Turbocharge your Google Ranking with Hyper-Effective Local Pages: An AI Love Story

In this episode, Chris and Anne talk with Jon Simpson, about Swifty's Hyper-Effective Local Pages (HELP).  AI-powered landing pages built for how renters search — by neighborhood, landmark, and location. Jon tells us the story of how they developed HELP and how this strategy helps their clients rank quickly in Google.  And of course, no episode would be complete without predictions about the future of multifamily marketing.

Flamingo - Resident Retention App
400K+ units use Flamingo’s Resident Retention Platform to stop Retention Leak & hit 63%+ retention.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

And now a message from our sponsor Flamingo. Every multifamily marketer wants to know what the next big thing will be. At the apartment department, we think that resident retention is the next big thing, which is why we're excited to have Flamingo as our podcast sponsor. Flamingo, founded by Jude Chai, is an all-in-one resident retention platform used by some of the top performing communities in the country. And here's a fun little secret. If you see a community with 300 plus online reviews and 65% plus retention, there's a good chance they're using Flamingo. From automated renewal management and resident events to amenity bookings and even an AI concierge, Flamingo brings everything together in one sleek app that residents actually use. Learn more at getflamingo.com. We are so excited to have our guest with us today, John Simpson. He's a repeat guest, which you know that means he has something really exciting to talk about. He is the founder of Criterion B and Swifty, both um multifamily companies. One is a branding and marketing agency, um, and the other focuses specifically on websites and optimizing Google My Business pages. But he has Swifty has a really, really, really exciting new product um called Help, which I am gonna go ahead and turn over to John so he can explain what help is and uh how they came about with this new product.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

Yeah. Well, thanks again for having me on again. It's awesome. I'm really looking forward to it. Um, so help stands for hyper-effective local pages. And basically what we did is last year was we were looking at uh the problem of trying to rank higher in Google, search engine rankings, um, as everybody's looking into that problem, especially right now. The problem identified that I've been telling people for years is there's only two ways to get up and beat the ILSs in the search engines. You can either pay for it with Google Ads or you can earn it through Google Business and get in the Map pack. And everything else, I said, you know, don't even don't even try. Don't don't fight that battle of trying to beat the ILSs because they have so much content, it's a losing battle. We we we can't win. So just do the other two. Um, but we set out uh to try to solve that problem last year, and around one specific client who is struggling, uh coming out of leasing season, they they are huge property, Dallas-based property, and they were just really struggling. And so we said, well, what if we go back, rewind a few years? And I've been doing this for about two and a half decades now. So um, back then, like early 2000s, um, we would create landing pages and we or we called them satellite pages, landing pages, all different different terminology for it. But the idea was to get more content about a topic than the next guy, right? And the the rule of thumb was typically if you want to beat um a competitor in the search engines, you needed to have one and a half times the amount of content about that topic around those specific keywords in order to do that. Back then, that meant writing a lot of blogs. Blogs are they're awesome, but they are time consuming. And back then we didn't have AI to help us, we just had to do it manually. We had a team of writers, and so we would oftentimes have to write, sometimes, you know, we had a franchise client where we had to write articles on brake pads, and we had to do 80 of the exact same article on brake pads that had to be 20% different each in order to be effective with Google, right? And that's just mind-numbing. It you'd be your writers wanted to quit on day one, right? So fast forward back to last year, and what we were the idea was now that we have AI at our fingertips, how do we leverage AI to start helping us generate these landing pages and still have them be very, very effective? We know that our content has to be uh centered around a two to five mile uh radius of the property and only talk about those those things in order to really bolster that presence. So that's what we set out set out to do. Uh we said, well, what's the information we have? We know all the property data from the website, we know the pricing and availability from the PMS, and we we know all of the local uh points of interest from Google, from their maps API, from their places API. And so we said, okay, how do we put all these pieces together? So we did it manually for the first 60 days and just started writing every day, um using AI to write the content. We'd manually post the content and landing pages, and then we tested the results. Within 30 to 30 to 45 days, we were getting results. Meaning we had keywords, long tail keywords that were beating the ILSs in the search results. We said, okay, we've got something uh here, we need to start building it out. So we immediately started building this out to tie into all the different LLMs um to give us a lot of flexibility in the types of content we were writing and tying into all the APIs that we already have access to through the PMSs. So set out to do that. We released the product in February and we immediately launched it for about 10 clients. Again, we wanted to watch it, we wanted to see how it worked, we wanted to make sure it was a solid product. We started seeing the results again. It took two to three weeks and we started seeing really, really strong results. So I, of course, got super excited and was like, oh my gosh, we found the fountain of youth. This is amazing. You know, I I couldn't believe it that it was working so well. And then March happened. And in March, mid-March, Google decides they're gonna release a new algorithm. This algorithm was set to try to squash AI-driven content. They they finished the the update on May March 27th. And on that date, we said, hey, we've got to pause everything. We turned the whole thing off and we said, we've got to we've got to relook at this algorithm, we gotta see what they're doing, we want to play inside the lines, we want to make sure that everything that we're doing is uh acceptable and that Google acknowledges it because we we are not interested in short-term results, we want to create long-term results. So we paused and we said we looked at it. Google, as you guys both know, they they had put a framework out uh several months before that. It's called EEAT, experience, expertise, transparency, authority, and transparency. And they say if you want to rank high, you need to create content around this framework. That framework is not specific to AI, it's just the framework for all content. Um, again, as you know, but for your listeners, Google doesn't care about you. They don't care about your company and don't care about your property. They only care about people doing the search. They want to make sure that they're getting relevant search results to the searchers. That is it, it's their only priority. And it hasn't changed. They've stayed true to that statement, what I just said, for decades upon decades, right? So if we can live within those lines, we're we're not worried about an algorithm coming out. We don't have to be worried about getting squashed, right? And so that's what we want to do. We want to play within those lines. So again, where we're getting our data is very, very credible data. It's from your PMS, it's your actual data. It's about the the actual property details that we know about the property, the amenities, the neighborhood, all of those things. And we're using Google as a source, their own sources, right? We're using maps and we're using their places API to get the points of interest. So we're putting that data together and we're we've written, you know, all of our prompts and all that kind of thing to make the most out of that information. Um, we've ran our content through loads of different testers to make sure it abides by EEAT and it passes. So we relaunch and we're still and we're having the oh, the one caveat, the one piece that Google had thrown in there was hey, if you if you want to use AI content, that's okay, but don't hide it. Tell us you're doing AI content and show us that it was approved by a human. And so the one big change we made after pausing was we added an approval process. So all the content goes through an approval process from somebody. They have to review it and they have to click a link and it adds their name into the code and says, Hey, John Simpson approved this article, huh? Approved by it by a human. That's interesting. Exactly in the code, right? So it's in the schema, it pushes it into the schema, and this allows Google's bots to be able to see it, and they they know that it was approved by a human. And in the next iteration, we're adding in that approved byline into the actual front end of the site as well, because our our theory is that it's gonna improve the rankings even more, right? So we want to move move towards that. So, fast forward, the product is now live, it's up, it's running, it's working incredibly well. We're getting really, really good results. To talk about some of those numbers, I I know you like to talk about data and so seeing like how well it's actually doing. So we're looking at it and again, as it's still early, we're still trying to figure out the best KPIs to track against. But the first KPI is is the impressions in search. So using like uh Google Search Console, it tells you you can look at any date and you can say, hey, what what is my actual uh like what keyword count am I getting? What impressions am I getting from organic search? Right. And you can use tools like uh simrush and ahrefs and and things like that if you want to get into more detail on it. But basically it says, hey, you came up in X number of search for these keywords and all of that, right? And so we're seeing our our actual number of keywords that we show up for go up exponentially. It's it's a it's a crazy amount different, right? So we're if you're coming up for 55 when you start, you're coming up for almost 200 or over 200 keywords within a 60-day period, say. Um, our impressions though, within about three weeks, we we're seeing the impressions to our name, our property, our listings in organic search go up much higher than that. I don't want to say a specific number, but it's it's multiple times more than what you're getting right today from an impression standpoint in the tens of thousands in a lot of cases. So now just because you have an impression in a Google search, that doesn't mean a whole lot, right? We really want to focus on clicks. And so we're seeing that a lot of these long tail keywords that don't get searched very often, right? We're coming up very high for those. Typically, when you have longer tail keywords, they get searched less often. The people that they attract are way more qualified, right? Because they are looking for a very specific thing, which you had the answer to. So if let's say it was 10 people, those 10 people are way more likely to do more on your site when you get them. What we're seeing is that our clicks are going up about 10%. So which again seems minimal, but when we consider the quality of the 10%, it's substantially more valuable, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:12

So then you're winning in the SERPs, which you know, against ILSs, which you might so just to go back real quick, because we talked about this at Apartmentalize, and I felt like I got a full view of of what you're talking about. But basically, you're creating a landing page every single day using AI and focusing on specific keywords. So ultimately at the end of maybe a 60-day period, a property website might have 60 new hyperlocal pages. Yeah. Um, that are then all helping from a ranking standpoint. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 11:50

Right now it's um it's one a day for the first 60 days, and then we increase it from there. We we slow down the pace from there, uh, just minimally, but we do slow it down. Uh, we want to make sure that we're giving Google consistent content. And again, just like on your social media, just like on your Google business, uh Google's really looking for active managers, active marketers, right? So they want to see that you're continually adding, you don't just set it and forget it, right? They give you preference in your Google business if you manage it like social media, right? You update it twice a week, three times a week. You post new pictures, you do some postings, you put your specials, and they they rank you higher, right? They give you more points for that or whatever because you're active. This is the same thing. Websites, other than like your specials, oftentimes don't change. They're very rarely do you add a page to an apartment website. You might do it when you redesign the site. Um, every once in a while, maybe you think of a new thing to do. But apartment sites generally are not even built in a way where it's easy to add pages, it's usually difficult to add pages. So you figuring out, and when you can, the the flexibility you have then is also an issue. So really figuring out, you know, how do we go about doing it? How do we create this network of crosslink pages that all are feeding each other, right? And benefiting. And what one of the interesting things we found was when you leave AI in control of topics, sometimes or keywords, even those keywords we may not think are relevant, right? Very relevant because it I did wonder there's one um for this property in Dallas, and the keywords that one of the keywords we rank for is like, let's say two bedroom apartments near Frontiera Flights Museum. Who in the world is gonna type that in, right? Nobody is gonna type that in. But from Google's perspective, it's highly relevant because Frontiera Flights is a is an actual point of interest. It's really close to where the property is and it's two bedroom apartments, and the content on the page talks about the price of the two-bedroom apartments and the square footage of the two bedroom apartments. It's it's very relevant still. So we're seeing that even though those pages may not get a ton of traffic, the content being relevant is helping lift the whole ship.

SPEAKER_03 14:20

So I was gonna ask you a question on this. Yeah, very, very interesting. I did something similar when I was in storage actually. Do you keep the pages hidden? Just they're on the site map, or do you actually have them on the main page to be navigated?

SPEAKER_02 14:34

No, that that's absolutely correct. They are on the site map. Our site maps are not hidden. You can get to them on the bottom. They have a button for site map. Yeah, most site maps, a lot of site maps are hidden, but uh they are not in the main menus. They yeah, I don't think so. Yeah. From any of those pages, they all have the main menus, you can get anywhere else in the site from the link page. But yeah, you to get them, they're they're really there. People are not gonna stumble across them more than likely on the site, they're only gonna see them one page at a time through the search.

SPEAKER_03 15:04

And is this strategy the I mean, it's great for the website. You get your domain up. I mean, I'm sure it just does a whole bunch. We have a large website with tons of pages of content. I love this idea. Like I said, I mean, it's like we go back, yeah, and we talk about this all the time. This is literally yeah, the fashion loop, you know, or like it's popular, then it's not popular, now it's popular again. And we used to do this, but do you have to have the landing page or can you go through a blog site? Can you get the content out there in other ways for it to matter? That's a great other places, or are you just leaving it on the website? I know I've asked I, you know, my usual two questions in one, but what's the best strat? You're you're saying the best strategy is on the site, but can you put it in other places?

SPEAKER_02 16:33

The best strategy is on your primary domain because you're building equity in your primary domain. Anywhere else you put it, you're building equity in some other mechanism, some other channel. That's what you do it. It it won't, it's not that it won't work or it won't be as effective as quickly, right? You're indexing and you're you're relying on on backlinks from whatever other channels you put it in. So let's just say you you started a WordPress blog on a different domain, or you're using uh the free WordPress um blog on WordPress.com slash property name and you're posting there, it's gonna take you a lot longer to build up the same amount of benefit, I guess the same benefit that you'd get from having on your primary domain. But it's again, it's a it's an amazingly great question. It's really a great question because one of the things that we found at AIM specifically was people kept asking us, can we use it on our current sites? Can we do this on our current sites? We're not interested in switching, we don't want to move over to the web platform. We just signed a contract, we're under contract for multiple years. We've, you know, we just spent a year building out our sites, we don't want to have to move again. That's a very painful process. Setting up sites, building sites, moving sites. It's almost like moving a PMS. It's not fun, it's it's a hard, long-term process. So at the time at AIM, we said, yeah, you have to have a Swifty site. But we quickly went to work during AIM. Uh, so Patrick was there, my sales guy, he was at AIM, and uh he he called me on the first day. And after two or three conversations, like, yeah, we've got to come up with a way to do this. So we uh within about two weeks, we released a version now. We can do it. Um, we use subdomains, so we'll use it on your subdomain. We can still build out all the pages, we can launch the pages um rapidly still, um, and we figured workarounds on on how to get our the benefit out of it still using a subdomain under your primary domain. So there are some caveats on what we have to do in order from a technology perspective, in order to connect all the dots, but we we can do it and we now have done it.

SPEAKER_03 18:52

So yeah, that's awesome. I mean, like I said, I did this in the storage when I was working at storage, I don't know, about 10 years ago. And I actually had a copywriter and my SEO company meet every month, and they the SEO company was giving the keywords, but they weren't good at writing the content. Yep, and the content would write them and then we would have the approval process in between and did the exact same thing. Wow, and it was pretty amazing the results we got very quickly. It's funny because Google has to index a million times because they have a million different versions of Google, so to see the results that fast means that they like it.

SPEAKER_02 19:31

Yeah, it's two weeks is about the time frame it takes Google to index. And this changed somewhere in the last decade. Google used to let you just say, Hey, crawl my site again, and they'd crawl it again. Now you have to request it, and it's up to them when they do it, right? So every time we release a page, we put it on the site map and we send a new request into Google. Hey, please come search our site. Please come search our site, please come search our site, and it's about a two-week period for them to come out and look at the site, right? So um, every time they do come out, they now have a whole bunch of new content. So they're they're constantly looking. Now, another interesting thing that came up in the last two months or so after the algorithm was released, we started seeing a lot of chatter online about uh Google not indexing all your pages, even though they pass the criteria, even though they, you know, Google says they're good pages. Uh, they'll crawl the site, they'll see them on the page, but they won't actually index the pages. They say that it has nothing to do with the algorithm, but everybody online is saying, Oh, yeah, it's definitely got something to do with the algorithm. So it's something that they're not telling us. But um, but yeah, it takes about two weeks, and we start seeing results very soon thereafter.

SPEAKER_03 20:45

That's a cool product. Can we go back just for the listeners? You dropped some pretty nifty little tidbits in how you were describing this about being in a certain radius of the property and content that you should be focusing on. Can you just tell everybody maybe your top three to five you know content pieces that you should focus on first when you're thinking about this project? You know, whether they want to try to do this in-house or go with you. Um, I think we're all trying to create content in general. So I think it would be a great tip for our industry if you could just talk about what you would focus on.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

Yeah, for sure. So, and I I actually was listening to some of your previous episodes um before this one. They all you were talking about, this is a year ago almost now. Y'all were talking about websites and uh specifically what page of the sites get the most traffic, right? And this is not change, it's your homepage and your floor plans page are the are the two most traffic pages, and floor plans are right up there with the homepage. They're they're very, very close, right? So home page content. Um, I was well, one other thing. You also mentioned that the majority of your traffic comes from mobile. And again, when you look back two decades ago, we were at like 10% mobile. You look at today, we're closer to 80% mobile. And most operators and marketers in our field still still look at the desktop more than mobile, right? We still say, oh, well, the mobile looks like this, or or the desktop looks like this, or desktop has this kind of thing. And we we don't emphasize that mobile piece enough and and see what are people doing on it. And there are tools out there that you can use. Crazy Egg is one of them. There, there's several others that allow you to do heat mapping and screen recordings and things like that of your sites, and you can actually see if you have a lot of content on your homepage, about 90% of it's never seen on mobile. They won't go down, they're not going to scroll down, right? So put your important stuff at the top. So make sure your your your actual content is or Organized properly on the pages and that you can get to the important information with as few of clicks and as little scrolling as necessary, as absolutely possible, right? On each page. So kind of put on those those goggles when you're when you're looking at your sites and do look at it at mobile. Even if it's not the first place you look, which we all say mobile first, very few people do it, but you look at it. At least look at it, right? When you're looking at content that you should be writing about in the two two to five mile radius, the easiest way to think about it is I when I'm teaching classes on SEO, I I would typically break it into buckets and say, you know, there's national SEO or traditional SEO and there's local SEO. Property in Dallas does not need to worry about competing with a property in Chicago. You're not going to compete with them. You're not even going to compete with a property across town, let alone in Chicago, right? And so we don't have to worry about the traditional SEO. And there's a lot that goes into traditional SEO that's very expensive that you don't want to have to do, right? So we that that kind of brings down our uh focus a little bit. And then when we look in local SEO, we really want it to be hyper-local. We want it to be within that two to five mile radius because I'm competing against those properties that are within that circle, but most people are not looking across town. So I mean, if you're looking at a town as big as Dallas, across town could be 45 minutes to an hour in some places, and sometimes even further than that, they want to they want to be close to work, they want to be close to life in general, right? So they're looking at that two to five mile radius. That's our competition. So we're gonna focus there. We also focus these pages specifically. We're focusing them on non-branded keywords. I don't, you know, if people are typing in my name, they already know who I am. We're really focused on trying to figure out what are those keywords that are not so broad that I don't have a shot in in getting them, right? So not Dallas apartments, but we're gonna focus on areas of Dallas, neighborhoods in Dallas, uh, points of interest in Dallas, right? So the Frontiera Flights Museum, which has to be near Lovefield Airport, or uh Bachman Lake Park, or things like that. So we're gonna be very specific around there. Large employers, we have clients that are in West Texas, and it might be um two bedroom apartments near Kimberly Clark factory or near just Kimberly Clark, right? You want to come up under those long, those longer tell keywords because as people do their searches, Google has trained us to be very specific in what we type in. Um, another question you haven't asked yet that I I imagine you're gonna ask is how does it do in this SGE results? How does this work search?

SPEAKER_03 25:39

We were getting there. It's our favorite, it's our favorite new topic to talk about.

SPEAKER_02 25:44

Well, I told I told Ann at in text on the way to apartmentalize, I was like, hey Ann, I I actually side with Chris on on the whole debate here with with uh is Google going to go down or not? And you know, I Google will adapt, they will change. You're and Google's such a massive company, I do believe that, right? And even today I got new AI Google video tools are now in your Google dashboard, and I started playing playing with those, right? So it's like they're they're they're adapting as they go. So as a company, it's not going anywhere. Um, I was in an AI uh talk at another real estate conference uh maybe a month or two ago, and the the panel said, How many of you in the audience still use uh Google? And you know, a lot of them raise their hands, and then uh how many of you just use you know chat GBT and a few raise their hands? And after one of the panelists, I was talking with her, and she's like, I can't believe that people still use Google. And I'm like, that's like 90, 90 of the 99% of the world still uses Google, right? And and we still have to be prepared for that. Now, Google is embedding SGE technology directly into the search, as we all know and love. I love it. I love that it's the first thing that comes up, and we are seeing these pages start to come up in SGE more and more and more and more often because SGE is based off of answering questions. The more questions you answer, the more content you have, the more content they can pull from, and the more relevant you are to come up in their results. So it all benefits you. So back to your question, Chris, on what kind of content, be specific to the points of interest. The easiest way to do this, if you're not going through me, is probably through a blog. It's setting up a blog, it's having a blog on your if you can have it on your main website, have it on your main website, add that content in and be very consistent with the release of content. Create it however you can, but create content focused on the neighborhoods, the locations around your property, a lot of the things you have on your property. Be specific around that. That's I think those really the main ways to do it. Our tool makes it very, very simple for you to schedule it, make it super, super fast and easy to do that.

SPEAKER_03 28:08

Yeah, I mean, this is amazing stuff. The results are right there. You know, on the Chat GPT thing, I was saying last week, maybe I'm cracking a little bit, but it still needs to pull info from something. And you know, I think you at least for me, and I know you can't view your bias, but you use each of them kind of different, you know. When I'm searching for something, I go to Google. When I want a direct answer on something I'm trying to problem solve, like installing a ceiling fan, in my case this weekend, I used uh Chat GPT because it gave me a more direct uh answer. I didn't have to search four web pages to get the answer that I was looking for. But I love this hyper content, local content. And boy, I wish I wish we've had it had a tool like this just kind of ongoing. It's kind of wild and just having this conversation that you're developing in 2025, 2024. Yeah, something that we've all been kind of struggling with. So to me, that's that's kind of the wild piece of this. And I and I want to say to the listeners, I think the consistency is the biggest piece. And I always tell my team we're not gonna start something unless we know we can finish it. And I think that's that's it. So, you know, if you can't bite this off right now, then you have John and you can go to Swiftly to do it. But I would say if you're gonna do it, do it and be consistent in any other content you're putting out, whether that's social, responding to reviews, you know, new photo, whatever it is, be consistent in what you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 29:33

Yeah, absolutely. I think as far as like what I feel like is absolutely the most important things that you can be doing for your marketing for properties that you can do yourself, is still Google business. Uh you've got to be consistent, you have to do it. They give you so many tools to do it with, and they make it easy. It's just discipline. You just need discipline to do that. This is gonna help you if you're already spending a lot of marketing dollars in different ILSs and things like that. This is a way to help you decrease your budgets or decrease your investment in the ILSs, which continually get more expensive, and put more control in to what your output is. The other benefit that you get, again, I've and I've always said this, but I I've struggled with a way to really make it something that people can wrap their heads around. Marketing is a goodwill asset, it adds value to the property. You will spend tens of thousands of dollars on marketing this asset, and then you're just gonna hand it off, and most people forget about the marketing that went into it. They hand it off, it's a challenge to get the marketing assets from the last company, and it's a and it's a hassle to figure out how to rebuild it. Every time that pri that asset sells, the marketing starts back at zero, but it doesn't have to, right? Because you are spending the money to build a system to help that asset succeed after you're no longer in charge of it. There is value in that that adds so much value to the actual property, and we still struggle with this whole idea of I'd say most people that are running marketing departments for ownership groups or management companies treat all of marketing as an opex expense, it's coming right out of the NOI. It it cuts your NOI immediately. I spend money on ILS, there goes that money down the drain, right? It's it removes value from the property. Whereas there's a large part of what you do that can be put into the capex bucket, right? A lot of what you do from a technology perspective that is not done continually, right? It's it's done in big chunks. Hey, we're investing in a lot of technology right now. That is a capex expense that can be written off, not affect the NOI, actually de, like actually increase your NOI in the property by by moving some things around. Your website is one of those things, right? Chris, you just spent loads of money on rebuilding all your websites and doing all the video work and all that. You do not have to repeat that aspect of that process every month, right? That was a capital expense. You you did it all at once, or you could have done it as a capital expense all at once. And then if you were new that every year, this is, and and again, looking at tax code or whatever, this looks like hey, this is refreshing our our technology. We're investing in our technology again to keep ourselves fresh and all the new things that have come out in the last year. So you have a lot of um, there's a lot of things that you can do that decrease your actual marketing cost to the property. And this is one of them because when you hand off a machine that is generating landing pages, generating results on a regular basis, and they say, ah, we want to quit, we want to go somewhere else, they lose it all. You switch, you you turn off that, you you not only lose all the work that was done, because you can't go to another product, another, another system that's going to migrate hundreds of landing pages for you onto their system, right? So that machine that you build shuts down, whether it's a blog, whether it's landing pages on another third-party site you built, or whether it's the tools that we that we're building.

SPEAKER_03 33:48

That could be a topic at Aim next year, honestly, because I don't I've never thought of it that way. And I think we Ann and I have thought about and our guests have thought about things kind of sideways. Don, that was that was really good. I am actually gonna bring that up and see if it's viable at my company because it's it is that that was the one-time expense, you know, to get that stuff going. And it does, I always say we're a revenue generator anyway. I mean, we're not an expense, we're we're a revenue generator, but thinking of it that way on the bottom line, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:18

That's saying it's saying it on paper though, right? Marketing is seen as an expense, yeah, no matter how much we say it, because it's an operational cost, right? And every dollar spent on operations is I think what is it, like 10 or 12x or whatever out of NOI. So it it's it's unfair, Chris.

SPEAKER_03 34:40

I mean, that's a it's a good way to think about it. I don't know how many people we can get to buy off on asset management or whatever, but I'm gonna at least bring it up because I think it was that's a really nice idea.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

Yeah, John, have you seen have have you had clients that have put technology as a capex? I mean, I think you have because you're talking about it, but uh just I've talked to a lot of clients about it, and I've I've got and I deal with a lot of ownership directly, right?

SPEAKER_02 35:05

So most management companies that I talk to, they're like, eh, it doesn't to them, it doesn't make as much difference. They don't care as much. The owners care much more about it, right? Because at the end of the day, they're gonna hold the asset for five to ten years or whatever, and they're gonna sell it, and it's all about the NOI. One owner I was talking to is like, yeah, John, that's great, but you know what? I don't care until the year I'm gonna sell. So charge whatever the heck you want to charge, do all because I I I built I built this big NOI calculator to show you all the NOI money that you're gonna make because you use me instead of the other guy, right? And you can plug in your numbers and Dizzy's like, yeah, John, that doesn't make any difference to me because until I know I'm gonna sell, I don't need to do it. So if I want to switch my model, the year I'm gonna sell, I can switch it and it makes just as much difference as if I'd been doing it all along. So and again, that is something to think about because a lot of times the capital expense. Now I hit he's a CFO, was a CFO beforehand, and his whole thing was look, I can you can you I can go ahead and write it off in my books as I spent it all at once, even if you're charging me monthly. He said, So if your annual fee for websites is like$2,500, I can go ahead and take the whole thing as a capital expense once a year and say each year I'm reinvesting another$2,500 in my website to keep all the new technology going and make sure everything's up and running. And you can keep building me monthly because your books are different than my books. And you know, I so I don't have to show it that way. It's like, okay, well, that makes sense. And again, you know, this is why I would, I mean, not just me, every software company pushes to try to get your money up front. If we can get all the money up front, it locks us in for a period of time, which we like. It also in my mind was like, oh, and you can write a holding off as a capital expense because you're paying for it whole thing. He's like, John, that doesn't make any sense. I don't have to do that, and you don't have to do that because oh it's but you know, it's true. You can there's a lot of ways to think about it. We had to be creative, I think, in our in our thinking.

SPEAKER_03 37:18

Yeah, that is creative. My my remembered my question, so that's good. So a lot of people will tell you if you do this, you can cut expenses, whether that's on PPC or uh, you know, your ILS or whatever. But this strategy on the SEO, at least for me, part of the reason why I even consider ILSs is for their SEO power, because they are ranking way better than what I can probably do with my little site in Grand Prairie. And so your strategy actually does reduce your cost, potentially reduce your cost on what you're spending on ILS, because if you can rank organically above them, then that kind of takes away their power, right?

SPEAKER_02 37:59

Even if you can rank in line with them exactly low or a couple below. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. If you come up for any, if if an ILS comes up for any broad keyword or long tail keyword, you are not gonna be the only property that shows up, right? It's gonna be apartments.com, apartments near Lovefield Airport, and you're gonna be one of whatever 175. Yeah, and depending on how much you pay is where you show up on their list, right? So, but we could just get the property itself on the same page, right? By doing it.

SPEAKER_03 38:33

But that's what I'm saying. There is actual value there. Absolutely. And you could actually reduce budgets if you did this right and you started to rank better organically, because again, apartments.com, Zillow now. I mean, they're making a huge push. The there's a reason why they put out this content, and it's so they rank organically. Yeah, that's what they're doing, and that's what we're paying for, right? So that I mean, it really does, it really does have a potential of lowering costs. It does. Yeah, that's great.

SPEAKER_01 38:59

Well, John, I'm excited because I knew when we talked about this product, um, and I want to make sure that we share some examples when we publish the episode too, just so people can see this in action. But um, I knew when we talked at up at Apartmentalize that you had to come back on the show again because this was just really groundbreaking. And I love how you've really solved, I mean, taking us through how you thought about this product and you know, thought about it just uh from all angles was really neat. So we typically we're coming up on time, we typically ask our guests um this kind of question about, you know, Google search versus chat GPT, but we talked about that a little bit already. So I'm gonna flip the script and I am gonna ask you, besides this awesome help hyper effective local, I'm not gonna remember the acronym product, that is amazing. What do you think? Like, what is the next big thing? What else should marketers be thinking about?

SPEAKER_02 39:55

Oh, goodness. You know, I mean, right now, a lot of what we're seeing is questions on ads, right? I mean, nobody wants to, but everybody's having to spend more money on ads. We're seeing budgets quadruple or go more than that on ads. Don't be scared to do it. I I think that the results that ads are bringing in are still some of the most effective quality, high-quality leads you can get. The other thing to really uh think about when you're when you're if you everybody's looking for the next big thing and what they can do and where they can adjust. One of the things I see more and more of the ILS is going to, and even the ones that if I'm if I'm gonna recommend an ILS, I would recommend the ones that are pay-per-lease. And a lot, you know, over the last couple years, the quality you get from a pay-per-lease ILS is usually subpar, but they're playing a numbers game. They're gonna give you a huge quantity of leads in hopes that you get a few leases and they get paid, right? And with tools like Elise coming out and other tools that are like a lease, right? They've given you the ability to manage mass amounts of top-of-the-funnel leads and qualify them and deal with them from an infrastructure perspective that we've never been able to do before because it bogs down your phone lines and your leasing staff and everybody else. And so I say lean in to the paper lease ILSs more so than the other side, uh, especially if you have tools like a lease in place to help you uh qualify that day, those, those prospects. But yeah, it's not nothing new, probably you haven't heard before. But that and the SEO, that's right now, that's where it's at.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

Okay, no, I love that. And actually, I think that brings up one last question, too. Is that you could probably use the could are people using these pages, your hyperlocal pages, for pay-per-click landing pages as well? So could this help strengthen your pay-per-click strategy?

SPEAKER_02 42:02

They certainly could um use those for for landing pages, and we have done that. So, yes, you you can do it. You're making very specific pages at that point, and these pages are meant to be launched one at a time in a very consistent fashion. For 50 users, we also give you the ability to add um custom pages so you can build pages that would be probably more apt for your landing pages. You can be more specific on what you want on them and things like that, and you can build as many as you want, right? So it's it's a different, like Chris said earlier, you know, use a different tool for a different reason, like Google versus Chat GPT. It's the same thing here. Like have the right tools in your toolbox and you can use them for whatever you need.

SPEAKER_01 42:45

Okay. No, I think that makes sense. We've started being more strategic with our pay-per-click campaigns. Not that we weren't always, but as the landscape becomes more competitive, we're starting to see opportunity to maybe pull back from some of, you know, like you're talking about, city-specific keywords and really focus more on neighborhoods and just as it's becoming more expensive, it's you know, making sure we're really understanding our audience. And so um, I think you're right. Don't shy away from pay-per-click, but continue to be to be smarter about it. Well, Chris, do you have anything else for John before we let him go?

SPEAKER_03 43:24

I have a lot of other questions, but not for this pod. We'll have to have you back, John. Yeah. Um, I want to I want to get more into this landing page idea, and so I think to be continued for our listeners, John, let's have you back maybe in a couple months and we'll dive into this because I think it's I really appreciate you bringing this to the table, sharing what you've done. Uh, I think it's important for our industry. And and again, we're just this is what we're all about here is trying to be different, and you have a product that allows you to compete with the bigger with the big companies out there, whether it's ILS or within our industry. So I think it's it's really great, and I appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_02 43:58

Thank you guys. And I'd be uh get in trouble with my team if I didn't say it, but we only charge$99 a month per property to use the software. And if we're and we even have a tool where we'll do all the approving for you, and it's$199 if we do it that way instead. So very competitively priced. You will save way more than that on the ILSs.

SPEAKER_01 44:18

So yes, if you're interested in Swifty, get in touch with John on LinkedIn, find him at an upcoming conference. Um, he's awesome to talk to, always good conversations. So, with that, I want to thank Chris, I want to thank John, I want to thank Carlos, I want to thank our sponsor, Flamingo. And until next time, this has been the apartment department.