Interview with Landon Murie, CEO of Goodjuju Marketing for Property Managers

Ran into Landon Murie, CEO of Goodjuju, to talk about marketing for property managers and what it takes to grow a property management business through search.

He had grown his own property management company to 172 doors in just 15 months through organic search. 

We wanted to know what he had figured out along the way that most marketing agencies still miss.

“I was the client.” He Said.

That's the part an agency can't fake. I wasn't studying property management from the outside. I was a property manager in Utah who needed rental owners to call me, and I was building the company on the side while I still had a corporate job (my dad held the broker license; my job was finding the owners).

So I got obsessed with local SEO. Done right, the work you put in doesn't go away. It keeps growing.

What I figured out is how an owner actually hires you. They Google property management in their city. They see you in the map pack with a star rating and a review count. They click through to your site and decide, pretty fast, whether you look like someone they'd trust with their rental.

That's one path. Break any piece of it and the phone doesn't ring.

Most agencies still sell those pieces separately. A website from one company, blogs from another, maybe a review tool bolted on top. Then the monthly report is all traffic and rankings. A good local seo agency needs to connect those pieces to the leads a property manager actually wants. 

Back then I had one number I cared about. New doors. (172 of them in about 15 months, all organic)

When you've sat in the operator's chair, you judge every piece of marketing by whether an owner picked up the phone. Most agencies have never had to.

Q1. Why go exclusive to property management instead of taking any client with a budget?

We actually tried the other way. (It didn't last)

At one point I started worrying that property management was too small a niche. So we expanded into home services. Plumbers, HVAC, electricians, roofers. We wrote the content, started marketing to 

them, and started taking calls.

It felt off almost right away. We didn't know those businesses. I couldn't tell you what keeps a roofer up at night. I can tell you exactly what keeps a property manager up at night, because I was one.

So we doubled down instead.

When a PM owner talks to a generalist agency, they get case studies from a dentist, a law firm, and a restaurant. When they talk to our property management marketing agency, they see results from dozens of property managers. 

We know the language, the software they run on, the back office, the difference between an accidental landlord and a strategic investor. A lot of them tell us it feels like we understand what they need better than they do.

It shows up in the numbers. If we talked to 100 random small businesses, we'd probably sign 10. Talk to 100 property managers who need help, and it's more like 50 or 60.

The market is smaller. There are still plenty of them. And when you're that specific, you barely have to sell.

Q2. What does a property manager see in a website or SEO report that a generalist agency never would?

Tenants.

A property management website gets a lot of traffic that will never turn into revenue. Tenants paying rent. Tenants hunting for the portal login. Applicants asking if the three-bedroom is still available. Maintenance requests coming in through the contact form.

A generalist sees a traffic spike and a pile of form fills and calls it a great month. A PM looks at the same report and asks one question. How many of those were owners?

That's the lead that pays the bills. Someone with a rental property who wants it managed. When a client in Fort Worth says he gets 12 to 20 qualified leads a month from search, he means owners who are ready to talk.

Reviews work the same way. A generalist sees a three-star average and panics. A PM knows a lot of those one-star reviews come from tenants who got denied, or evicted, or didn't get their full deposit back (that's part of the job). What matters is what an owner thinks when they read them. Did you respond? Do you sound like a company that protects the property?

On the website, I look for the owner path. Can someone with a rental figure out what you do and why they should trust you in about ten seconds? Or is it buried under Available Rentals and Pay Rent?

Generalists read the report the way Google does. A PM reads it the way an owner would.

Q3. You run Goodjuju fully remote. What does that change about how you hire and deliver?

Less than people expect, honestly.

We're a fully remote team. I lived in different countries for years (my wife is Russian), and in 2024 we came to Thailand on vacation. Warmer, cheaper, beach right there. Now I spend a big part of the year here.

Clients don't care; a lot of them think it’s cool. Our team is on our About page, and it's pretty obvious we're spread across the US and Europe. Clients care about results. If you can show proof and a long history of good service, nobody asks what time zones you're in. There’s also a benefit that we pretty much have someone available 24/7.

Where it really changes things is hiring.

I'm not limited to whoever lives within driving distance. A lot of our team is in Eastern Europe. Talented people, fluent in English, and we pay them more than they'd earn locally. They value the job, and we stay profitable without cutting quality. (win-win)

We're careful about who gets in. New hires start on a paid 30-day trial at a lower rate, which shows us fast who's hungry. For some roles, we've run two people on trial at the same time without telling them. Both get paid. If they knew they were competing, they'd both put on a show, and we'd never see how they really work.

I also only hire people who are better than me at the role. I can do every job in this company (I started out doing all of them), but that doesn't make me the best at all of them.

Then we get out of the way. No set hours, no vacation policy, no meetings just to have meetings. Do your work and keep your clients in the loop. Beach or living room, I don't care.

Nobody has ever quit Goodjuju. Some of the team has been with me five, six, seven years. Jivko, our COO, was my first hire, and now he's my best friend (our wives love how much we talk all day, of course).

Q4. What does a bad fit client look like, and how fast can you spot one?

Sometimes I can tell before we even talk.

If their reviews say they run a bad operation, marketing won't fix that. It'll just help more owners find out faster.

On the call, the tell is trust. The call runs long. The questions get very specific. How many leads will I have in month two? What about month three? You can feel there's no trust in the room, and they're already expecting this to happen overnight. (SEO is a long-term game, and they haven't bought into that)

Then there's control.

"I don't want to ask my clients for reviews."
"I don't want that on my website."
"I don't want this content."

If we can't do the things that make SEO work, SEO doesn't work.

We learned this the hard way. A client had been with us for a few years and loved the results. Then they brought in a business development person who questioned everything, micromanaged, and acted like we had no other clients. They were on one of our lower plans and expected top-plan attention. We ended up parting ways.

Now when I see those signs, we don't always say no. But that client goes on a plan that matches the attention they want, and we get very clear up front. How often we'll talk, how we'll talk, what results to expect, and when.

The clients who grow fastest are the opposite. They run a good business, they're reasonable, and they tell us, "You're the professionals. Do your thing."

Q5. What's the most common thing clients get wrong about SEO in property management when they sign with you?

They think SEO means two things. A website that's "optimized," whatever that means, and blogs.

Both matter. They're also two pieces out of about ten.

The pieces most PM owners have never heard about are the ones that move the needle. Other trusted websites mentioning you and linking to you. A steady flow of new reviews. Schema. Local citations. A site built to turn visitors into calls. Speed to lead, and a CRM that makes sure somebody actually follows up.

Backlinks are the big gap. Over 90% of the property managers we look at have almost no good sites linking to them. A lot of them were told that if they wrote good content, people would link to it on their own (in property management, that basically never happens; nobody's sharing a blog about security deposits)

The blogs they do have usually aren't doing much. Generic, thin, not built around what owners actually search. They wrote a few posts years ago, nothing happened, and they decided SEO doesn't work for property management.

Then there's time. Most of our clients start feeling a real lift in leads somewhere between month three and month six. The ones who know that going in are usually the ones still growing three years later.

Q6. Tell us about a client win that surprised even you.

A client in Athens, Georgia.

When Justin came to us about three years ago, his brokerage wasn't really a property management company. It was a real estate sales brokerage that had picked up 114 rental doors along the way. (more or less by accident) They wanted to grow that side.

They're past 400 doors now. Online leads went from basically zero to 20-plus a month, and about half their new business comes through the marketing we do together.

Those numbers are great. What I didn't expect was for the whole company to flip. They started as a sales brokerage with a property management side. Now they're a property management company with a sales side.

And Justin still thanks us pretty much every month. That part never gets old.

Q7. Where do most Property management websites lose owner leads?

Right after the click.

Think about how an owner gets to your site. They Googled property management in their city. They saw you in the map pack with your star rating and review count, and that's what earned the click. Then they land on your website, and all of that trust disappears.

Stock photos. No faces. A headline that could belong to any company in any city. No reviews anywhere on the page. Nothing that tells them this is a real company with real people who've done this for a lot of owners.

People do business with people. The sites that convert carry the trust all the way through. Google reviews right on the page. Video testimonials from owners, which hit even harder. Real numbers about the company. Photos of the team and the owner, maybe a short video of the owner talking. (people want to see who they're handing their keys to)

The second leak comes after the form. An owner fills it out, and nobody calls back until tomorrow afternoon. By then they've probably talked to someone else. That's where a lot of good leads quietly die.

Q8. How is AI search changing the way owners find a property manager?

Still a lot less than LinkedIn would have you believe.

I got tired of hearing that ChatGPT was taking over and Google was dying. Coaches, consultants, vendors, all saying it, and nobody had data. So in the spring we pulled 90 days of Google Analytics data from our property management clients. This fall we pulled it again from the same companies to see what moved.

Google still drove 87% of their leads. Search and the map pack alone were 47%, the same as in the spring.

AI tools like ChatGPT went from 0.9% of leads to 2.0%. Still small, but it doubled since spring, and it did that without sending more traffic. AI's share of visitors stayed flat at about half a percent. (We tightened how we count leads since our first pass, so spring and fall here use the same method.)

That's because AI visitors convert. 3.7% versus 1.0% for Google organic, nearly four times better. When ChatGPT recommends you, it lands a lot like a referral.

And that 2% is undercounted. A lot of owners ask ChatGPT for the best property managers in their city, then Google the company to read the reviews, then fill out the form. Analytics calls that a Google lead. On our own website, Google Analytics credited 7 leads to AI tools since May. Counting the leads who told us an AI tool sent them, and what our forms recorded, the real number is at least 13.

That hop over to Google is the part I'd pay attention to. ChatGPT can show a star rating, but owners can't read the reviews behind it, and the ratings come from sources like Yelp and Bing. Most property managers stay off Yelp because it's mainly unhappy tenants. Google is sitting on years of reviews for almost every local business, and it isn't sharing them.

So keep winning on Google. And add a "How did you first hear about us?" question to your lead forms, with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the other AI tools listed as options. That one question is how we found most of the AI leads our analytics missed.

Q9. Cheap SEO or no SEO. Which is worse?

Cheap SEO. It's not close.

With no SEO, at least you know where you stand. You have nothing, and you know you have nothing.

Cheap SEO costs you twice. You pay for it every month, and you lose the time. Good SEO compounds, so a year of the right work keeps paying you for years. A year of cheap work is a year you don't get back.

Cheap SEO usually looks like a template website with "SEO" checked off and a few generic blogs a month. Sometimes it's worse, with spammy links and shortcuts Google eventually catches. Then somebody has to clean all that up before anything good can get built.

The worst part is what it teaches the owner. Nothing happens, and they walk away convinced SEO doesn't work for property management. I talk to owners like that all the time. Some have been through three agencies and never once heard the word backlink.

Q10. What's one thing you'd tell every property management owner to do this week?

Set up a check-in for every new owner client.

I know that's a strange answer from an SEO guy. But every new door you add is wasted if another one walks out the back. We learned that in our own agency. For a while we were signing about two clients a month and losing about one. You can't grow like that. You just keep replacing.

So we built something simple. When a new client signs, they go into a 90-day onboarding sequence in our CRM. Every two to four weeks, at random intervals, they get a one-line email from me. How are things going? Is the team in touch? Anything you need?

Most people reply "all good, thanks." The ones who are confused or unhappy reply too, and now I hear about it in month one or two instead of getting a cancellation notice in month four. A lot of those turn into a 30-minute call that starts a little tense and ends with us laughing about something. (and they usually stay, even becoming friends)

Property management runs on the same model we do. Recurring revenue, and the first 90 days decide whether a client sticks around for years.

So this week, write three or four short emails from you, the owner, and automate them to every new owner client over their first 90 days. It'll take you an afternoon.