The majority of the SEO industry creates far too complicated and confusing guides around how to do SEO.

SEO is four specific “pillars” applied in a similar way to how a doctor would prescribe medication: by diagnosing the problem, then assigning the right dosage of the right medication to get healthier.

The four key elements that make up our approach to search engine optimization: Technical SEO, Keyword Research, Content Creation, and Link Building.

Technical SEO #

This refers to the behind-the-scenes work that helps search engines understand and index your website more effectively. This includes things like ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly and has a fast loading speed, properly formatting your titles and meta tags, and using header tags to structure your content. By taking care of the technical details, you can improve your website’s visibility and performance in search results.

We have a standard SEO audit template that we create and run on any site we’re working on, but we don’t actually believe that technical SEO perfection is possible, let alone optimal.

Instead, we aim to improve the site’s technical SEO makeup the MOST with the LEAST amount of effort. Some issues may never be resolved due to known constraints.

For example: budget, website framework and complexity.

Instead, we focus on impact. Impact is simply the quality of the technical SEO changes that are being made. For example, changing a homepage title tag: costs very little time or money, is within scope for 100% of our SEO clients and helps improve site quality. That’s an easy YES to change!

Rebuilding a site CMS from a custom CMS to WordPress when the site has 1,000 pages, 50 page templates and 25,000 lines of legacy code would cost a significant amount of time, money and may not improve site quality. That may be a hard NO without the proper budget.

The best path to having success with our clients and their technical SEO efforts is typically a one-time major cleanup effort followed by ongoing review and maintenance.

Keyword Research #

This involves identifying the words and phrases that people are using to search for the properties and informational content that each client site offers. By researching and targeting the right keywords, we can improve our clients website visibility and drive more qualified traffic to their site.

Keyword research can be conducted through tools like Ahrefs, Google’s Autocomplete, Clearscope or many other SEO tools. We can find new keywords based on a source

Some of our best keyword ideas come from our starter list and general client destination research. Starting with just a seed list and expanding from there will often lead to nothing but “copy that” content ideas and strategies. For example, a great blog post topic for those visiting Paris may be “Everything You Need To Know About The Eiffel Tower”. However, a seed keyword list starting with “Paris” would never find the keyword “Eiffel Tower”.

The best path to having success with our clients and their keyword research efforts is to find the high value and high intent keywords for booking intent, then follow that up with high-traffic but low competition blog and content topics.

Content Creation #

Is all about creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content that will attract and retain our client’s target guest profile. We think the best content is comprehensive.

Comprehensive is not a specific word count or number of subheadings: comprehensive means that you cover a topic properly from A-Z to make it as useful as possible to the end reader/user.

Content could be in the form of blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, or any other type of content that is relevant and valuable, however typically blog posts and resource pages are 90% of our content creation efforts that help organic search traffic. Here’s a few ways to measure if the content is going to match the client’s business goals:

• Does the content have a business case – a guest researching information before their stay.
• Is the content highly relevant to their particular vacation rentals/properties. For example, don’t create pet-friendly content like “The Best Restaurants That Allows Dogs In Orlando” if our client has 0 pet friendly rentals. 
• Is the content geographically relevant to our client? For example, state-level keywords rarely make sense and it’s often tough to rank for them. 
• Does the topic/keyword present real traffic opportunity – there is a time and place for targeting very low search volume keywords, but in general we want to target keywords that can net us 250+ visitors per month minimum via Google by ranking in the top 5. 
• Overall does the intent match client branding – if a client offers luxury rentals at $5,000 per week, we shouldn’t do guides on “Visiting Portland On A Budget” and vice-versa. 

The best path to have success with our clients content creation efforts is to make comprehensive and useful blog posts and resource pages that, over time, drive organic search visitors.

Link Building #

Is the process of acquiring links from other websites to our client website. These links (put in a simple way) act as “votes of confidence” for our clients website and can help improve its authority and visibility in search results. There are a variety of ways to build links, such as guest blogging, creating valuable resources, collaborating with travel bloggers and press coverage (just to name a few).

However, link building is where it’s easiest to fall into “the spam traps” that can actually hurt a website’s organic search efforts. Links needs to be from relevant and useful websites to be successful and help SEO efforts, not hurt them. Two quick rules of thumb for link building: you should be happy and proud to show the client to the link, and the link should be kind of difficult to get. Easy and spammy-looking links are the first to burn you.

The best path to have success with link building is to be agressive with link efforts! Very few SEO battles have been won (especially in competitive markets or with new companies — even hardest, when both of those are true) by going slow and methodically building links.

Together, these four elements make up the TLCK BuildUp Bookings SEO process, and by focusing on all of them, we can create a strong foundation for any website’s search engine optimization efforts. By taking care of the technical details, researching and targeting the right keywords, creating high-quality content, and building links, we improve any website’s visibility and drive more qualified traffic, ultimately leading to more conversions, more direct bookings and more business growth.