Heads In Beds Show - Why Link Building Is Overlooked & Why It's One Area You Can IGNORE Google's Advice On...

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about link building: why it's the most 'skipped' area of SEO for many vacation rental managers and why that's a mistake and also why you actually want to ignore what Google says about link building. 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 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, lights, camera, action. Trying some different openings today. Paul, how's it going? What's going on?

It's another great week here. We're getting closer and closer to one of my favorite times of the year, March Madness, now that we've got the Super Bowl past us and all that. So I can feel it. I can feel the conference tournament buzz starting. I can feel, I look at the Bracketology articles every once in a while now, and those give me no hope because the Gophers are not so great this year, but it's still fun. It's still fun.

But there's always a Cinderella. Why couldn't it be yours? Right. Oh, my goodness. This is the end. If we've seen anything this year, it's that maybe the last few years is that there's a whole lot of parody in college basketball, which makes the tournament that much more fun.

That's am I going to win as much on the bracket side of things? Nope, probably not. But but that 16 over one, we went what 20 years 30 years and now we've had two in the last six or something like that. So Virginia went down Purdue last year. So it is it's a fun time of year. But how are you doing, sir? The joke I was gonna make it so funny. We didn't talk about basketball at all before we hit record. And the joke I was going to make is, are we going to put more effort into this podcast than they put into the all-star game last night? That was actually the joke I was going to make because that was so low effort. As we record this, the all-star game was the day before.

So the listener may be like, what are you talking about? And it was, if you're not into sports, basically imagine people just playing a game that we call basketball that I like to watch. And they were putting no effort is not even a fair comparison. It was like they were just watching the other team score on purpose. And I get it. The game doesn't quote unquote mean anything. But there was no pride in the professional accomplishments of being there.

No pride in. And I get it. We don't get guys to get injured. Believe me, that's like my worst nightmare. Right. No. Oh, goodness. You know, a lob from Jalen to Jason and he gets an injury or something but still like that just it was wrong it was wrong how

poorly how far we've declined as a nba that was an acceptable product they put on the court last night as the as a fan of the top scorer in last night's game right with carl anthony towns getting 50 points 30 of which came i don't know in the fourth quarter when, again, nobody's doing anything. Like it looked eerily similar. Cat scored 60 points a few weeks ago, and it looked really similar to that where it's just, I mean, I don't know how you get people to compete in that game. I think when there's like... It's leadership, though. It's leadership of the top players.

If LeBron was playing defense, which I know he doesn't even really play a ton of defense but if he was trying to play defense people would be like oh lebron's gonna do it then i'm gonna do it you know what i mean if he stripped insert player here and went the other way on him he'd be like wait a second that felt wrong i don't know that's what kobe did it's i there was i feel like in previous years and i don't again breaking it down by quarter i don't love that i don't like getting to the point and having the score to the point i think that that's just not basketball um as they play it 82 games a season but like the charity component at least was fun in previous year where they played for the quarter and then that quarter quarter of a million went to this charity and that and they had the kids there yeah and then they had the kids there there's some skin in the game that that's i don't know

and again i'm sure you had some kids that were just demoralized coming out of that because they didn't get probably needed funding or something like that from the charity. But I don't know how you fix it. I don't know how you resolve it. Like football's gone to having people play golf and dodgeball during their Pro Bowl. So it's a showcase. I just, I feel like it's a showcase of how much money they have now as opposed to a showcase of the skills they actually performed just give the day off if

you're not going to try just i think the skills challenge is not interesting the dunk contest was not great this year but there's been some great moments in the past so i'm fine with that thing in place the three-point contest honestly the best thing just because the pressure and there's no risk of injury so maybe that's more fun and there's more juice to that honestly than anything as far as entertaining drama skill related talent they're trying it's they're trying it as many as they did previous years but right i think but and then that's the the evolution of the game and then like right before this the dunk contest was this thing that like now everybody shoots three pointers like that's where the game honestly horse would have been east first west that's right been a more entertaining product like to put on

the court where they're gonna try they want to win there's no injury risk doing a shot or whatever so anyways i digress um you know the trouble with nba is that they're not gonna make everybody happy google can't make everybody happy either so let's get into today's topic which is link building so it's a fun one because i think this is something where even though it doesn doesn't often get a lot of reach when I talk about link building and things like that, when I post content about it, it's actually one of the most important things that a lot of occasional companies need. Because when you're smaller, maybe you could speak to this on the owner side too, even though we're going to probably spend a little bit more time on the guest side today. But in my mind, this applies in the owner marketing side too. When you're smaller, people

always say you're at a disadvantage, but sometimes they don't articulate why you're at a disadvantage. We did one a while ago about email marketing, and we gave that example with email marketing, where a bigger company has an advantage on you doing email marketing than a smaller company. Put simply, just because their list is bigger and they're taking the same amount of time to send out an email, and yet it's going out to way more people. So they build this phenomenal leverage in their business with email marketing because they're spending three, four hours to put together a newsletter, whatever, however long it takes. They're sending it out and they're getting a lot better results. On the SEO side, I feel like sometimes people don't articulate that too. What is it about a big site or the biggest competitor in your market

that gets more, that it's easier for them to get results? And the answer is links a lot of time. That's actually the difference. If you look over time at the smallest vacation rental company that has five units and the biggest that has a thousand. So maybe you could talk at a high level, like, why is this something that Google weighs so heavily? Why does Google care about links? And how does that actually impact your ability to rank in Google? Let's go back to the basics, and then we'll get into the fun stuff. There is. There was a beautiful, simple graph, and they have that in the early documentation for SEO. And it was talking about building links and really just talking about how these are signals of, hey, this is the authority and expertise of EAT. And trustworthiness is not as I'm sure it's part of that as well, because the value of the link that you have coming back is certainly going to contribute there. But the original expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, a lot of that was built by

links. And the content that you put out there was complementary to that. But when you have a lot of small sites pointing to your site and saying, hey, there is value in this content here, Google starts to say, okay, I see what's happening here. Now they're going to still measure the engagement on the website once people are getting there. But that's like that high level factor of, okay, at a very minimum, there's more than just one site that sees this, that sees value in this content and is trying to direct their travelers

over to this site as well. So it is. And that's where you talk about the lots of little small sites or one big site. So when you're looking at the kind of the hierarchy of those links that are coming back, you're looking for the.govs, the.orgs. Those are, they take a little more to get those. Obviously you have to be associated with the government to get a.gov,, the.orgs. They take a little more to get those. Obviously, you have to be associated with the government to get a.gov. But the.org, you actually, or at one point, I don't know if that's still the case when you're buying domains, but at one point, you actually had to submit some additional paperwork to say you are an organization and maybe a nonprofit or a 5013C3 or whatever that is, but you actually had to go through that.

So that's not the case. Yeah, I have a.org. You have a.org. Okay. But I still think that there is still more, they traditionally will still see more value in those.orgs versus.govs or excuse me, the.coms or.anything else. So that's at a high level, Google's looking at these factors and saying, okay, this particular page or this particular website, depending on where you're pointing that link to is high value. There is expertise. They're demonstrating expertise here. Obviously, it's an authority because it's more than just one site that's coming through and pointing to you. And again, that trustworthiness of, okay, it's Amazon that's pointing back to you. It's Spotify. It's the USA Today. It's the New York Times. It's wherever it is. Something like that is pointing back to you

with a higher domain authority and is indicating that you are a source of EAT. So that's high level how I've always seen it. What are your thoughts on, or what do you see, or how have you seen that be effective there? Yeah, I think extensions are one thing. I think a lot of things that the average vacation manager is struggling with is they just don't have any links whatsoever. It's relatively common. And when I say any, like you can count them in one hand, maybe two hands if you're lucky,

of actual real links that are made to link to your business. I'm not talking about scraper sites that accidentally picked up random image or something, but like people that intended to link to your business. Often I see people who are trying to talk about SEO or have some discussion about how to actually optimize their pages. And I'm like, basically your site in the grand scheme of the link index on Google just doesn't even exist. So the reason that Google uses links so heavily in their algorithm is that they don't really know, like every single page can be optimized perfectly, right? We can

take the same text content and put it on amazon.com, newyork.com, Conrad's Cool Cabins.com, which doesn't exist. I should buy that at this point. At this point, we use it enough here. But if that were a domain that I bought today, to give an example, it would have no links pointing to it, assuming it was never used before. You can check that kind of thing. It would be a brand new, clean, North Carolina, cabinet rentals. I'm competing against someone that has been doing it for 10 years and probably has 10, 10 to a hundred to 500 different links pointing to that domain and Google when they don't know,

obviously like leaning on page content is the most logical thing to do with regards to understanding what, where, what a page should rank for, but sorting those results links makes a ton of sense because think of these large media entities, think of things out there, the internet that you trust. They have a lot of links pointing to them. A lot of link building that happens is just like the normal course of using things on the internet. You're going to link to a website that's a reference point. You're going to link to things that are there. Now the SEO people, of course, like me, will try to take it and I don't want to

say manipulate, but we're trying to get links because we are trying to ultimately drive better search engine rankings. That's a pure, our motives are pretty clearly biased towards doing, getting better organic search results. But the point remains that it's like, Google is going to rely on this a lot. So if it were a car and the car really to drive on the road and be safe needs four wheels on it. I talk about the TLCK a lot, right? Technical keyword research content and link building. A lot of people, it's so funny, depending on what order I do that in, sometimes I get to link building last and I was doing one in a sales call the other week. I want to say I was being interrupted, but they were just asking questions naturally.

I didn't get to link building until the end and then we had two minutes left. And I was like, yeah, we did all that. And we had a lot of discussions about how to produce content and when we should update blog posts in the blog. And I'm like, but all that is not really going to move the needle a ton

if we don't get this site a lot more, if this domain, excuse me, a lot more links. You're just lacking severely in that department. And it's going to be challenging for you to rank ahead of any local competitor ahead of you because of the fact that you just don't have the same quote unquote, whatever you want to call it, authority links, domain rating. These are all third party kind of mushy metrics. The thing is that Google will tell you like, and that's the thing too.

If anyone's disputing the value of links, go into Google. I was, I'll call this reading the search results, right? Reading the SERP, go into Google, do a search and show me examples where you frequently see a site or a page ranking ahead of another site that has vastly fewer links pointing to it. It does happen. It's not like a perfect correlation. It's not one for one. If you have more links, you're automatically guaranteed to be the top slot. But for the most part, generally speaking, if you're trying to rank ahead of other local competitors, so it's your homepage against their homepage, you're going to need to at least be in the same general zip code link-wise, typically,

quality link-wise as that local competitor. And that's, so going back to the owner piece really quickly, we talked about this before, but a lot of owner leads are generated because people just go on Google and they search for the largest company or they look for a large company and they assume if this company is large and has a lot of different, they have a lot of different, I guess, like properties pointing to them, other people have trusted them. You feel more comfortable going down that path because you know that your property is probably going to be well cared for too. It's the same logic you could argue with Google. Like when Google shows a site higher in the ranking results because of links,

and then Google, like people seem to like those results. They go to those pages, they spend time on them. They're not pogo sticking back to the search results and looking for their listings. Okay. When I rank sites higher that have a lot of links, they tend, people tend to like these sites. I should probably keep doing that. So it's one of those things where at a high level, it's like, the why in a way doesn't matter. Like I'm telling you how it is. And this is based on my experience. I don't mean that in a dismissive way. But it's just go show me an example where that's not the case. And you really can't find it. Like, for the most part, generally speaking, the higher quality links you obtain, the better you're going

to rank in organic search results, especially when it comes to competing with local competitors. Now, maybe that we could pivot the discussion into the discussion that I always have with people, which is that yes, I am competing against five or 10 or 15 other local companies. That's true. But I'm also competing with OTAs. So I've imposed, I think it's going out on LinkedIn this week. And it's an example of a client that we're working with that actually has all thing all told a relatively low domain authority. So an Ahrefs, which is a third party measurement, they give them a domain rating of six, yet we're working with that actually has all thing all told a relatively low domain authority so in hrefs which is a third-party measurement they give them a domain rating of six yet they're ranking ahead of airbnb they're ranking ahead of vrbo they're ranking ahead or vrbo they're ranking ahead of even like booking.com and some other otas for their keyword it's like

seattle vacation rentals is their key that is the case because google weights the interior pages on airbnb differently than your home. So if your homepage is going up against an interior page, yes, of course, Airbnb has more domain authority than you, you'll never get more than them. The most successful regional vacation rental company, maybe Vicasa or even VTrips or a company like that probably has one 10th the links of Airbnb. So you're almost never going to compete on that criteria alone. That's a fair assessment. But it doesn't mean that you can't compete at all. Because again, you're it's apples and oranges, your homepage against their anterior page. Yeah, they're going to have more domain authority, but they may not have more relevance for the search query itself.

So then we get into some nuance of what kind of matters. But again, I'll pick a market that we don't have a client in. So if I pick a market, we don't have a client and I'll do some example searches while we're searching here. I'm sure I'll see both a mix of Amelia Island, vacation rentals. We'll do that search as an example. Don't have a client there. I won't even say the name of the domains just for brevity sake. The first page ranking is the local site, second page local site, third page local site. These are all homepages, by the way, that I see omnihotels.com. It looks like they have a vacation rental division here. Local site, Vrbo, local, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, local. That rounds out page one. So eight of the 10 or seven of the 10 results on page one are local companies.

Then it's just a matter of, okay, which of these means is the most authoritative? I'll say this now because they rank number one. Again, not a client or anything like that. AmeliaRentals.com ranks number one, and they have the most traffic coming in on that particular search term. And if I go and look at their Ahrefs data, their Ahrefs organic search data, it'll give me some estimate of their links. It'll give me some estimate of how much traffic they're getting.

And they have 170 different websites that have linked to them. It looks like that number has gone up pretty steadily since January of 2018. They peaked at maybe 200 links. Now they're down to 180, somewhere in that range, because links come and go. So it's a narrow example, but it proves the point of discussion a little bit about if AmeliaRentals.com, who I don't know anyone involved with that company again, but if they went, oh, we're not going to outrank VRBO or Airbnb, then they might not have ever tried to do it. And they would have been missing out on 25 to 2,800 searches per month on this

one keyword, nevermind the, according to Ahrefs, 2,100 other keywords that they rank for in Google. So it's, you've got to get in the game. You've got to have these links out there to actually be successful, right. And in, in in search and i think there's some people who like training a muscle group they over train a muscle group they over train the content or they overdo one area of seo and then they neglect this area because to be fair it's really hard so maybe you can react to some of that and then i'll get into some of the reasons of why this is hard to do because it's not simple which makes it challenging well i think it is and we've we've had the car analogy before, but I think it's really important because, because admittedly, there's a lot of other agencies in

the space that don't put the same strategy, put the same emphasis on the link building side of things. It really is more about putting that content out there, hopefully optimizing the onsite SEO and things like that. But link building is, and again, we did this, the more the focus on link building was disavowing toxic links, which in the grand scheme, I think it is, and you're shaking your head right now, I'm wringing my neck to say the very least, I'm moving things around. It's just not, it doesn't move the needle. And actually, it's something that more recently, I think it was last week or a couple of weeks ago, John Mueller from Google actually said, disavowing these links isn't going to help get your rankings back. I think that that's something that we did.

We put it as an industry overall. I think we put it out there as a, Ooh, this is going to help save your website from the negative factors, as opposed to, I would say, jump-starting the positive factors of gaining more links to your, more backlinks to your website. It is, it's hard. It is tough. It is tough to get people to commit to it and then to follow through and actually put that link on the site and link it back. It is not an easy thing to do. However, the long-term value of that, it is.

It does pay for itself over time because we've all seen that, if not hockey stick growth on the organic side of things, the gradual yet pretty significant growth of traffic coming from that organic side after you're getting links through. And yes, you're contributing, adding more content. Yes, you're contributing by having all the best practices in place for your H1 page titles, meta descriptions, schema markup, all that thing. And again, that's just four things I'm touching on out of another 20, 30, 40 things that are impacting the overall SEO of the site. So yes, does all of this need to be done? Absolutely. And does everything have a different weight? Yeah, but we don't know what that weight is. So we have to take care of everything. And I think that's something that, yeah, generally speaking, I don't think we do as good a job of focusing on how we're going to,

within that content strategy. And that's again, the conversations we've had, that's what I love about the fact that not only are you putting together that content strategy, but you're already looking for places where you can get that link, those authoritative links coming back to you. Because that is that's the part B to the part A of just writing the content initially there. Yeah, I think that pretty much covers it there. writing the content initially there. Yeah, I think that pretty much covers it there. And maybe so maybe we'll go down this path, which is like, why are other so I'm saying this is important. You were alluding to the fact that there's companies in our space that will sell SEO services who don't do this. So the question that the listener may have begs is why? Like,

why would they not do this? If it's you're saying it's an important part of SEO, there's lots of documentation and data out there to indicate that it does help quite a bit. Why would they only be focusing mostly on content production, keyword research, building new pages when this helps? Here's the problem with link building. I think I've said this before on the show, but it's worth repeating. The problem with link building is that your input of time does not map very well often to the output of links that you get. So you could spend an entire week link building and come up dead zero empty and not build a single link. And there is nothing more frustrating if you just think holistically about knowledge work than the idea of spending 20 hours doing something

and having no outcome associated with it, right? Imagine if the accountant was like, yeah, did 40 hours of bookkeeping this week. Nothing's right. None of the books are balanced. Everything's wrong. Didn't, we'll try again next week. And then they clocked out on Friday.

If you were the owner of the vacation company, you'd be like, what in the world is this guy or gal doing? You'd be questioning it. But with link building, that is often the case, right? It's often the case that we're putting in time, we're doing outreach, etc, and so on and so forth. And we might strike out 50 sites in a row, we might strike out 80 sites in a row and get no links.

So I think my honest, I don't know if that's cynical, but like my honest take on it is the reason that it would be, I guess, more straightforward to skip it is that you may say, we could do the outreach that you're talking about, Conrad, and it's possible that we could do a reach out to 200 sites in the next month that get zero links. Yes, that's possible. That is plausible. That would be a little lower than our average, but not way lower, like not completely out of the norm. Like we've seen some examples where we've gone sometime and not built a link for a client. And I can promise you, it's not for lack of effort. It's just a lack of available opportunities. What sites talk about this

small market. I think we've given examples like this in the show before, but when there's two, 300 people that search the name of an area or the name of a town, it's going to be really hard, obviously, to find content that we can get links to on that town, regardless of our effort. At some point, we'll just run out of people that have even mentioned the term city name here, that sort of thing. So that makes it a little bit more challenging. So that's my, again, cynical take on it, which is that the reason that people don't do this is because they can't mechanize it or productize it. They can't say, okay, we're going to get Paul and Conrad to do leader link building team. We're going to hire two people under the theme. And then every, every month

are going to pump out X number of links, just like our PPC team can manage a hundred accounts with four people or whatever the case may be. These are all hypothetical examples, but it's because I think of that reason where if you're charging like on a per link basis, it's tricky. And like we, we charge typically on a set number expectation on a retainer, right? So it's like we expect to get one or two, but we're now I think doing a better job of communicating to clients like I can't guarantee it. Like I think we'll get that many. We obviously tend to underestimate a little bit what we think we can actually get. We say, hey, we think we can get, let's say 15 this year over a year period, maybe when we really may only we should be able to get 20. But I'm giving a little

wiggle room in there. But it's different. It's different depending on the area of the market. That's the hard part is that your time is not going to map well to your outcome, even though it's important. It's like the natural thing to ask questions like, okay, show me the easiest path to get there. And the truth is there really isn't a really easy path to get from point A to point B on like billing, which can be frustrating. And I think the other side of it is that tangible piece of, they get a tangible piece of content when we write a blog post. That's true. Maybe they can repurpose it and use it in a newsletter,

but put it somewhere else. It is. You feel good getting that thing. Not saying that you're going to feel good if you get a link coming back, but sometimes that's all people really need. They don't necessarily see the next level of this content. This blog post is going to drive traffic to your website, which is going to holistically help out the whole ecosystem that we're trying to create here.

It's, ooh, I get 12 pieces of content. I get 12 blog posts. That's the tangible nature. Yeah, hopefully it's going to grow my traffic, grow my business. But I think it's easy. It's that easy cop out of, oh, I'm delivering something to you. If I incrementally have a little bit better traffic each time, and I can show that, I can use a SEMrush or I can use an Ahrefs to show, hey, your placement

in these keywords is increasing slightly, which is really all we need to necessarily do. Maybe your organic traffic is going up slightly. That's enough. But that's pretty low hanging fruit in the grand scheme of things when you can put your foot on the pedal a little more by trying to go after these links and trying to go after some of these more time consuming efforts. But again, that juice is worth the squeeze if you can find the right combination there. So I think a lot of the things that we do and we've done here, we do, we productize it, we scale it. And then as long as it performs just well enough to make sure that the property manager is happy with the results, we don't try to push the envelope that much more.

But there's always more to be done. And again, you got to have that from a business standpoint, you have to be able to pay the people to do this work and all that has to happen. So we're not doing this pro bono by any means, but it is, it's about evaluating what's going to help these end users, the partners, the clients, customers, the property managers in this case, to see the best possible results online. And I do, I think that if you're not incorporating some type of link building, whether that's an aggressive, hey, we're going to get two a month or three a month type of strategy, or you're not thinking about it at all, it's a misstep. It's not taking advantage of what we know is going to help. Yeah, I think that's ultimately where I should lead to. And this goes back to a few things here, which is had a

proposal recently come back, and there was questions on the proposal, not really about the pricing necessarily, but more about how do you compare this to this other SEO service that we're paying for? And the long story short, what it boiled down to is they really weren't doing any link building, the content production quality is very low, in my opinion. So I was like like it really i struggle with if i'm being completely honest with you because i'm like on paper these look like similar deliverables right it's if someone said let's say you went to an artist and you said give me a painting and one artist was like the street artist who's going to spend 25 minutes on it and then the next artist was some world famous artist i don't know it's michelangelo or something like that right it's a deliverable on the invoice would say one custom

art painting for paul manzi but the artistry or the like outcome of what the value of that art would be completely different if the street artist did it for 20 bucks and michelangelo or something did it for some i don't know it's not a great analogy but the point remains like you should be demanding from your seo agency what is your approach like building how do you do it because quality is something we've touched on at a high level we haven't really gone into narrow specifics the reason that i think we don't build a like a fairly high volume of links is that we try to focus on quality, like we're trying to find travel bloggers that have written about your destination, or local businesses that are in your destination. Although that can be a little bit trickier. And

we're trying to get them to link in content to your website in the context that makes sense. So for example, travel blogger may write a your guide to visiting area name your guide to visiting Amelia Island, Florida, right? And then we're trying to get them in a subheading to say places to stay or lodging or vacation rentals. And the link to your company is the best option. That's like kind of an ideal example of a link. And that travel, by the way, that travel blog itself should be getting 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000

organic visitors from Google, because that tells you that Google thinks that site is high quality. So when you get a link from a site like that, it's naturally going to help you more than if you get a link on, of course, we can give any number of spam scraper sites. But the point is that the quality of the site that you're getting linked from matters a ton. And so I will take every day of the week, five good links over 50 crappy links on a site that needs links desperately, because I've noticed time and time again, doing this now for a long time, the quality links move the needle, the crappy links don't move the needle. Sure, on a paper, like they check the box,

okay, we built a link to it. But you can go buy 5000 links on Fiverr for 25 bucks, right? They're just the worst possible links you can imagine. It is the gas station sushi of links, right? Compared to this finely crafted Michelin star link that you really want the one that really is going to help you. And that's actually the one to go back to your point about disavowing, quote, unquote, toxic links and things like that. That's actually the thing that moves the needle anyways over, over time is getting 20, 30, 40 of those types of links. Like I could take a company from zero to at least page one at Google. I can't promise top of page rankings, but I pretty much promise no matter the destination, I can get a top page at Google. If you said you can only

build 200 links, but your budget is unlimited for those 200 links. I could probably do it because I could be very specific about, okay, the type of client or site that I'm going to reach out to. If my budget's in this fictional scenario is unlimited, I can be very picky. I can go for the best quality travel blogs and so on and so forth. And I can get the most bang for my buck, right? Now we don't live in the world. We always joke about on the show of unlimited budget. So we have to find the middle ground of what's the site that will link to us. So we don't have to like cut our arm off to to like even talk to right, because that's part of that outreach conversation from earlier, right, we need to be reaching out to people that are

realistically likely going to link to us. And I say this a lot of times to people on my team, too. If it's a DR seven, meaning quote, unquote, a lower authority link, but it's relevant. I take that link every day of the week, I want a relevant link from a site that people care about that has real information and content on it, even if it happens to be a relatively low, quote unquote, value link. And I know this has been a thing in the forums that I've been in before, like in Matt Lando's forums, where people say, Oh, I got a DR five link is that bad. And it was like a local small business that served that community. And I was like, that's amazing. That's exactly the kind of link you want to be getting. But someone told them high DR good low DR bad when that's not at all what it is. They just look at it as like a

grading mechanism, like in school, high DR is an A plus and a low DR is an F. And it really, in my mind, you should be focused on relevancy and quality. And I say this a lot to people, and we had a new link builder join our team recently. And he was pitching us some stuff that would give us some links and the quality wasn't there. And I said to the person, I was like, when you see a good link, right? It's a bit of a taste thing. But you look at that site and you go, oh, my I could see people who stay in my vacation rental properties, reading the site, Google can figure that good link, right? It's a bit of a taste thing. But you look at that site and you go, Oh, my, I could see people who stay in my vacation properties, reading the site, Google can figure that out to write like the smartest people in the world work at Google. So if you can figure it out, and you can see, okay, I'm not trying to game the system,

I'm trying to genuinely get a link from people who write about this area, this destination to my site, that is always going to move the needle 10 times more than again, crappy scraper site.com.xyz.ru, right? That's never, ever going to really move the needle. Every once in a while, you might see a little spike, and then it just falls back. Because Google goes, yeah, I figured it out. Like, you got me for a second, and now I figured it out. The good ones matter.

The bad ones don't matter. Either ignore them, to your point. I don't think it's worth spending a lot of time disavowing them. I think it's, and it's one of those things where when you look at the site, when you look at where the link is, you know if it's a good link. You don't need anyone to really tell you. you once you've done this a few dozen times you get what a good site looks like what a bad site looks like you know what i mean oh it is just going a little further down and again another quote from mueller specifically yeah the specific

to the negative seo link reports he said ignore him ignore this semrush report and he's not going against some again going after semrush or anything like Right. They're a pretty bad purveyor of that, though, to be fair. Oh, that is. I will say they put an inordinate weight on toxic negative, the toxic bad things there. Yeah, they do say that a lot. Oh, goodness, yes. Let your competitors spend the sweet $5 for nothing.

Be glad they're not investing that into making their own site better. That said, if you have time to browse and take reports in tools like that seriously, you're probably not spending enough time on making a truly awesome site. I mean, it is. I think it's the fuel. It's the fuel that helps the car drive, but that website is still the car, so you have to make a really good car. so you have to make a really good car so it i think he's muller is still trying to tell us that we shouldn't be focusing all of our time on the link building but at the same time if you're doing if you're focusing on the right parts of link building not just disavowing but going after the right links that is what you should be focused on again it's focusing on

those negative ranking factors as opposed to the positive ranking factors. Reducing your negative ranking factors isn't buoying your site overall. Proactively using those positive ranking factors or optimizing those positive ranking factors, that is going to give you a better final product, hopefully more organic traffic. The search engines will be happier with you all those good things will go hand in hand there yeah i think the so the headline is a little clickbaity you know what i mean we're trying to get people and we're referencing like you may say oh you're referencing john mule i think the problem with the google talking heads is take on things is that they are talking to an audience of ses who are trying to maximize organic search traffic at pretty much any other outcome, right?

I think, so his advice isn't necessarily bad, but I do believe this to be the case. I don't think that he tells a lot of truth in this respect, where if we sat down and we made the best gardening blog on planet Earth, and we spent every dime and every waking hour possible to make the best possible gardening blog on planet earth. And we didn't tell anybody about it. We just waited for the good traffic to come. We waited for people to find out about us. Surely we'll get some links, but we're never going to get nearly as many links as if we sit down and make a concerted effort to reach out to other people to talk about that content

and get a link to it. Right. So if you have built the best vacation company on planet earth, and I've seen these companies that every once in a while who are more property management focused and less marketing focused and i find them and i go i know we're gonna be able to do damage together because you've done some of the hard pieces but just no one has sat down for an extended period of time and focused on links so like you've got to page one or page two on google through happenstance but to get from 11 to 2 11 to 1 is actually probably not going to be as hard as you might think because we're positioned well we just have to tell more

people about you have to go and make a concerted effort to do link building. And that's the thing that Google will say they don't want you to do. They don't want you to actually ask for links or get links. They say that. But all the sites that you know that rank well in Google have a concerted effort towards getting links that rank well in Google organically, I should say. They have a concerted effort towards getting links. And sure, in a non-competitive market, sure, you can get by with like kind of skating through and not doing a ton of link building. But whenever I find those markets and we're working with the new upstart, it's happened to us probably a half dozen times at this point. There's one that sticks out my mind where they started, they were on page 10 of Google,

they basically didn't exist. No one was link building the market, you could tell. We went from that to being incredibly aggressive. I think we got a little lucky too. We found some nice opportunities and got them probably 75, 85 good quality links over the course of the year. And they literally shot to the number one in Google. And I'm not saying we do that every time, but that is pretty common for us because you go from everyone's just floating around along like dead fish in the tide or just rolling in, rolling out. They're not really putting effort into it. They're getting some organic traffic because no one's really pushing them to all of a sudden we go in there with a motorboat of links and we're just, we build a ton. And if Google's wow, this site seems very relevant and they pop it up to the top or to the top of Google

very quickly. That's the piece where I just think Google gives very misleading information is this idea. Like they keep coming back to that. Make great content. That's the Matt cuts joke that people used to tell before. Hey, my leg hurts, Matt, what should I do? Make great content. Like he would just say that to every single question that people would ask him. And there's truth in that back to your point of yes, you have to have awesome properties on your website, you have to have excellent written information on the property description about those listings, you should have awesome photography, you should have a blog that talks about all the great things to do restaurants, all that stuff, that's going to help you get a lot of the way there. And the thing that if you skip it will not get you where you ultimately want to

go to the very top and getting lots of organic search traffic and driving a lot of your own demand is not doing link building piece and vice versa, to be fair. If you had a site that had a lot of links, but had crappy properties with bad photos and mediocre stuff on the blog, maybe we'll get to page one, but we're not going to get all the way to the top because we haven't put all the pieces together. So that's where I think Google is very misleading or just doesn't actually tell you what's really necessary to get the job done. And I think they leave you to, in our world, they would leave you to toil in obscurity, because you haven't taken that next step of being proactive and getting links. And that ultimately is what moves the needle in my

experience. So well, and then just to finally flip everything upside down your head. Yeah. And in this in the search and travel world, it doesn't matter nearly as much because once you do those vacation rental search, your pip popped into the map search side of things and you're trapped, propped into the actual OTA meta search aggregator side of things anyway. So let's close the loop on that. So why are they fighting for that? You know what I mean? Let's, let's think about that objectively.

So I think that you're right though, Paul, there's not as much organic search traffic available to the small property manager or property manager of any size today than there was, let's say two years ago. I think that's fair. And when people are saying, like, I'm not bullish on SEO for these reasons, I don't agree with them because I know how well it works. Even if it were new state, it still works well. But I think that's a valid, that's a valid conclusion to come from that information. So I don't like, I don't hate that logic, even if I don't necessarily agree with it, because I have lots of data that refutes that it does still work well. But I can understand that. But the reason that Google is doing that is they know how valuable that traffic is. The reason that any OTA

is spending a lot of money on Google ads. This isn't an episode about Google ads. This is an episode about link building, but why would Verbo be spending tens of millions of dollars a year on Google ads? Because that search traffic is very valuable. When people come in from search from Google search specifically, given that's the dominant search engine, they have the highest intent. Typically they're going to be one of the most high quality visitors that you can attract your website directly to your individual vacation management website directly. So you're right, though, Paul, there are things that are going to interfere with us. And hey, it's I could be wrong a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, maybe there's no organic search results. Maybe it's

five ads, a block that's mostly promoted, and then five ads on the bottom. That's plausible, right? Google's needs to maximize their revenue, they're going to do the things to maximize their revenue but my logic would be until that is the case until this no longer makes sense financially for you to do this is the key part of playing the seo game so if you're going to play the seo game which has a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow the best thing for you to be doing is to be focusing on the four things that we talked about technical content, keyword research, and link building. And don't forget about link building. If I could hammer one episode home to you today, focus on the right type of links and you'll see the benefit from it. There we go. If we beat up

a topic sufficiently, have we took our shots at Google at this point? Hopefully I think, I think we took just enough. We gave, we, we took a little advice from them, but ultimately we said what Google says as we tend to do every once in a while, but no, I don't listen to the man behind the curtain. Listen to me. I know what I'm talking about. Listen to these men behind the curtain. Yeah, we're really the wizards of Oz over here. I think just make sure you understand the SEO offering that you're receiving. If it comes down to nothing else, you know, it's if link building is something that your agency isn't doing, ask why, or see if that's something that they can, you know, or see if it's something that they can do for you, something like that.

It will have benefits, but just understand what you're getting on the SEO side of things. Because if you think you're getting that type of effort to build more links for you, and you're not, you're just missing out on something that could be beneficial to you and will be beneficial to you in our eyes down the road. So yeah. Yeah. I'll end on this note too, which is again, doing this well is very time consuming. Doing this well is very costly. I can point to you my costs on both the payroll side and link side of things, and it costs a lot of money to build links. So this is not easy, but as we butted a lot today, the end result, the traffic that you can get from this, when you compare it to maxing out your think about your PPC budget, where it runs out at 2pm every

day, because you only have so much budget. When you rank well in SEO, that's 24 hours a day, you know what I mean? Like you're going to rank well, and you're going to get that benefit for a long time. So nothing breaks my heart worse, to be honest with you, Paul, this happened to me a few times in my career, it always just a little tear will fall down the face when this happens is when I know we're doing good work. And for whatever reason, it gets stopped. We had this happen during COVID budget concerns. We had it during happen after COVID because people were like, I have all the demand I need. I don't need more traffic. And so all the work that we might've done, let's say, gets stopped for whatever reason. And then I see the ascension happen after we leave.

So we did all this like building content, technical work to get a site in really good shape. We saw this initial curve up in some scenarios, right? Or maybe it didn't curve up as much as they wanted to. Then five months down the road, all the links, all the content that we built start to really kick in. And then they get to the top of Google and I go, I got no credit for that. We got no credit for that. I should say it's not me, it's my team, but we got no credit for that. And yet they are, they're benefiting significantly from that traffic. If you want to ever poke at me, the equivalent of a paper cut professionally for me is seeing when that happens. So it's going to take time.

That's true. But I think that one thing to close the loop on that time comment too, it's going to take time, but you should see progress along the way. I do believe that I'm working with someone right now where we're seeing progress. We're not seeing a lot of traffic. I will admit that like the clicks aren't there, but we went from a thousand impressions a month in search console to like 40,000 impressions a month in search console. Now the traffic isn't radically different, but I'm like client name. I'm like, we're on the right track. Look, and then this isn't me just blowing the sunshine up your tail. This look at

this. We went from nowhere being nowhere in Google to being on the bottom of page one. Now, to be clear, that means you're getting almost no traffic, but look like Google now knows who we are. We're on the bottom of page one. Now we just got to make that climb up that ladder. And as we get to the top of that ladder, there's again, a lot of gold it for us on the other side so there you go that's uh 40 odd minutes on link building which the people always appreciate the link building episodes i'm kidding i never get emails about link building episodes but maybe this is i don't know if we could do a different analogy paul it's the plumbing of occasional marketing no one's ever excited about it but if it's not working properly you're going to be like what in the world is going on yeah you're

going to know i've done weird analogies and weird stories today. If you like this episode, you must link building and you must like 41 minutes with Paul and I talking about sports link building and all things marketing. You've got to do one thing for us. This is going to not take much time at all. You go to your podcast app of choice. Someone emailed me again the other day asking Apple podcast Spotify is where we get the most listens. So those two would help us the most. But whatever podcast app you choose, it's probably going to help us a little bit. You go there, you click five stars, leave a review, make a link building joke. That could be fun if you do that. Once you do that, more people can listen to the show and it helps Paul and I out a ton

so more people can listen to all of our different ramblings and ravings about all things vacation rental marketing. So we appreciate you and we'll catch you on the next episode of the Hudson Petty Show. Thanks so much.