David Ngati is a seasoned expert in SEO and a pivotal figure at Guesty, where he
serves as the chief evangelist officer.
David's journey began in 2009 and since then he's worn every hat in the industry
from vacationer to property owner.
and even an OTA company that he sold to Guesty named Staysense,
beyond his professional achievements, he's a pilot land developer.
And an ultramarathoner in which he has ran some of the
hardest races in North America.
. Today we'll be talking about a few of the fields inside the streamline that
are something of a mystery to all of us.
I'm Steve Schwab, and this is Kazakast.
It's the KasaCast, created by KasaGo.
It's time for the show, let's go!
Hey, David.
Hey, Steve.
How you doing, brother?
Pretty good.
Thanks for jumping on.
Man, happy to do it.
So David, with your background in SEO you were the first person I turned
to when the franchisees started asking questions about, the different
SEO fields inside of Streamline.
And I didn't know how to answer them.
And I'm really thankful that you're helping us, sort through these
different fields that they have.
And in speaking with Carlos he said specifically that the additional SEO
text and the mobile SEO text aren't even connected to the websites anymore.
So we can just forget those.
Those are legacy fields that Streamline hasn't taken out yet.
. That's good news, Steve.
Because when I saw those in the screenshot, I didn't know what they were.
And I'm like, man, maybe I'm getting rusty here.
So thank you, Carlos, for that, ? I think those were back in the days when they
were trying to do different keywords for mobile as opposed to, desktop.
Okay.
But days gone by.
Inside of the system, it talks about the meta tag title.
Can you tell us what that is?
Yeah.
On the meta tag title, if you want to see an example of this, basically go
over to Google, search anything, and you're going to see titles show up.
So the titles are the blue links.
And if you, when you perform a search, that becomes the blue link.
However, I do want to say.
As a general rule of thumb, we want to be careful about stuffing
keywords into these, or doing a keyword first approach, and rather
we want to do a user first approach.
So basically these links that we see on Google, the blue links,
Those are the MetaTag titles.
So whatever you put in there, in theory, should become what for that
page if you were to search that URL.
Now there's a couple caveats on that statement.
The first being that Google does not have to use your title or your description.
They're going to rewrite descriptions more often than titles, but
they don't have to use either.
The other one is.
They don't have to use the whole title.
So you'll see a title get truncated if it's too long which normally then leads
to the question how long is too long?
And so I typically go with a mobile link for everything when it
comes to titles and descriptions.
And so that's 60 characters on the title.
And about 120 characters on the description.
Now, if you get out there and Google it, you're going to see
different answers out there.
And I'm not even saying that those answers, for example,
that say 65 characters are wrong or 70 characters are wrong.
However, the thing to understand here is what Google's actually
looking at is pixel width.
And so not every letter is the same width.
And so that's why I say go 60 characters.
If you give 60 characters, you cannot exceed the pixel width.
And that's easier for most people to count than pixel width.
And so go with 60 characters on a meta tag title.
You're going to be good.
As you write this, try to include a keyword, but in a way that
would entice somebody to click.
You can think of this as the headline for the story.
This is the headline if it was a news article.
This should make somebody, as they're scrolling down
Google, Stop and want to click.
And that's the title in a nutshell.
So the meta tag title , that we're talking about today on these fields are going
to be on a specific property, right?
So say somebody's searching for, Sonoran sky, four bedrooms, and suddenly, Sonoran
sky 801 happens to be in the search rankings, , do you have any sort of
maybe suggestions of what a good meta tag title would be , or a suggestion,
like what kind of description yeah, so if the property has a compelling
name, for example, I think one of the ones you shared with me was like
relaxing Casa or, if it was in the Smoky Mountain Sunrise, a name like that.
I would definitely include the name because somebody that has
stayed there before is looking for that property potentially.
And so that's a good idea to do.
If it's random building unit number 710 C, I don't think that I would
actually typically include that.
Rather, I'd try to get into the, maybe the building name with some
of the selling points or even facts.
Building name, two bedroom condo with pool access or beach access.
Something like that would actually answer the questions.
for that end user.
Now, if you're managing a hundred units in that building and they're
all named with that naming convention, you really have two options.
You either go through and name them all, which is a pretty heavy lift.
The other option would be to go ahead and just put the unit numbers in there because
you aren't going to be able to come up with a hundred different compelling
two bedroom descriptions that don't overlap and you don't want these to be
exactly the same from one to the other.
Really what we need to think about is If an end user were to get 10 of these, why
would an end user pick one over the other?
If they were to come across your listing and and another listing,
what is it that drives them into your listing versus something else?
And in an ideal scenario with our non homogenized inventory, that's
much easier to do than when we have a hundred of the two bedroom
condos, which is much more difficult.
So it's not that it's in that instance super compelling to have unit 110 C or
whatever the name is, but at least it keeps them all separate and they aren't
all duplicated and exactly the same.
When it comes to Differentiating properties.
I know that when I first started off, back in 2001, I was still doing the
reservations and this guy calls me up, he's Hey, I want to stay in the
same property I stayed in last year.
I'm like, okay, which one is it?
He's I don't know.
It was almost conscious.
I was like, okay, we have 130 properties.
It was conscious.
He goes it was a white house.
I'm like, okay, every house on this conscious white.
So the second row was like, okay, we're down to 20 of them.
And he said, two stories.
I'm like, okay, we're down to 10 of them.
And he said, it had a bunch of seahorses everywhere.
I'm like Casa de Caballos is that's it.
And when it came to a theme and what, the psychologist called place attachment.
The fact that he can remember something about the property, and then there was a
name for it that was tied to it, , even as he got into his describing what
the, the nuances were, that owner had only had a chance of 1 in 10 of that,
, guess coming back through just those descriptions, I could have put them in
any of those and could have been wrong.
So having the theme and having a name is a great way to get guests to come back
to properties that they actually love..
And there's names.
Again, it's hard if you have 100 units that are the same so I'm not sitting
here saying, hey, go rewrite every property with a brand new name tomorrow.
That's not necessarily practical.
However, maybe we can reference a theme like the seahorse
theme or something around that.
And so then it might be.
Building name 110 C, seahorse themed condo, and then calling out something that
somebody could remember in that instance.
So there is there's some potential there on things we can do, even on a
homogenized or commoditized building.
Yeah.
So now the next field that we're talking about is the meta tag description.
So again, just to let people know what this is, when you go to Google and you
search anything, it literally could be anything you're searching for, you're
going to see the blue link first, that's the title, that's the one we're going
to keep it about 60 characters, or 60 characters, roughly and then below
that, we're going to see some black text, the black text, not the blue
link's the title, the black text is the description, So the description,
it's even less important to have the keyword in the description, unless it
makes perfect sense for an end user.
Do not feel compelled to stick it right there and have the keyword
three times or anything like that.
This is expanding on the headline above to convince somebody to click in.
So it's the subtext.
You can think of this like when you get an email on your mobile device and you
see the subject line, that's the title.
The little line up below that's what we're talking about with the description
here in terms of psychology with how an end user is going to interact with this.
Again, you're going to see different character links.
If you want the character link, that's going to work for mobile.
That's going to work for desktop, everything, and all of your different
character combinations, because again, some letters are wider than other
letters, and the most of the numbers you're seeing out there are basically
taking into averages, and I'm going to give you a number that's always safe.
120 characters will always be safe for mobile.
And for desktop and then takes into account that there's different
widths and we'll make sure that you're within the character limits
that you have to work or the pixel width that you have to work with.
So that's the description.
Now there is Something that's worth calling out.
People will get aggravated because they'll rewrite their
titles or their descriptions.
And first off, they're looking for an immediate update.
Sometimes that's not the case.
It's not immediate.
Google's going to have to recrawl your site.
And then a week from now is a good time to check.
Not today.
And then there may be other delays, even potentially with your
software, it may be a job that has to process on that side as well.
So just give it a week and that's when you should be able to see it.
The other thing to know, and a company called AHREPS did a study
of 30, 000 search results this was back in 2020, give or take, and they
found about 68 percent of all desktop descriptions were rewritten and 71%.
Of all mobile get a rewrite and that's Google taking your description, your
page content and saying, huh, yeah, your marketer may have decided that
description should be this, but we're going to change it to that thing.
That increase, there hasn't been another study at larger scale that
I can quote since then, but it sure seems like it's actually increased
with AI and in some of the recent developments of the past year and a half.
So just be aware of that.
Don't let that frustrate you., I can imagine like an owner saying, you know
what I really need, I needed to say this.
You're like, okay, Mr.
Owner I'll put that in there.
And then a week later, you're like, what is going on?
The owner's mad.
Yeah, it's a good, it's a, that's good information to maybe explain to people
why it's not what you put into the system.
So it's important to note if that question comes up, we should advise
the owner we can control our website.
We cannot control.
Other websites such as Google.
And we put certain things in our website that other websites
can choose in some instances to respect or not respect an example.
This would be Verbo not too long ago saying, Hey, we're going to
decide the image order, not you, not your owners, not anybody else.
And this is just another version of that.
And I believe it's Verbo or Expedia one, that they attempt to answer questions
about a property using machine learning.
We aren't feeding that information over.
That's their machine model.
That's creating that content.
Now, if you had a stubborn owner, that's prove to me that you
put in the description, right?
Because the description doesn't show up anywhere.
That's as simple as in Chrome.
Right click, view page source, and then command F or control F, depending on
if you're Apple or PC, and just type description in, and you're going to
find the title description section in the source code, and you can see that
it's actually populated correctly there.
David, what are some of the big mistakes with the meta tag descriptions and titles?
Too much emphasis put on it.
Slamming keywords in there.
Really think about this.
If I'm writing this for my mom, how would I write this?
Knowing I have these limits on how much copy space I have to work with.
How would I write this to resonate with my mom?
Forget about a search engine, make it make sense for the end user.
Don't stress it too much.
It's going to get rewritten almost three fourths of the time on the description.
Make it make sense.
Don't use the meta tag keyword tag.
That hasn't been around for a very long time.
So at 2009 is when Google quit respecting that.
2014 is when Microsoft and Bing , quit considering that a factor.
So it's a waste of time to put keywords in.
So the third field is actually meta tag keywords in Streamline.
We should just completely forget that exists.
It does not help at all.
Every major U.
S.
search engine has said that it does not help.
And to date, there's only one search engine that I know of that has not said
this is a completely deprecated idea.
And that's Yandex.
So if you, if you look at your Google analytics and you have half your
traffic coming from Yandex or something, I have other questions for you.
But if you did, then that would be one reason to leave a man, even that
everything that I've seen study wise indicates that they aren't really
respecting it or doing anything with it.
I've seen this used for some fun stuff internally, because again, the search
engines are ignoring it and so you can use these almost as an internal field
to tag certain pages or as a heads up to an SEO person that has SEO tools.
So if you have a technical department, you could use these, for example, to,
to call out certain like maybe the ones that you have rewritten the descriptions
on and the titles on you could put like a rewrite, like I rewrote this
right there in the, in that when you hit save that way if you go back in.
A month later when you're through season and you're trying to remember
which ones you rewrote are already, you can see it really easily.
So you can use it almost like an internal tag, but it doesn't do
anything from an SES standpoint.
. So David, we should be writing this more for conversion when somebody's seeing your
unit on Google, this isn't about ranking, this is about once they found you, what's
motivating them to click on your page instead of somebody else's by what they're
reading as an introduction to what they'll possibly get when they get to your page.
Is that correct?
Yeah, so on the Google search results, Title becomes exactly as
it's described your title over here.
What, how do you get somebody to click descriptions?
Just a little bit of subtext underneath that, that again, emphasizes getting
somebody to click, helping them find what they're looking for.
You aren't going to rewrite your titles.
And rank for crazy keywords magically just does not happen.
If it were that easy, I'd go rewrite a bunch of page titles right now
about credit cards, mortgages, student loans, all this high dollar products.
It's way more complicated to rank for anything than titles and descriptions.
We aren't going to get into all of that today, but suffice it to say, that's
not going to be what pushes your side over the edge and gets you to rank.
For Destin condos or Smoky Mountain cabins.
It just does not work that way.
This is about helping an end user.
That's looking for what's called a long tail keyword or a specific keyword,
maybe the property name, helping them find what they're looking for.
It's not going to be a high volume keyword that has thousands
of people searching it a month.
This is something that may only have 10 people searching it a month, but
it has a large amount of search intent behind it, meaning it will convert
higher if you can help them find it.
Then another just unsolicited advice for anybody that's a property manager
on the SEO side, but really not so much the SEO side is the user side of the
equation is how I think about this when we're building content, it needs to
serve the needs of end users, that unit description on your page that this isn't
like where we need to be super flowery with our text and not answer questions.
This needs to be.
Factual, it can definitely include selling points, emotional triggers, all of that.
But running OTAs, I received these from all kinds of property managers, and I can
tell you the ones that convert best follow a certain formula where they're clearly
answering, not just how many people this property sleeps, but what level.
And where it sleeps those people answering questions around in
some markets, how difficult it is.
Is it to get to the property?
Do you need 4 wheel drive?
For example, in ski markets or mountain markets, how close
you are to certain things.
But basically imagine as you're a reservationist on the phone, the
questions you receive over and over again, how many parking passes do I get?
Or, is it pet friendly?
Those same exact questions are copy should answer those.
And a way that, that resonates with an end user.
And instead you see people trying to again, work in Cabo Villa
over and over again in the copy.
That's not what that page isn't going to rank for Cabo Villa.
That page is going to rank for something with much higher intent or it's going
to be the page that people navigate to after they found your website through
another another medium and then now they see that on your own website.
So it's again, it's just ranking in your own search results, not on Google.
So make sure the page itself answers the questions of the
end user and does that well.
And we see that as much as double the conversion rate on individual pages
that do this and follow it properly.
. I feel like we could do a whole nother episode on just descriptions
yeah, this is like at the end of the the television season where
you think the show's sober and then they give you one more cliffhanger.
Yeah.
Stay tuned for season two to be continued.
That, that drives a whole nother question that I have, but we'll save it
for another time in which does it make sense to have a different description
on the OTAs than your own website,
David.
Thanks for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
This is going to help our partners a lot.
It's the Casa cast we're so luxury.
The Casa cast, they don't want to be us.
The Casa cast just don't call it in their being B Casa cast.
We got Orange credo, the Casa cast, our company's nato, the Casa cast created by.