Heads In Beds Show - Explaining The BuildUp Bookings Vacation Rental SEO Framework: TLCK

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul talk about the genesis of Conrad's SEO framework: TLCK that started in the VRMB forums and has been expanded and built out further since then. 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, yo Paul, what's up? Now that I got my bodybuilding grunt out of the way, I think we're ready to go. We've been talking about getting all our workouts in and being as healthy as we need to be this time of year because it's time to shed that winter weight, right? Absolutely.

Maybe not today's focus, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by Athletic. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. God, the podcast ads for Athletic Greens are relentless. it's yeah no but the joke is that paul and i before we record i was telling about my five mile trek this morning on the treadmill which is much longer duration that i typically go and a much longer distance than i typically go so double

whammy so to speak and boy am i regretting it's with some sore lower body extensions here so not doing great myself, but happy. And you're right. We should get the bodies in summer shape. The funny part, even if I am in great shape this summer, you may, the listener may not understand this, but the person that's met me in person will. The whitest of white skin.

I do wear the sun shirts and I don't feel bad about it. I don't care what the body looks like underneath. I'm not getting toes. Like you can get crispy here in South Carolina if you're not careful with regards to just whipping off that shirt and you got skin like I got. So I don't care if I'm Captain America under there, which I'm not going to be. But even if I was, I still honestly would keep the sun shirt on 99% of the time. Like maybe take it off for one second.

But it's just not good. Like I just get I've had actual legitimate sun poisoning before on my back and shoulders when I went to Florida when I was a kid. And it's like a permanent core memory for me to like never get that bad sunburn again. Brutal. It's here it is. We both have kids. kids we can dad bod is legit you know what we can you know however that needs to look and whatever anybody wants the picture of that being it's gonna work we you know that's we've earned that yeah you need the dad bod because when you're holding the baby in your arm like this you actually need a little shelf in the drift to put the baby on it or to put like a toddler on it or whatever. So it's actually serves a very functional purpose. The listener

doesn't understand that, but there's some people nodding right there. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. But I will say this, very lucky genetic wise, certainly my son, Julian, my oldest son, he definitely got his mother's skin, which is excellent, like the nice olive Italian skin. When we were out all summer this year at the pool, right, every weekend he went to go, this kid got tan. But I will say, like his mother, it goes away relatively quickly. So I look at him now and he looks like me and I'm like, ah, poor kid. But by June, let's do a July 4th check-in.

The fireworks are going off. Take a look at Julian and I feel like he's going to be as tan as he can be. So he does get very tan, but it does disappear relatively quickly, unfortunately. It is. In Minnesota, we don't get that direct sun. So we got to be careful, just careful enough to wear the sunscreen wear the sun shirts we're definitely big sun shirt wearers as well it's it's i am also pretty pale white i i get a little ruddier so i get red i don't get tan but right yeah that's some people just have that nice skin

though that's just that's just how it goes some people have very beautiful skin and a lot of people you know what else a lot of people have that some people don't have? Success on Google. And success on Google, at least in the organic frame of mind, also typically comes from SEO. Now, the problem that I always have with SEO, Paul, is that a lot of people try to make it very complicated. That's usually how I lead in this topic that we're talking about today, which is our four frameworks for SEO. TLCK, we'll go through each one of those letters here and what they mean in a second. SEO, TLCK, we'll go through each one of those letters here and what they mean in a second. What maybe you could tell me like your entry board into SEO, because I assume you didn't exit the womb knowing about SEO, there were some learning curve for you, just like I had a learning curve as well. How did you learn the process? What were some things that you studied, resources, material, etc? And what was like your initial reaction as you get dove your foot into it some time ago?

It was it was it starts for me with resortsandlodges.com. And it was just the basic understanding. I didn't admittedly, I didn't have any background in SEO or really a lot of marketing to be completely fair. I still make the joke that for the longest time, and I still probably have it here somewhere. I have a little piece of paper that says SEO, search engine optimization, SEM, search engine marketing. I didn't know these terms. Like this is stuff that, that I was learning on the fly, but it was fortunately, we had a really good framework with how that site was built and really with how you could put the technical in, you could put the key, you could not really

do the keyword research, but the content creation was pretty straightforward. So it was really learning how people do the searches, why people do the searches. And it didn't make sense to me that, oh, yeah, some people do searches for family vacations. Some do it for group vacations. Some do it for wedding venues and stuff like that. So I think it was a, I get the general premise of a website, but how people get there and the searches that people do, it was. I really hadn't thought about connecting one-on-one to get to there. But that is certainly something where learning, okay, how you're structuring the content is important.

How you're structuring the website is important. You have to do SEO for images. You have to do SEO for all these items. Location plays a large role in this, like where you are geo-targeted. It does. There was a whole lot more that my eyes became quite wide open to it. And I think that is, that's where I really started to fall in love with marketing and fall in love with the SEO side of things. Because while it was very technical, a lot of it was very straightforward. A lot of it is very logical. I do like that, generally speaking,

if you put the right framework in place, if you have your page titles optimized, if you have your meta description, if you put the TLCK in place here, you can rank well. Maybe that's not going to be the case in a year or two years here as Google continues to upset the apple cart. But right now, I appreciate the fact that most of what we do here is pretty logical. If you write quality content and you write it for people who are actually going to do the searches to get to your website, and you do some keyword research to put together the right content, and you do the link building behind the scenes, you can rank. And I do. I think that's something that it's not universal. There's a lot of stuff that we do on the marketing side of things that doesn't matter how good you do it or how much money you spend doing it. You're not going to necessarily get the desired results here. And we can make the argument that whenever any of the

search engines make the big switches, maybe we'll see that on the SEO side too, but it just does. It feels like there's, you have more control over, over SEO when you're doing it the right way. And I think that that kind of goes hand in hand too. You don't want to take the black hat approach. How did you, where was your entry into SEO? How has that morphed over time? Yeah. Pure black hat, all spam. No, I'm just kidding. You mentioned black hat there at the end. I had to make a joke about it. No, it funny so i feel like my entry point into seo learning about seo i think this actually used to be on the home page of my old website when i say old when i wasn't called build up when it was 91 digital i used to have that website and i told a story about how this all started with my father-in-law's not at the time but now obviously that's the case his fishing charger business and

he was like hey i'm gonna do fishing charters here in the myrtle beach area and i want to rank number one when people search for Myrtle Beach fishing chargers. So I got into ads and SEO simultaneously, which always surprised me later in my career that there'd be people who would only do one or the other. And they wouldn't really ever dip their toe in the water. Because in my mind, it was always like people go on Google to search for a product or a service. In this case, it was the fishing charter example. They there's two different avenues we can go down, I quickly figured out, all right, here's how we can figure out ads. That's a different episode, we'll come back to that, no worries. But there's two different avenues we can go down. I quickly figured out, all right, here's how we can figure out ads.

That's a different episode. We'll come back to that. No worries. But there's that ads component, of course. And there's your getting component. I'm like, the natural conclusion I had was so obvious to me. Let's try to master both. Let's try to get ads running very effectively and efficiently.

So we're getting enough traffic. And let's try to make sure we rank number one. That was always the logical thought process conclusion for me. So I always worked on both from the beginning, from the first website I ever worked on all the way through to today, I always think of them as complimentary. Now there's a time and place where one makes more sense than the other. And there's a cost equation to PPC for sure. In some markets or some clients, they can't afford to do a much PPC. Maybe they can afford to do something very narrow. See my book for how I think you should approach small budgets. We can go through that in a different episode too. But anyways, yeah, in my mind,

it was always that we have a business, we have people out there looking for the small business in this case. What do we have to do to get there? And the first kind of iteration, the first crack at it was very on-page focused. It was very much, let me put a bunch of keywords on the page, see if that does the trick. Let me make the page really long. That was my second iteration that I tried. I learned all this through Moz. That was my initial reading source.

And I thought, I don't really know about link building. Who the heck is going to link to a phishing charter site? We got lucky later on, which is funny. The people who linked to us later on are now a client of mine, which is just a funny, weird roundabout thing that happened a decade later. But anyways, we get we end up getting links from resorts and hotels, which kind of ended up again, spiraling back into what we do today at build up. And I figured it out, there wasn't one moment where I'm like, I got it, it was more just like doing searches in Google, seeing

the results come up a little bit more, or seeing the site come up a little bit better. I remember getting access to webmaster tools at the time, not called search console. And I was like, to me, that was like, every day, I'd go in there and look and be like, where are we at what became this game? I think that when you get decent at SEO, when you start to master it, I feel like that's what you get addicted to is the game. It's a game there's keeping score, the with the beneficial win, if you will, the scoreboard is the traffic, you can do a lot of things to influence the outcome of the game. And ultimately, when beneficial win, if you will, the scoreboard is the traffic. You can do a lot of things to influence the outcome of the game. And ultimately when you win,

you can be very positive impact on that business. And I feel like we did have a very positive impact on the business for a very long time. Google shifted a lot since then. Now they favor different types of sites. And that search query, that was what makes it really hard to rank for that one. Business has been since been sold

and stuff like that to different family members, not the same folks today. But that was my entry point was that. And then when I got into the first agency I worked for, actually, before I was at the more vacation rental specific marketing agency, we'd work with any type of client. And I was like, I feel like I figured this out because I understood citations, which were like the link side of it, mostly for local businesses. I knew how to make the pages really long and put a lot of content on them. This was obviously probably a decade or two before Heroscope and

some of the smarter on-page optimization tools that we'll talk about here today. And I was like, I get it. I get the basics of it. And then I encountered an actual competitive search result page. And I thought what I knew, or I thought the process that I had learned was going to be something that I was going to be able to replicate and keep going with. And that was definitely not the case. Once the one client that we had at the first agency I worked at, again, not in the vacational space, was actually targeting keywords like prom dresses. And I was like, Oh, that is like a national keyword, or we're competing with not just the five or six other companies that do fishing charters in Myrtle Beach, that was like, all right, how much more activity do I have to do to

them against the top? Not a lot for being honest, to Oh, goodness, like I have to go against like Macy's, and I have to go against these very competitive search keywords. And then I was quickly humbled by my knowledge was there. But like understanding the level of the game was a lot different. So to bring it all the way back to today, and actually this framework, just to explain a little bit too about where this all came from, there would always be threads in Matt Landau's form. And that's how I got started. I would argue like with BuildUp back in 2016 was I would go into Matt Landau's form and just try to help people. Matt always told me help don't sell. That was like his mantra.

And I believe that was, he was more talking about the vacation rental context, but he said it actually works perfectly. And I believe that was, he was more talking about the vacation rental context, but he's like, it actually works perfectly. If you're a vendor, don't come in here and sell, Hey, I'll do your SEO for you, or I'll write your content for you, or I'll do paid search for you or whatever. I was trying to, you know, pitch at the time. He's going to hear and help people. They have a question, answer it. All I ever did. The only ever marketing I did in the inner circle was I would have a little link at the bottom. I think the line was really simple. I helped vacation rental managers get more bookings or something like that, or I'll help you get more traffic and then dash and then a link to at the time, 91 digital. So that was like the only marketing I did. Everything else was like 99.9% helpful information and content. And of course, Matt was completely correct as he always is, almost always says, and that worked really well. And that was my first 10, 15 clients maybe came from that inner circle in the marketing that we did there. I say marketing, but really it was education. But at one point we would, the forum and the community would go down 12, 15 different topics. They'd read about this and they'd have a question about this. They'd read about that. They have a question about that. It could be schema.org. It could be, do I buy this link for five bucks? Do I not buy this link? Do I join the chamber? And I was like,

these all kind of fit into a few different categories, which in my mind encompass everything you need to think about. And the way that I always put it together is sometimes people work on the wrong thing. Sometimes people are a new site and they're sitting there trying to perfect the content and their content's already in good shape and they've no links. And I'm like, we got to get the links in good shape, but I didn't have a way to classify it before. So anyways, this was born out of a blog post that I wrote for Matt Landau a very long time ago. Now I'd have to go look at the date. Maybe I can check it on the show notes if it's still active on his site. And it was, it was at the time just called, I think it was just called TLC. I didn't actually have K in

there. I later split out K to be a little bit different because in my mind, constant and keyword research are naturally intertwined, but they do serve a slightly different purpose. So the goal of TLCK is to break down the idea that there's technical component to your website, which is like the code, how Google crawls the website, the actual information that they see from a technical perspective. And there's a lot of things we can talk about there. These aren't in any order, by the way. It's just like all these things need to be done well, by the way. I think that's what Paul was leading to earlier. There's link building, which is that, by the way. It's just like all these things need to be done well, by the way. I think that's what Paul was writing to earlier. There's link building, which is that how do I get references or other people to talk about my site, link to my site, make my site notable so that when Google goes and crawls the web,

they find my site mentioned a lot. Just think about that at a basic level. And let's assume there's no black hat back black hattery going on. If you have legitimate mentions of your site and people hawking by your business, think of a political figure. Think of Donald Trump or Joe Biden, whatever. They're going to have more mentions of them than someone who's not as well known or not a political figure, right? Or something like that. So Google kind of works the same way with websites and links. It can look at the general popularity of a website by just roughly

how many links there are. There's a whole nuance there to quality of links. Again, we can talk about that. Then my original version of this was just content, but I expanded this to include content and keyword research. So the C and the K are content and then keyword research, because in my mind, you can only do the content well when you know what people are searching for. I think it would be easy to make a killer piece of content actually about something that don't actually search for. And I saw that happen quite a bit in my career. So I was like, we got to change this a little bit. So we do cut, I say there's no order, but we do roughly do them in an order with a new client. If I'm being honest with you, we do typically start with a technical audit. Hey, let's try to make sure like the

foundations in good order, the house doesn't have any holes in it, stuff like that. So we typically do start there. Let's fix. And I always call this distance from perfect. We're never going to be perfect from a technical SEO perspective. The example I always give is go look at the site that's ranking number one in Google for your keyword today, not Airbnb or Verbo or something like that, but go look at the local competitor ranking number one, pop them into one of these technical SEO tools, and you'll find they have broken link here and there. You'll find they have broken little link here and there. You'll find they have broken little metadata here and there. So obviously, if a perfect site led to perfect rankings, then every site at

the top of Google would have perfect technical SEO. That's obviously not true. So we don't need to be perfect, but we certainly shouldn't be leaving things on the table that could be more well-optimized or could be more optimal for Google to crawl and process that information. So when we do a technical audit initially, I call it distance from perfect, how close can we get to perfect, we all agree, or let's agree that we're not going to get all the way there. So what are our trade offs? What are we willing to accept? What limitations do we have using the streamline WordPress plugin for your vacation to website does a great job, but it's got a few little limitations or things that we can't control. We just got to live with those. And we can still get have success using the other

three areas of the framework, then we typically do start with keyword research and content. So that kind of piece of the puzzle is something that we do put in place early on. What are we already ranking for? So we might go into a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush, pick your tool of choice there and kind of download and export a list of what we're currently ranking for. Gives us a pretty good indication, depending on the client. Are you brand new? Are you like coming from ground zero? Or are you actually pretty far along? We just started with a client who was already doing three, 400,000 visitors a month on their website. Like I didn't need to go back and be like, you should rank well for area and vacation rentals. It's yeah, I know that that's already

the case. It's more about enhancing what they're already doing with blog content and things like that. Then we go into content. So once we decide what we want to rank for, those might map to pages. Sometimes those pages exist. We should improve the content on them. That's one path to success in my mind, or the content's not created. Like we don't have a page on the 10 best restaurants in Myrtle Beach. Okay, let's make one that could be a blog post that could be a resource page and so on and so forth. And then let's do that ongoing. So we'll talk about that. And then finally link building again, it's less step in the process. Not really. In theory, you want links pretty much on an ongoing basis. Again, can play a massive role in how you get the links, the method you use to which

acquire how you acquire them. We joked, we did a previous episode a few back of why you should ignore Google's quote, unquote, advice about link building. I don't think it's good. But just to give you like a long summary here of the overview process that started from this idea of let's try to make SEO a little bit simpler. Because within those frameworks of each of those four letters, there is like a deep well that you can dive yourself into. And you can get really nerdy on just schema, schema.org markup, which kind of falls in that technical bucket for me. And you could also just be like, yeah, like you don't have to make everything as complicated as it needs to be.

You're never going to learn everything, nor is everything relevant to your vacation rental website, right? There's so much within the world of technical SEO or on shopping markup or all this stuff that we just don't even touch. We don't even need to worry about it. So I think that it's good for you to have like to get good enough knowledge wise and get good enough skill wise to be able to understand what your agency is doing, if it's working well, how it's working, we can talk about that. And then yeah, what like when someone comes to you with an SEO

recommendation, I think you should quickly at least be able to categorize it into those four categories. Are you giving me a suggestion on I should get more links to my site through this means? Okay, let's think about that cost, pros, cons, etc. Are you giving me a suggestion of how I should fix my site to make it more technically optimal? Okay. Explain to me maybe why other sites are using this or what benefit I might see from it and so on and so forth. And then I think even if you don't understand every little nook and cranny of SEO as the

business owner, nor should you, if we're being honest, right? You can at least get a quick understanding of what's going on. We were joking before you record about that. I'm a car guy. I like cars, but I don't understand how cars work. And my wife got this quote of fix these five things. And I wish there was a framework for like, all right, here's the different systems in your car

and here's how this works. It would help. It would make things a lot easier. So anyway, super long monologue on my side, Paul. But any reaction to those ideas or do you like my categorization of TLCK? Did I miss anything or anything you would add into those? No, I think that it is.

I think that's the basic framework. And I like breaking it down into those categories because I do. I think that they all do stand alone as important items that you need. I think I can understand where the keyword research and content creation going hand in hand there. Certainly that's going to play a role, but I also like the way it's not always just about a blog post or something like that. And I think that's something that content creation, it's a blog post, it's an infograph, it's this, it's this, it's that. It doesn't have to be a marketing piece.

It can be your website may be missing a page. That is very critical to how it's going to perform, how guests are going to or how owners are going to interact with your business. And I think that's something where maybe too often we get into the habit of, we'll just create a blog for that. Yeah, that's an option. And then again, it's a tangible something that you can get, you can feel it, you get the approval. And we've talked about that. That's how we feel the good feelings of a blog post unless it starts ranking. But I do, I think there are times where a blog post isn't going to cut it and it's got to be a page on the site.

Probably building into the link building there a little bit and the technical as well. Just making sure that Google is going to see a hierarchy in the value of this page, a directory page or a menu level page as opposed to a blog page. So I do. I like everything. If we talk about each of these sections individually, we're going to dance into the other areas there. So I do. I think that it's a really great outline. And I think it gives people a good way to look at and evaluate, put scoreboards on these items specifically, or put scorecards on these specific items, if you can do that, because those are going to give you truly, I would say, the key performance indicators of how your website and SEO is performing, as opposed to just saying, how

much traffic am I getting organically? Yeah, that's going to play a role. But what are those actual indicators? What are the stats? What's the data that you need to have? What's the reporting you need to have in place to truly understand how your website is performing on the SEO side of things? Yeah, because COVID taught us nothing else is that an area can go up in search

volumes significantly. And maybe you're not doing any better ranking wise, but your traffic doubled year over year. Like that happened to clients, their traffic doubled year over year, and they actually weren't ranking any better. Some clients ranked worse at Google, and yet they got more traffic because there was so much more demand or people were actually frustrated. I went on the first three websites and I actually couldn't find anything. They make it all the way down to website number five or six, and then they found a booking. So everything looked good for a while there with regards to demand. And now we'll see right now we'll see a market that has less demand, perhaps in most areas, the searches may be down a little bit. You could go into something like Google trends,

you could go into something like ClearScope and they actually export search volume by month, which can be really useful. So we're recording this February 2024. You could take a look at a search volume in February 2023, wait till 2024 is over the month of February, and then do a quick comparison of the monthly search volume to give you some sense of what the traffic may be doing. We've seen clients where this happened. For example, we were in the Gatlinburg market for some time with a large client up there. And there was one year, I think it was from 22 to three at memory serves. It might've been one to two. I don't remember because it's been a little while, but short version of the story is that they ranked number one in Google organically for the main keyword. It was like Gatlinburg cabins was the

main keyword. They ranked number one for that keyword during that timeframe in both months, the average was 1.1 or something. And I couldn't ever find it. Not in the one slot. And yet the traffic difference from year over year was like over 7,000 clicks different. Cause there was so much less search flame going on. So I'm like, yes, on paper, the SEO guys are asleep at the wheel, right? Or the SEO team is asleep at the wheel. Why did we just lose 7,000 clicks? Then we dig into the numbers and we're like, we rank number one. There's literally nothing else we can do on that keyword. Like we've done everything we possibly could. And the search trends have indicated that there's significantly less search volume. And therefore like the traffic is down under no one's fault, right? That just

happens. It's an extreme example. That's not very common. I would say I've encountered that maybe a handful of times in my career, but it can't happen. Like a destination can go up and can go down. And I will say this too. We've had companies that we've worked with where we've worked with them to do some really solid SEO work. This happened quite a bit during 21 and two specifically, then they sell to Vakasa and then their website gets 301 from their website to vacasa and vacasa ends up taking that top slot because they took two somewhat powerful convorces combine them together to form this like super great page ranking i'll do a search in the client that and i'll say it's on my website when this client launched and sold we got a client ranking number one for steamboat

vacation rentals for a very long time probably almost two two and a half three years in steamboat we ranked number one he sold to vacasa as he has the right to do. Then he moved on to another thing and he automatically took that number one spot overnight. It looks like they slipped a little bit since then, but there's a different company in there, Steamboat Lodging Company, who I don't think I'm familiar with. Mountain Resorts and then Vacasa's number three, Movie Mountain's number four. Shout out Robin. But yeah, that's how the landscape looks today. But there was a period there where for Steamboat, Vacasa flipped number one and ranked number one overnight over a tactic that I would argue is very challenging for anyone to replicate, which is go buy the number one ranking property manager in a given market, 301 their website to yours. Like these are pretty advanced

tactics, but they still fall under to go back to the episode topic. They still fall under the idea that site was technically well optimized. We put a bunch of content on it. We got it all the right information on the page. We had built some links to that site. And then when the Casa bought that domain, bought that company, and then 301 did, they obviously benefited tremendously from all the work that we did, which yes, left me a little bit of a bittersweet feeling in my mouth to know that I ended up helping the Casa in a weird way through all the work that we did. But obviously, it was a great exit for the business owner and stuff like that. I'm just being a little tongue in cheek here. But ultimately, that's a good example of some tactics are not easily replicatable,

or they can be very expensive or costly to replicate so yeah i don't know if you have a reaction to those ideas but there's a lot of nuance right the serp can change for a lot of different reasons that's my main point there yeah and i think looking at this the serp has changed just take a look at and i think especially with those city vacation rentals city cabin rentals or going down to those specific unit types specifically when you When we're looking at 20 to 21, 21, 22, that is the time where Google, and they were making the push before that to get vacation rentals into that travel space. But that local pack of the vacation rental management companies themselves, those business listings are going into place. That is no longer the case.

And I think that the fact that you still might be getting that number one placement and we can do all the keyword research in the world and see the volume has not changed. But I think that's another reason we see the fluctuation coming into play is that now those local pack company records in the map are individual rentals that Google that is being served up or aggregated by the meta search. And then you've got the three or four ad placements on top of that. We went from placement number one or two to maybe placement number seven or eight. And I think in doing that keyword research, it's important to understand what position number one actually looks like for a given keyword. That's something that I think

does a good job of it, but that's something I've paid a little closer attention to SEMrush and just some of those results in seeing how specifically some of these sites are showing up within that local pack or what types of results. Is it a featured snippet? Is it the three pack local pack? Is it, what does it actually look like? Is it just going into the travel side and are the websites or are the domains getting credit for that or are they

being run through the third party kind of api there so yeah it's i think that's the other complexity here is that we're losing space on the on just the serp just outside of our control and again it goes into the that's the algorithm part and the technical SEO that we don't have any control over. So all we can do is optimize and make sure that we're in good shape elsewhere. So yeah, you're optimizing to play a game going back to my earlier commentary about like why it's fun and addicting, but the rules of the game can change at any moment in time. This is not like time immemorial. It's going to stay the same way always. There's always going to be an example where Google is just like, yeah, why not toss a

random massive search block in the top of the search results and throw you for a loop? So that's to get back to the TLCK pieces of it. Yeah, there's a lot of things that you can control. There's a lot of things you can't control. When it comes to technical SEO, it's like you might be limited by your website CMS. You might be limited by the way that you do linking. You may be limited by just like the fact of a really old website. It's really challenging for you to modify content. We had a client we started working with

recently who was taking over something that was quite a bit older. He was the marketing manager coming in, dealing with something that was very dated and was doing his best and trying to get the right outcome. And certainly, I would say, give him a C plus on the technical SEO side of it. Luckily, his site was still doing okay, but it was frustrating, I know, for him because he wasn't able to have this really modern web platform. And all this is expensive. Like I'm not going to lie, like a lot to do SEO. I guess that's the piece that I would go to next, which is the doing a technical SEO audit. That could be a 10 minute job to do this crawl, but it could be a 10 hour job. I always say this to clients to fix everything in the crawl. And what they often get reached out to by

different, you know, agencies out there, whether they're interspace or not, is, hey, look at all the problems. And I'm like, okay, maybe maybe again i'll go back to my comment earlier about distance from perfect maybe some of those problems are worth fixing maybe some of them aren't or it may be too tedious to fix them the question may become okay if you were to look at your seo approach do you fix every single problem on the website i i've not found that to be the case have yet to crawl an seo website or a website from any other seo provider in our space and got 100 out of 100 without any errors unless it's like a one-page website But even then they'll pick at something. No, there's no alt tag on this image or something like that. If you build a complicated site,

there's going to be a lot of complicated pieces to getting it there. And you've got to be comfortable with the shifting ground under your feet a little bit like you as you referenced, Paul, with regards to the search results can change, the rankings can change. And Google has these updates all the time. It's so funny, we talked about these updates before. A lot of them I feel don't hit our space. There was one that happened, the helpful content update towards the end of last year that I felt did impact our space a little bit. But for the most part, I don't see like massive shifts for them, generally speaking, when these updates drop most of the time.

So I feel like you're living in your own little world here a little bit. Just because there's some update that impacts medical websites doesn't mean it's going to touch a vacation or website in Miami or something like that. Yeah, it's in my mind, it's figuring out the path of if these were four different, I posted this LinkedIn graphic a while ago, and I think this makes a lot of sense to me. If you had a bucket of water and that water represented the time that you had to spend or the budget you had to spend, maybe it's both depending on your situation. And you had four different cups in front of you, technical link building, constant creation,

keyword research. You have to determine what's the appropriate level of effort I need to put into each of these, knowing that you're never going to get all of them to the completely full cup, or you're never going to perfect maybe and put all the water in the technical SEO cup, because then it's shoot, now I have no time to do link building or no budget to do link building, nor do I have any time to research new keywords or actually publish new content on the website. And although this is uncommon, I do see it sometimes where a site may have like actually a decent link profile, but they haven't gone through the effort of making like really nice, really usable pages. Because to be honest, some platforms out there, PMS platforms, make it really

tricky to make new pages, you have to go in and tag every property in the back end to get it to pull through properly. Like these are things that are content related that were tricky to do. It's not simple as just clicking a few buttons and most PMS platforms out there. And then boom, we've got a page of all the pet friendly rentals in insert area here or something like that. That can be very time consuming. Sometimes SEO is not just on the SEO person, right? Like it would be ideal that you hired an SEO person and that person could go A to Z, they could write content, build links, they could fix all the problems on the website. But we live in the real world. And in the real world, those people don't really exist. If they do, please email me and I would happily hire that

person and pay them whatever they wanted. But they don't really exist. So the best thing for us to do is to have like on our team, for example, Paul, we have specialists for the most part, right? We have someone that kind of has mastered really the content process on our team that does a great job at that. We have someone that really does a good job on link building. In fact, we have two now, and we're looking to even potentially go a little bit further into that process with more team members, because we just have a growing need for more and more links that we could potentially build and get more results in there. We have someone that kind of now goes back and does the technical SEO audits. It used to be the same person that would do content and tech SEO. They had that knowledge, they had that background, they could do both. Again, we split that out now where someone who

does more of the paid search work is actually pretty savvy on the technical SEO side of things. So that person, that individual, he'll go in and fix a lot of those problems. Again, knowing full well, he's never going to make them 100%, but certainly flagging things like broken links, flagging things like no page titles or busted page titles, like right issues, going in correcting those, especially on your top 10, 20, 30 pages, which drive the majority of your traffic. So I think that's ultimately what it all comes down to is that when you're thinking about your SEO approach, it has to include all these things, to be clear, you understand what they now are, if you're listening, like you understand that there's different pieces in here. And it may be a little bit of your judgment call of like how you determine

what company you work with what agency you work with to work on all these problems i will say it's not uncommon we have a client right now where we're not doing everything they have someone else is doing one part of it who's doing almost more like of the pr link building angle i'm like awesome if they do a great job and build us links i can give that out of our scope and not focus on that we're going to focus on the content creation i think we're doing a really good job actually on that content creation and i think that together we're going to focus on content creation. I think we're doing a really good job actually on that content creation. And I think that together we're going to actually go pretty far with that because there's a lot of wins to be had on this particular brand, this particular website by doing polls. Maybe it's not a agency that does everything for you. And also

we had this come up recently. It also depends on what your appetite is for growth. We had a call with a client and he was happy overall, but he wasn't happy with the pace of link building. And I said, okay, we can be more aggressive on link building, but it's going to require more investment. What is your appetite for investment here? And it turns out he was maybe willing to have that conversation around doing additional investment, knowing that he wasn't maybe making a huge amount of revenue today from his SEO efforts, but seeing progress. Maybe I'll go down that thread here really quickly to finish that thought out, which is that if you're working with an agency or anyone on your team and they're doing SEO, it's true. You're not going to see results right away. You're not going

to put a blog post up today and it's not going to shoot to the top of the rankings tomorrow. That almost never happens. But in my mind, you should always, as the SEO agency, be able to show progress. And typically I might even show that in terms of impressions on Google search, as opposed to clicks on Google search. That's happening with a client right now. Within month four or five of his SEO campaign, and I'll be honest, the traffic is not killing it. Like we're getting, we've gone from zero basically, and he started at ground zero to getting a few hundred clicks a month, but that's not something that he's necessarily thrilled about.

The return on his investment so far isn't there. But I went to the client, I said, look, totally understand. That's a valid frame for you to have. Remember what we talked about? And we talked about this kind of during our process, but I'm like, look at this. Like we were dead. We were getting no impressions at all in Google. Last month, we did 50,000 impressions in Google search console.

So I know the clicks aren't there. I'm with you 100%. I want to correct that as soon as we possibly can. We went from Google not knowing about the site to Google showing this website 50,000 times a month. So believe me, trust me, we're absolutely on the right path. What we've got to do is get from the bottom of page one of Google, which is where all these impressions but no clicks occur to the at least the middle of page one of Google, where I promise you, you'll start to see significant, you know, returns on that investment, and you're to be really happy with the results. So to go back to that thing, which is, I think that people come to us somewhat regularly with this. I was paying some other SEO company. I didn't even know what they were doing. Again, you should be able to map

back the deliverables to a technical audit. What'd you fix? Link building. What links did you build? Keyword research. Okay. What keywords did you research? Show me a spreadsheet and content. What new pages did you publish? These are all very clear deliverables that any decent, half decent SEO agency should be able to provide you. Now we could talk about quality and whether you're happy with those things. That's a different discussion, but you certainly should never utter the words. I know none of our clients should ever utter this. I don't know what they're doing because we have a spreadsheet and we talk about this

on a monthly basis, right? Here's the things that were published. Here's the piece of content that went out. Here's links that were built. We don't always put that in the report, but like they can ask us, we keep track of everything there, of course, so you can get the right outcome. And if you don't know what those things are happening and the SEO agency is overly focusing on one of these areas and it's not focusing on one of the other areas,

you probably got a data in your hands. I hate to say it. So I don't know if they have any reaction to that. Yeah, I think it is. And we talked about it a few months ago and I think it's the weaponization of any of these things. It's that if you're going to go through and again, target someone that their technical SEO isn't good, or their link building isn't good enough, or they don't just target that you're that they're not doing it right. That'd be like, my assumption would be if you're going to pick this out as a reason that, oh, this is not being completed, then you have a plan to improve the technical or you have a plan to, there are tangible goals, smart goals in place that you are going to make improvements and you're going to produce better content.

You're going to do better keyword research. Like that, I think that's probably what gets me the most on all this stuff is that we've got all these great tools and they can show how really we are doing, or they can, if you selectively interpret them, it's going to show, Hey, this is terrible. This is something you need to improve, but it does. It seems like we focus in specific areas. The technical, I think is the most, most frequent that we see, but keyword research as well. And again, if you're just using those reports to weaponize and you're not using to actually improve the overall website and the overall experience for the end user, then you're just using those reports to weaponize and you're not using to actually improve the overall website and the overall experience for the end user, then all we're doing is, again, it's a slight step better than what it was before. Well, if you're only getting that incremental improvement, what are you really doing?

to your credit and the work you put in, there's a reason why you do see the growth, why your customers, clients, partners do see that growth is because you are looking at this in an equal weight. You're not saying it all has to be technical. It all has to be content creation. These all play a role in the overall success of the SEO plan that we're putting together or the organic, the website plan that you're ultimately putting together there. So this is something that, yes, certainly take heed what people are saying as far as understanding how your website is performing. But if it's just a constant barrage of, oh, they're not doing this right. They're not doing this right. They're not doing this right. I'm sorry. There are no agencies in the space right now. And anybody that's worth their weight in anything right now, who's not doing this right. They're not doing this right. I'm sorry. There are no agencies in the space right now. And anybody that's worth their weight in anything right now, who's not doing one of these things,

they may not be doing all of them, but don't let that, don't let the negative be the focus. Just make sure that let's acknowledge that we do some things better than others. And ultimately all of these things are going to contribute to a much better website, much better experience. So I say take any reports you're getting from someone or anything like that with a grain of salt they deserve. And understand that just like with anything else, there's vanity metrics out there. And we can see what we want to see and we can have these nice pretty numbers. these nice pretty numbers but ultimately if you're not you'll know when you've got a good company that you're working with a good company and the sustained success is going to be a major driving

focus of that i would say so yeah i think that's what we're all after so i put a bell on this one as we kind of wrap here time-wise well i think it's sustained success with seo is doing all these four areas checking in on them regularly right like with technical seo maybe that's a monthly crawl for example that's usually what it looks like for most of our clients. And it's when things start to flag a little bit more aggressively, maybe triggers for a tech more technical review might be doing a site migration or adding a bunch of new properties or changing a bunch of the way the site works or swapping PMSs could certainly be a big technical trigger going from PMS platform A to PMS platform B that could change a lot of the URLs and things like

that. You want that to be in good shape. When we use tools like Ahrefs, if it's rating the 90s from a score perspective, usually there's not many major flags there. Again, you want to go back and look because things do change, but that's a reasonable cadence, I think, for that. When it comes to content, again, have you organized all the properties on your website in a logical way? Do you have landing pages that people search on? Again, keyword research and content are so closely related in this regard are people searching for oceanfront vacation rentals in city name area name probably let's figure out the volume is let's figure out maybe if we can only do one page a month versus oceanfront and pet friendly let's see which one has a more search volume

maybe which one's a little bit easier to rank for go back make the page that targets pet friendly or oceanfront whatever the case may be or oceanfront pet friendly who knows that may be a keyword out there in some of the larger markets they want both oceanfront and whatever the case may be, or oceanfront pet friendly, who knows that may be a keyword out there in some of the larger markets. They want both oceanfront and pet friendly, maybe not. But anyways, you could research this using some of the SEO tools that Paul and I've mentioned today, build a page around that, put content on it, use ClearScope to make sure you build the content in a way that's SEO friendly, we find that's the best tool, insert your tool of choice if you want to try other ones. But that's just where I can personally attest to that we use all day every day, we've had the best success there. And then get that page in your navigation index in Google so Google could find it.

And then you have a chance to rank for it, right? You're not going to rank for that keyword if you don't specifically go make a page that's targeting that intent 99.999% of the time. There's a few exceptions, but it's very uncommon. Yeah. And then how am I promoting my site on an ongoing basis through getting more people to talk about my company? Think about it that way.

If you want to forget the DR and link building and no follow, just forget about that for a second. I want more people to talk about my company. The more people that know about my company, the better my company will do. And Google should be able to see that and figure it out. There's link building. We do it through travel bloggers. Typically we do it through local businesses. Typically we do it through other sites that we have access to in that travel blogger, Facebook group that we've talked about before. And these are very valid paths to get more people to talk about your business, talk about your company. And then therefore Google finds those links. They say, Oh, this company seems notable, let me show them higher in the search results. And that's a pretty tried and true method

to get from point A to point B, point A being 10th page of Google, point B, I guess like the backwards being the top, which is ultimately we're trying to do if you're listening to a 40 minute episode about SEO. So that's all we got today, Paul, we're up against the time wise. So I appreciate you recording with me as always letting me flourish out my thoughts here on TLCK, our SEO framework. That is all good. Anything that the listeners should do, Paul, as they depart here, the fifth thing they should do maybe is, what is it? R? Review? Is that the case? Review? R? TLCKR? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Why not? Just for today, just for the next five minutes. Go ahead. We'll put an R on

there. Your site's going to rank better in Google. If you go to your podcast type of choice again spotify and itunes or get the most listens you head over to your podcast type of choice leave us a review and then we'll forget about the whole r thing as soon as you leave the five-star review but no we joke but we always appreciate the reviews they do come in and more people listen to the show every month since we've been asking for a review so we appreciate that if you have any seo questions let me know conrad c-o-n-r-a-d at buildupbookings.com or you can fill out the contact form that is linked in the show notes description and someone from my team will reach out to you and we'll talk to you about SEO.

We love talking about SEO. So we appreciate it. And we'll catch everybody on the next episode. Thanks so much.