A Ridiculously Easy SEO Plan to Drive More Traffic - Your Blogger Genius Podcast

🚀 I had an absolute blast chatting with Brandon Leibowitz on the podcast! 🎧 We dove deep into the world of SEO, backlinks, and Google hacks—but don’t worry, no geek-speak overload here. Just straight-up actionable tips to help you drive traffic without spending a fortune on ads. 💰🙌

🔎 Ever wondered why some websites rank #1 on Google while others get buried on page 10? Or why Pinterest used to be a goldmine for bloggers, but now feels like a dead end? 😱 We cover all that and more—including the one mistake that can cancel out your backlinks (trust me, you don’t want to make this one).

Brandon spills the SEO tea ☕ on:
✅ How to “spy” on your competitors and steal their best strategies 👀
✅ Why Google is your BFF (if you know how to play the game)
✅ The power of schema (a.k.a. the secret SEO weapon no one talks about)
✅ How to get high-quality backlinks without sounding spammy 📨
✅ The right way to create content that Google and your audience will love

If you've ever said, "SEO feels overwhelming" or "I don’t know where to start," this episode is for you! 🎯

Hit play and let’s turn Google into your personal traffic machine! 🚦💨

🎁 Bonus: Brandon even has a free gift for you! Grab it here: SEOoptimizers.com/gift

#SEO #MarketingHacks #GoogleTraffic #BloggingTips #ContentCreators

Transcript

0:17

I knew it. Brandon hey. How are you doing? Hi. Are you there? Here, hold on. I just Will you put on your camera? I promise I'm not gonna post this. No, no, no. Is it. Oh, there you are. Hello. Do you Okay, so let me. I'm just. I'm printing out. I didn't print out my questions for you. Okay. Do you have a Are you speaking into a mic? Yep. Oh, okay, terrific. I can. And where are you located? In Los Angeles. Where? In Venice. Oh, wow. Okay. So we lived in Santa Monica for, gosh, 15 years. Okay, nice. Where are you now? Now we're in Austin. Okay. So how is. How is Venice? I hear it's weird. Yeah, it's not the best, but I'm on, like, the border of Santa Monica. So try to stay over in Santa Monica, not try to go into Venice too much. Because just as we were leaving, we moved from Santa Monica to the Bay Area about. Wow. Like, almost 10 years ago. And then we moved four years ago from the Bay Area to Austin. But just as we were leaving, I feel like we were in Santa Monica, like, in the heyday, where every cool restaurant was coming to Santa Monica. But it was just start. We had a babysitter who lived in Venice, and just. She was starting to say, you know, there's some campers on our street. It was just like. And I was like, that's so weird. Like, people are, like, living on your street. That's so weird. So I have a good friend who lives in Sea Colony. You know where that is? I think I've seen the complex. It's like, those apartment buildings. They're, like, expensive. Right by the beach. And she said that, like, it's, like, really nice where she is, but parts of Venice now are looking a little bit like Brazil. Yeah. Like skid. Yeah, it's bad. It's bad. They don't clean it up. Unfortunately, they don't. So it is true. Because I see, like, videos on Twitter, and I'm like, is it real, or is this just, like, a little snapshot? Its a little snapshot. I mean, there's a little pocket. So move around. But they're usually in a couple blocks. Like. Yeah. But, I mean, they put up porta potties and showers, so they're not going anywhere, unfortunately. Like, really? Next to Gold's Gym or in front of Google. Thats the worst area right there. Like, really? Google? Really? And Google used to be the Chiat Day building. It's the one with the binoculars. Yeah So that on Main street, that's the worst area, that little area. But once you cross over to Santa Monica, it's clean because they don't let them camp there. But once you cross over to Venice, Venice is la and LA doesn't kick them out. So yeah, once you cross right over, it gets bad for those couple blocks, but after that it's not too bad. But that area is just so bad they put up porta potties and they put up showers so they're not going anywhere. Like that whole area, it was always right there. It was like a little sketch, but not so bad. You know it was. But it was always like a little like it doesn't feel as safe. Yeah No, they took the bus station, I think, and made it a homeless shelter. But the homeless don't want to go there because they have to be sober and they have to be in a curfew. So they all camp outside of it, which is weird. Do you mind holding on for one second? So my husband is. Hold on. I printed out my questions and my husband is going to leave so that I have privacy. But do you feel like, like my friend was saying again, she's a woman, that she feels like she has to continually like cross the street. Like she doesn't feel like in so much danger, but you have to kind of avoid like the crazy people and the homeless people? Yeah, I mean there's people sleeping sometimes on the sidewalk which gotta walk over them and so, but, but, and what about the Promenade? No everything in Santa Monica, I mean they're there but they don't sleep there. It's Venice. Venice is where it's like LA county. And LA county says come on over. Sleep here, we don't care. Just like skid row and everything. So that's why. But Santa Monica is like you could be here, but you can't sleep here. Like you get panhandle and stuff like that, but can't sleep here. So now what about though I've heard that the block up the north part of the promenade is like gone. Like where Barnes and Noble used to be and there was like a Banana Republic. Yeah, yeah, all that's gone, but not much. Homeless. I mean they're there, but they don't sleep there. Like they'll kick them out. Like they might stay there for like an hour, but someone's gonna kick them out. They have security over there that Google security is weird. Google lets them sleep there, but like promenade, they'll kick Them out pretty quick over there and the pier. They'll kick them out. In Santa Monica. And how long have you lived there? Six years, maybe seven years. Okay, and where are you from? From San Pedro, near Long Beach. Okay. Okay. So you're like you're a California guy? Pretty much, yeah. I grew up here, so. Okay. Just moved up here. Closer to be work or closer to work because commuting on that 405 from Long beach to Santa Monica was rough. That was not fun. So. Got it. Okay. So your offices for your company are in Venice. Well, that was my old, old job. Like that was. Got it now. Yeah. Now it's just remote, so. But technically in Venice, but Got it. Got it. Yeah. So weird. Like we're. My husband is born and bred in Los Angeles. Like went to Beverly High, went to usc and so he's dying to go back just to see what it looks like now. You should definitely check it out. It's not that bad. But it's not. It's just pocket. It's just pockets. Yeah, it's just little areas where like. All right, maybe I'm not going to turn down this street. I'll walk one more block this way. But it's not just like skid row. Like it's not like downtown where it's like just trash. How about Hollywood? Yeah, I mean, I haven't really been up there, but I heard kind of the same. But I haven't been up there. Not much in Hollywood anyways. It's dirty and Yeah, the same as it's always been. Dirty and not a place you really want. You bring your tours, your friends there. But after that it's like I'm not going back to Hollywood. Really? Even restaurants, though? They got some good restaurants. But Santa Monica has a lot of good restaurants and Venice has a lot of good restaurants. Right, right, right, right, right. Is Gilenia still there? I mean, Jelena. Jelena. I love that restaurant. Yeah. And I've heard that Abbot Kinney now is like cool shopping. It was always cool, but it was a little. Kind of. Kind of sketch or a little like off the beaten path. Yeah. Now it's opposite. Now it's like a rodeo drive. It's kind of like bougie and. Yeah, that's what my friend said. It's like the Lululemon is now on Abbot Kinney and it's like what? Yep, yep. It's big. Yeah. Abbot Kenny's like. That's what I say. Like Venice, you just walk around the corner, it's super nice. Otherwise it's super sketchy, but yeah, it's got everything in there, but. Got it. We used to live off of Montana. Mm, yeah. Yeah, over there. Which is nice. You know, Brentwood, Cleaner, quieter. Yeah, totally. And safer. 100 much safer. Wow. Wow. It's super. Definitely. Check it out. Okay. We will come back. I mean, again, we always would be coming back, but we haven't in a while since moving to Austin, we haven't been back and it's like, oh, we want to just see. Especially again, because all of our friends are there and you know, my husband lived there forever, so. Yeah, he's like, he's like, say it again. Especially when it starts getting hot. Summertime. Totally. Oh my God. Absolutely. Absolutely. So Austin is a good place. Yeah, it, well, it's funny. Just watching it like explode is weird. Everyones going out there now. Yeah. Yeah. And we didn't know that it would like, it wasn't like, I mean, we thought it was a cool place, but like, it's just been, you know, super weird to see. And the fear, of course, is that it will like, tip over. Yep. Hopefully it doesn't become like Santa Monica. You got in early places, you're finding a good spot. And people people in Austin like hate people from California because they come and they drive up, you know, real estate prices and, and stuff. So. So we'll see how it, we'll see how it transpires. So did you get, you got my questions? You could go ask any questions? Pretty much. Okay. So my audience is female content creators. Predominantly there are men who listen to my show, but in general these are bloggers, these are mompreneurs, These are people who understand social media more probably than they understand SEO. However, initially these are people who leaned into Pinterest. And Pinterest drove a shit ton of traffic to these bloggers. And then Pinterest is now pivoting because they're public and they have to figure out a revenue model and they're, I would argue, struggling to do that, that successfully. Therefore, they're not as willing to drive people off of Pinterest to other people's blogs. They're like, we want to be like Instagram and keep people on our platform. And therefore it's harder to get traffic via Pinterest. And people are going, oh no, we got to lean into this thing called SEO. Yeah Pinterest used to be huge, huge, huge, depending on what you're doing. But it could bring more traffic. Like, if you're DIY crafting fashion, you're gonna get a ton of drive. Food, food, food, food. It was like, the place for food. Recipe. Yeah. You know, and so now, though and it was fun. Because you make pretty picture, you make pretty graphics and people click through and it was like yay. And now the idea of like SEO I think can be intimidating and these are not. I think that women tend to be intimidated by like the, the bro SEOs because it's just not the way they think. So they're not thinking about. I'm going to go after my competitors keywords. But I would argue they should. You should definitely. That's what I want to talk about is and easy wins where You don't have to spend a ton of time in Semrush to like gamify the whole thing, but that there are these ways to build off of what's working. So does that resonate? Does that sound reasonable? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Give you like the things that have the most impact that are not technical. Not too crazy. Target. Right, Right. Where you could be a food blogger making recipes and not spend. You know, you can focus on that and do SEO, but it's not like you are spending 247 just on SEO. Definitely We can talk about all that stuff. How to optimize their content, videos, even optimize Pinterest for SEO. Perfect. But in truth. Wait, I'm just gonna. In truth though, Pinterest was a visual search engine. Now they're trying to be more of a social network and keep people on the platform like as creators. However, it is all about keywords. It is all. What'd you say? Yeah. Keyword research. Finding those. Right. Keywords. Right. Hashtags and all that stuff. Hashtags no longer hashtags. No more on Pinterest. No more hashtags. No more hashtags on Pinterest. They just changed it. No. That's weird. That's kind of dumb. I know. But I think it. It's because they want. It felt too spammy. Yeah, they get spammed. But still Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, they all have. It's a sign they should keep them. I mean if they all took them away, then yeah, take them away. But if Instagram and all those platforms are leaving it, especially Twitter. TikTok. Absolutely I don't use Pinterest too much, but I do have 10,000 followers on Pinterest, which is weird because you should lean into that. Boarding social media SEO, which is not really the target audience. But talk about how I grew my audience and stuff like that. But sounds like a lot of the stuff I did in the past isn't gonna work. Hashtags and everything. Now they have videos and Stuff like that. Which. Yeah. Its all visual. Everything's video nowadays. I feel like, terrific. Okay, so I'm going to say, Brandon, welcome to the show. And then we'll just launch in. How does that sound? And I'm usually, I'm keeping my episodes to about 30 minutes. 30 to 40 minutes. And SEO content on my podcast does really well. So what my audience wants are like real tactics. Like the best comment I get is I was listening to your podcast in the car and I had to pull over to take notes because that's like the kind of stuff that people love from my podcast. Like, I want to up my game rather than like, you got this. Yes. It's all mindset. Like, no, it's like, how do you break that down? Cool Yeah, definitely strategies. Definitely strategies. Yes. Awesome art. Are you doing the. So what happens after that? Do you do the video or is it just audio or is it both? I'm just posting audio right now. That might be the video you want to share. Oh, great. Okay, totally. Well, like say that my audience and. Share the video or the audio or whatever works best. Perfect I will then give it to you. I will definitely. I'll share it with you. Will you speak closer to your mic? Yeah. Is it. That's better. Better. Much better. Let me. Okay. Awesome Yeah. Everything sounds good. Yeah. The more we can help promote each other, the better. So definitely share it with me and I'll share it with my audience and just get the word out there for each other. Absolutely. All right, so here we go. Ready? Brandon, welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks everyone. Welcome. So you are an SEO, and can you explain how you got into this and kind of where you are today and what kinds of clients you have and who you help? I just kind of fell into SEO. Wasn't anything I really planned on. Back in 2007, got my degree in business marketing and the first job near my house or first company in my house, had offered me a job, said, we want you to do SEO. And I was just like, I don't really know SEO. Don't know what this is. I know marketing, but I don't really know Internet marketing is what it was called back then. And they're like, don't worry, we don't know either. We're gonna take you to classes and workshops and kind of teach you and learn along the way with you. And so back then I kind of just fell into it and went to all these classes and workshops and helped them out. They were an e commerce website and I was pretty much doing everything for them, doing their SEO, doing social media, doing email marketing, running paid ads, et even taking pictures of the products and adding them to the website. So back then, after a few months working there, I kind of realized like, I think everyone's gonna have a website in the future and SEO is a way to get free traffic. But I would recommend doing everything I talked about. Don't just focus on SEO. You wanna do email marketing, you wanna do social media, you wanna do paid ads, it all works. But SEO is a way to get free traffic and why would you wanna pay if you get it for free? So that's really why I focused on SEO over the years and working at different mom and pop shops and different advertising agencies over the years, but always been doing freelance work because also I realized with SEO you could do freelance work. And I've been building up my business and building it up and nowadays I just focus on my company, which is SEO optimizers, and just focus on helping people get more traffic, but also making sure that traffic converts. Because I could get you traffic, which I do for a lot of my clients, but a lot of times their websites are not optimized for converting that traffic into leads to sales, to phone calls or whatever that conversion goal is. Which I realize now that's all that matters. It doesn't matter about getting traffic, it matters about getting those sales and leads. I like you saying that because I think you are right. For example, people will say, I want to grow my Instagram followers. And I say, oh, that's only part of the puzzle because what are you going to do with those followers? Where are you going to direct those followers and how do those followers lead directly to you making more money? And I see the same thing about SEO. Great, you've got traffic, but what are you doing with that traffic to ultimately move your business forward? And I say every blog post that you write has to have a goal attached to it. It's not just, hey, come see my podcast, my blog post and then just leave. Yeah you have to have a call to action or something. But you just like the social media because people come to me all the time, hey, I want to grow my social media presence, which I could help out with organic growth. But I always tell them like, all right, I'll get you all these followers. But like you said, followers mean nothing. Like followers are, you could have a million followers and if nobody's engaging or even engagement doesn't even mean anything just because they're liking or commenting doesn't mean anything. Either you want them to go to your website or go to make a purchase. Whatever your call to action is, whatever your conversion goal is. Because a lot of these times, social media, they lock you in. Like Instagram, they lock you in. They don't really want you to leave Instagram. It's really tough to leave Instagram. So it's kind of just like that closed network. But yeah, it's just trying to make sure that you have some sort of conversion goal at the end of whatever content you're putting out there, whether it's social, whether it's videos, whether it's emails, whether it's blog posts, whether it's a landing page for your product, you want to make sure that all has a clear, concise conversion goal. What do you want people to do? Call you? Do you want them to email you? Do you want them to buy this. Add it to cart, join your list, click on your affiliate links, whatever. I agree. I agree. Okay, let's talk SEO right now. Because I feel like SEO is always changing and also staying the same. Like, the fundamentals are the same. So if you were to put yourself in Google's shoes, what does Google want from you as a content creator? Google is just changing because they're just trying to find the spammers and kick them off. So, yeah, Google changes every single day. And trying to figure out what Google wants is not really feasible. What we really care about is, like, what is your competition doing? So if you're a content creator and you're trying to create some content, you should just go and search in Google for your keywords that you're trying to write content for or rank for and see what your competitors are doing. Because what it really comes down to is word count. Like, if someone, if you go and search on Google for, like, how to fix a flat tire or something, and you see, you search on Google and you look at the first 10 pages and you see that everyone is writing 200 words of content, then maybe if you write 250 words of content or 300 words of content, Google's gonna rank you a little bit higher because it really comes down to content when you're putting it out there or text. Google can't really read images or videos, but they can read content and they just feed off your content. The more content that's relevant and makes sense, don't just throw content to throw content out there, but making sure it's good content has to be 100% unique. If it's been copied from another website or another page on your website, or from a social media post that you did, it becomes duplicated content and you could actually get penalized, which, that's where Google makes all these changes, because they're looking for people that are trying to game the system. And if Google sees you trying to game the system, which is duplicate content or backlinks, I mean, they have so many different penalties out there. Just the whole podcast could be about penalties, but don't want to take it that way. But just got to be aware, as long as you're doing everything that seems right, like if you're trying to trick Google or doing shortcuts that seem a little weird or shady, you gotta understand that Google has been around for 20 plus years and they know all these tricks and they're looking out for them all the time. And if you do get caught, instead of ranking higher, you're gonna go down in rankings, which they'll. Right. So are you saying though, let's say it is how to fix a tire. Lets say I wake up, let's say I don't know, I'm a car mechanic and, and I want to do, I want to create a piece of content. And I think to myself, huh, how to fix a tire sounds like a good piece of content to create. So therefore the question is, is that too big? Say keyboard, Is that a too, too big a kind of topic to go after? Or should I narrow it down? Or like how should I wake up in the morning? How do I come up with that content? Then how do I go validate. Yes. Spend a couple hours days writing this piece of content. How should I think about it? How would you plan it? Yeah No, I would first do keyword research. So research the keyword like flat tie or how. How to fix a flat tire. How many people are actually searching for it every single month? So where would you go? What tools are you using? Yeah, there's a bunch of different tools out there, but the best one is from Google, and it's free. So I would use Google Keyword Planner. Okay, so Google, how do I find Google Keyword Planner? You just search in Google for Google Keyword Planner, and you have to create an account with Google Ads. Okay. Only downside is nowadays they don't show you the actual numbers. They show you ranges on Google Keyword Planner. So they might say that fix a flat tire might get 100 to 1,000 monthly searches, or it might say 1,000 to 10,000, or it might say 10,000 to 100,000. So it doesn't give you the exact number. Unless you're spending money on Google Ads. Because Google only cares about ads they don't want. This tool's not for SEO. They don't really give out much for SEO because they don't want you to do SEO. They want you to spend money. Google makes all their money off paid ads. So to use that tool, you have to sign up for Google Ads. And I forget what the minimum is that you spend, but if you spend like a couple hundred dollars a month, or Maybe even just $100 a month, that'll show you exact numbers instead of ranges. Okay, but that's a lot of money. Other tools are like Ahrefs A H R E F S or SEMrush or Spyfu or Moz or. I mean, there's so many different keyword research tools out there, but they're all feeding off the Google Keyword Planner. So they're all just taking the data from the Google Keyword Planner and then making it look prettier. So that's the only thing is it's all coming from Google Keyword Planner. So can you get enough information just using the free Google Keyword Planner? Yep, as long as you're spending money. But if not, the ranges make it a little tricky. If it says 10,000, 100,000 monthly searches, that's a big number. 10,000 is still good, but 100,000 is a lot. Okay, so therefore, you might want to spend. Spend on something like ubersuggest, which is a cheaper alternative or keyword. What is it? Keyword IO. There are a couple tools that are cheaper than, like, the kind of Cadillac of keyword tools like Semrush. You know, or those. So it might be worth it, then, to invest in some sort of tool. So you would start with keyword research using one of these tools. And what am I looking for? Like what, what seems like a good amount of monthly traffic that I could potentially rank for? So that is a tricky question because I see a lot of times where 0 search volume keywords bring in traffic. So I always take everything with a grain of salt that I see with these tools because sometimes it doesn't make sense. Like what Google's telling me that only 100 people search for SEO classes every single month. I'm like, that seems like it might be a little bit higher than that. So usually, and even with zero search, like sometimes it might show zero. But if it's a highly targeted keyword that you know is going to convert, if one person searches for that a month and finds your blog post or finds your website and you get that conversion and that lead turns into whatever it might be, $100, couple hundred, couple thousand, then it's worthwhile. So you just have to look at the overall cost value and see is it worthwhile for me is because you have to think, is somebody searching for this? If I'm thinking of this keyword, there's probably somebody else that probably I have thought of this in the past. But just take everything with a grain of salt that you see on Google. And what I really do is I search in Google for my keywords and I see who's on that first page of Google. So I could spy on my competition. If all I see is like Wikipedia, Amazon, or like big, like corporate, like Target, Walmart, stuff like that, that might be like, all right, this keyword is very competitive. I could rank for it over time. But if all these corporate big websites are up there, it's going to be hard for me. If you're a small, medium sized business, even if you're a big company, it's still going to be competitive. Also, when I search in Google, if I see ads at the top or the bottom, that means it's also very competitive. Because if people are spending money on that keyword, that means they tried ranking for it organically and they weren't able to do it. So searching for ads, that kind of tells you like, should I maybe steer clear of this? Because it might be a little too competitive for me at this time. But again, it all depends on your business. If you're established and you're ranking for a ton of keywords, then it's easier for you to rank on Google because Google already trusts you. If you're a new website or don't have much trust or much rankings. Google's not really going to rank you that quickly. They don't trust you. They don't. So you have to build that trust up, which is all done through backlinks. I mean, that's part of that SEO. But keyword research, you still need to make sure that you're finding. Like, I always just search on Google. Google's going to pretty much tell you always what's going on. Like, look at Google, see what other people are using. And also when you search in Google, I look at people's the blue clickable link, which is called an SEO title tag. That blue clickable link is where everybody is playing their keywords. So I'll go into Google and I'll search for my keywords, and I'll see what other people are using in that blue clickable link. I'm not gonna look at ads. Skip ads. Ads are irrelevant. That doesn't matter. They're not using the same keywords. They're similar, but they're different. So when I'm searching in Google for SEO, I'm just looking in the organic results and looking at that blue clickable link and seeing maybe people aren't using the word tire, maybe people are using the word whee or people are using whatever or tires. And I look for patterns and trends, and that gives me ideas. Because if everyone's on that first page of Google and they're searching or they're saying how to fix flat tires, not how to fix a flat tire, then I might say, all right, maybe flat tires might get more search volume. Because everyone on the first page of Google is using that same. That phrase. And Google will pick up on synonyms in plural. So if you put the keyword flat tires, you're still going to rank for the word flat tire. Okay, so wait, so are you saying that if every single link on page one is using flat tires, and is it smart then to go, you know what, I'm going to change it up a little bit and go, how to fix a flat tire? Or do I go, wait, like wisdom of crowds. This is what Google is. You know, I should do what everybody else is doing. Like at what point do I zig? When other people are zagging? Yeah. Now, I would do what other people are doing for the most part. But if I see a Wikipedia or like a Yelp, I mean, they have teams of people doing their SEO, they're not just guessing these words. So if you see these big corporate websites. But then I also search because I don't trust them because they might have put flat tires. And that was 10 years ago that flat tires got more search volume and now it's 2022. Let me check again, just to double check, using like the Google Keyword Planner to see the exact search volume. Because then I could see flat tires might get 20,000 searches. Flat tire singular might only get 500 searches. So you want to double check. But usually when you see the trends or you see everyone doing the same thing, it's usually there for a reason. They have. So there's wisdom. Yeah especially the big corporate, like big corporations, they have teams of people. It's not just one person doing the SEO. They have teams of people that are researching these keywords, making sure they're putting the best one up there because it's hyper competitive for some of these keywords, especially for these broad keywords like that. So I think what you are saying is there is a lot of wisdom already out there if you know how to look for it. For example, TikTok is all about. There is a trend. You get on that trend, you do what those people are doing and let's say you know their TikTok is 20 seconds and you do your TikTok for 20 seconds using the same sound, using like a similar approach and you put your like little spin on top of it. And the goal is to ride that wave. So you're saying, go into Google. So it looks like your favorite kind of SEO tool is Google. Go look at what's working on Google and see if you can do something, say slightly better, slightly different, but make sure you're leaning into the wisdom of what Google is telling you. Yeah, definitely. Google is your best friend. Because a lot of people look at Google and say, all right, how do I be Google? What is Google's algorithm? But I don't even care what Google's algorithm is. That doesn't matter to me because Google's algorithm changes every single day. So even if I knew what their algorithm is, tomorrow it's going to change and the next day it's going to change and every day changes. What matters is who's on that first page of Google for your keywords. That's all that matters. And how much SEO are they doing? And how can you do more SEO than they've done? That's all that matters, is doing more SEO than the people on that first page of Google. That's all I see, more SEO. What does that mean? So that means search in Google and then open up all the servers. Whoevers on that first page of Google. Open up each website and see how much content do they have? Are they writing 100 words? Are they writing a thousand words? Are they writing 2,000 words? Because you'll see like a trend. Just like with TikTok, you said everyone might be doing 20 second videos with content. People might all be writing 2,000 words. So if you write 500 words and everyone else is writing 2,000 words, Google's gonna be like we're gonna go with the 2,000 words because everyone else is using 2,000 words. But if you write 2,500 words then Google's like, oh wow, you're even better than this other person. So you want to go above and beyond what they're doing and do it, take it a step further if possible with good content. But you have to make sure it's original content has to be good content. Don't just throw it up there to throw it up there. Or what you could do is search in Google, look at all 10 websites, take all that content and make one giant master article out of that or blog post or service page or e commerce landing page and taking all that content and combining it and writing it in your own words, but using their ideas and using their kind of headings and topics and like oh that's interesting. So that is very much the TikTok model, which is you do not reinvent the wheel. You take what is already there, what's already worked, those hashtags that sound and then you just kind of tweak it a little bit. What you're saying is I could open up those top 10 results on the first page of Google and kind of combine all that information and like use their same headings or make sure to hit all of those keywords and kind of make a master blog post. Yep And also when you search in Google there's a section that called. It's called People also ask right at the bottom. Yes, all those. And if you click on it, it keeps adding more and more questions. So you take all those questions and take the questions verbatim and then write your own answers. But pick and choose which questions make sense. But those are all high search volume keywords or phrases. So you incorporating that phrase on your website and answering it will help out a lot and also might get you into that featured snippet that appears on Google sometimes. Also there's this thing called FAQ schema. So you can add schema onto those faq, it's called FAQ Frequently asked questions so people also ask, you could add this schema code, which this gets a little technical, right? So yes. So this is like markup, where you are able. For example, in the paid version of Yoast, they have a. Block for Gutenberg that you can drag into your content and write your FAQs and then Google can read that and know that those are FAQs. Like, like you need a recipe card if you are a food blogger because Google sees it differently and can read that recipe and knows this is a recipe and can identify all the pieces of it. And if you are a food blogger and you do not have a recipe card, you are at a serious disadvantage. Yep, you definitely want to incorporate schema because sometimes when you search in Google you might see stars in there or like ratings. It's all through schema and you could do Yoast, but you can also just go into Google and search for free schema generator. I forgot what the URL is, but there's a ton of tools out there that are free where it just says what's your name, your business name. If you're doing recipes, it says, what is a recipe? If it's for the faq, says, was the FAQ the question answered? Just throw it in there, copy and paste that. You get the code and you can throw it on your website. Because if you don't have WordPress and you're just like, all right, how do I add Skiba, Like Shopify will do it for you automatically. But still there might be stuff that you want to add manually. Squarespace and wix I don't think will do anything for you. WordPress you're going to have to do yourself. But I love WordPress because WordPress is free and it's the best, easiest, not easiest to use, but great. And it's free and the plugins make it really SEO friendly. So it's a great platform. Okay, so let's, I like this. Let's talk about these strategies where you can kind of hack. I know you're not going to like this, but you can hack Google to make your content better. Like this idea of adding this, like these schema. What is like these kind of schema to let Google know, like FAQs recipe cards. You can do it for DIYs where you're letting Google know what your content is. And this will give you a leg up if other people are not doing this. Huge, huge, huge. Even if you're like a local business, you put schema on there, you'll see. Yourself spell schema so people can search it. It's S K E A right? Sch. Oh sch. Okay, I'm wrong. Okay, good. I know it's like, it's a tricky. But Google Bing and Yahoo, I think created that language like eight, nine years ago. So search engines created this programming language I believe and they are saying like this is really important. I mean not many people use it. But if you incorporate it onto your website you will definitely see a boost in rankings. It's a little bit more technical, but that schema code is worthwhile. Trying to invest in it or hire somebody if you're getting stuck on it, that could help out with it and just throw it in there. Because once it's up there, it's up there. You don't have to keep adding unless you add new pages to your website, each new page you want to add schema to. But for the most part if you're done with your website, it's all built out. I mean sometimes when you're searching you'll see if you're an E commerce website, the product price will be in the search results, the reviews will be in there. That's all through schema. If you don't have schema, Google's not going to show that even though you have it on your website, the price and all that stuff. The schema just tells Google to like hyper focus, pull that out and pull that into the search results. Sometimes doesn't always appear in the search results. Like I put stars on every single page on my website because sometimes stars show up in Google. Most of the time they don't, but the 1% time they do. If I'm ranked number four on Google but I have stars next to my listing, your eyes are just going to be drawn in because these are yellow stars, they don't show up often. But every page on my website, all my clients websites, I put those stars on. But you have to make sure you put schema with the stars. If you just throw stars on your website. Now can that work for a blogger? Oh yeah. I put on every page on my website, I do SEO, I put on my service pages, I put on all my clients. So in a blog post, let's say I'm doing how to fix a flat tire, where am I putting my stars? At the very bottom. So at the very bottom of the blog post, at the very bottom left it says just like rate this post and have like stars and you put one to five stars and you put five stars. Oh yeah, definitely put five stars for yourself all the time. So that's why Google doesn't show it all the time because too many people have used it in the past where four or five years ago these stars would show up. Majority of the time nowadays they hardly ever show up, but they still sometimes show up. And if they do show up, you're just going to get those eyes focused on your listing and it's going to really help out a lot. So I always tell people, just do it. Just take advantage of all that extra stuff that Google is willing to do for you. Schema huge one to definitely look into. It's a little more technical but definitely look into that. What about video? Video is huge. And sometimes when you search in Google, videos appear at Google. So when you search in Google, if you see a video that appears in the search results 90% of the time, well majority of the time it's going to be a YouTube video because Google owns YouTube, right? And Google only cares about making money. So if you search on Google and you don't click on any ads, Google's not making any money. But if you search on Google and then there's a video there and if you play that video, that video, if it's owned by, if it's on YouTube, it's always going to have an ad. Google's gonna make more money. And Google only wants to make money. So I feel like video is gonna have a huge presence or in the future. Like I mean look at like Instagram. It's images and videos but it's all primarily videos. Like Pinterest has videos. TikTok is all videos. People want visual content, people don't. I mean their pension fans are so short nowadays so gotta capture quickly. And video, especially on YouTube, like YouTube is the second most popular website. Google's the most popular. Facebook and YouTube switch off every day between number two and three, which seems strange. Facebook is still up there. People go on Facebook all the time. They're not posting as much but they're going on there for like friends or family or birthdays are really popular on there and stuff like that. But right, YouTube. Okay, video is huge. But I'm doing my flat tire post. Do I need to make a video and put it in the blog post? No, but it definitely will help out. You don't have to, but it will definitely help out. If you have a video in there and make sure it's on YouTube. Take that video, embed it from YouTube onto your website. If you have videos, you have to upload it to every platform separately because they don't really cross promote one another. So you have to upload it to Facebook. I'd upload it to igtv. Check that out. Cause that's a long form video. And Facebook knows that Facebook video is disappearing and Instagram is taking over. And IGTV is a way to keep that video content up there, but throw it up everywhere, Throw it up on Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, all over the world. Does Google know? Is Google seeing other networks? Does it care? It just cares about Google. Google's block from all social media is blocked from Google, except for Twitter. Google and Twitter partnered up a few years ago, but. And Google owns YouTube. But Instagram, Facebook, direct competitors, TikTok, they don't have anything to do with it. And Pinterest. No they all, they're all blocked. Pretty much like Google is blocked from all social media except for Twitter and YouTube, since they own YouTube. Okay, let's talk about authority because Google cares about you as an authority. So first of all, do I need to be in a very specific niche or can I be more general? No, you can be general, but the more niche you are, the quick or the less competitive it's going to be. And less competition means it's easier to get those rankings. So if you're just going for a really broad general category, you get up there but just realize it's gonna take a lot more time versus a more niche. So I always tell people start off broad but have all these niche pages. Cause overall like I do SEO, I'm not gonna say, oh, I focus on one specific aspect of SEO because I wanna rank for SEO and any variation of like link building, keyword research, Google Analytics, Google Search console, all that stuff. So I'm not limiting myself to just the broad general ones. I'm gonna have the broad general keyword, but then have all these really niche ones and kind of you're throwing everything against the wall, seeing what sticks, what ranks faster. Like you never know. Sometimes Google Analytics SEO might rank faster than how to do keyword research for SEO. But I'm going to try to rank for all those different variations and just see which ones get a quicker. But you're also, let's say you have a hobby of being a car mechanic. You're not also going, well, I do SEO and I work on cars. No no, you have to keep it, keep it one specific topic. Like that's. I realized over the years too you don't want to have multiple topics because is I do social media as well. And if someone's looking for social media that doesn't necessarily want SEO, so I keep them separate, have my own website for SEO, have one for social media. And I mean those are Kind of similar, but I mean if you're a mechanic doing SEO, you might definitely keep them separate. It's just like in social media, you want to have one topic. Like if you start blending everything in, you're going to get a lot of people going to your page. A lot of people are going to be like, this is not what I want. I just want only one thing out of these 20 things that you're posting about. So don't just go all over the place. Like pick one topic and then you could go as broad into that topic as you like, but still go deep into the more niche, kind of unique, specific keywords. But got it. To gain authority, I need backlinks. I need people linking to me because it says she's an authority. Backlinks are what ranks websites so. But are they still as important? I read stuff back and forth like they're important, they're not as important. They're important, they're not as important. What is your take? Yeah, unfortunately everything I talked about before doesn't matter. Without backlinks you do. None. Of that stuff will matter. I mean, unless the only thing that people say backlinks don't matter is if you write really good content that's naturally gonna attract backlinks to your website. But still you still need to reach out and like build them on your own. Everyone's building backlinks. I mean, that's why all these corporations have companies that do SEO. They're not just sitting there doing keyword research and optimizing the pages. Cause after that you're like, all right, I've optimized all the pages on the website. What do I do from here? So it's all about content marketing and just getting yourself on as many third party sites that are relevant. So you don't want to be on any website because that could actually drop you in rankings, which we don't want. What are your best strategies for getting backlinks? I get emails all day long. Hey, I see you wrote this article. Would you add my link to it? Whatever. And I delete, delete, delete. So what are those best strategy? Is it that though this person is emailing 10,000 people and a certain percentage will say yes, I just happen to be somebody that says no. Yeah that strategy, that's blogger outreach. And that's probably the safest way to build backlinks because then you're getting on real websites and you're getting on targeted websites. So if you're a mechanic, I would tell them like, let's go into Google and search for other mechanics or other websites about automobiles, automotive, car, whatever it is, just anything that's somewhat related to you. And start building relationships with other websites. Start building relationships with other mechanics, or find other people. And other mechanics are easy because you can find a mechanic in a different state where you're not direct competitors and be like, hey, let's build this relationship. Let me help you, and I'll help you out. Let's help one another out. But SEO, I can't really help out other SEO companies because we're all direct competitors because we compete nationally. But if you're a local business, I would definitely start reaching out, like, go on to Yelp and look at your competition and. Different states and build relationships with these people and offer them a free blog post or a free article or some way to get onto their website. Because that's the best way. The safest way to build backlinks. There's millions of different strategies to build backlinks. But the best way is, I mean the safest backlinks are relevant. You want to be on relevant websites. So let's say in certain communities like DIY people or food bloggers or whatever, they have these built in communities. Is there value in all of them linking to each other? Yep. So that's where you gotta not do. It's called reciprocal backlinks. If I link to you and you link to me, it cancels it out. So you just want one way links? Yeah. No, Google's on top. Even if you have a hundred people in this group and all linked to one another, but we're not directly linking to each other. It's called link wheels. Google knows about this. Google knows? Yeah. You only want people linking to you. You don't want to link back to that person. Like a lot of times people get published on like Huffington Post or Forbes or New York Times or LA Times and then they link back to that article from their website. That cancels that value of that backlink. No, so what I tell people is just like take a screenshot of it. Because if you link back to that website, you're really just. It's called reciprocal backlink unless you put a no follow tag. So you could say no follow this backlink on my website. Right. But even then Google still sees that you're linking out and Google still sees that I'm linking to you and you're linking to me. It's called reciprocal backlinks. So you got to make sure that you want people only. You want to only link to you want them to only link to you. You don't want to link back to them. So that's the tricky part. That's where it's like all right. How do I get people to link to me? Give them a free blog post usually. That's why people are emailing you all the time. Also they're telling you to do link inserts, which is a little weird. Like insert my link into this content, which seems weird. When I do that, I cold email people and I'll reach out and say, hey, I was writing your blog, I'd love to give you a free blog post. I'm not going to say ins my link in here. That's a little like why Would I insert my link in there? That's really weird. But if I'm giving you a really good blog post that I spent time on it, it's high quality. I know who your audience is. I'm going to write it specifically for you. I'm not going to just send you a blog post. I'm going to pitch your website and then if you say yes to me, then I'm going to look at your different topics and different content and see how you write in the past. So keep it on tone, make sure it makes sense for your audience. But there's also like, I mean, that is the safest way. But definitely look at your competition, look at your competitors. Just like you could search on Google and look at your competitors use the different backlinking tools like Ahrefs or Semrush or Moz or whatever. These are all paid tools, but these tools will show you all your anyone's backlinks you could throw, anybody, you could throw Facebook in there and see all of their backlinks. And then one by one you start going to those websites and trying to acquire them. But there's only so many that you could get from your competition because maybe your competitors have a backlink from a website from eight years ago and nobody's responding to that website's inactive. So that's why you have to build new ones. And the way I build new ones is really by that blogger outreach blogging on other target sites. But I'm not just sending out 10,000 emails. I'm sending out maybe five emails, 10 emails a week where I'm like picking unique sites, not just. And will people say yes? Will people. Do you end up writing content for these sites? How many say yes? You put out 10. How many say yes to you? One will say yes. Well, out of a hundred. So let's say 100. So out of 100, one will say yes, I'll do it for free. One will say no. Another one will say yes, but pay me. And then the rest is just no answers. Because a lot of times like the email addresses are inactive. Like, it's crazy. Like I get so many clients that they're like, I'm not getting any sales on my website and, and their e commerce website. And I look and their shopping cart is broken. Or they're like, nobody's contacting me. I go to their contact page, I test their form out and they're just like, no. They don't know where that form is being submitted to. So you have to realize A lot of websites get built and they're not maintained or updated. So you have to try. Like when I do the blogger outreach, I try to find as many email addresses as possible. I'll see if they have a Contact Us page. I'll look for their social media because Twitter is a great way to get responses. If you message somebody on Facebook, it goes to that filtered inbox. Nobody's ever going to see that Instagram, nobody's going to care about SEO. But Twitter is great. Twitter, you can reach out to big corporations or big influencers or celebrities, and they don't have that many followers on Twitter and they'll usually get back to you. There's no filtered inbox or anything on Twitter. So I've built relationships with big brands on Twitter really easily, and I recommend that to everybody. Check out Twitter for people like that to build. Really, ultimately, you just want to build relationships with other people. That's the main thing is build these relationships. You're not just like emailing them to spam them, which sometimes it seems spammy. But you really want to build relationships. And that's the main thing is build relationships with other people and be authentic and don't just be like, hey, here's a. Insert my link to just to help me out. Like, that's really. Nobody's going to help you out. Like, I mean, I get those emails, too. I get like, it's. It's. I get all those emails every single day and I weed through them all. But sometimes I'll see like, oh, this is a big. I know who this person is. Let me respond back to them and see what type of content they're going to put out there. Because I know they'll have higher quality standards. I mean, usually you get the content. It's like broken English. It doesn't make sense. So that's how a lot of people don't respond. But I make sure that I have a team of writers, that they're all based in the United States. They're all specialized in these topics and not just writers just to write content that actually know what they're writing about. Which is really important nowadays is authenticity, not just throwing stuff out there to throw it out there. You want to be credible and build that trust up for people and for Google, because people are going to be reading this content. Google's going to be looking at for SEO perspective, but people are going to be reading it, and if it doesn't make sense, they're going to see through that. And yes. Now what about. Okay, to close. I want you to walk me through. I am new, let's say I'm a new blogger. And I'm in a niche. Like I've niched down. So I have. I know what I'm about. But what would you recommend for me? So let's say I am a like a landscape architect. Right. I do landscapes and I want to all I want to get this free traffic that you are talking about and I blog about it. Let's say I also then work with clients to help design their landscape. I make plans for them. How do you recommend I go about starting to create content that gets me traffic? Yep. So I would just go into Google and search for keywords like landscaping or architectural landscaping and just put those words in there. And then there's gonna be a dropdown on Google that shows like suggested keywords. Take all those keywords. Also at the very bottom of Google scroll down, there's also that search or searches related to those are all high search volume keywords. And take all those. Take that people also ask and use that as kind of like an outline to start writing that content and find the competition. See how many words you need to write versus the competitors. And then when you write the content you have to make sure you interlink it. This is really very important is linking to the service page. So you write this blog post about architectural design or landscaping. You have to link that to the architectural landscaping service page. Because interlinking your pages is just important as getting backlinks from other websites. Ooh, could you just speak very briefly? What does that mean? Yeah, your site structure and your site hierarchy are so very important. So Google looks at where your, the internal links that you have is like a roadmap to keep them on your website. Keep keeps people on your website longer, but you have to link to the right pages. So if you write a blog post about structural or architectural landscaping, you want to link it to the service page where they can hire me the service, not the homepage, but your service page. Right. Where you can like contact me, learn more about my services so that ultimately this can turn into money. Yep. And you want that link in the content to look natural. And then you also want to put like maybe two or three links to other blog posts that content as well. Because you want to keep people on the website after they read that blog post. What are they going to do? But if there's links like if you're reading like a New York Times or LA Times, you always see there's links to other articles, other blog posts in there, because they want you to stay on the website as long as possible. But also Google follows those links. So you link to other relevant blog posts, helps build up your whole website's trust. And then what you do is you build backlinks to that blog post. So you get other people to link to that blog post. And. And then that blog post, since it's linking to your service page, it's linking to other blog posts. That link value gets spread out across your website. So it's not just getting that SEO value to the blog post. The blog post is then linking to your service page, which gets that SEO value. So the backlinks get passed on. But that's really gets a little tricky with all this stuff. But it's easier to, like, visualize it all out by somewhere to drop. But essentially you want other people to link to that blog post, and that blog post is on your website. And then you link out to your service page, you link out to your blog posts, because then you're just giving yourself backlinks. You don't want to be spammy. You only want to link out to maybe like one service page and maybe two or three other blog posts. You don't want to overdo it. Because what happens, what happens when people get to the end of that blog post? They're just like, what do I do? Do I want to leave a comment? Do I want to share it socially? Which is great. But ultimately, you guys keep people on your website and hopefully get them to convert, like, social shares. Comments are good, but they don't leave comments. It's like what we were talking about at the beginning. You want sales, you want conversions, you want phone calls, leads. So getting a comment or getting someone to share your blog post is okay, but ultimately you want to lead them back to the service page, which has a strong call to action on there, and that would be the best. And then just write good content. Write good content and be of service. Yeah. Solve problems for people. So, Brandon, this is very enlightening. I feel like you have given this insight into Google and how to think about serving Google. So Google serves you back. Yeah, that's the main thing. So if people want to get in touch with you or learn more about you, where should they go? Yeah. So appreciate everyone for listening today. And I've made a special gift for everyone if you go to my website. It's SEO optimizers.com gift. There's a little gift for everyone. So S E O O P T I I Z E R s dot com gift. And so a gift for everyone. And then you can also find out me out my website, on my website as well, or if you go on YouTube, search my name. Brandon Leibowitz. I put out a lot of videos and just want to kind of help give back and help people learn how to get that free traffic from Google so they could stop spending money on ads. That's really the main thing. I mean, the ads work, but stop making Google richer. They already make way too much money. Well, Brandon, I have to say, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me on. It was great.