The Multifamily Podcast Reboot
Martin: All right, Ronn, we are back with the multifamily podcast reboot. I know it’s been a heck of a long time. But definitely I know we want to get things back on track. And so basically, that’s what we’re doing here. We’re getting things back in order with the multifamily podcast, making sure the websites up to date, making sure we’re planning out the episodes, and really try and do push this thing out, like at least every two weeks, so we can make sure we’re building a very strong community, and you know, helping the industry and answering any questions that they may have. So, Ronn, what’s new with you?
Ronn: Well, first of all, I want to say, yeah, thank you for having us again, so excited to get the band back together. I think it’s been; it literally has been a lifetime that we have done this. It’s a very much a passion project of ours, obviously, we had to focus on our core business. And, you know, being thought leaders and movers and shakers in our industry. So, the podcast, has kind of been our second baby. And so now we’re ready to give rebirth. But yeah, Martin and I, combined, we have some great ideas that we want to share with you guys. The industry, as you know, is moving and shaking like at lightning speed. What’s new with me is obviously, post pet. Well, I’d say post pandemic, even though we’re still in it. But some of the things that I would love to share with everyone is kind of the things that we’ve learned throughout the pandemic. When I say it’s been a lifetime that we last did multifamily podcasts, it certainly was before the pandemic. And I think that our entire business world, from all business sectors has really been shaken up and disrupted. And in a good way, I think that we’ve learned a lot, I’ve certainly have myself as a person, as a leader, as a business owner, you know, in this industry, and outside of what the road looks like today for business, and I really want to share a lot of that.
Some of the things that I’ve been focusing on, or we have as a company is obviously embracing the new normal, really looking at where the world has come, has gone through, we’ve survived. And if we’ve survived, you know, all of that craziness, I think we can survive a lot more. And so, the resilience and the breath of fresh air, it feels so good. We’ve been working on a lot of technology, I call COVID, my downtime, because it really didn’t make me settle down a little bit on personal and professional level from traveling all over the country for business, to even personal weekend getaways all the above. So, it really kind of gave me some still time to focus on our business model, what it means for the industry. Are we really that strong, strong provider still, best to breed in all of our offerings from SEO, PPC, social media, rapid, web. So, it’s been a great breath of fresh air, I think we’ve given some new life into ASEO, and Martin, you know, you’ll touch a little bit about that. But also, the industry has forced us to change a lot. You know, there’s a lot of upcoming stuff with Google, that again, Martin will share with, but some of the stuff that we’re excited to share with you guys in the future is some of the tech we’re working on, some of our own proprietary tech that will be industry disruptive, which is awesome. Really focused on just building a stronger agency life and a service provider, whether it’s full service or even self-service off earnings in the future. Yeah.
Martin: All that good stuff. I know, I know, in my case, you know, we were doing definitely conference season, we just came back from multifamily social media, I was able to speak on Google business profile, which definitely was a hot topic this year. And we’re also getting ready for aim and a couple of weeks. And I’ll be speaking on SEO strategies your competitors don’t want you to know about. So, if you aren’t going to aim, please check us out. We’ll have a booth there as well for apartment SEO. And then after that, we’ll probably do another episode talking about the multifamily social media Summit. Some of the highlights going on there, some of the topics that we’re talking about. And also, things I’m personally working on CPACCC pack certified, Certified Professional in accessibility, core competencies. So, keeping up on ADA stuff and continuing education, to make sure I maintain my certification. That’s a big thing I’ll be working on over the next couple of months. And then just keeping up with really the latest Google updates overall.
So, in regard to like, what apartment SEO has been up to, and everything Google related, there’s a lot of Google updates really coming down the pipeline. One of the biggest ones is the Google Analytics four. And the standard UA Google Analytics actually kind of going away around July 1, 2023. So, all the agencies, all the reporting platforms are kind of scrambling, because Google doesn’t actually have an open API, basically, to plug into their new Google Analytics for. So, a lot of the reporting platforms are struggling with that new platform. So really, it’s about them opening up the API so we can all connect and basically have the updated reporting. So now we’re basically setting up the standard UA and Google Analytics board to make sure both are set up, making sure that we do get the correct reporting moving into the future. Another big update was Google vicinity update, and this was based on your physical location for your community based on the keywords you’re going after. So based on your physical address, location, zip code and the central location where you’re at, you know, any long-term keyword, whether it’s like apartments and city, state, luxury apartments in city, state, all those keywords, you’re going to notice you’re going to rank better for the keywords where you’re actually located, when people are searching for you in a mobile, on a mobile phone or mobile device, they might be searching for you right there. And depending on their location to and your location, the ranking will fluctuate and change.
So having a strategy for Google business profile, and also a strategy for maybe areas you don’t actually physically reside in, where you can make sub area pages, location pages to actually bring in organic traffic, for the places you’re actually not physically located in because that’s definitely going to matter. You know, we’re going to Google Business traffic, Google profile traffic and organic traffic is going to be really important. Another big one for Google ads is the getting rid of the extended text ads and pushing more of the responsive search ads. So, we’re making sure all of our campaigns have updated responsive search ads, where they’re basically grabbing multiple headlines, multiple descriptions, and then Google kind of places them based on the user to get the best results for those ads. We’re making sure to have some extended text ads, keep within the back end. So, this way, you have some timeless ads that don’t really fluctuate because sometimes you lose control when Google does the RSA mode. So, it’s important to have a combination of both Google may and will probably take away ETA from the back end sometime soon. So, Google giveth, Google taketh away. But still, that’s just something we want to have a strategy where we have both RSA ads and ETA ads. This way you have flexibility in how you’re presenting your community online. All right
Ronn: That’s a lot. A lot of stuff. A lot of that’s just like recent right? Like, q1, it’s like boom, here. This is what’s happening in the first half of the year.
Martin: Yeah, Google always keeping us on top of our code. That’s for sure. So, yeah. So why the reboot now, Ronn, why are we all of a sudden kind of jumping in on this project, and really wanting to, you know, push it forward?
Ronn: Well, I personally think that I mean, I know just in connecting with you, but also personally thinking, again, as I mentioned earlier, so much has changed in the world. So much has changed in business, as being, you know, multifamily marketers, so much has changed in the marketing world, and it’s moving fast. There’s no going back, you know, we’re very much in a virtual world, our industry had to learn how to lease apartments in a very physical world, virtually. And we’re a component of that, because we’ve always brought leads virtually to the front of, the virtual front door, if you will, of the apartment community. And then they would take it from there. Well, now we could follow the prospects, so much more down the pipeline, and make sure that their success on all avenues. So, we have a lot of talk about, we really do, I’d love to share some insight that I’ve learned also, as I mentioned, as a leader and a CEO of a company, nationwide, being able to now completely commit to being a first 100% virtual company, which was a huge taking, we have a beautiful brand-new office in downtown Long Beach. And ironically, I had to resign, or we moved during the pandemic, because our five-year lease was up. And I was struggling on what to do, you know, do I get an office? Do we need an office but at that time we did? And so, but we have, you know, employees across the country, I want to share that. I think that for a lot of remote companies, this is a great thing. If you haven’t adopted, it and your hybrid has been the big buzzword. You know, we’ve looked at that as well. But what I can tell you is that I’m excited that we have a company that now has so much further reach and we’re able to hire even entry level positions that were once in downtown Long Beach, where our corporate offices California based, SoCal based, LA county based, and they could move anywhere, it could be anywhere in the country. And so, we’ve been able to really expand our reach, hire better talent as a result of that, and also hired talent in the respective time zones that all of our clients are in. So, we obviously have a heavy presence in the East Coast, we can be able to hire more people there. And they don’t have to have crazy early hours, they can work standard hours and still, you know, work with our customers.
So that’s the reason why I thought it would be important for it. I know, Martin, there’s I mean, we’ve talked about just so many advancements, again, as you just you know, spilled out, we have so much new stuff going on. And we, I think we are educators, we’ve always said that, you know, from day one, when we started the company, like our job is to educate people on what, even remember the back in the early days what the acronym for SEO stood for, you know, I know we’re a lot more advanced in our industry from there. But I think that we are an education component. And I’d like to just share what we know and have that dialogue you know, have, when we did it before I remember like meeting people at conferences or even having a demo with a client and they listened to the podcast and they’re like, hey, that was great and you know, you could carry on some conversation and, and of course, we get ideas from them. So, I’m hopeful of that as well where, you know, as we’re making back in the circuit of the conferences now that we’re back to being in person, we’ll be able to get some new insight and share a lot of things. I mean, you learned even more just preparing for and attending the social media conference. So, you know, the conversations that you had, I think that if we could share that on a global platform, and people who couldn’t attend the conference, can hear it here or hear what they should be working on. I think that’s really important. So.
Martin: At least the highlights for sure, you know, and not only multifamily conferences, but we’re also attending a lot of outside industry conferences around digital Marketing, SEO, PPC, you know, like MozCon, SMX, all those fun ones that were really want to bring a lot of that good information back to the multifamily industry so they can stay ahead of the game. But yes, the multifamily industry, I remember when we first got started, you know, definitely we’re in the early stages of SEO, and they have grown quite a bit in their overall IQ in SEO, PPC. And you know, really knowing the difference between the two, you know, SEO being like more organic, PPC more paid and the importance of having both of them together. And working together and using the data to make those decisions to make for a better overall campaign and user experience for the websites.
So besides, you know, Ronn and I, as obviously the host of the show, we definitely want to bring on other members of the apartment SEO family from different departments, whether it’s reputation, training, campaign management, we’re gonna bring all the fun and bring some of the team from there, also bringing in outside multifamily titans of the industry. Also keeping up on the latest real estate trends and anything happened economically around that. So that’s definitely what we have in mind. Like we said before, you know, for multifamily podcasts, we want to try to be pushing out at least one episode every two weeks, we want to build a community, the website will be updated. multifamily podcast.com. And of course, you can find this at apartment seo.com as well. If you want a free marketing analysis, all you have to do is submit the information or the website. And we can basically run a benchmark and see how you’re doing on your rankings. Get a benchmark on your citations and directories and see how you’re stacking up on Google for your overall average rankings for desktop, mobile, Google, organic and Google Maps. Because it’s really important to keep a pulse on all that. So, any questions you guys have, you’ll be able to submit them to us and maybe we can make an episode out of it. So, we’re definitely really excited to kick this thing off. And you know, we look forward to many more episodes to come. And so yeah, just keep us, keep us in mind and get ready because it’s about to really blow up.
Ronn: Here we go.
Martin: Any other final thoughts, Ronn?
Ronn: No, I just wanted to say thank you for those listening today. We are definitely obviously it’s a reboot, and we’re excited. And it’s going to get raw. It’s going to be fun. And yeah, I hope I hope to really bring some good insight that you can take away.
Martin: Cool. Well, until next time.
Ronn: Have a life.
Martin: Definitely yeah, so until next time, my friends. We’ll see you later. We’ll be talking soon.
Ronn: Sounds Goodbye, guys.