Heads In Beds Show - When You Should Build "Mini Sites" For Your Vacation Rental Business To Generate HUGE ROI

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

In this episode Conrad and Paul dive into the when, how, what and why of "mini sites" and how they can an extremely high ROI channel for you to build for your vacation rental marketing and SEO approach. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing🔗 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 & 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. As promised, we went ahead and made part one its own thing last week. If you haven't yet listened to that episode, go back one in your feed if you are open to doing so and listen to the Google versus Verbo breakdown that we did from the tech email. That was pretty clever.

But part two this week was a different episode. We focused specifically on mini sites. So mini site is when you have your main brand vacation website, and then you build a secondary site off of that. When should you use one? How does it work? What's the benefits of it? We'll cover all that in this episode.

So this will be part two of our recording here. We're going to talk all about many sites. Let's go ahead and roll that now. We'll do a little bit of part two here, maybe on something that we actually did have in the show notes or in our outline, which is how to build secondary sites or many sites for your vocational business. We might've touched on this before in previous episodes, very briefly, I might've just said, Hey, here's one to consider it. But we thought we'd do a little bit of a deeper dive today into mini sites or secondary sites. I don't know what you want to call them. And it's actually funny. It actually, we just talked about this a few minutes ago, Verbo and Homeboy. They had these, they had these different brand strategies,

vacationrentals.com and they merged them all together. There may be a time and place for that. Maybe that's the wrong idea. We'll talk through it here in a second. So Paul, what would you call like a mini site or a secondary site for most markets, like most vacation rental managers in a single market? How would you define that? And what does it look like? And then we'll talk about some pros and cons. Oh, I've seen microsites used in a variety of ways. Obviously, at Ventura, we use them what we consider to be fairly effectively. I think it is. Whether it's a division of your business, whether it's a subset of your business, it's something to allow you to differentiate a little bit while still keeping

branding together, still keeping the experience and the cohesiveness of everything that you're going to do together. But I've seen microsites for different markets. I've seen microsites for guest side versus owner side. I've seen for if you're looking to get into the tour side of things and that's something where I think the key with a microsite is it's micro, it's small. It's not the full version of your site where you've got 100 pages or 1,000 pages and it's a huge site map and maybe people are going to make it to every page. Most likely people are not, but it is. I think the key to a microsite is you're really giving small digestible bits of information, whether that's content, whether that's marketing materials, whether that's assets, whether that's calls to action, whether that's content, whether that's marketing materials,

whether that's assets, whether that's calls to action, whether that's video, stuff like that. But I think that's the feel that in my experience, it's been a little more effective where you're not, you really are trying to make sure that people are focused on what the point of this microsite is. Again, for the owner side of things, we do. We want to talk about your values. We want to talk about your realtor program, how much people can earn, doing stuff like that. On the guest side of things,

maybe you want to talk about all the fun things you can do, all the activities you can take advantage of. But yeah, where have you used it? Where have you seen it? How have you seen them be effective, Conrad? Yeah, I didn't even think about that owner piece, but you're exactly correct. A lot of our clients use Venturi

as their owner management platform, and they have that linked in the navigation, typically joined.orlist or something like that,.theirwebsite.com. And it's on a different platform, but ultimately then owners are in that arena. And then you can put content, you can put landing pages on that domain. So from an owner perspective, I don't even think about that. I probably should have. Whoops. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. In my mind, when I think it, I always think maybe this is just the first exposure I had to it was the client that I've worked with for a long time. Now, really my longest tenured client has done it or has seen it done at a long time at the condo building level, especially here in the Myrtle Beach area, right? There's the broader

Myrtle Beach market. And then there's all these individual condo buildings that people might have an affinity towards. And depending on the construction of the building and how kind of things are put together, in some cases, it's every unit is individually owned, but there's some flag they all fall under fly under, right? So it might be called, you know, whatever beach sands 102 or something like that might be your unit, but it's all under beach sands, right? So the first exposure I had to many sites, I feel like effectively was and not clients that just have multiple websites. They used to use this PMS, now they use this PMS, but like an actual targeted site that actually had some real SEO value was like, they would go and try to buy beachsandscondos.com or they would try to go buy beachsandsrentals.com or beachsandsmb.com or

something like that. And they would build an entire website dedicated towards just that condo building. And there was a time with Google, certainly when I got started in SEO, this was the case, or pretty much any direct match EMD style domain like that would rank well in Google. So even with like minimal effort on the SEO side, just a homepage, about page, maybe a map, and then a few listings, like that was basically just a little doorway almost as what Google ended up calling it in a later update to get to your main sites. You'd go to that site, you would see information about that building, then you click book now and would bring you to like the main primary website so that they could track everything

there. And that strategy in my mind is one that still works today. In fact, we built a mini site for a client just a few months ago, and he's already ranking number one for the name of that condo building, plus the Outer Banks where he happens to be located. And it's number two, number three, it's getting in relative terms of traffic here won't see my popping, it's getting maybe three to 400 visitors a month, that's not a lot of traffic, but it's so high intent traffic, right? They're looking at that specific building. And then of course they have, he has six or eight units in that building. He gets a lot of conversions from that. Now in my head, when I think that's generally how I think about it, but I also have another

example. I have a client that I worked with a long time ago in Hilton. They've since been purchased by Vacasa, but at the time they had two different brand names. So they'd acquired a company, a smaller company in the market. It was called Aiden or Beach Me. And then they were called Vacation Rentals of Hilton Head Island. This was during my previous agency days. And at one point, they were ranking number one and number two for Hilton Head Vacation Rentals because they took these two brands and they worked on them somewhat independently. There was the same inventory across both sites, and they sorted it differently so that you wouldn't necessarily know that it was the same inventory. And so you started really digging in and looking at each individual

unit page or whatever. But that was, again, early exposure in my career to this idea of why not have multiple sites, I think at some point, it makes sense to have multiple sites at that level targeting really meaty head keywords with different sites. Once you've in this case, it was an acquisition, but they could have done the same thing by they reached number one in their main brand, why not try to another brand and try to get more traffic from it, right? It's like you're already harvesting a lot of traffic, why not get more. And since then, I've been exposed to a lot of clients that have multiple sites. We have a client in Ohio who actually has multiple sites targeting his same area, probably like six or seven, and two or three of them drive the majority of the traffic. But

that's worked phenomenally well for him. Yeah, it's my high level thoughts are a lot of different ways you can play this. I think the more specific the traffic, the less competitive it tends to be. So I tend to lean in that direction. But ultimately, you can do this in a lot of different ways. You could do a things to do site, you could do things to do in minnesota.com, if you could secure that, and then try to build something off of that platform, right? And then drive in relevant traffic to your vacational business. So there's a lot of different flavors of this. But my quick reaction, I'm curious your perspective on this is I find some people want to do this too early. Like I pitched this idea to people who are listening right now. And if your main site isn't dominating, don't do this.

Only do this in my mind when your main site is either dominating or it's like top three, four, maybe in that region for some of these keywords because otherwise you're splitting your efforts. And it's what's the expression? The man who chases two birds catches none or something like that.

I think that's what can happen if you're not careful here. But once you have that top ranking, then it makes sense to enter the mini site conversation. I don't know your perspective on it, but that's how I see it. I agree. And I think that's the thing is that you have to have a focus. You have to have a focus in the business. If you don't have that single focus, if you're just creating more, there's something to be said for increasing your real estate in search rankings. Completely

justified. But you don't want to just create something else because you think it's something to be said for increasing your real estate in search rankings. Completely justified. But you don't want to just create something else because you think it's going to do better. And I think you hit the nail on the head there with, hey, if you're not in the top three, you're just going to be peeling off because Google's going to maybe see more value in your microsite. You don't know what Google is going to find more value, but you hope that you're still going to be able to maintain the rankings on your primary site. But the other side of it, I think with so much consolidation in this space right now, where you do have brands getting acquired and you do have a lot of these things, I feel like that, or you do have flags

or you do have, you've got the, like mergers or? Mergers, but no, I'm actually thinking about the Casagos, the Grand Welcomes, franchise. Boy, that was a struggle. But with so many franchises coming under or popping up and really, I would say, taking some of these smaller businesses under their wings or doing stuff like that. I think that's where there is that question of, are these all microsites for the larger franchise? Who's benefiting? And I think that's the benefit of who's benefiting from these microsites. So is the consumer benefiting from the microsite? That's great. Is the business benefiting from the microsite? That's awesome. Is the franchise benefiting from the microsite?

I have questions. So that's, I think, between the mergers, between the acquisitions, between the consolidations, and then you're adding in some of these franchises over the top. I think this has become more frequent where we do, we get to work with a lot of grand welcome partners. We get to work with a lot of Casago partners. And a lot of them are in a lot of different positions where some are sitting on the primary domain still. Some are doing this. Some are, they're a, just a directory page under this larger brand. iTrip's another good example. They've got a great iTrip.net, iTrip.com. Everything's a subdirectory under there just within their thing.

But how do you really differentiate yourself when you're under the iTrip umbrella? It's finding someone that's buying that domain and then putting your own site under there. I think that's another area where I've found more effectiveness in those microsites because it does. It allows you to differentiate yourself and allow you to create more of a identity that's outside of just your flag chain, outside of just your franchise chain. You are XYZ owner at iTrip wherever or Casago wherever or whatever that happens to be. or Casago, wherever, or whatever that happens to be. And then you're able to leverage that further outside of just, hey, I'm going to take everything through one of these franchisees where there's a little dilution in there.

Let's just be honest. Someone gets to that page and are they always going to get to your area? That's the thing. When I see owner submissions come through from one of these flags and they're coming from the main site, how's that getting to everybody? If you got your own microsite, they're going to you automatically and you've got a little more control over that. So I think it's almost a recommendation to a point where if you are working with a franchise and there's some great franchise models out there. there. I think everybody's got a bone to pick with everybody once in a while, but I do. I think that allows you to differentiate a little bit outside of that. Now, you may not have the control to do that. They may put up some red flags and do whatever. You may have something in your contract that says you can't do that, but that's definitely something. I think it's on the same lines of that

condo building where you want to rank for the condo building. I want to rank specifically for my brand, not under the flag brand. What are your thoughts on that? And have you encountered that more? Yeah, we do have some Casago franchises that we've worked with, but they're all in their own domain. So they still have their domain name.com. And then in the footer or something like that, they may refer to their Casago kind of partnership agreement. So that seems to be because I know in some cases, one that we work with, it was already a business well before they joined the Casago. So it was like its own domain name, etc. The other one that we're working with, they're starting to work with their domain name has Casago in it, but it's still their own domain name. So I think it's interesting how they do that. Yeah, I don't have as much exposure as you

do to the smaller operators that have a few units in some markets and how they're doing their websites and things like that. Just broadly speaking, though, like, I feel like you're going to want to have more control over your website, if at all possible, I would much rather have and again, not a knock on itrip. I don't mean it to be that way at all. But I'd much rather have Conrad's cool cabins.com than Conrad's cabins.itrip.com. If that's my two options given to me, I feel a lot more confident in the first option being the one that I can work and grow than the second option. Again, not just the truth. But I will say this, there's a case to be made for a franchise model, let's say Casio launching their franchise model or something like that, where you have

Casio.com slash Minnesota, and I have cap Casio.com slash Myrtle Beach, and I figure out how to work within that subfolder and potentially get my results accelerated because I'm attached to a much larger, more authoritative domain. Again, not a client that would have any inside information. But I can make a case for that argument to potentially help a little bit from the SEO side, both to the main brand and also to the sub-brand or the franchise model that might work off of that. So that's an interesting one. There's a lot of examples that I would need to look at, to pull apart the best insights on that. But broadly speaking, I think when you join that franchise model, for the most part, you're giving up a lot of your control and a lot of your identity from

a brand perspective. And I think that I don't see many ones out there. The only one I can speak to personally is Casaga, who I've seen let them keep some brand in place, let them keep their own website, let them do their own marketing, and not really have handcuffs on them in some respects, so to speak there. And if you're joining a franchise model that has all those marketing pieces in place, they're going to be killing it for you. Excellent. But I just don't know if that's out there as today in the marketplace. I've not seen that where I see a franchise model, for example, dominating the search results where I go do a search for a given market. And I see, oh, yeah, of course, there's the itrip website ranking. Oh, of course, there's the

Casio website ranking. I just don't see that. So it's not that it can't happen. It could happen. But I don't it's not in place today. So it would be hard for me to go to one of those people who've signed up for one of those models and say, oh yeah, you're in the right seat from my control perspective. Maybe there's other benefits to joining, but I, if it was my sister wanted to get in the business and said, should I do it this way? I probably would lean towards making sure she had control of her website overall else for sure. Yeah.

That's, I mean, and that is, I think that's, we can have another discussion about franchises at some point down the line, because it is, I think that's, we're going to have another discussion about franchises at some point down the line. Because it is, I think that they are, they play, they certainly play a role in the industry right now. And we can discuss the benefits and downsides there. But I do, I think that is the one thing is that kind of you lose your uniqueness. You lose your individuality. You are under the flag and that's to the benefit if it's a good brand and if it's a good chain, if it's good, everything like that, it's a good franchise. At the same time, if there is ever anything bad that happens under that umbrella, now you're just stuck holding the

water there with everybody else. And yeah, I think that's an area where I think that's where you're going to see microsites more frequently or the need for microsites more frequently if you are trying to differentiate yourself, because I can't think of another way that you're going to be able to do it really. So that is, I think generally microsites are, as long as you don't just create a dozen or two dozen microsites, just, oh, I'm going to start ranking for all these little extraneous keywords. First of all, Google is going to see that and they I'm going to start ranking for all these little extraneous keywords. First of all, Google is going to see that.

And they're probably going to ding you like they're dinging everybody else when they see something malicious afoot. But it is, I think there's definitely a case to be made for if your business is where it needs to be. If you've exercised your organic growth to a high level and you're looking for more, you can't find any more right now. I think that's a great way to do it. And as long as you're doing it the right way, you're doing the back end SEO, you're putting all those technical aspects in. all those technical aspects in.

It's the other thing. You're not just going to throw a site together, not do any of the SEO on it, and it's all of a sudden going to rank just because you've got a great domain or because you've got this and you've got that. It is. It's still a process, but I think as long as you're working cohesively with your full brand and your primary domain and all these other items, I think they work. Yeah. One other thing you mentioned a minute ago, I just wanted to stack in there a little bit

further, was the idea of stacking the search results, right? So having people come in and say, for some of the clients that we work with, we're actually doing that where we have the branded site ranking well organically, hopefully the top few results, we have the many site ranking well organically. So we're already getting two results. Then we go in and do PPC on the other on those pages as well. So we actually get four, we have a client where we're getting four of the top eight results are our results. So we're in theory, we should be getting more than half the traffic or so, especially because they rank number one and number two for some of these keywords. And again, there's some keywords are so valuable to you. So important to

you from an overall conversion perspective. I did a recording for a client. She's on maternity leave. So she didn't want to do like a meeting, but she's like, can you send me a recording of my report? Just send it to me. And I'm like, no problem. I got you. So i did a recording of her report and sent it over to her from ppc and i was like these keywords are converting to four percent i was like i don't know how to put into words how good that is because they're non-branded keywords but it's an a plus plus result right like i would do anything to get more of that traffic because a four and a half percent conversion rate on a booking is outrageous right and it's a building it's back to the earlier commentary it's a building and that client it would be easy for them to Okay, let me just go ahead and build 20 condo mini buildings,

because they have all these different buildings they manage in this in the speech market in Florida. And then just build these out, and we're going to rank on them. But to your point, Paul doesn't work that way, quite as simple. You have to build unique content on each one, ideally unique photos. Ideally, you have some, like some of the ones that we do the best on, we have a little about us page or things to do page. We have like nearby is one page that we typically put on there. So it takes, it could take 25, 35 hours to put together a mini site, so to speak. And that's without even doing any onsite booking functionality. That's another layer we didn't really discuss. Some clients that I worked with in the past actually had onsite booking functionality. So not only was it a mini

site in the sense of the brand, the name, they actually built different logos for the different companies. Brooks talked about this before during his Vantage days. He did that. But that you would actually book, I actually believe that was the case with those mini sites in Vantage. You could actually book on them. So it wasn't just that it was a mini site. It was almost this whole functioning individual entity in some respect that was pulled off of the main site that you could work within. The more simple version that you click a button and then you go over to the main site to actually complete that reservation or complete that booking. But you could take this to the 10th degree.

And that could be potentially a $5,000 or $10,000 investment to put the mini site up and rolling. But you can make it back relatively quickly. Five or six bookings, you're probably back break even. Maybe 10 bookings, you're back in the profitable standpoint from running those mini sites. Yeah, I just wanted to mention that. Stacking the SERPs email collection, we didn't touch on that. But obviously, you could actually collect emails on that website and then tag them specifically

as high interest in this building, but then put them on your main site. So if you have a site, we haven't done this before, but this could work. What if you had a site that was like pet friendly area.com or something like that, we could tag them and only send them pet friendly rentals or pet friendly information because they're probably on pet friendly.com. Maybe they're on a blog post called five best dog parks in Minneapolis or something like that. And then maybe you could pitch them properties that fit that criteria if they're bringing a dog. So you can take this to a lot of different degrees, but I think again, hit the main points

about focusing on the, breaking your brand website first, then focus on this. You can stack PPC and SEO together. You gotta make the sites great. If you put out crappy sites that with no content on them, they're probably not gonna do well.

But ultimately you could build, you gotta, this is very much a seed in the ground type situation too from an SEO perspective, because you're probably not gonna be able to build a lot of links to these sites. So you have to wait for Google to hopefully show your site a little bit, get some traction, get some wins, and then come in over time and really build it out.

But this is very viable for any client that we're working with that's getting good organic traffic in their market. It's something that we bring up relatively early on as like, hey, what's your perspective on this? Or what I've learned bringing that up early on with some clients is they actually have a bunch of domains that are just sitting in their domain registrar account. And oh yeah, I already have condo rentals.com for the market that they're in, or I already have this already have that. And to be fair, a lot of domains that clients tell us they have are worthless. Like

I'm like, okay, I'm glad you have that, but it's not gonna make a difference. But then I feel like I'm in like a flea market or something. I'm like sifting through the domain registrar list and I find that going and I'm like, that one's gold. So you can certainly hunt down some gold in this, in this arena. If you're willing to put in the work. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. No, we all know your affinity for domains, Conrad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like a recovered addict a little bit. I feel like I have to go to meetings. Hey, I'm recovered. I haven't bought a domain in a minute. I've just been busy. When I'm not busy, like I'm about to go on vacation next week, I'm probably about to buy a domain because I'll be scrolling auctions or something And I'll be like, that's good. But I'm up, I'm up on my domain sales. I told you

of some of the sales that I've had this year, domains that I bought for 1000, I flipped for 10,000. So it's some of us have an eye for, so there's some people that have an eye for real estate. Some people have an eye for sports cards. Some people have an eye for different things that they collect and make money on. I can make money on domains. So that's just digital real estate. That's still, I mean, that's the right kind of prospecting. I'ming. Yeah, yeah. Maybe you don't want me actually buying vacation rental properties. I don't know if I'd make all the right decisions there. But I know a good one when I see one on a domain name, especially a nice.com domain in a given market. Awesome. We can put about with this one, Paul, unless there's anything else you want to feather in here before we finish it out

for today. I think we are good today, sir. We're good to go. Awesome. Thank you for listening this far. If you made it this far, I think we'll split this one into two parts. We got part one, Google versus Barry Diller, the ultimate showdown, so to speak, bum. And then of course, we talked a little bit about many sites, secondary sites for your vocational business. So a fun one to record. Thank you, Paul, for your time and recording with me today. I always appreciate it. If you haven't yet, we appreciate reviews a lot. So if you can go to your favorite podcast app of choice, click five stars, leave a review. It's not a mini task. It is a mini task. So there it takes a few seconds. Yeah. Then you hit submit. If you like our ramblings on Google and kind of the verbal layers there, you can also leave a

review. Lastly, last little bit before you jet out here today, the book has reached, I think it's reached five reviews at this point, Paul. So we're making some progress. If you can go to your amazon.com version of choice that I did, I was going to say podcast app of choice, but I budgeted that a little bit. All good. If you go to amazon.com and you search mastering vacation on marketing, there's a book there by yours truly, Conrad, and you can buy that. It's going to cost you 15 bucks for the paperback, which is the paperback is a lot more popular than the ebook, believe it or not, Paul, which I find pretty interesting. I do.

I told you that it is. Everybody likes to hold up this book and say, man, I know Conrad and I read the whole, nobody read the book, but yeah, they just want to say that they can put it on LinkedIn and have some fun with it. But no, I appreciate that. That just lines Conrad's pocket. So let's make that happen, everybody. Let's make it happen.

So you go to your, you go to amazon.com, you search for this book, you buy it, send me a screenshot that you purchased it. And maybe I can give you something in return. Maybe I can buy you a coffee or something like that, because I do appreciate it. And like I said, we've got some reviews in the door. I would love a lot more. Appreciate everyone's time and attention. But that's all we have for today. We'll be back next

week with another engaging episode here of the heads in bed show. And have a great weekend, everybody. We'll talk to you soon.