really any pet friendly units, there's two out of 200 that are pet friendly. So it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to spend a lot of our time and effort and resources writing pet friendly content, when really, even if that visitor ends up on the website it's not really something that we can typically serve that anyways and in fact the two properties that he has that

are pet friendly book up without an issue so it's not even really a marketing challenge for him to be honest with you so i think that's also what a proven topic is it's that look going into google and researching the fact that yes people are searching for in this example it might be that there's a thousand people a month that search for best dog friendly beaches in area name, that's probably the case. But if that doesn't overlap with your target guest and who you're going after, then I don't actually think it's a proven topic for you might be perfect for the property manager down the street who has 25 pet friendly houses that are he's able to serve that customer type a little bit better. Another one that I see all the time, we always come across this in keyword research is like

a ton of people search for camping and campgrounds in every location that we're in. So if you were just doing blindly a list of keywords, and you said, Oh, yeah, let's go ahead and do the 10 best campgrounds in destination, that's not really going to work too well, for the most part, because you're essentially offering like an alternative product to your product, for the most part, if we think the property is the product, like you're giving someone an out to not really do and stay in a vacation rental property, but instead bring an RV or a camper or something like that and do it that way as a way to visit the area. So I find that's another challenging piece is like finding out what people are searching for, making sure it's the ideal

target audience, and then not taking away from what you're trying to do and build the right type of traffic. So it sounds simpler than it is. I think sometimes what we find is that clients will come up with ideas that sound good in their head. Oh, sometimes people ask us about XYZ. I'll write a topic on this. And then we go do the research and we find there's not really a lot of people searching for that.

So we can do it, but it's not really the best outcome. It would be better if we wrote about this because we find that's like more top of funnel and it's going to lead to more people coming into the process. So it's harder than you think. We have a keyword research episode that we did a few back. I can try to link that up in the show notes. When we were putting together like things for today's episode, we forgot that we went through it in as much detail. And I was thinking about the fact that when we recorded that, we ended up talking a lot about content. So now, of course, we're doing the dedicated content episode. But yeah, I would have someone think about that aspect of it. Is the person that is searching, this isn't just a bunch of keywords in a spreadsheet, because that's how a lot of SEO agencies might deliver that work to you. It's who's the person searching that? And are they someone that I want to attract? So those are the pieces that I think about at least. Absolutely. And thinking about what the potential is there, do you ever consider

traffic potential or ranking potential to be factors as is? Obviously, those are in those reports for Ahrefs and SEMrush. but are those weighted factors that are weighted heavier for you or lighter for you? How does that look with your strategy? I tend to rate them a little bit in the middle, maybe. I think it depends heavily on the keyword. So I think the example I've given

before on the show is weather. People searching weather, again, on paper, it sounds great. People searching weather last minute, especially if the weather's good, they might want to come stay and look if we could give it a swing. I'm not completely opposed

to doing the pages, but generally I find that your chances of outranking weather.com and like weather bug these types of sites is pretty low so it's something where and also to your point of like possible click-through rate total traffic potential on the page itself google provides the weather so if you search weather north myrtle beach like google's giving you the weather there's really not even an incentive to click on weather channel or something like that unless they give you very specific information that google doesn't give you but you're trying to just see like basics, like temperature, participate, not participation, let's try that again. Precipitation, lots of words today

that doesn't really provide a lot of value there. So that's one example that I give. Another one that I'm seeing, unfortunately, we did a lot of these blog posts. And I think they've turned they flopped a little bit to be completely honest with you is that we did a best time to visit and then we did a seasonal post for a client like a whole series of them across a bunch of different locations that they're in and then google started scraping the content and putting at the top of the page like these little summaries which is of course what the whole you know generated ai thing is going to do for them but they're doing this just part of kind of a it's like a specialized knowledge panel type thing and even though ranking i think we're like two or three depending on the keyword we're getting

like a garbage click-through rate so you i do think you have to consider that, unfortunately, nowadays, because some topics, you can rank number one and get no meaningful traffic, unfortunately, because of ads or additional units or SERP units on the page. And then you just end up with no traffic, even though you've quote unquote, done your job as SEO content person. So it makes it challenging for sure. What's your experience there? I was gonna say it makes me think of I remember when zero click searches when Google is doing more of the featured snippets to start initially doing some of those featured snippets and one of my team members at that point asked what about these zero click searches and i dismissed it haphazard just thinking oh yeah that's not going to be a big deal over time the right keywords the right pages

will rank and then you'll get the traffic certainly does not seem to be the case anymore. And as it is, as we've seen the generative search experience ahead, people are, it looks like Google is, people are going to have a lot of zero click experiences and Google's going to provide as many of those answers as they can right from the start or right from their own, even from their own products. I think on the vacation rental side of things with those new search results, it's not that they're not getting you back to your homepage or even your website, which is the case in some cases, it's that they're keeping you on your Google business listing. They're recycling the search. They're doing another branded search as opposed to just getting you to the ultimate destination that you want to get to there. So it's not new as far as people showing up high, but then

as Google has put more of this featured content or structured snippets or any of that information in there, it is, you're taking information directly from that website. And if it's answering the question, boom, they're done. So I think potentially for less stay intent keywords, obviously then it's more beneficial to get them just seeing the overview content or what that is. But if they're actually looking for dates, rates, stuff like that, or, and at some point potentially maybe Google will even be able to scrape that information. And I think that's, what's really scary is what happens when like unit specific unit information or property descriptions start to go in and therefore

booking right through a Google vacation rentals section or something. So I can see how it could go down there. We can go down the rabbit hole pretty quickly there, but hopefully there is some thought towards user experience, user intent there as Google and then the other search engines. I think we focus on Google because there's so much there. They have a travel component already, but it's concerning, I think, to see when your higher placements get less engagement, less click through in search console. That's definitely the metric we're not looking for there. But how do we overcome it with this SEO content ideas? Hard to say for sure, but we'll I'll throw it back over to you there for kind of talk about the next topic here. Yeah, I think that all that last piece speaks to in my mind is figuring out how to analyze the search intent,

which we touched on a little bit already. But the idea behind that is that I call this reading the SERP or like reading the search results page. So the reason that I use that terminology is that when I say read, I don't mean like you just read the text on the page, like anyone can do that. You have to look at the page and understand what people are actually looking for. So for example, this is the example that's very big. And I'll go to an adjacent industry quickly, because I think it does a good job of explaining how people might search. So if you do a search like hotels in San Francisco, you'll get booking.com and you'll get all these different OTA style sites, hotels.com, et cetera. If you do that same search and you add just one keyword to modify it and you

say best hotels in San Francisco, the SERP actually changes quite a bit. Instead of going towards the OTAs, it actually tends to go to more blog style sites that are actually talking about the hotel and saying that this particular one is the best and here's why it's the best. Now this doesn't happen quite as much in my opinion in the vacation rental side because people don't often search like I have to stay in this vacation rental. They're usually a bit more open to I can stay in this one or this one as long as the amenities are somewhat equal. Whereas a hotel is more like a single unit and you're picking this hotel or that hotel based on the amenities and the services offered and location and service and all that kind of stuff. But the idea remains, which is that adding one keyword changes the intent drastically

from hotels to best hotels, you get a very different results on the page from it. So going to restaurants as a more adjacent example that we typically would write up in our client blogs and client informational SEO content, if you do best restaurants actually doesn't tend to modify the search results too much in my experience there. But instead, if you do a search for restaurants, what you do see almost all the pages ranking are incredibly comprehensive. In other words, Google doesn't really want to be honest with you a list of four or five of the best restaurants in a given region that actually typically doesn't perform well. If you're doing restaurant searches, like restaurants in Myrtle Beach, typically what ranks best is a really detailed, really long form directory style page

of every restaurant in that area. And maybe you can skip like the fast food restaurants. I've noticed some restaurant aggregator sites will do stuff like that. But for like traditional sit down restaurants, they want you to list everything. Now if you wait, the ones at the top, these are more popular, these are better for this type of food or whatever, that seems to actually improve the results a little bit from the SEO end from our experience. But you can't write an article about restaurants in area and then just put five or six restaurants on there unless that happens to be all the restaurants that are there. But you have to make it very comprehensive and very long, to be honest

with you. Otherwise, it just doesn't tend to rank in our experience. So when I say reading the SERP and analyzing search intent, going and looking what types of pages are ranking, what types of sites are ranking, click on all of them, click on the top 10, read them all, and then start to put in your head the similarities between that content. Oh, they're all doing listicles. Okay, maybe this one at 14, this one at 10. But you can figure out what they're what Google's looking for, or what people are actually clicking on. Okay, this one for the restaurants one, everything's really comprehensive, like it's very detailed. For the best dog friendly beaches, every single one has a map like they have a map and it shows on the page exactly where to go. And that's kind of what

people are looking for. And I'm not saying that you should just go copy and paste what they're doing and put it onto your site, that's probably not going to work if you do it that way. But you can typically see threads that you're going to have to pull out and put into your content as I better have a map on this page, I better be comprehensive on this page, I better list out all the reasons why this is the best particular XYZ for this particular search. And I do think that your writer or content creation team that's working for you should really be very specific when they're writing that piece of content for your site of exactly how it's going to look when it's published on the page. And then really their work is more centered around research, making sure that they're putting the right information

in there, optimizing it for SEO in terms of comprehensively covering the topic and so on. We'll get to all that. But I think understanding what type of page you need to create is a very elemental foundational skill in this side of the business. And if you make the wrong page type, you could have a very talented writer make the wrong page type. And it's just they're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and it's not going to work. So I think once they understand what they need to work on and actually create, then they have a much better likelihood of success in my experience. I would agree with that. I think in addition to reading the SERP pages for the content type and the content format, which I think you covered there in the perfect detail,

I think it is. It's about understanding that intent and the angle, for lack of a better term there. Is it informative? Is it supposed to be more sales dominated? That's the one nice thing. I'm not sure if Ahrefs has that, but SEMrush does have something that they rolled out now a few months ago, maybe a year ago, I guess. It goes pretty quick in the SEO world here,

but really what intent that is, whether it's expertise authority, what's TNT, trustworthiness, whether it's the EAT or whether it's expertise authority, what's TNT, trustworthiness, whether it's the EAT or whether it's your money, your life or things like that. I think it is. It's really trying to understand, is this supposed to be more educational? Is this supposed to be more salesy? Is this supposed to be more entertainment driven? That really helps to understand how you need to, I think, structure that content even a little further.

Taking it to that next level, it's not just a listicle. It's not just this. It's not just a full directory, comprehensive directory. It really is with a little bit of a sales edge or with a little bit of a informative edge there. I think those blog posts, they do tend to rank more as informative as it tends to be or as the different tools are indicating. But it really helps you write the content in a way that I think the end user is going to get

more use out of it. Again, if you're just writing top things in an area, what is it going to give you? If you're being comprehensive, if you're taking it to that next level, if you are linking back, if you're getting backlinks through as a result of that content as well, I think that's something as well as you're looking at SEO content, that link building, which we also have another episode out there back to talk about. That's something that I think it naturally manifests itself with better SEO content there. So yeah, just to recap so far, we have chosen a proven topic. We have analyzed the search intent. So yeah, just to recap, so far, we have chosen a proven topic, we have analyzed the search intent. So we're going to make the right type of article. And then we're showing off our expertise when we actually go to produce that content. So at this

point, we put up something that's accurate, that has all the right information and that kind of stuff. So number four on our outline is covering the topic in full. So covering the topic in full sounds straightforward, but a lot of our clients kind of do this the wrong way. And it's not just word count. I think that's one thing that I want to push against. A lot of people would say, oh, I've made it 2000 words or 3000 words. That's great. I could write 3000 words about a single restaurant going back to our earlier example. And I could write 3000 words about the cheese on the pizza at one particular restaurant.

And obviously that wouldn't rank for a thing because we need to cover the topic where we write a little bit about every restaurant to get to a more solid content approach. So anyways, needless to say, covering the topic in full is not just about, oh, I put out 3000 or 4000 words. Now with AI writing tools, you can put out 3000 words or 4000 words of garbage very easily for a very low cost, but it's typically not going to rank well in our experience. Our tool of weapon here, I think we've talked about this quite a few times on previous shows is ClearScope.

So with ClearScope, we've done a lot to, it does a great job, in my opinion, of actually helping you cover the topic comprehensively, because it tells you when you run a report, all the different keywords and topics and things like that, that people are actually using on the page. So when you run a ClearScope report, it scrapes the top 30, desktop 30, mobile results, typically, there's lots of overlap, but it goes through, reads all those different pages, and then tells you, hey, if you're writing about the best restaurants in location, it'll start to list out these seem to be mentioned a lot like you better make sure you cover this restaurant when you're writing this particular blog post. Otherwise, you're probably

not covering the topic comprehensively. So yeah, that's one that I think is relatively straightforward to get right, in my opinion, when you have the right tools, again, clear scope has typically been our weapon of choice there. And it's more so about working with a writer that wants to make that blog post comprehensive and not just stuff a bunch of words in there. So we find that paying by word can be a little bit of a bad incentive. We do it for a lot of our writers, but you have to police the writers a lot when you're paying by word because they're going to tend to want to over-explain and add a lot of extra quote-unquote fluff inside of a blog post, which doesn't really lead to a lot of better outcome. So if you can guide them to the right process by saying, hey, I want you to cover this topic, I want you to write about it, but please make sure you use this list of terms,

not just make up a list of terms that you want to do. I think we're going to get to a better outcome. So what's your experience with writing a topic comprehensively is what I say, or covering the topic in full as we put in our outline. Yeah. So this is something where, you know, at different times and different organizations that I've worked in, we have been more about the, Hey, it's about the number count. And I think the results speak for themselves. Yeah. It can rank initially over time, but the key is really making sure that you're covering it in comprehensive terms, writing a blog post with the top five restaurants and writing two sentences about each restaurant. Google's probably not going to, or the search engines in general are probably not going to

find a lot of value in that. That's just looking at the comprehensive nature there. I think that going back to ClearScope a little bit there, it is, it's those subtopics. It's not just the initial going back to ClearScope a little bit there, it is, it's those subtopics. It's not just the initial content. It's how can you build out more content? It's make it pillar content. How can you build all of these other pieces of content into that single priority piece of content there? And in some areas, I think we would both acknowledge that it's tough to find a lot of content to write. In some cases, in some areas, in some markets, you are the only one. You're the leader or there aren't any leaders. So you're having to forge that path. And I think the ability not to just pick yourself out three to six to 12 specific topics, but

having one or two, maybe two or three topics to start with, and then building subtopics after that to build subtopic content after that to really build up to that. Not only is it giving users a better experience, but it is giving Google a better idea of where, how you're seeing the flow of content and what that intent is for those searches that are coming through and supporting that. Giving them not only just the initial content, but other follow-up pieces that they can engage with as well. I think the one thing behind the scenes that I would love to see in the Google algorithm, the search algorithm, is really how much engagement from a Google Analytics platform is built into that.

Because you know that there's some little facet there of if people are hitting two or three pages on your site, that is a boot. That's got to be a thumbs up somewhere in the algorithm, but where is that coming into play? And is it based on like sub pages in a directory? Is it you go down to a top level net, you stay at the top level nav. It's not as good. You go two or three pages deep, it's better. I think that's that area of intent where I would love to understand even more, even further, is it more important to build out a cluster, a topic cluster, or is it better to build out individual keywords for individual keywords and then ranking specifically for those? That's something that I think with more insights from Google and the other search engines,

we just have a better idea. And that's a good, that's, it seems so easy. Some of the things we talk about are very straightforward, very logical, but it's how they're actually working behind the scenes within the algorithm and within the framework that I think it is. Everybody is going to learn that on their own terms there. And I saw a tweet today about someone even talking about the Penguin update of they had done all these best practices for SEO

back in 2012, April of 2012. And as soon as that Penguin update came through, boom, all their SEO was gone. All their rankings were gone. Everything was gone because they had some shady backlinks in there and they'd had some spammy content, some keyword stuffed content. And I think that's in everything we say, we just gotta be ready for that next shoot or drop with another algorithm update, so. Hey guys, Conrad here, just hopping in to say

that we're gonna split this one into two parts. So that was part one. We are gonna come back next week with part two. Stay tuned and we will catch you on the next episode.