Heads In Beds Show - Understanding The Lingo For Your Vacation Rental Marketing: Organic Search

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul come up with some ideas based on real everyday pain points that they deal with based on homeowner and guest marketing to help vacation rental managers. Someone, build these! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 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 Meds Show presented by BuildUp Bookings. We teach you how to get more vacation properties, earn more revenue per property, master marketing, and increase your occupancy. Take your vacation rental marketing game to the next level by listening in. I'm your co-host Conrad. I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Mr. Manzie, how's it going? What's going on? Well, you know, it's, uh, we are making our way through the fall season here in Minnesota. This is apple orchard time, unless it's 85 degrees, like it's been for the whole month and a half. I don't know. This is we're seasonally out of place place I feel like I'm a little closer to your seasonal temperature weather all that stuff, but I am

Excited about the cool down you anticipate that I want to be able to wear sweatpants and long-sleeve shirts and sweatshirts and all that good stuff, but Complaining about the weather. I guess maybe I'm topically maybe I don't know if it's great. Not so great right now. We're kinda seeing some impacts of Helene as we're recording right now. So how are you doing, sir? How are things going in your neck of the woods where it's a little closer to that weather right now?

Yeah, yeah, luckily I'm okay. I think we talked a little bit before we record. People on my team are definitely not okay, though. So we're trying to deal with that. But I mean, it's just brutal. I mean, I know this podcast is about marketing. We'll talk about marketing for sure today. But all these hurricanes will always impact someone that we know in the space.

Right. It's just a matter of who and where, you know, it feels like I hate to do this, but it feels like Russian roulette roulette, right? Like you're just going to spin the chamber and it's going to shoot someone you know or like or love or whatever the case may be in our in our world that we do here. So all these people love to vacation in the Carolinas. They love to vacation in Florida. They love vacation in Texas So all these people loved to vacation in the Carolinas. They loved a vacation in Florida. They loved vacation in Texas and all these amazing places, Gulf Coast.

But unfortunately, the reality is these hurricanes hit and when they do hit, it's just a bummer all around. So we're trying to see what we can do. Person on my team is physically okay, so that's fine. And maybe it's just things and the things, your things matter a lot to you, but we're trying to figure out maybe if she can go somewhere else.

So we're kind of doing some of that research today. So just a bummer. I had to start on a bad note, but some days are just bummers and these things do happen. So, yeah, I guess we can maybe we can put a link in the show notes to like Red Cross or something like that. If someone's doing some fundraising there, if you are you know someone or I mean, heck, if you're in one of those areas and you're listening down the road, Western North Carolina, gosh, hope you're doing OK. It's a bummer. And yeah, we'll we'll over to Search, where we hopefully can talk a little bit more about some upside stuff.

So this was your idea, Paul. So lead us into it, if you could. What is going on with this kind of episode series? We're going to start with this one, I think, which is specifically around Search, organic search. Like, time Ian, what was kind of your pitch here? And then we'll go into the specifics. Yeah, I mean, I think we do a really good job

about talking about the topics that we talk about. But I sometimes I'm afraid that we just talk, we use all the terminology and we use all the lingo and it gets a little too technical. And sometimes we do, we have to take that step back, break it down, really make sure that people understand what we're talking about. So they're continuing to get value here. So I think that's just something that when you get into the marketing space, it's hard not to kind of fall into the lingo. So like into those terms that click through rate and conversion rate

and this and that. And I do I think that sometimes we do we just have to pull back and make sure that we're all on the same page with what we're actually talking about. What is an impression? What is what our core web vitals? Some of those things that, you know, I hope will bring a little clarity and again, bringing the conversation to everybody's level. I think we're all gonna either level up or fulfilling that foundational piece of information here

just to make sure that when we're talking, people are actually getting value by listening to what we're talking about here. So that's, that was kind of my thought process, thinking about, you know, breaking down the different areas that we talk about, too, not just talking about Google ads, not just talk about Facebook, but taking those three pillars, the search, the social and the email side of things and really breaking them down to a level that hopefully gives everybody some value here. So let's, you know, kind of jump right in here. And I think we're going to

start on the Google Search Console side of things, which, you know, I think Google Analytics, most of that is pretty straightforward of if you know, some of the general marketing KPIs will say, you're going to be able to understand and put some things together. It's much more visual as well. Google Search Console, there is, there's some nuance there that it takes a little while. Once you, if you get just dumped in there, you may be able to figure some stuff out,

but I think what we're going to be talking about here is really gonna help you drive more value and understand how your websites perform. Yeah. Yeah, I think Search Console is one of those things too, where unfortunately, this is such a common one. The data in search console you see doesn't actually match what you see in analytics. And that's because they're measuring different things, which can like add in more layers to that confusion. Also search console over the years has gotten more and more restricted, limited, maybe these are the friendly words to use with how much data it actually shows

you in the web interface. So as your site gets bigger, you actually may find Search Console gets a little bit less and less useful or a little bit less and less practical. From a really granular standpoint, I think the overall summary numbers are like pretty accurate, right. But if you go start to look at like, on a page level on a keyword level, exactly how accurate it is, you may find yourself a little disappointed with what you see from Search Console. But yeah,

I'm with you 100% on this episode idea. I liked it because like you, I sometimes, I never intentionally do this, by the way. And sometimes when I've done my presentations in the past, I'll kind of be like, what's everyone's level here? Like I, what I hate to do is like, and I see this at, you know, and I've consumed, you know, stuff like this before, and it always bothers me when you go back and give me like the really basic stuff, you know, like, you know, you and I both like golf, right?

If someone like was like, all right, so this is the pin, there's 18 holes, I'd be like, okay, this is ridiculous. Like I'm not learning anything here. But then again, if someone went like way high level esoteric on certain things, you might lose someone too. So I think it's good to like do these resets every once in a while. Maybe there's something here that you thought you knew,

but maybe it's worth like refresher. So I like the idea, but yeah, I think that's trouble with Search Console, honestly. One of the problems with it is that number one, it's a separate interface from analytics to your point. The numbers are different and that's on purpose. It's easy to get confused. Click is not a session and vice versa. That can be confusing, because you think, oh, shouldn't the sessions match what the click number is? No, that's not going to match,

which can be confusing. And yeah, like I said, as your site gets bigger, it gets very limited. First one we had here, honestly, was just when you log in first, Search Console, you're going to see a few metrics right away. Impressions is one of the first ones after clicks. So we'll do more in clicks because there's more to say there. I think impressions is an interesting one because my take on impressions when you're logging in and looking at impressions, what does that number mean? What is a Google search console?

What registers as an impression? The way I look at it, it basically like the website loaded in the search results. That's all it's saying. It doesn't mean that someone actually saw your brand or your website, unfortunately. They could have, but there's no guarantee that they did. It's really just your website loaded in the search results when someone did a search for a specific keyword. That's it. That's basically the only metric that would be necessary for it to be an impression. So if you think about it that way, my take on it is that the number one thing to look for for impressions is just growth over time, generally speaking.

And as we begin to work on a site, one thing I've said to clients before, when we're working on from an SEO perspective is look, impressions are going to go first, like we're gonna actually see a lot more visibility, the site showing, and then the clicks are not going to follow, like right away. So you may see like, you go one month from 1000 impressions in Google search to 5000, even from 5000 to 8000 or 10,000. You think, oh, we're making awesome progress. We actually are, but you may not see a lot more traffic. And you

may go, what's going on? I expected more traffic. It's not really working. What's the problem? And the truth is that it means that you're loading in the search results, but at the bottom of page one, probably, or the very top of page two, or something like that. So you're loading more in the search results, but you're not in the very desirable high-click

areas. So if I was giving someone guidance for coaching on, I'm looking at a report that has Google Search Console impressions in it, what should I be looking for I think first you should look for maybe just go to the impressions metric only sort descending and look at what you're actually showing up for the most if those are keywords you like and you care about you want traffic on those you are on the right track even if the clicks aren't there you're on the right track because it means you're showing for the right keywords just the bottom of the search results now I will

say we've had clients ever once in a while this happened with a client I can't say the name but the name of their company is basically like the name of a landmark, we'll just say it that way. So this isn't the case. But imagine like the name of their company was Eiffel Tower rentals. And for like a moment, they start they showed in the bottom of Google for like Eiffel Tower, like at the very bottom. So we got millions of impressions right over the short period of time because they this landmark that they were ranking for was in the bottom of

it. And then that went away. And I'm like, Okay, well, that was just a random sort of thing that happened. Obviously, we're never going to rank for, in this fictional scenario, Eiffel Tower. We're never going to rank for what the actual keyword was that this company is focused on. That's some bad data.

So I think it's looking at it, understanding where those impressions are coming from. If there are keywords you like, you're going to see growth there. If there are keywords you don't like, then that's understandable. That's going to happen from time to time. But it's a health sign in my mind

of if your SEO team is headed in the right direction, that's the way I look at it, generally speaking, how do you look at impressions from your point of view? I would agree with that. I think what maybe tip me off to like something being just a little off when I looked at it is, well, your average position rate is, and we're kind of talking about here as well, average position is 49. and you're getting hundreds of thousand impressions. Well, let's do the math and think about, are people making it to page four on search results pages?

Obviously, I mean, that's, we just know by user habits, that's not the case. So I do, I think that that's where it was one of those, the moments of me of that eureka moment of, oh, okay, take this all with a little more grain of salt here that yes, you are showing up in the results. And I think, I mean, when we look at that, I think you got to think of it as one of the first 10 pages.

Now there could be thousands of web pages or results pages that are out there, but one of the first 10 pages, one of the first hundred results, that's what they're basing things on. So you are, you're basing things on. So you are, you're looking for trends there. And I think that's where their default kind of date range that you're looking at usually

in search consoles, three months, which that's kind of a good time period by which to every quarter you should be reviewing it more frequently than that. But that should give you some idea of seasonality and really the growth and maybe decline of your site if you're seeing those indicators, impressions going down or clicks going down or something like that. I don't think it's the be all end all, but again, something that you should know to make sure that I think you did the, that's the right exercise to take is looking at the impressions but sorting by You know most at least and figuring out which are the keywords that I really am concerned about and putting more focus on there Yeah, exactly. But the thing we really care about right is clicks. So maybe I could do

Like impressions are good, but I think the classic example right is like impressions don't pay the bills Honestly clicks don't necessarily pay the bills if they're for the wrong clicks. Maybe we could talk about that down the road. But generally speaking, like someone seeing your website and search results, eh, someone clicking on your website and search results. Okay, now we're heading in the right direction, right? So right next to that impression metric, of course, is click metrics. Again, growth over time, obviously, that's the goal, right. But I think it's it's worth always looking at clicks to from a page level and a keyword level, or what Google Search Console calls a query level. Because ultimately, you know, when you're looking at the keyword itself, or the query itself, as Google Search Console calls it, you kind of want

to know what people actually looking for, is it mapping to what I actually offer? And you'd be surprised everyone's finally go look at content that you know, is ranking for a client's website. And it's not like adjacent at all to what they're actually focused on. Like we have a client, for example, that was ranking well for things like, you know, cabin interiors or like best, best, you know, siding to use on a property or something like that, because they've written blog posts to that effect before. And it's like, okay, like, that's pretty far removed from like someone looking to travel and visit this particular destination or this particular area. So I got a little bit less like excited when I saw that that click traffic, as opposed to even I would argue like things to do in area traffic in Google Search Console. That's more indicative of what you're going after, even

though we all know the best thing is probably most people listening is ranking for Destin Florida vacation rentals. That's probably the optimal click that you want to get from an organic perspective and what you pay a lot of money for to get on the paid search side of things, which we'll cover in the future. So yeah, I mean, obviously page level data, keyword level data is key because I think page level is good because if you obsess over individual keywords, and I've had clients like this before where like, they wanna make sure they show for like, you know,

destined FL vacation rentals, cause that's how they search for it. And they may not show on that keyword, but they do for like destined vacation rentals. And I'm like, well, it turns out more people search without the FL. So why are we still worried about the one with FL? Like, you know, you can get a little too narrow down

in the weeds on that. I think whereas if you look at the page level, and you just click that page in search console, and then you go look at the keywords ranking for it, you may see a mix by the way, you may see a mix of brand keywords, you may see a mix of those general keywords like Myrtle Beach vacation rentals or Destin Florida vacation rentals or whatever the case may be. And then you may also see, you know, other terms that you really

didn't focus on, but maybe you could focus on, like we have clients who I am trying to convince actually to do new pages and they're kind of hesitant because they like the site. So minimal and clean and stuff like that. Bit of a red flag for me now when I hear someone say that, oh, it has to be minimal and clean. It's like, well, we got to make pages for SEO.

So different discussion for a different type. But, you know, I'm like, hey, we got to go do this area, the sub beach, basically. People are searching for the sub beach and you're ranking kind of the wrong page decently well on Google. I'm like, if we make the right page based on the search console data and go put it up on the page or put it up you know the index on Google I bet we're going to get some good results and just trying to figure out how to link that make it look so that works

well. So I think there's gold if you look at the page level for search search console click. You know what keywords where's my position and stuff like that. I will say the thing for position look over a short time frame like if you look over that 30 day timeframe or 90 day timeframe, like you said a minute ago, and you're looking at average position, it bounces around so much. And like, it's never static. I think you would look at average position over like, five days, maybe four days of data, I don't think you want to look at it for 90 days, because the average will say like, like, you could have one or a few days, a few days where you rank very low, and then your average is like 45, even though you're on the first page at Google.

So it's really misleading in that respect. So those are the ones I care about, at least from a keyword core click standpoint, what's kind of your take on those two? And then we go over some other stuff. I think that the way you're visualizing that as far as which queries are pointing back to the right page, I think that's something that sometimes it is eye-opening to see, oh, I don't want this specific market plus vacation rental going to the homepage or vice versa. I think that's identifying some of those areas where, and then trying to identify what needs to be optimized to make sure,

is it more content, is it more keyword, not keyword stuffing, but some more keyword rich content that's going to help drive more value for that search engine as they see it and probably that end user as they're kind of experiencing that page. So I do think that matching the search term to the right end page, landing page, wherever that is,

Search Console is a great tool for that. So I think you covered that perfectly there. I'm gonna hop into the core web vital side of things just because I think you covered that perfectly there. I'm gonna hop into the Core Web Vitals side of things just because I think that's something that even Google has kind of gone to both ends of the extreme on this. When they presented Core Web Vitals initially, it was this, okay, speed is important. We had just gone through mobile friendly,

we had just gone through a few other iterations, and now speed's going to be really important. And now I think that different variables within the Core Web Vitals have taken on more importance, less importance. Overall, as a user experience thing, you want the site to run as quickly as possible. And we now, I think we do have some limitations by the property management systems you use,

the fact that where our tech stacks are kind of, you know, let's morph to a little bit of, there's a lot going on there. So I think that being able to identify specific pages, identify specific areas, that is the one thing about that is if you have 70 pages on your website, you may see that 20 are in good shape, 20 are in bad shape, 30 are really, really bad.

So being able to identify specifically which pages do need some help and kind of understanding whether or not you can impact those at all. In some cases, you may be able to minimize some image sizes and do some things like that, maybe reduce some JavaScript, but if it's kind of impacting the overall functionality of the website, it may be just a nice to know and send it over to your web team or something like that. I think the Core Web Vials are something that we either over focus on or under focus on. And it's depending on our own experience on the website. But what are your thoughts on PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals? How Google measures them and kind of brings them into that search console side of things. I struggle with it a little bit just because I find that

this feels like, I don't know, it feels like trying to catch a rabbit or catch two rabbits with the expression. Maybe tries to catch two rabbits catches zero rabbits. That's what I feel. That's what I feel trying to fix page speed issues at times. It's like I fix one problem that I like, the page speed scores are good. And then the website doesn't work well. And I'm like, okay, like I think I've caught one rabbit, not the other one.

So yeah, it's it's one of those things. Yeah, I think broadly speaking, like I want my websites to be fast. I feel like sometimes these technical tools will overly index or way things that a real user doesn't see. And then I'm left scratching my head where it's like, is the point to make the website fast for a user or is the point to make a website fast for, you know, this robot basically, right. And that's always the classic, you know, oh, you SEO people, you only care about what the robot says. And I'm like, No, like, I can objectively tell you if a website is fast or slow based on using it as like a normal person that uses the internet. And I can tell you the fastest, you know, oh, you SEO people, you only care about what the robot says. And I'm like, no, like, I can objectively tell you if a website is fast or slow, based on using it as like a normal person that uses the internet. And it gets even fast as, you know, based on like those interactions based on how it works. But like, if you put a lot of these high, high performing sites into Search Console, or like, or not Search Console, because we can do that if we don't own them, but page beat insights, I should say, excuse me, just the free web

test, like you'd be surprised how often some of them don't get great scores. Like I put an amazon.com right now, just for example, and like it's barely passing. It's passing, but it's barely passing on mobile. These scores like 1.45 and it's supposed to be like 1.5 second for largest contentful paint. So it's passing and this is Amazon is the most performant web, you know, platform on planet earth, right? And like they're barely passing when they go through these tests. So it's really hard to pass this stuff and get it to be great.

I think you've got to look at it from like your perspective, how you actually use the website and how people are using it. And I think you've got to improve on this stuff. But I think you shouldn't beat yourself up too much if like it's in the yellow zone, like you're probably not in a horrible spot if it's loading under three seconds. But Google is flagging it. So I think you'd be foolish to just ignore it. Improve it the best you can. Yeah, like I just did a test right now. Sorry, the test actually finished, it took a second. So when you do a live test of amazon.com, it gets a 43 out of 100 on mobile, and it gets a 95 out of 100 on desktop. So it gets good desktop scores, but it gets pretty mediocre mobile scores. And again, this is the most performant web application on planet earth,

supposedly amazon.com. And they have 10.9 seconds of JavaScript execution time on their homepage today as we record this. So it's really hard to get these things perfect. There's some, you know, search console guy at amazon.com right now who's like, how do I get this thing to work? Well, I remember, you may not remember this. This was a while ago. Airbnb actually had a video on their homepage for a while and it killed their page speed time. And I was curious. I was like, I wonder how long they're going to keep that video on their homepage. And they've since dumped it, you know, very, very long time ago.

But it's a good example of like maybe they did it because of page speed. I don't know. Maybe they just didn't want to do the video. And now it's all listing focused. I'm not sure what the reason is for that. So yeah, don't drive yourself crazy over this stuff. Like if you send your web team on like, a rabbit chasing the tail, you know, situation where you're like, obsessing and focusing on speed to the 10th degree, I think you hit the mission returns very quickly. I think you want your site to

load in under three seconds or less. Once you get there, I'm not sure there's much more gains to be happy on that in my practical experience. And I've worked on fast sites and slow sites. And I've been able to rank both of them. I've been able to get both of them a lot of traffic, a lot of bookings. I think there's a reasonable tolerance people have for how fast a website is. That's my take on it. Truly, I think this is probably where the old bounce rate metric is probably still your best measurement of whether or not your website is loading fast enough for people Because if they're not seeing it fast enough, then they're bouncing off of that homepage

That's at least that would be one of the first indicators of okay Something's not right and then I would you know, I'd try to run those speed tests as well So that's that's something that I think there are other keys that you can look at that may be just as good of a indicator of how people are experiencing it, as opposed to just saying, okay, pass, fail, somewhere in the middle there. Yeah, yeah, 100%. So look at it as with a lot of reports in Search Console,

look at it and evaluate it, do what you can within reason, you know what I mean? But ultimately don't drive yourself crazy. It is a path to insanity going down the page speed route and trying to perfect it. That's for sure. All right, let's do you want to do discover versus search? What's your take on this too? So within within Search Console, I mean, we you know, going back to like the interface, when you load it up, how things look and stuff

like that, it's going to load you in search by default, but Google discovers like a real thing, some clients get like a meaningful amount of traffic or discover. What's the difference between those two? Why they separate reports? What's your take on that? Yeah, so I mean, I think that definitely more as Google has pushed more into the shopping experience, the not necessarily the AI overviews, but just, we kind of know the enhanced top of

page search result where, in our case, you know, you do vacation rentals in any market right now, you're rarely going to see a business profile for the top level vacation rental management property management company in that map pack. It's going to be specific vacation rental listings that are either in Google vacation rentals or you've got some structured content, structured snippet information that's our schema markup, excuse me, that's going into those results, that is going to be the difference. So showing up in that local map pack or showing up in more of the shopping experience or showing up in Google Discover, just the Google Discover, that's something that, see I have seen people who have articles that show up in Google Discover, they're in the top Google Discover, that's something that, see, I have seen people who have articles

that show up in Google Discover, they're in the top 10 list, and that's where their business shows up there as well. So I think where I've seen it more frequently as people are getting more of, they're distributing more of their rentals on the Google side of things, whether that's through their PMS or a channel distribution network there,

they're definitely, we're seeing more in the Google Discover side of things. So understanding again, which, which keywords you're showing up there for on the discover side of things just the same way. And which rentals, you know, if it's, if you're going back to a rental specific page, which of those units are getting searched sought more frequently. I think that's, that's really important to understand the difference there. So it is, I mean, your general Google search is going to be your results 1 through 10, but anything that's above the fold, that's outside of those standard 10 or 7 or whatever the SERP looks like on any given search result right now, that's really where you're going to see

probably more of the interaction with the potential organic placements as well there. Yeah, that's kind of the primary differences. The non search results are going to be those discover and it is it's more of the map. It's more of the, I guess, we don't see as many of the you don't see the AI overviews. But occasionally, you'll see some more of the, I would say amen the AIO reviews, but occasionally you'll see some more of the, I would say amenity specific searches that kind of populate themselves up. People also search for kind of getting into some

of those secondary searches as well. But how do you see the discover and search side of things? It's, you know, I don't think we get as much discover in this space and we probably get it more for like ancillary things that happen on the site. Like I've seen it for like flowers in Hawaii or like surfboards and can like, and then some of the, again, the, the Eiffel tower example, something more similar to that than the actual vacation rental. So where do you see that as you're discovering those, that, that data?

Yeah, I don't think I've ever actually seen like an individual property detail page show up in discover to my knowledge. It's always blog content for us. Like we write these blog posts and then they can put in discover. I did a LinkedIn post on this a little while ago. I don't, in my perspective is that I don't think that getting discovered in and of itself isn't super valuable or it doesn't provide a significant amount of like highly interested traffic that's going to book. That's my take on it.

However, sites that show and discover tend to seem to do better in regular organic search. And if a site stops showing a discover, it tends to start to do worse in my experience in regular Google organic search. So I think the reason you want discover traffic is in a weird way, not for the discover traffic, but almost as a filter for the fact that Google seems to like the site. And then if you stop showing up and discover, Google is not liking the site. And maybe there's some learning something you can learn from that or something you can modify in your approach based on that context or based on that information.

So that's my take on it. I mean, it's good to know it's there. You have to click on both tabs, like you said, to reveal them. It's not, by default, it's only showing you one view that maybe someone misleading or may not be giving you the full picture. So it's there, check on it.

But my take on looking at that and evaluating and understanding what that number actually means is that you want discover traffic is Google likes sites with discover or maybe it's the other way around. Sorry, Google. I don't, again, I don't think it's a correlating factor but I think it's one of those situations where it's like if your site is doing well, you start to show up

and discover when we work on a new site and it goes from like nothing to like showing and discover we seem to start to see like more lifts on the other side of things. So I think whatever algorithm they run looks at both quality of site and chooses some some of that to rank and search organically and it chooses some of the quality signals and that's what's going to show in discover. So there's differences, but that's kind of my take on discover versus

search. Do you want me to grab site maps or are you excited? You go ahead and grab site maps. Site maps are not my favorite right now. So I'll let you dive down there. Yeah, no, site maps. I mean, what could be more exciting than site maps? No, I love site maps. I think at the end of the day, having a list basically what a site map is telling Google is like, here's all my pages, I'm giving you in a very clean list, you know, formatted ways to understand where all these pages are, how they're going to interact, you know, based on,

you know, you could put metrics in there about how often they change and stuff like that. I just typically use if we're using WordPress site, I'm just using like whatever the rank math is like our preferred SEO site map solution, you tell Google in a WordPress site, I'm just using whatever. The Rank Math is our preferred SEO sitemap solution. You tell Google in Search Console, here's the sitemap. Here's where it's at. Here's the list of my pages. Please index them is basically what you're telling Google.

But Google will give you better reports based on the fact that it's in your sitemap or it's not in your sitemap. So I like them. There's no reason not to put them in there. You get better data. Without it, Google may be guessing where your pages are. One of the largest, actually, companies in our industry doesn't do a good job of putting properties, detail pages be guessing where your pages are. One of the largest companies in

our industry doesn't do a good job of putting properties, detail pages in the sitemap. And it always bothers me. We always have issues with one of these PMS sites trying to get property pages indexed because they don't give us a sitemap. So Google has to find them by crawling and it's not perfect. Sometimes they make mistakes or they find little crawl errors or call traps or whatever the case may be. So use sitemaps. Google will tell you what's going on in those pages versus all your website pages. Those are probably the ones you care about the most versus pages not in your site map you might not care about as much. So if you need to prioritize what to fix, I think site maps are really useful from that perspective. As you add new content, it typically gets indexed quicker.

That's how you're going to rank better if it's in the site map. So simple thing, it's in Search Console. Use it. You'll get some benefit from it. But I don't have a ton beyond that. What's your take on site maps? Do you have some horror stories or good stuff? I just I think the key is just making sure that it's continuing like this isn't a stat. It's not a static thing where you set it once and that's it. I think that's that's that is the key is that some companies or whatever that is, it's just like you set that one site map and that's it. Especially as you get larger, more complex sites, it is so important to have those broken down. I think categorized as well.

You can have a single site map, but what I've seen with some of those larger sites is, Google, it takes a little more, a little longer and a little more, what they call crawl budget to crawl larger sites, crawl more of the sites. So if you do have it structured in a way that is just more foundational understanding of, okay, properties here, here are your properties under here, here are your blog posts here,

here's your blog posts under there. You wanna give it a very linear experience for the search engine. I think you wanna do that for the user too, but for the search engine to be able to find and crawl all those pages. Because yes, if you're putting new content out there and it's not getting attached to your site map and there aren't any internal links from point A to point B

where the search engines are gonna be able to get there or the bots are gonna be able to crawl there. I think then you you you're losing out on you then it doesn't have it you don't have as much value in building that content out if you're not putting that technical structure behind the scenes there. So the larger the site gets, the more important it is to have a very solid and sound site map structure in place. Yeah, yeah, couldn't agree more. Awesome.

Well, I think you could take the next one because we did some research on this before the recording about enhancements, which I kind of brought up in case someone on markup, maybe you could talk about that a little bit and then we could dive into some other stuff from Google analytics on or. Yeah. Yeah. So the, I mean, the enhancement side of thing, I think again, that's what else is on this, what, what outside of the search? Is it the site links?

On the average thing, you could see site link search box. You could see videos that you have showing up organically. If you have the structured schema markup for vacation rentals, this is where you're going to see those more enhanced. When we talk about, you actually, you may look in your Google search console and if for

some reason your schema markup hasn't been implemented properly you're gonna see this page is you know is indexable and Google sees it or the search engine sees it but it cannot be shown with enhancements because you don't have X Y and Z you know the right aggregate this or right this or right, this or that. So I think that's where any enhancements that are available, anything you can do, I mean, you did a beefy Google Ads example on LinkedIn, but the more beefy we can get those organic results, this is where we're going to find those and to find the opportunities where Google is going to say, okay, this is eligible for this enhancement.

I think moving forward, one of the pushes we all should be making is this schema markup for vacation rentals, making sure that any time people are doing those, whether it's a unit specific search or for your business and vacation rentals that some type of enhanced organic placement can show up, is able to show up for you. It might not always show up, but if you don't have that in place, if you don't have the schema markup

and you can't see that from the Search Console side of things, then we're all kind of running blind. So I do, I think it's kind of a bit of an instruction guide to be able to show you where you should be focusing some of those areas outside of just the search. But how do you see the enhancement side of things? Yeah, it's one of those things I like to look and see what else is flowing in there, like discover kind of from a few

minutes ago, I feel like it's helpful to understand what's going on. But I don't I don't overly worry about it. I mean, like we have sites that don't have a lot of enhancement showing up. And they seem to be doing well in search, we have a site that we work with that has like full time development resources. So we've got every enhancement out of the sun in place and it's had its fair share of ups and it's a fair share of downs.

So to me, these feels like little tiebreakers. Like if you can put it in there, you can get that markup perfectly situated for Google, why not do it? It was actually interesting. I did a podcast the other day with the owner as CEO on the other podcast that I do. And he was like, people were beating down his door to integrate with Google, Google vacation rentals. And they've done that. And I think now on

the rest has that integration. And I was like, I was curious, like, how many how many people are getting bookings from that? And the answer is always like one or 2%. So it's like, Google is so big, this product is so large, and yet, no one's really using it. Like people aren't really using Google vacation rentals in a really meaningful way. People do a search, they just go to Google, click on a website, and then use that website. Like that's the majority of the way that people use things.

So I'm a big believer lately in like 80 20 stuff, like, what is the one or two things that like really move the needle? And yes, I know I'm leaving something on the table by not doing every single thing. But ironically enough, if I was advising a client who had limited budget time resources, etc. I would put Google Vacation Rentals low on my list, even though I put Google very high on my list. In fact, it's the top of my list. You know, I think it's one of those things where it's like, people are not using this software a lot right now or this tool a lot right now. Now, by no means do I think that I copy and paste that forever. Like that's going to change quarter to quarter, month to month. If your PMS integrates, of course,

you could like check the box and turn on Google Vacation Rentals, that sort of thing. Can you put the markup on your website? If it's something you can do, it's not going to cost you a lot of extra money. Why not? What's the downside? Nothing from what I can see. So it's only upside from that perspective. Of course, if you can then do but yeah I think it's one of those situations right now where it's like again people end up focusing on the wrong things like Going back to this example from you know Merch markup if you're not producing a lot of content and building a lot of links your website Yep, then don't distract yourself with this like you are you are a step one or two or three

Maybe you're now worrying about something that's in step 15. Don't even worry about it Like you don't need to worry about that right now. Or I guess that's a common thing in engineering. What about when it scales? It's like worry about that when you actually have scale right now you don't have any scale. So why are you worrying about it? Why are you stressing over it? So that's my take on like the a lot of these extra pieces with like all this extra markup or all this stuff. I know to build a technically perfect site is something that

some SEOs like wake up in the morning and they just like they fantasize about hitting a button and running a test and getting like all green check marks and everything working perfectly. I'm actually not bad SEO. I'm not that guy pal. I'm not that guy. What I like to see is a site that ranks well, that gets traffic.

And in my experience, that works a lot better through links and content. So I don't know if I really answered your question there, if that was just a mini rant, but that's my take on that. It's following middle of here that I was gonna ask you, if you could, if you had the choice between writing

five blog posts or let's say you have 50 bigish rentals that you're going to put schema markup on, what do you think would move the needle more? I would tend to agree with you. I think it would probably be the blog post just depending. There's some factors there, keywords and what you're going for. But I think the positive signal of fresh content and good content on the site is going to outweigh in the short term, the schema markup telling people, I've got a two bedroom, three bath home with these amenities could be helpful down the road, depending on how Google ultimately renders those results in the Google travel side of things. But right now, I agree with you 100% that that's the that's the 20 of the 80 20. So yeah,

right on. Well, that yeah, that's my take on that. Alright, so we talked about enhancements, do you want to flip the page over to analytics? Because that was a lot of search console, but I think it's good to walk your interface, understand what it means search console, verify, get it set up, start to look at this. I think if you're a vacational manager, and you're responsible for marketing at some level, I think you should be looking at this stuff weekly. I think if you're maybe more C-suite higher level, like you're, this isn't your day-to-day stuff, I think monthly is probably fine, but you probably don't

want to go more than a month without looking at your search console data. See what's going on and start to do comparisons year over year. You can do that. If you haven't verified long enough, you can do month over month comparisons. That's what we typically put in our reports for some clients to ask for. Year over year, we send year over year data for month over month. Sometimes when I look at that, see how they're progressing, obviously seasonality, but yeah, let's flip over to analytics.

So GA four, um, obviously we get the majority of our, you know, traffic tracked in this platform. Very few clients where we don't have GA four hooked up. Now, when you go to the channel report, you're going to see an organic search report, I put in our outline here. Obviously it's Google is the majority. I mean, there is other search engines. Maybe we should mention that. Of course, there's going to be 123 for maybe 5% that's going to be being duck duck, go

is kind of when I see pop up more and more now, I guess we could have this debate. Maybe it's a quick debate wasn't in the outline about where do we slot things like search GPT coming out or perplexity. Like these are things that kind of feel like search engines, but they're kind of, you know, these LLM tools as well. I don't know exactly. But like even Gemini is kind of like, is that search? Or is that something else? I don't know, maybe we could start on that. And then we can talk about some of the metrics inside GA4. Yeah, I mean, that is something that I still do see. Even not the but not necessarily the volume of being search traffic coming through. But I definitely, I mean, that's one of those

where I'm usually shocked when I don't see some type of, maybe outbooking come through the Bing side of things. And when I was focused more on, very much more on the traveler side, that was something that the user story I would always tell was, okay, you gotta think of the people who are using Bing, who are using probably Edge as an explorer,

they bought the computer, whatever the default was, and really brings in that anti-VV monopoly discussion on the mobile side of things, but these are the people who are, who are opening up their computer for the first time, whatever that default browser is, it's Edge, okay, I'm gonna use Bing, okay. Well, those are the people who are gonna stay with Bing the whole time, and yeah, I'm going to use Bing. Okay. Well, those are the people who are going to

stay with being the whole time. And yeah, they are going to do the same buying process, the same, they're going to go down the funnel the same way. And yeah, Bing is one of those where he did end up seeing some some bookings come through usually, and consistently, not a lot, but consistent bookings, maybe 1000 bucks a month or 2000 bucks. Now, you're not going to make your living on 1000 or 2000 bucks a month or two thousand bucks. Now, you're not gonna make your living on a thousand or two thousand bucks a month. That's probably not gonna work. I think you do.

You definitely wanna break down your organic into the channels that it's actually coming from. You wanna know if DuckDuckGo is actually driving you some additional traffic. You want to understand where specifically those are coming from. So, I think, you know, kind of diving down into the question of what is a session in Google Analytics, that is something that has a little more nuance and

probably more so on the g4 side of things than it did in in the universal analytics. I think we would is it is there there at one time there was a specific amount of time that had to you had to be on the site for a certain amount of time for that session to be able to come through. I don't recall it because it is without that was something that we ran into a lot. I'm going back to resource the modest side of things of we're doing a redirect link and and referral traffic same way, but if your site is slow enough that it's not loading right away, usually Google Analytics is implemented through a tag manager or on the site itself. So there's a whole little cyclical item of sites not loading fast enough,

analytics isn't loading fast enough, a session isn't being counted fast enough, and you may have people hitting your site, maybe from the Google Search Console report of clicks, that a session never comes up there. So Google Analytics doesn't always measure exactly what we're looking for there, but what are your thoughts?

As you're evaluating the organic side of things in G4, how are you doing that? Are you doing it by source medium? Are you doing it on the user side or the session side? What does that look like for you now? Yeah, I think it's tricky because do I like using GA4 as much as I like to use website analytics? Here we are.

It almost feels like two years later at this point. Gosh, no. It's not really as good. So I think I tend to look at mostly channel reports to answer the question. And I tend to prefer to look at, and I guess I look at traffic inputs. I mean, like, in theory, yes, you could look at traffic versus like the

acquisition reports. I prefer just look at traffic, like where people coming from. That's what I care about. Ultimately, whether they first visited through this channel, this channel, I mean, you and I both know that's that data is very noisy in our space. People don't understand device, they book over long periods of time. That's true. So I think the best thing for us to do is look at when people are ready to book, how often do they come direct versus other ways. And when they're coming from different ways, what's the most common way they

come? And the answer is always almost always Google search, right? That is the most common entry point for a direct booking, you know, to occur basically in our industry. And I feel like I can say that confidently. Now I've looked at 200 plus sites, and it's very, very, very rare that I see either direct people coming directly to the website, meaning, very rare that I see either direct people coming directly to the website meaning or search not being the number one refer. Now, sometimes that's branded paid, sometimes it's, you know, branded organic search, but either way, that's kind of where things are coming from. So if you look at it as it's such an interesting way to think about it, by the way, if you think about it as how can I get more people to search for my company,

it's very different, like objective than how do I master SEO, right? Or how do I perfect my SEO, which kind of goes with my brand from a minute ago, like objective than how do I master SEO, right? Or how do I perfect my SEO, which kind of goes with my grandfather a minute ago, like there is no perfecting or making everything flawless from an SEO perspective. There is a lot of things you can do or you can think of doing to get someone to search for your company. That's a different mindset. Maybe that's part of what you should think about as we're looking at numbers here too, is not to get

too bogged down in the numbers too much. I mean, we should know the numbers and what they mean and what they were represented, all the things you just said are true. And there's like little esoteric things that you should try to be aware of. But I've also been, you know, my thought process in the past has been like, alright, some percentage of people block, you know, tracking scripts with ad blockers, for example. But that probably that number probably hasn't changed much in the past few years, you know, unless there's some massive shift to like a default, like you and I talked about this before, that if one

company could kill Google, it's Apple, Apple could make a search engine and then make their Apple search engine the default search engine on iPhones, which is like for most of our clients anywhere from like low 20s to like high 30% of their traffic is coming from mobile Safari. And if that flipped overnight, and that was all Apple search engine traffic, we would have to significantly shift our approach and our strategy to be like, hey, like we need to now optimize for Apple search, whatever that happens to be called Siri, or whatever it happens to be called, right? So that need to now optimize for Apple Search, whatever that happens to be called Siri, or whatever it happens to be called, right. So that's like a meaningful thing that could change. But if it's like just little 1234% people

using ad blockers and things like that with analytics, it just is what it is like you just I mean, there's nothing you can do about it. There's no such thing as perfect data, your PMS has to have intact data. So do your best there to make sure those numbers are intact, obviously. But like any third party measurement analytics tool is going to be a little bit imperfect. And I joke because like I've been unhappy with GA four, like the reporting that we get. But any third party measurement analytics tool is going to be a little bit imperfect. And I joke because I've been unhappy with GA4, like the reporting that we get.

But it is what it is. I can sit here and complain and cry about it, or I can just do what we can to get the best data in there. So that's one thing we talked about previously, linking GA4 to GSC. So gather data from Analytics 4 and also Google Search Console. I think that's all helpful stuff. So that's my take on it from high level by GA4.

Then that goes for anything that you can link with Google Analytics, Google Ads, any of the other. I mean, if you're using 360, if you're using BigQuery, if you're using anything like that, make sure that you are connecting those because Facebook and Google don't get along. So that reporting doesn't, that's usually not an easy lift

to just kind of marry that data together. But on the Google side of things, if you're using all these Google products, hey, make sure that they're talking to each other, and you're at least getting the most complete picture of the reporting that you can. And I think that's something that too often we do I get into Google Analytics accounts and Google ads isn't isn't connected or Google Search Console isn't connected and

you're not getting these additional insights and not just you but I do think that the more connected you get them Google Analytics those insights that they provide do get stronger because they get a more complete picture of the of the business too. So yeah, could not agree more. Well, I know we've only got a few minutes left. So we'll kind of pop in some non Google things. Maybe that's appropriate. We've, we've given Google a lot

of love on this episode so far with analytics and search console. Again, what are these numbers? What do they mean? How do we understand this lingo? Granted, Google, that's the king and the queen and the court jester of search. So we got to give them a lot of shine. So we talked to length in the past about our SEO tools of choice. So a trust is kind of my preferred SEO tool of choice. I guess you're more of a free agent now. Like, do you still have like SEM rush yourself personally? Or you were a traps? Like, where do you where do you stand there? I think I love this. I like it. I do like a traps. I've used

that a little more the last few months. I think it they do. I think they focus on different things, different optimizations, I you can plug the same site into both locations and get completely different scores of how the performance and health of the website is. But I think on the link side of things, actually I do prefer SEMrush because, again, talking about the visualization that you get

in just the Google Search console overall, kind of being able to connect those pages back to the queries. in just the Google Search console overall, kind of being able to connect those pages back to the queries. I think SEMrush does a really good job of that, of being able to do a full backlink audit and be able to tie some of those things back together. Again, as long as you can visualize and see if you are growing or kind of bringing those links,

if you're seeing any decline in links, I think that's important. But that is something that maybe familiarity, more than anything else, is that when I put in a backlink audit for any website, I can break down and see, okay, this page has this many links coming, this many keyword or back links coming back to it,

and this many keywords pointing back to it as well. So that is still kind of where I sit there. I still like ahrefs for just some of the other overall maybe identification of issues on the site, troubleshooting stuff like that. But yeah, for links, it's still some rest for me. But how do you evaluate links when you are looking in ahrefs there? Yeah, well, you're wrong. But that's okay. We don't wait that right now. I joke, but that of course proves the point of like both these tools are good. You know, like Paul

goes in the stuff and looks at all the time. I look at this stuff all the time. I prefer one. He prefers the other. I just find like a trust crawling to be very fast. I know this because we pick up links, we build links regularly and I see a pop up in a trust way faster than I've ever seen a pop up in SEMR. So that's like my own lived experience. But you know, it's all good. Like you can get great tools for both these. Yeah, I think what I'm looking at in these tools, regardless of which one I'm using, I want to track like link route, like where links coming from, what's the quality of those links? Like, am I placing them? Are they placed in positive ways organically? Like, what I mean by that is like, we got a link the other

day for a client that we did not place or like a client got a link the other day, maybe I should say that we did not place. And it was a, I think it was like a, it was like a local restaurant or like a local food. I don't know how did not place and it was a I think it was like a it was like a local restaurant or like a local food I don't know how to describe it it was kind of like a food hall type thing this is I get common in more urban areas where it's like one big place and there's a lot of individual places inside of it anyways one of those places had a website and they're like oh stay here when you come and like visit our area and I'm like we didn't ask for that link but like hrefs caught it I showed the client like hey just so you're aware we didn't

build this link but like just so you're aware like this kind of popped up recently we saw it in hrefs so I think link growth is important also when links get lost hrefs you it. I showed the client, like, hey, just so you're aware, we didn't build this link, but like, just so you're aware, like this kind of popped up recently, we saw it in Hrefs. So I think link growth is important. Also when links get lost, Hrefs, you could put a list together and then you could track like really important links. You might want to put your top 20, top 30 in link, in Hrefs and track them and be like, am I losing any of these? Sometimes that, and it's sometimes unintentional.

Sometimes it's like malicious or intentional, or like, you know, you build a link or pay for a link and then the website owner removes it, or they revamp their website and then they take you off of it. Or maybe we have a client who is in a mountainous area and they had a link on a tubing website. That link just randomly disappeared one day. They're like, oh, our bad.

We're changing things around. Super friendly, but we're checked in. Hey, Google's not going to tell you that. But tools like Ahrefs and Paul Singh, SCM Rush does. I don't know if he's right about that. But it's fine. So yeah, that link, I think is important. And then the last one here to bring us to a close

is number of pages indexed in Google. So again, Search Console kind of tells you that, but I'm interested in how Ahrefs is perceiving that. And then more importantly, what the estimated traffic is to those pages. And this can be particularly useful when you're looking for new ideas. So obviously today we've talked about

looking at your own data. I think that's important. But if you're looking for new ideas, I think these tools, and this is where I think both are really good. SEMrush and Ahrefs Excel at putting in a competitor's website, seeing what they have indexed, and then you can button things up from there. So those are my, those are my last two.

But any parting thoughts on your side? I think we've given people some answers to questions that they may have. And hopefully there's some more questions that we can answer. This is, this is a, it's a bigger conversation. You know, we I think initially, we thought maybe this was going to be organic and paid together. And as we started going down the important things, we decided very quickly that, oh, we have some things to talk about here. So again, hopefully, people

found some value here a little more leveling up if they if they needed that a little more foundational information, and we'll be continuing this thought process as we kind of move through the other areas of marketing. So yeah, maybe we'll do like we've done before with mini series, Paul will do this every other maybe episode so that way people can check it out and go from there. So all good. We appreciate it.

If you have any questions, thoughts, comments, concerns on search, understanding lingo terms, tools, software technology, we're on one today. Email us or email me, conrad at buildupbookings.com. I'll make sure it gets routed to Paul. We've got a link in the show notes to Paul's LinkedIn. You can reach out to us there. And that way we'll put a link in the show notes to Red Cross. If you're in Western North Carolina, we feel you.

We see we appreciate you. And for any further notes, leave a review. We appreciate that. And we'll hope everyone has an awesome day. Thanks so much.