Short-Term Rental Roadmap to Driving More Bookings through SEO and Digital Marketing with Scott Quesnell

Highlights and Summary

In the competitive short-term rental market, being visible online is essential to attract guests. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to improving your property’s online presence, helping your website appear higher in search results and meet what users are looking for. This guide outlines important SEO strategies specifically for short-term rental operators, focusing on a data-driven and customer-focused approach to marketing.

Highlights:

1. SEO Essentials:
   • Optimize website and content to align with user search intent.
   • Key components include On-page SEO (keyword placement and answering user questions), Technical SEO (website speed and mobile-friendliness), and Off-page/Local SEO (backlinks and local listings).
2. Keyword Research:
   • Conduct thorough research to identify specific terms, questions, and search intent of your target audience, enhancing content relevance.
3. Testing and Optimization:
   • Implement systematic A/B testing by changing one variable at a time (e.g., headlines, images, calls-to-action).
   • Utilize tools like SEM Rush, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console for in-depth performance insights.
   • Encourage experimentation with unconventional strategies for potentially impactful results.
4. Marketing Flywheel:
   • Consistently create high-quality, optimized content (e.g., blog posts, landing pages) to drive organic traffic over time.
   • Promote content through advertising, social media, and other channels to build awareness and attract visitors.
   • Analyze performance data regularly to refine and improve content and marketing strategies, creating an ongoing optimization cycle.
5. Mindset for Success:
   • Persistence in testing and optimization is crucial; remain committed even when initial results are uncertain.
   • Develop an obsessive approach to learning what resonates with your audience through rapid, iterative testing.
   • Base your marketing decisions on customer data rather than assumptions for more effective outcomes.

Summary:

This guide provides essential SEO strategies for short-term rental operators to improve their websites and content for search engines. It focuses on three main areas:

1. On-Page SEO: Making sure your website uses the right keywords and answers potential guests’ questions.
2. Technical SEO: Ensuring your site is fast, mobile-friendly, and easy for search engines to navigate.
3. Off-Page/Local SEO: Building backlinks and optimizing local listings to increase visibility.

This approach helps drive growth and engagement in the short-term rental industry.

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Transcription

Scott: SEO is marketing where you tailor your website to what people are searching for. So when people are searching for websites like yours, they are using specific terms. And the job of someone who’s doing SEO is to put those specific terms and language And answers to the questions that people are looking for on their website.

So you can tell Google, Hey, this is a one stop shop for anybody who is looking for websites like me. And then if Google likes that, they will give it to the people looking for you. And that’s kind of the, the flywheel of SEO is just consistently figuring out what people, what terms people use to find companies like yours, optimizing your website to Rank for those terms.

And then just making sure that you’re making that content better, answering all the questions that might come up and have something for every type of searcher that uses those terms.

Gil: Hey folks, welcome back to direct booking simplified. We break down the strategies and tactics to win in direct bookings. On today’s show, I have Scott Quesnell. Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott: Thanks for having me, Gil.

Gil: Yeah. You’re one of the few folks I know in our space specifically that knows. So I’m really happy to have you on the show. I know a lot of folks kind of outside of our industry, but there’s not a lot of folks kind of within the industry that is, uh, well versed in this topic, um, to kind of kick us off, do you mind kind of giving an introduction to our listeners?

Silence.

Scott: um, talking to other Airbnb owners, like just trying to figure out what the day in the life is like for them, uh, specifically around the financial operations and marketing aspect of things. But then once we started talking about marketing, I Started to realize that they, they were a little confused on the topic, you know, so financials, they didn’t give away that much because they’re just like, who’s this random guy asking, like, to see how much money I make operations.

They, they all had it nailed down on their operations, but marketing, I sort of realized that there was, um, a need for knowledge in the space. And so this year in January, I started the STRLF newsletter, and it’s a newsletter, uh, that talks, that gives away marketing tactics, tips that I’ve learned in my marketing career.

For short term rental house, hotel, uh, hotel owners and property managers. Um, and ever since I started that, I, it’s been growing really well. I’ve been able to talk to even more short term rental entrepreneurs and really understand where their biggest pain points are in marketing. So that someday soon I’ll be able to, uh, solve that with some sort of service.

Gil: Nice. Nice. And you’re getting into hosting yourself as well, too. Is that right?

Scott: That’s right. So that that’s kind of what kicked off my my whole Airbnb tour campaign that I did Because I just wanted to learn like, you know What are the permits and like what are all the legal stuff I have to worry about but then my marketing brain automatically went to Asking them questions about that and realize that there’s actually a need in the marketplace and something that I could, I could easily solve.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel that our space is much different from a tactical or even strategic level than other industries that you have done marketing for?

Scott: Uh, the only difference I would say, I guess there’s, there’s two differences. So one is, you know, all short term rentals, they’re local. So they’re in a specific location and, you know, More times than not, they attract people from that surrounding area. So that’s one difference, um, that I’ve, that I’ve seen because in my last agency, I worked with a lot of companies that would service the entire U S so their market was specific age groups or like interests versus where they actually live.

And then the second one is when you. Advertise for a short term rental. It’s not like if you were selling soap or something to where it’s an impulse buy, there’s a lot of people that will see your ad and not do anything. And then come back days, weeks, months later and book, but it’s hard to attribute that when you start to advertise.

And so I think that discourages a lot of short term rental entrepreneurs when they start to advertise because they think, oh, my ads aren’t working. But in reality, The ads are solving the problem of, of just getting your name out there. And so the attribution model with ads is one growing pain I had as I was really starting to dive into the short term rental space a while back.

Um, but it, it, it, it, it works.

Gil: Yeah. I mean, it’s not too dissimilar to like a lot of SAS businesses as well, too. Um, and in a way, like most folks that you do any SAS business, whether or not it’s. You’re targeting SMBs or large enterprises that that buying cycle is much longer. So you’re having, you’re having to nurture folks for a very long time.

And the first touch point is more like brand awareness. What it sounds like here is that SDRs are operating in a very similar model with the spin that. You’re not targeting the whole entire U S you’re targeting a very local space, but you’re going to have to spend a lot more on retargeting a lot more on banner as you’re, you’re having to get to grow your brand out there much more.

Um, and it takes a lot more than a single touch point to close someone.

Scott: Exactly. Yeah. And, and one thing I’ve seen is, uh, if you start to advertise and then you start to see, and we’ll get into this later, I’m sure, but, and you start to see your directs, like direct searches increase as well. So people looking for you for your website directly, um, that is a good sign that your ads are paying off.

So that’s one thing, I guess, maybe one little tidbit that I just throw out there.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Um, maybe kind of diving into it. One of the reasons why I wanted to reach out to you was more specifically on the SEO front there. I don’t hear a lot of folks talk about the real tactics around SEO, We as operators, anyone that has a direct booking site knows that we need to have good SEO. Um, but maybe to kind of give us like the one on one on one, um, lesson on, on SEO, maybe to you, what does, what is the definition of SEO?

Um, maybe start off there.

Scott: Yeah. So SEO is putting. Language on your website. Um, well, let me, let me back up here. So SEO is. Marketing where you tailor your website to what people are searching for. So when people are searching for websites like yours, they are using specific terms. And the job of someone who’s doing SEO is to put those specific terms and language and answers to the questions that people are looking for on their website.

So you can tell Google, Hey, this is a one stop shop for anybody who is looking for websites like me. And then if Google. Like that, they will give it to the people looking for you. And that’s kind of the, the flywheel of SEO is just consistently figuring out what people, what terms people use to find companies like yours, optimizing your website to rank for those terms.

And then just making sure that you’re making that content better, answering all the questions that might come up, um, and have something for every type of searcher that uses those terms.

Gil: Yeah. So it’s almost like a matchmaking between the search queries and the website. So you’re trying to marry the two together and the better that you can do that matchmaking, the more that Google will reward you with more traffic like that in the future.

Scott: Exactly. Yep.

Gil: Yeah. So, um, it, there’s a lot of components that goes into SEO as an, as an umbrella term there.

Um, can you kind of break down, what do you think about like the big categories of, um, SEO? Like I’m thinking like keywords is one batch, the way your page structure is another batch, um, or another category. How do you think about it?

Scott: Yeah. So I, I think about it as, um, so there’s one sector. So on page SEO is the actual doing of making your website better. So that’s putting the keywords onto your website. That’s, you know, making your images relevant to the terms that people are using to find your website. Um, that’s almost like, I guess maybe to put it into a different perspective, like that’s almost, um, Like opening a restaurant and putting signs on the windows saying like, Hey, we sell burgers or like we have beer or we have French fries.

Like that’s, that’s kind of like what on page SEO is. And then there’s technical SEO where that’s if sometimes your images are a little heavy, so they take a while to load on the website. And so you want to make those images smaller so they don’t take as long to load. And then there’s, there’s a hierarchy of how Google kind of assesses a website and that’s using header tags.

So there can only be one header tag and that’s like the title of your page. And then you can have a couple of header, two tags, which is, should be related to the header, one tag. It kind of just elaborates on the header, one tag a little bit, and then it goes all the way to six. And it, it works in the same way.

It’s you just want to get like, I guess, maybe more specific based on your main point, which is your header one tag. So, so that’s technical SEO. And then you can do local SEO. Um, which is like generating reviews on Google and Yelp and all these other places. And then you can do, um, there’s one more, but I can’t think about it.

But the three main ones that I focus on are on page SEO. Technical SEO and local SEO. And I would say technical SEO is like, you know, if somebody comes to the restaurant that the example I just gave, and they’re just like, Oh, these guys have like burgers and all that kind of stuff, but your service sucks.

And like your bathrooms are terrible. And like the quality of your food is actually just terrible. Um, that’s kind of what technical SEO is. It’s like fine tuning the internal things. And then, uh, local SEO, I guess to translate it into my restaurant example, again, it’s. Just getting reviews and telling, like getting referrals.

Um, telling other people to tell, tell other, their friends how great your place is.

Gil: Yeah. There’s, um, we hear, uh, I do a lot of like, SEO work for, for some of our clients as well, too. And one of the things we get asked is like, what about that? Like backlinks? What are, what are those? Um, which categories that fall into, or is that a separate category altogether?

Scott: Yeah, that was the one I forgot. So that’s, that’s, that’s off page SEO. So that’s, that’s going to, that’s, it’s similar to local SEO. In my, you know, in my head, it’s, it’s going to other websites. And it’s saying like, hey, our website might be relevant to your website. Is there any way that you’d want to share what we have on your website?

And maybe, you know, maybe we’ll do the same thing. Like it’s somewhat of a trade off. And I wrote, this was a couple of months ago. I wrote an article on, on STR lift and it’s, it’s called the local guide or something like that. And it’s essentially, one of the main points is how to get backlinks. So one way that.

Short term rental entrepreneurs could, uh, get backlinks is right. Like a local guide of their area. Um, so I, so I’m in Northern Wisconsin. We’ve got a bunch of small towns, but like, it’s, they’re really well known for fishing. They’re really well known for mountain biking and you could write guides for each activity that are popular.

And then chances are like fishing outfitters will have a website, or I know most of the mountain biking trails have like a committee or some sort of organization behind them. Um, and you could go to these. Places and just say, Hey, we wrote something on you. Would you mind putting it on your website in return?

Um, we’ll link out to you on our website. And so that’s a, that’s a really good way to get back links for short term rentals.

Gil: Yeah, a lot of folks will do this for our listeners here. One of the most effective ways, um, to do this is the chambers of converse. Um, almost every, especially if you’re in a vacation market, every, uh, Tourist destination will have a Chambers of Commerce page there. Um, and there they list out all the vendors, all the businesses, small businesses that are operating in that area, and they’re usually pretty open to having you listed on there.

Um, like I’m in Gatlinburg and they, they make it super easy for us to be listed on the Chamber of Commerce. So that’s like an easy way for you to get your first backlink generated there. On top of that, there’s like, yeah, go ahead.

Scott: And, and, and I was just talking to my buddy owns a travel agency. So we kind of just talk shop all the time because we’re somewhat in the same sector. And he brought up a good point just last week, which is crazy. Destination DMOs, destination marketing, marketing organizations, uh, are also another avenue you could take as well, which are similar to chamber of commerce.

Um, like we have, we have visit Duluth, which is huge. We have, uh, a couple other towns that are just like, like visit Wisconsin, like a couple other destination marketing organizations that just like. They’re more than willing to have a conversation and kind of do the whole, I’ll scratch your back. You scratch mine approach.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. And there’s even like directories are more general within the SEO or kind of the, the web space where you get a list on the on, on the directory. Um, and you can even think of like Yelp as even being a, a directory there where they link back to you. Those are a way to get back links, but they’re probably not as efficient or effective as like the chambers of commerce or the destination directories that you mentioned, like Visit Wisconsin.

Like that one actually has a strong score because they’re actually the same folks that would actually visit your property. Um, whereas like someone going the opposite, it’s, it’s a bit more general there, would you agree with that?

Scott: I totally a hundred percent

Gil: Yeah. It’s almost like every one of these categories has a certain weight to it, where if you do it really well and you’re driving, um, traffic from adjacent verticals or adjacent companies, even that ends up like magnifying the, the backlinks that may be referred to you or, or any of the other tactics there.

Scott: right. Well, and if, if you go with the, like the smaller websites, so if you have coffee shops in your area, or if you have multiple, like fishing outfitters, I’m using my scenario again, but if you have multiple, like. Uh, like maybe theme parks or something, wherever, like big, whatever big cities have, um, those might be easier from a volume standpoint to kind of just reach out just super rapidly and just collect backlinks.

And then, um, and then like travel Wisconsin or visit Duluth. Like those are kind of the bigger fish. Like those are kind of just like bigger websites that would just boost your site traffic. Way better than all the smaller ones, but it doesn’t hurt to get all the small fish as well.

Gil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned something very interesting. We, we spent a lot of earlier about like technical SEO. We actually spend a lot of time on our websites on that specific section there because that’s something that unless you’re the developer of the website, you really have very little control over some of the technical SEO.

It’s like one of the things that we did early on. Was like, we found that when we did, um, our page load times, like on our sites, it was not the score that we wanted to, like, I think we were hitting probably like sub 50 and that was not good for us at least. Um, and what we ended up doing was. We, we, we download images from the PMS is, um, so we’re able to get all the high quality images.

And then we started loading that on mobile. And you probably know this, like when they crawl, they, they see how fast that, that, that load time is. And if you’re Jen, you’re loading that high res images on mobile, it ends up hurting you quite a bit on your SEO rank. So we ended up having to download that, that image from the PMS and then regenerate four different versions of that formats of that based on the different screen sizes.

And that’s significantly shot up our SEO rank on our pages

Scott: Yeah. I’ve seen that too.

Gil: Yeah, that’s that’s one example. And then all of our templates, we try to follow like all the H ones all the way through H six tags so that if you’re loading one of our templates out there, it’s following the best practices out there so that you don’t have to figure out like, Oh, do I tag this as H one?

Do I tag the H three? We kind of follow that as you kind of build your building blocks there. So it’s good to know that some of the stuff that we put into practice is like helping our, our customers rank a bit higher and SEO.

Scott: Yeah, totally. Yeah. And, and, uh, animations too. Another big thing I see a lot of, especially in our space, like the rental space, like there’s a lot of websites with animations, I never build websites with animations because of how slow it makes everything. Um, so that’s another, another thing I would recommend that people kind of.

I almost want to say avoid, like just, if you don’t have to use an animation, maybe don’t. Because those, those do slow things down a lot.

Gil: yeah, we, we, I, the first template had some animations in there and we almost immediately cut them out. It, and not just for SEO, but it ended up dropping our conversion as well too. So when we tracked that conversion, when we took out the animations out there, it actually lifted our conversion quite a bit.

Um, and it was mainly because like it’s, it’s kind of distracting from, from a guest perspective. When you see the animations flow through, what you want to do is actually like tell a story and try to nudge them towards. the conversion to actually end up booking. And more often than not, the animations are there as, as an, as I can need to distract you more than actually like funneling you to the, to the right place.

Scott: Yeah, totally. Well, especially in this day and age, like it’s tell a story as clear as you can, as fast as you can. And animation is just slow things down.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Um, any other tips on the, on the SEO front, um, that you want to give to our listeners?

Scott: Uh, I guess maybe I could talk about some tools. So SEM rush is, is the tool I use for essentially everything when it comes to SEO. So SEM rush helps me figure out what terms people use to find my website. What terms people use to find my competitors website. Um, SEM rush also. helps me figure out the technical SEO stuff.

So like, part of my page is broken? Um, how are my header tags formatted? It’ll just tell you, like, you don’t even have to guess. It’s beautiful. And then, uh, there’s a couple other things you can do. So you can, uh, you could create a list of like keywords or terms that you want to go after. You do competitor research.

So if you’re kind of a new investor into an area and you’re not super familiar who’s around, uh, SEM rush is a good way to figure that out. Uh, and you can just build lists. And, and so SEM rush is great. It is pricey. So if you want something free, uh, Google keyword planner is another great one. Uh, that’s free.

So long as you have an ad ad account and you can see, you know, what terms are people using to. Find your website, but also get ideas. And so Google keyword planner will give you some ideas based on your website or the terms that you want to go after. Uh, and then the other one. You, you people really should use is Google search console.

Cause Google search console, um, just tells you how you’re doing. It monitors website performance. So it’s, it, it tells you like, are you getting more clicks after you spent 10 hours doing SEO stuff or how are you ranking, are you ranking higher? Are you ranking lower? Are you getting more eyeballs on your site?

If you are getting more eyeballs on your site, are the people that are seeing your website, are they clicking through? So Google search console. Answers all those questions. So those three tools are probably like the greatest three tools I can recommend. I use a couple others, but those are like the backbone of my process.

Gil: Yeah, a lot of what you said, um, on click throughs and conversions and some of those things on using Google search console is almost some of the stuff that you also use analytics for Google analytics. Where do you see the differentiation between when do you go to search console versus analytics?

Scott: So search console, uh, measures your website’s performance on the worldwide web, so in the big ocean. Um, so it, it tells you how people find your website organically is what Google search console does. Google analytics tells you what happens after that. So do people get to your homepage and do nothing? Do people check out your properties?

Do more people start a booking and then like just a fraction of them complete it? Um, it answers a lot of questions like that. Uh, the biggest ones I pay attention to are, okay, people are landing on my website. What do they do after that? Are they even visiting the property page? If they’re not, then I got to promote that a little bit better.

And then once they start the booking process, is there a huge drop off somewhere, and then that starts, uh, posing some questions. Am I too expensive? Should I offer a deal? Is my nightly minimum just like way too long? Uh, so that starts posing questions that you can then test. By looking at the data and Google analytics,

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s almost like you use Google Analytics to understand your entire funnel and where in that funnel do you have leaks in there? And when I think about a funnel is like the top of the funnel, at least in the website space is like people coming into your webpage and the bottom of the funnel is actually them converting and booking.

And there’s. Probably at least three or four different pages if done interactions along the way. So are you actually driving people towards that booking? Are they, like you said, are they going to the property pages at all or are they bouncing on the first page? And if they’re bouncing on the first page, that means that whatever copy that you’re putting in there, whatever imagery you’re putting there is likely not resonating with the folks that you’re bringing in.

Um, so that’s, that’s a good place to look at and figure out like, okay, what, what part of your business needs a bit more attention?

Scott: Yeah. And I mean, I can even put it into a story, like how powerful Google analytics is. Uh, I was working with a relatively large brand. I think some people would know it. And I was looking through their Google analytics. They came to me with the question, like, we get a ton of website traffic, but our sales are bad.

And, uh, I looked through their analytics and I told them, I was like, you don’t ask people to buy. Like people get to your website, they look around, but they don’t go anywhere else because you don’t tell them to go anywhere else. And that one simple fix was huge to their business. And, and I learned that I figured that out by going through Google analytics.

So that kind of just goes to show like analyzing that data, learning how to read that data can be huge for your company. The first obstacle, obviously you have to hurdle is how do you read the numbers? But after enough reps and looking at it enough, you’ll figure it out pretty, pretty quickly.

Gil: Yeah, there’s a few topics I want to, I want to get into one is on the keyword side and like understand your keywords. But kind of before I go there, um, you mentioned something interesting that were actually not just now, but right before that it was around testing there. And we had a previous conversation, this talk to me or have our listeners, uh, give listeners listeners a kind of a glimpse of like how you think about testing, um, and what it means and digital marketing to do testing.

Scott: Uh, okay, so I can, I’ll start kind of broad and then I’ll just put it into some examples. So the best way to test in marketing is through sprints and testing one variable at a time. So if I were to put it into an SEO example, one way to sprint test with SEO is to batch as much possible content as you can.

So maybe in 10 days you write. 30 different pages, whether those are landing pages, um, or blogs, and then you wait 30 days, 60 days, however long it takes for you to see improvement. And then you go back and you analyze, okay, Obviously this worked, this sprint worked. I am getting more eyeballs on my site and hopefully more clicks.

But if you want to try to get more clicks, one thing you would do is test a different headline or a page title that the thing that appears on Google in blue. And you could test that for 30 days, change the page title, maybe make it more enticing. Or one thing that I’ve done a lot is just throw a number in it.

So, so, uh, like an example would be the best coffee shops in Duluth, Minnesota. And just changing it to the best 10 coffee shops in Duluth, Minnesota, that could

Gil: everyone.

Scott: increase your click through rate substantially. And so that’s one way to test with SEO. I guess the biggest thing I would want to touch on is always be testing.

So if you test, you know, if you change your headlines for all 30 pages, if that’s what you end up doing, you want to continue making those pages better. And maybe that’s because people are coming to your blog sites and they’re not clicking to your properties because maybe you want to change your call to action, like from book now to an image of your property with a button below it.

Like there’s a bunch of different things you can do, but you only want to do one thing at a time, because if you do more than one thing at a time and you win, you don’t know what caused that win. And therefore you cannot replicate it. And that, that goes with ads and social media as well. So, um, do you want me to get into ads?

I can

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Scott: Yeah. Ads is the quickest way to test stuff. So, so one thing that I do, it’s almost required in my company right now is whenever we get a new client on, whether they’ve been marketing before or not. We always test a couple of different things. So one is the creative and that’s different amenities from your, from your property or what your property looks like entirely. So we test different aspects of that, um, and just put it on Facebook ads and see what does the best. So we, we add zero context. There’s zero headlines. The only other thing people can see is who’s advertising it and the link to learn more. And we just single out that one variable. Being the creative and then after this takes just a couple hours, I mean, I’ve done it as fast as like an hour and, and after that timeframe, you figure out, okay, people are more interested in my hot tub that has a view of the forest or the log features in the interior of my cabinet.

It’s wild. It can, there’s so many different things, or it could be as silly as like the driveway shot. From the bottom of your driveway leading up to your cabin, like it can be so many different things that you won’t even think, uh, would be what people are most interested in. And then from there, okay, cool.

So you take your top three pieces of creative and now you match them up with headlines. So you test the thing that gets people to click. So maybe a headline example would be, looking for a weekend getaway. Um, or another one would be Hey, people in college, do you want to hang out with your friends in the woods?

There’s a bunch of different things. Um, I do have a couple of frameworks on this, but to simplify it, just write as many headlines as you possibly can. Whether that’s 10 20 or 30 and and test those because again You will be surprised as to what gets people to click

Gil: Silence.

Scott: them together so three times three is nine, so now you have nine ads that you want to put together and Go for bookings now. And so see which ad combination gets people to book and And then same thing, you’ll find your top three and then just promote the crap out of them until you no longer are making money on the ads anymore.

And the main thing that I guess, where we started with this is everything you test, just single out the variable and everything is a variable, everything.

Gil: Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s good advice. Um, I, I actually use one of those tests to whenever I launch a brand new property. So for us, what we do is we run ads. Every time we launch a new property to help us pick out which hero image do we, do we put on our Airbnb page because you only get the one hero image.

So what we’ve done started this a little while ago, uh, with our first cabin, what we do is we will take the six top photos that we think are the best ones out of, out of the bunch that we get, we usually get like 60 photos. Um, so we picked the top six and then we’ll run simultaneous ads for each one of those.

Um, and see which one has the highest click through rates and we, we keep the headlines, the same, the links, the booking links, all the same. And we just track that. We will run it for seven days. We’ll probably spend no more than like 30 on it. It doesn’t take that much, maybe 50 at most. We were surprised to find out that the photo that we were intending to put as the initial hero image was not the one that ended up having the highest click through rate.

Um, and it’s very likely the people that do the click through rates on Facebook are the same ones that will resonate on Airbnb. So it has a pretty, for us, it has a pretty high trust factor in knowing that we’re choosing the right photo.

Scott: Totally. Yeah. And that exact, that exact process is, is, is how we do it on our end too. It’s just singling out every single variable. Then whatever wins, we use it until it doesn’t work anymore. 

Gil: I don’t even have to wait for bookings to come in. Like, you know, whether or not something is effective just by someone clicking through to it. So even if you just get the click to rate that ends up becoming a good barometer on like, okay, is it actually driving them to the next part of the funnel?

Yeah,

Scott: Yeah. And you can see all that kind of stuff in Google analytics.

Gil: absolutely. Um, we don’t, I don’t do this for the headlines though. Maybe I should. I haven’t, I haven’t played around with using Google analytics or not. Um, Facebook ads to help us, uh, tune the tune the headline. Mainly because like Airbnb headlines are, you kind of write them a certain way where you’re putting the amenities inside the inside of, uh, Inside your, your, your headline of your, of your property.

It would be kind of odd to see a Facebook ad that says like hot tub and sleeps for whatever. Um, but maybe, maybe it could work.

Scott: Well, the pool is small enough to where people are going to scroll past. And if you’re worried about like, is it going to damage your brand? That’s probably the number one, uh, pushback I get. Is if we, you know, if we just promote a word, people are going to think we’re just like cheap and weird. And it’s like, nobody’s going to remember you people see what couple thousand ads a day.

Nobody’s going to remember like a three word sentence that you put on Facebook ads. Because plus the pool is so small, like the people you hit might not ever want to book anyways. So it’s, it’s a win, win, win, win, win. Like it’s, it’s the greatest thing you can do from a marketing standpoint is just test every single variable.

Gil: yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely right. Um, it’s such a large pool. Like if you look at the impressions and how much it gets, it’s actually like Google’s Google and Facebook. They serve your ads to such a small. segment of the population there. So like there is actually like very little concern of like erosion of your brand whatsoever.

Now if you’re running for a very long time and you’re spending a pretty big ad budget on it, then, then that might be a different story there. But if you’re using it just to do, and we do this a lot in the startup space, um, where before you actually launch your startup, you may actually start to figure out like, is this a problem worth, Actually solving for, and you’ll find like early founders go out there and they’ll run Facebook ads on a particular problem set to see, are people clicking through?

Are they going to that signup page? Are they getting themselves on the, um, on, on the waitlist? And if you don’t, then usually that’s a good signal that maybe this isn’t a company that you should be starting. So like this is actually applicable to many different areas and kind of to your very beginning of our conversation digital marketing Um, although like we have to look at it from our own perspective our own industry There’s actually a lot of like knowledge transfer Between how you do digital marketing between different industries.

There’s actually a lot more overlap than there is not Silence.

Scott: you just got to keep testing things, keep iterating and just keep making what you already have better, uh, to kind of go off your, your, uh, startup comment.

I test for the newsletter for STR lift. I test article ideas. So about once a month, maybe once every two months. I’ll do the tests that we were just talking about. I do headline only because images don’t really matter, but I’ll just test like are people interested in direct booking websites versus learning social media tactics versus paid ads.

And ever since I started doing that, my open rate is higher. People are more engaged. It looks like a, so you can, you can transfer the idea of testing from your short term rental business and then all the way to, like you said, startups and all the way down to something so small minuscule, like a headline for a newsletter that goes out once a week.

So transfers and everything.

Gil: that’s a really good point. Because as, uh, marketers, um, folks getting into the direct direct booking space, we’ll end up getting to a point where we start to hire VAs to help us write blog posts or do a lot of the maintenance work. Um, but what you’re saying is there’s probably a more effective way.

Even before you write blog posts, Your four blog posts a month on certain things that might be, you might want to drive traffic to what you could do is actually. Run sprint test at even in batches to figure out like, what do people search for? What do people want? What do they click on and use that as a way in combination with your, like your keyword, keyword analysis to figure out what are the right articles to be spending your efforts on.

Scott: Totally. Yeah, you could totally do that. Do keyword research and then come up with topics that you can write about and test them. Yeah.

Gil: you, uh, We’ll write a blog post on, on, on our blog about that. That’s a, that’s a definitely, that’s definitely a thing. Like what I find is like, we don’t have an infinite amount of resources. We don’t have an infinite amount of resources and especially in time. And as SDR operators were constantly being pulled in many different directions.

Um, and some of those directions are like very effective and drives the business forward and other, other parts of it is a lot of busy work that we can try to see if we can cut out or make more efficient there. So if hosts are able to market and drive more direct bookings, drive more traffic with less amount of effort, um, they just get to spend more time.

On their business on other areas that drive drives more revenue or just on living life and just like enjoying other parts of life and make this more of a passive thing because more and more STR operators are, they get into it thinking that it’s passive, but it ends up becoming more active than they originally anticipated.

Scott: And one thing I’d like to start doing with the newsletter is, uh, so, so I’m kind of, I’m rolling out this new, it’s called lodge social. It’s a agency for the hospitality space. So hotels, property managers, and Airbnbs. And one thing I really want to do, um, but I’ll need enough data in order to do it is be at the.

Like the lead of that conversation where, you know, maybe once a quarter, I write an article of like, here are the top formats that are performing really well on Instagram as far as like videos go or ads go, uh, because we’re testing things all the time. Or like. What you just said, like we tested all these keywords with all these creatives and they performed this well, or they didn’t perform well and, and kind of be at the, at the, at the head of that conversation, because kind of like you just said,

Gil: Silence.

Scott: If they kind of figure out like this format does really well on Instagram or this type of ad does really well for multi property landscape resorts or something like that, you know?

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. I do think that we’re starting to see a big rise in direct bookings, we’re starting to see more maturity on the marketing side there. Uh, I would not be surprised that. Um, and it’s a very different ballgame on how you get traffic to, to, for bookers, um, there, there’s just so much more information and like the, the folks that are invested in making this work, we get to ride that wave and it’s almost like that organic, like SEO wave there where like you’ve put in that time right now, it starts to pay dividends many years from now.

Scott: Yes, I think more people are looking for specific things. Uh, I think maybe Airbnb kind of popularized like unique amenities. And I think more people are looking for places that have unique aspects to them. And the best way to get that word out, the best way to get direct bookings for that is to show your unique amenities on social, advertise them, um, You know, and then optimize for SEO obviously as well.

But yes, I do think direct bookings are going to increase because I think the intent of what people are looking for will change because I don’t think people are no longer just looking for a place to stay. I think if people are going to a popular area, like again, in, uh, Minnesota, we have like the black Hills or Colorado, or we have, uh, Duluth just in our state.

I think. All these bigger tourist destinations, people know that they have hotels, people know that they have campgrounds, but maybe they want something specific, like a campground with, there’s not many of these, but like a campground with a pool, you know, or maybe like tree houses were in the woods. So maybe tree houses are big.

Um, I think, I think the intent of what people are looking for. Is going to change and therefore, um, direct bookings will increase.

Gil: Yeah, absolutely. Um, Scott, we covered a lot of topics. Was there anything else you want to share with our audience today before we get into the two last questions? I usually end with.

Scott: Uh, let’s see here. Ads. I feel good about SEO. No, I think,

Gil: We covered it all. Yeah. Yeah. And I’m sure folks definitely, um, sign up for your newsletter, um, Scott’s newsletter, um, to stay tuned, um, and kind of just learn from kind of what he’s doing there. Um, but I usually end with two questions. Uh, the first question is a mindset question. The second question is, uh, kind of the big takeaway from today’s conversation.

So kind of starting with the first one there, um, you started something new recently, um, or not that recently, but over time, but what is that one piece of mindset advice that you would give to someone that’s starting something completely new?

Scott: Can I give you two?

Gil: Sure.

Scott: So there, there are two things I always think about. Uh, I just started the newsletter, uh, but I’m also starting that new agency right now. I’m rolling that out by the end of the year. And I think the one thing I always think about that probably killed me at the start. Is, you only quit if you lose, or you only lose if you quit.

So just don’t quit and then you’ll win whatever winning means to you and be consistent. So in business, as you know, it requires a lot of doing the same thing. Therefore, consistency is required. So just do that. So just stay consistent and just don’t stop and you will win. Whatever winning means to you, you will win

Gil: Awesome. Awesome. I love that. Um, the last question here, um, what’s that one piece of tactical advice that you would give to our, our listeners, um, today?

Scott: with marketing.

Gil: Yeah. With our conversation today.

Scott: start testing, just. If, if you’re, if you, nobody really knows if a campaign is going to work out. I’ve been doing this for forever. You’ve been doing this forever. You never really know if a campaign is going to work out. So the best way you can get the answer to that question is test stuff. And then you’ll start getting like.

Feedback loops like you’ll realize that maybe the views from your cabin are like are what people are interested in or like I said Like maybe your hot tub is what people are interested in but you can’t come up with that assumption You want your audience to kind of tell you what a good campaign would be like tell you what they’re interested in And the only way to do that is to just start testing different things like become obsessed with Doing these small little tests, they’re super inexpensive.

The time commitment is not extremely high and just like become obsessed with learning what works and what doesn’t.

Gil: Yeah. I love that. Um, is there one resource that you would point someone towards, um, to learn how to do their first sprint test?

Scott: Yes, I have, I can send it to you after this. I do have a couple of articles on STR lift that are tailored to short term rentals. You can find a bunch of different like sprint test articles online, but they’re not tailored to your business. I think if somebody were to read a sprint testing article, That uses their business as examples.

Uh, I think that might be. The biggest benefit to them. So I’ll send you a couple of, of, of articles that might be interesting for somebody who wants to start sprint testing.

Gil: Sounds good. Sounds good. Awesome. Scott, uh, where can folks learn more about you, connect with you, collaborate, partner with you? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome.

Scott: So you can go to strlift. com that’s S Sam T Tom R Rick lift. com or to read the newsletter, you can sign up. It’s totally free. You’ll get a new. Article every Thursday at 5 45 AM central standard standard time. Or you can go to get lodge, social. com, join the wait list for the new agency I’m building. Uh, it will be a first come first serve.

I’m only accepting a couple of new clients. It’ll be a slow rollout. Um, but it is a first come first serve to who we take on, but you can go to get lodge, social. com to join the wait list.

Gil: Awesome. And you’re also on Instagram as well, right?

Scott: Yes. Scott STR lift

Gil: Awesome. I’ll make sure to include the, those links into the show notes there. Scott, it was really good to have you on the show and just talk about some of the digital marketing, uh, tactics that you’ve learned throughout the years and how it applies back to the SDR industry. So I appreciate you sharing that with us.

Scott: Gil. This was great. Let’s I want to do it again. This was awesome. This was so fun.

Gil: Awesome. Well, we’ll have, we’ll definitely have to have you back and, uh, have you talk about some of the case studies that you’ve done after launching, um, your new agency.

Scott: Absolutely. Definitely.

Gil: Thanks, Scott. See ya.

Scott: Thanks Gil.