Digital Marketing For Beginners - Coaching Call Podcast

🎙️ Exciting Podcast Alert! 🎙️

Hey everyone! I was super pumped to be a guest on the Coaching Call Podcast hosted by Sifu Rafael, where we had an amazing conversation about SEO, digital marketing, and how I built my business from scratch! 💻✨

In this episode, I shared my journey from a curious newbie to a marketing expert, and how I dove deep into the world of search engine optimization (SEO) to help businesses thrive online. 🚀

We covered everything from:

• The power of SEO to drive FREE traffic to your website 🌍
• How to get Google's trust and rank higher 🔍
• The magic of backlinks and how they can skyrocket your rankings 📈
• Why video content is a game-changer for your website 🎥

It was a blast talking about how social media, hashtags, and personal branding play a HUGE role in growing a business in today’s digital age. 📱💡

So if you're curious about how SEO can level up your online game or just want to hear some insider tips, make sure to check out the full episode!

👉 Listen now! And don’t forget to share your thoughts with me! 👇
#SEO #DigitalMarketing #Backlinks #GoogleRanking #MarketingTips #BusinessGrowth #PersonalBranding #SEOExperts #SocialMediaTips #PodcastLove

If you enjoyed this, don't forget to hit subscribe and leave a review! ✨🚀 Let’s grow together!

Transcript

0:02

Hi everybody. Thanks for tuning in to the Coaching Call podcast. On this podcast, we'll cover various types of coaching by trainers in sports, martial arts, fitness and business. We'll discuss each coach's methods to getting the most out of their respective athletes or clients and how they attempt to change the platform in which they coach. Join us on a fun adventure as we discuss unique coaching styles. Coaching is a universal part of how we get others to get something done. Join your host, Rafael and his guests on this unique journey in coaching. Hi I'm Sifu Rafael, and this is the Coach and Call podcast. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and leave a review. This episode was made possible by listeners like you. Hi everybody. Thank you for joining us. I am here with Brandon and we have so much to talk about. Brandon, don't we? Yep. Looking forward to it. Yeah. Yeah. So, Brandon, you know, you are, I guess, a marketing genius because you made yourself that. You were not born a marketing genius, were you? No, no, no. Yeah, Learn it. Learn everything about it because, yeah, I did not know much about all this stuff until started educating myself about it. Right, right. So tell, tell us your story as to what made you decide to get into marketing to SEO, which is what your company is based on. What in your mind did you say? This is something I want to not only know, but I want to help other people with. So I just fell into it, really wasn't planning on it. I enjoyed like the entrepreneurial spirit. So I always wanted to have my own company or have my own business and went to school for business marketing. So did business marketing. And then after I graduated, got my first job and that was doing digital marketing, which didn't really know much about digital marketing. They said, don't worry, we don't know much about it either. We're gonna take the classes and workshops and learn alongside with you. And this is back in 2007, so working there for a little while, I realized that I could, well, that SEO I was helping out with search engine optimization, social media, helping out like email marketing, running paid ads and everything helps to get traffic. But SEO is just a way to get free traffic. And doing SEO is a way to also get freelance clients where I could pick up clients here and there while I'm working full time. And there's no conflict of interest. So while I was working full time at different companies, advertising agencies, I would be building up my business, working on the side after work, before work, during lunch, on weekends, and to where I was able to quit My job and just focus on this solely. Oh that's so cool. You know, a lot of people talk about a side hustle, right? And sometimes a side hustle is so different from your actual current job, but your side hustle was exactly what you were doing in your regular job. So you were just building to create your own company, right? Yep, yep. Pretty much. For the most part it was all the same thing. So what I was learning there at the company, I was taking it and implementing it on other businesses that were similar strategies. With SEO, it's just taking keywords that you put on one website and doing research, trying to figure out what keywords to put on a different website, what type of backlinks, and just employing those strategies that work from one client to another and just watching them grow and take off and get that traffic from Google. Right, right. You know, one of the things that, and, and you and I, obviously we, we understand what SEO means, but that's search engine optimization. And a lot of people may not be up to par as to what that is. They just think a website, that's it, and somehow the traffic gets there. But it's a lot deeper than that, isn't it? Yep. So it's not just setting it up and forgetting it. It's a lot that goes into search engine optimization. Putting keywords in different places on your website, building trust, sending trust signals to Google to let them know that you are relevant and trustworthy to be shown for those keywords. Because Google doesn't really trust anybody. So gotta build that trust up. Which is probably the toughest part about digital marketing or with SEO is just getting Google to trust you. But then also once you get Google to trust you, how to get people to trust you on your website. Which is also another really tough part. Yeah. So how do you get Google to trust you? Because Google is the biggest search engine, right? Yep. So to get Google to trust you, you have to do what are called build backlinks, getting other websites talking about you. The more websites that talk about you, the more trust Google gives to you. And then Google looks at the keywords on your website to figure out what to rank you for. But it doesn't really work the other way around. So a backlink is really just a clickable link from another website that points to yours. If you're reading an article on let's say the New York Times and in there it says Brandon Lieboitz and you click on that and it goes to my website, I'd be getting a Backlink from New York Times. So the more websites that talk about you, the more trust Google is going to give to you. But they have to be from relevant, authoritative sites. It can't just be any random website linking out to you. Because if you get the wrong type of backlinks, instead of ranking higher, you're actually going to drop down the rankings, which is the last thing you want to happen. So you have to be very, very careful with the backlinks. Right? Right. And technology has truly, truly leveled up, if you will, to what it was five years ago even. Right. So the things that we need to do even now. Right. That's why an expert like yourself would be the right person to have someone help To get more reviews, to get more looks at, if you will. Right. Because when somebody goes to look for you and they type up your name and you don't come up. Wow. Yeah, we have a problem, don't we? Not a good thing. Not a good sign. Especially if they're searching your name, because those are branded searches. So you need to be showing up anytime someone searches your name, your company name. If not, that's a really bad sign because those are the easiest keywords to rank for, because there's no competition for that. You're your own competitor. Unless you have a really, really generic name like John Smith or something like that, then it might be a little tough. But other than that, you need to be ranking for your branded terms. The ones that are tough are the non brand keywords, the ones that don't have your name in it. So if you're like a restaurant and your name is like Hof's Hut Pizza, you should be ranking for Hofset Pizza all the time. But the word pizza near me is your main keyword because that's where you're going to get new people that haven't heard of you, haven't seen you before, and get those new eyeballs on you. It's amazing how I could go to a whole different state even, and just type in those words, whatever, near me. Right? It's always near me. And I get boom. I get bombarded. Well, not bombarded, because I'm looking for it, but I get all these links and it depends on which one I click, right? What am I looking for? Is it a salon? Is it, you know, to get a haircut? You know, do I want to go to a restaurant? Do I want to go to a movie? Do I want to look for clothing? Whatever it is I can find. And it's near me. And how important are the words in your website to locate your facility? If you have a brick and mortar, I'm talking about. So, for example, my place is in Farmingdale. So in my website, the word Farmingdale is everywhere so that people can find me. So that Google searches are coming in. Right. But also, how important is it to put it in the title? How important is it to put it in the footer? To put it in almost everything where you're located? It's important, but you don't want to overdo it. No, of course, of course. So you want to have that balance of putting in places that are relevant, but you don't need to put too many places because if you put too many places, it looks a little spammy. If you don't have it anywhere on your website, then Google doesn't know that you offer it in that location. So you have to put on your website. If it's not on your website and you're wondering why you're not ranking, it's because you don't have those keywords on your website. If you don't have those keywords on your website, it's gonna be really tough. But the best strategy is making a page targeting those keywords. Because if you really want to become relevant, if you have a page about those keywords, that's the best. If you just have the keywords sprinkled all over your website, that's okay. But if you really want to rank for keywords, you need to make pages dedicated to those specific cities. So if you're targeting four or five different cities, you need five different pages or a page for each city targeting that specific keyword. Because if you don't have it, you don't become the most relevant. Google's going to say, oh, this other website has a page dedicated to this keyword. Let's show them. Because this page is all about what that person's searching for. It's all about relevancy. The more relevant your website is, the better. The more relevant that page is to the keyword that someone's searching for. Even better, right? So when we think about web design, if somebody's designing a website, let's say, and a lot of people go, oh, I got my, my teenager to do my website. They know all that stuff. And let's say they do a good job, right? But maybe they didn't put anything in the description. Is that important anymore? Like, I, I know it used to be, you know, the words you put in your description to explain, because Google is going to look for those words as well. Right. So there's a lot of different places you could put your keywords. I don't know how tactical you want to get with it, but go really, really technical with, like, the title tag is the most important place to put your keywords. Or the SEO page title, it's gonna be called differently for every platform, but that's really where you want to put your keywords. It's about 60 characters. After that, it gets cut off from Google. Gets a little dot, dot, dot gets cut off. So Google really looks at the title or SEO page title tag for you to put your keywords and put as many keywords in there as possible without repeating yourself. And this is really where you want to do keyword research to figure out what keywords do you want to put in here. If you can't put the keywords in there, you need to create a new page. Yeah. Because you only target about three to five words in that SEO title tag. After that, it gets cut off from Google. And the SEO title tag is when you're searching on Google, the blue clickable link that you see is called the SEO title tag. Black text underneath it is called the meta description, which is usually about 160 characters. And that's usually two, three sentences. Maybe that describes what that page is about. I want to really focus on putting the keywords in there because when you write the description, it should describe what that page is about. It should have the keywords. If it doesn't have it, then you should rewrite the description because the description needs to describe what that page is about. And if it's about that set of keywords, it should happen somewhere in that meta description. Unfortunately, half the time you put a description in there, Google is going to pull their own meta description. But still, it's good to put your own in there because the 50% of the time that Google's not pulling it, they're going to show yours. Right? Right. And then there's a bunch of other places too to buy keywords. And so one of the things that I think that became extremely popular was with Amazon and reviews. So how important are reviews on a person's website? And it doesn't matter the type of website nowadays. Right. If it's a lawyer doctor, I notice people are looking at reviews. If it's a deli, if it's a restaurant, on their own website. Not necessarily on Yelp. Right. But on their own website. How important are those? For SEO and ranking on Google, reviews don't really matter that much. For people going to your website, it definitely helps out. But in terms of ranking higher in the search engine, reviews aren't the number one thing. Especially like on Google Maps and Yelp and things like that. Or even Amazon.com, like reviews are important, but they're not what ranks a website. You could see someone might be, if you search on Google, like restaurant near me, the first listing might have five reviews. The second one could have 500 reviews. Third one could have 5,000 reviews. Reviews are important for people because if we see 500 versus 5 looks a lot better to us. But in terms of ranking, that's not the biggest factor. There's a lot of other variables that go into it. And so that, that's where we, we, we talk about like the, the, the web crawlers, if you will. Right. The spiders that, that come out and take a look at your site. So if somebody creates a site, right. They also have to submit to Google, right, In order to get ranked or is it. Does Google just come out of nowhere and find you? Both Google has what are called spiders that go around crawling the Internet, right. Looking for all the different pages on the Internet. So sometimes they'll find you, sometimes they don't find you. Because there's a lot of pages on the Internet for them to go through and crawl. And they only have so much time and so much space. And the way to hopefully get them to find you is just build a good website, write good content, and once people build backlinks to you, Google will find you. But sometimes you have to give them that little nudge and you can create what is called a site map. And then you create the sitemap and you submit it to Google. You can submit it to Bing through Google Search Console. It's a free tool from Google or Bing Webmaster Tools. Submit that search and sitemap there and that kind of gives them like a little roadmap showing all the different pages on your website and helps them to crawl your, and crawl your website and find all the pages. It doesn't guarantee they're going to find all the pages, but it's kind of like a roadmap. So a sitemap everyone wants to check to see if they have one. All they have to do is really go to their website, whatever it is. Www.your website.com forward slash site map. Just one word. S, I, T, E A P, XML. And if a sitemap appears there, they have one. If not, it might be a different URL. But 90% of the time if they go to my website.com sitemap they could sitemap XML. They could find their sitemap, see if it's there, and then if it is there, go to Google Search Console, submit it there and let Google find all those pages. But if you don't find one, then you might have to build a site map. There's a lot of free tools out there. You just search on Google. How to build a site Map or a free sitemap generator. And there's tools that will build sitemaps for you for free. And then you add that sitemap to your website and submit to Google. That's a great, great advice. For anybody who's not there and they're saying, what, what's he talking about? How do I do that? Well, this is why you're gonna contact Brandon. He's gonna help you with that, right? So one of the things that we're talking about is websites. And now that's, that's, that could be either a company website or personal website, right? So now let's get into what branding is all about. Because you can have two kinds of branding, right? You can have a business brand or personal brand. And I notice a lot of people nowadays are going for the personal brand. Even though they have a website, even though they have a business, they're still trying to. And everyone is talking about how important your personal brand is to drive traffic to that website. So let's talk about personal branding. And a lot of personal branding comes through social media, right? So when we think about social media, what are the top platforms? Because the other day I was talking to some teenagers and I said, yeah, just go to Facebook. They're like, yo, that's for my grandparents. So. And then of course the teenagers are going to go to Snapchat. They're going to go to different things where. And first, I think one of the most important things that we need to know when we're talking about our brand is where do we want to be seen? Right? Yeah, you gotta figure out who your audience is and where are they? That's number one, is whose audience, what platforms are they on and how I put myself in front of them because you don't need to be everywhere, you just need to really be where your audience is at. That's number one. Especially with social. See people spending too much time trying to be on every platform. But it's not what's the most popular platform, it's what's the most popular platform for your audience. So you just gotta try to take a step back and try to think, if you're looking for your project service, what platform would you be going on? Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, tick tock. There's so many of them out there. It's just trying to figure out really who that audience is and where are they. Yeah, absolutely. We have Surab who says, thank you for appearing. So thanks for showing up. That, that, that's part that's half of the thing, right? When we think about how we present ourselves, right, Showing up is not enough, Right. We have to have all these bells and whistles, if you will. And a lot of this SEO is not seen. A lot of it is. Like you talked about backlinks, keywords, and you don't necessarily go to website. You don't see those things. And when you go to social media, how do we get seen? If we just, let's say we've never posted and we go, that's it. I'm going on social media. Today's my first day. I post and I get the big zero. Nobody noticed. How do we change that from a big zero to a big ten to big twenty hundred thousand? How do we get seen on social media? Is it. It's not keywords anymore, it's hashtags maybe, Right? But some, some platforms don't even care about hashtags. So what's, what's the secret sauce that we need? I want, I want to see you get excited about this, buddy. Yeah, no it's tough to get any engagement nowadays, unfortunately. Most of these platforms are pay to play platforms where you have to advertise, spend money. Because if you do get an audience, let's say on Facebook, you get a hundred people that like your Facebook page, right? But you spend all this time building up all these people that like your page. You post on Facebook, only 5% of those people will ever see what you post without you having to advertise to show the rest of your audience that post. So essentially, they're really pay to play platforms. Like even Instagram has maybe 30 reach. Facebook owns Instagram, so they're dropping that reach. They all have algorithms, so it's not chronological anymore. When it was chronological, it was a lot more easy to get that visibility, get that engagement. But with these algorithms, it's a lot tougher. So there are little things you could do, like putting hashtags, which are essentially putting the pound sign in front of a word, and that makes it a clickable link or a searchable way for people to find you. But really, just providing good content, providing value isn't gonna be the best. If you're just talking about yourself, no one really cares. But if you're offering value, that's where people are gonna care. So if you have a really good content that could get to be shared by people, so make sure your content is good. You're not just promoting yourself, but offer value. That's so very important. And not many people do that. Yeah, yeah. So how. How is it crossing platforms? Like, for example, let's say you know, TikTok is. Is become a big one. And TikTok has truly grown as far as, you know, even its value in the market. Right. But it has grown where? In the beginning of it, it was just teenagers running on it. Right. And then somehow people decided, wait a minute, this is good for business. And people like, well, I really don't dance. I really don't, like, throw my hands up and act silly. How do I get on there for my business or my personal brand, which is a little bit more serious than I would for teenagers. So I've seen that. Happen. And people are now posting videos on, you know, like carpentry, cooking, music all these different, different venues as well. And then they're promoting themselves to go to their website to go find them in other platforms. What is the best practices you would say for someone to cross platforms? Well ultimately all these platforms are just a way to get traffic to your website. So you gotta really just offer good value, offer good content and lead people onto your website. Because most of these platforms close it off where they don't want people going to your website. They want to keep you on that platform. Because once you leave that platform, you're gone and you're not watching any more ads, you're not making that platform any more money. So they don't really make it the easiest to leave. Some of them make it easier than others. But like Instagram makes it really tough. You're kind of locked in there. There's not too many ways to leave Instagram. Whereas like with Twitter or Facebook, LinkedIn, they have a lot of clickable links. So you can leave those platforms, but it's really just again putting value out there, putting good content, leaning people onto your website. But social is usually a way to build trust. So once someone has found you on Google, then they're going to check you out on social to make sure you have the social proof. You have reviews, you have status updates, you're active, that you're really a real business. It's a way to put a face beyond the company. Social media, that's really what it's used for. So as long as you're putting good content out there, putting good value, hopefully they've already found you on your website and they're just vouching for you on social, but you never know how they're gonna find you. Yeah, yeah. You know, one of the things that I'm always looking at is the different content that people are putting out. I mean, don't get me wrong, some, some of it is just junk, right? And then some of it is real valuable. And then you're like, wow. And then you have to understand that even on some of these platforms, when you follow someone, it's you, you start to follow them and then either the content remains good, it was just that one content they did, and the rest is crap anyway. But so tell me, how important is even to create a link tree on your social media? Well link tree is just the boxes, I think, where they could click it and it just pops up. A bunch of boxes that go to other websites, but that's another step that people have to take to get to your website. Ultimately, you just want to send people to your website, right? You don't want to take people from Instagram to Facebook, you want to take people from Instagram to your website. Because you own your website, that's yours forever, you get full control. So the link trees are okay, but it's just too many options. Like you give someone 50 different links to click on, they don't know where to go. Unless you're the New York Times, you say, here's my link tree. Each one of these is a blog post or an article that goes to that. That makes sense. But if you're just like, here's my Facebook, my Instagram, my Twitter, my YouTube, my Pinterest, most people don't care about it. It's too much. They're on Instagram, they want Instagram, they don't want Pinterest, they don't want LinkedIn, they want Instagram because that's where they're at. And they might not even have profiles on all these other platforms. You just want to ultimately send people to your website. That's really the main goal is you own that website, you have full control. Everything else, you're really just running space off Instagram or Pinterest. That's not yours, that's Instagram's content that you're giving them. So you want to make sure you have full control of everything. And that's where your website comes into play. So talk to me. And you just mentioned Pinterest. What's the attraction to Pinterest? Because initially I always thought it was just cool images, right? But people are actually going on there. They're looking for content, people are looking for even businesses on Pinterest. How did that make that shift? Pinterest is about 80% female oriented, but it's all about DIY, crafting, fashion. So if you're in one of those niches, you need to be on Pinterest. Pinterest will get you more traffic than Google potentially because it has so many people looking for those specific industries. It works for other ones, but it doesn't work as well for some other industries. But if you're in anything female oriented fashion, diy, crafting, food, you need to be on Pinterest. If not, you're missing out on such a big audience. Right. And so for somebody who's never been on Pinterest and they decide, okay, I'm gonna go to Pinterest, are there easy steps to follow or do you need a guide. Probably a little bit of a guide. You can learn it yourself. There's a lot of video tutorials, but you just gotta really just get in there. Just like with Instagram or any of these platforms, just gotta get in there, play around, test out. You're not gonna break anything. I mean, you might break something, but you always fix it. It's not the biggest deal. But you're not going to break these websites. So go around, play with everything, click on all the buttons, see what they do, explore and learn. Because if not, you're not going to be growing. Okay, so here I go. You ready? I've tried all this. I don't know what to do. I call Brandon. Brandon I need your help. Brandon, help me out. How do I start? Where do I go? Yeah. Maybe Pinterest isn't where your audience is at. Maybe you need to be on a different platform. If you're trying it out and it's not working, then that might be a sign. Either you're not doing it properly or your audience isn't there. Because the number one thing is you don't need to be on every platform. A lot of people try to be on everything, but if it's not working, it just might not be where your audience is at. But with Pinterest, it's all about just posting images and videos, pulling them from your website and just sharing them or repinning them and putting a good description and some good hashtags in there. And other than that, there's not much you really do with Pinterest. Once it's up there, it's up there and it lives forever, which is pretty nice. It's not like you have to keep updating it because there's no dates when that content was updated. It's once it's up there, it becomes kind of evergreen content. As long as you have a good image, that's really the main thing has to be a good image. If you're not putting a good image up there with the right dimensions or a video up there with the right dimensions, it's not going to look good. It's not going to be enticing for people to click. But even then, that's me where your audience is at. If your audience isn't on Pinterest, it's not going to work. Gotcha So let me ask you, not only Pinterest, let's say I'm starting a new business, even a brick and mortar, right? And I don't have time to do all this stuff to post every day to, you know, create a website to do my search engine optimization. So do I call you or do I call a web developer? Who do I call? Do I call both of you? So I don't help with building websites. I help with the marketing campaign, getting traffic. So if you don't have a website, you're probably gonna need a web developer programmer to build that website. But once you have a website, then we can help getting that traffic and making sure people find you. Because building a website, you could spend millions of dollars on it, but if you're not marketing it, no one's really going to find it. So got to have that balance of building a good website that's optimized to get conversions, but also making sure you market yourself to the right people. That way you do get those leads. Yeah So that's. That's the critical part, right? Marketing. So when. When. Let's say I hired you, right? And let's say I have a pizzeria, right? And I don't have time because I'm making pizzas. I don't have time. And I hired a guy and he promised me the moon, and all I got was silence. Nobody comes to my website. I barely have a visitor. Maybe I get a visitor once a month. And I heard about you on this incredible coaching call podcast, and I said, you know what? I'm going to reach out to Brandon, because not only do I know his website, which is right up on the screen, is SEO optimizers.com, and I reach out to you. I said, brandon, I have my website. I need your help. I need help not just with search engine, but I need help with my social media. Are you able to do both for me with marketing? Yep. SEO social media, paid ads, email marketing, pretty much anything that focuses on getting more traction, getting more traffic. So building the websites, not my expertise, but growing it, making sure people find you, that's really what I focus on. Right? Right. So when in the past I've had. I have a martial arts school, right? And I hired a guy and swore that he would get me as many leads as he got someone else, guaranteed. Well, guess what? Didn't work. And then he got mad, and then he goes, give me another shot. I'm like, okay. He didn't charge me anything more. He goes, give me another shot. I said, okay, take another shot. Don't get me wrong, it cost me money because I had to advertise, right? I had to pay for the advertisements. Nothing. Still crickets. So I got rid of him. Now what sets you apart from someone who only delivers crickets? Well I make sure to focus on getting those conversions. So getting traffic is just half the battle. That's what I realized over the years is doing SEO will get you traffic to your website but what happens after that visitor gets to your website? Most of the time they're going to leave unfortunately. So getting traffic is just half an hour. Once you get that traffic to optimize that website for conversions to capture that traffic can actually convert them into leads, phone calls, sales, whatever that may be. But that is the tough part that is really the trickiest part is getting traffic is easy enough. It's how do you get that traffic convert that is really the tough part and that takes a lot of time of testing, trying things out, seeing what's working, what's not working and just constantly tweaking and testing strategies out. But it's not something like. Done and forget about it. Right. It's a constant revision, right. Because I, I believe that the spiders do come back to your website. They don't just come back. They don't come back once, right. And then just never come back and look at it again. Isn't it important to constantly update your website, to constantly change the content? And therefore I'm wondering if a blog or vlog is going to make a difference on your website. I know Google wants you to. Google's spiders, what's that called? Internet, they come to your website all the time because they're looking for new content, new pages, new keywords, changes, revisions. Because a website's always been updated. If you're an E commerce website, you're always having new products, taking products away. So Google has to come to your website all the time to see what's still relevant, what's not relevant. And there's a lot of different ways to add new content to show Google that you're still relevant by updating your website, adding new pages, tweaking the copy on your pages, adding new blog posts, whatever it may be. But a blog is just another way to add more content to your website. Add new pages. Because the more pages you have, the more keywords you could target, the more opportunities you have to rank for different variations of it. But it's all about just adding good quality content to your website. Nice, nice. So when we talk about adding more pages, for example, let's say, and I'm talking about like the pizzeria, right? Let's say I have my, my main page and then I have my menu and then should I not just have those two pages but maybe have like maybe meal of the week, right. Or pizza of the week. Or you know, we now offer delivery. So every so often that should change. Like even, like even this week's special, right? So that, that way it's changing and you're creating new content, right. Would that, would you say that's relevant? So essentially the pages need to be keywords that people would be searching for. So people will be searching for a new deal of the day. Pizza, that'd be a keyword. But I'm not too sure of how many people will actually be searching that. Whereas someone might search for, you know. People might be searching for like pizza delivery. So if you have a page about delivery, that would be good. If you have a pizza restaurant, someone's looking for a restaurant, then you have a page about dining in. That could be good. Then you have a page about the different kind. Like if you have like gluten free or Paleo or all these different ones that are out there, put those in there if you want. But it's all about doing keyword research to figure out what people actually search for. Because you don't want to just create pages to create pages. You want to create pages that have search volume that people are going to be searching for you. And that makes sense. So maybe you look at your competitors, see what type of pages they built out. That kind of gives you a strategy of what they're doing. Doesn't mean it's right, but it'll give you some ideas. Let me ask you how, how important is it for us to have a person like yourself helping us out? Is it, I mean, I know we can all do it ourselves, right? But I think that by having an expert, it's just gonna relieve us from that duty so we can take care of other things that are important for our businesses. Right? So for example, I gotta make the sauce, right? I don't have time to go look for keywords and all these things. And then here's the, the other question is, I asked how important it is to have someone like you on, on my team, right? But then what if I do have time? How do I find the relevant keywords? Is there a search that I should do? Is there a Google tool? What do I do? And I know I gotta hire you. I gotcha. Yeah. There's a lot of different ways to do that keyword research. It just depends on your strategy. But what I like to do is just search on Google for your keywords, see who's on that first page of Google, not the ads, but right below the ads. So skip over the ads. But when you search on Google, you'll see that blue clickable link, which is that SEO title tag that we talked about earlier. That's where everyone's putting their keywords. So if you really want to quickly spine your competition searching Google, see who's on that first page of Google and look at those blue clickable links. Look for patterns, look for words that you might not have thought of and make a list of all these words and then you can throw them into a different tool called the Google Keyword Planner, which is a free tool. They'll show you how many people actually search for that keyword every single month. Because you don't want to just guess or copy what your competition is doing. Because sometimes it's right, but sometimes the keywords that they're putting in there might Be outdated, there's old, there's new variations or slang terms that might be out there, that might be a little bit more relevant. But definitely look at the competition, spy on them. Because they're on that first page of Google. They're definitely doing something right. So you could quickly see those keywords without looking at the coding or anything else. They're just right there for you. Right, right. Easy for anybody to find, right? Yep. Don't have to look at the code, you don't have to know any technical things. You just search on Google and you can see it right there. No That's awesome. That's awesome. So I'm gonna. I know that you have a gift for all my listeners and I appreciate you doing that. I'm actually gonna throw it up on the screen and have everybody just go check it out because tell me about this gift. Right. I think it's really cool that you're doing this and I really appreciate you doing that. Talk to me about when they go to your website, they do backslash gift. What are they getting? Yep. So for everyone listening, I create a special gift on my website. It's SEO optimizers.com, that's S E O O P T I I z e r s.com gift and they can find that gift which has all my contact information, but also my classes that I've done over the years, I've thrown that up there for free. So if they want to learn, learn more about SEO or digital marketing, I've done a lot of different courses, they can find those there along with. Also if they want a website analysis where I'll check the website out from an SEO point of view, see what's working, what's not working, and give them some free feedback. They could book some time on my calendar to get that free consultation all there on that, on that page. Oh that's awesome. I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you to do mine. Yeah, happy to do it. You can fill that out there and I'll check out your website and give you some feedback from an SEO perspective. That'll be awesome. That'll be awesome. You know what? Because for me, like I said, it's, it's important to get the right people on your team. And it seems like not only seems, but it's apparent to me that you know your stuff. Right. That you know that just, just getting the traffic to your website is important, but also keeping the traffic on your website for a little bit. Right. Is important for them to do something. Not that they come to your website and just look at it for two seconds and click away. Because attention spans, my gosh, they've gotten shorter and shorter and shorter. So what are the things that from two points of view, One is from your social media. How do you get somebody to click on your content or even stop and take an extra three seconds and look at your content? And then how do you get someone to stay on your website and even click around a little bit and find out more? You have to have really good engaging content that hooks people right away because it's too easy to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling past it. So if you don't have anything exciting right away, probably lose that person. So got to capture the information or capture their attention, hook them, then offer some value and then try to lead them onto your website. Which leading them onto your website is going to be the toughest part because most of these platforms kind of close it off. They don't want you just clicking on links. So someone's watching an Instagram post from you and you say go to my website. There's no clickable link there. They have to actually type it in manually, which most people are probably not going to remember your URL. So it's all about just getting creative with it, trying to figure out ways to get people to leave social and go onto your website, which could be tough on some of these platforms because they really keep it closed, they don't want you leaving. But as long as you offer some value and keep them engaged, then you could even potentially run some ads to follow people around that have been to your social platforms. So it keeps yourself top of mind to them. So they see you all over the place. And from those ads they can probably click onto your website and go directly there. But the ads will just keep you top of mind. Maybe they saw you post a really good Instagram post with really good valuable content and now they see your ads following them around like, oh, I remember this person gave some value, now let me check them out on their website. But then once you get to the website, how do you keep them active and engaged? And you just have to have all the permanent information right there for the person to see. But they get a call to action, a value proposition, put a video up there. But whatever you can do to just entice people to want to learn more and keep them engaged. Yeah, absolutely. I just, I actually I, I just threw my website up there. Maxfit us. So whenever you get a chance, just check it out. And then we'll talk, obviously. But, you know, one of the things that. That I'm always looking at is, and you talked about it, so much content, right? How engaging is the content? Because for my, you know, I have so many different platforms. I actually post on. I post on LinkedIn, I post on YouTube, I post on. On Instagram, I post on Facebook. And all these are like, I'm sharing content, but I'm not asking for anything. I'm just sharing content to try to help people along, because I'm doing fitness videos, and I just want people to have a better life. So that's all. I don't even ask for anything. I don't tell them to go anywhere. I just say, check this out. Do this. Have fun. So, but I've been doing that to. Today's day 228. The reason I'm doing that is because I want to make an impact on people. But then maybe, somehow, maybe people will say, you know what? This guy keeps posting stuff. Maybe I'll see what he actually does do. He does teach martial arts. Let's go check that out. Right. So when it comes to giving without asking, how beneficial is that for someone like myself or anyone else who's doing it? Yeah. You gotta give. If you're just asking, no one's gonna listen to what you're saying. But if you give, then you're gonna keep them interested because you're giving good advice, you're giving good tips, giving useful content. So just give, give, give. Don't ask. If you start asking, you lost them already. Yeah yeah exactly. You know, one of the things that. And the reason I started coaching Call is because during the pandemic, everyone became a coach. I mean, everyone. I mean, it was, it was getting a little ridiculous when I was getting about a thousand emails a day. And I'm a coach, and by my program, by my program, by my program, by my program. And I didn't even know who they were. And then sometimes even if you were interested in the program, once you gave them your email, my gosh, you had to go unsubscribe, right? Because it was a bombardment. So I started doing this coaching call because there were so many people who claim to know their stuff, but they actually didn't. They just learned it like the week prior. So that's why I'm so happy to be talking to you, because you've been doing it for a while. You, you not only you didn't know it because the company that hired you said, we'll learn this together. And man, they took a chance on you and, and you ran with it. Which is really cool when you think about it, right? Because you didn't know that. You didn't have the knowledge and neither did they. But they took a chance on you and said, let's do this together, and you kept it going. You could have just said, okay, I'm going to do this is just because of this. Tell me, is there a passion now that you've been doing it for so long? It's like not only second nature, but do you constantly continue to learn? Because it changes, doesn't it? Google changes every single day. So it's constantly changing and just trying to stay up to date with it. She's an interesting. Because if it's just the same thing, over and over again, probably get a little boring. So Google is making it interesting by changing their algorithm pretty much all the time. They never keep it the same. So you're in school every day almost. For the most part. Not too much. But everyone's from all the big updates, right? Those are the ones where you really have to look at what's going on. But they are making little tweaks all the time. So you have to constantly just see, did anything happen? Did I shoot up in rankings? My rankings stabilize, do they fluctuate? Do they bounce around, what's going on? But you never know what's going to happen until you just keep, keep up to date with it, keep reading, learning as much as you can. Digital marketing, it constantly is changing. Yeah. So let me ask you, Brandon, how how do you know. And you keep talking about your ranking. How do you know where you rank with Google? Is there a tool, is there a way? Do you go to I know you have Google Analytics and so forth, but do they rank your website in comparison to other similar websites? Or is it the business, the type of business you have, how do they rank? So ranking is what position you're in. So if you're searching for yourself and you're ranked on page one, position, fourth one, then you'd be position four. So you just manually search or there's tools that will check for you. Or you could use like Google Analytics, Google Search Console and those three tools to track it as well. But there's a lot of different ways to track it. Some of them are paid, some of them are free, but. Or you just manually go in there and search if you have time to do it yourself. So yeah, thank you for that. And talk, let's talk a little bit about. Because right now we're doing a video, right? Let's talk about video. How important is video content on your website? And when we talk about, there's a couple of places you can do Vimeo, you can do YouTube. How important is it to either have the video live on your website or embedded in your website? Video is pretty important nowadays. People want visual content. They want to see things versus reading. So if you have videos, it's always going to be a little bit better, I feel like. And if you can put that video on your website, that's gonna be a lot better than just having a long article blog post. People probably going to read that, but they'll watch that video. So video content does help out, especially nowadays if you look at all these social media platforms it's pretty much all video. People just want visual content or videos. And like we talked about earlier, Tejas fans are really short. So videos are a way to keep people engaged without having to read. Spend a lot of time invested in reading an article or a blog post or something that's really long. So that's something that, that's very interesting that you just said, something that's very long. So, so should videos be short as well? Because this is, this right now we're up to like almost 48 minutes and this is going to go on YouTube, right? And then it's going to live there. So are people going to engage in something that's longer than 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes? Or is it based on the interest that they have? Probably based on the interest because there's no golden rule for videos. Usually a little bit shorter nowadays seems to be better for people's attention spans. Really long form, but just depends on how engaging that content is. And if it's really engaging, they'll listen all the way through. But if not they're gonna drop off. So that's where you watch the drop offs on the videos or the pod, the audio version, see where the drop off is. Are people coming back after they drop off? Are they just leaving and not coming back? You gotta just look at the data because every, everyone's gonna be a little bit different. You just gotta see how receptive your audience is. Right, right. Because I, I can actually, if I have a pizzeria, I can be how I make the sauce. I can make a video with that, how I flip, you know, the pizza pie and all that stuff. So yeah, I think it doesn't matter the type of business that you have. Even an auto mechanic can have videos. Like hey, hey, when you drive up, this is what you're going to see. And this is our guys. Meet Tony. He'll change your tires for you. So that kind of content will probably attract someone more because they're putting a face to the business, right? Yep It helps a little bit more putting yourself out there, letting people see who you are, who, who's behind the business. It's not just a company, but we're actually people here to help you out. So putting a face behind it with social video, all that helps out. But if you're just filming a video without yourself in it, it doesn't really help out. So you gotta film yourself. Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's that personal brand even in the business, right? I mean, if you think about it, right? Yeah, Company, and you are that face beyond the company. So putting your face out there, letting people know that you are not just a website, but you're actually people, humans that are here to help out. Right? But let's think about two brands, right? Apple, iPhones and Hershey's Kisses. We knew Steve Jobs was behind Apple. Who is behind Hershey's Kisses? We don't know, but they're both popular so it's, I guess it's the way that, that the message is brought forth. Right? Because I mean, Steve, besides being brilliant, you know, he, he definitely changed the way technology is viewed today. Yep He had a big impact on it, but huge. It just depends if you want to put yourself out there or you want to just be anonymous. I mean, back when Hershey's Kisses is around, they probably didn't have social media to put the face behind the company. So. But maybe like 100 years ago when they heard first out versus Apple's been around a little bit newer, so they're able to get people to kind of get that, get the people talking about it. Word of mouth spreads a lot easier versus 100, 200 years ago. Right. It's probably tough to spread the word about who Mr. Hershey was or whoever that person is that created this candies. But nowadays I feel like personal is a little bit better, but just depends on what you're putting out there. Sometimes you want to stay anonymous and not put yourself out there. Yeah no, listen. Wow, you've given us so much to think about. And listen everybody, I'm gonna have Brandon look at my website. If you have a website, have him look at yours too. So once again, here is, he's giving you a gift. You can take a look at it and then reach out to him. If it means that you're going to increase your traffic even by 10%, it's worth doing. What are your thoughts on that, Brandon? No, I would recommend checking it out and I could give you some feedback and let you know what's working, what's not working from an SEO perspective and help you try to get more visibility, more exposure, more sales and leads that come into your website. Awesome. Awesome, man. You are exceptional. Thank you, my friend. I really, really appreciate you. Any last words for anybody? Just keep working at it. Don't get discouraged if you don't see that traction right away. Just keep pushing at it and you'll see that growth coming up. Perfect. All right, everybody, thank you. And everybody have your best day ever. Brandon. Enjoy, my friend. Thanks for having me on. All right.