Heads In Beds Show - Mistakes To Avoid When Re-Designing Your Vacation Rental Website

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellThe metaverse is failing...Google Ads display updates🔗 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, Paul, how are you doing today? It's a beautiful morning in lovely Minnesota. That's what I always like to say to start the week here. Yeah. We're just getting by, enjoying the time heading into hopefully conference season here. Yeah, we're headed into conference season. As we release this, we may actually even be at the RMA. So again, if you see us there, certainly say hello, or we'd be happy to see you. You can always email one of us.

I thought, Paul, we introduced our new segment this week, which is that little marketing rundown. So you saw something pretty interesting. Tell us a little bit about what you discovered here with new business information for search ads. Yeah. So in most recent, our information from Google ads help was that Google's now going to allow businesses to deliver a little more information. I think previously we've probably

seen, or most people have seen as they're doing searches, the favicons are changing a little bit, but Google's really enhancing that quite a bit more here and really having you build in more image assets, more true logo assets. And really something that I noticed on not just the paid side of things, but the organic side is that they're tending more towards just the business name overall. Even on the organic side of things, I was doing kind of research results for HubSpot even. And HubSpot, which leading CRM, best in class CRM, is now just showing up as HubSpot as an organic asset, just in the business name there on the page title. So it bucks our idea of what maybe best practices are for SEO overall going forward with some of the on-page information.

But certainly that's something that you want to make those ads, obviously, as appealing as possible here. So being able to build in that logo, it looks like Google's also toggling over from ads to sponsored. They've been beta-ing those calls to action within the ads. So that looks like it will roll out here with sponsored. You can put your logos in, you can put your business name in, really giving more opportunities to customize that ad content outside of just the headlines and the descriptions that were already limited by there. So definitely something that

anybody who's running paid ads certainly look into how you can get additional information in there. I do think the caveat was you do have to have your registration in place where you have to verify your business information, but making sure that people can see the best version of your ad only going to help with engagement, click-through rate, and hopefully that overall conversion rate down the road there. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, that's a good rundown. We'll put a link to that in the show notes so people can check it out. And we'll just try to do a little marketing updates here before we get into the meat of each episode going forward. One other thing that caught my eye, it looks like Facebook's metaverse is failing. It doesn't really look like there's much there. I think that obviously what we're

promoting, what we typically talk about is like real world experiences, like someone coming and staying in a vacation rental home. So the idea that you'd own 10 pixels of beachfront real estate, and that's going to be more valuable than actual real estate never made much sense to me anyways. I don't know. We'll see. It hasn't grabbed me. I don't know if it's grabbing like the marketplace in general and meta, if you will, the machine that is behind Facebook is putting all this effort and energy and resources into something that doesn't really appear to have much momentum. So we'll keep people updated. But I think forget the metaverse, let's vacation in the real world first. I guess that's better for us.

It is. I think Facebook just may have a bit of a core business issue of what's your core business? Is it Facebook? Is it ads? Is it the metaverse? Where is it going to go from here? So I think the next 12 months will be pretty interesting to keep an eye on Facebook or meta or whatever it's going to be moving forward and see how that all rolls out. Speaking of things that we need to keep an eye on, we have a pretty interesting topic today. So we'll conclude the marketing kind of rundown minute there and tap into the main topic of today's episode, which is website redesign. Now, I'm sure, Paul, you've been a part of many of these in the past. You've seen many websites just over your career.

From all the major, there's a lot of different companies out there that build websites. A lot of them use similar frameworks, templates, things like that. But regardless of what system you're using, regardless of if the site's on a custom CMS, or it's on Drupal, or it's on WordPress, or you did it with company A or B or C, in my view, it really doesn't matter too much, right? When you're redesigning a website, a lot of mistakes that you could make, regardless of what platform you're on, that can really cause your website harm. So I don't know if you have a horror story. I have a horror story. And it's with a client that I was working with, with my previous agency that I worked for. This happened quite a while ago.

And I thought we had a good handle on this launch. So we were working with this property manager, a large property manager, several hundred units. We launched the new site towards the start of a new calendar year where their booking season is very high. So we work on the site towards the end of the summer, into the fall, launch it here. And let's say we launched it here in,

let's call it, let's say we launched it January 7th, let's just say. It was somewhere in that timeframe. When we launched the site, everything was okay from a redirect perspective. There was no like obvious major SEO misses. Metadata was carried over, things like that. We'll go over all those things here in a few minutes, but the site just absolutely tanked from a performance standpoint. And what I learned is that not all redesigns are good. Like objectively, the site looked a lot better. If you looked at the good. Like objectively, the site looked a lot better. If you looked at the way it was before, and you looked at the way that we launched it in this new state, it looked a lot nicer. It had a video background, the logo was cleaner, fresher, crisper, all that stuff. Any reasonable person looking at the site would go, this looks

awesome, but they just weren't converting. So that was my like watershed moment. And the punchline of it was that they lost, I believe, $400,000 plus in bookings during the next few months, doing a year over year comparison of their January and February traffic and conversions, things like that to the previous year. So again, that was like this like, again, watershed or like victim feeling moment to me of me being like, you have to be really careful in redesigns. And I've been super careful since then to go, look, redesigns are not this like cure all medicine. This is not a problem that we can just fix with a redesign. A redesign may actually make things worse. So again, I don't know if you have a horror story, but what's your

perspective when the client says like, redesigning our website, I have this like immediate like tensing and clenching of my muscles. I'm not always most optimistic about it sometimes to be honest. I think that's a pretty fair characterization. I think one of the things that we began in that previous experience with the agency side is once you started identifying specific redesigns or specific transitions from a specific web provider or specific property management system in the vacation rental space. That's when my skin started to crawl a little bit because I knew who the easier transitions were and who the more difficult ones were and who had done a good job of technical SEO previously and who

hadn't and stuff like that. So I think what we began to do was try to identify what are those areas immediately off the bat of what needs to be improved and really having that game plan for each of those previous providers. I don't think there were horror stories. And I think more of them were small misses, small internal misses or miscommunications here. But I think anytime changing, again, for the online community, this is their brick and mortar. You do have hospitality companies that they've got the brick and mortar and obviously that's where people are staying. But as far as your online presence, that's just as important, if not more important, because how many people

are coming by your property, they're driving by and that's how they're going to decide to book. It's pretty rare in the grand scheme. So really just understanding how much value is in that website. I think we forget about that from time to time that it's really important that you've got that good website and making sure that when you're making that transition, when you're migrating a site over, when you're doing a redesign, having all those items in place to ensure that you're going to have long-term success with your online marketplace. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the thing that we're talking about here, right? Is long-term success because you might be on that website platform for several years,

right? And ultimately, most people aren't going to swap websites, but every three or four years anyways. So it's one of those things where if you're going to be on that platform for some time, really the first 30 days might determine how the next three years go in terms of relaunching that site. And you don't want to be going backwards and harming work that you've done with the previous company. Let's say company A did a lot of SEO work for you. You're going and doing switching PMSs going with company B.

That's fine. There's a way to do that and preserve a lot of your efforts. So yeah, I think we've all gone through a painful, anyone who's been in this game for any length of time has gone through a painful launch and problems have been missed. And like you said, it's habitual in some companies. We don't need to name them. And it's one of those things where some companies just don't have the proper training, infrastructure, team, et cetera, in place to make these launches go smoothly.

Other people do. And you can see the results in the outcomes of these launches. And so again, our goal here is education, not any sort of negative sentiments. So our goal is really just to tell people, hey goal here is education, not any sort of negative sentiments. So our goal is really just to tell people, hey, here's what to actually expect when you're doing a redesign. And these are questions to ask. Again, we talked about this last episode, questions to ask the company that you're working with, will they have things settled? I made a little hit list here that I want to walk through of things that I see are the most common mistakes. And there's other things that may be outside the scope. I know you have a little

bit of a list as well. From more of a functionality standpoint, I have some of the main things that I've seen. So number one, people doing this sometimes don't have any plan for migrating content. And it's not just that they don't have a plan. It's usually what I find is that they don't do it properly at all. Like they don't actually make a site map. They don't go and crawl the website beforehand with let's say tool like Screaming Frog or something like that. And really my outcome now or my like thought process when we're doing a redesign is I want to get information from many sources. So I'll actually pull down analytics top pages.

I'll pull down search console, which usually there's a 95% overlap, but every once in a while, you catch different kinds of variations of things. I'll pull down a sitemap crawl with Screaming Frog. I'll even go to Ahrefs and see what pages are ranking and driving in Google. And yeah, just make sure I covered every single base,

put those into a single view, like a Google sheet, deduplicate. So we're not duplicating stuff over and over again. Some sites make this very easy because they have a very clean up-to-date like sitemap that just, you go to sitemap.xml, you can see everything right there. That's the first thing I check because usually that's the best way of doing it. But it's not always there, right? Sometimes there's not a sitemap or if there is, it's not actually updated with the content

that's actually being published there on a week-to-week, day-to-day basis. So that's first, though, ultimately. So however you get the pages, there's a lot of different ways to skin the cat there. But you need to have a plan for migrating content, and you need to make a concerted, significant effort to get every single URL that people are visiting of any significance. Let's say you set some floor of 10 visits a month over the past year or something like that. But that could be easily hundreds of pages or hundreds of variations of pages when it of any significance. Let's say you set some floor of like 10 visits a month over the past year or something like that.

But that could be easily hundreds of pages or hundreds of variations of pages when it comes to things like query modifiers and things like that. And that needs to be put into a very clear, very logical migration plan. How are we going to take this asset that's on the old site, the current site, whatever you want to call it,

and move it into the new site? Are we recreating this functionality one-to-one? Okay, here's the old events page. Here's the new events page. The URL structure is changing this way. Okay, great. Or are you omitting that functionality? And if so, do you know the consequences of omitting that functionality? So I think you've been through that process before. When you get rid of things, it's not always positive, right? And I think that's the key is that when you do have maybe hundreds of pages that were previously in place that they've lost some

functionality. Not functionality, but people just aren't finding them. And like you said, hitting that threshold, making sure that if you're deciding on, okay, I'm going to remove all of these pages, all this content, where's that content going to go? Or is it going to be visible anymore? Did the search engines find it valuable before? Yeah. That was always a gray area of what do we want to lose? What is going to be valuable from our perspective on the marketing side versus what was important to the business themselves? Because there may be some business ties that we don't know about to X blog post or X activities page or this and that. So I'm really making sure that once you've got that contract, figuring out how you are going to map that content over and really having a plan

behind it. Because otherwise you do throwing 20 blog posts, republishing 30 blog posts, a hundred blog posts, whatever that number is. Now we're going to have to take some time to re-index. We're going to have to take some time to make sure that the search engines are finding us as they did before. Yeah. Migrating content was always one of those of, do you want to slim it down? Do you want to enhance it? What's really the plan with that content and how do you make sure that you're not losing out because of you had great content before or because you need great content moving forward? Yeah, it's by far the most common thing. So if you're doing a redesign and you can ask the company only a few questions or you're looking to check the competency of someone working on the project, I think that's my first question.

What is your plan? Where's your list of the old content? What's your plan for migrating into the new site? And sometimes getting rid of it is an okay decision. I don't want to be like... My general philosophy here, by the way, is that the less you change on a redesign, the better, generally speaking, from a structure standpoint. Unless it was set up horribly before, then it's a different thing. But if you're getting a lot of traffic and things were set up using general best practices before, then changing a lot all at once is generally a bad thing. These are broad generalizations. Someone might... I don't want a client to email me and be like, but you recommend I change all these things. Yeah, I was probably terrible before if I recommended that. And I

reserve the right to change my mind in any future situation. That should just be like a rule on this show that I can just change my mind in this future. But for the last 80 that I've done, the last X number that I've done, site redesign, site launches of, generally the ones that we change less on have smoother launches. The more we change, there's certainly going to be more short-term fluctuation in terms of losing rankings, losing things that may or may not come back. So if that's my overall process, again, number one question, what's your plan for migrating content? This kind of ties into content, but it's more specific thing that I would say is worth diving into a little bit more, which is no plan for migrating key landing pages. So I just encountered one of these recently

working with a client and they didn't carry over, they carried over obvious stuff. Like here's the blog. They did an okay job. I'd give them like a C plus B minus on migrating the content, but they didn't, they had all these custom landing pages. It was like winter snowbird rentals. It was different community pages, different condo complexes. It was all the stuff that was not carried over. And I'm like, look, this was 35% of the traffic on the whole site. And maybe you guys don't want to feature these in the homepage. I can live with that. Like we can hide some of the pages in some regard if we really don't want to make them

as primary of a focus on the new site as they were in the old site. Maybe you think it looks more clean or there's more of a design aesthetic that way. There's other flaws we could talk about there in a minute as far as internal linking. What I disagreed with was the idea that someone would click on the winter snowbird rentals page that was still indexed in Google. They'd come on the site, it would be a broken page. So I don't know if you've had experience with that, but making those key landing pages is in and of itself a SEO value adding activity generally, but then migrating them can be just as important. I do. I think one of the, and I don't know for the property management space,

for some of the PMS companies, how they categorize their rentals. Everybody does it a little differently. Certainly some are doing it by destination, by amenity type. But that's something where I've always wondered if it's more of a functionality thing with the property management side that they can't tag these or they can't categorize the same way as they could with their previous PM. I don't know why you wouldn't be able to. It seems like functionality you'd want to be able to carry over between the two businesses there. But that was always intriguing at the very least to me, whether it's I've got all the one bedrooms, I've got all the two bedrooms, all the three bedrooms there, and that works fine here. But now we're going to switch to by destination or by amenity type, like you're talking about the waterfront or the luxury or anything like that. So I guess I question whether that's a decision that the businesses are making, and I hope that they're taking that into consideration, or it's something where they're limited. All of a sudden, they wanted to have it categorized that way.

Or it's something where they're limited. All of a sudden, they wanted to have it categorized that way. They want those landing pages, those sub pages, but the functionality just isn't there to be able to tag appropriately and make sure that they're showing up the way they were previously. Yeah. And that's sometimes one of those things where I've heard people shrug their shoulders. Old PMS company, old website had this functionality. New PMS company, new website doesn't have the functionality.

And then in my head, I'm like, then build a functionality or come up with some page. But yeah, the idea that you're shrugging your shoulders at a page that I just did, this is a small diversion, but it'll come back to this idea of landing pages in a second. I did a mini site report for a client. We ended their summer season. They don't really get a lot of fall off season. This is a very sharp decline beach market once the winter comes around. So we're looking at the numbers and basically one of their mini sites did 350,000 in referred revenue. Click on the mini site for the name of a condo complex. They click over to the units. We did 350,000 in revenue just from one little mini site that my designer and I did in about 25 minutes. It took us a little bit of time to put together, but the outcome of it was very positive and we haven't really fiddled with the

mini site a lot since, and it's still doing very well. So just one mini site can be that much revenue, $300,000 of people landing on one specific search query, coming in and booking. And this is not a massive property manager, by the way, we're talking 90 units in total. And actually this landing page only has about, I think, 12, 15 units on it. So this isn't like a 5,000 unit tech company, but that's a huge driver of their success is just people specifically looking for the name of that building. They come in on the mini site, they come through. So if you had a landing page addressing that same particular search concept, the name of a condo building or the name of a, like you said a minute ago, types, pet friendly, waterfront, luxury, whatever the case may be, it doesn't matter. People coming in on that page have very high

intent. So it's not, this isn't a one-to-one, this isn't, oh, I lost 20% of my traffic, therefore I might lose 10%, 20% of my bookings. No, if you lose 20% of the wrong traffic, that could be 30, 40, 50% of the bookings in a given community or in a given area or something like that. There's the delta between traffic and conversions. If it's the wrong type of traffic you lose, it can be massive. So that's why I'm hitting on this point hard, which is like migrating key landing pages might be, you know, that, that very important revenue saving thing. The first one migrating content that we talked about is maybe more of a traffic saving thing in some regards, but the next thing and your revenue often relies on how you rank for some of these five, six, seven, eight, 10 keywords that really have most of the buying intent.

That's the key. Yeah. And most definitely. Yeah. All right. So detailing into the third that I had, no plan for mapping redirects. So we touched on this a few times. It's one of those things that to us, it's second nature, right? It's like putting your car into park. Everyone knows how to do it, right? But no, people do not know how to do this properly. There's so many mistakes made in the world of redirects. Some that are a little bit more complex than I've made before. And yes, I'm saying this because I've butchered it before. I'll tell you another story. This was when I started out on my own.

I did a site migration for a client that had a lot of query strings in their URL before. I tried to use regular expressions and I botched a redirect rule and I ended up redirecting hundreds of property pages to one property page. So people were clicking on all these old property page detail links and they were getting redirected. So I was on the right path a little bit to one property detail page. So that owner was super happy getting all this traffic and probably all the bookings in the world. And the other, oh, I don't know, 299 properties that I wasn't redirecting properly for a few days were getting the brunt of lack of traffic from people clicking on links. So we corrected it, but it's one of those things where not only do you need

to do redirects, you have to check them, but let's circle back. Let's go back for a second. Maybe Paul, you can explain for folks, what is a redirect? What's the point of it? How does it help with this website relaunch process? Yeah, it is. Knowing that, and we deal with redirects certainly a lot on the owner's side now with Venturi, but with a redirect, you really want to make sure that you're one-to-one. You're taking whatever the previous traffic was, and now you're directing that to a new page. 301 and 302 redirects are the ways you can do that permanent or temporary. 301 redirect is usually the gold standard for redirecting your pages, but it is. It's one of those things that if

you're not doing it properly or if you're certainly some multiple ways that you can redirect and moving things forward, adding the slug on at the hour, adding the appendage on at the end there. I think the pain point there is if you do have legacy marketing going on, if you've got some type of email marketing, if you've got old Facebook ad that you haven't updated, haven't forbid we had, we didn't update the destination URL on a Facebook ad or a Google ad, how are they going to get to that new page? And they're either going to go to a 404, then all of a sudden you've lost them. Hopefully Google's going to catch you on a 404. They're going to stop you if they're not able to go to that page. But Facebook, they'll let you keep spending that money and they'll send it to

a dead page until they're blown to the face. And certainly we've seen that before where that didn't get updated. So making sure that anything legacy marketing that that is in place, you want to make sure that they are still getting that new experience because it is it's typically it's, that's why you're doing the redesign, different messaging, different calls to action, different USPs. So you're trying to direct them back to that old experience. And ultimately, that's not gonna be beneficial for you there. So yeah, making sure that you're unifying that experience. I think that's really important between old and new. And if there is some old out there still, and again, on the owner side, we see it a

lot. It's the, hey, the postcard that people kept sending and kept sending. I held on for six months. If you're going to a page that doesn't exist, you have to make sure that nobody's going to be able to go back through and update that copy on that postcard. So six months later, so that's something you need to make sure they're hitting the right page moving forward. Yeah.

I think you bring up important points, which is this is not just an SEO conversation. Our brains work similarly in terms of thinking about SEO and thinking about that side of it. But you bring up other many more practical use cases in some regard. An owner saved a postcard, a Facebook ad that's legacy, any email link that's legacy, a bookmark that's legacy, right? These aren't the majority of your traffic most likely, but very high intent. Someone's going down and hunting down an old URL.

I text my wife a property detail page URL like six months ago for a property that we might stay in for Christmas this year. And she saved it on her phone, like it's on her home screen. Like she wants it. So if she were to tap on that and it were to be a broken link, she'd be like, oh, I guess they don't have it anymore. If she saved it on her phone. Like it's on her home screen. Like she wants it. So if she were to tap on that and it were to be a broken link, she'd be like, oh, I guess they don't have it anymore.

If the redirect wasn't mapped properly. So I think that's important. Yeah, to understand, which is redirects are a bit of an SEO thing. That's where like my head automatically goes. Right.

But it's not. You're pointing out important things here, which is that it's a user experience thing on the post guest side and the owner side. And if you botch it, you botch this,

then you can lose a lot of high intent traffic. And it could be potentially catastrophic. And that could be $100,000 deal you lose out on the owner side. And if you botch it, you botch this, then you can lose a lot of high intent traffic. And it could be potentially catastrophic. And that could be $100,000 deal you lose out on the owner side, just if you don't properly redirect the subdomain or vanity domain or landing page URL that you place onto a postcard. So these can be very expensive mistakes. They don't even see. The owner may say, oh, I guess start a business and then just walk away and not really pursue it further. How many owners are to like jump through many hurdles to get where they're trying to go? Like they're probably just going to go where it's easier.

Oh, they seem like this other company here seems like they're in business. I guess I'll just call them and deal with them. So yeah, it can be very misleading in that regard. The pain that you see here isn't always, again, we said this a minute ago, reflective of the traffic lost. And it's not always reflected on the fact that you see a four or four, you don't know what their intent actually was. That can be pretty challenging. Correct. My last one that I had on my list, and then I know you

had some other things on your side that I think are great points that we'll get to is no plan for carrying over key tracking and marketing pixels. So some of the obvious stuff, right, being Google analytics. Now we have Google analytics for, but I see like Facebook pixels get dropped on, sorry, meta pixels get dropped on migrations. We'll get to use that eventually. It's like a Verbo VRBO. Like I got it, but it took me a long time anyways. It's so, you know, any sort of tracking or tagging or marketing pixel. Now, if you have tag manager, that may be a pretty simple process because you might just carry over your tag manager container, which fires all your tracking pixels. So if you're a little bit ahead of that curve, then you're probably in good shape, but something to keep in mind for sure, when you're launching a redesign, you know, the actual tracking mechanisms that you

have data scripts, etc, that are firing for these various marketing tools that you may have in place want to make sure those carry over. I don't know if you have anything particular dig in on that, or just as more of a checklist item. I think that is the question is, how are you going to carry over those tags. And that's something that certainly I've found a lot of success. Google Tag Manager, it's the non-developer's developing tool. I'm not a developer. I don't pretend to be one, but I can pretty easily get in and update what I need to as far as tags and tracking goes, just being able to go right through Tag Manager. So I'm a big proponent there. And if you don't know, that's another good question. How are my

tags being rendered right now? Are they hard coded into the back of the site? Or are they in a tag container? And really, how are you going to get access to that tag manager container? Or are we going to build a new one? There's some nuance there that certainly ask your web company what they're going to do, because those are questions they should be able to answer. Yeah, you touched on something important there. Maybe this is just my last little rant and before we go into your list, which is make sure you have access to everything and you should own as much as possible here, right?

I get it. The web company might be an all-in-one type PMS solution that hosts your website for you and you don't really own the website or any of the code associated with it. And that's okay. Like that may be the choice you made and that's fine. But you should own your domain name.

You should own your Google Analytics account. You should be the primary admin. And then you should give access to your vendors and partners from these mechanisms, right? So like I tell clients, I don't want to own your Facebook ads account. I don't want to own necessarily Google ads account. I may make it so I get credit in my MCC, but then I'm giving you full admin so you can do whatever you want with it. And I don't think this is common in the vacation rental industry. There's very few people that I've encountered that will pull this kind of technique or tactic, but there's one that comes to mind who will keep your Google ads account for sure. If you decide to move on from this particular company, I've never done that in

my six years. I don't think there's a lot of reputable companies that do that, but there are some out there that will execute upon that clause in their contract. And they say, Hey, it's in our contract. And okay, read the contract. Maybe you would have known, but you don't know until much later on. So with any sort of marketing initiatives that you're taking that may be website design related or not, your domain name, your analytics accounts, your Facebook ads accounts, or Google ads accounts, you may work with a vendor like Paul works with, you may work with me, that's great. We want you to have your own account set up. I think that's best for both sides of the equation here. Ultimately, it's just not, it's not in your best interest long term for your business to have someone else

have the keys to your car. That is not necessarily the right approach. So mini rant there as we move along. Okay. So I really liked your list a lot. Let's slide over to yours real quick. So you had some things in here that I thought were, we touched on kind of the second one a little bit. So maybe we come back to the first one, which is adding complexity to your website doesn't necessarily lead to a better outcome. So go down that path for a minute. What do you mean by adding complexity? And how have you seen that kind of go and maybe go poorly in the past when it comes to redesigns? Yeah, and I think some of it is,

it deals with those landing pages, those key landing pages is, I want to build all of these specific, uber specific areas where I want to drive traffic. You can drive traffic in that way. And certainly you can drive more engaged traffic if you're doing search campaigns and you're trying to hit the messaging right with X location, make Google happy. But again, when you're doing anything to make a search engine happy or Google ads happy or Facebook ads

happy, you're not doing it for what's ultimately going to perform for the business. I think putting additional widgets in, putting extra content in that's not really driving any more value for the user, moving things around where on landing pages, moving a form down the page or moving a call to action down the page because it flows better. If it flows better, you should be seeing more conversions. You should be seeing more engagement. And I do. I think that's just an area where make it look pretty just falls into the second one. Just because it looks better doesn't mean it performs better. And something that we've seen that has been very beneficial for building out microsites

and landing pages is getting that session recording, getting that heat mapping on there. Hotjar is a great tool. We use Clarity because it's free. And just to be able to go through and see a 20-second recording or a minute-long recording or get two minutes on the site of a guest, really playing with and understanding what they're doing, how they're navigating the site. Because if you don't have the optics into that,

and I think that's just overall as a best practice as a fallout from this, is put some type of, require some type of session recording on your site because you're going to get greater insights and your web company should be getting some greater insights into how to better design and better make that website flow. You are, you're not adding extra complexity. You're not adding extra clicks to your booking process. You're not adding extra pages that people have to navigate to. I have to go from the three bedroom to the waterfront to now the luxury. Now I'm going to get to the unit page. Now I'm going to maybe, we might've lost them at that point because we overcomplicated the booking process or just the navigation in general. So

I think that's something where just because it looks prettier, just because it got, there are more pages and some people want to see more pages. It's a numbers game for them, but don't add more pages when they're not necessary to the overall process and engagement and experience for the user. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a great point about like having the right tools in place to evaluate performance because analytics is good, but it's very, it's very cold sort of way of looking at things. Like you're looking at aggregate numbers of time on site. The truth is some people time on site, maybe 15 seconds, because they go to the bottom, they go for your footer, they look for your phone number, and they call you or they go to your they were trying to get to a property address, or they said, Oh, here's the property we booked this Christmas, they slide through the gallery for 10 seconds showing someone they go, Oh, that's great.

And they close it. And those were all actually successful visits. One thing that I think people misunderstand a lot is a bounce rate is automatically bad having a high bounce rate. And now Google Analytics for kind of originally got rid of bouncing out. I think they brought it back. Yeah, bounce rate is like the Google Analytics 4 kind of originally got rid of bounce rate. Now I think they brought it back. They're bringing it back. Yeah. Yeah. Bounce rate is like the most misunderstood metric. But a screen recording, like it's, let's be honest, right? It's slow and arduous to review screen recordings. It's painful. But the insight that you get from it is invaluable if you're not seeing things work as you expect them to, or like you said, during these big changes, these big inflection points of website redesigns and bigger changes, that's

ultimately something that you're going to learn a lot from if you go and watch them. And clarity, for example, you can watch things at 3x speed or 4x speed. So you can go through 20, 30 of them pretty quickly and see what's going on. And you spot trends and things that are happening over and over again. So I think that's a great tip for folks to slide in there and get something like clarity added, literally free hot jars and maybe a more premium solution, but it does cost a few shekels. You might have to consider that on your side of things if you're a website developer but yeah that makes a ton of sense to me having that review process so you can see what's going on i wouldn't say that you have to have it on long term again you hit the nail on the head

there it during the transition if you can get it installed a month before to as you're beginning the redesign process to get some insights there in the last month or two or however long that project's going to take for you. And then the proceeding two months after that, 60 days after that, to be able to check on yourself. It doesn't have to be anything you're monitoring long-term, but certainly it's something that you want to consider what that user experience is. Because if you're not taking, again, if you're not taking that into consideration, don't do anything for the search engines. Don't do anything for the ad channels. That's not what ultimately is going to drive it home for you. Yeah, you're

going to get some bookings through there, but you want people to engage with the site in the best possible and really understanding how it's happening. It's critical, I think, in making sure that you do have that well-rounded overall experience that isn't lacking after the redesign. Yeah, those are good points. To recap real quick, we've talked about have a plan for migrating content, have a plan for migrating key landing pages, have a plan for mapping redirects so that all your old legacy marketing activities, So that Google, everybody who accesses the old version of the site is given to the proper page on the new version of the site. That's so important. Carry over your marketing pixels, your tracking information, analytics, meta, Facebook, all that kind of stuff you might

have rolling. And then Paul, I think you nailed some really ultimately like bigger picture points here, which are probably in some ways questions to ask as you've got going on a redesign, which is the, what are we adding here? Who is it helping? Are we making this more complex to the benefit of the user? Am I making it more look a certain way? Cause I want it to look that way. And then what Michael Lombardi would say, evaluate the evaluators. So if you're a vacational manager, we love you all, right? Like Paul and I are here to tell you, we love you, but you're not website design experts in many cases. So when you're giving feedback on how the website should look, or you want this, or you want this color, that color of the button should look this way. That's fine. We'll listen to your feedback. And in some cases we may agree with you, but also keep in mind that you may not actually be benefiting,

you know, that in the most beneficial way, like you may not actually be improving the outcome of the website. So in that scenario, go to what you said a minute ago, Paul, record, measure the data, look at screen recording, see how people are using the site and be willing to make small adjustments. I guess that's my final point here, which is that don't plan on, you launch the website and it's whatever day, and then you're done. It's going to be an ongoing process probably for the next six to eight weeks after that launch process, after that launch day for things like we've talked about here.

And certainly leave a little room in your budget. I would say from a practical standpoint to work with your website development company to maybe make some of those tweaks. Don't spend 100% of your budget on a really custom design that looks all different. It looks cool and that's fine. But like we talked about, that doesn't always lead to a better outcome. So think about that six weeks post-launch. Maybe consider launching during the low season as well, if you can swing that or during a season where if you get no bookings, that may be challenging. But if you get some bookings, it might make sense to launch on a shoulder season that you have time to work through any kinks or bugs before you're actually in a heavy booking

season. So redesigns are great. They can go very well. They can help your business a ton. Let's talk about the good side of it. But there's a bad side of it as well. And if you mismanage this process or if your web dev company does not do a good job, a lot of harm can befall you.

So keep in mind of all these kind of pitfalls. And as you kind of get through the process, I think that ultimately you can make it where your business can grow and accelerate through this process. So what else? Did we miss anything or anything that covers it? Yeah. I think maybe the last question is what is the post-launch plan? Like that's something where that should never be a, once it's launched, that should always be something that we're keeping in mind. So maybe ask that web company, that post-launch plan is. Are you continuing to make those changes? Are you evaluating just like me as a property manager is evaluating? And hopefully they can give some insights into how they're going to continue to

manage that because it is like any marketing strategy, set it and forget it doesn't work. So the launch is not the very last stage of a new website. It's the first stage of the new website. And how are you going to move it forward? I love it. Let's put a bow on it. Thanks so much for listening. We appreciate everyone who has checked out the show and given some very positive comments to us so far on LinkedIn.

We'll try to keep posting links or clips, excuse me, there on LinkedIn and other places where appropriate. If you have any questions, feel free to email me and I'll make sure they get routed into the show. Conrad, C-O-N-R-A-D at buildupbookings.com. We should be findable in any of your podcast apps of choice. If not, then let us know and we'll make sure it's in there for you.

Leave us a review. We would appreciate that. We don't have many of them, so we're getting going here. Any reviews help us a lot. Get more people to check out the show, the content and what we have to offer. Thanks so much. We will see you next time.