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In this episode, we cover the top tools we use at BuildUp Bookings for paid search, SEO, content, social media management & more.
The Heads In Beds Show is your vacation rental & accommodations marketing podcast co-hosted by Conrad O'Connell and Paul Manzey. Learn how to double your direct bookings with search, social & email marketing strategies and tactics.
Conrad:
Hello there. Welcome to another episode of the Heads in Beds Show. I'm your host Conrad O'Connell. Thanks so much for this. So today's episode, we're going to talk a little bit about the tools that we use at our agency to deliver results for our clients. So clients often ask us as they're getting started with us, "Hey, what access do you have? What tools do you use to research website to perform, SEO audits, to run paid search ads, to do design, all these sorts of things. So in today's episode, I thought it would give a small peek behind the scene into all the different tools that we subscribe to, pay for and ultimately see value in helping our clients with. So let's get into it.
So I'm going to start by focusing first on the search side of things. So most of the tools in this section, we're going to dig into really the SEO and paid search tools that we use. So this is by far our biggest service offering and often our biggest expense each month. Some of these tools are great, but they deliver results. So we see a lot of value in continuing to work with these tools. But I'll start with a great one and a free one. Number one in the list here is Google Search Console. So we use Google Search Console. Obviously, we verify all of our client's websites with Google Search Console to make sure that we can get keyword data, page traffic data. It shows impressions. It shows any errors or problems that Google has crawling your site. And now shows information about core web vitals, site speed, et cetera, and this is all straight from the source, straight from Google.
So we love using Google Search Console on all of our monthly reports and reporting that we do. Internally and externally, includes Google Search Console data, because it lets us know a lot of things that are happening right now, which posts are trending and getting more traction within the last week, within the last 30 days, within the last 6 months. Which keywords are people searching for to find our website? Where do we generally rank for that keyword? What gets to that search? So Search Console really has invaluable data and there's really no replacement for it because, again, it's straight from the source. It's straight from Google. There's no estimates or guesses in there. There isn't some of the other external SEO tools that we'll talk about in a few minutes. And it gives you notifications when things are going wrong, redirect errors, things like that. So we love Google Search Console, a free one that you should definitely check out, verify your website inside of Search Console, if you have not already. And review that information to see where your organic search traffic is coming from.
So tool number two, another Google free tool that we can dig into here a little bit is Google Analytics. So we have over the years, worked with lots of different clients that have Google Analytics. Some set up they're tracking flawlessly. Others have a lot of holes in there. Really the way the Analytics works for you to understand what's going on, I would say number one is limiting the number of reports that you're looking at. It's easy to get down a rabbit hole in Analytics and look at reports that really don't have a lot of actionable information in them. It's just telling you that someone on this page spent three minutes looking at it. So it's not always the most useful information for you to do something with. But within Analytics, what we find is that if you have your tracking setup for goal completions and online bookings, through Google Analytics e-commerce tracking, it becomes a lot more useful very quickly.
So then you can see, okay, which sources of traffic are delivering the most bookings, which sources of traffic that we're working with are getting the highest number of conversions, meaning like lead form fill outs, newsletter signups, phone calls, things like that. And then you can take that Google Analytics data, and reports and make it a lot more actionable. But Analytics is the gold standard, if you will, of website traffic and tracking information. So we love using Analytics to be able to report on that visibility, where people are coming in on the site, what pages they're looking at, where they're coming from, and then ultimately what action they're taking to actually book properties or fill out forms to hopefully book in the near future. So we love Analytics. Again, another free tool that you can leverage and take advantage of.
So let's go over to the paid side real quick, PPC, and let's talk about Optmyzr. So we've actually worked with Optmyzr now for I think about two and a half years. And it's in theory, a completely optional tool. You can just use Google Ads through the interface, and we often do that as well. But Optmyzr has been incredibly helpful for us for managing and doing a little bit of heavy lifting for us on a lot of repetitive tasks within a PPC account, within a Google Ads account. So with Optmyzr, we connect all of our client accounts to Optmyzr and then leverage that information to find negative keyword ideas, to manage our budget pacing, so that we're not spending too little or too much on a given day. We use it to monitor our return on investment. So there's a simple dashboard view that we can log in there and see all of our client's return on investment from ad spend to online bookings, just in one page. So it's phenomenally useful for that purpose as well.
Optmyzr has a ton of tools to help you build ads quicker, to do AB testing on ads. I think I mentioned this, but to find negative keywords, to give you insights on search terms that are starting to do well, to give advice or automate even bid strategies. So you could look at a keyword that's doing well, increase the bid automatically, and they also even have Google Ads scripts built into Optmyzr as well. So you can use a specific script from Google Ads or install a specific script into Google Ads and have automations work on your behalf all through the Optmyzr interface or dashboard. So we love Optmyzr. If you're spending a good amount on paid search, let's say north of maybe 2,000, 5,000 a month for your vacation rental business, definitely check out Optmyzr or ask if the agency you're working with is using some sort of automation tool like this, because it saves a ton of time and just does more work than a human PPC manager could do in a day, a week, or a month because it analyzes all this information automatically. So we love Optmyzr.
The next tool is more on the organic side, although there's some paid search information inside of it as well. And it's a combo and we have Ahrefs and SEMrush subscriptions, but 90% of our time ends up being in Ahrefs. So we use Ahrefs for competitive analysis, competitive research. We'll put sites that our clients are trying to outrank or get more traffic on. And we see what pages, what keywords, what topics they're ranking for, what they're getting traffic on. We also see what links they're getting and Ahrefs, in my opinion, has the best link index of any of these major tools out there. So you can put in a site and see exactly where they're getting links from, which can help inform your link building strategy, what you're trying to focus on. And their traffic projections, although never exactly precisely on real traffic, especially in a seasonal business, like the vacation rental businesses, I find is the most accurate of the options out there. Ahrefs will tell you here's a page that's ranking for 200 keywords and it's getting on average 4,000 visitors a month.
We typically find, if anything, Ahrefs tends to underestimate the actual traffic that comes into most sites. So if you see a site in Ahrefs that claims that's get 2,000 visitors a month, it's likely getting more like 3,000 visitors in our experience, but directionally, we find it very accurate. So you can look at Ahrefs traffic estimates, put your site in there, put in your competitions. And even if the absolute numbers are slightly off, the relative numbers tend to be pretty accurate in our experience, based on real data from Analytics. So Ahrefs is a phenomenal tool for content research, for keyword research, for link research. And I really don't know how you can do SEO without Ahrefs, to be honest with you. So if you have an SEO campaign and you're trying to grow organic traffic to your website, definitely check out Ahrefs and SEMrush, although we prefer Ahrefs. And I think you'll be pleased with the data that they give you.
So the next tool that we've started to use recently over the past few years is Clearscope. So Clearscope is a content optimization tool and, essentially. It's a key part of our blog and content creation workflow. So when we create a new piece of content, let's say it's a guide like the best restaurants to eat at in a destination, we always use Clearscope reports to make sure that we're hitting the right mark on that actual content. Although our writers are going to do all sorts of research to make sure that we're finding the right topic, to make sure that we're writing about the right area, the right information, what Clearscope does is really help automate the process of gathering and making sure that the on-page topics and keywords and queries that we're covering in that piece are as optimized as they can be.
So the gist of how Clearscope works is you give it a keyword, let's say restaurants in New York City, and it goes and crawls the top 30 search results on mobile and the top 30 search results on desktop. And, yes, there is some overlap, but sometimes there are unique results, and tells you which terms are co-occurring on those pages, which terms you should consider, based on the headings and all the text content on those pages, to write into your piece into your article. So it helps tremendously, because when we give a Clearscope concept report to a writer, they don't need to guess so much and they don't need to do nearly as much research.
They can simply just look at the Clearscope report, evaluate the keywords inside that report, and then simply consider including that information when they write that blog post. So we love Clearscope. It's a phenomenally useful tool. And if you're doing any sort of content production, tools like Clearscope are incredibly useful to make sure that you're handing off something to a writer and that they're writing things and structuring things the right way from an SEO perspective. And we typically see very positive results when we publish content with Clearscope. So we're big fans.
The next tool is another copy or content tool. It's one that's a little bit newer to us, but we started using copy.ai. So it's a GPT-3 automated content generation tool is, I guess, how I'd describe it. It's a new segment for us and for our clients that we work with. So I don't know exactly how to describe it, to be honest with you. But essentially what you do is you log into the copy.ai interface and you give it, for example, we might give it a brief for the intro to a blog post, or to look for Facebook primary text ideas, copy.ai uses AI to generate content from your brief. So we really find this useful if we're trying to come up with new intros or we're trying to come up with a specific copy and [inaudible] in a little bit of that writer's block mode. I think everyone's been there, if you're in marketing or if you're in-house or agency side, and you're trying to write copy.
Sometimes you have that blank page syndrome hitting you. So copy.ai has been super useful, because we give it a brief and the quality that comes back is hit or miss, but when it hits, it's phenomenally useful. So it's a newer tool for us, but we've had a lot of success recently using copy.ai to help write Facebook ads. We've used it a little bit on Google description generation. We've used it a little bit on a landing page copy, and it usually either gets us out of a rut and we ended up writing a better page because of it. Or we literally can copy and paste the generation that comes back from copy.ai and helps us write these things. My opinion is that these tools aren't quite a far way away from actual replacing a content writer.
I don't think we're there yet, as we record this, but who knows what the future holds? I wouldn't be shocked if tools like copy.ai gets significantly better in the next 2, 3, 4 years. And they could maybe write entire sections or maybe even entire blog posts just with a small prompt. And then you just have to go in there to clean things up a little bit before you hit publish. And who knows? Maybe in the future, AI will just run our whole life. I don't know. That's not my area of expertise. But, yeah, these tools are really helpful just, again, to get that kind of boost when you're writing that piece of content and you need another section, you need a call to action, you're just looking for more ideas. The prompts and the feedback that copy.ai gives are pretty stellar. So we like working-
The next tool on the SEO side that we leverage a lot on our link building team is BuzzStream. So BuzzStream really helps us a ton with automating and organizing all the outreach that we're doing. Managing an email inbox is tough if you're just emailing all the guests maybe that you're dealing with or all the clients or contacts that you may have. But when you're emailing, let's say, a few dozen or a few hundred people every single day, it's critical that you want to keep things organized and on track. On our link building side of things, we might be reaching out to hundreds of sites, constantly looking for link opportunities and promotion opportunities for our clients, BuzzStream really helps nail that and put that into a single place so that we can see when someone has last emailed from either someone on our team, or just if you reach out to that person before and you want to see when that last was, you can keep everything in a simple view.
So you can search by project or by email, see what that person is looking for, and really helps a ton if you're doing any sort of broad outreach for link building or for other activities that are more PR based, BuzzStream is clutch. So getting out of the search mindset for a second, we have a few other tools that I think are worth discussing. We promote a lot of content on social media. So we do use a few different tools on the social media side of things to help us publish that content. And we do use Hootsuite to help schedule content ahead of time. So natively within Instagram for the longest time, there wasn't the ability to actually schedule posts or it's very cumbersome or not really supported to do so. That's changed a little bi recently. Facebook now has a Creator Studio tool set where you can schedule posts through Facebook and Instagram natively just within the Creator Studio interface.
But Hootsuite has that functionality for a long time. So we've been Hootsuite customers for a few years and we help them, or we use them, I should say, to manage all of our client pages and help schedule these things ahead. If you're busy or you're a vacation rental manager, you don't have time to do this during the busy parts of your day or parts of your week or month, these tools are phenomenally useful, tools like Hootsuite or Buffer, to just have a day set aside all your content publishing that you're going to do. And then you schedule things out for a week or two weeks or a month at a time. And then you're not worried about it so much. You can go about focusing on what you need to focus on with guests or other marketing activities and things are scheduled. And they're firing without you having to hit a button at 1:00 PM on a Tuesday or something like that when social posts need to go out.
So Hootsuite is phenomenally useful for social media scheduling. Although I would say the need for these tools is a little bit less now for Facebook and Instagram, with the new Creator Studio feature. So check that out. If you don't want to upgrade to a paid tool. Now on the design side of things, our designer actually uses all the Adobe tools that you would expect, Photoshop, Illustrator, XD, and so on. But we've recently as a team explored a little bit more inside of Canva. So Canva is a simple, graphic design tool. It's web based, so you don't need to download an application, like the Adobe products. It's also reasonably priced, unlike the Adobe products. And really has a lot of templates and things built into it. So, again, you're not starting from a blank page and within Canva, you can click, generate a template. You can swap in brand colors, brand fonts. You can put in your logo and you can create social media graphics.
So things like Facebook posts, Instagram posts can be created really easily within Canva. And then you can duplicate that style and mimic it if you want it to have, for example, we do a lot of clients. We have featured properties on a certain day. Featured Friday is very common. So we have a template inside of Canva for each client and then we're just swapping out photos and texts and a few small details. And we're able to deliver high quality, really nice looking graphics at a much, much faster pace. So if you're in marketing or you're inside of a vacation rental company and you need to produce a lot of images, Canva and their templates can be extremely useful and a big time saver as you need to create, let's say, 20 or 30 graphics for a blog post or for social media or for email or any other purpose. So we love using Canva. We've recently upgraded select their enterprise platform and it has a lot of features that are super useful for agencies, including brand styles for multiple clients. So we're big Canva-
when we talk a little bit about email, most of our clients are on MailChimp. So MailChimp is an email marketing software tool. It allows you to upload your list of past guests to it, and you can send out email newsletter templates through MailChimp. We also have some clients on Constant Contact and ActiveCampaign. And I believe we have some other clients using some other systems, but MailChimp is our preference. So if you're working on a newsletter campaign or you're looking to send out newsletters to your past guests, we highly recommend checking out MailChimp, because the templates and the ease of use and the reporting are all, in our opinion, some of the best out there in the market. So we love using email marketing tools with MailChimp. There they're a great partner for us.
So that's a quick snapshot into the different tools that we use. It's not exhaustive list, but these are the ones that we find ourselves using most frequently for design, email marketing, social, paid search, organic search. And these are things that we love using and hopefully you get some value out of seeing this list and seeing what you may need to use to explore marketing your vacation rental company further. So if you have any questions or if I missed a tool, and you're wondering if we use it as well, feel free to email me, conrad@buildupbookings.com. Thanks so much for listening and we will see you on the next episode.