Heads In Beds Show - [Part 2] The Right Way To Build "SEO Content" For Your Vacation Rental Business

Episode Date: August 30, 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 two.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. Hey, Conrad here. Just wanted to butt in before the episode actually started. So we had some weird technical issues on this particular episode. For some reason, Paul's audio file was completely lost, but I thought it was some decent stuff. So it's kind of a weird one. If there's little

audio hiccups, we do apologize, but I think the content's pretty good. So let's roll a clip. Yeah, I guess it's really hard for me to figure out at the volumes that we typically can publish at what the right approach is there. I'll be completely honest. I don't know if that is actually the right approach or if by bouncing around by, okay, it's relevant, it's lower competition. Was that actually a better way to lay out the information and build things out? If a client has a massive content budget and they want to reach out and they want us to test different ways of publishing content, I'm all for it. Go to build.com, fill out the form and let's have a conversation because I think it's really challenging to figure that out. So I guess my

point of view on it would be if you're a property manager listening and you're determining, should I, you know, what sort of investment should I make into content? Most of our clients are typically only producing one to four assets per month. Like weekly is pretty high pace for this type of content that we're talking about where it's well-researched or you're working with an individual writer. You're producing a clear scope report because that also includes getting it on the site. Like even when you're done writing the content we didn't even have this in the outline but it has to also be formatted into the website that's not a snap your fingers and it just pops up process we have a dedicated team member essentially two now actually that all they do is format content

all day it gets approved and it's all done by the writer and then it has to go from that into an actual website with metadata title tag all the on-page seo stuff as well formatted properly that in and of itself is a bit of a task for a property manager to be doing properly, even if they have the right content on the writing side done. So it's very challenging. I think there's not many companies that are small businesses that can afford to do more than like a weekly piece of content. That's good. Sure. If you want to publish crap, then you can publish crap, try clusters, try whatever you want. It's probably not going to work. Yeah. I don't know if it matters though, to be honest with you, Paul,

because we've tried different approaches. And at the end of the day, it just seems like over time, if we're publishing useful, relevant information, we tend to win. And so I guess I'm, I guess I'm a little bit less interested in the philosophy of this approach A or approach B work better. If both roads lead to the same outcome, which is that our client ranks really well in Google for their core keywords that monetize and they get a lot of blog traffic along the way to build their audience and build their brand. I think we're doing the right thing. But ultimately, a lot of questions in SEO in my mind

are somewhat unknowable and also very difficult, if not impossible to test. So I think the better approach is, what do I do that's moving me forward? And even if I'm like one or two degrees off track with SEO and you do it long enough, you'll get to the right spot. It's not like an airplane. If you're two degrees off, you end up in the wrong spot. If you just

keep building traffic, you can get better results. And you always try different approaches along the way. My advice there, honestly, would just be give it enough time. If you're going to do what Paul was suggesting a few minutes ago and try publishing in batches or hubs versus publishing just topics based on competition where you might bounce around a little bit, don't do it for a week or two weeks. Oh, this is how it's going to's gonna work like you gotta give it a lot of time you gotta give it at least probably three or four months for each approach minimum and then see the traffic see the rankings see the progress before you make any sort of judgment call on oh this is the way that this one is going versus this is the way that this one is going so that'll be my take on it is that you've got to give some stuff like that

for sure absolutely and when you the nail on the head is it's got to be good it's got to be high quality content quality content is the key if it's not quality google knows and we have a bing knows that the search engines know because it's not being it's not being engaged with it's not you're not getting the end result that you're looking for there so you might not even get the with that low quality content you might not even get the, with that low quality content, you might not even get the traffic. So I think that's something that it's all about the quality, whether it's 200 words or 2000 words, high quality content will be recognized by the search engines. And it is over time that will help get you to the promised land of more traffic. Yeah. Yeah. Right on. We said, make it, make it

good, which is always very tough because it's somewhat of a subjective measure. But in our outline here, we said make it unique and make it sticky. Those were two of the things that we put in there. So I think by unique, like you have your own point of view into things. I know that we've referenced people on the show before David from smokymountains.com as an example where I think he paid a lot of money for original photography. That is a huge investment. Obviously, not many people are willing to make that kind of investment. But all for to my knowledge, at least the bulk of the photography on his website is original, he hired photographers to go out there and get it for his website. So every header photo, etc, etc, that he has posted there is of his own design. And you can't rip it off and put it on your site. It's not etc, which I think is a good way to make things unique. But I don't think you

have to do that. Like, I think we've been able to produce really neat content by, you know, changing the layout, like having an image with each graphic of the actual restaurant or having a specific, oh, the locals often recommend this dish. We've done that on Restaurant Post before. Or pro tip, make sure you show up at 5pm, right at 5pm, and then you get in on the early bird and you get seated a lot quicker versus showing up at 7.30. I think there's lots of ways to make content unique that doesn't just rely on making massive investments into photography and things like that.

And that's the type of thing that ultimately a user, just think of the user on the other side. If you're unsure of is this content quality or not, I guess you just have to think of the user on the other side and think, are they getting value out of that information? Which is why, by the way, not to turn this into an AI conversation, I'm very skeptical of seeing a lot of success with AI content, because I do think you can get AI content to give the user satisfactory information. And we've done some of those posts and some of them have started to get a little tiny bit of uptick but I don't think it's something that's

going to last very long I guess that's part of my concern so if we have a AI writing tool that's saying what's the month that it snows the most in Seattle Washington or something like that like I think an AI writer could answer that pretty well because it's like a known statistical fact that it can just use its corpus of documents and figure out. But I'm like, everyone else is going to have the same article. So I think any sort of advantage you have is so short lived that I'm just a little bit less optimistic that the AI writing tools are going to provide us this utopia of click a button, get an optimized article on the other side. And there's a lot of SEO SaaS tools that claim they can do that. I'm just a little bit more skeptical that's going to work in the way that we claim. I think what might be the approach there going forward, going back to this like

unique and sticky angle is how can I maybe use AI to give me a first draft or refine what I'm doing or edit what I'm doing and then go back and add my own insight or add my own beliefs into it. Like I think there's a button to hit to maybe give you a starting point, a framework to get going. And then I think you can go back in there and improve it. But I don't know your take on this. It's been a minute since we've talked about this. I'm not sure. The unique, I have a hard time believing that any AI written content is unique because most of them are built off of some, the clear one of the large, the LLMs, the large language models for ChatGPT and BARD. But somewhere along the lines, everything's reading off of some type of language models. The uniqueness of AI generated content is

going to be as unique as like where they pulled it from. If they pulled a direct line, direct quote from another blog post, from a news article, from something like that, your article, your content isn't unique at that point. So I would say my healthy level of skepticism with most AI generated things probably does base itself from the uniqueness of content. Like how can an individual or your individuality of voice, of angle, of anything like that, of intent is gone when you're putting that into a system that's literally just reading other content and trying to make it similar to or something like that or something where the model can recognize it and generate what it needs to on the back end so yeah unique content

is something that it is it's i think it's really difficult to get unique content because more often than not we do fall into the top this top that top list of that because it is it's I think it's really difficult to get unique content because more often than not we do fall into the top this top that top list of that because it is it's easy it's more fun to write that content sometimes and over time it usually does rank so it's effective there but as far as the uniqueness of that content and trying to make it more unique I love that idea of pro tips I love that idea of making someone feel like it's unique. It's special to them. This message is special to them, or it's something that only insiders get, or it is. It's why those membership groups or things like that, people are willing to pay up for those memberships occasionally because it is. It's that unique,

it's that one of a kind experience that you're going to get. How do you make content that way? I don't know, but I do not think that any AI content long term is going to be unique. I think just over time, that's something that, and I think we'll see it, is that at some point, the algorithms will make another shift and we'll make that change. And the content that isn't unique is going to be deprioritized. And hopefully we get an understanding of why it's deprioritized. But I think in a lot of cases, it's because there is a lot of that content that's already out there. It's another one of those things that the uniqueness, I think, is tricky. The stickiness is something that... What are some examples that you would use as far as trying

to make that content stickier and keeping people, whether that's on the site or just at least engage with the brand there? How, what are some ways? Yeah, I think like blog design is probably an underrated piece of the puzzle. A lot of the PMS template websites that we get a hold of, they just, they don't do much to modify the blog design. It just has a very basic, simple look to it, which it's not the end of the world. You can work with what you're given. But I think if what I see a lot of them are like taking over existing content or other work from other agencies, or we're taking something

over, maybe the clients tried it themselves as they don't really know how to make the blog post just look nice on given the framework of the template that they're given to work with them. And sometimes we can make some just simple modifications that make it look a lot nicer. So for example, this sounds simple, but just like having the author name be very clear at the top of the page, putting a caption on every photo, we typically do photo credit underneath each photo or a caption, like explaining what the photo is, looking at the sidebar of the blog and determining, should I be putting in extra pieces on the sidebar for a search box? Click here to search vacation rental properties. Click here to sign up for our newsletter. Click here to

view other content. Like some blog sidebars by default are just blank or it says like categories over there and it just doesn't look nice. So those are small things that can make a difference. Making the images full width, but not too wide. I see that sometimes where like the images, one image is like very vertical and doesn't look great. And then the next one is like too small. It's 300 by 300 and it doesn't actually fill up the full width of the kind of viewport of where the text is. So that's another issue that I see. I hate when sites are like difficult to scroll, especially on mobile, when like you scroll and it goes too fast or too slow and it makes it hard to read. The text being too small can be a factor as well on like our little website audit accessibility

thing that we do. We look for web fonts that are like typically 14, 16, like in that size, but some sites by default are like 10 or 12. Like it's just hard to see. I'm blind as a bat, so I need that personally as well. So I think there's a lot to professional blog design, but none of it's complicated in my opinion. A lot of it's just doing the basics well, images, links, text, just make sure it's pleasing to read. And then when they get to the bottom, having the next step, click here to search now, click here to sign up for our newsletter. Here's related content, just something that kind of gets them to the next step there. And I think all those things sum up. It's not one thing. It's all those things that make a reader be like, ah, this is

pleasing to read. And they want to stay a little bit longer in my experience. I think that last part, that next step, it's the content's great. But if you've not given them any call to action of what they're actually supposed to do after they've read that blog post, I think it's a huge missed opportunity as far as keeping, making it a sticky experience, not just with that blog post, but then taking it to your website, whether that is going to look for a rental or whether that's looking for another piece of content to read. That was something that it is. You get to the end of the blog. So when you're looking at the blog post, I think the biggest missed opportunity there really is that call to action at the end of it. It is. You're wanting someone to take an action. If you're not asking them, giving them the next step of, hey, now start planning your getaway.

Hey, here's the next blog post you're going to read in the series or whatever that is. I do. I think that's something that it's just a missed opportunity. You've gotten, you've concluded the, you've written your three points, you've gotten your, or you've written your five paragraph essay. In some cases, you've gotten the introduction, you've gotten your three main bullets, you've gotten your conclusion and you didn't give them anything else. So it's a, sadly, that's a lot of the content I think we see out there because, and it's written in a way that that is, it's very linear. It's, these are the points I have to hit these points. I have to hit these keywords. And now I've accomplished my task of writing the content and I'm done now, but we don't take that next step of thinking about

how do we make it sticky? How do we keep them there? How do we now get them to go do the right, take the desired path that we typically would see where they're now going through the booking process or they're looking at your website in greater detail. We've gotten them in with this initial search query that may really have nothing to do with the ultimate service we're providing. We may have brought them in on an activities keyword and all of a sudden now we have to get them to stick to the process and book that unit. So I think that is something that if you're not, if you look back on your blog content and there's no action on any of the last five, 10 blogs that you have, look for that. That's a huge opportunity to maybe not recycle that content, but at least add something to it. And especially if you go back in your Google Analytics and

there's traffic hitting that page and then they're bouncing. There's definitely some metrics that you can see there where it's going to give you an idea of, are people sticking around? Are people staying? It's not just the SEO tools and the SEO reporting metrics. It's now once those people have hit your page, you've got Google Analytics, hopefully in play. Hopefully it's G4 analytics

that's currently implemented on the site. But that's going to tell you, that's going to give you the true engagement of what people are doing after they have that initial organic session

or organic engagement with the business. Yeah. Yeah. And ultimately, I think when it's all said and done, like, I feel like people have a good sense of it. When you read a blog post from your own website, I think we shared this on an earlier episode. Do you want to take that blog post, copy and paste it and put it into a guidebook that you're going to send to a guest staying in your property? That's a really simple litmus test. Yeah. If you're on the right path from a content quality standpoint. If so, then, you know, great. If not, then you're like, oh, I don't know if I'd recommend this or this doesn't look great. Then yeah, then why would a reader care? And why would Google, who can choose from not an infinite

number, but a very high number of articles, why would they rank yours ahead of everybody else's if it doesn't actually have anything really unique or differentiated inside of it? It's really challenging, I think, to bridge that gap, to bridge that divide of, oh yeah, let's figure out a way to show this article ahead of everybody else. It doesn't have anything unique, like nothing good about it. But yeah, please show me at the top. Google doesn't think that way or work that way, nor should they. They should be showing the content that's, in fact, the best when they're building their algorithms that we don't fully understand. I think we got one more note that we want to slide in here, which is keep it evergreen. That was our last note here on the

outline. Keep it evergreen, meaning keep the content updated, keep it up to date. So as things change and shift a lot over time, you can actually make sure that content still reflects the most up-to-date version of it. We frequently do this. In fact, some months we just go back and don't produce new content for a client. We just go back and do a bunch of updates, which has been, in my opinion, a much better approach for us long-term from an SEO perspective. Would rather have 40 or 50 pretty highly updated high traffic articles on my site than a hundred that have never been touched. Because I think over time you tend to see them just decay and go down. Whereas when you update them, it's like they almost get stronger too.

And Google tends to respect that URL and that content a little bit more in my experience. So yeah, keeping it updated isn't necessarily a massively complicated process, but it is something that requires intentional effort and a bit of a budget. It's not that click publish, ignore forever, let's click publish and then go back and check it on a certain cadence or schedule or something like that. I don't know your experience there, but a simple one that I sometimes get. It is. So that was something where I was taking it back to the resortsandlodges.com days, but we did, we have on that site there to this day, I think are over 600 top 10 lists.

But those are written somewhere between 2015 and 2022. So over time, it probably goes up to 2023. Now, I'm not sure about that. But that's the thing is over time, whether businesses go out, businesses are active, businesses are not active. And the other thing is that in, I think, 18 or 19, Google was starting to say they were starting to make timeliness of the content more of a felt like more of a weighted factor in the algorithm there. the page title started to include, hey, whatever name of website or keyword page title, 2022 or 2023, or having the year actually included there, because that was something that the search engines appeared to be taking into effect where whether they were actually looking at the age of

the page, or just reading it, and the page title seemed to be enough. So I do, I think that's something where, especially in a time post COVID where let's face it, there's a lot of businesses that just aren't around anymore that probably were around and were around when you originally built the content. So going through and updating that again, Google understands at a deeper level. I mean, they have that Google My Business information or Google Business listing information just as well as everybody else does. But additionally, it's not just the search engines. If someone comes to your website, goes to that blog post and sees five activities, but three of them aren't available to be, you can't do them, you're giving them a bad experience.

And it is. And they may try to book that experience or book the activity while they're planning their trip. If they find they can't do that, are they going to lose a little bit of trust in you as a property manager or something like that? Probably. So I think that's, it is, it's a true prong of making sure that, yeah, refreshing your content, getting a republish on it or doing something like that, letting the search engines know that it has been updated.

It has been refreshed. It's good. But then it is, it's that trust piece that if you're sending a traveler to a piece of content that has inaccuracies or old information, that's the last thing anybody wants to see. And it's going to not only affect that initial experience, but it might, you could lose a booking because of it if people have lost that trust in you. So definitely something that I don't know where it sits in the ranking factors. I don't think I see that as much anymore.

Some of the old travel, some of the travel sites still have it in their URL structure and in their page title structure. So I have to think that the recency and evergreen nature plays a role there right now. But I think that's something that if you've got the content out there, yeah, just keep improving it. You don't need to rewrite or you don't need to write new content necessarily when you've got great content that's already there. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't even think about that last piece that you were saying, which is that how is it going to convert? So forget about that.

For one second, we'll just forget about SEO. Yeah. Let's just forget. A potential guest is on that page and you're putting out stuff that's not accurate or up to date. They're going to be like, ah, forget this company. How clean are their properties? See, if I can't trust this, how can I trust them? That's a good way to think about it. Right on. What else did we not cover about SEO content, Paul, that we should tell the fine folks before they depart for it today? It is. I think ultimately you got to produce content, like the last thing you got to produce content, though, that's what Google wants. That's what the search engines wants. That's what your end user wants, like whatever content type, format method you provide, you choose. I think it's,

I think it's worthy of doing multiple things, like trying out different things. Consistency is good. Obviously you want to not just try it for a month for one or two pieces. You want to go further than that, but don't be afraid to mix it up, to try a listicle one time, or to try an infographic, or to try some of these things that may seem a little harder to produce, but that long-term, I think the upfront cost will pay itself off with the backend results. It seems like that's something that is more or less universal with SEO. It does take some upfront costs to do it, but the long-term payoff is almost always more. And then quantitatively, I don't know, but qualitatively is always more than what that upfront cost is. What about you? Yeah, no, I think maybe I can put some numbers in context

to share that a little bit. I was thinking of a client that we've been working with since 2020. Interesting time to start with a client, but that's when we got started right at the very start of 2020. And I was looking at their results here. Let me just pull this up really quickly in analytics and I'll give you like a month by month breakdown. So basically month one, we start with the client and they're getting no meaningful organic traffic. So not a lot of visitors coming into the site. Let me give you a number. So the first month we worked together,

they had a grand total of 1,357 people coming to the site in total. So by the end of 2020, so the first month of 2021, that number had gone from 1,700 to a little bit under 6,000, 5,962 visitors. Not bad. By the end of 2022, that number was 12,742. And last month, so we're recording this in August of 23, obviously, in July of 23, they did a little bit over 18,000 visitors last month. So they started at 1700 coming

for the website in total. Granted, the majority of the traffic comes from Google. Yeah. And now they're getting over 18,000. So it's been an 18x growth, but it's taken three years. It's taken a lot of time to get there. And obviously, during that time frame, they've had to invest a lot of money. It's SEO. Now you may say, is it worth it? OK, the traffic has gone 18x.

But what's been the numbers, the dollar and cents of it? So during that time frame, in direct bookings on their website, they've driven a total of $9.3 million in direct bookings, 3,000 bookings for an average order value of $3,122. Meaning they had 3,000 individual people book a unit on their website. They made a little bit over $9.3 million in gross revenue and their average booking value was a little bit over $3,100. So it's taken time to get there as well. It's the first month that we, let me give you those numbers too from a revenue perspective. So the first month that we worked together with those 1700 visitors, they got a grand total of

32,000 indirect bookings last month. They did a 394,000 indirect bookings. In fact, their busiest month this year was February. This is one of the markets where they tend to get those early bookings that they can. Their biggest month ever since we've been working with the client was February of this year. They did a little bit over $635,000 in direct bookings on their website in February. So there's a lot of ROI there, no doubt about it. Client's super happy, but it took years literally to get those types of results. And it's a chart where it looks flat,

little nudges up, and then over time it's really gone up. And they've done a great job too. I'm not going to take all the credit for that. They've got more properties. We're putting into a website. They've swapped PMSs at one point. That was a headache for them,

but I think it was a good outcome as far as the company goes. And it's a lot of work. So I think that site's a good example of content takes time, but when it's working in your favor, it's like those rowing teams where it's like content working and they're getting more inventory and they're doing a good job with guest service and the cleaning team does a good job. If we're all rowing in the same direction, we can just fly and make a lot of progress. There's no doubt in my mind about that. So that's all I have as well. I don't think we have anything else. If you made it through both parts, we kind of chopped this one into two.

But if you made it through the second part this week, we appreciate it. Please do leave us a review. That means a lot to us. And we will definitely come back at you next week with a new topic, new episode, and more stuff to share about marketing. So thanks so much. And we'll catch you on the next one.