Heads In Beds Show - The "Math" Behind Common SEO Metrics, Numbers And Data

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

In this episode, Paul and Conrad chat about common SEO metrics, numbers and other data points that you need to understand from your marketing team or agency. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellEVERYTHING You Need To Know About Google Search Console Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick 🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right. Hey there, Paul. How's it going? Great, Conrad.

And just pushing our way through summer right now. The excessively exceeding heat in Minnesota, unsurprisingly. Minnesota, 90 degrees. Yep, that's where we are this week. Just going to enjoy that beach feel and hope that the little plastic swimming pool holds up for the family this week. How are you doing, sir? Yeah, warmer than you. Apparently, I just got back from vacation, where it was 95 and very humid every day down in the lovely Bahamas. Yeah, lovely, lovely vacation. But I don't have much tolerance for any heat complaints right now. Got off the plane, go back home, and looked around and went, ah, it's a nice 85 and only 45% humidity here. But I will say, it's enough pollution to get real ocean breeze. And down there, you're definitely on the ocean getting

ocean breeze. That is the difference. You hop in the pool, you hop out, the wind crosses you up and you get a little bit more comfortable. But no, all good. Good to have a family vacation and ready to be back into it. I know we missed last week. Our bad for the listeners that look out for that. We'll back to it. So we'll be good. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Awesome. Well, speaking of things that are good, good SEO. And when we talk about SEO before, people tend to like it a little bit and we've had some good experiences and results from it. And a little bit about SEO. I know a little tiny bit about SEO.

So we thought today we'd break down, I guess, some of the myths. They're not even myths, but really just like some of the numbers, some of the data around SEO, because I think that this is the experience that I've had, at least. I'm not sure how this has been in your career in the past. You talk to a vacation rental manager and they have to deal with so much stuff. Some numbers coming at them all the time on the revenue side, on the rate side of things. There's a million things they have to juggle and keep their hands on top of. And then when the SEO guy comes in, that agency comes in and starts going at all

these numbers at them, all these different figures and data points at them. I've seen it before, both in-person meetings and then over Zoom as well, is the eyes gloss over a little bit and they're just like, what does it actually matter? And then usually I'll typically pivot back to this much traffic came in and this many bookings came in. And that's usually a pretty good spot. But obviously there's a lot more to it than that. So we thought we'd spend a little bit of time today breaking down some of the numbers, what

they mean. Obviously, this isn't going to cover every single possible data point when it comes to SEO and measuring organic traffic, but it's a pretty decent overview until the most common ones. So I thought that would be our topic of today. I think we like that one in our outline here. If you like it, then maybe we start with Google Search Console. Yeah, I think that works. Absolutely. Yeah. Google Search Console is of what we're going to be talking about here today. It's the only free product, I would say.

There's free versions of Ahrefs and SEMrush as well. But this is the one that gives you the most bang for the buck because it's free there. And I think anytime you're working with a Google product, although we've seen how they're definitely killing some things off, that's the only thing you have to worry about is Google still needing the product or finding value in the product. I think it's going to be a long time before Search Console doesn't have any value for them.

We've switched from Webmaster for those people who are listening that primarily stayed in the SEO space back in 2018, 2019, something like that. Webmaster Tools turned into Google Search Console. So that was their, I would say, their iteration change. But it does. It gives you, at a high level, really good insights into how your domain is performing from an argument perspective. And I think the four main KPIs that we were looking at, there are clicks, impressions,

position, and then click-through rate. As you're looking at those numbers, how do you break those down? Of those, do you value any higher, any lower? What really tells you the health of the website when you're looking at those numbers, Cameron? Yeah, for sure. Actually, we did a deep dive too on Google Search Console. So if you're a little bit unfamiliar with what those mean, go check it out. It's episode 33. I'll put it in the show notes so you can go back and check out that episode. I think it was one of our more downloaded ones. So I think people want to know this data to the point of your question, because ultimately, like you said, it's a free tool, anyone can access it. And it's really is supposed to be at least to the best of their ability,

straight from the horse's mouth is supposed to be Google's data. We'll talk a little bit about estimating tools or these kind of third-party tools, which have their time and place for sure. But if you could only have one source of data, this is probably a good one to go to. So the most common thing I see people mixing up when it comes to the data that these tools provide is they conflate sessions with clicks. So they'll look in analytics and they'll say, I got 5,000 sessions from organic traffic. And then they go into Google Search Console over the same time frame.

Let's say it was May of 2023. And they say, but I had 3,800 clicks. How is that possible? First of all, clicks are filtered a little bit. So that's one thing that can automatically cause a difference, even if in theory, a session was mapping one-to-one with a click, which doesn't often occur. But even if that was occurring, there may actually be some differences in the data there. Because if actually, if you access the data through the API, you can see how many queries are removed for privacy. And some of those click data actually does not show up inside of search console. So consider it a good source of data, but by no means a perfectly accurate source of data, because it often will, I don't know exactly the right terminology way to describe it,

but they'll remove stuff basically that they don't want you to see, because they think there's some downside in doing so. But in theory, a click is a visitor going to your website, or at least clicking on the link that your website showed in the search results. One thing that I've seen on sites that have poor page speed practices is that the click count won't match a session count at all in analytics because their site is so slow that people click over from Google over to the website, and they don't actually finish the like loading the website because they're so frustrated by it. So anyways, in theory clicks also in theory, click it happened twice, someone could click on your site, they could then click on a site link, or they could click on a second link. So that could

lead to two clicks in only one session. So a lot of kind of the that can start the clock a little bit on like, you're showing me two different things, like they mean different things in some respect. But anyways, in theory, a click from Google Search Console, when they measure it is supposed to just be someone visiting your website from Google Search organically. Obviously, this doesn't cover any paid stuff. We'll talk about that in a second. The other numbers that they typically show you there are impressions, position and click through rate. The one that I think impressions pretty straightforward. I think the one that sometimes gets me or even clients a little bit crossed sometimes is when your website is showing a different SERP feature images being the most common culprit, where you'll

see really high impression count and really low clicks and you go, why is no one clicking on my website? Usually my stock answer is you're probably on page one, but the bottom of page one, which is where you'll talk about the click through rate curve in a second where it tends to flatten out. So you're getting all these impressions because the page is loading your sites, quote unquote showing, but no one's actually scrolling down to the very last position on the page and clicking. So that's one thing that can inflate the numbers a little bit. But more commonly, what I see is when the numbers are really out of whack, when it comes to impressions versus clicks, is they're showing in like an image result. I see this all the time with like very generic

searches. So if you were to search like North Myrtle Beach, I have a client who has actually has an image sitting in like one of the top few slots of it's a nice beautiful beach shot that he had shot by local photography. Great shot gets hundreds of thousands of impressions every month in the summer and gets like 19 clicks to his website, right? No, no meaningful traffic comes from it because it's not really like a clickable link, the blue link that we're all used to in the summer and gets like 19 clicks to his website, right? No, no meaningful traffic comes from it because it's not really like a clickable link, the blue link that we're all used to in the Google search results. You can get there, but it's like convoluted. So that's one thing to keep in mind. Now, when it comes to position inside of a Google search console, the thing that I think people get most confused by here is that position is an average across all the people that have done

that search. So the most, the culprit I see all the time is like free. I do the search and I click on the website all the time. If I'm signed into a Google account, ICS ranking number three, John Doe over here has never been to the website. And even a searching from a different location, even with the same keyword gets completely different results on the first page of Google. So position is an average, it's probably one of the most least reliable ways to measure search console data, in my opinion, because it is very skewed, where you'll see one or two impressions happen with someone who's going to go to your website, and they chose very high for them in search results, and that personalized search environment. And then someone else who does the search, they see you on in the 90th position in Google. So someone sees you fifth, someone sees you 90th, your average is what 45 or something like that. But no one actually saw you in the 45th position. So on low volume keywords, I think you can ignore position on high volume keywords that you're getting a lot of clicks on it generally is a little bit more accurate. It'll say like 5.7. And you go look and you're usually in that range on a high volume

keyword. But that one gets misinterpreted a lot. In theory, what it should show you on when there's enough data coming in is where you're actually showing on the page as it relates to the positions on the page. And then click through rate is just a function of clicks divided by impressions pretty straightforward. The better the click through rate, obviously, the more people clicking on your site, which can be useful on like brand searches. You want your click-through rate on that to be very high. So those are some of the things that I see. I'm sure you've seen some similar things as well.

Maybe you could talk about click-through rate curve for a second as it relates to this data as well. Yeah, I think and certainly the position is key and where we do see something like in Ahrefs or in SEMrush when that number is a little more static, they're actually finding the screenshot of the most recent result. Now, again, there could be some more local based or location based search tendencies there or whatever it is. But yeah, I think that's something that certainly the higher in search we all are, the better off we are. And it does. When I was originally thinking about this particular blog post, it always comes down to that cascading the organic curve as it is here, where when you look at the average number of clicks that come through when you're in position one, it's about a quarter of the clicks.

So that click through rate is about 27% if you're in position one, 15% when you're in position two, 11% when you're in position three. And it just really drops down pretty dramatically from there. And it is. That really tells the story of why we put that emphasis on being as high and really in that number one position. Because once you get past five, 6%, 4%, 3%, these are all pretty small numbers of the overall organic breakdown for any of the keywords that you're going after. For a branded search, it's going to be, should be quite a bit higher than that. Now, maybe someone's going to compare you to your Yelp listing or your TripAdvisor listing

or wherever else you're listed online. Hopefully they are still making it back to your base domain, your root domains going in that top spot. There's another point I want to talk about there. We'll tag that on in just a second. But it is, I think that really for any of those long tail keywords, whether they're activities in or obviously anything relating to lodging, vacation rentals, accommodations, anytime you can be as high as possible there, that's going to be the key. But even when you're getting, even when you're in the number one position, you're still only going to get approximately a quarter of the clicks that are coming through. So let's say you are getting

a thousand clicks for Myrtle Beach Condo Rentals and you're in that number one spot. Maybe you'll get 250 visits in that competitive market. Maybe it's more like 200 or maybe it's 150. So really putting into perspective there ways to get to that top position. I know if you're able to do it with your base domain, awesome. But if you're not, and let's say TripAdvisor is on there, you should probably be on TripAdvisor. If you're on, if there's a listing site, if there's a local tourism bureau, that's number one or two. It's more important to be, to find a way to get to that number one, number two, number three placement, I think, than necessarily... Sometimes the investment in SEO... Now, this is not to say don't invest in

SEO. This is to say sometimes the investment in SEO initially can be cost prohibitive. So find someone else. Again, find someone else that's already there, whether it is a listing site, whether it's X, Y, and Z. Make sure you're on there, do the SEO work behind the scenes so that you can butt up against it. And I would say battle against the big players there eventually down the road, but leverage what they've already done and make sure you're taking advantage of the higher click-through rates that are available potentially, even if it is, it's that first click a quarter, and then maybe you're getting 10% of the traffic on there. Still 10% that you weren't going to get if you're on page two, page three, or even further down the road there. So I guess, what are your thoughts on that? And then I have

one more question on the branded search side, just relating to vacation rentals in our space. Yeah, I like that point. I've heard the barnacle seo kind of referred to what you're describing where it's like you are a tiny particle you are not a large ship but you can attach yourself to these sites that do well from a traffic or organic traffic standpoint and then you are going to benefit from it it's actually something that i used to talk about more when i feel like this has slowed down a little bit but for a while there was like everyone and their brother was trying to do another listing site they were like oh we've got the code we've cracked the code we figured out if we only could bring back the old VRBO, like we're gonna here's

the site. There's been people that have tried. I'm not gonna name them. But there's been people who have spent hundreds of 1000s of dollars in domain names with no actual traffic. And I say, go look at that site and say, Okay, they have claims about what kind of traffic they're generating. But go verify that look in Google, how are people going to find them just based on the fact that they have whatever thing they claim they have, if they don't have traffic, then what are you after? And there's regional sites where we can mention this one, because it's something that I think someone that we've both worked with in the past, but David and Gotti from smokey mountains.com has a regional site. Obviously, if you're in Florida, that site

does no use to you, although he has a site in Florida as well. But that particular site have no use to but if you're in the Smoky Mountains, it provides, I won't say exact numbers, but like hundreds of thousands of visitors come into that site to check it out on a monthly basis. And it would be phenomenal for you to get traffic from that source. Like you said, if you couldn't afford to kind of do your own SEO campaign.

And I think there's actually a lot of logic in that. In fact, the tier list that we've worked on that's coming out with the project that we're working on with a writer of mine right now is the first thing that I actually recommend people do is not create an SEO campaign. If you have one or two properties or you're doing $100,000, $200,000 a year in bookings, that's probably not what you need to do where you're creating that approach. It's usually rank for your brand name, create a brand name, rank for that. That's actually your first SEO win.

It's not going and trying to rank for, like you were saying earlier, condo rentals and Myrtle Beach or something like that that's very competitive. So yeah, that's kind of the way that I see that. And then, like you were saying earlier, condo rentals and Myrtle Beach or something like that. That's very competitive. So yeah, that's kind of the way that I see that. And then, yeah, your branded question. I'm curious. I was going to say, and it leads right into that branded question of, okay, so as we are pushing more towards generative search, and we've seen some of these results that are substandard, to say the very least, do you recommend, and I don't know how many people you're catching at where they're in the branding or working through that, but do you recommend having vacation homes, vacation rentals, cabin rentals in the actual name right now? Or have you consulted on this recently where it is? And I've seen this kind of in LinkedIn as well, where people are just generally saying, maybe we should be getting away from that. But

knowing where generative search is going as well, what are your thoughts on, again, differentiating the name from vacation rentals or vacation homes? Yeah, I think it's market dependent. And I think it's brand dependent. What is that brand actually trying to achieve? Because I've certainly seen some people who are shoehorning in vacation rental brand names into areas where vacation rentals is not the primary use case of the property. They're in like urban markets where if you're in New York City, it's like legal to even do any sort of form of short term rentals. But if I had to choose between naming something like Conrad's short term rentals or Conrad's vacation rentals, and I was based in New York City, I would take short term rentals because that makes more sense. If I was doing that in Myrtle Beach, I would pick vacation rentals if I was just doing it based on that only on that single criteria. I think it depends like that's

the classic SEO answer to always, right? It depends. But I think you have to look at your market. There's actually a great book. I actually had a call with someone the other day who has a brand name and he says he likes it, but he also hasn't launched anything yet. And I said, read this book before you decide that this is what you're going forward with. It's called Hello, My Name is Awesome. I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And it basically teaches you how to actually name a company, name a product, name a brand, something like that. And some of the clients that I think we've done the best with that have gotten the most SEO traffic

do typically have rental or rentals, those types of names inside of the brand name. But we've worked with some that don't have that in there and they do well too. So I think that it's more about the way you promote that brand and the way that you talk about it in the marketplace, the way you present it than just simply this or this keyword or this term is included or not included. There's obviously phenomenally successful companies. Twitty would be a good example in the Outer Banks that don't really have, I think it's Twitty Vacation Rentals, but their domain is twitty.com and they dominate

the organic search landscape out there for that search. And they don't have any sort of really strong branding on their side that relates to rentals or vacation rentals in their domain or in a lot of their material. Once you get to the site, you see it, but you don't really see it in that initial first step. So would you rather have Outer Banks Vacation Rentals.com or Twitty.com if you were them? I think the answer is they like their brand and what they built with it.

So I would suspect they'd be happy with the choices that they've made. Yeah, it depends on what you're trying to do. My general point of view though. And I had a client that for a while that was doing the strategy and then he got bought out by the Casa is that he had his name plus vacation rentals in the market that he was in. So it was a ski market and he had the area ski market. It wasn't Breckenridge,

but imagine he was like Breckenridge vacation rentals.net actually not.com. And over a while though, because he pushed hard on that brand, despite the subpar domain name, he ended up ranking number one. We tried to help him do that because people would search for it and he put his brand in so many places

that the exact match domain I think actually helped him. And he was ranking ahead of a lot of these other sites that had a lot more bigger SEO budgets or bigger approaches to it. He was a much smaller player in the market that he was in. So I think that there's a case to be made for that approach as it relates to all the stuff we're talking about here. Are we going to get more clicks, impressions, et cetera, from that approach? But you got to be careful because I think that it's very easy to try to do that in

a market that's established. And then you go by the exact match domain and you actually don't get the progress that you're after. So a buyer beware on that one and consult that book. I think that would help quite a bit for sure with that approach. That's perfect. That's I mean, that is I think that's something that it scares me. It does scare me every time

I see a vacation that vacation rentals term that and again, just location vacation rentals. We I think there are what three Gulf Shore rentals Gulf Shore vacation rentals like that type of thing

where once you start and ultimately this could do a whole nother branding episode that is probably more comprehensive than we could ever dream of getting into here. But yeah, that's certainly something that it's going to contribute to your SEO. The name of your business is always going to contribute to the SEO, whether you're including vacation rentals in your name or not. Yeah, for sure. Maybe we could turn the page then a little bit and go down the path of talking about these tools, Ahrefs and SEMrush, which also have very fun and unique names, I guess, in some respect, because you mentioned, we've talked about this before, I tend to be more of an Ahrefs person, although I do have access to both. That's my default. And I tend to look there first.

I think you mostly look at SEMrush for kind of your thing. I've told people before, this is a Coke versus Pepsi. This is a kind of your thing. I've told people before, this is a Coke versus Pepsi. This is a Honda versus Toyota thing. You'll find loyalists on both sides, but they both have similar problems when you're looking at this level from a data perspective. So inside of Ahrefs, you might see the term DR or domain rating pop up a bit. I think in SEMrush, correct me if I'm wrong, it's authority score. I think you saw that earlier. Yeah. So what these measurements are trying to do that again, the number and this would be back to the kind of the original context of some SEO person, agency person sends you a report and they say, Oh, your Ahrefs domain rating went from 29 to 32. You may look at that again and go, what does that mean? That's not really useful information.

What they're trying to do is give you a rough relative idea of how authoritative how many links basically that domain has quality links that domain has versus other sites that are out there on the internet. So it's not indexing you against other vacation rental companies or brands per se, although I guess they're just indexed against every other site on the internet. But they're trying to give you a sense of how, I'm using air quotes for the audio listeners, how quote unquote authoritative a site may be. And one thing that's important about these scores, I know this is the case for Ahrefs, I believe it's the case for SEMrush, is these are logarithmic measurements. So in other words, going from zero to five is not that hard.

Going from five to 10, not really that hard, but it's a little bit harder. Going from 10 to 20 takes a bit of effort. 20 to 30 takes a good amount of effort. 30 to 40 takes a lot of effort. 50 to 60 takes a ton of effort. 70 to 80 and so on. And they go all the way up to 99. And the site with a 99 domain rating inside of Ahrefs is like google.com or facebook.com

or twitter.com or those types of sites, like your top 10 top five media websites in the entire internet. So most sites that we work on, at least in the Ahrefs side, happy to hear your perspective on the SEMRush side of things are typically like 15 to 50, somewhere in that range. Sometimes we take in people that are a bit smaller, they're trying to grow, they're not in super competitive markets. But it's usually a decent, simple way to measure site A versus site B. But it's not to be just be taken in at this like perfect face value, because it's all it is, it's an estimate from a third party tool, like Google doesn't access or even care about this data, they have their own stuff that they can see on their side of things, there used to be page rank, maybe that's a different topic

for a different day. Another thing, visible page rank, but that's basically what they're trying to measure is they're trying to measure roughly how authoritative a site is. In theory, based on all other factors being roughly equal, a site with more authority tends to rank better than a site with less authority. But what's your kind of take on this from the SEMRush side? Do you kind of, is that gospel to you? Or is it more just like a directional number? No, it's about the same thing. It's a nice visual as far as I think if you're looking at it, use it for growth. If you're actually, you can use it as a metric by which you are growing and looking at just their, SEMrush's, their definition is, let's see here, backlinks.

SEMrush uses authority score to measure the impact of web page on or domains links. Authority scores are compound metric that grades the overall quality of the website or web page. I hear their calculations based on three main facets, link power, organic traffic, spam factors. So they're probably building into if you're getting a lot of spam back linking and stuff like that. Your organic traffic, that's where, yes, if that's a big lever in what we're doing, obviously, most of the people in our space just aren't going to have the sheer volume of traffic coming through at some of those larger websites that you're talking about there before. So I think it's a nice to know. Are you basing all of your business decisions on anything that you're going to see there? No, I don't think so. Now, I think as with anything, if it's really

negative and it's going to come to, then obviously that's a red flag marker of, oh, what happened? Something, if you see dramatic decrease, and I think that is the nice thing is that I'm assuming Ahrefs is the same way where there's a measurement of week over week or month over month or time period over time period. So you can actually see if you're putting these domains into projects, you're going to be able to understand, okay, my authority score has gone from 19 up to 24 in the last 30 days. Awesome. Wonderful. Or it's gone the other way. It's a benchmarking metric, but not something that I'm going to say, hey, this is all that we're going to do there. And

again, just when you look at the link power, okay, quality and quantity of backlinks. Yeah, that's certainly good. And we want to focus on higher domain authorities and stuff like that as we see it. But all of those numbers are made up numbers. Everything we're looking at here is more or less a made up number. Trust what you're going to see, but also take a little logic into it and just make sure you're not just focused in on those numbers and you're really focusing in on the quality. Look at Google Analytics, look at some of these other more, I would say, accurate, inaccurate, but driving information, driving KPIs, as opposed to look at some of the other, some of the other metrics we'll talk about outside of the authority score in these tools can be helpful. Talking about keyword difficulty and search volume and whether or not search volume is good there. But this authority score, I think it's a nice to know number and probably

is more of an indication of your linking strategy than necessarily anything else that you're doing truly on the technical SEO side of things, I would say. Yeah, it would be a very poor score or number number to optimize for too in my opinion because like you said it can be gamed very easily go buy a bunch of low quality links and your authority square typically in the short term will rise very quickly and then those may not actually provide any true benefit to you from a traffic standpoint or from a organic ranking standpoint in fact over time that may actually hurt you but in the the short term, you can find sites there. So like you said, the better metrics you look at going back to like inside of Ahrefs,

at least then SEMrush has a similar thing, in my opinion. If you don't have access to the actual analytics data, obviously you're estimating how much traffic, for example, your competitor gets, they're not gonna give you access to their analytics. Obviously that's where the real value of these tools comes into play, where you can say, okay,

I know I'm getting roughly 10,000 visitors inside of SEMrush or Ahrefs is telling me i'm getting it could the number could be off by a decent margin it could say you're getting 5 000 when you're actually getting 10 000 it could actually say you're getting 15 000 when you're actually getting 10 000 so these numbers are directionally not super close at these lower traffic levels they tend to get a little more accurate the bigger the site in my experience like i have a client who gets one to two million visitors a month from google inside of semEMrush. It's 985. Like it's pretty accurate if you were to go look inside of that platform. But you can go look at your competitor and say, okay, they think I'm getting

10. I'm really getting 15. For the time being, we'll put that to the side. But when I put my competitor in there, does this tool claim I'm getting more or less than them from an organic traffic standpoint? The metrics around just looking at the link or the domain rating, like you said, it's useful. It's nice to know, but it's not really anything that you should be optimizing for. It's not something that we put on our reporting or anything like that, because if a client were really asking about it, I'd be like, okay, if you really want to know, we can put it in there. But I don't think it really, it doesn't move the needle.

It's not revenue driving. It's just a way to quickly measure and say, okay, this one has this one as this based on what we're estimating. Okay. In theory, we should be able to rank a little bit better, but take a high domain rating site and put crap content on it. And you're not going to rank for a thing. It's only one small measure of an overall approach. So that's what those numbers are. That's what they mean. And

then in my again, the follow up here that I think is really worth going into is the fact that estimated traffic, which is what it is an estimate, I guess, tends to be a little bit more useful and a little bit more actionable when you're talking about measuring how much site a traffic may be getting, or sorry, measuring how much traffic a site may be getting and kind of looking at the difference between those two. So that would be what I'd focus on as well. One other number in there that we have in the outline that is, we bring up quite a bit, we will talk about this a little bit more with clients when they're asking why we choose certain topics or why we're choosing to create certain blog content is keyword difficulty. So maybe you could break down

keyword difficulty for us super quick. What does that number actually mean? And how is it measured inside of some of these tools? Yeah, keyword difficulty, it's really how difficult, how competitive that landscape is in the overall organic visual. If you've got a keyword difficulty, I think in the SEMRush side of things, it's zero to 100 being the most difficult, zero being the least difficult. So it is on average, a lot of the long tail keywords that we look for on the lodging side and even on the just general travel things to do activity side of things in the 40 to 50 range. And again, it depends on how competitive the overall market is and how many websites are

out there, really. But that's something that typically most of the keywords that we're targeting are in that middle, medium range of difficulty. And it is, that's based on number of searches that are out there, certainly the search volume for any of the keywords, but also that competitive landscape. So if you've got 10 competitors in the area, 10 competitive domains, as opposed to 40 or 50, obviously it's going to affect that there. And I think the higher you go up. So if you're going to the state level for some content, obviously it's going to be a little more competitive there. I've seen competitive numbers in the 70 to 80 range. When you're going down to the city or maybe

metamarket level, Smoky Mountains, as opposed to going down to Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, maybe aren't the best examples, but it should, as opposed to going down to Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, maybe aren't the best examples, but it should, as you go down to those city levels, it should be a little more easy. That difficulty should lift or get a little lower there so that you can go after, it gives you, I would say more granular nature of what kind of keywords you're going after. But have you seen similar things on Ahrefs or Or I guess, do you use that? Or is there a keyword difficulty equal or parallel metric that you're looking at there? Yep, they have the same thing, keyword difficulty, zero to 100. And again, typically, for the sites

that we work on, we're looking for stuff that's in the 20s, like where we're typically able to consistently see results. Sure, every once in a while, we get lucky and like restaurants tend to have pretty high difficulty scores because of how competitive that content is. But restaurants is stuff that we have ranked for and we've created content around in the past and done well with that. For example, restaurants in city or in town name, it'll have pretty high difficulty scores. But if we put together a good piece of content, we can rank for it. So I like the difficulty score metrics. They are in the atrial side of things are mostly measured on links, though. In fact, they're pretty much only measured on links. So it can be a little misleading,

because you could have sites with high domain ratings, that's very difficult to outrank. But that particular page doesn't have a lot of links. It's just that domain has a lot of links. So it's not a critical page for TripAdvisor or Yelp or something like that to rank for a tiny little beach town restaurant. So it's gonna be hard to outrank that particular site, generally, just because Google tends to respect these huge brands and these huge domains. But you can if you provide more useful context and more useful information. We have a mutual client, I believe, in West Virginia that we've both worked with over the past year plus at this point, who has a domain rating, I still think that's in the single digits, I think it's still eight or nine. Although we've

been working on building links to the site, it's it's hard because it's a small area, and there's not much link opportunities, but we're getting some progress on the link side. It's not mind bending, but he ranks very well because not a lot of people are going after this tiny town in West Virginia, restaurants, things to do cabins being the kind of the core money making keyword for him. So you can actually get a lot of success there. So the keyword difficulty says 25 or something for this area plus restaurants. And yet his little domain writing nine site is ahead of almost everybody. It's like second right now Google for things to do because of the fact that we've created good content. So a lot of nuance in these numbers, which is a recurring theme. If you haven't noticed here

on minimarker31, if you haven't noticed a lot of nuance kind of in how you approach these numbers, but generally speaking, you can look at the keywords you're ranking for inside of these tools. Look at, okay, what am I on page one for today? Oh, I'm getting on page one for stuff that's in the teens, that's in the twenties. It's reasonable to assume that if you were to create a really nice, awesome piece of content of similarly scored keyword difficulty content ideas, you can expect that you'll generally do pretty well there. A lot of generally unexpected estimates, but that's our experience with it. And it also tells you potentially how hard it would be to rank for a certain area. Orlando being a good example. If you go look at Orlando vacation rentals inside of Ahrefs, I'll do that right now so I can get an exact number on it. That'll have a very high difficulty

score. So you should know that going in. It's going to be challenging. Yeah, this one's a 58 out of 100 inside of Ahrefs for that particular keyword. So a lot of people are going after a lot of well-established companies with tons of links and lots of different SEO efforts that have been put into place are doing well on that keyword. And the traffic they get is very valuable. So it's not going to be easy for you to just come in on day one and outrank Expedia, Vacasa, Verbo, TripAdvisor, let's see, floridarentals.com, which is one of the regional sites. Home2Go is on page one. So there's a lot of competitive people going after that, including people that I know in the industry like Cassiola, they're on page two for that keyword. When they're not a client or anyone that, you know, I know that well, but like they're on page two, booking.com is on page two, not even booking.com is on page two for that keyword. When they're not a client or anyone that you know, I know that well, but like they're on page two, booking.com is on page two,

not even booking.com is on page one for that keyword, because it's pretty competitive. You got to always look at those things and measure them. I think that is something where if an agency you're working with is suggesting content, I think they should have some sense of keyword difficulty layered in with that content. Obviously, it needs to match like your guest persona who you're going after all those kind of things. But I also think it's a waste of time to produce 100 articles that you have no chance of ranking for no chance of getting any initial traction on. I think you're better off producing content that's actually going to get you some results. Even if it's lower traffic value to you. Initially, you got to get some

wins on the board as you continue to scale up content. So that's kind of what that number does for us was interesting on the SEMRush side of things, keyword difficulty, we have 64% difficult. But the little caveat they give here is you will need to have 145 referring domains and optimized content to compete here. So they are definitely factoring in the high, again, high referring domains. It does give you a little bit of, I would say, insights into how they're viewing the difficulty and what it's not just a matter of search volumes, not that it's, it is, you need to have 145 referring

domains and looking at the, even the results there, as you get down to the bottom, I would guess that everything is, it's in the range. There's one, one result, the number seven result right now, I see Epic Florida Rentals has zero referring domains. Everything else is right in that range there. So very interesting to see just how it gets broken down when you go down to that. When you look at in the back end of those analytics there. Yeah. And ultimately, that's what all this stuff is. And when you're working with an agency, or if you're trying to understand these numbers for yourself and your business, it's nuanced. It's going to take you some time to sort through what these things actually mean. But you can get it directionally pretty accurate pretty quickly. Okay, here's where traffic's

coming from. Here's the estimate of where you know, they think they're getting traffic from. And here's how here's what it means to me. So maybe that dovetails nicely into the next one, which is the value of organic traffic. In my mind, this is the one that is a really good thing to be measuring over an extended period of time. When a site's new, it's not getting much organic traffic. The only things you're ranking for back to our earlier commentary is probably brand searches, people looking specifically for the name of your company, or the name of homes that you have on and it's not getting much organic traffic. The only things you're ranking for, back to our earlier commentary, is probably brand searches. People looking specifically for the name of your company or the name of homes that you have on your program if you decide to brand or name each individual property.

A lot of our clients do that. Not everybody does though. So that's your initial, the value of that organic traffic actually is high to you, although it's relatively low cost to get that traffic initially. So that's the good news. Now, as you get more competitive,

as you go and try to rank for an Orlando vacation rentals, a Myrtle Beach vacation rentals type search, it becomes a little bit more difficult, obviously, but the value of that traffic is very high. So if you are one of these companies that's a local company ranking in the top 10 for an Orlando vacation rental search, the value of each of those clicks,

according to, we'll talk about the value of a click here in a second, but just to use the Google API data that I have access to, this particular keyword is gonna cost, yeah, 187 a click now, Orlando Vacation Rentals, which is actually pretty modest. That's actually a little bit less than I would expect. We don't have a client in that market that we're doing any PPC work for yet, so I wasn't aware of that number. So it's $1.87 a click. So if you were to rank for that and get 10% of the 18,000 people per month that are searching for that keyword right now, you're talking about getting to 1,800 clicks a month, and the value

of that click is roughly $1.90. You know, the value of that traffic, if you were to buy in Google ads on a monthly basis, would be just a shade under or shade over, excuse me, $3,400 a month. So there's a lot of value in that traffic. That's just one keyword, too, by the way, we, we didn't talk about this yet. But inside of Search Console, you'll often see that one page will rank for not one keyword, not two, not seven, not 10, but potentially 100 keywords, a single page can rank for 100 keywords that are all basically the same thing. They're closely related. So it'll be someone will search Orlando vacation rentals, someone else will search Orlando, Florida vacation rentals. And it's let's be honest, that's the same thing. It's just

they use a different modifier when they put in their actual query into Google. So when you go sum up the value of all the traffic that you're getting to a page once begins to rank well in Google, it can be in the 1000s or 10 thousands of dollars a month of traffic value that you're getting from your SEO efforts. And that doesn't often show up inside of our reports. It's not something that shows up there. Obviously, you look at the impact of that traffic and how much revenue you're getting from it. But it's something that I think you should certainly take into account. And there's companies out there that specifically buy. I mentioned that client earlier that was in Colorado that sold out to FACASasa. I believe one of the reasons they wanted him is because they took his domain, redirected

it to their landing page in their particular market for Vacasa, and they basically bought themselves a number one ranking overnight. There was certainly some value in doing that. Obviously, there was value in the contracts that they had. That was the bulk of the value of that sale and what he was able to achieve in a sale to Vacasa, which was great for him financially, but certainly part of the business value that he had was the fact that vacasa ranked number one overnight once i redirected that domain to their larger set of inventory both the ones the set they acquired from him and then a bunch of other inventory that they had in the market so yeah the organic traffic once you're seeing momentum once you're ranking well we have clients who excuse me are paying

five figures a month in ppc dollars they're paying 1010,000, $15,000 a month in PPC. And they're still getting 10,000 to 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a month in Google organically on these really high value rental keywords. And there's a lot of value in that too. So calculating that, understanding what it's worth, I think is a worthy exercise to do. Not something you need to do all the time. Maybe once a year is probably sufficient. As you see the traffic scale up.

And then cost per click can go up or down. It's an auction. So the cost can go up or down over time. You might want to keep an eye on that too. Was it cheaper for me to get traffic now than it was before? We have a new client we just signed who I was, he was very shocked when I told him that his market, we might only have to pay 90 cents to a dollar per click. He was told by other companies that he might have to pay two or three or four dollars per click or something like that to get the traffic. So keep an eye on that because there's a lot of value in knowing what those figures are. And again, knowing what value you're extracting from your SEO

efforts for sure. So your thoughts on organic traffic value as well. No, I think you hit the nail on the head there as far as really understanding that if you're not getting these clicks or you have to get traffic to your website, you kind of get people to get to the website. If they're not getting to the website, they're not booking. Owners aren't happy. It's the ecosystem that you have to sustain there. So it is, if you're not getting that traffic through that channel, how are you getting that traffic to come through? And if you play that kind of that cost analysis of, okay, high converting traffic coming through.

If you look on average, most of the partners that I look in their Google analytics at, and I don't have to look at the booking side as much anymore, but it is. That's a channel where direct is going to be pretty high. Organic is still a driver. It's a pretty heavy driver of revenue and bookings coming through. So right now you're getting that for free. If you're going to pay for that same traffic, how much are you going to have to pay? And does that ROI really pay itself off at

that point? Can you still find the same ROI, 8 to 1, 10 to 1, 12 to 1? It depends on what you're really looking for a goal on the PPC side of things. But can you truly justify that cost when you know that if you put the work in over time, those costs will go down and you can reinvest instead of doing PPC reinvest in email marketing or reinvest in another channel that may be maybe a higher converting for you or just may be a better fit for what you're trying to push there. I think it's not just the paid versus organic. It's how that fits in your entire marketing budget and marketing ecosystem and making sure that you have a dollar value that you can put to

what that organic traffic means to you. Maybe it's 50 grand a year over the course of the entire year if you're taking your top 10 keywords and calculating your cost per click, calculating the traffic you're getting. I think it's a fantastic exercise and one that I haven't done nearly as often or I didn't do nearly as often as I probably should have, trying to really show the value of SEO on the back end. Yeah, and ultimately that's what it's about is that if you're a business owner, you're trying to decide

where's my marketing dollar best spent. I've talked about this before. I don't think on this show to my knowledge, so if I'm repeating myself, I apologize, but I believe that any media, almost any media channel can work, right? If you bought every billboard in America and advertise your vacation rental company, you would get bookings off of it. Now it would be

ridiculously inefficient. You'd have to spend millions of dollars to potentially get 20 or 30 bookings a month. That wouldn't make any sense to do that from a return on ad spend perspective, but it would work, right? Any form of media, any form of advertising can work and will work at a high enough volume. The real question is not, does it work or not work? The real question is, how hard do I have to pull this lever to get the outcome that I want? And ideally, we're putting in minimum effort to get maximum output. That's really what we're after. And that's the reason that I'm so bullish and still bullish on SEO, despite all the changes going on right now, is that even if our traffic gets haircut a little bit, I still think we're in a great position to

continue to yield a lot of positive traffic and a lot of positive return on our time and our investment from this channel. Because when you look at it, once you're ranking, once you put in that effort around creating content, creating links, making sure the site's in good technical shape, and doing that on an ongoing basis, you're extracting 10s of 1000s of dollars a month from a traffic value from these efforts. And you're getting that instantly as you get more booking. So it's a very clear and obvious path in my experience. Let's go down the last two here. We'll wrap these relatively quickly. I know we're time here. So search volume, last one I had here, where does the data come from and why trust it? I think that's the question you should ask when you're looking at a spreadsheet or data from someone, which is that where'd you get the search volume data? Again, we've mentioned on the show

already, Ahrefs, SEMrush. I've mentioned the Google Ads API, which I have access to. I tend to trust that one the most, the non-metered API that gives you the actual monthly search volume data. It is, in my opinion, the most accurate one for month by month data. So again, if you look at a keyword like Orlando vacation rentals, a lot of these tools will give you an average, which is great. Seasonal business like ours, it's not always the best thing to know. You generally want to know when does it peak, when does it fall, and what's the delta between

those two. So if I put Orlando vacation rentals into the Google Ads API tool that I have, I can see that the average is 16,000 a month. That's great. But it goes as high as what's this 29,000 a month, and it goes as low as 5,400 a month. So there's a huge difference, right? 5,000 searches versus almost 30,000 searches, depending on if we're in the low season or the high season in this particular market. And that's the case for almost every market that we're a part of, whether it's Orlando, a ski market, a beach market, a lake, whatever the case may be. If you can get it, I prefer that to get data from that particular API, the Google Ads API, because even though it's meant for advertisers, it does

typically give the most accurate data. Sure, use SEMrush, Ahrefs, if that makes sense to you from a cost or budget standpoint. You can sometimes look at all three together if you want to get really nerdy and try to determine where the keyword volume actually is. But you know, ensure it should give you a rough sense of how many people each month look for that particular topic. When it tends to get a little bit less accurate as the bottom of the scale, in my opinion, maybe you can talk to this on the owner side, but it says that 10 people a month search for short term property management in location, but then we go run Google ads, and we find that there's more. So maybe you could go on that thread for a second. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. And certainly on the owner side, it's, it is low search volume.

There there's we're, if we look at do searches for most of our areas, it's 10, maybe 20. Occasionally we'll get 30, 40, 50 searches a month, but that's just, it's a low numbers game. And I think key, the key there with the Google side, Google does have search trends. That's not where you want to do the searches, or that's not where you want to do the comparison because it's based on a scale of one to 100. So it may be 70% of the or 70% of the searches are happening for Orlando vacation rentals. If you do vacation homes, maybe it'll be 30. But it's not really the actual search volume there. So that's the one thing where people who do are looking for kind of that Google search tool that make sure you're looking at the keyword planner, not the

search trends. But yeah, I think that's something where just being able to visualize what that number is. And in a lot of cases on the management side of things, especially in some smaller to middle markets, I would say, you're not going to show as having any search volume. That is the reality. It's going to say too low to search. That's what we deal in. We deal in dozens, not hundreds, not thousands. If you're making a decision about going into a market, yeah, do a quick keyword planner search or do something like that and do some considerations of how many people are doing searches for the area. Is that a deal breaker on whether or not to enter?

No, absolutely not. There are other ways to find people, market to those people and potential homeowners. But if you're just looking for people, if you've made your business and we have some partners who say, I want to spend on Google because that's where I've seen the most value

over the course of my career. I don't care the cost. I don't care that there's only 10 to 20 searches per month in a given area. I want to get those 10 to 20 searches per month in a given area. I want to get those 10 to 20 searches. And so that's what we do. And then that's where those cost per click gets a little high on us. So maybe where you're talking about some that maybe two, $3 or less than a dollar on the guest side of things, on the owner side of things, maybe we're in the 20 to 30 to 40

to $50 cost per click. And again, it's getting that measure of how much does that traffic cost and the owner side, can you actually find that traffic? If it's not coming through the Google side? Yeah, we'll find a way, but it gets a little interesting. What's the expression where there's a will, there's a way or something like that? Will people to search more, unfortunately, in the owner side, that's the challenge. Yeah. So I think it's a good, again, it's a good number to have a sense of. But as Paul highlighted very well there, be aware of that low end. Be aware of that low end of the number.

It's just hard for all these tools to collect the data when there's only 10, 20, 30 people a month searching. Think about it. How many? I don't even know the number off the top of my head, but it's billions of queries that Google processes on a yearly basis. So to find your little pocket down there in your little tiny neck of the woods sometimes can be hard for Google, obviously. Last one here, we'll put a bow on it after this one, is referring domains or backlinks. Small thing, I just wanted to highlight the difference between

it. A domain is just one website. So that is inventory.com. Buildupbookings.com is the domain. But you could have, in theory, multiple links from that domain. The most obvious example maybe being like you're in the footer of the website. The footer shows up on every page. That could generate on a 100-page website 100 backlinks, but it's only from one domain. So clients often get confused by that. Oh, we've only added 17 new backlinks since we chatted. Yes, but 17 different referring domains, like 17 unique websites linked to you. And there's a lot of value in doing that from an SEO perspective, which we'll talk about maybe on a future episode about link building. So you just understand the difference between the two of that. And just the reason that matters is that an additional backlink from the

same domain tends to not carry a lot of weight. The real value you typically get is from a link that's from that first link. There tends to be diminishing value as you get more links from the same domain because Google just understands, okay, you've already given this site essentially some of your page rank. Additional links aren't going to necessarily double or triple or quadruple the results from it. So you generally want to be focused on link building side, generating links from new domains, not just the same one over and over again. Of course, there's a time and a place when you might want that, but it's not like your default thing that you should be focusing on, on in my experience, anything there or backlinks, referring domains. I was gonna say that's the key. I think

the higher you can get in the page structure. So it is if you can get those backlinks, the back that's referring domain to come from the home page as opposed to a sub page or directory page or something like that that's always where the value is going to come from but still it really is about the difference between the domains i mean if you five different domains as opposed to five links from one domain you once again it's simply it's pretty simple of Google likes more domains, Bing likes more domains, all the search engines. They're looking for you to be a, it is, it's reputation. It's essentially Google playing reputation management of, okay, there are five expertise or five what I perceive as high authority websites that are pointing back to you. Clearly, you're an expert or authority in this domain, in this area. That's where that link juice comes in.

So tie it all up. That's how we ended up there. So yeah, no, all good. I think that's a good place for us to put a bow in it. This one ran a little bit long because it's hard to find all the numbers and we didn't even really go into all the nuanced numbers that we could have gone into. We could have made this a five hour episode if we wanted to. But hopefully that episode is good for folks listening. If you made it this far, we really appreciate it. We would always appreciate a review. That's a simple number that helps us. You go to your podcast app of choice, you click five stars, you write something nice that makes our day makes us smile. So we appreciate that. And if you were going to come back next week, the new episode,

if you have any other questions or feedback or anything like that, feel free to email me Conrad C O N R A D at buildupbookings.com paul is p-a-u-l at ventori.com b-i-n-t-o-r-y.com so we appreciate it and we'll catch you on the next episode thanks so much