Mastering SEO Turning Traffic into Revenue - About That Wallet Podcast

🌟 Get ready to supercharge your SEO game! 🌟

🎙️ In this episode, I chat with none other than Brandon Leibowitz, the SEO mastermind who has been cracking the code to Google rankings since 2007! 🚀 From finding the right keywords to optimizing your website for conversions (because traffic means nothing if it doesn’t turn into 💵), Brandon breaks down the secrets to getting noticed online.

🧩 SEO isn’t just about traffic; it’s a puzzle of backlinks, bounce rates, and Google’s ever-changing algorithms. But don’t worry—Brandon’s here to help you piece it all together! 🕵️‍♂️

💡 Whether you’re a small business owner, content creator, or someone just starting your website journey, this episode is packed with actionable tips like:
✨ Why one-page websites are a big no-no.
✨ The power of naming your files properly for SEO (yes, even your podcasts and videos).
✨ How to use free tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to track your success.
✨ And, of course, how to make Google trust you!

🚨 BONUS: Brandon’s got a special gift for YOU! Head over to SEOoptimizers.com/gift for free classes, a website analysis, and more tools to dominate the search engines. 💻

📌 Don’t miss this insightful convo—it’s your ticket to SEO mastery.
🎧 Tune in now, and let’s make your online presence unforgettable!
#SEOOptimizers #SEOExpert #GrowYourBusiness #PodcastLife

Transcript

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And from there, that's where you got to make sure your website converts. Because SEO gets you traffic traffic, targeted traffic that has buying intent if you target the right keywords. But once people get to your website, how do you get them to buy? And that's a whole another field where it's conversion rate optimization, just making sure that you maximize value of every visitor. That way you don't lose that traffic. Because unfortunately on in general, most websites lose about half the traffic. It's called bounce rate. So half the people that come to a website leave immediately just because, well, of tons of different reasons. Usually the website loads slowly. It doesn't look good on mobile, or it's not what they're looking for, or just cluttered, it's hard to read through and things like that. So getting people to your website is what SEO does. Welcome everybody back to another exciting show of the about that Water podcast, where we help you build strong financial habits so that you can have that confidence talking about money, spending money, or even having that fun conversation at that cookout talking about money. So I have a special guest today who is going to help you take your SEO to a whole new level. And I cannot thank this guy enough because he actually found me through SEO stuff. Apparently the page is actually ranked. So, Brandon, how you doing today? I'm doing well, thank you for having me on. All right, so, man you've been doing this for so long. What got you into SEO? That was something I did not plan on, didn't really know about it. And after I graduated from college, got the first. First job I got was doing digital marketing, which my degree was. Business marketing is back in 2007. So digital marketing wasn't really taught too much in school and I didn't really know much about it. And the company that was starting to work for said, don't worry, we don't know much either. We're going to kind of learn with you, which I thought was interesting. Like where I take your classes and workshops and seminars and kind of just learn alongside you and let you learn while you implement some of these changes on our website. And did that for a while and especially going to these seminars, just realized that you could work full time at a company, but you could also get a little side hustle where I could offer SEO to a local business that's not a direct competitor of the company that I'm working for, and did that for a while and worked at different advertising agencies as a director of SEO and before work and after work and on my lunch breaks, I'd work on my own company and eventually built that up to where I was able to quit my job and just been doing this ever since, man. So I just recently talked about this a lot on my show, and I actually try to bring it up more often than not, which is understanding that our jobs allow us to fail, but we get paid to fail. And like them taking the leap on your skill set, we're like, hey, we don't know, but we don't have the time to do it. We hired you for your time. Learn it and let us know. And it's like, once you gain that knowledge, nobody can take that away from you. No, that's the nice part. But you gotta test and try. And if you don't try and you're not testing, and unfortunately, sometimes you don't succeed, but you learn and grow from it, and that's really what matters. Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit? What is SEO? Yeah, SEO is search engine optimization. So that means ranking websites on search. Search engines, which really is just kind of Google really runs the show. So when you search on Google, there's ads at the top. Those are all paid ads. If you click on it, those websites are paying Google for each click. Could be a couple cents, could be a couple dollars for each click. Could be a hundred dollars for one click. It's pretty expensive. But right below that are the organic, the free listings, which is what SEO is all about. There's 10 spots on that first page of Google, and what we want to do is rank your website in one of those 10 positions. Yeah. So being ranked high is very important in being noticeable, especially for smaller businesses. Considering like, my podcast is small as it is, I guess you would say, considering it's an employee of one. But what is it like? Is there like a website that somebody can go to to kind of check out their ranking if they have a website? Yeah, if you have a website and you want to see how you're performing, then I would use like, Google Analytics or Google Search Console. Both are free tools from Google that will let you see your traffic. So you can't see other people's traffic, but you can see your own and just sign up. It's free to use. You have to install a little tracking code on your website, which is not that hard. And if you don't know how to do it, I would just Google it and just search how to install Google Analytics for. And then you fill in the blank. If you're on WordPress, how to install Google Analytics for WordPress. If you're on Shopify. How to install Google Analytics for Shopify. And it shouldn't take more than 30 minutes. And once it's installed then you're going to be able to see where your traffic's coming from, what pages they visit, how long they stay on your website. Google search console will show you what keywords you rank for, if there's any like errors, if your website loads slowly, if you maybe even been penalized by Google. Hopefully no one gets penalized from Google. And instead of ranking higher, Google actually sometimes will drop you down because they don't like your website or think that you're not a real legitimate, trustworthy business. Yeah, so like we hear this term, we kind of get an understanding of it, but how does this SEO process turn into money? Because we trying to make some money on our websites, we're trying to get noticed. But what, what is the, the end result of having a good SEO? If you're ranked on Google, people are going to search for your keywords related to a product or service or whatever it is that you're promoting and that's going to get people to your website. And from there that's where you got to make sure your website converts. Because SEO gives you traffic traffic, targeted traffic that has buying intent if you target the right keywords. But once people get to your website, how do you get them to buy? And that's a whole another field where it's conversion rate optimization, Just making sure that you maximize value of every visitor that way you don't lose that traffic. Because unfortunately on in general most websites lose about half their traffic called bounce rate. So half the people that come to website leave immediately just because, well of tons of different reasons. Usually the website loads slowly, it doesn't look good on mobile, or it's not what they're looking for or just cluttered, it's hard to read through and things like that. So getting people to your website is what SEO does. And then once people get to your website, you gotta figure out how can I get people to trust my website and want to buy off of me versus a competitor or just going to a brick and mortar store if you're selling products. Amazon is a competitor to almost every e commerce website. Unfortunately that makes sense. So because I noticed a lot of smaller businesses or so like say for my podcast and even though I'm located in Maryland and I want to go to like a mom and pop shop, like, hey, I noticed that your website Isn't that great? You know, why don't you come on my podcast or something like that to help build a backlink? I've heard backlinks a lot. It just means that your link is on somebody else's page, but what's the importance of having one? So Google doesn't trust websites because anybody could put keywords on a website. And a lot of people have manipulated and still to this day try to game the system by putting keywords that are not really what their website's about. And that's why Google became popular back in the 90s is they said, we're not just going to look at your keywords, but we're. Because that's what all older search engines would do, is they would just look at keywords and pull those keywords out and then rank you accordingly. And I could build a website and I could say, like, Brandon's dentist dot com. And he was like, all right, are you really a dental office? Because we just want to make sure that you're really a dentist. We don't want to send people here and then find out that you don't exist or you're scamming people. So Google said not only we want to look at your keywords, but we want to look at what other websites say about you. So if I'm a dentist, I should be on, like, WebMD or Wikipedia or Google Maps or Apple Maps or Yellow Pages.com Chamber of Commerce. So the more websites that talk about you, the more kind of popular Google sees you as, the more trust Google gives you, and the higher they're going to rank you. So backlink is really just a clickable link from another website that points to your website. So let's say you're reading an article on, like, Wikipedia, and in there it says Brandon Leiboitz, and you click on it and it goes to my website. I would be getting a backlink from Wikipedia. So the More websites, other websites that talk about you, the higher Google is going to rank you. That makes sense. So that could be the reason how you came across me then. So when you did your Google search, how did you find me? Like, what did you search to find me? My advanced search operators. So I put, like, these things called, like, site colon and then in quotation marks, podcast. And then I put keywords, and then it's going to show me websites related to podcasts that are related to my keyword. And it's a little complicated, a little technical. I have full classes. I do that. I've done for free that I've thrown up on You Tube that shows step by step how to do that. If you just search my name, Brandon Webot on YouTube, you can see it's the link building classes I did or videos I did, which shows you how to do those advanced search operators and really find targeted websites to help you build backlinks to get you to rank higher on Google. Because Google's whole algorithm really is based off back or heavily based off backlinks. And the more backlinks you have from sites that are related to what you're doing, the higher Google's going to rank you. That makes sense in because also some of these folks that like to geek out with me I used to do HTML a long time ago. I kind of slowed down on that and a little bit of css. But I would see embedded in that there's some coding called like the metadata and, or like the meta description. What does that actually help people out with when they building their website? So once you build backlinks and get Google to trust you, Google's going to read your website to figure out what keywords to rank you for. And what Google sees versus what we see is much different. Google can't read a website or can't see what we see. They just look at the code. So Google looks at your code and reads it line by line, trying to read that code and trying to figure out what this page is about. And there's certain areas that Google puts a little bit more emphasis for SEO purposes, like a title, tag or meta description. All this stuff kind of gets technical header tags, schema all this stuff. But one place that's really easy that anyone can do without coding is just add more text to your website. Every single page. Not just your homepage, every single page, add text to it. Because Google feeds off text, they can't read images or videos yet. They're getting much, much better at it, but they can't really read them. All they can read is like a file name on an image or, or a file name on a video or a podcast or whatever it is. So if you have any content that you upload to the Internet, make sure you name that file name. Something descriptive like this episode, you can name it. Search engine optimization strategies that work in 2024 with Brandon Leos or something like that, dot MP4 or whatever. But putting those keywords in really helps out a lot because they can't really, they just feed off that text. So everyone needs to add more text to Their website, that's very, very important and easy, doesn't require any coding, no techn knowledge, just add more text. Google's gonna reward you with more rankings then. That would explain why I'm getting more hits on my videos. Because what I've been doing lately is actually explaining it fully of like the whole podcast, actually putting the word podcast in the actual file name. Even when I uploaded to YouTube or even uploaded to Spotify or even Apple, like to make sure that their full name is spot out. Does that help out or is that just kind of like I'm faking myself out at this point? No. The more you do to make it easier for them to read and understand and know what you're trying to rank for, the more they're going to reward you. If you just have an image on your website and name it image.jpg they're like, all right, what is this? But if you name it descriptive words and then you have text around that image or that podcast episode, if you can transcribe it, or if it's a really long episode, timestamp it, summarize it, that really helps out for YouTube, for any website, any platform, because they all really feed off text. They're getting much better nowadays, especially with AI and understanding audio and video, but still not perfect. And the more you help them out, the more they're going to reward you. Like even putting subtitles or closed captions on your own videos instead of letting YouTube do it, putting your own, that really helps out because then they read that text and that's like you transcribing the entire video to them. That makes sense. Okay, I'm had to start doing that for more often because I did it for a couple videos, but I haven't did it for all of them. Just to kind of test out to see what happens and what works, what doesn't work and see what the people actually resonate with. Is there something that somebody who's starting a brand new web page or they just started a company, got a domain name, they have. Have a place where they want to host their particular website. Now they just got a blank canvas. Is there like Because most people do those one pagers. I've seen a lot of one pagers. Is it good to have those, like, little anchored links or just kind of like just throw a bunch of text and just keep it as is? One page limits you. Because the more pages you have, the more keywords you could target. Each page on your website can only really target about like three to five words. After that kind of loses relevancy. So if you want to target more keywords, you need more pages. The more pages, the better off you're going to be. That's why blogging became popular is after a while you build a website and you could say, like, I'm a. I sell Windows and I do Windows. Then you can have pages on your website about like, selling windows for, like, homes for cars, for commercial real estate and things like that. You have all these pages that list out all these services. So if someone is searching for like Windows for cars, you have a page about that that makes you really relevant. But after a while, there's only so many pages you could create. And then you want to rank for new keywords. So like, you might want to rank for how to replace my car window or my car windshield myself. You write a blog post about that, then you rank for that keyword that someone's searching for, like, how to replace my car windshield. And hopefully, well, they'll read it. And either they can fix it themselves or they're just like, all right. This is way too complicated. Let me contact you. So it leads them into your website, but without having those more pages or more pages, you're not going to be able to do that. So one page websites are really, really bad for SEO. They really limit you down. They look nice, they look aesthetically good, but in terms of rankings, it's going to really hold you back significantly. Yeah. So why do you go so hard into SEO? Why not any other business? I just kind of fell into it and been doing my own thing or I mean, I love skateboarding. So been doing a little passion project, a little side hustle of trying to build up a skateboarding company. Because I've helped all these companies out over the years. I was like, maybe I should just follow my passion and help myself out. But SEO has always been interesting and it was something that. Just trying to figure out Google, it's like a puzzle. So just trying to. Because Google changes their algorithm all the Time. So it's not just doing the same thing over and over and over again. It's keeps it interesting and like helping businesses and watching them grow and watching them succeed. Yeah. So what's the hardest thing about SEO then? Because it seemed like it just kind of came out of necessity versus like something you really wanted to do. Yeah, I had no idea about it, but do something with marketing. So coming business marketing and digital marketing was just something I was just starting to pick up back then and just kept going with it and realized this is probably the future. Traditional is still important, but it's not as relevant as digital and especially nowadays. I'm glad I stuck with it. Back in 2007, no one knew what SEO was. I mean I barely knew. And trying to get clients, like trying to get like little freelance projects here or there was really, really tough. Now seems like it's new Hot topic, everybody's talking about it and everyone's trying to jump into SEO. So glad I got in sooner than later. But it is something that's really. And as long as there's search engines, people are going to be searching and there's ways to just try to make sure that you get that visibility that you're looking for. Yeah. And I do appreciate you keeping the energy going with SEO because you could easily just say, you know what, this isn't, this isn't scratching your itch like you want it to. Like most people who start their businesses, everything's going to be small up front. But like Coca Cola only sold like 25 cans their first year. So it's like this is a marathon and you're track, you're on track and your timing is excellent, especially now. So everybody can look for you. As the SEO guru at this point, would you consider yourself a guru though? I definitely do it for a while. Definitely. Passed my 10,000 hours by far. So I feel like, yeah, been through the weeds and seen a lot of the changes over the years because Google changes all the time. So see now back in 2007 to now, it's changed a lot. It's going to keep changing. With AI and everything else, it's just going to makes it interesting. So it just keeps you on your toes. Yeah. With AI, is that going to impact your particular work or you think it's going to be helpful for you now that you have at least a little leverage? Im not sure. I'm more worried about if Google just shifts to AI only in the search results. So AI will help any business out because it creates content, it can write articles for you. It create blogs like I was talking about earlier, Blogs are very important. Create content. It's not the best content. You have to edit it. So bun just use AI and just copy verbatim. But you use it as like a starting point to help you write outlines and things like that. So it does help out even social media. You could say, write me 50 social media posts about SEO. Or I can even say like, here's my website. I've written hundreds of blog posts. Write a social media post for each one and then I could schedule them all out. So it saves a lot of time. And unfortunately I feel like copywriters are going to. Writers, content creators are fortunately going to. Everything's going to shift to AI for them. SEO, not too worried about it because can't build backlinks. Could do some of this, like title tags and meta descriptions, they kind of do it, but it's not really accurate. So feel like I'm safe for a while, but we'll have to see how. Long that is got you. So for people who are looking into getting into SEO, where did they start? Like as a business? Like for them getting into this type of business? Yeah, they should just start learning, reading articles, blogs just trying to podcast, maybe joining Facebook groups or forums and trying to learn as much as possible. And then test. Don't just read and read and read, but take action and see what works and got to test things out. Perfect. So we coming up on the third segment here, which is a feature. So what skills or habits that you feel is going to take you to that next level? Just managing business now. So doing SEO, but also trying to grow a team and manage and hiring and doing systems, processes and everything else that comes along with owning a business. And that is important. A lot more than I thought so. A lot. But it is all very, very important. Yeah. I actually started reading the book the E Myth Revisited, and they were talking about the manager, the technician and the entrepreneur and just having that separation because it seems like you're, you're a good technician, but it's like, how do you branch out and step away from that technician piece to more the entrepreneurial piece. That is a tough part. Stepping away and delegating and been doing that a lot more. But it is tough if I just. Get out the way I'm doing it. Yeah. Just because you want to have that control. But if you want to be able to grow, you can't just do everything yourself. Yeah. Is there Anything you want to leave the audience before we dive into the final four questions? Yeah, well, yeah, I mean one thing is just like with SEO, just be patient. It does take time. So does take about six months if not longer. I mean sometimes it'll be faster, but just in general, Google doesn't trust a website and they're not going to rank a website quickly. It takes time, especially nowadays. So be patient. Don't get discouraged if you're not ranking right away because it does take time if you want immediate results. Paid ads, social media, email marketing. But SEO is more the long term. We have to build it up over time. Yeah. Oh one thing you did recently post on Twitter. I was just checking it out. You're talking about video SEO, because this is going to be posted on video side of the house. Is there any tips for those older people who are looking to get into video SEO should. Well, yeah, I'm gonna have to do SEO for this video. Is there any like tips and tricks that people can kind of do or at least I could do when I post it? Kind of talk about like the file name earlier. That's really cool. That one is very, very important. Make sure you name the file name, something descriptive and then add text. So if you can transcribe the video, if it's an hour long video, maybe don't transcribe the whole thing, but timestamp it and summarize it and then you add that as a description because that text is really what the search engines, whether it's Spotify, YouTube, wherever you put it up there, they're all, they all have search engine or they all have algorithms and reading through that and the more content, the more descriptive you are, the more, the better off or the easier you're going to make it for them to really understand what that video, that audio, that podcast is about. And then reviews are always good. The more reviews, not necessarily the better, but the more reviews with keywords, the better off you're going to be. So if you could get someone to write a review and mention words in there like podcast or SEO podcast, not just saying this was amazing. That doesn't do much but this podcast episode was great. I learned so much about SEO and building a business and how to get more money revenue for my business, that really helps out. So keywords, but it's kind of hard like to influence people to say to put keywords in there. But the more keywords and reviews, the higher you're going to rank or comments description. I need stuff like that. So that what they call it, that not the social marketing, is it? Social marketing where pretty much you see like if you were to look at a book or a business, you look at how many people got reviews. So you're like, yeah, I'm not going to shop at this shop because it's only got like 5 reviews versus another shot. Could have a thousand reviews. You're like, okay, I'll trust this shot more so than the first shop with one review, if that makes sense. Yeah. What it's called? Can't remember. But yeah, no, no, people love to see more reviews. Definitely. It builds trust up. As long as it's good reviews. Not not one star ones, but good price. All right, so final four questions. You ready? Yeah. All righty. Number one, what does wealth mean to you? Financial stability. Just, I mean wealth could mean you're very, very wealthy, but as long as you just have enough to get by and not have to think about money, that is something that I think would be amazing for everyone. Okay. Number two, what was your worst money mistake? Maybe not buying bitcoin when I saw it for like $100 like 10 years ago back or like back in like 2013 or 14 or something like that. So thought about buying a couple of those and got talked out of it and wish I bought those because that would have been a nice investment. Yeah, that's a whole nother story. But yeah, yeah. Number three, what is your favorite financial or non financial book? Never, rarely read too many financial. I mean, maybe like Rich Dad, Poor dad kind of is a financial book. So we can go with non financial. I mean, it's okay. No, I think that one is a good one too. Just Rich Dad, Poor dad is always a. It's a good book for everyone to read. Yeah, that's normally to go to you. And number four, what is your favorite dish to make? Chicken parmesan to make candy. This is my favorite. Love Italian food. And that one is my favorite chicken parmesan. Can't go wrong with that. No, you can't. That's just that used to be my go to dish when I order out. A good choice. The very last question of the show, which is where could people find out more about you? So for everyone that made it to the end, I created a special gift. If you go to my website@SEO optimizers.com, that's SEO O P T I I z e r s.com gift and you can find that there along with my contact information and a bunch of classes I've done over the years. I throw it up for free so you can 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. That is amazing. Thank you for the gift. I mean, for everybody. I mean, it's just I might have to check it out myself. Definitely. The more the better. So share it around, check it out. And if you need that website consultation, if you do have a website or anyone does, feel free to schedule some time. Awesome, man. Thank you so much, Brandon. It's been a pleasure having you on and I mean, I can't thank you enough for all of your insight, all of your knowledge about SEO. How do we can monetize and actually optimize our websites, our videos, and any of the content that we put out there? This is definitely a great value add for those of you who are actually going to take it life to that next level. So if you haven't already, go ahead on and like, subscribe, share, do all the fun things. If anything else, y'all be safe out.