Big Google Update Performance Max w/ Martin Canchola, Co-Founder of ApartmentSEO.com

Speaker 1: I mean, there’s Google ads. The change or update anything Google Ads SEO, we got to start all over just the algorithm, every time the algorithm changes, we got to fix our content. Like read, you guys ever read the Google algorithm update, Martin? Martin has, thank God. Martin is here to help us with the algorithm. What about your Google profiles? There’s like all new Google profiles, you guys have been dealing with updating. How much of a pain in the ass is that? What about your Maps, Google Maps? Have you guys heard about the neighborhood vibes? No, you’ve not heard about neighborhood vibes? Oh, man, you are in for a treat. That is why we are going to talk about big Google updates. Because it’s all about neighborhood vibes or isn’t that about neighborhood? All right. You guys have seen him before, if you’ve been to a wonderful multifamily Social Media Summit event. But before I bring them up, I just want to point your attention to our update for the children that have been displaced by the conflict in Ukraine. We are doing well. I don’t know because I think number on there. $1,000, thank you so much. We have about $4,000 to go, the SD Media team was going to naturalization to help those kids. And it’s a worthy cause something that is personal to everybody on this team, media team cause Google is around. So yeah, take a picture of the QR code. Do it later. Because right now, we have to talk about Google update. So please, without further ado, I want to hear a big Google update round of applause for Martin Canchola, the co-founder and CTO of ApartmentSEO.com, please give it up for Martin.

Martin: Thank you. All right, who’s ready to go down to Google rabbit hole. I have a confession to make, I almost didn’t make it to Napa this year. My back went out on Tuesday, and I could barely walk. But my chiropractor worked a miracle and I’m here today. And so, I want to share some great things going on with Google in the world of search, Google My Business and Google Labs because always something changing. And I have some bonus content towards the end. So, before we dive into each of these modules, I wanted to go into some Google statistics that I think we, it’s important for you guys to know about. Obviously 91 as of right now, Google still has close to 92% Market Share with Bing and Yahoo, still trailing behind. You got Bing at about 3% and then you have also got that going on about 1%. So again, it’s still pretty clear that Google is pretty much where you want to be. That’s the majority of your traffic was coming from. So, you just want to make sure that it’s just where you want to be obviously. So, this is how many searches are processing per day, 8.5 billion. And when you break it down in seconds, that’s over 99,000 searches every single second of the day. And these searches are constantly evolving, constantly changing. Some of them are local, some about products, some of them about information, transactional, everything under the sun and it’s constantly evolving. 

How many people here have actually tried Google lens, it’s like a visual way to use Google. Yeah. So, if you go to Google, you go into Google Mobile App and run Google on your mobile phone, you’re gonna see by the search bar, that little lens segment, you just got to click that, simply open it up and explore the world. And these are visual searches taking place. Back in 2019, they had about 1 billion visual searches taking place. Now, today, it’s over 10 billion visual searches taking place. So, you can see there’s a lot of activity going on here. You can do a lot of things with Google Events. So, you can pop out your phone, open Google lens, put in a business card, click the hyperlink, import the card, you can identify plants, you can also look at your building, your own apartment building, you can walk around, and it’s all plugged into your Google My Business. So, making sure that all of that is geared in is what you want to do. Also, it can also help with language, text translation. So, if you’re traveling to another country, you could actually use Google Lens to translate signs while you’re traveling about. Also, it’s local immersion. So, whenever you’re walking around the neighborhood, maybe you’re in Napa, just checking it out, you could use Google lens to actually look at the different restaurants. So, you get feedback and ideas like that as well. 72% of respondents said that they had only clicked on organic results, or on organic results most of the time. Now I know, it’s pretty common, especially for my mother-in-law, she’ll click the first thing that she sees. So, but there are more savvy searchers out there, they know that Google ad PPC is you know, that’s where the advertisements are. But Google still tries to deliver really good results even with those Google Labs.

A lot of times people are getting smarter, so they can go straight to the local results, or go right into the organic results. So, when people do perform searches online, we find that thinking about percent of return of written content, you have another 29% up for images, and then another almost 14% of time for video. So right now, it’s clear that Google is a visual rich media search engine. So besides making content on your website, on your blog, you got to be publishing content on LinkedIn, Google business profile, also with images, we’ve got to take advantage of sites like Instagram, Flickr, and upload to these different portals. So, you have different reach, where your website, where your images can be seen, you can link to the website, include your name, address, and phone number in the description. And so, you have all kinds of Flickr, all kinds of visual image websites that you can take advantage of to get that extra in your marketing mix. Because Google discover is also something I wanted to mention, Google discover is an app. So now you can actually base on your search history using this app. And you’ll actually find new things based on your interest, new things that you want to learn about, discover. And so, it’s important for apartment websites to have that rich media field. So, to have tax, have video, and have images, it’s going to be really important, even audio content is going to play a role. 

So about 90% of pages, get no organic search traffic from Google. So let that set it for a little bit. The majority of websites on Google don’t really, they’re either not index, or they’re not being seen on Google because they’re on page three, five, whatever it may be. That’s a missed opportunity. So, making sure you’re tracking your rankings, seeing how you’re performing in Google. For your key words, you have to keep track on the mobile, desktop, Google organic, and Google Maps. So, you know, Google is one search engine, you really have to keep track of all those different type of search terms. Now, 96% of search results on mobile take place on Google, we know that the majority of traffic comes from Google. So, it’s important that you think about the load time of your mobile websites. Also, amp is a Google standard Accelerated Mobile Pages, that you can work with your web developers to make sure that those are at that standard. So, this way, those pages load up pretty much instantly. If your website’s loading up more than five seconds for a mobile website, you’re probably losing out on a ton of traffic. This isn’t a Google statistic. It’s more of an SEO statistic. So overall, though, you want to be looking at strategic keywords, localization and then optimize for mobile. And strategic keywords while you’re trying to rank for whether it be Napa apartments, Long Beach apartments. That’s what we call the short tail. Want to go up to the longtail, so it could be like luxury apartments for rent. Talk about the different amenities. Maybe you have garage doors, which is a big deal. You know, washer and dryer, pet friendly. These are all keywords you want to be tracking and seeing how Google’s performing for those keywords and creating unique content around strategy. 

So, let’s dive in to the first page of Google update. How many people in here, if I can get a quick show of hands are actively running a performance Max campaign in Google ads right now? Only a couple of you know, a handful. So, you can see there’s an opportunity here, you have all the standard campaigns for Google, which is a search campaign, you have two display campaigns. But now you have a campaign that has all this rolled into one. So, this is more of a complimentary campaign. So, on top of your search, campaign and display campaigns, you could be activating your performance max campaign, and taking advantage of the Search Network, Display Network, YouTube, Gmail, discovery, and max. So, this is a social media conference. So, you guys should already be creating great copies, great images and great videos. And so, by taking all that you’re already creating for social, you can put that into Google performance max campaign, and really ignite the amount of qualified traffic you’re getting. These are meant to be supplemented traffic to what you’re already doing. And so it’s helping me find missed opportunities that you otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to get. Fully automated, goal based, and it is AI driven. I will get into the pros and cons of this particular campaign type as we move down the presentation. 

So, here’s some of the items. When you’re setting up the campaign, you want to set it up for obviously, we’re going for sales, leads engagement, traffic, and then local store visits. This is going to play a big role of conversion focus. So, when you are setting up this campaign, you have to be sure your actual conversions are set up. So this could be through wiki page, contact us, mobile click to call and any email lead forms or any kind of apply now links. Make sure these are set up prior to launching the PMAX campaign. So, these are all the digital assets that you can actually include in your performance max campaign. You can have up to fifteen images, five logos, five videos, five headlines, and five long headlines and five descriptions. This is where you put your best to the best content when you are building out your performance max campaign. Video, I know it’s kind of hard to come by but you know, you can play around with short form video. If you’re already doing short form video for YouTube, you can take a lot of that content and repurpose it for your next campaign. So really, there really is no excuse why you can’t launch something like this. There is platforms like Animoto, if you need to build a video on the fly out of the slideshow, I would like a slideshow present, slideshow video or slideshow photos. It also allows you to do vertical videos too. So, there’s plenty of platforms out there to build out video. Is anyone playing around with chat GPT. Yes, you have all your thoughts on that. The results are better than Google search. That doesn’t say much. I think depends what you’re trying to do on chat GPT. You know, Google, there are definitely a lot of purposes for instant answers and things that you just want to get and go. Chat GPT, if you really want to have a conversation with a bot, talk philosophy. You know, you can help you do and now we’ll chat GPT for that. It can also besides just text through images and video now.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s going to be going to the next level.

Martin: And that’s why I actually Google, their founders actually came back and chat GPT launch. Because that was the first time I’ve seen them kind of get shaken a little bit and actually bring the founders back, which I thought was pretty interesting. So really, I didn’t have to keep chat GPT.

Speaker 3: Yes, wait, you guys doing okay. 

Speaker 2: Almost always. 

Martin: We’re good. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, please give it up for Martin.

Martin: Performance max is also the audience signals. Now, we’re not talking about segmenting audiences, what we want to do is just track the different audiences that are relevant, that are performing the best, that you can do like getting criticism, adjustments and decreases based around that. So, it’s just important to keep track of the audiences that is marketing to, and then you can make adjustments and fine tuning as the campaign and as a conversion is our process. So, some of the pros about PMAX is that there is a high level of automation, you do lose some control, because you’re giving it up for Google AI. It is conversion focused optimization. So, you have to make sure all your conversions are set up and ready to be triggered. It is less manual work, and they just recently allow you to add negative search terms. So, before they first launched, you weren’t able to do that. So, you’ve got a lot of some garbage within your search campaign. But now you can add in your search term, so that helps clean up a little bit. Some of the cons with performance max is overall less control, it’s difficult to see some sources of the data. And then sometimes based on your reporting platform, depending on where you’re using, they don’t have this updated this campaign type, you might not be able to get into your reporting platform. So, you’ll have to go straight to Google Apps for that. So, when launching your performance Max campaign, you know, it’s gonna allow you to market your product or service, you’re just going to make sure to put all of the best campaign types and when you are setting it up, it has to be set up at the sales leads, website traffic or local store visits. So, they’re the ones you want to select actually have to be the performance max campaign. And again, this utilizes text, images, and all the rich media that Google is really looking for, to promote your information and their properties. So just take time to look into this. If you have any questions after it, you guys can come talk to me, we can dive in a little bit more on their specific situation. But it’s a great way to get supplementary traffic, and a great way to lower your overall cost per click and cost per conversion, when you put all the campaigns together, rolled in one. 

So, let’s get into the next big update, which is Google’s fresh algorithm update. So, to help the content update will target websites that have a relatively high amount of unsatisfying and unhelpful content for the content has been written for search engines rather than humans. This was released back in December of 2022. Has anyone noticed any kind of fluctuations and rankings overall, from further interviews from that point now, or has it been relatively stable, as they call it pretty, pretty stable. But overall, I’d say when it comes to the new content and having a full update, it specifically targets content that seems primarily created for ranking. So, it’s important that we get really deep with the content. And when we’re creating the pages, you have to really dig down deep to the different sub areas, the major attractions, and just don’t just write one sentence or add a couple of words, you really have to create paragraph, create content, and really have a strategy behind that, to really have an opportunity to be showcased in Google discovery and some of these other items we’ll be talking about. So, if Google determines your site is producing a relatively high amount of unhelpful content, primarily read for rankings search, then your whole site will be impacted. So that’s something we want to avoid. We don’t want your site to get D-indexed by Google. And we want to make sure that it stays within Google Maps, so you have opportunities to traffic. So, you want to build your first content, or build resident first content, and really focus on the human side of things and not worry about Google bots. 

These are the questions that Google wants you asking, when creating your content? Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful, they can directly view? And that’s been your prospects and current residence. So, you need to build content specifically for them. Does your content clearly demonstrate firsthand expertise and the depth of knowledge, for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service or visiting a place, so your community and main location is your product, and then the people leave reviews about your community? Those are the people that you know, you need to friend and need to be putting out the surveys and just getting all the activities you can because Google, when you google your community, and your brand pops up on Google. That’s what we call your Google Knowledge Graph. And so that’s everything Google’s curated about their business or community. And so, it’s important that you have a good sentiment online, if you had a negative sentiment online, that would hurt your rankings. So having a positive reputation does help build up better rankings in Google. Does your site have a primary purpose or focus, so showcasing your community in the area to the best of your ability. So, if you’re in downtown San Diego, maybe you have a hyperlocal blog, that’s, it’s either attached to the website, or maybe you have a whole another content strategy, where it’s like downtown San Diego today. And you have that geo focused blog, and it’s building local traffic. And then you have a living town kind of promoting the community’s kind of indiscreetly. So, there’s different ways you can become a publisher, you don’t have to have it on your community website, you can build out other domains around your area and become a hyperlocal expert, and author in this specific Metro. 

After reading your content, will somebody, will someone begin feeling that they’ve learned enough about the topic to achieve their goal. So, cover all form factors about your community, and show the user if you’re a true expert in your geolocation. And that just goes into just having a robust content strategy. And it doesn’t have to just be written content. You guys can do the video, short form video is probably the biggest opportunity that I see. I know Tik Tok is all the buzz right now. But we have to remember that YouTube is still the second largest search engine and there’s a long form content in YouTube right now. But if you actually create short form vertical video content, that’s 30 seconds to 60 seconds vertical videos, you start uploading those for your specific floor plans, your amenities, the pet friendlies, all those different keywords. And your short video is one of the first ones there, I did a test recently. I did five short form videos for five pretty competitive keywords, specifically for ranking on YouTube. And all five of them ranked pretty much top number one, number two, and months later, they’re still maintaining that spot. And when you’re scrolling through YouTube, when you put a search in YouTube, and that result pops up, it actually says short video, and it has like an extra, a little icon for the short. And there’s not that many short videos competing, compared to the long form video, especially for multifamily. So, you guys can be taken advantage of that right now. So, if you’re already doing short form video on Tik Tok, take it over to YouTube, set up a channel and I think you’ll be surprised by the type of response you get. 

Will someone reading your content be feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience. So you have to provide rich media experience. And that’s everything from written video, and audio and all that good stuff. So, you have to have all that stuff on your website, you need to have more videos and you need to have more images. So, are you keeping in mind our guidance before updates on product reviews? And the only way you guys can really do that is by setting up a Google Search Console. Is everyone here pretty active, at least setting up your Google Search Console? No, no. Okay, so that’s pretty important to verify your domain and get that set up on top of your Google Analytics, you want to know that your site is indexed by Google, a lot of times we’ll have you know, somebody will come be like, I don’t know why I’m not ranking. And I’ll put in their URL, and it’s not even indexed by Google. So that’s the first step of getting your site indexed by Google, you do that by setting up Google Search Console. And also, you want to keep an eye on malware on the site. There’s a lot of spam, a lot of hacks going on. If your WordPress, whatever platform, you could be hacked, and they could put malicious links in your website. And if they do and Google finds malicious links to the website. Not only are we not going to be indexed by Google, if you’re running paid ads on Google, they’re going to stop it all together until you get that fixed. So, keep up on your Google Search Console. And managing that is pretty important today, because there’s a lot of stuff out there. And you just want to make sure your site stays in Google’s pretty much soil and we’re. Also, online reputation management matters. So, when people Google you on Google Maps, if somebody says Long Beach apartments, pet friendly, pet park, there’s a chance that a review that somebody left could be highlighted in the snippet. To help with that organic click through. So, the reviews and the responses you guys provide are other longtail keyword opportunities. So, you want to push to get reviews to Google, the more the better, the more quality, the better sentiment, and get that sentiment really high. And that’s going to give you better rankings in Google. Is the content primarily to attract people from search engines rather than made for humans. So ,create content for prospective residents and not bots. 

Are you producing lots of content on different topics and hopes that some of them might perform well in search, in depth content is king, there is no specific word count. But the deeper you could go, the better. So, all the sub areas that you guys were in all the different amenities and features. And we really have to expand on the written content and the visual content. And just the more video, the better. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there besides YouTube, just be able to make sure that those videos, then you can leave the company description, and your name, address and phone number. And that’s going to all carry over more traffic to your website. Are you using extensive automation to produce content on the topics? So, you can utilize the icon to like chat GPT for but remember, input prompts matter and  always QA with humans. This is something you’re not going to want to write a full website on. But you could use it to help come up with ideas for content, post ideas, and other fun things like that, now that it can actually look into reading the video and photos. You can even use it to write a description for a picture or stuff like that. So, chat GPT among other things, I’ll be talking about Google view releasing gear on Tuesday. It seems like everyone’s coming out with a chat GPT clone right now. So that seems to be the hot topic. Are communities summarizing what others have to say without adding much value. If you are repurposing content, you have to add value. You can’t just regurgitate the content. You need to expand upon it and add more value as much as you can.

Does the content leave readers feeling like they need to search again, to get better information from other sources? Give a prospective resident everything they need to know, to help them see the right, the right community for them. So, on and on. Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard Google refer this specific word count? The answer should be no, because Google doesn’t have a specific word count. But we have found, the deeper the content, the more words and things that are semantically similar. So, you’re not just seeing apartments, you’re talking about living, talking about home, you’re talking about a lot of different amenities and features. And then he can expand upon those even more. That’s just more opportunities. And FAQ section on the website is also another opportunity that I think a lot of websites have missing. And don’t just put it on Google period, and you have your own FAQs on the website, too. So, let’s get into what is EAT? Has this termed being, you guys probably heard that before? No. Okay. So, EAT, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And this is all built into Google’s algorithm and the search guidelines overall. So, they’re using this to evaluate and use machine learning to actually find on helpful content. So, I want to show you guys how to get more EAT, get more expertise, get more authority, and how to build more trust. 

So, make sure your community is publishing content on Google posts, blogging, LinkedIn, and other platforms to show you are the local authority. And this isn’t just about publishing one and done, you have to be continuously publishing and building your brand or communities, overall, authority. So, the more trust you can build in the local area, the more Google’s going to rank you on Google Maps. schema markup for apartments is vital. So, schema markup, for those that don’t know, when you’re making a website, like coding it up for WordPress, or HTML schema is just a markup that tells Google that your apartment is an actual property, is actually a physical location. And there’s different kinds of schema markup so you can go after. It can be for floor plans, through reviews, even features and amenities. And so, you want to make sure your website is marked up for schema, because other websites are looking for schema to index and find sites. And so, the more your website’s markup the schema, the more traffic to potentially get plus, it also benefits from Voice Search. So, if your voice devices like Samsung, Google, Amazon, all these different ones, schema markup we help you get to that. So, web pages are high quality, making it helpful to users. So, high quality as it loads really fast. It works good on desktop, and mobile, and just provides a really good rich experience. And you want to just tell the visitors who you are. And then you can work with that expert section and create content. But in reality, we’ve worked with micro influencers that are already in their community, and just find people willing to spread the word about your property, and also just get good reviews. That’s really at the end of the day, that’s what I would focus on. just getting more Google Map reviews, because that’s going to really help your client in the global rankings. 

And if you want to update your content regularly, there is no fixed amount. But if you’d have a way to dynamically and just update your content, whether it was a blog, or photos or more videos, or have a way to just feed them in, that’s gonna be another great way to just show Google you’re constantly updating the website. And again, the online reputation that is very key and earns money. So, Google is looking for the following: expertise of the creator of the content, the authoritativeness of the creator, and the trustworthiness of the creator. So, your communities are those experts now. So, you have to have your brand combat expert, and really put it out there. And LinkedIn is probably another good spot that you can run your own local blog through there, you can have a lot more property management companies wanting to publish more on LinkedIn. And that’s been actually very, very good results going on over that. 

So next big update, we can get into Google business profile. So, let’s just face it, a really good, good Google business profile is going to give you a ton of traffic. You might be spending money on Google ads; you might be getting organic traffic, but Google Maps is where the individual property can shine. iOS if you have a lot of organic placement and organic search engine, but you guys are right here in Google Maps. And when they’re using Google discover and there’s different apps, this is where you’re gonna be able to showcase. So, an enhanced Google business profile, it will drive even more traffic leads and sales. Your categories, the best categories you want to be using are apartment complex, apartment building and apartment rental agencies seem to be the top one. Reviews always products. It seems to be catching on now. See actually use the product pages to put in your floor plans. There are 360 tours, and all that in there. So when people do Google your brand, and they see your Knowledge Graph, all that’s going to be right there as they click on the floor plans, the 3D tours, and all the front and center. Images and video, making sure you’re going through your images on Google, especially the user generated ones. Sometimes communities have a ton of photos, maybe too many photos. And sometimes they have too little photos. So, you want to make sure you go through the photos and look at you have the best pictures being presented. And any user generated photos, if they’re really bad, you want to try to get those flagged by Google and try to get those taken down. Because you don’t want to have that kind of presence on Google. So, Google posts, how many people here are actively publishing on Google post more than once a week. Okay, good. So, Google posts, all the content within there, is still stored in Google. So again, that’s more keyword opportunities to tell Google what your knowledge graph is about. 

UTM tags, if you want to track traffic directly in Google Analytics to see how your Google business profile is doing, you can put a UTM code. If you don’t know what a UTM code, just ask a web developer or a marketing provider, and they should be able to help you set that up. So, you can track that traffic in your Google Analytics. So, you can see, when we look at Google Business Profile traffic, it is some of the best quality traffic you can get. Time on site is through the roof two plus minutes, the engagement, the pages per session, are always way higher, when compared with any other anything else out there, your community website. So, whenever you’re Googling something, you might see Google mentions, or the website mentions. So, Google my profile is looking at your website to pull out keywords and content. So, we have to keep that in mind. And that’s why the deep content strategy is vitally important. The recording link, so you might have a bot or a scheduler, it’s important to have an appointment link. So, you can make sure to capture that lead as soon as it comes through and start engaging with it. And then remember, Google is a mobile indexing first search engine. So, if your desktop is really good and ranking well, that’s great. But Google’s looking at your mobile site first. And I’ve looked at a ton of different reports, and the mobile is usually the one that’s suffering the most. So, making sure using Accelerated Mobile Pages, making sure your load time is three, three seconds is really good, three seconds or less of where you want to be. That usually is between three and five seconds. And if you can’t get it below three seconds, that’s really the holy grail of websites popping up. And that’s gonna get you better ranking in Google.

 And then also how people when they do search on Google, if they’re clicking through the organic results in your title tag meta description, for each page is very important, because we want to just tell Google what each page is about. So, when they do find you on the Google search result, it’s more likely to click through and they have a higher organic click through rate, Google  will reward that and push it up as well over time. So, you can actually now manage your Google business profile directly in search. So, as you google your brand, and you log into Google and Google, you can just start managing your Google business profile right in there. So, I said I highly suggest go back in there and check it out. There’s a new whole new editing and management experience. And also, the funnel insights are pretty much not there anymore, which is kind of a bummer. But and also, there’s more of an intense verification process. And that’s mainly because like other niches like plumbers, and locksmiths take advantage of Google and the search engine. So, now we need to make sure that every listing has activated its legitimate business. And so, that’s why they’re actually asking for things like signing proof, pictures, business license and pictures on the national office and things like that. How many people here have been having more of a hard time with verifications overall? Is that part of it, the extra steps? 

Yeah, so really, Google is trying to fight spam overall. But obviously, we’re the multifamily industry. We’re not spamming Google, because we’re genuine, so. So, Google suspensions, how many people have dealt with some crazy suspensions lately? So, Google recent change the guidelines to include that all business profiles, even exterior storefront photo with permanent signage that says the current business name, there is also a recent Google Maps glitch, which actually suspended a lot of accounts just automatically, based on any ideas to produce a little idea of identifier which are duplicatable, and it just started sending out all these suspensions. So, whether it’s your fault or Google’s fault, it really doesn’t matter. You still gotta go through the same process of actually getting them an appeal. So, when you submit a reinstatement request and wait. Before submitting a reinstatement request, make sure every piece of information on your business profile is up to date. So, if you do have any challenges or actual suspending accounts, if you have any questions about any specific properties, we can always talk about that later on as well. So, this is a fun review though, Google Maps and Google vibes. Like if you’re in Napa, and you want to get a taste of the area. The new neighborhood vibe feature is designed to give users a bird’s eye view of everything that’s popular on the one in particular neighborhood. So, here’s recommendations, it’ll actually tell you the hotspots and things going on based on all the Google Maps that said all the reviews, all the images. So, if you want to get a really know a local area now, Google Maps is helping you do that and that’s all from Google Maps. 

And according to Google Maps users add more than 20 million reviews, photos and videos each day. It has more and more content being added to the system and it’s just making it smarter. Google’s attempt to surface valuable content by leveraging considerable AI capabilities for rich experience overall. Here’s like a little preview of it. The technology actually relies on both AI and community contributions to Google Maps. So, if you are a Google contributor, you can see yourself in here as well. I also suggest trying Google Live, if you are on Google Map enough to turn around now or walking around the city, looking at your apartment community too, because it’s all tied back to Google My Business. So, they’re using Google lens, Google Live, check out your community, see how it looks. So, there’s also a new profile string, it’s not that big of a deal, and you don’t have to like freak out. It doesn’t say it’s like the full string. It’s okay. But just to be mindful, just let you know that it’s there now, so you kind of see what’s going on. But again, just make sure you have your whole profile that you filled out with hours of operation are correct. Your categories are good. And I’ll get into the exact categories that we use, and just make sure that you’re putting photos, video and keeping up to date on the images and literature. Not even a bunch of just Q&A which are just bunch of garbage and kind of just edited out, so you have a lot of control over Q&A, not so much reviews. And also, so let’s get into some SEO tactics a little bit to profile. 

So, the new content strategy is going to be key, the more content the better. We also have videos and photos to your Google business profile. Internal linking on a website, that helps with your downstream, so when people come to your website, you want to encourage them to click through to other pages. So, besides having your main menu on the top, you want to also have links within the content. Choose receipts and pages you want people visiting. Also, schema markup, we talked about the importance of that and just making sure everything’s marked up properly, so you can be indexed and picked up by Google. Also, GA4 activation. Has everyone set up the GA4 transition to that or is that still something that’s pending for the industry? So yeah, for GA4 is definitely going to be something that you want to set up and get that implemented. It is a lot easier now and there’s ways to automatically move over your conversions as well from Google ads and connect them together. The setup process has gotten a lot easier. So, improve your Google Knowledge Graph and this just goes with reviews and just being active on Google business profile. And remember Google Business Profile complements your community’s already existing websites and that’s where information and rankings. So, these are the best apartment categories that we utilize, apartment complex, apartment building and apartment virtual agency, in that order. And then also it’s important that you monitor your Google organic rankings for mobile and desktop. And remember, mobile is where it matters most. 

So, if you’re ranking really good on mobile, and your load time is really good. And you should be rewarded across the board for that. So, here’s a little bit of bonus content. Google just released continuous scroll. Now that was happening already for mobile. And now desktop is the same thing. So now when you’re going on your desktop to try to have that same mobile experience, and so it’s an infinite scroll. So, instead of just having page one, page two, Google just keep dropping down some type of pages, unlimited page one. Everyone’s on page one. Congratulations. Obviously, we have Google AI, so when chat GPT came out. I couldn’t believe it. I never thought I would see something that would shake up Google and all that good stuff. But this is one you’re going to want to be checking it out. And they just released it on Tuesday. So please check this out and give it a whirl and again, chat GPT and all that good stuff. It’s gonna be a wave of the future. And so that’s pretty much it. I haven’t got time ,so that’s pretty much all the time we have. Thank you guys.

Speaker 1: That was awesome. But don’t leave, don’t run away, let’s at least take one question because so many people have questions. We’ll take one from this side and one from that side. They have to be short answers are you cool with that? You had you hand up first, whats your name? Diane’s got an amazing question for the whole side of the room.

Diane: I heard Google’s doing away with cookies. Can you remember even. 

Speaker 1: Oh wow. 

Martin: It is, they are doing away with the cookies and that’s why it’s so important to setup GA4, setting that up will help with that whole process. And then also with your conversions, especially conversion with google ad, so it can help with that whole process. So GA4 the ticket to the cookies.

Speaker 1: And that is a perfect segue into our next segment to our next session. So, who raised their hand up first. I think it was, I’m sorry, I apologize. But this is the whole side of the room, be better be good. Ready? No pressure. 

Speaker 4: What is the recommended response time to review? 

Martin: 24 hours or less. That’s our standard, that’s the standard we go by.

Speaker 1: That was so fast we can take another question. And I think you were second, so you want to do it? Okay, here we go.

Speaker 5: I have a question, so in our industry like, builds to rent single-family rental homes is new but like the only option on Google business profiles is housing complex. Do you know if they’re going to be coming out?

Martin: Actually, we’re actually building a strategy for build to rent. So, we should talk.

Speaker 1: There you go. Everybody, give it up for Martin.