Mike Bayer
Welcome back to the Vacation Rental Success podcast. It's Mike Bayer, CEO and co founder of the Vacation Rental Formula Business School, and I'm thrilled to share the fantastic response we've had to our newest training program, THRIVE Essentials. Launched in October of 2024, THRIVE Essentials is designed to be the ultimate onboarding tool for vacation rental property management teams. It's perfect for quickly bringing new hires up to speed, cutting down on training time, and ensuring they have the essential knowledge to THRIVE in their new role.

Mike Bayer
With THRIVE Essentials, your team members gain the foundational skills they need to be effective contributors faster, building confidence, loyalty, and job satisfaction right from the start. The feedback from property managers and HR teams has been overwhelmingly positive. Many are saying they wish they had had access to this program years ago. Enroll your new team members in THRIVE Essentials today, and you'll see how quickly they adapt, contributing with confidence and being effective within days. For more details, visit the link in the Show Notes or head to vacationrentalformula.com to see how THRIVE can transform your team.

Mike Bayer
Now, let's get into today's episode. Here's your host, Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer
Today, I'm talking about SEO. How to make your vacation rental website rank higher, attract more bookings, and stay competitive. With AI tools shaking up how search works, it's time to rethink your strategy. And I'm joined by Jill Highsmith from ICND [Intercoastal Net Designs], who's sharing some powerful tips to optimize your site and future proof your business.

Heather Bayer
This is the Vacation Rental Success podcast, keeping you up-to-date with news, views, information, and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business. I'm your host, Heather Bayer. And with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new, and what will help make your business A Success.

Heather Bayer
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer. And as ever, I'm super delighted to be back with you once again. So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you'll know that we've talked about SEO many, many times over the years, from building great content to optimizing for local searches. It's been a cornerstone of how short-term rental owners attract guests and stay competitive in a crowded market. If you have come across Conrad O’Connell from BuildUp Bookings, you know how powerful this method is. And definitely follow Conrad. I'll put a link in the Show Notes just to go to BuildUp Bookings and see where he's talking about SEO.

Heather Bayer
But here's the thing. The SEO landscape is constantly evolving, and lately it's been undergoing some pretty seismic shifts. The rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, like Gemini, and Perplexity, are changing how people search for information. I don't use Google very much anymore. I use Perplexity to do all my searches. I just put my question into Perplexity, and it draws from a multitude of different websites. It does that searching for me. No longer am I going in and clicking on different websites to see if they've got the answer to my question. Perplexity is doing that for me. So AI is changing the way that we search for information and how those search engines deliver it. So if you've been sticking to the same old strategies for SEO, it's really time to think again.

Heather Bayer
So today we are going to take a look at how we keep up with these changes and continue driving traffic to your website, and I've got the perfect guest to help us do that. I'm joined by Jill Highsmith, she's at ICND, and she recently wrote a fantastic piece called Spooky Good SEO Tricks to Optimize your Website. I read that article and it just came to me. I need to share this with this audience. Just in case you haven't seen that post, which I have put, of course, onto the Show Notes. But don't let that title, Spooky Good SEO Tricks, fool you. These aren't just seasonal tips. They're really actionable strategies that will help you level up your website's SEO and make sure that you're not just surviving these changes, but you're thriving and growing with them. So we're going to break down these tricks, talk about how you can make your website work harder for you, and explore what all this means for all short-term rental businesses in the age of AI. So let's head on over to my talk with Jill Highsmith. I'm sure you're going to enjoy this and get a lot out of it.

Heather Bayer
So I'm super delighted to have with me today, Jill McGee, who is the Senior Digital Marketing Specialist at ICND. We used to know Jill, because she's been on the podcast before, as Jill Highsmith, but we are now Jill McGee, so just to clarify that, because I think I used Jill Highsmith [now McGee] in the introduction, but now you know. Welcome, Jill.

Jill McGee
Oh, thank you, Heather. I'm very glad to be on again. And I'm excited to dive in and talk about things before the holiday, too. So it's good we've got to get it in.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, your holidays seem to go on forever. I mean, you started with Halloween because that's the whole catalyst for this conversation; I'll mention that in a minute. But now it's Thanksgiving, and then it goes into Christmas. I said in last week's podcast that we do it the right way in Canada, because we have our Thanksgiving the second Monday in October, which means there's a huge gap between turkeys.

Jill McGee
There you go. It is true. I feel like this three-month period, we just gorge. It's candy, turkey, ham, and there you go. And in the New Year, you're like, Okay, it's time to digest some of this, maybe eat a little cleaner.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, time It's time to step back, which is good. I will gorge myself up until New Year and then get down to Alabama and sit in the sunshine and say goodbye to the snow and eat healthy.

Jill McGee
There you go. That's the way to experience the holidays in the snow. And then when you're done, you're done. Go to the sunshine and enjoy it. It goes into what we're talking about, vacation rentals.

Heather Bayer
Absolutely. So we are going to be talking about SEO today because you wrote a post on the ICND blog called, Spooky Good SEO Tricks to Optimize Your Website. I loved it. I just loved this post. And there will, of course, be a link on the Show Notes if anybody wants to go in and take a look at that. And you should, because we're going to cover off some of these topics, but we're not just reiterating this blog post. We're going to be expanding on it. But it was great. You must have really enjoyed writing that.

Jill McGee
I did. I had so much fun. A lot of my time is working on client websites and doing SEO and more technical items. So when I get to do a blog and get to be creative, of course, I use Canva, love Canva to create some of those graphics. It's just so fun to use that creative side and play with it. And I had a blast writing that one. It got all my puns out for Halloween, and got to use some pumpkin spice latte jokes. So it was very fun to write that one.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, well, it was certainly very eye-catching. I loved the graphics. I too am a Canva addict. So yes, it certainly took my attention in a number of ways. One, because I thought, Oh, Jill. I haven't had Jill on the podcast for a while. Let's redo this. Let's have her back again. And then, secondly, because you're talking about SEO, and that's something that we've talked about over the 11 years now of the podcast. And it'd be interesting, actually, to go back over that 11 years and just relisten to some of those podcast episodes on SEO, because there's been so many changes. So I want to kick off, actually, just talking about the most recent changes. And let's start with the boring technical stuff and talk about Google algorithms just to kick this off and why we need to pay attention to the changes that have been made in the past year or so.

Jill McGee
That's so interesting. I would love to watch those podcasts from 11 years ago as well. I think there's been just drastic changes, with Google, but just in general, with the way we all consume content and the way we all do our research on where we're going to vacation. And it's been a very interesting change. Even in the vacation rental industry, it's changed. So as industries change, so does how we market them.

Jill McGee
The Google algorithms, though, we've noticed this year, specifically with the introduction, and we'll probably talk about it later as well, but with the introduction of AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, these types of tools, we've noticed a lot of Google algorithm updates. And during the pandemic, I feel like they might have taken a little bit of a break on as many updates as they were doing, and Universal Analytics changed to GA4 as well.

Jill McGee
So with that, that's changing the complete landscape of how Google is scoring and ranking websites. But the one thing that remains a complete constant is content. So content is still king. Content and true content, authentic, unique content, long form content is a great place to start. You don't want to just get lost in the generic few pages on a site and not have any meat or depth on the website.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, and you mentioned three words: true, authentic, and unique. And I think with the advent of ChatGPT in particular, and we certainly saw last year, throughout 2023, when it was all new and very exciting, and people were just - and I'll use a ChatGPT word - diving in to create content and not adjusting it or amending it. And even at the beginning of this year, we were still seeing posts on websites that were so blatantly GPT created. But Google and Google Analytics have something to say about this, don't they?

Jill McGee
Yes, definitely. So Google doesn't necessarily give you a full map of what it changed. It's just different SEO professionals will optimize and continue to track and use different platforms to say, Okay, why did this website that was ranking number one for this keyword, why is it now number three or five on page one of Google? And then you go and peel it layer by layer and say what changed, what shifted. And that's how we figure out what changed with the Google algorithm update, because they want to keep it a secret. They don't want to just hand you the keys.

Jill McGee
But I think one thing that's really interesting, and I can't say for certain, but one thing that's very interesting is a lot of - I guess for plagiarism - for students using AI, there are certain terms that AI will, like you said, consistently use. So I do think that that must be some type of a factor. They actually did a study on medical journals and, using Google Trends, found that the word meticulous was appearing. They found that the word meticulous was not used pre-ChatGPT, and the uptick has been, I think, 60 to 70% increase of using that specific word in medical journals.

Jill McGee
So I think there's definitely something to say with there are specific terms that ChatGPT consistently pumps out that you don't want to use. One thing, if you're writing a description for search result page, I have seen.... Nestled in the charming coastal.... blissfully walking down the tranquil.... This is a lot of floral and different words that you wouldn't necessarily use in your everyday language. And that's something to keep in mind when you're using ChatGPT is read it and edit it the way that you would speak to your audience. Don't just copy and paste it. You definitely want to go through it with a fine-tooth comb and make sure that you take out the blatantly obvious language that it uses.

Heather Bayer
Well, let's just talk.... We're heading off into this realm of AI again because we talked for 10 minutes before we started to record. We just talked AI, and I think both of us are just pretty much immersed in it. But I wrote, and I have, nearly five hundred blog posts on what used to be the Cottage Blogger site, but is now Vacation Rental Formula, and we still have those blog posts on there. And I trained ChatGPT to write everything in the voice that I was using that wrote all those blog posts. So we uploaded all our blog posts to ChatGPT as a Custom GPT and trained it on my voice.

Jill McGee
That's a brilliant idea.

Heather Bayer
So now when it writes a post, and I'm looking at it, I really wrote that.

Jill McGee
You start to forget. When you do it correctly, you're like, wait a second.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. The only thing is that I've always said, let's dive in. And it really bothers me now, because in my Custom GPTs, and this is a whole other podcast episode, and it's also... I mean, we're creating a course on this at the moment. And one of the things we say is make a list of the words that ChatGPT uses, like meticulous, maybe like to dive in, blissful, and then you train ChatGPT not to use those words or to use them in very, very limited ways.

Jill McGee
Very sparingly, yes. That is exactly it. And as you use it, you will see those patterns emerge, which is so interesting. I think that's a brilliant idea, though. Bringing back in creating content is... If you wanted to use ChatGPT in the best way to use your platform and send out content as quickly as possible, is sharing a blog or an e-blast that you've created, putting it into ChatGPT and asking for, what would you do next? Or what else would you share with your audience? And getting those brainstorming ideas so that way you can create additional content for your website and your voice, which is a great way to really pump up your rich content on the website.

Heather Bayer
Well, this is all great, but we're talking about SEO, not necessarily AI, but it is going to creep in. So in the post that you wrote, you talk about, and you mentioned it earlier on, you talk about how content can still be used to drive bookings, and it's still as important. Content is still king, queen, emperor, president, whatever. What type of content are you talking about? You did mention you talked about it being true, authentic, unique, and long form. So just tell me what you mean by long form.

Jill McGee
Yeah, absolutely. I think the content that you want to be putting on your website, if you think about the 'things to do' pages or events pages, they don't always get updated. Sometimes they might have just one. You have a calendar and it has one line that says, Santa's coming to town for your holiday calendar, and that's not long form. That's just sharing that this event is going to take place. You might link out to another site. That content necessarily isn't going to be the best content to have on your website. And you actually might even want to put that in a robots.txt file, so that way you don't waste your crawl budget on having those less valuable pages, crawled and indexed by Google.

Heather Bayer
You just got very technical. So you're going to have to now explain that. What's a robots.txt file?

Jill McGee
Well, if you have a digital marketing agency that you're working with, or if your webmaster or anything like that, they'll know what that is, and they can easily do a disallow and make sure that those pages that don't really get updated very often and aren't necessarily... They don't have a lot of long form or rich content, so they aren't being indexed by Google. But you still might want them on your website because they can be helpful for the user experience. So it's great to have them, but not necessarily the content that I'm talking about that's going to help with SEO. That content is going to be your main pages that are going to be evergreen content. So content that's not constantly changing, but Something like an annual events page. If your area has multiple events that happen, festivals that you know are going to happen, that type of page on your website, and then you can go in and edit it later or that type of blog, and then go in and edit that blog each year. You don't necessarily need to have the blog from 2021 and keep it from 2021. You can go back into that blog, change out the dates, update the links, and then refresh it and repurpose that content to make it important for 2024, or now, I guess we're already 2025. So that's the type of long form. That's my long answer for long form content.

Heather Bayer
I remember reading somewhere, and I spent a lot of time on it a couple of years ago, about Keystone posts? Cornerstone posts, which are... Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I remember this, the gist of it was, is that you have this big cornerstone post, and within that post, you link out to other posts. Does that make sense?

Jill McGee
Yes, it absolutely does. And I love doing that. I've actually... Once, like you said, you have over 500 really great blogs. There's only so much you can talk about, but with our industry, it's always changing and everything. But it is so valuable to use GA4, go in, and see which blogs or which pages on your website are receiving the highest traffic, and then go into those, especially seasonal. If it's seasonally changing and you have, if you're in a ski area and you've got something about top ski resorts to visit or lodging deals, restaurants, and creating one post that has all the links that are going to those different blogs that you already know are very popular or going into a very popular blog that's receiving a lot of traffic and adding some calls to action throughout the blog that maybe direct people back to your website for bookings and 'contact us', things like that.

Jill McGee
So interlinking is extremely valuable when it comes to SEO. You want people clicking around, getting lost in different pages, and without getting too technical, again, if you have something that's ranking really well and bringing in a lot of traffic, that page is going to create authority for your website, and you want to send people to other pages that might not have as much value, and that will help those pages rank as well.

Heather Bayer
To use an analogy, for anybody who still reads magazines, you actually pick up a magazine in a store, so many of them have that editorial, the editorial at the front. So the editor writes it and says, How much fun I've had writing this issue, and you're really going to enjoy this article, and then on page something, and then it goes down a bit and said, and if you're interested in this, read this article on page whatever. So that is it, isn't it? That's exactly what the cornerstone post is about. It's an overview of what's inside.

Jill McGee
Exactly that. It's an overview, an outline, and that makes sense. I I mean, not much, I guess, has changed from magazine to print. But that is the main thing if you want to provide not only an easy outline for your user to follow for a good user experience, but if you think about the way that Google crawls a website, it's going to showcase each link as it goes down and say, Okay, this page is popular, and all of these pages that are linked within it have value to what the user is... They provide intent. So that's a positive thing.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Okay. That confirms what I was doing a few years ago. That was when I was working within my own property management company and was working on the different types of content that we should put in there. And we spent just so much time creating these areas on the website and then the blog post that would go in there. I loved it. It was a lot of fun to do. But as you say, it's got to have purpose. You can have a lot of fun with it, but make sure everything has an outcome, and that outcome is ranking on Google.

Jill McGee
Exactly. And getting bookings. So getting those direct bookings. And if you rank for planning a vacation, that's always a great blog to write as well, specifically because you want to catch people during that planning, that dreaming phase, where they're looking, and you'll be able to rank for those specific long tail keywords that people are typing in, which are a little easier to rank for in competitive markets, is those specific niche terms that you would put into a blog, or an annual events page, or top staff restaurant picks. And having a page like that on the website would be good, too.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Okay. Well, talking about content, I recall when I was working on content strategy, it just took so long. I mean, it doesn't take anywhere near that time today. I think managers who struggled with keeping up a consistent content strategy maybe have the help out there now with AI tools. But how would you advise them to plan their content really efficiently?

Jill McGee
That's a very good question, too. It depends. But I I know as I had a good amount of experience in the vacation rental industry and a lot of family, they've all been in that. And I know as a property manager, you have many, many, if not all, the hats. So your maintenance, inspections, cleaning, the whole thing. So where is their time to deal with content, which seems like it's a small portion. My suggestion is if you don't have once a week, just maybe once every two weeks, and put it on your calendar or just pick a day that you take one hour and actually fill out your Google calendar and put in today, I'm going to spend one hour searching things to do on the chamber website, or I'm going to be a tourist in my own town and just go around, maybe take some great pictures if you're doing social media. A great way to bring in some attraction is those live videos. So being a tourist in your own town and that content, which I know you don't have a lot of time to do. But just picking one day a month and using all content that day and then dispersing it out.

Jill McGee
Also planning, so using a calendar to plan out Cyber Monday deals or Black Friday deals. If you're going to have specials, searching your peak season and when people are actually going to be booking, what that booking window is, and make sure you're planning to really pump out the content during that booking window, as opposed to when they're already there. So I think some of those ideas, but like you said, using different tools to help create the outlines for the content is a huge game changer. You just want to make sure that you also have some authenticity within it.

Jill McGee
One great thing for content that is often overlooked because we're talking about creating pages and things like that, it's the property descriptions and really adding valuable details within those property descriptions. If there is restaurants or places nearby that are walking distance, grocery stores, things that you would want to know. If you were visiting, what would you want to know? And adding that to the descriptions on each of the pages, I think that's a really valuable way to utilize content in a different way than just creating a blog or a page.

Heather Bayer
That's a great point. I don't think I would have thought about that. It's actually using the listings themselves to feed in the types of information that are going to be helpful from an SEO standpoint as well. So yes, and I love that suggestion of be a tourist, because I think we all get so immersed, don't we, in our own little worlds, in our websites, in our companies, that it's really worthwhile taking time out and trying to come back in as somebody who's coming to that site for the very first time.

Jill McGee
Yes, absolutely. And they don't know what they're looking for.

Heather Bayer
Yes. I explained something to somebody the other day on, I think I sent a.... I can't remember what I was explaining. But it made perfect sense to me, absolute perfect sense. But they came back and said, I really don't understand a word of that. Because I was doing it from my standpoint, my perspective, and what I was immersed in, and forgetting that they're coming at it from a different direction. I suppose that's a good segue into just talking about avatars and target audience. Do you advocate at that your clients define their target audience?

Jill McGee
In a sense, yes. I think sometimes I feel like - I'm bringing back slightly in AI a little bit - but sometimes with all of the information that you can gather about your audience. You don't want to pigeonhole who your audience is. You want to make sure you are appealing to other people that maybe they weren't your audience and they will become it. So for instance, if you see in your data that your demographic is an older, more retired, searching for budget-friendly and smaller accommodations, that's wonderful. And definitely gear some of your content towards targeting that demographic.

Jill McGee
But don't count out other people that maybe are young couples that are looking for a budget-friendly, one to two bedroom, still at the beach, because they will be searching as well. So I think in a sense, yes, you do want to use your demographics and use as much data as you can. But don't pigeonhole yourself into one specific audience, because you might miss out on someone else that is still searching, and then you're not showing up for them. But in a sense, yes, but not completely.

Jill McGee
In our company, we had some very clear avatars. We had, certainly in the summer, it was families, and it was generally the grandparents searching for the bigger properties that they could take their big families to. Then once you got into the fall and the winter, it was groups of couples that were going to somewhere looking for the snow, looking for the winter activities. So we probably had several different ones. But yes, you've got to be careful not to miss out on somebody who may be just coming along and looking for something different, something new. They've never tried this before.

Jill McGee
Exactly. Maybe they've gone to the beach every year and want to go to the mountains this year. So it's always different.

Heather Bayer
You talk about local SEO. What does local SEO actually mean?

Jill McGee
Yes. Basically, in a sense, the Google Business Profile. So once Google My Business, now Google Business Profile, you want to make sure that you have your business listed. You want to make sure that you claim your business listing and that you utilize that. Don't just set it and forget it, especially as we talked about this October through December holiday frenzy hours are going to change. So make sure that you're updating your hours on your Google Business Profile, adding good reviews, and also adding images, and making sure that you're staying up-to-date with that footprint because you don't want to just forget it and then it be a bad reflection on your business later.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. And I remember years ago, I figured out that we needed... I mean, it was a long time ago, so maybe that was the start of the whole Google My Business. But we never paid much attention to it. We claimed it, but we didn't pay a great deal of attention to it until we realized that the reviews that were coming up on there were really, really valuable. And people were looking at them. And the importance of that just became really apparent. We spent more time asking people to give us a review on Google.

Jill McGee
It is such a valuable way to create trust in in your business. And also something that's new and recently released is fake reviews. Those can negatively impact you, or paid reviews can negatively impact you. I would definitely steer away from doing anything like that. But a way to get good reviews would be if you send out a survey to your guests and say, How is your experience? And it's just a personal survey for you. The ones that do leave a nice review of four out of a five or five stars, you could email them specifically and say, Hey, do you mind filling out this for future travelers? And I think that's a great way to get those good reviews. But I would definitely stay away from any fake reviews. That is going to negatively flag you.

Heather Bayer
Can we talk about term keywords now? Because it just seems like if I look back over my 20 years as a property manager, that keywords was... It was a word that was always there. And there was keyword spamming, if you're... And I think I still see it occasionally. When you'd have that paragraph that says, come to Ontario's Cottage Country for the greatest Ontario Cottage Country experience. And while you're there, you can enjoy Ontario's Cottage Country restaurants. So there was a lot of that then. I did see one just recently and I thought, wow, I thought keyword spamming had gone, but it was a similar type of thing. So keyword research can be overwhelming. How do you go about looking for the right keywords to make a difference in the content that you're creating, whether it's for listings or whether it's for social content or blog posts?

Jill McGee
I think that's a great question. It can be overwhelming, especially when you're not sure what to look for. So if you don't use tools or if you don't have an agency like ICND and you're not using or Semrush or Ahrefs, which are paid tools, and you want to something that's free. A great Chrome extension that you can use is Keywords Everywhere. That's a nice free extension that you can get an idea. You type it in, it shows up on the side. There's only so many times that you can use it before, of course, they want you to pay. Another great tool is, I think it's AnswerthePublic.

Heather Bayer
AnswerthePublic, yes.

Jill McGee
Yeah, AnswerthePublic. And that's a great website to use, especially with creating long tail keywords and seeing what people are typing in. And then Google Trends is another free tool that you can use to see year over year how a keyword is doing. And that's a great way to see what people are typing for free. But another way to do it is type in your area, vacation rentals or lodging, depending on what term you know is used, and see who's ranking. See what competitors you have that are ranking for those top keywords. And visit their website, see what page is actually ranking, and see what they're doing differently than what you're doing. And not mimic it exactly, but utilize that and see maybe where the gaps are in your own strategy and utilize that.

Jill McGee
But you're right about the keyword spamming/keyword stuffing, where you don't want to use the same term 50 times in one paragraph. That is going to be a negative. Google is going to know what you're doing. It is not going to help you in any way. But using long tail keywords that are easier to rank for is a great thing to do. And AnswerthePublic can help you with that. So for example, 'Outer Banks rentals', great term, but 'Outer Banks vacation rentals with a pool' is another term that you could use and use it interchangeably throughout the content. And that can help you rank for a lot of those terms that people are typing in.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. You've mentioned GA4 a couple of times. Now, this is what used to be known as Google Analytics. So for me, I remember I didn't really... I spent some time with Conrad O'Connell, who taught me how important that was. Can you explain why it's important for people to know about GA4 and use it, even if it's in a very basic way?

Jill McGee
Yes, it's important. Well, it shows you who's coming to your website. So I think we can, especially if you've been in the industry for a very long time, you have an idea. We talked about your demographic, who your audience is. But there's a lot of things that you might think and perceive or based on your experience, and you might miss out on a ton of traffic and data that is completely opposite than what you thought it was. And GA4 is that. It shows you who's coming to the website, where they're coming from. So you can see if it's direct traffic, organic, if you have a really great referral site. So these are the easy ways to use it. So if you're paying for a listing on a referral site, like a chamber listing or something like that, and you want to see if it's profitable, you can use GA4 to make sure that you're not just wasting money on that and you're actually seeing traffic come from there.

Jill McGee
A really interesting thing that's different from Universal Analytics to GA4 is it can track touch points. So it's not necessarily a last click attribution, which without getting too technical, is where somebody clicked last before they made an e-commerce booking. It's going to show you the entire journey of the customer in every place that they went to the website. And it's really interesting. So I would advise, if you haven't already, go into GA4 and not necessarily look at the reports, but go down to the advertising section and look at attribution paths, and it can show you all the touch points that a user went through before they booked. And that's a really useful report that you can review just because you don't necessarily always see revenue come from social media or SEO exactly, or sometimes even pay per click. You don't always see revenue, and it's hard to quantify and say this is really important. But with this attribution path report, you see all of these things do play a huge role in getting that consumer to book.

Heather Bayer
If somebody is listening here, they don't have a digital marketing specialist like you to help them through that. Can they learn to use GA4?

Jill McGee
I think so. At one point, I was not a digital marketing specialist, and I learned. So I think you absolutely can. I do think interpreting the data does require a more keen eye, and it does require a little bit more of a background. But I think that you can use it in the sense of reviewing it and getting an idea. And I would say, use YouTube. If you don't have a digital marketing specialist, use YouTube videos to teach yourself a little bit about GA4. Or you can always do consulting with a digital marketing specialist if you want some ideas. And then that way you can, over time, teach yourself and then branch off. That's always a good strategy because I do think it's very valuable to use GA4, but it does require some technical ability. It's not as easy as Universal Analytics was to just go in and it was all right there. GA4 requires some fine-tuning and different custom variables and reporting, so it is a little bit more technical than Universal Analytics was.

Heather Bayer
Okay, that's good to know. Tell me about backlinks, because I never really understood backlinks. So I'm all ears now. I'm waiting to be taught. What is that? I know what a backlink is, but how do you build them?

Jill McGee
That is a great question, and that's a hard one. Backlink building is difficult. There's a few different ways that you can go about it, but there's some things to keep in mind that are really important, is you don't want to build negative backlinks because they can negatively impact your ranking on Google. So for example, a blog that is not in your industry, maybe a cooking blog that has nothing to do with vacation rentals, you wouldn't necessarily want to solicit a backlink from that blog because them pointing to your website is not going to help you. The building backlinks in local chamber listings. If you're at the beach and you have beach delivery equipment companies that have a lot of authority, they've been down a really long time, maybe connecting with them, building community backlinks in a sense of connecting with them, say, Hey, we'll send out an e-blast and advertise your company to all of our audience if you put us on your website. And their link to your website is going to help show Google that this is a trusted website that a lot of similar users are visiting, and they trust you because they link to you.

Jill McGee
So that means that you're a trusted website as well. So it helps you grow in the rankings.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I remember as we grew, some reciprocal backlinks. I remember one, there was a company that did boat rentals and that they delivered boats to different lakes. So we had the reciprocal backlink with them is that on our site, we were saying, If you're looking to rent a boat, you should go to this site. And then on Peel Marine's website, they had a link to cottage rentals. So if you're looking to rent a boat and you want to rent a cottage, this is where you go. So that's just a very clear example of a reciprocal backlink.

Jill McGee
Exactly. And that is the best type. That's the best way to go about it to help build trusted authority. You don't want just a bunch of backlinks pointing to your site from non-trusted websites because that will negatively impact you if Google thinks that you're running with the wrong crowd. You don't want that. You want it to be a helpful, trustworthy website that are linking to you.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, That's a great word, trustworthy. That's what this is all about, particularly for direct booking. If you listen or read any of Chris Maughan's posts, Chris from I-PRAC posts a lot on LinkedIn about the importance of trust within this industry. And you can create that trust within a website by doing things in these ways that we're talking about.

Jill McGee
Absolutely. And I think it's so interesting, like you said, trust in this industry. You're going somewhere completely different. You want to make sure that you trust where you're vacationing. You don't want one of those nightmare stories where the fan, that's the air conditioning, and it's 95 degrees. So you don't want one of those.

Heather Bayer
Yes. So that was great. I have to come back to AI again.

Jill McGee
It is a hot topic, 2024, 2025. I think it's here to stay.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. I was telling you in our chat before we started recording that I'm barely using Google now to do any searches, I use Perplexity. I like the ease of just going in there and asking a quick question, and it comes up with all the different sources of websites that it's been to to find the answers. And it's actually what I do like about it is the way it presents information. It's very nicely presented. You can copy each individual answer. You don't have to do a copy paste as there's a nice little copy button. And you can put similar types of searches into what they call spaces, so you're filing, if you like. That's something I find a little bit challenging in ChatGPT, unless you've got an extension for filing all your searches. But now, as you said, ChatGPT now has something similar. So can you just explain that, about when you're doing a search on ChatGPT, you can filter it to show the sources of where it's gone and got that information from.

Jill McGee
Yes. Well, this is the unpaid Chat[GPT], but you can actually just ask it to say, Can you source where you received this information? And it will show you the links of where the information came from. But one thing that we talked about before we started today was, again, GA4. And something new that's happening is you can search your traffic and actually see when you do search source medium, you can see that ChatGPT is now an option to filter and see who's coming to your website via ChatGPT or Perplexity, Gemini, which is really, truly fascinating to me. I haven't got a lot of traffic on sites yet, because it's slowly...., it's very new in there. And it's just very interesting that it is already listed as something that you can filter within GA4. That's really interesting and shows that a lot of traffic is expected to be coming from these types of AIs, which is going to change things up, I'm sure.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, that's really interesting because that was really my question with more and more people going through Perplexity and Gemini and ChatGPT-4 and all the other platforms that are out there. How is that going to impact the SEO work that you're doing on your website? Because it's not just going to come out on Google anymore.

Jill McGee
It is going to be a very different scenario. I think that's what these algorithm people are gearing up for. And that's why this long form, like we talked about content, evergreen content, this valuable, rich content is going to be popular because it's more conversational, like how ChatGPT will answer a question.

Jill McGee
Another really important thing to get on your website is FAQ pages. I think those are going to be very heavily utilized with ChatGPT. So adding FAQ schema, different things like that to your website to make sure you're answering specific questions that your audience is asking ChatGPT is going to be very valuable as well.

Heather Bayer
That's a great point. We had this lengthy, lengthy FAQ on our website, and we just kept adding to it and adding to it every time we had a new question. One of the things we did with it was when somebody asked a question, we would go back to them and answer that question and then say, And if you have any more, you might be interested in this page on our website. And it was amazing how many people then go back to the website and look at the other questions. But what you just said there was really valuable in how that single page on your website can be used in your overall SEO endeavors.

Heather Bayer
So coming up to the top of the hour now. So I mean SEO is always evolving. At some point, I will go back to look at those old podcasts. But if somebody's just starting out and thinking, okay, I hadn't really thought about SEO. I've got my AI harnessed, if you could harness AI. But I want to be creative with my SEO, and I want to future-proof everything, what should they be doing now? Can you give us a couple of tips of where they should start?

Jill McGee
Absolutely. I think taking out the technical SEO aspects of page speed and things like that. The only thing that is an easy one to include would be making sure your images are sized accordingly so they don't slow down your website. No one wants to go to a website that's very slow or it's taking forever for an image to load. So making sure that they're the right size. But outside of that and content creation, creating pages on your website that are geared towards calls to action and keywords. So making sure that you're creating Oceanfront Vacation Rental in your area pages or Ski-in and Ski-out types of pages on your website that have clear calls to action. They are specifically for bookings and conversions.

Heather Bayer
Can you just give me an example of a call to action?

Jill McGee
For bookings? So call to action as in a button.

Heather Bayer
So a button would be, Click here for listings or?

Jill McGee
Exactly. Yes. So make sure that you're creating... If you want to rank for a term, you have to create a page for it. And you don't necessarily need a ton of pages on your website, but you do want very specifically geared pages towards what you're selling. So Oceanfront Rentals, Ski-In and Ski-Out and then within those pages linking out. They don't have to be in the navigation, but linking out to your long form rich content pages of Ski-In and Ski-Out, here are all of our listings, and here's a lot of great local restaurants nearby. That's a great way to create some content. Another aspect of SEO, if you're just starting out, is making sure you have a Google Business Profile set up; super important. You want to make sure you're listed and making sure that you have your keywords like your area, vacation rentals, somewhere on the website. You definitely... I mean, if we go down to bare minimum basics, keywords are still the top thing that you want to make sure you don't want to overuse them, but they are the top way to rank for a website. You want to make sure that you are finding what your user is searching and that you're matching that user's intent when they get to the website.

Heather Bayer
This is really interesting because when it comes down to it, it's content, it's keywords, it's backlinks, it's speed of loading. It's exactly the same thing that we were talking about 10 years ago.

Jill McGee
It has not changed that much. It's just gotten more complex.

Heather Bayer
Yes.

Jill McGee
There's just more layers.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, more layers. And I think something else I really got out of this conversation was knowing about GA4. And if you're not comfortable with using it yourself, then find somebody who can help you with that.

Jill McGee
Yes, it is valuable. And one more great tip that I will say is for your homepage, a quick search, where people are typing in what they're searching for. I think amenities, we got really excited for a little while of adding a lot of amenities. That's not necessarily the best way. As we were talking about defining your audience and pigeonholing people into their search, maybe keep it a little shorter on that quick search. You want to make sure it's just the dates, maybe the town, maybe the view or pet-friendly, but you don't need a ton of amenities on that quick search that are going to pick from, I guess, when they go to that main search result page and to only seeing two properties that match the criteria. You want to make sure they see a lot.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I remember falling for that one and we had just, Oh, this is great. We've got all these amenities so we can have hot tub, we can have ironing board.

Jill McGee
Yeah, ironing. Yeah, that is the exact... That answer is exact. You don't need an ironing board. Put it in the description. That's great. But it does not need to be an amenity listed. I think you will see a higher conversion rate with that.

Heather Bayer
Jill, this has been a fantastic conversation. And I know we could probably talk forever on certainly AI, if not other things. But I just want to thank you so much for joining me. Just tell us a little bit about ICND. And what you do and what they do. And we can put that on the Show Notes.

Jill McGee
Yeah, absolutely. So at ICND, I'm a senior digital marketing specialist. What I do is pretty much everything we talked about today. And then what we didn't touch on was pay-per-click and Google Ads and things like that. But we focus on digital marketing and direct booking websites. And we actually build direct booking websites. And that is our main thing is building really great high functioning, mobile-friendly direct booking websites for vacation rental managers, so you can compete with OTAs and maybe stop leaning on them as much once you get your own website. And then the other aspect is the digital marketing side. So we do the SEO, pay-per-click, blogs, email marketing, you name it, we're here to help. And we even, if you can't do the full digital marketing package, we can do consulting and talk about things, even social media as well. So the full gamut of what you would need as a vacation rental manager, we can help you with that.

Heather Bayer
Well, that is great. And as I say, all that information will be on the Show Notes, so people can go check that out. Check out ICND. Always see you at the conferences. It's always lovely to catch up with April and everybody else who's there.

Jill McGee
And they will be at DARM as well. So they'll see you there if you get to go.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Jill. It's been a pleasure. And I look forward maybe in a year or two's time to catch up and just see where we are with all this.

Jill McGee
Oh, my goodness. Absolutely. Well, really. Thank you so much, Heather. It was great. I'm so glad that you liked the blog post. I look forward to hearing more about your blogs from 10 or so years ago and what's changed. I think we could do a whole conversation about 10 years, each decade, what has changed.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, that would be fun.

Heather Bayer
What a great conversation. I'm beginning to think that every one of my conversations is going to just find its way back to AI in the end. And I think maybe it's just a current obsession of mine, but it is here. It's here for good. And we've just got to get in there. We've got to see what's out there. We've got to adapt because it's not going away anytime soon.

Heather Bayer
As I mentioned, I might have just mentioned, I'm currently working on a course with the working title of Practical AI for Property Managers. You'll be hearing more about that in the New Year as we go into developing that. But also, don't forget our course called THRIVE Essentials, which is perfect for anybody that is joining your company that has no idea what vacation rentals or short-term rentals is about. And it's a like a 101 on the business. If you want to know more about that you can go to the Show Notes and information is on there.

Heather Bayer
So that's it for another AI filled week. And I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Jill, and I'll be back with you, of course, next week.

Heather Bayer
It's been a pleasure as ever being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the Show Notes for the episode at vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you, and I look forward to being with you again next week.

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