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In the Lab: PM Marketing Real Talk

In the Lab: PM Marketing Real Talk

Tamara: [00:00:00] ​ Okay, so we just analyzed data from 87 property management companies, and the ones ranking number one on Google. Their websites are often worse than the ones on page three. know that sounds crazy, but if you stick around, we’re gonna explain exactly why that happens and what you’re probably missing. Welcome to in the lab, the Property Management podcast, where we pull back the curtain on what’s actually working to grow PM companies in 2026. I’m Tamara, your brand and content manager here at Good Juju Marketing, and I’ve got our CEO, Landon Murie here and our CEO you have me today. All righty. So, okay, here’s the deal. We work with hundreds of property management companies across the country, and we literally have seen it all. What’s crushing, what’s dying, and honestly what everyone thinks works but actually is not working at all. This podcast is where we’re going to share all the insights without us, like the usual marketing bs. Think of this like you’re sitting in kind of on our internal strategy meetings where we’re talking about real data from real clients. No fluff, just what’s actually happening out there. Real [00:01:00] quick. This is actually our very first podcast, our very first episode. So we’re just getting started and we’ve got some incredible guests lined up.

We’re gonna be talking to Mark Cunningham, one of the biggest names in property management podcasting, from property management.com is coming on. Plus, we’ve got our successful PM clients who are going to share exactly what’s working with them right now. And our team is gonna be diving deep into specific topics that actually are moving the needle.

So if you don’t wanna miss any of that, hit that subscribe button right now. Seriously do it Helps us out a ton. Make sure you don’t miss these episodes. Alright, so before we dive into all the marketing tactics and all the nerdy stuff, I wanna start off with something most people don’t know. You two have been working together for what, like nine years now?

Landon Murie: 7, 8, 9.

Jivko: yeah.

Landon Murie: Dunno. Yeah.

Jivko: Seven, or eight years.

Landon Murie: Mm-hmm.

Tamara: long time. Okay. So this wasn’t really like a typical. Landon posted a job on LinkedIn to hire someone’s situation. You have ku, you literally slid into Landon’s dms on social media and like right when he was starting out. So we’d really like to hear this story. Like what made you reach out to him specifically?

What did [00:02:00] you see that made you think like, I actually wanna work with this person

Jivko: So I remember that like it was yesterday. I was complete pain in the, but but yeah, I, I believe it or not, I, like 10 years ago I used to work in Fiverr and I was a freelancer there and I knew a guy there like we are not friends. I was just following him and I had his Instagram and I was uh, kind of like watching his stories and YouTube videos and whatnot. And I saw a video and I saw a story of Wand just, he was recording Wand and he, wand was talking about how he used to be in PM and how he started his marketing agency just was talking about

Tamara: bottle.

Right. How, what the

Jivko: I kind of felt

Tamara: hell was.

Jivko: yeah, I decided to just contact him on Instagram and Instagram.

That’s how it’s all started. And he of course did not answer the first time, so I followed up and I think he answered on the third time. And that’s how that started. Yeah, he answered and we got to talk. We then hop on a meeting and yeah, seven years later. History.

Landon Murie: That’s not it. That’s not everything though. [00:03:00] There’s an important part about that. So Jivo, he, he had a unique angle when he reached out where a lot of people wanted to work, uh, wanted a job, whatever. And Jivko was willing to prove himself by, he offered to work for free, I can’t remember, like a couple weeks or a month or something like,

uh, he’s like, dude, I’ll, I’ll show you that.

I’m serious. And so, and then it didn’t happen right away, right Jko, I was like, I was like, okay, like I’m kind of on the fence now about needing help. Uh, but that stuck with me. And then maybe a month or two later,

Jivko: Yeah.

Landon Murie: uh, I had gotten more clients. ’cause I was doing everything at that point. I was doing the, you know, reaching out to potential new clients.

I was doing the SEO work, I was building websites, I was doing everything and [00:04:00] got to like 12 clients or so. And I was like, okay, it’s time for me to get somebody to help me out with this. And I remembered that guy on Instagram. And so I found his message and hit him back up. And then that’s when we had the call started working together.

And he literally, so he was willing to work for free, but I didn’t let him, I paid him like a little bit. Right? Like $50? No.

Jivko: I was young and hungry, but yeah, I remember it was like $200, the first

Landon Murie: Yeah. It wasn’t much. But I had, I, I felt bad. I was like, I got paid this guy something. But he proved and now what, seven years later?

Jivko: somewhere, right?

Landon Murie: Yeah.

Crazy.

Tamara: Awesome. Well, sounds great. And that’s honestly not how most business relationships start. Um, but what do you think kind of made that work? Like what do you think that the approach kind of says about building relationships? ’cause that’s kind of what we do here with [00:05:00] property managers as well.

Landon Murie: It was a, just his approach of providing value. Uh, and like you said, Tamara, we, that’s kind of our philosophy here with good juju. When people reach out to us, when PMs reach out to us, we don’t, we’re not salesy, we don’t have a pitch. We’re teaching and educating them, you know, uh, when they’re interested in what’s going on with their marketing and their SEO and we pull up the tools and show them what’s going on behind the scenes and just show them the reality that they’ve usually never seen.

And we’ve gotten countless, countless comments of, I’ve worked with how many property manager? Not not property manager, how many marketing agencies, SEO agencies, and I learned. In this 20 minutes more than I [00:06:00] have in all those years. And so providing value and being willing to do that in the first place, which is exactly what did,

Jivko: Yeah. Yeah, I

Tamara: Sounds good.

Jivko: free value in order to prove yourself, in order to get paid. You know? So you have to do something, you have to provide something. And after that, we just clicked, we become, we we’re best friends now and we kind of clicked from the big, from the get go.

So yeah, it

Landon Murie: yeah. So we, Jivko lives in Europe and we, we’ve actually met up three times now in different locations.

Uh, four times, yeah. In Europe. And yeah, we like. It is kinda like he said, like best friends, kinda like family. So I know his wife and like

Jivko: Yeah,

Landon Murie: it just like a little family, almost like brothers kind of.

Jivko: exactly. And we are talking literally, no, no, Monday through Friday. We’re talking [00:07:00] literally 24 7. Like whenever he’s awake or I’m awake, we are just on the phone talking about business, talking about wife, talking about work, just by brothers. So

Landon Murie: Yeah. Our wives love it. They love it.

Tamara: Awesome. well for context for everyone listening, so Landon essentially started goodjuju. He was a property manager first. Um, so give us a little bit of background, like give us the real story. Um, and you know, obviously if you haven’t worked with Landon or if you have worked with Landon, you know that he can for a very long time. So give us like the cliff notes version, Landon, of, you know, what is it like, what was it like when you were a property manager? Like what was kind of, what were the biggest frustrations, especially like with marketing that you had back then?

Landon Murie: Yeah. Okay. Keep this short. Yeah.

If, if I, if I’m dragging off, raise your hand or something. Um, yeah, I started because I had purchased a couple investment properties myself, and that was my goal. I wanted to acquire properties as rentals. Uh, I had a good job, [00:08:00] uh, kind of a corporate job, uh, but even with a good salary and a good setup, I couldn’t, you know, as fast as I wanted to acquire properties every two or three years, I could buy a new one and somehow it hit me, maybe because, so my dad.

All his life was, uh, in real estate. He was a real estate broker in the state of Utah. And so what are you doing with your hand anyways? Um, so he, maybe that’s how I got the click for property management, where I was like, Hey, I could manage other people’s properties and I would make less off of each property, but I could pull them in quick.

It wouldn’t be my properties, but I could kind of do the same thing. And because my dad was a broker, I was able to do that. So I got my real estate license and we kind of started, it was mostly me. Uh, my dad had health problems and I just

dove in [00:09:00] crazy. I took a. The company I was working at, they in the oil industry, they go through up and downs and they were at a down point where they do paid layoffs.

So they actually like give people a good chunk of money to just leave. And it was perfect timing. So I took that and then I was basically home, you know, learning, SEO, YouTube, watching courses, this and that. Finding people who were good at it, copying them, um, as far and website design as well, and built my own website over time, which sucked really bad at first.

Um, and then got better and better built the Google business profile. Which used to be called the Google My Business started getting reviews. I started getting clients and it [00:10:00] kind of snowballed. I started learning more in depth SEO strategies that were pushing us up in the rankings. And we kind of came out of nowhere against some of the bigger companies, some of the franchises in the area.

And we grew from 0 properties to 172 in like 14 months. And I hired a couple people and we grew so fast that it kind of fell apart. My dad had health problems. Um, he ended up later passing away, but the business kind of fell apart. But what I had learned there was that I really loved being a marketer. I loved SEO.

And I was not a property manager, but I knew how to help property managers grow. And that was when I started Good juju and I literally started just finding property managers on Google in across the US that I could see needed help, cold emailing them, offering them a [00:11:00] free analysis. That’s how I picked up the first few clients and now we’re here.

Tamara: Awesome. When you were a property manager yourself, like what did you, did you look for marketing help at that

Landon Murie: Uh, that’s a, yeah, I didn’t answer that.

Tamara: what did you find through that? Like was everyone just trying to sell you like generic real estate marketing or were you able to find like what you needed?

Landon Murie: That’s an awesome question. So I

Tamara: I.

Landon Murie: didn’t have much money, and I won’t name names of the companies that. Existed then and still exist now. But the prices were more than I wanted to pay. And I had been learning more and more about SEO specifically, um, which we’re gonna get into in depth on later podcasts, but I learned that there’s, uh, kind of two sides to SEO and all of them focused on one side, leaving the other half kind of untouched.[00:12:00]

And so I was like, why would I pay for this when I know the whole pie, the a hundred percent is not being done? And so I did it all myself and it worked out well in my case. I don’t recommend DIY for everybody. Of course, some people I’m insane. Uh, Jivko knows this, and so if you’re insane, then you can probably make it work.

But if not, if you’re a normal person, then probably better to be a property manager and hire insane marketers people to do the work for you.

Tamara: Makes sense. Well, now that you’ve kind of been on both sides, like you were once, you know, a property manager trying to grow, and then you know, the, the other side of that, you’re trying to help other property managers grow now through the marketing, like what would you, looking back on it, what would you tell yourself about marketing that you would’ve done maybe differently?

Landon Murie: [00:13:00] Nothing because. Everything that happened, I made mistakes. I learned from those mistakes made me have to try harder and learn more, and that’s the obsessive person that I am that got me to where we are. And so I wouldn’t, it had to happen that way I think.

Tamara: Makes sense. Yeah. Especially with marketing, like there’s a lot of trial and error before you reach a level of mastery, so. sense. Alright, so let’s kind of switch gears here to, you have co, so you’re running the operations for like, you know, a company that’s serving like a hundred plus property manager, property management clients. Um, what are some patterns that you’re seeing across ’em? Like what’s sort of something that they’re do that certain companies are doing differently fundamentally others that are kind of just stuck at that like 50 to a hundred doors?

Jivko: That’s a [00:14:00] great question for sure. And yeah, wand and I are actually talking about that very often. And yeah, first and foremost, the most successful companies, they’re all just focusing and caring about the right stuff, about the right things, and with the writing things, I mean. Their Google business page, as one already mentioned, they’re focusing on that, optimizing it, just keeping it active, because Google wants to see that they’re focusing on those, on the reviews, because that’s a really important factor in Google’s algorithm.

So they are focusing on, on those reviews, on the consistent reviews over time. And if they want to be successful and when they’re successful, they also have to rank high enough. So they’re, caring about just being ranked in the first few spots. They’re caring about their Google business page being co optimized.

They’re caring about the reviews. And also having a website that’s. is built to convert and has solved the right, systems and tools to convert people because you don’t just want to send people to your website. You want to actually convert them and to get them to become your leads essentially. And also really important, which [00:15:00] I see of our successful plans have that in common is they just have the patience because as you guys know and as everyone’s known, and that’s not even in business, that’s in life as well. If you want to build something great and if you want to, to just have successful business, you have to have patience.

Things are not gonna happen overnight. It’s gonna take a few months, gonna take three, four months. But you have to have patience. And I’m not saying you’re gonna have to waste two years without results. You just have to a bit, a bit of patience. Especially in the beginning, in the first few months.

Tamara: Makes sense

Landon Murie: When it comes to SEOF, which is what we focus on, you know,

Tamara: And I think that’s kind of, you know, we wanna talk a little bit about also specifically why we started this podcast. So Landon, you’ve been in the property management space for eight or nine years now, but why start a podcast now in 2026? Like what are we trying to do here that’s maybe different?

Landon Murie: um, you know, we’ve been really busy. And there’s always an excuse. There’s always things that keep us from getting to this type of [00:16:00] stuff. And it finally, I think like the turning point for me was this new wave of AI and a lot of hype around it, and a lot of misunderstanding around it, and fear, uh, fomo, fear of missing out for business owners and property managers where they, you know, they, they feel like they need ai and if someone comes to them with some AI solution, they’re like, okay.

You know? Um, and when I started seeing that more, it triggered something in me that. There’s a education problem

in property management and any local service business, uh, business owners, like property managers, they’re not marketers. They’re running their business. They are [00:17:00] operating, they’re dealing with tenants, they’re showing properties, and they, you know, when something gets all hypey and talked about, uh, people can kind of fall into it.

And it started me and Jivko. You know, we were, at first we were kind of also believing it, you know, like, okay, things are changing a lot and they are changing

in certain aspects of SEO and search. But when we looked at the raw data. For local businesses, particularly our clients, property managers, the stats and the traffic and stuff are not really changing.

There was a period when AI kind of really the hype peaked and Google made some changes and was doing some tests where they really put more emphasis on AI in their search results [00:18:00] and, and people did see some loss in traffic and leads, but they, they corrected it, I think because what we see is not really much different than what we saw a year or two ago, where when people are looking for a local service like property management, they.

Are going to Google and they want to see those local map results with the reviews, compare the companies, check out the websites and the ai, the LLMs, they don’t, they’re not search engines. They don’t have that data. And so when you do a search there, they’re pulling what they can from usually Google. A lot of times it matches up.

If you do a search on Google, do the same search on an LOM, A lot of times they’re very similar because they’re pulling the data, but in [00:19:00] the LLM, there’s actually less info because they can’t pull the reviews and all that. So yeah, it was, that was kind of, that kind of pushed me over the fence. There’s other, mm.

Misunderstandings and education problems in property management related to SEO, uh, where over the years people hear SEO and they think this just means that their website has the right keywords on it and it’s optimized, and that they need to be posting a blog once or twice a month. And that’s what SEO means, and that’s a piece of SEO.

These are good things, but there’s so much more to it, and it’s hard to see people not understanding that. And so this is a way where we can educate people on what SEO in particular really is since that’s our focus [00:20:00] and help people. Understand that, whether they wanna do it by themselves, like I said, there’s a lot of things that people can do by themselves.

If they wanna do that, that’s great. If they wanna hire another company, that’s great. If they wanna work with us, that’s great. But I want people to better understand what SEO is and how it works. And ai, SEO, there’s different terms for it. G-E-O-A-I-O, um, these are optimizing for LLMs, but this work is 85% SEO.

So it’s kind of like a new word for SEO. Um, just a lot of misconceptions, misunderstandings and jiv, cco, and I want to do what we can to help people understand what really is going on.

Jivko: Yeah,

Tamara: Sounds great.

Jivko: really tell our clients what’s helpful and what’s not. Tell

Tamara: It seems like they’re very [00:21:00] parallel and there’s a few things that you can do that are kind of in addition to, um, the SEO work that can help you from an AI perspective, but they’re very much parallel and build up on one, one, you

Landon Murie: Yeah,

Tamara: um,

Landon Murie: you have, if you do SEO really well, you do well in, uh, LLMs. And there are, and like I said, it’s not a hundred percent, it’s maybe 80, 85%. There are those, a couple other things specific to GEO or whatever we wanna call it, right. Optimizing for LLMs. But yeah, it’s mostly SEO.

Tamara: Yeah. And I, I think at the end of the day too, from what we’ve seen, it’s that it’s not AI that’s costing you your leads, it’s just still goes back to bad SEO costing you your leads, right? So it’s, again, we’re in this, things are changing and people, you know, a a wanna make clickbait type of content. Um, and I think that’s probably, you know, like you’re saying point, is why we want this podcast to be there. Because if you don’t know anything, marketing can be really overwhelming, [00:22:00] really full of fluff, really full of trends that you’re trying to, you know, keep up with. So it’s nice to kind of, like you said, take that away and just show people here’s what actually is working.

So, um,

Landon Murie: And it is hard to know who to believe because, uh, a lot of people take the opportunity of a new wave and a new hype like this to take advantage of that fear and push these services on. Business owners who are scared and don’t really know what’s going on. So yeah, this, we’re here to educate and help people understand, yes, AI is an aspect and is important, and maybe in the future things will change and it will be something that, um, is valuable for local search.

But right now it, the data we have and what we see from our clients is that they just, they get the [00:23:00] majority of their traffic, their leads from Google Local Maps, results,

Tamara: Mm-hmm.

Landon Murie: and.

Tamara: a little bit. Um, because Jivko, like from a kind of perspective, and you see the client data every single day, what do you think property managers. Kind of need to hear that they’re not getting anywhere else. Kind of like what is that kind of fluff that maybe they are being kind of fed elsewhere, that they just, you know, need to be broken down.

Jivko: Yeah. So as, as you guys mentioned, there’s so much work right now, so much marketing forth and everything is riding the AI wave right now. Everyone is selling a course or selling something. So there is a world going on and we are kind of trying to educate people and to really show people how to achieve their goals.

And for property managers, what they want to do is just get more property owners, right? And we are essentially showing them how to get just that, like focusing on the right things. Again, focusing on their Google business page, focusing on having those consistent reviews, focusing on links from other relevant companies and [00:24:00] just important stuff like that to just help them achieve their goals.

And we are also, there’s, I’m not seeing. For quite a few clients, quite all the clients that they don’t have the right operations, they don’t have good operations and you know, a good marketing is not gonna fix a broad operations. So if you have great marketing and if you have all those leads, so say you have 50 leads a month, but if you don’t have the right operations, you’re still not gonna grow your company.

So you also have to, to know that from the get go, that you have to fix that, it’s speed. Lead is really important. You have to do follow ups with people. We have to call them, have to reach out to them on time. So, yeah,

Tamara: Makes sense. Yeah. You have to really view it like holistically as a whole picture, so, okay.

Landon Murie: I, I wanna elaborate on that a little bit.

as Jivko said, you know, not just getting the leads, there’s that aspect of converting the leads, uh, which is kind of an operational sales aspect. And then there’s also the property management services, you know, doing a good job. [00:25:00] So the clients that we see that do the best, they usually have really good service, and we can see that by the amount of reviews that they get.

And when you’re providing good service, you lead to more reviews, snowballs to more exposure, more clients. And so that’s one thing that we’re gonna have included on this podcast as well, is things that property managers are doing kind of behind the scenes with their operations, how they run their services, things they’re using, systems they’re using with their teams.

Uh, not just marketing, but running and operating a business in property management, doing it effectively, keeping everybody happy and running, you know, property management’s stressful. It’s, [00:26:00] you know, tenants for the most part usually don’t like. Property managers. Um, and so you’re dealing sometimes with people who don’t love you, and that’s day in and day out.

So when you can have a business that is making everybody happier, it’s a more enjoyable life overall.

Tamara: Makes sense. Um, Landon, what do you think makes goodjuju different? Because I think a lot of people always hear like property management, marketing agency and they kind of think we’re all the same. Um, so what do you think most marketing agencies in this space kind of get wrong about property management?

Landon Murie: Yeah. It’s been a problem for years that I saw 10 years ago when I had my property management company. Kind of going back to what SEO means, if you ask, you know. 10

managers, 10 random property managers, [00:27:00] kind of what SEO is and what that means. They’re gonna tell you, you know, probably nine or eight of them at least, that it’s your website being optimized with the right keywords and having the right content posting blogs.

Um, and that’s usually kind of the extent of it, because that’s been pushed so heavily in the PM industry by the marketing companies that exist and good juju. It started out as just an SEO agency. We didn’t use to make websites, we didn’t use to have our own CRM we didn’t use to do some of the things we do now.

You know, it used to just be me and now we have 14 people or so, don’t know, 13, 14, and, uh,

I don’t know what I was talking about five. What was I saying?

Yeah. So with goodjuju being solely [00:28:00] focused on SEO, both sides, because there’s the, yes, the website, the content side of things, and that’s about building trust. It’s not trust, it’s about building relevance, uh, for the type of keywords that you wanna be found for, like property management companies in your city, right?

And in the algorithm, there’s another side that is about trust and authority. And Google doesn’t just show the companies that have a nice optimized website and that write blogs every month. It comes down to both doing those things the right way and having the signals, offsite signals is what they’re called because they’re coming from third party, other websites, places on the web that are showing your legitimate, that are showing you [00:29:00] are a trusted authority.

In your market, and it’s very, very important for some companies, these things can happen naturally. There are other companies where kind of they’re involved in their community, they’re involved with different organization and events, and they do get these kind of mentions and people talking about them, but it’s rare. And most companies, they need proactive help getting other companies to recognize them, talk about them so that Google sees them for who they are, which is a good company that is a trusted authority in their market.

Tamara: Sounds. and I would say like, I think that we’re a lot more SEO focused than a lot of agencies in the PM space. and not, like, we’re not talking about SEO agencies, like you mentioned where like you post what a blog a month type of situation. So what is, you know, for people who don’t really know, what does [00:30:00] real SEO actually look like?

Landon Murie: Well, in the next episodes, everybody’s gonna find out ’cause we’re gonna dive deep. But to, for a brief overview, it’s, yes, it’s your, it’s your website and being built on the right type of platform for one. And then knowing the right keywords to focus on. What are people in your market searching, the different phrases that are popular for property owners and using those keywords, which are the search phrases and building content that is based on those and content.

That is helpful and unique highlights the unique aspects and services and systems of your business answers people’s questions. And that’s the website side of things in terms of SEO. Then there’s the website side of things in terms of conversions like Jivko talked about, right? Getting [00:31:00] traffic to an SEO optimized website that isn’t optimized to convert doesn’t do you. Very good.

So then there’s the conversion optimization with the right calls to action, building trust, building a connection, building status, decreasing sales resistance, all of that. Uh, your Google listing quite a bit goes into that. Reviews the optimization, continual updates, other citations and listings other than Google.

Because Google kind of cross references the data that on the, across the web, uh, about your business, your address, your website, your phone number, your company name, uh, and having consistency within those and then moving over into the offsite signals. These signals about trust and authority. This is for local businesses.

You know, you’re usually not going to have [00:32:00] USA today writing an article about you, right? Proper management’s not very sexy and fun. So it’s more kind of other local businesses building relationship and connections with them, that they also have websites, you know, other home service businesses. Maybe even vendors you work with.

Uh, then there’s more niche specific types of websites that don’t even specifically have to be in your location, but they are real estate and property management related sites that Google likes that have good metrics. And when they are mentioning you, you know, the local sites are talking about you.

These niche related sites, these, these mentions that are links when these are linking to you. It’s kind of like boats of confidence and popularity contest we could say. And [00:33:00] the more you have from the right sources, this is surging your authority and trust showing Google, these guys are legit. So when. And that’s just a little part of offsite, SEO.

But when you have all of those things onsite and offsite working on them, that’s when Google’s just getting all the right vibes, all the right signals. There’s also, so social media, um, creating content, uh, on LinkedIn, uh, getting that referral traffic. Maybe having an email list where you’re providing a, your clients and old leads with helpful information that is leading them to a blog on your site.

This type of direct traffic, there’s all these signals that is telling the algorithm, these guys are good and Diviv Co. Maybe you have something else.

Jivko: You have [00:34:00] to, it’s, it’s like an entire ecosystem and you have to put all the different pieces because there’s hundreds and hundreds of different signals and pieces, and you have to put all those pieces together in order to make this work. Not do just half us work and just take care of some stuff. You have to take care of all those little pieces.

You have to build them out together, and then that’s when you’re gonna have the results. And as one mentioned, he already gave you a great answer, but we are gonna talk about all of this in the next episodes as well, where we’re

Landon Murie: Yeah. Each of each of those specific things will go more in depth on

and help people understand, uh, what that looks like and

Tamara: Makes

Landon Murie: real examples, right? We’re gonna have some of our clients, of our smaller clients who manage. 5,000, 200 properties. Some of our bigger clients, we manage several hundred to 2000 properties, uh, both related to marketing and SEO [00:35:00] stuff and operations, things they’re doing in their business to run smoothly so that when you’re running a smooth business, it’s easier to grow and scale.

Tamara: Makes sense. I think it goes back to, to what, um, Jivko was saying about patience too, because it’s almost like you have this like soup that you’re cooking with all of these different ingredients that go into SEO, but you have to let it marinate. You have to let it cook. You have, you know, you have to really, you know, for, um, the payout.

And that doesn’t mean that it’s, you know, forever. Um, but once the, the greatest thing too about SEO is once you’ve built that authority for yourself, it’s not going to go away. So you will be reaping the

Landon Murie: Yes.

Tamara: you just have to be a little bit patient with it. So. Makes sense. Um, and while we’re kind of on that topic, give code, do you think. Because we have, you know, from time to time it happens where we get clients that have been with other agencies. do you think are kind of like the most common gaps that you see with what they were doing before when they come to us where we’re like, wow, we’ve really, you know, like, we need to fill that gap for you in terms of your marketing, in terms of SEO, all that [00:36:00] stuff.

Jivko: So right off the bat, like the moment you ask me that question. It’s their website. All right? So their website, we always have to start from their website because you, you can’t really do SEO, you can’t really bring traffic to that website if it’s not, uh, built to convert, right? So your website, their website has to be built to convert.

‘m seeing quite lot of, uh, call to actions, so they’re not having the right call to action, so they can’t really get the leads on their website. They can’t really con, they can’t really convert those leads. so that’s is by far the biggest, the biggest gap. And the second one is probably gonna be they’re just not paying attention to their Google business page.

As, as much as they should be. Because to me, working with all those hundreds of grants on a monthly basis, I’m seeing that literally like 95% of our qu, they’re getting the majority of their leads, leads from their Google business page. So you have to treat that little Google page like, like your own child.

You have to have to feed it, you have to optimize it. You have to constantly think and [00:37:00] just get those consistent reviews out there. You have to be updating it to publish your product services. There’s so many different things, but you just have to have all of those different things just taking care of

Landon Murie: Yeah. I wanna add to that Jivko if I can, where when we talk to property managers and they, they come to us and they maybe want a website and you know, like, ah, no, I don’t really wanna do this. I just want a website so that I can kind of be seen online and generate leads and have to. Show them kind of through real life examples that your website is not what’s going to be found.

It’s your local listing. They go hand in hand. You have to have both. One without the other is no good. If you had a great local listing, tons of reviews all optimized, but no website where people can go to to learn more and [00:38:00] call or reach out for more information. The listing is no good. If you just had a website, that’s amazing.

It’s perfectly SEO optimized. It’s built to convert, but there’s no local listing for when people are performing local searches. You’re gonna miss out on that 90% of traffic, so they are there. Married, they’re equally important. They have to be done together and done the right way.

Jivko: absolutely. Um, I also think, so one of the that I’m also seeing quite often is just because. As ai right now are being talked so much and everyone talks about backlinks and whatnot, but as Landon already mentioned a couple of times you have to focus on the right types of links. Okay.

So not holding links are good and you need only welcome mentions and niche relevant mentions. And whenever a company starts with us, we are often seeing quite a lot of spam links [00:39:00] and just some alterative links with all of walks on Their

you can see that they created those links just for the sake of having that link and it’s doing no good.

Landon Murie Can I also emphasize, uh, elaborate on that? So Jivko talking about, uh, we are doing an analysis for a potential client, or we have a new client and we’re using one of our tools, which we’ll be showing in future episodes how we do this. But the, we can check what websites are mentioning your company and linking to you.

And there are websites that are literally built with the purpose of looking like a business, but it’s not a business. It’s a site that is built, like he said, with the purpose of writing blogs that. Have back links to people’s sites and you [00:40:00] usually have to pay for these, which is against Google’s policy, which we don’t do.

We have three outreach girls who are reaching out to,

Jivko: Real

Landon Murie: I don’t even know how many companies every day. And we’re working out kind of collaborations where, hey, we’re gonna create this piece of content you’re missing, you’ve got all this, but you’re missing this. We’re gonna do this awesome thing with these infographics.

And all we ask for, right, is that we’re able to mention ourselves in there. And

as Jko said, these local and niche specific links, they need to be coming from legitimate sites that are healthy real. Businesses with a real purpose and value

that carry no risk because when you get other sites that are specifically built for the purpose of getting links, this is always a risk in Google’s frequent updates that they’re going to [00:41:00] classify those as

a negative asset and at worse penalize you, which literally just takes you off of Google or highly devalue them, which will bring you a huge drop in rankings and exposure.

So, so important to be careful about links because there’s always, we get emails all the time our clients do to, sometimes they forward them to us saying, Hey. I, I just got this offer. These guys, they said they can build, uh, you know, 50 backlinks for $300 and you know the price right away. It gives it away.

But our clients don’t know that and so we have to explain and show them and ask them, okay. Ask them to show the links and then we analyze it and have to be careful back. Links are a sensitive, sensitive subject. They’re so important.

Jivko: [00:42:00] that’s the purpose of this podcast, right? Just educating people about those important aspects of seo.

Tamara: Makes sense because I think also people think, oh, okay, well what’s the worst that could happen? It’s just not gonna help my website. But they don’t understand that it’s harming your website as well. So it’s not just now you’re all, you know, maybe you’re out a little bit of money, but what are you out of in terms of authority, in terms of Google’s trust?

All of that kind of works together. So I think that’s kind of a nice segue into our next section, which is kind of talking a little bit more about myths, um, because there are a lot of myths in marketing, a lot of myths in SEO. So before we talk about SEO, maybe what’s something about property managers, um, property management marketing that you’ve heard kind of over and over again that’s just not, not true when it comes to marketing?

Jivko: Great question.

Landon Murie: Something that’s not true.

Tamara: like a like kind of a misconception about, um,

Landon Murie: Misconceptions and misunderstandings, kind of, we’ve talked about right about,

you know, SEO is just these things, but far as.

Jivko: right away. For me one, and you can think about it, why [00:43:00] while I’m answering, but right away. For me, especially in property management, I think it’s a huge misunderstanding that are kind of, they’re building just content and walks on their website and they’re thinking that they’re really doing something meaningful.

And I’m not saying that that’s not meaningful, not doing anything for them, it’s just part of the puzzle again. And I’m seeing all of people just building those two, three blocks a month and they’re thinking that they’re doing something and

Landon Murie: Or more.

Jivko: even one and I, we, I think we recently saw someone was doing like 10 blocks a month.

But even just, just that, that’s just a piece of the puzzle. So you can’t expect any results by, even if you decide to build a hundred blocks per month. So I’m seeing

Tamara: I see.

Jivko: right now, just people building those books on their websites and they’re thinking that they’re doing something meaningful when it’s written out and it’s not gonna your desirable results, which are always gonna be having more people finding your business and having more property owners.

That’s, that’s the purpose of it though.

Landon Murie: Yep.

[00:44:00] That’s the good answer.

Tamara: and from the a content perspective, what we’ve seen too is, um, are so many property management companies out there, and if you’re just pumping these blogs out, you’re just creating duplicate, replicate content, one of the same. And Google’s just not even gonna show that content anymore because there’s thousands of blogs, most likely written by AI showing the same thing over and over again.

So there’s definitely a lot more strategy to it when it comes to that. So that’s a good one.

Landon Murie: Yes. Yes.

Tamara: well if you are at this point finding this podcast helpful, um, feel free to subscribe. feel free to comment if there’s any kind of myths that you’ve heard or misconceptions.

We’re gonna read every single one and comment back to you. Um, and we’ll cover them in future episodes, alright, let’s do a quick rapid fire round. I’m gonna just throw a couple questions at you. Let’s just do quick answers. long explanations. I’m talking to you Landon. Ready? Let’s go. All right, let’s start with you, Landon.

So what’s a non-negotiable for a property management website?

Jivko: Think.

Landon Murie: many, there’s too many, um, conversion optimized for trust building.

Jivko: Actions for me right off the bat. [00:45:00] Definitely

Tamara: Okay, sounds great. Um, what about SEO Google Ads for long-term growth? Landon, we’ll start with you.

Landon Murie: 1000%.

Tamara: Okay.

Jivko: no question asked.

Tamara: most overrated marketing tactic in property management right now.

Landon Murie: Blogging.

Jivko: Yeah.

Landon Murie: The blogging, the, there’s, there are good ways to do blogs, but like you said, Tamara, where

Jivko: Yeah.

Landon Murie: the same topic and it’s not locally specific and stuff. That type of blog, that’s garbage

Tamara: We’re done with that. Okay. most underrated.

Landon Murie: reviews and the way you’re doing it.

Jivko: All right, so Wands sold mine. That’s by far the most important one, but the other one is gonna be link building for sure.

Tamara: Um, what about metrics? If you could track one metric for property management website, what would it be?

Jivko: The amount of legitimate leads they’re getting, the legitimate leads.

Landon Murie: [00:46:00] Five leads.

Tamara: Good. What about a biggest red flag? Um, when you’re reviewing a company’s current kind of property management, marketing, what’s kind of a red flag that stands out at you

Landon Murie: Um, I often check the, uh, home page, page title, and I’m surprised how often I see that wrong. And if that is wrong, I know that the site is not set up well.

Jivko: and to me it is because that’s always the first thing I check

Tamara: one thing a property manager should do, um, today that takes like an hour, less than an hour, um, that would help them optimize something with their marketing.

Jivko: I’m gonna

Landon Murie: Go to. Go ahead. What?

Jivko: so just right off the bat, really quick, less than an hour, you can focus your, on your, optimizing your Google business page. Add some products there, add some services, some descriptions, optimize it, add five to 10 images on your Google business profile. Just do something to keep an active. It’s not gonna take a a lot of time, but it’s really gonna [00:47:00] be helpful to just move the needle a bit. I.

Landon Murie: He stole it. So I’ll elaborate and say, reach out to five people with that short Google review link, which you can get when you’re logged into your Google Business profile and send texts to people who you know or. Likely to leave a positive review.

Tamara: sounds good and I’ll.

Landon Murie: What

Tamara: another, thing too that you can do is you can just, another thing that if you’re not currently doing is just responding to your reviews too. Like take, you know, take 15

Landon Murie: Yes.

Tamara: to people leaving you positive reviews. Um, that can go a really long way, not only for your client relationship building perspective, but also for seo.

So,

Landon Murie: And negative reviews? Can we please? We have to talk about it. Yeah, it’ll be quick. So when you get negative reviews, if they’re coming from owners, that’s a problem within your business. They’re usually gonna be coming from tenants. And as a property manager, we see, we have our clients [00:48:00] who worry about that a lot.

And the reality is you represent. A property owner or an investor, and you have been hired by them to look after their best interests. And so when there is a tenant review, you know, the worst property management company ever, they used my deposit to blah, blah, blah, fix some repairs. A property owner, a potential client is going to see that and they’re going to know, oh, these guys are looking after me.

These guys are not just, you know, leaving my property damaged and giving the tenant the deposit. They’re holding the tenant to the agreement. And so those negative tenant reviews the, not a ton of them, but they can be. A [00:49:00] actual selling point that shows you work for your clients and you hold up the rules with the tenants, and it’s also how you respond to those two.

Respond professionally with with facts, no feelings. Keep it short. Let them know, Hey, contact us if you wanna talk more.

Jivko: Just to emphasize a bit on that. So you, as a business owner, you can’t be, your company can be perfect, right? So you can’t have a perfect rate or you can’t have a perfect rating. And to me it’s always better to have 4.9, even 4.7, rather than just having a perfect rating of 5.0. Because when I’m checking businesses or when I’m doing a walk or search, and when I see a company with. 500 reviews and 5.0 rating, that’s just instantly clicks. And I was, I’m like, this is probably fake, right? Because you can’t be perfect. You’re along the way. You’re gonna get a bad negative review from a tenant or sometimes even from [00:50:00] an owner. So it’s way better for me, and it makes sense, right? Just not target that 5.0 rating.

But rather than, as Landon mentioned, sometimes just have those negative reviews and answer them professionally.

Landon Murie: Yeah, a 5.0 can look manipulated. Over controlled and little too good to be true.

Jivko: And I’ve seen some companies with even more, even thousands of reviews with 5.0 rating, which almost sounds impossible, right? So.

Tamara: And there’s something about human psychology too, where, and I’m sure you guys have heard of this too, where like. You see a 5.0 and you tend to trust it less than like you’re saying a 4.8, a 4.6. There’s something that just triggers where you’re like the velocity of seeing a lot, you know, lots and lots of positive reviews that are at a five point or 4.8, um, versus seeing maybe fewer or whatnot that are sitting at that 5.0.

Landon Murie: It’s, it’s the same with pricing. Uh, if you have something priced at $500 or a hundred [00:51:00] dollars, it, it’s just such a perfect number, uh, that. Looks like it was just chosen, but when it’s $93 or $487, this looks like it’s just again, that strategic psychological, this is for a reason type of number. Yeah.

Tamara: Okay, so as you remember when we first started this at the very beginning, we talked about how we analyze the data from 87 different property management companies, and we found that the ones actually ranking in the top three of their local Google search results were actually found a little bit further down on page two or three when it comes to their actual search.

So why is that happening? Can you kind of shed a little bit of light in terms of why are we finding this.

Jivko: Yeah, so yeah, great, great question as well. So, when it comes down to the Google business pages, as you mentioned, sometimes you can see those Google listings ranking in the first few spots, and the websites are just nowhere to be found. That’s because when it comes down to local businesses, especially in the [00:52:00] beginning, because, with websites it’s just smaller, to get the website up and running and to, to rank it in the first few spots in Google, it’s always slower. And when it comes down to work or businesses, we also, we always want to get those quick wins. And we, already talked about all those important things that we’re doing in the beginning for, for everyone that you should be doing as well as just. on the right stuff. Just having those consistent reviews, having your Google Business page optimized, having the right address in there and all those little things, they actually compound and the results are gonna be way faster and easier rather than the results from the website, which are sometimes, especially if you’re in the competitive market, it’s gonna take months, like six, nine, sometimes 12 months to actually get your website there.

But you’re a local business, so it’s better to have your, the majority of your traffic and exposure is anyway coming from the map pack results from your book listing. So you have that, you want that quick win, you want your Google listing there. We have the majority of our plans [00:53:00] just relying almost completely on that. But eventually, once you build the momentum, once you compound of the, the work, your website is also gonna be there. But that’s, that’s why just the Google business page, you’re getting those quick wins and you’re ranking faster. Than the website.

Tamara: Awesome. So, wait, a quick follow up to that would be, does it matter then, if you are showing up in the top three of your, you know, your local search results, right? That’s really, you know, valuable. would you say is the important then of your website doing the same and also being right there on page one underneath, you know, those first three results?

Jivko: it, does matter because, uh, everyone is different and everyone’s checking different things. And I have the numbers, I have stats. I’ve read the stuffs hundreds different times. And, the majority, like 85% of people were just gonna stick to the map pack. They’re gonna check the first three businesses.

They’re gonna click more businesses and check the other Google business pages. But the other people, like the other 10% of people, some people are gonna be curious to see the website rankings. So [00:54:00] those 10% of people that’s gonna scroll below the APAC results and they’re gonna go to the website rankings, and we, of course it’s 10%, but we don’t want to miss on those 10%.

Landon Murie: Yeah, and we have a couple clients that we’ll show right now. So here on the screen we have, uh, in Toledo, Ohio, BRTI, who’s in the top three in the local results, and then they’re number one organically. And then in Athens, Georgia, you now see. This listing of them in the top three locally, and they’re here in the top three organically.

They’re right there at the top on both, but they get most, like Jko said, 85 plus percent of their legion traffic still from the local listing. So whether your organic website ranking is in the top three or on page two, not a significant difference because [00:55:00] people are looking at the local listings and that’s why Google puts those at the very top.

Jivko: That’s,

Tamara: Makes sense.

Jivko: Google wants, Google cares about user experience a lot. So Google literally wants to show people exactly what they’re searching for, and that’s precisely why they’re actually showing that those map pack results, those Google businesses with the reviews out there with the, the, the website links, the, the co links, they’re showing that on top.

Tamara: So we need to essentially cater to, you know, your client’s search patterns and how they’re gonna do that, right? Most people are going to stay at the top, some will go, go down, but you still wanna be there so they can find you.

Jivko: that’s why it’s really important to have a plan. And when you have a company or when you have a clear plan and know what is actually important, you have to start with your Google Business page and care about that more. And eventually, when you’re out there in the first two, three spots, then you can actually start work more towards your website rankings.

Landon Murie: Yeah, and if you’re in a market that’s bigger, you can see on the screen here we have this local [00:56:00] grid, and this is showing your business at the center. And you’ll see the green here around this example client. And each of those dots that you see, that is representing what a searcher sees from that exact location , uh, that is what someone is searching and what position your business is in.

So the green ones, that means you’re in the top three. Those yellow orangeish ones. Further out, red, further out. And what we do this tool is it shows us over time that expansion of the local listing, as you build more authority and trust, you increase your radius in your market. And that’s what we focus on.

Tamara: It’s questionable for sure. Alright, well perfect. That was really great. I think we covered quite a bit. so if you are a property manager and you’re currently listening and maybe you’re like, you’re right in that boat where you’re not sure where to go, where with your marketing, [00:57:00] you’ve heard all the fluff, you’re not sure about ai, if you, um, we’re gonna put a link in, in between below in the comments. I need to say that again. If you’re a property manager out there and you’re listening and you’re confused as well and you need help with your marketing, but you’re not sure where to start, we’re gonna put a link below in our description. Feel free to contact us. We’re gonna do a free custom video analysis for you. Um, we’re gonna cover your current website, if you have one, your current ranking when it comes to SEO, your current, you know, how are people finding you right now, um, to see if that’s something that we can help you with. So, um, again, thanks so much for doing this with me guys.

Um, and I’m really excited to kind of kick off this podcast and kick off our new episodes.

Landon Murie: Yes, we’re excited to bring some raw, real teaching to the PM community

Jivko: Yep. Yeah,

Landon Murie: soon.

Jivko: educating everyone and just really sharing. Finally, really

Landon Murie: Overdue. Long overdue.

Tamara: Agree, agreed. Awesome. Well, we’ll see you in the next one. Thank you.