How To Rank #1 On Google SEO Tips Podcast ClearBrand

🎙️ SEO isn't dead, and I'm here to prove it! 🌐

When I started doing SEO back in 2007, people were already saying SEO was dead (spoiler: it's not). Fast forward to today, and whether it’s Google, Amazon, Yelp, or any search engine with a search bar, there’s always an opportunity to optimize. 🚀

On this episode of the Clear Brand Marketing Podcast, I join Alexander to dive deep into the ever-evolving world of SEO. We chat about everything from cracking Google's algorithm to how AI is reshaping the game. Plus, I share some insider tips on backlinks, blogging strategies, and why having systems in place is the ultimate key to SEO success. 🧩🔗

🔥 What you'll learn in this episode:
✔️ Why SEO is far from dead (even with AI on the rise)
✔️ The secrets behind ranking higher on Google without breaking the bank
✔️ How to build trust with Google using quality backlinks
✔️ My proven strategies for small and medium businesses to get more online traffic

🎁 And because I love sharing value, I've created a free gift just for you! Head over to SEOOptimizers.com/gift for free resources, SEO classes, and even a complimentary website analysis. 🎉

Hit play now and let’s optimize your way to the top! 💪✨ #SEO #DigitalMarketing #BacklinkStrategy #MarketingTips

👉 Ready to grow? Let’s connect at SEOOptimizers.com!

Transcript

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When I first started doing SEO in 2007, people were saying SEO is dead. And people have been saying that forever. And even if Google leaves, that's the. Great thing about experience. Great. Yeah, no everyone's been saying that forever. And I mean if Google leaves, there's going to be another search engine maybe. Or I mean as long as there's search engines, there's going to be SEO. But if things change to something else where you're not searching, then SEO is definitely gone. But for the time being, I don't see that changing because even with like. AI, you're looking for neuralink and you don't have to type anything. Your brain will just connect directly to the Internet, which is also terrifying. But until then, people are going to be searching for stuff. Yep. As long as they're still searching, then it doesn't matter if they're on Google or like I was saying earlier, like it could be Amazon, it could be Yelp, TripAdvisor. Anywhere that there's a search functionality, there's going to be SEO and ways to optimize to make sure that you get that visibility and exposure. So I don't worry too much about it, but it's definitely going to change. Welcome to the Clear Brand Marketing podcast where we take the mystery out of marketing and help you get more leads and sales with a clear brand and proven marketing tactics. I'm your host, Alexander. Today I'm talking with Brandon Leibowitz. He runs and operates SEO Optimizers which was founded in 2007. SEO Optimizers is a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium sized businesses get more online traffic which in turn converts into clients, leads and sales. Welcome Brandon. It's good to have you. Thank you for having me on today. So you've been doing this since 2007 almost the birth of Google? Not quite, but you've seen a lot I'm sure over the years. So I'm excited to get to learn from you and hear. I mean how basically how do we rank is kind of the whole point. How do we rank and get clicked on so that we can do what you guys talk about, which is get those clients in sales. And you founded this company, what made you want to found this? I'm kind of curious just to as we get started. I've always had the entrepreneurial spirit and in high school I made like a skateboard, love skateboarding, so made a clothing company for skateboarding and once I went to college kind of focused more on school. And not the company anymore, Even though I should have kept building the company up because it was pretty well known around my area. But went to focus on my degree, which I got in business marketing. And after I graduated from college, one of the first jobs I got was helping a company out with their digital marketing back in 2007, which I didn't really know much about it back then. They said, don't worry, we don't really know much either. We're going to learn with you and take you to classes and workshops and seminars and went to a few of these seminars that they took me to about digital marketing. And a lot of these people talked about like how they do SEO, but they also have like 10 different websites and do drop shipping and affiliate marketing and all this other stuff. And it made me realize I could work full time at this company and I could also go to like a local dentist or doctor or a lawyer or any. Or a restaurant and try to see if they want to help with SEO. Because the company I was working for, they made 3D lenticular products, which is very niche that he didn't really have much competition. And I realized I could just build it up. And worked at different advertising agencies over the years as a director of SEO and before work and after work and on my lunch breaks, I work on my own company and eventually built it up to where I was able to quit my job and focus solely on this. Just helping people really tap into that free traffic. That's great. And that's the way to do that's a great way to go about starting a business where you've got regular income so you're not super stressed about where's the next meal gonna come from. And you built it up till you could just go out on your own there. You seem pretty systematic in your approach just from the little conversation we've had so far. And does that kind of ring true with you? How do you approach marketing in general? Is it kind of like hey, here's what we're going to do today or are you doing a lot of systems and kind of back end like engineering things? Trying to make more systems and processes to streamline things because there's only so much I could do on my own. And if I'm trying to really push it and get it out there, especially for more competitive keywords, there's a lot that needs to be done with SEO and just trying to kind of. It's kind of like a check sheet, like making sure you check all the Boxes that Google's looking for in terms of what we know that they want to do or we know that Google's looking for to help you build that trust and relevance with those search results. So kind of is systemized a little bit because you got to make Google happy. And Google has certain things that they really put a big emphasis on. And if you skip that over, it means that the SEO is not really going to have that full impact. It's kind of like a puzzle. Tell people like, there's a lot of pieces to that puzzle, and if you skip some of these pieces, it's not going to really work out. And you have to just really make sure you tie everything together and make Google happy so they reward you with those rankings. All right, well, I'm excited to hear. I love systems. And that always to me indicates that there's a higher chance of success when people are actually systematizing following those, you mentioned, checklists. So we're going to have to get into all of that. I'm just going to use this time to learn and improve what we do over at clearbrand. But just for the folks who will go through this quick, because I know that a lot of folks are just want to hear what's on that checklist. But to start with, for the folks who might be newer to SEO, can you share what, what SEO is and why it matters? Yeah. So SEO is search engine optimization. And that means ranking websites in the different search engines, which is really just Google runs the show nowadays. There's hundreds, thousands of other search engines, but Google really just dominates. So it's really making sure that your website shows up when people search on any search engine, whether it's like Yelp, even Amazon, it's a search engine you get optimized to make your products rank higher on Amazon. But with Google, there's ads at the top. Those are all paid ads. Right below the ads are the organic, the free listings. There's 10 spots on that first page, Google. And we want to get your website in one of those 10 positions. But it's not just websites that appear when you search on Google. Images, maps, videos, products sometimes appear. So we want to optimize everything and try to give you as much free real estate as possible on that first page of Google without spending money on paid ads. That's really what SEO is all about, is just trying to tap into that free traffic from Google. Okay, so it's pretty simple. People go to Google to search for something, and the goal is to optimize the content for the search engine so that you rank on that first page and actually get clicked. So what, what rankings do you consider to be a win usually? Well, getting on that first page of Google is always a win because most people are somewhere way deep buried down on page 10 or 12. So getting you on to at least the first page of Google, because most people don't really go on page two or three or four or five. Most people just go on Google and whatever they see usually at the top or somewhere around the top middle is what's going to get those clicks. But of course we want to get you to the top, that's the ultimate goal. But initially it's trying to find that low hanging fruit like maybe you're on page two for a bunch of keywords. Let's try to push these ones up and get those ones ranked higher, faster. But eventually you want to ultimately try to get you to the top because that's what people trust and their eyes are drawn into the top and that's what they see first. And if you're up there, usually you're going to get the majority of those clicks. Okay, so there's kind of stages. It sounds like goal one, hey, let's get on the first page. Goal two, let's move that up higher. With the eventual, you know, the, the gold medal being let's get into that first spot. So there's some stuff happening in the SEO world today, especially with Google where AI is just changing the game. I want to get there here in a minute, but let's just have a layout of what are the basic principles of how you get onto the first page of Google and then we'll talk about how AI is kind of changing everything. I mean for the most part. Well, it's not really a one size fits all for every website is different. But there are some general things that Google looks at, which is the, well, Google looks at the code, Google looks at your coding and they want you to put keywords in different places so they can better understand and know what that page is about. Because Google's just a robot. And what they do is just read that code line by line trying to decipher what that page is about. And the more places that you put keywords, the easier it is for the search engines to really understand what that page is about. And that requires you going in like a title tag or meta description and header tags, all this tactical stuff. But one place that doesn't require any coding is just adding more text to your website because Google feeds off text. And if you could add more text to every single page on your website, that's really going to help the search engines better understand and know what that page is about. But unfortunately they don't trust you. Or Google doesn't trust websites because too many people have gained the system over the years and put keywords on their website, saying like, I'm a doctor. And Google's like, really? Are you a doctor? Because we don't want to just send people to your doctor's office and find out you don't exist. And Google The way Google became popular back in the 90s is they said we're not just going to look at keywords. Were going to look at what are called backlinks. We want to see other websites talking about you. The more websites that talk about you, the more popular Google sees you as and the more trustworthy Google sees you as, and the higher they're going to rank you. And that's really a big part of SEO, is building backlinks from sites that are relevant, authoritative to build that trust and Google to want to rank you higher. And what is a backlink? A backlink is a clickable link from another website that points to yours. So let's say for example, you're on like entrepreneur.com you're reading an article and there it says Brandon Lebowitz and you click on it and it goes to my website. I'd be getting a backlink from entrepreneur.com so the more websites that link out to that are related, the higher your rank. Okay, so we've got a couple things so far. We've got some technical stuff in having the right words in the title, the meta description, the headers, things like that. And then you kind. Of simplified it. And you said, well, an easy way to do this is to add more content. How much content would you say a landing page or a blog should have? You basically need to do more than your competition. In the past, a lot of people would say, like, write 400 words or 800 words or a thousand words. But that's not really how Google works because every search is different and you have to really tailor your content to that person searching. And Google, Google wants to offer value and wants to make sure that your website is offering value to the user. Because if it's not offering value, you're like, google, why are you showing me this result? And you're probably going to not use Google in the future. So Google really makes sure that these websites solve the issue or the question or whatever that you're searching into the Google. And you need to figure out how much text you need to add to your website. You need to take your keyword that you want to rank for it, whatever that keyword is, search it in Google, Open up all those websites that are on that first page of Google skipping over the ads, because ads are not doing the same thing as SEO. But open up all the organic, the ones that are ranking there, and you can see how much text they have. And basically you have to average it all out. So if everyone's writing a thousand words, you should probably write thousand and 100 words. If everyone's writing 50 words, you don't need to write a hundred words. So you don't have to write hundreds or thousands of words and just need to do a little bit more than the competition. Okay, and, and so do you have a any recommendations for tools that might do this or, or do you guys kind of just do that by hand where you're going to go through that first page, you're going to, you're going to basically do a word count on that page or give a tool. Theres paid tools that are not cheap, but like Surfer SEO is a tool that you could pay for that does it? But yeah, sometimes they'll do it by hand, but it helps out using a tool. But they do get pretty expensive if you do a lot of searches. So Surfer we use Surfer at clearbrand. What is your perspective on surfer SEO? Surfer SEO is a great way to just speed things up because essentially you are trying to figure out who's on that first page of Google, how much SEO have they done and how can you do a better job of it. And Surfer will take stuff that's really important, like word count, headers, stuff like keywords that they see commonly showing up. But then it's just a tool. You have to really write the content and make sure it offers value. It's good content, and that's where you have to have good writers, at least to help supplement all that. So it's not going to do the job for you, but it has. It's. It, it provides these metrics where for anybody who hasn't used Surfer SEO, it it kind of does what Brandon was just talking about, where when you initially provide the keyword that you're going to be writing an article about or a landing page or whatever it is, it looks at the first page of Google and it kind of counts up the words of each of these pages, and it looks at the words that are the specific words that are being used on those pages. And then it provides recommendations for you based on what it's finding on Google. So in the sidebar, it gives you, like, an overall ranking of how well it thinks this page could rank on a scale of 1 to 100. But then it also has goals. So how many words does it think you should have? And it gives you a range, and it gives you all these keywords that it thinks you should include, and it tells you how many times you should include each keyword. Now, it's not as smart as Google, so it often includes, like, misspellings. So we were writing one recently that included the word nonprofit, and it wanted us to include nonprofit as one word and non dash profit and non space profit. Now my understanding is Google is smart enough to know that this is all the same thing, but Surfer's not. So how much do you trust Surfer's recommendations when it says you need to have this exact keyword in there 15 times, whatever it is, do you actually just go through and do exactly what it says, or do you guys have a little bit of wiggle room when you're doing that? I mean, there's always some legal room because they're just guessing. I mean, they're just looking at the data and trying to guess, but nobody really knows how Google works. So Google might not even look at some of that stuff. I'm sure they look at the number of times those words are mentioned, the variation, synonyms, plurals, reordering the words around. But in terms of following it, you don't have to follow it completely because it is not Google. And it's just trying to guess at what Google wants. But, yeah, It's a good starting point at least to folk to base your content off versus just kind of cold going at it blindly and saying, let me just write a thousand words and let me put my keyword in here five times so I could get that right. Density. But is that really what matters versus the competition? And if you could spy on the competition and get some insights, that's going to help you better make that correct decisions. And Google does a lot more than what Surfer is doing as well. There are these Google leaks recently and one of the things I maybe I was out of the loop on this. I don't know, maybe it was new information. But if you use Google Chrome, this is my understanding, you can correct me here. But if you use Google Chrome, they're basically just following you everywhere. And they're using their Chrome users to determine how people are interacting with these websites. And so they actually get to see this live behavior and they can use that to say, oh, this is helpful, or it's not. So it's not just these keywords, but it's also, is it good? So you can't just pump out an AI thing and call it good because it has the right keywords in it. It has to be helpful. Have you seen the same thing in Google's kind of looking at people's browsing behavior? Yeah, they look at user experience as another one that they've said. They look at this one a long time ago, which is like if someone goes searches on Google and clicks on your website, but then all the people that go to your website leave immediately. That bounce rate, if Google sees a lot of people are clicking and then coming back to Google, that's a negative signal to Google saying, maybe you shouldn't be ranked number one. Let's move you down to number two and let's move number one up and see how do people behave. But of course Google's going to track everything if they have Chrome. Yeah, going to track everything like Gmail is free because they're reading all your emails looking for keywords to send you ads. Like anything that Google puts out there for free is because it gives them more data, like Google Maps. All that stuff is just giving you more data about, are you going to the store, are you asking for directions for this local business, are you calling them up like what's going on? And they could see all that stuff and they're tracking everything that they can. Yeah. So that kind of brings us to some of the things that are happening with Google and depending on the SEO person that you talk to, some folks are kind of freaking out. I've had, I've talked to some owners of marketing agencies recently who don't do SEO. So of course they're going to be more likely to say that it doesn't work. But one guy actually said he thinks SEO is dead. I wouldn't go that far. But what are some of the changes that you've seen happening recently and how is that impacting the SEO strategies at your company? SEO Optimizers. When I first started doing SEO in 2007, people were saying SEO is dead. And people have been saying that forever. And even if Google leaves, Love, that's. The great thing about experience. Great. Yeah. No, everyone's been saying that forever. And I mean, if Google leaves, there's gonna be another search engine maybe. Or, I mean, as long as there's search engines, there's gonna be SEO. But if things change to something else where you're not searching, then SEO is definitely gone. But for the time being, I don't see that changing. Because even with, like, neuralink and you don't have to type anything, your brain will just connect directly to the Internet, which is also terrifying. But until then, people are going to be searching for stuff. Yep. As long as they're still searching, then it doesn't matter if they're on Google, or like I saying earlier, like, it could be Amazon, it could be Yelp, TripAdvisor. Anywhere that there's a search functionality, there's going to be SEO and ways to optimize to make sure that you get that visibility and exposure. So I don't worry too much about it, but it's definitely going to change in terms of how people search. Are they going to be using AI more, or is AI going to be in the search results? But Google's already been kind of doing that with featured snippets, which they did like 10 years ago, where they'll kind of give you the answer at the top, which has taken a lot of traffic away from people's search or websites, because Google will just give you the answer right there, which is kind of what AI is doing. And that's kind of what Google's AI is doing right now, where they're testing out AI, where there's like a big featured snippet at the top of the search results, which is kind of what they've already been doing. So I'll have to see what's going to happen, how it's going to change. But that Definitely takes traffic away, especially from like sites like Wikipedia where you're like, what is the birthday of this celebrity? And we don't have to go to Wikipedia. They'll just give you that answer right there. They'll have that knowledge graph on the right hand side too, showing like their date of birth, like their spouse, their children, all this stuff is pulled in. Or if you're searching for like scores of like a basketball game, they'll show you that in live time, in real time, live on the, in the search results. So was that. And that takes away traffic from like the NBA's website. So all this stuff is good and bad and it's good for users, but it's bad for people that own websites because that traffic is now just staying on Google. Because Google knows if you're searching for the score of a basketball game, you're probably not going to click on the ad. So they want to keep you on Google as long as possible. So you do a search maybe for like that sports team jerseys or something, and then you want to buy that jersey. Google hopes you click on an ad because Google only cares about making money. So all the stuff that they're doing is just to make more money. That's really what they care about. Of course they want a good user experience because that makes them more money. But that didn't make them money. They wouldn't care about that because they're just in it to get that ad spend. The more clicks on ads, the more money Google makes and the happier Google is. So one I prefer. I appreciate the context there. Just knowing that Google's been changing things since the beginning. People have been you know, like chicken Little crying that the sky is falling since the beginning. And even you pointing out the snippets. Well, Google has been taking clicks away from websites for a long time. The snippets and the answers. They had those dropdown questions for a while. And so AI isn't necessarily breaking Google. It's just kind of the next step in this iteration. And it's kind of defined by this conflict that Google has. Well, we need our users to use Google, but that's not how we make money. We make money on when they click on ads. So it has to be functional enough that people use it and they keep coming back to it. Like you were saying, people spending more time on Google, but also they gotta get those ad clicks. So we know that, like, AI can't go too far with providing answers because then there won't be any ad clicks for those. So there's a limit. There's kind of these boundaries around what Google can and might change because they still need to get their revenue. Yeah that's great context. So how do you approach these Google now, has it changed anything in the way that you choose what to write about or how that you, how you write articles for your clients? Not too much. I mean, it's still kind of the same. It's just now he's got to be aware of AI, and now I got to make sure my writers don't use AI. But Google said last year, we don't care who writes the content. If it's written by AI or humans, it doesn't matter as long as it offers value. Yeah. And unfortunately, most of my writers are using AI and then charging me full price. I'm like, all right, do I still need to use you? I still, I don't rely on AI because it's not accurate. So I could have them like an outline on ChatGPT and then have the writers write that content. But if I just have it, like, write an article, it's going to be full of those AI hallucinations where it makes up stuff and it doesn't tell you that it's making it up. Which I feel like it should at least tell you. Like, hey, we don't know the answer. We're making it up. But a lot of people just copy it verbatim and then just post it on their website. Like, I heard a lawyer did that when Chat gtp, Chat GPT first came out. They had it right. Like a deposition, and it had incorrect information and it got that lawyer in a lot of trouble. So if you use it, like, as a tool and a reference, that's fine. But if you're just having it write your content, it's not quite there yet, but it is a good kind of starting point. Like, if you don't know what to blog about and you're like, stuck on blog topics, be like, hey, can you 20 blog topics that are have positive sentiment and include this keyword or variations of it. So the More specific you get, the better it's going to be. But still really in its infancy. So you just got to kind of be careful with it. But it does help you out and saves a lot of time if you do it properly. Yeah, okay, so. So if I'm hearing you right, AI isn't in terms of Google's AI, it's not scaring you, and you guys are kind of just going about business as usual, but in terms of like, using AI, there's kind of limits. So it's nice for an outline, it's nice for maybe a first draft, but definitely not the final draft because it's making stuff up, pulling things off of bad websites. I saw somebody type into the search bar when Google's AI was first coming out, how many rocks should I eat a day or something like this? Did you see this? And it had said everyone should eat one small rock per day. And it had its source, and it was an old Reddit post from 15 years ago where some. Who knows if it's Reddit, so who knows if this is an actual doctor or not, but some doctor had said that small rocks help with digestion. So Google, I mean, that's AI in general. So if you're going to use it to write an article, like you were saying, it's not going to be the final, final draft. Youve at least got to fact check it and maybe, maybe actually rewrite it. AI is kind of boring. ChatGPT writes in a boring way anyway. I mean, is that kind of. Am I hearing you right in terms of the approach and then the way that you write it? And that's also why Google still runs the show, because Google just doesn't rely on keywords, they rely on backlinks to support those keywords. Because ChatGPT is just reading through and reading all that text. But is it really accurate? And if there's no backlinks? The backlinks are kind of like popularity, like a trust signal. And right now I say, like, AI is kind of where it's just the old search engines before Google, Link as, or any of those other search engines that didn't really look at backlinks, they just looked at the keywords, which, it's a good starting point and it's great at like, compiling information really quickly together. But you still need to double and triple check because who knows what's real or what's not real? And people could put up, like you said on Reddit, you could put anything on Reddit and You put anything on your website and it's going to read it, is it really accurate? Or like what's correct, what's not correct, what's real news and fake news. It's like, can't differentiate. Like, people could barely differentiate what's real or fake news and AI is not going to be able to do that. I mean, hopefully someone could differentiate that, but it's just, it's so tough, it's so complicated right now that what is real, what's not real, and how do you know what to trust and what's really accurate? Well, and that's a, that's a great comparison. That's, that's a great reason for Google to trust backlinks. I mean, I, I hadn't thought about that. That ChatGPT is able to consume a lot of information and it's able to summarize it in cool ways. But, but it can't determine authority is what basically was what that means. So let's actually go, let's go there to the backlinks, because this is how Google is determining authority is by how many and what backlinks you have. So a link on somebody else's website that sends people to your website. When I'm telling a client about this, I kind of describe it like having a recommendation for a blind date. You don't know anything about this person. So if a stranger says to you, hey, I have a friend that you should go on a date with, no, I'm not gonna. You don't know me. You know, why would I, why would I do that? But if your best friend says to you, oh, man, I've got, I just, I've got the perfect person who I think you should go on a date with. Well, now there's this different level of trust. And so Google kind of approaches websites how we might approach a blind date. And the more websites that refer to your website, it's kind of like the more friends that you have saying you should go on a blind date with this person. It helps to build that trust since you don't have the ability to know if they're trustworthy or not on their own, since it's a blind date. So we've got the number of folks referring, but we also have the trustworthiness of the people who are referring and also the relevance of the people who are referring. So walk me through your, your plan for backlinks. I'm kind of stealing your thunder here. I didn't mean to do that, but how do you approach backlinks at SEO optimizers? Yeah. Well first we would want to. Well, everything that you said is perfect and spot on. It's like those recommendations are referrals and trust signals. And what we need to do is get you, get your website more of those backlinks. And there's lots of different ways to build backlinks and some are better than others and some are actually bad and will do more harm than good. And that's where the majority of Google's algorithm updates are really just to stop spammers from people gaming the system and finding loopholes and ways to build backlinks that are really low quality backlinks that are not going to move the needle and where the quality. So we want to build quality backlinks. And a quality backlink to Google means it comes from a site that's related to what you're doing and has some authority. Like if you're selling T shirts online and you got a backlink from a restaurant, looks a little weird. Like why is a restaurant giving this T shirt company backlinks? I mean maybe they did T shirts for the restaurant so they posted up there. But if the majority of the backlinks came from restaurants pointing to a T shirt company, Google's going to get confused. So you need to get the backlinks from sites that are related to what you're doing. And if you're selling clothing, you want websites about like fashion, about style, about maybe the materials that you're buying. So anything somewhat related doesn't have to be another T shirt company because you might be competitors and they probably won't want to give you a backlink. But anything somewhat related, that's what Google wants to see. And then the more authority that website has, the more SEO value that's going to be passed on. If I gave you a backlink from my website, it's a good backlink but it's not the same as like a New York Times or Wikipedia or Wall Street Journal. So the bigger the website, the more trust Google gives to those websites and the more value that backlink has. But relevancy really is very, very important. You got to find those sites that are niche related. And I usually start off by looking at my competitors backlinks using tools like Ahrefs or Moz or Semrush or any of these paid tools to check backlinks. You can look at your competitors backlinks and then one by one try to figure out or try to reach out to the sites and Figure out how did they get that backlink? Did they do an article, did they do a blog, did they do a podcast, did they sponsor an event? Did they join like a chamber of commerce or whatever it is? You could pretty much reverse engineer their entire strategy and see what's working and skip over the low quality backlinks, ones that are like in foreign languages or just don't make sense because you don't want to build every single backlink that your competition has, but you want to find the ones that have that relevancy and have that authority. Yeah, talking about some of this, man. When we were just getting started, I had hired somebody on Upwork to provide some backlinks and they label themselves as white hat and all this. So black hat is typically what's the bad backlinks. And I want to hear your perspective on some of those. What those are. But here's one example. So this person on Upwork was like, hey, yeah, we do white hat backlinks, high authority, all this stuff. So I paid for the service and they put a spreadsheet together with all the backlinks that they had gotten. And these guys were just this person. I don't know if they had a team or not in another country. So you never really know. And they're just pumping them out. They're just getting backlinks almost every day. But they were all weird. So I, you know, I'm going through these sites and it looks like they're basically just building websites that are essentially backlink farms. Sometimes they're building a website like a blog spot. Is that what it's called? Google Blogger or whatever? Yeah it's called Blogger. So it's like this random string of letters and numbers.blogspot.com and it's like hastily thrown up. It's just a little bit of content with no design or anything. Oh, but there's the backlink. So. This is an example of a bad backlink. What are some other backlinks that you think people should be avoiding? Yeah, Those are called PBNs, private blog networks where people build a bunch of websites and make them look like real websites, but they're just a blog and they're about, usually they're on random topics and you kind of spot them out. If they're like writing about like casinos or pharmaceuticals, those are the types of sites that usually post on them. So also that's a big thing is making sure that the website that you get the backlink from is only related to your topic. If you see these backlinks coming from sites that post about every topic, it's not the best. I mean there's Huffington Post, Forbes, they write about everything. But in general the sites that write about everything are usually fake. PBN blogs. Yeah, those are high trust. High trust, like news authoritative sites. So I can see that being different. But you're saying you're talking about a site that writes about everything and, and is low trust. Nobody's ever heard of this thing, potentially a weird URL. So there's some ways that we can figure it out. Okay so PBNs, public blog networks are bad. What else would you say is a bad backlink? I think where it's too easy to get. So blog comments are ones that hopefully no one's doing that anymore. But commenting on blogs or joining forums just to get backlinks, unless it's like really related. So I had one client, they did car parts for Mercedes and Mercedes has this forum. So joining that forum and getting backlinks from that forum is really good and also get some, some traffic. But if you just join hundreds of random forums, that used to be a strategy that worked pretty well, but again now it's all about relevancy and making sure you go for quality, not quantity. So getting one or two good backlinks is going to be much better than getting a thousand low quality backlinks. And anywhere where it seems too good to be true, too easy to get a backlink, like even social media doesn't really help out. Those are all kind of blocked from Google. So Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, all that stuff doesn't really help out with SEO because also they're not related to what you're doing. So find those niche related websites, that is really number one. And then trying to get a link somewhere in the content, not just as a blog comment or something like that. So Google looks to where the backlink Is and usually the higher up the back, because Google reads from top down. So the higher the backlink is, the more likely they're going to read it, trust it, and follow that backlink and count it as a SEO backlink for your website. Okay, so, so a few questions on, on what you're saying here. So number one, let's say you do a guest post on a website that is in your industry, right? So we know that it's relevant because it's topical, it's in your industry. Youre gonna do a guest post in exchange and you're gonna put a link in there to link back to your site. Would you put the link in the bio, which tends to be at the bottom, or would you see if there's a way to link back to your site within the content of the article or both? It depends. Like sometimes they don't put bios. So if they're not gonna put a bio, then I definitely want it in the content. But if they're gonna put a bio that adds that authorship, and that's also something that does help out with SEO is getting your author name on a bunch of different websites. So if you could get your name authored on those websites, that's great. And then usually they will say like Brandon Lebowitz from SEO Optimizers, and they'll give me that backlink in the bio. But in the content is always going to be best. But if you could have both places, that works just as well. But usually the higher up the better. Great. Okay, so we want that to be high up, relevant sites. If it's too easy, it's probably too good to be true. What about so we just completed an SEO audit for a client and we did exactly what you're talking about. Backlink gap analysis with Semrush is what we use for this. And you know, we put in some of the top competitors and it lists off. Here's the backlinks that you all have. Here's the ones that your competitors have and you don't. And so some of the ones on that list are do kind of seem too good to be true, but it's things like Indeed. Right. So there's a company profile page on Indeed. What do you think about links like that? Are they, Is it worth going and creating a company profile page on Indeed, or would you not even waste your time? Those ones I think are good, like clutch and Indeed. And all these ones where they're kind of like Business profiles. But if you're just only relying on those for backlinks, that's not the best. But to Google, a normal business would have a mix of backlinks. Like you don't want all your backlinks to be perfect from sites how related to what you're doing do follow looks a little suspicious. So having that mix and even social media like to Google, a normal business should have like a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or at least some of them. Doesn't have to have all them, but it just makes you look more real, more legitimate, more trustworthy. So having those pages on Indeed tells Google maybe you're hiring. But I know in the past a lot of people would just create listings on like all these crowdsourcing, crowdfunding type of websites like GoFundMe and they would create listings on there, get backlinks. So those ones where you create like company profiles and like weird or smaller sites might not be the best, but like an Indeed or a Clutch or stuff like that helps out. Especially for local, trying to rank locally, getting your name, address and phone number and all these different websites will move you up. So it's a big strategy for local and it's not a bad strategy for national either. Just you don't want to overdo it. You got to have that mix of backlinks. So a few of them from there, not a big deal. Okay, so if it, if it seems like it's actually a legit company profile that that can help with the, the trust, then and it's easy, so might as well. That's kind of what I'm hearing you say here. What about paid? You know, when you start reaching out to folks and saying, hey, do you want to swap backlinks or can we do a guest post or stuff? If you haven't done this before, you know, for the listeners you will get people who say, oh yes, we would love to put your link on our website and it'll be $200. What is your thought on that. I mean backlinks, unfortunately you gotta pay to play. And most websites do want compensation because they know that you're doing this for SEO. Of course, Google says don't buy backlinks, but Google doesn't really know if you're buying these backlinks or not. And it's not the best thing to do. I try to get the free ones. I mean, Google wants you not even to do any outreach. Google says you write good content, people are naturally going to link to you. But that's not really the case. You have to do some outreach and build those relationships. It's not a bad thing to spend the money on those backlinks. But if you're just going to like New York Times and be like, hey, here's $2,000, write an article about me, which you can do that. There's lots of writers that you could pay off. On pretty much any website you can imagine, there's writers that you could pay off and they'll write articles for you and give you those backlinks. Say, maybe steer clear those. But if a blog wants like $50 because they say, oh, it takes time for me to edit it and publish it, so they're trying to recoup those fees. That's how they justify it. I would pay for them sometimes, but I try not to if I can. Okay, so you said something interesting there, which is, Google says don't do it, but we kind of have to. How much do you feel like you know, we should. You just blindly do what Google says versus. Cause I've seen other things where, where Google says X or why doesn't matter. And then there's some semrush or Ahrefs report where they looked at a million websites and they said, well, actually it does appear that websites that do that rank higher. You know, what's your approach when you see Google kind of put out a recommendation like that, like, don't buy backlinks. Yeah, you just gotta kind of take everything with a grain of salt that Google says. Because Google's main interest is on ads. And SEO is there because they know if they're for if Google was just all ads, nobody would use Google. So they have to have that balance of the SEO and the paid ads. But they want to make it tough and get people confused and frustrated. So you just give up and be like, all right, not ranking on Google organically. Let me just spend the money on paid ads. But Google does tell you some things that matter, like making sure your website is mobile friendly. If it's not mobile friendly, they're not going to show you on mobile devices. But that's all comes down to user experience. Like if you're searching on Google on your cell phone, you click on a website and you have to like, zoom in. It's not a good user experience. You're like, google, why are you showing me this search result? So it all just comes back to just making sure Google look good. And the better you make Google look, the more they're going to Reward you with rankings essentially. So, but yeah, like Google even said a few months ago or recently that like backlinks are not that important, but never really seen a website rank without backlinks. Maybe they're putting a little bit less emphasis on backlinks, but I still say they are. Probably the majority of Google's algorithm is based off those backlinks. And it's still where I spend most of my time is building these backlinks along with the on page. But building the backlinks is just so important and it takes a lot of time to build those backlinks. So so Google, Google's ideal world would be one where nobody is actually trying to game the system. And so that's part of where their recommendations come from. That's kind of what I'm hearing you say. But we all have to follow best practices and do the work that's within our control to look good and look trustworthy and authoritative. So there is maybe we wouldn't call it gaming the system, but playing the game, you know, something along those lines. So you just said that you spend a lot of time with your clients building backlinks. So when you put together a strategy, how much of your time is building backlinks and how much your time is doing other things like fixing the headers. You know, you mentioned that earlier. Fixing headers and title tags versus writing content. I would say, well probably 80% of my time is building backlinks I would think because just depends. Well, also depending how big your website is. Yeah, because once you opt like if you're a local business and you have 10 pages on your website, I'll go in and optimize all those pages, all the titles might as do keyword research, add schema make sure the sitemap, all that stuff is in place. And then I would be blogging on their websites like one or two or couple times a month depending on how frequently they want content on their website. Because you have to add more content to the website, but there's only so much that you need to be, that needs to be done on the website on the on page. And once you're done with the interlinking the pages together and doing all the stuff that Google wants to see for the on page SEO, then it really. Does come down to those backlinks and then touching up the on page SEO, cleaning it up, adding new things that Google might say like hey, let's add let's you had a blog post from seven years ago, let's update it, add some new content on it and let's add a little little sip of code saying this blog was updated in 2024. Whatever you're in. So it shows that it's not like a 7 year old blog post which Google thinks like if it's seven years old and someone wrote something a month ago, let's try to show something ran a month ago because it's more topical and things like that. But the backlinks just take so much time. Building relationships with these websites, depending on what strategy you build but use but usually I'm doing like blogger outreach and reaching out to niche related websites, trying to build relationships with them, talking to editors, seeing what type of content they want, writing the content, sending it over to them to make sure it gets approved and scheduled in a content calendar and ultimately getting it published on a website. And takes a lot of time finding these websites, finding good websites, building real relationships, not just spamming people. Because a lot of people that do the guest posting just spam websites and it's not a good look, but done properly it works really well. But doing it properly means you have to take a lot more time and invest time analyzing each website, making sure it's relevant, making sure they have good content on it, making sure they have a good backlink profile, making sure that all the things that need to be in place for a good website are in there. So you kind of essentially like auditing these websites like quickly, not spending too much time but just doing like a quick higher level audit. So it sounds like there's kind of a flow here where you start off with fixing the technical SEO stuff, title tags, meta descriptions H1s. We should, you know, for example we should only have one H1 on each page. So kind of going through that stuff, cleaning up what they have is what I heard you say where you start then you'd said that you update things basically how much Google expects. So how much would you say that is? Well Google wants you to update your content or update your website in general. That's why blogging became popular 15 years ago, because back then there was no WordPress and it was just like Dreamweaver and custom coding. And to update a website you need to know some code. But blogging made it easy to Update your website, add fresh content. So Google wants to, to make sure that you're still in business. Your website could have been sitting there for 10 years and never been updated. You're still in business. But Google looks at it and says are you still running this business because you haven't touched it in 10 years. So just updating it every once in a while. You don't have to update everything all the time. But if you have like a blog post from like 10 years ago and it's still relevant, then just go in there and just make a couple changes to it just to make sure that all the information still is relevant. And then you can change a date saying now it's a blog post instead from 10 years ago. You could say it's a blog post from a month or a couple days ago. So it just helps with that relevancy, that freshness part of Google's algorithm. So when you update the date, you know, let's say that we're in WordPress and in a WordPress blog over in the right bar you've got the date of that it was published. Do you change that date or do you add a line towards the top where it says where you might say updated on and you'd have a different date. So then it has an original date and then an updated online. How would you go about that? Yeah, I wouldn't change original date, I would just update it saying like last updated on and then you put that last date so it says when it's first published and then also shows when it was last updated. So it that's going to be the better because if you try to change the dates, Google's going to see that. And sometimes your URL structure is attached to the dates too. They might break your URLs and cause all these other issues and redirects that don't need to be done. So that's where it's just better leave it as is and just have a little. Or just put a sentence at the very top. Last updated last week or whatever it is. So when you say snippet of code you know, let's say that we're in the back end of WordPress. Are you saying like is paragraph text fine or are you doing something kind of fancy with this to make it display for Google in a different way? Nothing too fancy, but you could add like a H2 or H3 tag. I'm going to do the H1 like you're saying you only want to have one H. Ah1 tag per page, but you can make like an H3 tag so it gives a little bit more emphasis on it. Still not saying this is the most important thing, but we're bolding it or italicizing it. Google looks at all that stuff a little bit. Not much, but they still look at that like, okay, you bolded this word. It must be somewhat important. Okay, so putting the text in there that says last updated on with the date is acceptable. And then if you make it an H3 or bold or something, that can tell Google that it's a little more important. But just for our listeners, you don't have to go in and code something. You can throw some text in there is what I'm hearing. Yeah, just. Is that right? Yeah. Do you want that at the top or does it matter? I would usually put at the top or wherever the date is, because usually most blogs say when this is published. So I would just have it near that date or at the top because then people see it and people will say, okay, I'm reading an article from last week versus 10 years ago. So got it. So we're, you know, so we build a lot of websites with WordPress with Divi. And so Divi has this theme builder function. So we get to choose where we're displaying the, the date that the blog was published. So you're saying just kind of put it near that Yep Usually I'd put at the top for people because people are going to read that blog and they're going to see that date and they're like, okay, this is written or updated a couple weeks ago. Awesome. So it helps for people as well. Okay, awesome. That's. That is great advice. So do you typically blog for your clients once a month or once every other week, or how would you approach that? That strategy. Just thinking we want Google to know that this is being updated, but we don't want to take too much time with the blogs because link building is still pretty important. So how do you figure out the frequency there? Kind of varies. Like, some clients I have have written hundreds of blogs. So it's like, let's go in and clean those up, make sure we interlink them and just fix those blogs. But again, a lot of people have never blogged and I'm starting from scratch and got pump more content out, but I don't want to overdo it. So, yeah, usually like at most once a week. I mean, it depends on your industry too, like talking about something really boring and stagnant versus something like sports or entertainment. You could talk about that every single day, but I'm talking about SEO. Do you really want a blog post every single day? Some people would, but most people are like, this is way too much information. Just give me like once a, or twice a month, something like that. So it's not as is overwhelming. Okay, you mentioned interlinking the blog. So how do you go about that? What's your you know, your kind of checklist for linking the blogs to each other? So just like you build backlinks to your own website, Google looks at your own links that point to other pages on your website, and Google kind of follows them. And it's like you're building backlinks to your own pages. And I'd make sure that you build backlinks to your own page or interlink your blogs together. So when you're writing a blog post, also, it's for people, too. So, like, if you're reading a blog and there's no links in it, they get to the end of the blog and they're like, all right, what do I do? Do I leave a comment? But if you have a blog and you have all these links in it that point to other blogs, that gets people to stay on your website longer, read more content, get more page views, and hopefully ultimately convert into whatever your conversion goal is. But Google sees that backlink as a little kind of trust signal, saying like, hey, this page is about this, and this page is also linking to this other page. As long as they're related to each other. Don't just link to random pages, but link to related blog posts and then link it to one of your service or product or category pages as well, just to help Google follow all that and get that topical relevancy. Okay, so, so if I'm hearing you right, the, the the pages that have more links to them, even if they're from your own website, Google sees as more important. So we want to be emphasizing that, but not just linking from a rant, really. We're approaching in internal links the same way that we'd approach external links. We want there to be a level of. So it's a similar topic. So if it's an article. So like on this podcast, for example, when it's on our website it might make sense for us to link to our SEO services page for our own internal link. And we're going to link to your website. So you get a backlink out of this, and maybe we might have A link that says if you want to learn more about SEO, here's another article. And that might be on our website as well. And we get another internal link. Would that kind of be how you'd approach this? It's all related to SEO, since that's our conversation, that's the topic, and we can kind of choose intentionally what pages we want to boost with those links. Is that the right approach? Yep And then also looking at the text that you use to build that backlink, the anchor text, and making sure that you try to pick anchor text that has keywords related to that post and also that is going to hopefully get someone reading that blog post to want to click on it and stay on your website longer. So kind of doing it for people and for Google more so for Google for SEO purposes, but also for people just to keep them on that site longer. That way they don't just read that blog and be like, all right, what do I do next? And then they just hit that back button and go back to Google and they forget about your website. Okay, so how do you give me an example of good anchor text? How do you write that? And for the listeners, the anchor text is the text that's hyperlinked. So if it's I'll let you take it from there so that you can include your example. Yeah, the anchor text is. Yeah, that, whatever that text is, that's a clickable link. That's called anchor text. So if it says like click here and you click on it, click here is anchor text. But Google looks at that as kind of like the keyword. So if you just say like click here and you have that link to more blog posts about SEO, that's okay. But it would actually be much better to say like, like read more SEO blogs here. And then you have SEO blogs as a clickable link. So making that clickable link more related to that page with keywords in it helps out a lot. That same with the backlinks that you build to or when you're building external backlinks from third party sites, you want to make sure that they put some keywords in that anchor text. You don't want just to be like click here. I mean it's okay. You want to have some of them say click here because if all of them are just your main keyword, it looks a little weird. But same with the internal links, like not all of them should just be the main keyword. Use synonyms and plurals and variations and reorder the words around and then some of them would just say click here, but majority of them should have at least some keywords that are related. Google said should put like 33% of the keyword or 33% of the backlinks. Should be your main focus keyword. 33% or the anchor text, I mean, should be your main keyword. 33% should be like generic keywords like learn more, click here. And then 33% should be your company name or your website URL. So just make it look natural because if it's all just one way, that looks very suspicious to Google and they could follow those trails, those breadcrumbs, and see that you're doing SEO and potentially penalize you for doing over optimizations. Too much SEO. So do you build out a spreadsheet then when you're doing this for a client so that you can keep track of what the anchor text is? I mean there's tools. So like if you're using like WordPress, there's tool or plugins that could help out with that. Like Link Whisperer is a plugin that can take care of it. But not everyone I work with is on WordPress and sometimes you have to manually keep track of it through spreadsheets and things like that. But just depends. So Link Whisperer, tell me how that one works. I haven't used that one before. It just kind of looks for keywords and it tries to find blog posts that have top or titles related to that keyword and tries to recommend saying, hey, you wrote a blog post about link building. And here's another seven blog posts about link building that you could potentially interlink together. Recommends the anchor text as well. Does it only do it for internal links or for X for backlinks as well? Just internal links I believe. I mean it's still very helpful. Yeah Saves a lot of time. So link whisperer for WordPress, but I don't think there's much with like WIX or Squarespace or Shopify. Unfortunately it's a little bit more closed. Like WordPress is nice because anybody could build any tool for it and you could customize it however you like. Whereas other platforms kind of lock you in those platforms and don't let you fully customize them. Okay, so link whispers for, for internal links and then when you're reaching out you, you would tell somebody the anchor text that you would like. So let's say that you're going to do a link swap and you've identified a blog post from another website that you would like a link on. You'll reach out, initiate the conversation. Obviously we're not going to say, hey, can I get a link with this exact text and this exact blog? Tomorrow Nobody's going to respond to that. So walk me through how you do your outreach for backlinks. The outreach is offering something. So if I'm just asking for a backlink, they're not going to say yes. But if I offer something of value, that usually helps incentivize people, like a blog post or being a guest on a podcast or something where you're, like, giving your time and not just asking for that backlink because they're going to say no, or they're going to respond back saying, like, pay me 500 bucks, because you're just asking for it, backlink, but you offer something of value, then it helps out a little bit more. And if you're writing a, like, if I was doing a guest post for you, then I would write that post. I would put the backlink in that content somewhere, so I'd pick it out. But if I'm a guest on your podcast, you might just link out to my company, and that's fine too, or that's not a bad thing. So I try to just let it be more natural and not, I mean, if something's really off that I'm like, all right, can we change this? But in general, as long as it seems good enough, it's going to hit a different variation, a different way of linking. To me, that's good, because then it just mixes it up and makes your backlink profile look more natural. Which is ultimately what we want to do, is make it look as natural as possible, not just overemphasize. Like, only link out to me using the word SEO company Los Angeles, because that looks a little strange if every single backlink was like that. So in the past, like back in 2007, I'd be like, yeah, change it to SEO Co. Los Angeles. But think in, like, 2011 or 2013, they had an update that said, gotta diversify that anchor tax, otherwise we're going to hit you with the over optimization penalty. And we don't want that to happen. So you reach out, you fill out a form on the site, or you send an email to the info, or you use a tool like Apollo I.O. to get somebody's email address. You send them an email, you start off with an offer, and you're offering a guest post, you're offering a podcast interview. That's how we met, was you reached out to to me, which is a great strategy. It worked. So congratulations. We receive a lot of these. So we also receive a lot where people are telling us that they want to link to our website. And so for somebody who's kind of Uninitiated in the SEO world, they might just get excited they might not know what it means, number one. Number two, they might get excited and not know what's going to happen next. And that's fine. But if the person agrees to any of these things, then kind of part of the deal is you've made this offer. Theyre going to get something out of this. A link, a guest post, podcast, interview, whatever it is. And then part of the deal is you're going to say, great, can you link back to my website? If it's a guest post, you're just going to build it in assuming that they're going to copy and paste. Great. In a link swap, you know, we've had this folks reach out, hey, we want to link to your website. We have this blog that we think would be great, awesome. And now at this point I'm just like, great, where do you want, what page do you want to link on? You know, and they generally have an idea of which blog or whatever that they want us to put a link to their website on. And so it turns into this mutually beneficial trade. Anything that you'd change about that summary? No that is a good way to do it. Yeah, I mean there's lots of ways to do it doing the link swaps. But you gotta be careful with the link swaps because Google said we don't want reciprocal backlinks where it's like I link to you and you link to me. Google knows that we're probably just doing that for SEO purposes. And it they say it cancels it out. Who knows really if they're really doing that? But I try to try to get one way links that are inbound and try not to link out to the other person. But sometimes it does make sense. Like I was on your podcast, I probably would link or to, or post the episode on my own blog and link back to you. So it does become a reciprocal link. It's like, I'm helping you, you're helping me. And then those links probably get devalued a lot. So instead of getting that full SEO value, Google's like, all right, maybe we're going to cut this down and give you like 10% of the value or 20. Who really knows? They don't tell you. But they have said ever since I started doing SEO, like reciprocal links don't count. They actually cancel each other out. But I doubt they cancel each other out. But I'm sure they drop the value of that backlink and say it's not as valuable, but it's a great way and it still works. But you could do like three way, four way, five wavelength exchanges and do link wheels and get like 20 people and yeah, still kind of picks up on those patterns. They're able to because they're pretty smart at it. But that was a little bit. So, so this is great. This is something I wasn't aware of, you know. So guest posting and podcasts would be preferable because you're offering the guest post. So that's what they get out of it. And you don't have to exchange a link in a link swap scenario you're recommending well, especially as an agency. Well, we got a bunch of clients. Well, what if I give you a link on one of our clients websites? What if you link to my website and I'll give you a backlink from one of our clients? Is that kind of what you're saying? It's like tangential. This is like the link wheel. I idea. Yeah, that's a better way. Like I have a blog about social media. It's on a whole different URL. Then I have my SEO company, then I have a couple other domains. So I could be like, yeah, give me a backlink to my SEO company and I'll give you a backlink from my social media blog. So it's not just that one way reciprocal linkage. Now it's three way link. Google still kind of could pick it up, but it's a lot tougher, especially if you have it on different hosting and different IP addresses. And make sure it's like one built on WordPress. Another one could be built on Blogger or something. Just kind of like you're building a pbn. But these are all real websites. I'm not just PBN sites. So it's the same idea. I see what you're saying. So you have a social media blog that really is just for this purpose, Is that what you're saying? I mean, it used to be my main focus. When I first started doing SEO, I had this social media blog and now I've kind of let it be on, put it on the sideline. But it still has a lot of SEO value and can use that to just make it look a little bit more natural. But I don't really get too many people offering link exchanges. I mean I still get a decent amount, but I just delete those emails. I don't even look at them. People that are offering guest posts. Yeah, I just Skip them over. Because usually it's just low or they're just hitting me up from a random website in a different country or foreign language. I'm like, no, this is. Or gambling website. A lot of the guest posts, it's like I would not, I would never post this. I appreciate that you wrote this, but like, no, but that's part of your strategy. So you just write better content or that's the part of your strategy. Be more selective on the sites that I reach out to. So not just reaching out to a hundred websites, which in the past I've done that, where it's just like, spray and pray and like, hope someone gets back to you. But it works. But it doesn't really work as well as picking and choosing 20 or 50 good websites and really honing in on them and trying to build a good relationship with those websites. Okay. And then, I mean, we work with clients who. A number of clients who have multiple arms of their business that have multiple websites. So that's a great strategy for folks. If they own a lot of. Not a lot, but maybe some business owners own multiple companies. Or some folks that we work with have separated out like the store to a different URL a completely different URL from their main site. So anybody who has that can immediately leverage that as part of their strategy. If somebody does not have multiple websites, is that something you recommend that they spend some time doing? Or what would you recommend for them? I mean, it's a lot of work and then you're kind of like building a pbn. But if you make it a real website and try to make that like my social media blog, I was trying to get ad revenue from it from like Google Adsense and doing affiliate links and things like that. So it was like a real website. But if you're just throwing up a blog just to throw it up there, it's going to look like a PBN and it's not going to do the job. Yeah, well, and I would say this is a great reason to. For a company to work with an agency, it knows what they're doing, which, you know, is surprising how few of them actually do. But to find an agency that knows what they're doing and has a number of clients, the agency is able to leverage this strategy on that company's behalf. They can engage in this, hey, we'll get you client links. And then we've got to get these other guys links too. So we're going to be putting links in this company. Of trade on yours, we'll put some of those trades on theirs and it all ends up working out. They at least have the option to use their resources, which would include their clients websites to do something that Google sees as more authoritative. It's actually a great reason if somebody's on the fence about working with an agency to find one that knows what they're doing and, and go for it. So is most of your strategy guest posting with your clients or do you do some of this kind of link wheel stuff with them? No, I try to do the guest posting or trying to look at the competitors backlinks as well and analyzing the competitors strategies and seeing are they sponsoring events, are they giving out products to influencers if it's an E commerce website or where it may be. So yeah, everyone's going to be different. But like E commerce, if you're selling like something cheap or low cost, then try to give out product to get bloggers to write about it. That's a good way. But if you're selling something that's very expensive, you can't really give it out. Or you could be selective with who you give it out to but it adds up no matter what. You're spending money somehow on these daft links and any way to minimize the costs, that's going to be the best for the client. Okay, so you start with looking at the backlink analysis, seeing what the competitors have, seeing what's relevant, seeing how they got those links and then you kind of build a strategy from there. And if you're going to do outreach it sounds like guest posting is the preferred strategy over a link swap. But I like that idea of like just offering something. Can we offer the product, can we offer an interview? What else can we offer besides just a straight link swap? Is that a decent summary or would you add anything there? No, no, just kind of offer value. Like if you're just asking offer value it might work but it's probably not going to work. If you offer some value and incentivize out of the person then you're going to pique their interest and get them to at least inquire. It doesn't mean they're going to give you the backlink but at least they're going to try to learn more about it. So try to just think like put yourself in that person's point of view. Like if you're receiving all these cold emails about trying to get blogs on your website, probably just going to ignore most of them. But if they offer value and be like, hey, I have an email list. I'm going to share this blog to 5,000 people. I'm going to post it on my own social media. Ways to incentivize them and differentiate yourself helps out. Okay, cool. So even offering, well, guest post will give you this post to put on your site and then we'll send it to our list. That's value. Thats great too. Yeah, yeah. That's another way to try to cut costs. Especially if they're saying like, pay me 500 bucks, that's a good way to offset those costs. Yeah, but this is also making the idea of paying for a link more attractive. That's value. Money is value. And if there is no other option and it's a good website with some good relevance, might as well. So does this kind of encompass your SEO strategy? We've talked about some technical SEO, getting the website cleaned up, which these tools that we've mentioned, Semrush and Ahrefs, they can, they help with this. They'll give you these they'll tell you what pages to focus on, they'll tell you what to fix on those pages. So you can, if you're new to this, you can just jump in using these tools which are expensive but very helpful. You can pay For SEMrush for one month, for example, audit your site, go fix everything, get the backlink analysis and then don't pay for it for the next month. Just cancel this. You could do that if you wanted to save some money. So going through your strategy, we've got technical SEO, we've got content, we've got backlinking. Is that basically it or do you, is there, is there more that you do when you're serving a client to get them ranking higher on Google? I mean majority of it is like on page fixing all the coding, technical issues and then putting that trust through backlinks and then depending on like if they're E commerce, trying to optimize that Google Merchant center feed, if they're a local business trying to get them up on Google business profiles. Every website is different. But in general it's like the content backlinks are two things that every website needs. And then it just depends on what type of business. If you're a service, local service, if you're E commerce, they're all going to have slightly different strategies on structure of the website and hierarchy. But it all comes back to the on page SEO stuff. Okay, so that, that and when you say on page SEO, that's where I was seeing the technical stuff. Is that right? Fixing that, making sure that the site is like cleaning your house before people come over. You just got to make sure that your site is well done before you go do this. Because you can spend all your time doing backlinks. And if your site's a mess Google still wouldn't trust you very much. I've had lots of clients, like not lots of like one or two clients where they've been around for like 25 years. They have all these backlinks, all this trust built up. But Google couldn't read the website, made a few changes and they went from being nowhere to ranked number three within like two months. Normally it doesn't happen that fast. And now they're ranked number one for pretty much all their keywords. Because now Google could read their website and this website's like 25 years old. Building backlinks consistently, it's just didn't have the keywords at the correct places. Missing a lot of important elements. Google couldn't read the website, so but it could be vice versa. You could spend all your time cleaning your website. If you don't build backlinks, they're not going to trust you. So you got to do both. But backlinks are where I'd spend a little bit more time. Okay, well, and I'll add something too. We've fixed some sites where a web design agency had basically messed up redirects when they launched the site had www and then they launched it without it and they didn't communicate that to Google or we had somebody who's who another company had launched their site and they had changed and I can see how this would be done accidentally, but they had changed all of the blog URLs. So that was either during an import, like an export and import or it was during when they were setting up WordPress, they In WordPress there's a setting for. And you mentioned this earlier, is the date part of the the URL? Or is the date not part of the URL? Is the category part of the URL? And so they must have just selected a different option. In the build process all of the blog URLs changed and they didn't add redirects. And so that's, that's part of what we've got to be paying attention to as well. Because if Google suddenly says well these blogs disappeared, but look, there's all these New ones. That really decreases trust. We've got to make sure that we're doing these redirects. Well. Also that mostly matters in a web redesign, a website redesign. Most of the time folks aren't going to be changing URLs. Although I have seen folks who would randomly change the URL of a page and not add a redirect. So that's not great. But you had mentioned that earlier, we really want to leave the URL alone. We want to leave the date of the post alone and then add that last updated on line instead. Well this seems like a great strategy. Anything else that you would add? I just be patient with it all. Like SEO does take time, so don't expect immediate results. Unfortunately, if you want immediate results, got to run like paid ads or social media or email. But SEO is a long term play where you have to build it up and build it and build it and it takes time, so just work at it. Build a couple backlinks every single month and that's a huge win. So don't think you have to build a hundred backlinks all at once, but just slowly build it up. And this, you know, this goes back to what we mentioned earlier about the systems, like really just systematizing these processes so that it happens consistently. Thats huge. And the patience is huge as well. SEO is fantastic because it'll consistently bring in leads once you've got it figured out and you're ranking. Unlike Facebook ads or Google Ads where the minute you stop paying, the leads are gone. 100%, just gone. Right. But with SEO, your invest, it's more of an investment where you're building this up and then if for whatever reason you're like, hey, we're gonna take a month off. Well, you're not really gonna lose a lot in a month. But if you had to take a month off from Facebook or Google Ads, it's all gone until you turn it on and you start paying again. So it is slower but it ends up being very high value overall. Well I appreciate your time today, Brandon. This has been insightful. Clearly I've learned something while we're here and that's exciting. So where do people find you if they're like, man, this guy's it and we gotta hire him to do rseo. So for anyone that wants to learn more or stuck around to the end, I created a special gift for you. If you go to my website at S E O Optimizers com that's S E O O P T I I z e r s.com gift and you can find that there. Along with my contact information and classes I've done over the years, I've also thrown out for free so they could see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about. And also if they want a free website analysis, I'm happy to check out their website from an SEO point of view and they could book some time on my calendar there for free as well. Okay, so this is high value stuff. So you've got seooptimizers.com to find you. You've got a gift@seoptimizers.com gift and then free audit, free classes and teaching that you've done so really valuable today. Brandon, I really appreciate it and hope to have you on again soon. Thank you for having me on.