Mastering SEO for Long-Term Business Growth: Getting to the Bottom Line Podcast

🌟 SEO Secrets Unleashed with Brandon Leibowitz! 🌟

I had an absolute blast chatting with Stephanie Smith on her podcast Getting to the Bottom Line! 🎙️✨ Stephanie is the mastermind behind New Light Financial Solutions, where she helps business owners discover the 16 financial drivers that boost cash flow and revenue. 💵 But this time, we dove into my specialty—SEO! 🌐

From my accidental journey into digital marketing back in 2007 (who knew a college grad would stumble into SEO?) to how I’ve helped businesses climb the Google ranks and avoid pricey ads, we covered it all. 🚀 I shared the juicy details about optimizing websites for search engines, building trustworthy backlinks, and how mobile-first design is the key to winning over today’s audiences. 📱💡

We also talked about:
 ➡️ Why SEO is a long game and patience pays off 🕰️
➡️ The do's and don’ts of backlinks (spoiler: Fiverr isn’t your friend here) 🚫
➡️ How tiny tweaks to your website can DOUBLE your leads 📈

Oh, and I dropped a little something special for all you listeners. 🎁 Head to SEOOptimizers.com/gift for free classes, a website analysis, and tools to get your SEO game on point! 👊💻

If you're curious about how SEO can impact your bottom line or you’re ready to level up your digital presence, tune in to this episode. You won’t want to miss it! 🚀

#SEOOptimizers #GettingToTheBottomLine #DigitalMarketingMadeEasy #SmallBusinessTips #SEOStrategy

🎧 Listen now and let me know what you think! 💬

Chapters

• 0:09 SEO Optimization for Business Success
• 12:19 Maximizing SEO for Business Growth"
• 18:55 Effective SEO Strategies for Business

Transcript

0:00

Foreign welcome to another episode of Getting to the Bottom Line, where I'm your host, Stephanie Smith, owner of New Light Financial Solutions, where we help business owners walk the one clear path to generating more cash in their business. And we do this by looking at 16 financial drivers that impact your revenue, profit and cash flow. However, we know that the things that we look at aren't the only things that impact your bottom line. So that is the goal of Getting to the bottom line is to see what other things to put into perspective the various things in business that impact your bottom line. So I'm excited to have with me here today Brandon Leibowitz. Brandon runs and operates SEO Optimizers, and he's done that since 2007. They're a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium sized businesses get more online traffic that converts into clients, sales leads, or whatever it is you want. So thanks so much for joining me today, Brandon. Thank you for having me on today. I'm excited to have this conversation because we were chatting right beforehand and I was saying I don't, we're going to focus on SEO. I don't do SEO in my business and I know I should or shouldn't focus on it. I should focus on it more. So I'm glad to have you here so we can talk more about it. But first, why don't you tell us how you got into what you're doing. I kind of fell into it. I graduated from college in 2007 and after I graduated, well, got my degree in business marketing. And one of the first jobs I was offered was helping a company out with their digital marketing, which I don't really know much about it. Back then they didn't really teach that in school and the company knew that and said, it's okay, we're gonna take you to classes and workshops and learn with you. And after going to a few workshops, just realized back in 2007 that everyone's probably gonna have a website. Digital marketing's not going anywhere anytime soon. And SEO is just a way to get free traffic. And who doesn't want free traffic? So I really focused more on the SEO side of things. But in general with digital marketing, Google Ads or ads, social media, email marketing, it all works to get traffic. And I'd recommend doing all that. I just really focus more on the SEO side of things just to help people avoid spending money on those ads. And over the years I worked at different advertising agencies as a director of SEO and before work and after work. Now my lunch Breaks. I work on my own company and eventually built that up to where I was able to quit my job and focus solely on this and been doing that ever since. That is so awesome. It's such a story I think a lot of people recognize and are familiar with, right. Transitioning from corporate or other jobs to their own business. But starting in 2007, that was a long time ago at this point. I'm sure you've seen a lot of changes over the years. Is there any significant thing you've noticed over the past year since you've gotten into everything? I mean it's always changing. The biggest change right now I feel like AI is such a big change compared to all the other changes. We're big changes. Like mobile has taken over everything. Mobile first for building websites and just, just most of your traffic, majority of your traffic will come from mobile. That happened around like 2013 is. Google started switching over from desktop to mobile focused optimizations. But AI is just something that's so new and we'll have to see what's going to happen. Where is it going to go or people are going to use AI or search on AI versus Google. Or it's just that kind of that. Mystery box right now I did, I do have chat gbt so I use it and it did ask me if I wanted to use like chat chat GBT as my search. I did it one time. I was like this feels weird and I went back to just regular Google. But I completely get it. The landscape is changing. So keeping up with that, we need someone like you so you can keep up with the landscape changes and tell us how it impacts what we're doing. But tell me, tell me more about what it is your business does and how you help people specifically in this world. So we make sure that when you, when people search on Google for keywords related to your business, your product, your service, whatever it is that you show up on Google underneath the ad. So the ads, you'd have to pay for each click anytime somebody searches on Google. And if you click on an ad, that company, that company has to pay for each click. Could be a couple cents per click. Could be a couple dollars for one click, it could be a hundred dollars for one click. Gets pretty expensive. I mean as long as you're making more than you're putting in, you don't have to worry about. You could keep running ads, but you don't want to always run them. That's why the SEO is right below the ads. Organic, the free listings and that's what I focus on is helping your website appear in those free listings so you could just capture that traffic when people are searching. Because people searching on Google, they usually have some intent behind those searches to make a, or learn more about a specific question, need help with something, and then eventually it might lead to them buying a product or using your services. And that's really what the goal is, is getting people from Google to your website and then ultimately having them reach out to you or whatever that conversion goal is. Right. We want people to find us and buy from us as business owners. Right. That's the ultimate goal. So tell, tell me, I'll say someone who isn't as familiar with SEO, like what exactly does that mean that you're optimizing? Like, how do you. What's then. And dumb it down for me to, to real easy, easy understand language. What, what is it that you're doing on my website? With SEO doing a few different things depending on what type of website you have. But there's some commonalities with all websites where Google feeds off text. Google loves content, really. Text, images, videos, audio. They getting much, much better at it, but they still rather have text. The more text you put into your website on every single page, the easier it is for the search engines to really read and understand and know what that page is about. Because search engines are just robots and the more you give to them, the more you spoon feed to them, the easier it is for them to understand that page and rank you for the correct keywords. But keywords really mean nothing to the search engines because they just don't trust anything anybody puts on a website. I could build a website and I could say like Brandon's dentist.com and Google's like, all right, are you really a dentist? Because we don't believe you and we don't want to just rank you and then have people go to your dental office and find out you don't exist. It's a bad user experience. People are probably going to get frustrated and say, Google, why are you showing me this dental office that doesn't exist? And they're probably going to switch over to Bing or ChatGPT or some other search engine and Google doesn't want that to happen. So Google wants to see that other websites are talking about you. And that's a trust signal to tell Google that you are trustworthy. It's called building what are called backlinks, getting other websites to link out to you. So if you're a dentist, you'd probably want other websites related to health and wellness. So other maybe dentists in other states or get on like WebMD or Yelp or Wikipedia or join your chamber of commerce in your area. But the more websites that talk about you, the more popular, the more trust Google gives to you. And then they look at those keywords to figure out what keywords to rank you for. So when you work with someone, you work with them to figure out how they can get these backlinks in other places to help their SEO. Yep. Or sometimes I have clients that have been around for 20 years, have a lot of backlinks built up, a lot of trust built up. But their website's just built in a way that Google can't read it and going in and cleaning it up. Because Google looks at code, they can't see the website. What we see is not what Google sees. Search engines just look at the code and the code is all text. That's why it gets all tripped down to text. And if you have the code in a weird format or you sometimes might block the search engines, they're not able to read that and they're not going to be able to know what keywords to rank you for. And that's really important. That feels like a puzzle. You got to put all those pieces together. You can't just do one thing or do another thing. You have to really do it all to make sure that you maximize that trust and then make sure that you get the correct keywords ranking on the search engines. So doing what you've done for so long, like what are the biggest mistakes that you see that impact people's SEO? The backlinks are the trickiest part because either people don't know about backlinks and have never heard about them, or they know what backlinks are and they're going on sites like Fiverr and buying a thousand backlinks for $5. And unfortunately, if you build a wrong type of backlinks, instead of ranking you higher, it's going to drop you down. And Google knows there's all these ways to like trick and game the system. And going on Fiverr, you're getting all these low quality backlinks. And what you want to do is get quality backlinks into Google. A quality backlink just means it comes from a site that's related to what you're doing. So if, depending on whatever you're doing, like if you're selling shoes you want websites are about like shoes or about fitness or about style. If it's stylish anything somewhat related. It doesn't have to be other shoe companies like I do SEO. Probably not going to get other SEO companies to link out to me because we're all pretty much competitors. But I could find SEO blogs or find podcasts about marketing or about advertising or just anything that's somewhat related to what I'm doing. That's what I want to be on. That makes sense. And I didn't know you can buy backlinks on Fiverr, so that's news, news to me. But okay, so note to self, don't do that. Where are they putting those links, you wonder? It's commenting on blogs. So that's why most blogs don't allow comments. Because back when I first started doing SEO, there's a tool with and still out there. And I, with the click of a button, you'll comment on whatever amount of blogs, 5,000, 10,000 blogs. And Google knows that blog comments anytime you have a comment. And well, in the old way you always used to say name, website and email address. So you put that in there, you're always getting a backlink. So a lot of people just go in there, put their name as a keyword and put their website URL in there and that became a clickable link. And you're able to do that on some really, really big websites. And that's why Google always updates their algorithm. Like in 2011 they changed it saying, hey, these backlinks, it's not the number of backlinks anymore because it's too easy to spam and get a bunch of low quality backlinks. We want good quality backlinks. So now really what you need to do is build a couple or more backlinks than your competitors. But usually that's around like 100 or so backlinks. So if you're buying a thousand backlinks from Fiverr, that looks really suspicious to Google. A normal website would only be getting a couple backlinks every single month, depending how big you are. If you're a big corporation, then of course you're probably going to get more. But small, medium sized businesses get a couple backlinks every single month. So naturally you just want to get a few and build it up and build it up. And over time that's going to see Google getting you more trust. But that's why SEO takes so much time because Google just doesn't trust you. And to build trust is not easy. So you're in the long game when it comes to SEO. How how speaking of that. So how long do you usually see that it takes for people get results from focusing on this? It really depends on the competition of those keywords. The more competitive those keywords are, the more time it's going to take. But also how old your website is. Like if I go back to that old example where I had a client that had website that's 20 over 20 years old, it has the word Amazon in it, I'm like, how do you get the word Amazon in it? He's like, I have this website before Amazon existed. So his website's really, really old. It was just built in a way that was really hard for Google to read it. But we went in, changed a bunch of coding things in the or changed a lot of the code and pretty much in a month they shot up to like the first three positions for almost every single key, what they, they wanted to rank for. But that's really rare. Usually it's the opposite where I get someone that doesn't have any backlinks and is a brand new website and we have to build that trust up and that's where it just depends on that competition. So if you can niche down and find something more unique that helps differentiate yourself, that really helps out. Because the more competition, the longer it's going to take. If you're just selling T shirts, lot of competition. If you can find something more niche, like maybe sell organic cotton T shirts for toddlers, still very competitive, but a little bit more niche. So the more niche you get, the, the faster you're going to see results. With SEO that makes sense. And have you seen anyone? Because we're talking about things that impact your bottom line. Right. So I'm going to ask. Have you seen anyone really get like a lot more sales or increase their revenue from doing this and focusing on SEO specifically? Yep. So usually once they start getting more traffic, that's where also the website has to convert. And that's why I try to work with the web or the owner of the business and the web developers and just making sure that your website is optimized for conversions because a lot of people will spend money on paid ads and they're like I'm not getting any conversions or they'll do SEO and they're getting all this traffic. But traffic doesn't really mean anything unless you get that traffic to convert. And that's where you have to build trust for people when they get to your website. So for SEO I have to build trust for Google to get Google to rank you. And once we get Google to rank you, then how do we get people to convert? And that's where try to figure out. Let's make your website look really easy to find everything. Don't clutter it up. Make sure it looks good on mobile, it's easy to purchase. If you're E commerce, make sure it's easy to buy. Make sure that add to card button is on the top of the screen because whatever you see on a screen is called above the fold. And most people don't scroll down. Majority of people never even scroll down on the website. So if you don't have all your important information at the top, like a value proposition of what's in it for me, maybe a video or a couple bullet points and then your call to action. A form, if you want people to fill out a form all needs to be on the top of the screen. And that's where a lot of times where I'll get people traffic and then they're just like hey, leads aren't coming in and I'm like we need to move this around and we need to tweak this. And doing little changes has had big impacts. Like one of my clients, they had a, they were a lead generation website and they had a really long form on the website for the contact page asked a lot of questions. Like it had first name, last name, separate, it was asking for their address, their city, state, zip code, all these things where you could kind of merge some of them together. So you just ask for a name instead of having two fields. Instead of asking for the address like the street, the city, the state, you just say zip code because from zip code you could get the, or you get the city and state from There because the less fields you have, the more conversions you're going to get, especially on mobile. And by cleaning up their form, we pretty much doubled their leads that they were getting. Because especially on long form, like you got to think about, do you really want to fill out all this information on your cell phone? And nobody has time for that, even on desktop at least it kind of auto fills it for you, which is great. But on mobile and you really have to understand or think anytime you're building your website or looking at your website, look at it from a mobile first perspective because that's where you're going to get. 60 of traffic nowadays comes from mobile and it keeps increasing. And you can check Google Analytics, it's a free tool from Google that will show where your traffic's coming from and you can see how much is really coming from mobile or desktop or tablet and gives you a wealth of information in there. Yeah, that's all great information. Yeah. And then two of the drivers that I mentioned at the beginning that we look at is leads and conversion rate. Right. So you want people to find out about you and you want them to convert into either sales or even if you're having people on, on your website, convert into a lead, depending on what you can consider a lead. So that makes sense. I mean I look at my phone and if it doesn't load, I feel like we're all like that. Right. If your page doesn't load fast enough or if you can't see what you need or I agree with you, forms are way too long, you might just abandon ship. So that's really great advice. And so you help people beyond just the SEO to help improve their website to, to get those conversions. Sounds like. Yeah, because I realized over the years SEO just gets you traffic, but traffic isn't a means to an end. And even I help out a little bit with paid ads because a lot of people that come to your website, no matter what, are going to leave immediately. Feel like half the traffic that comes to any website leaves immediately that bounce rate from Google Analytics. And if you can just follow people around using remarketing, that keeps you top of mind and gets gets people that were warm leads back into your funnel, hopefully. So those ads are very, very cheap. Where if you look at a product on Amazon and you see those ads that follow you around doing the same thing, and I do it for my website, that people come to my website and don't watch one of my free classes, I'm going to follow them around with ads for my free class. You've gone to my class but you haven't booked a free consultation. I'm going to follow you around saying like, hey, book a free consultation. And if you have booked a consultation but haven't signed up as a client, then I'll follow you around with like testimonials and reviews so you could sell all these different custom audiences. And the more trust points you have, the more, the more trust you're going to build, especially for things that aren't the cheapest. Like if you're just selling socks or something really cheap, then you probably don't want to spend money on those ads. But SEO, I've had people come to me five years later taking one of my classes saying, hey, I was in startup mode. I'm now ready to start the SEO, which just took me a little while. But you, it's a long buying cycle. That's where you have to understand your audience and just how to really resonate and connect with them at the right moment. That makes sense. So you help with SEO and you'll help with these other things and you have classes. Is there anything else that you do to help business owners in this area? Those are really the main things. I mean, I'll guide them on social media, email marketing, but emails, usually we have to have a really good lead magnet to get people to sign up or give their email address up. But after that I usually just tell the business, business owners, you should probably write the emails because if you have somebody else, it loses that authenticity and you know your business best and how to speak with the, with your audience and keep that tone and everything like that on point. So I usually help guide them with that stuff. But in general I just try to figure out where their audience is and how to get them in front of their audience at the right moment, whether it might be social. Like sometimes SEO doesn't work. If you have a new product and nobody's searching for it, there's not much you could really do. So social media would be a little bit better. And it's just trying to figure out where, where your audience is and how to get you in front of them. That makes sense. Which which of those things do you like doing the most? Is it the SEO? I like the SEO is the better long term strategy. I feel like Google's not going anywhere anytime soon. Except for AI is kind of mixed that up. But social and everything, I'm like, you can put all your eggs in one basket and focus on Facebook, but Now Facebook is kind of the foresight. Instagram took over and then now it's TikTok. So you have to keep jumping platforms. And to get your audience from one platform to another is not the easiest. Even if you have a really big audience to get them from Instagram to TikTok doesn't always work. It sometimes does, but it's tricky. So that's why I like the SEO is one of my better strategies. But email is always the best as well. Because email. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, it's just you get the full reach. So if you have 10,000 people on your email list and you email all them all are going to get that email. With social media, you post on social media and reach is so low that you don't really get that full engagement. I mean that makes sense. I feel like you can post something and you, you don't know how many people actually see it. Its usually a small number. I know I don't see half the half the people I follow on Facebook anyway when they post stuff. So all good focus areas. So if I'm a business owner and I want to get started with SEO, where would you recommend people begin? I would first start off with building backlinks and working on their website, their structure of their website. Because the sooner you build backlinks, the sooner you get rankings. Backlinks, I mean it takes about six months to get Google to trust a website. So if you're thinking about building a new website or starting a business, I would buy your domain name right away and then try to start building some hyper about it. Maybe do a press release saying like, this website's launching soon. That's a way to get some backlinks. Not the best backlinks because they're just kind of general news sites. But it doesn't hurt just to try to get some hype around it, get Google to see that other websites are talking about you and hopefully speed up that process because it is a more of a patience game with SEO, you got to stick with it. How do I know where I rank? I use Google Analytics. It's a free tool that everyone should be using to track their traffic. WordPress and Shopify and Wix and all these platforms will give you analytics, but it's not the same as Google Analytics. It just shows so much information. It's like big data overload. A lot of people look at just don't know where to go. And I just say click on everything. You're not going to break anything. And you're just going to learn so much information about your traffic, where they come from. There's also Google Search Console, that's another free tool from Google. Search Console is really for SEO. I'll show you what keywords you rank for, what position you're in, how much traffic you're getting. Google Analytics is just for all traffic, just general information. And then Google Search Console is for SEO specifically. It'll show you if you've been penalized for doing some things that Google doesn't want you to do. It'll tell you, it'll show you how fast your website loads. It shows you a ton of information on there. Interesting. So knowing that all there's all these tools that we should know about and be using, I assume you have some courses to help people, you know, learn how to use these tools and do things better, is that true? Yep. I do a lot of classes to help educate people and do them on. Well nowadays, mainly online, doing one in person and watch me in like three days for the first time in a long, long time in Los Angeles. So if you are around Los Angeles, come out. But yeah, usually they're on person. So or online, which is nice because now we can watch them anytime. It connects everybody and it makes it so if you're in another country you can just log in and it's all good. You don't have to drive. Find parking in Los Angeles. It's not the easiest and usually they're like after work or on lunch break. So can be tricky. But I like that Zoom has connected everyone and made things a little bit nicer. Even though it's still nice to do them in person. I'm excited to do it in person, but online it just makes it so much easier for everybody. Sometimes it feels like Covid's still happening. We all went online and never came back. So maybe some of my listeners might come see you in person or come see one of your classes. So I would love to know if there was one thing you would want someone to take away about SEO and the conversation that we had, what would it be? That you have to work up SEO and it takes time. A lot of people, I mean everyone wants that instant results just to shoot up those rankings. But with SEO, it is a long term play. You have to build it up and build up and building trust with Google takes time. So just be aware that the sooner you start building backlinks, the sooner you start getting Google and other search engines to trust you. And that's going to get your traffic to slowly move up. Sometimes it just jumps really fast. But in general with SEO, we just got to keep building it up and building it up. And over time, you're going to see that traffic just slowly but surely increasing. I love that. It's the long game. It is the long game. Listen, one of my takeaways is thinking about the mobile first experience. So when you're building your website mobile first and remember that people don't like to scroll too far. So starting with something that gets the interest and the action that you're looking for. But this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming. I want to know, if people did want to find out more about you or take some of your classes, where is the best place for them to find you? I create a special gift for everybody if they go to my website@seoptimizers.com forward/gift. That's S E O O P T I I z e r s.com forward/gift. And they could find that gift there along with my contact information and some classes I've done over the years, I've thrown up for free there so they could watch classes to see I do a lot of stuff that we talked about. And also if they do have a website and they want a free website analysis, I'm happy to check their website out from an SEO point of view and they can book some time on my calendar there as well. Awesome. I will put the links to that to your website and where they find your free gift in the show notes. Everyone can find that because who doesn't like a free gift, right? And if you're looking to find out more about me and what we do at New Light Financial Solutions, you can find us online@newlight fs.com but that is all that that we have today for this conversation of getting to the bottom line. Thank you again, Brandon, for coming on the show. I hope you all have a wonderful day and we will see you next time. Bye, everyone. Thanks for having me.