Expert Tips To Master SEO Today - Talking with the Experts Podcast

🎙️ I had an amazing time chatting with Rose Davidson on Talking with the Experts! 🚀

In this episode, I dove deep into expert SEO tips for 2025 — from 🔍 keyword research and 🆚 competitor analysis to 🔧 website optimization strategies that can help any business grow online without relying on paid ads.

We talked about why hashtags are basically the "SEO keywords" of social media 📱, how important it is to give your images smart filenames 🖼️, and why you should never blindly trust AI for keyword numbers (hint: it makes stuff up sometimes 🤖🙈).

I also shared some inside tips on:

• How to find high-traffic, low-competition keywords 🏆
• How to use free Google tools to crush SEO research 💥
• Why remarketing ads are a total game-changer for staying top-of-mind 🔁
• Why patience is the secret weapon for long-term SEO success ⏳

If you want to learn how to actually optimize your website for real traffic and future-proof your SEO strategy, this episode is packed with actionable advice you can start using today! 🚀

Catch the full conversation now — you won’t want to miss it! 🎧✨

#SEO #DigitalMarketing #SocialMediaMarketing #WebsiteOptimization #KeywordResearch #BusinessGrowth #SmallBusinessTips #SEO2025 #BrandonLeibowitz #TalkingWithTheExperts #SEOOptimizers

Transcript

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Foreign. With the Experts learn expert SEO. Tips for 2025 with Brandon Leibowitz. Discover keyword research, competitor analysis and website optimization strategies in episode 571. What do you want to try to find? Like, keywords that are good for SEO are going to be hashtags for social media. So the hashtag is where you put the pound sign in front of a word and it becomes a keyword per se. So you want to try to find good keywords that you want to use as hashtags and incorporate those into your content. Make sure your images or videos have file names that are descriptive before you upload them to social media. Really, really important. And just making sure, depending on what platform you're on, if you can write a title like YouTube, make it a good title for your video. But every platform is different. It's just trying to figure out how to best optimize for the space that you're given and trying to look at your competition and seeing what they're doing. What type of keywords, imagery, videos, what type of content are they posting and trying to replicate that and try to sprinkle in those keywords to try to maximize the reach of that content. Talking with the Experts. Welcome to Talking with the Experts. This is where we discuss great ideas to take your business to the next level. How do we know these ideas work? Well, it's because we're talking with business owners who are using these ideas. Business owners who have years of experience and expertise. All things Business by business owners for business owners. And now here is your host, Rose Davidson. Hello. Welcome to Talking with the Experts. I'm your host, Rose Davidson from rose davidson.com. talking with the Experts is all about business by business owners for business owners. You can find it on all podcasting streaming platforms and on YouTube. And today my guest is Brandon Leibowitz and Brandon is going to be discussing with us all things SEO. Now we know, we know with the advent of AI and all those things, sometimes our SEO needs a bit of a tweak. So Bren is going to discuss with us how we can optimize our websites and how strategies that we can use, how to use research, keywords and techniques for competitor analysis. Brandon, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for having me on today. Brandon runs and operates SEO Optimizers and has done so since 2007. And he they are a digital marketing company that focus on helping small and medium sized businesses get more online traffic which in turn converts into clients, sales and leads. Brandon, tell me a little bit about why SEO is so important. You know, a lot of people don't think in this day and age with AI and stuff that SEO is important, but, you know, in my mind, it still is. So SEO is ranking websites on search engines. And it doesn't matter where you search. If you're searching on Google, bing, Facebook, Twitter, Yo, TripAdvisor, chat, GBT, anywhere where you're searching Amazon, there's ways to optimize and try to make you rank higher without spending money on paid ads. Which is ultimate goal is trying to make sure that you show up in those free searches on whatever platform you're searching on. It doesn't may have to be Google. It could be anywhere that you're able to search. There are ways to optimize and make sure that you Rank higher. And AI is. ChatGPT is a big one. Chat GPT is open, owned by OpenAI, which is really Bing. So it's just Bing putting the search results in a new format for people to read. But you still have to optimize if you want to show up in AI or Google or Amazon or whatever platform that you're trying to rank for. So why is SEO so important for website conversion? SEO is going to get you free traffic. SEO doesn't lead to conversions, but it leads to targeted traffic. And once people get to your website, then you got to make sure you optimize your website for those conversions, which is called conversion rate optimization. But SEO is really trying to make sure that when people search it, search wherever they're searching, that you show up and you capture that targeted traffic. And then once they get to your website, then you got to work on how to make sure that every visitor then converts into a sale or lead or phone call or whatever that conversion goal is that you're trying to focus on. So I guess you know, people putting, you know, keywords into their website and, you know, in the back end of their page and, and all that. You know, how, how do you use SEO? How do you find those, you know, focus keywords that is so important when building the back end of your page. I try to look at my competition first and start from there. So I'll go into Google, search for my keywords, see who ranks on that first page of Google, and look at that blue clickable link, which is called the SEO title tag. That's where everybody is putting their keywords. And I could quickly look at my competition and see what keywords are they using. And write them down. And what I want to do is make a big list of keywords and then use tools like the Google Keyword Planner to figure out how many people actually search for that keyword every single month. But first, I like to try to spy my competition and get ideas from them. Because if someone's on page one of Google, they probably did some keyword research. Hopefully, maybe they just got lucky. But in general, most of those websites probably did some keyword research and you can get ideas and see is everyone using a singular or plural or a synonym? And if you see everyone, if you're trying to rank for a keyword and you see everyone's using a plural, maybe the plural might be a better one. But you still need to check using the Keyword planner from Google to really see how many people search for that keyword every single month. Like one of my clients or personal injury lawyer, and they want to rank for personal injury lawyers, which gets I think 20,000 searches a month in Los Angeles, where I live. But personal injury Lawyer Singular gets 200,000 searches every single month. Just by removing that one letter, you're going to get 10 times more searches. That's why you got to do keyword research, because you could guess and you might get it right, but you also might get it wrong. And it only takes a few minutes to do that research. Quite often I I, I use ChatGPT to, you know, get those focus keywords for the back end of the website to do the SEO. Yeah Is it better to use them or is it better to use the Google platform? It depends how you're doing keyword research. If you just want list of keywords and Chat GPT is okay. But if you want to know how many people search for that keyword every single month, Chat GPT is going to give you the complete wrong numbers. Like their numbers don't even match up close. And that's the thing with AI. It doesn't know the right answer a lot of times. And if it doesn't know the answer, it's going to make it up and it's not going to tell you that it's making it up. So I would probably avoid doing keyword research on Chat GPT or any AI for the time being because it's just so far inaccurate. And using the Google Keyword Planner takes the same amount of time as using Chat GPT. Right, that, that's that's a good tip because, yeah, I've been using it and using that and they ask, I ask for A focus keyword. And you're right, it doesn't give me the amount of searches for that particular focus keyword at all. So yeah, I think I might start using the Google Planner instead and find out, you know, what I'm doing wrong. Because, I mean, when I go and search for my page, it comes up automatically, but I don't know exactly what page it's on in Google. So just quietly, how can you find out what page you're on? What do you mean? Where you rank in Google. So if you put, say if I put my website URL into the, into the search bar and it comes up, how do I know where my page ranks in Google? Obviously, you have to just search. So if you want to see what position you're in, you're gonna have to search and see where you rank. So if you're ranking for like car mechanic near me, you could just search. And you have to go through all those pages of Google to see where you're at. But usually I want to go past page three if you want to, but there's tools that will let you check and Scan to page 10 to see what position you're in for those different keywords. I wonder if I must be on nearly page one then, because I don't have to search very far. Yeah, but anytime it's your company name, that's not really. We want to rank for keywords that don't have your company name. Non brand keywords. Because anything with your company name, you're always going to rank for that. But what you want to do and anyone searching for your company, they already know who you are. You want to show up for new searches of people that don't know who you are. And that's where you want to do unbranded searches. Keywords that don't mention your brand name or a company name or your name where it's just mentioning the services only. And that's going to get you that new traffic. Oh, I'll do that. I'll go, I'll go and do that after this interview and see how we go. Branda, what are some really great SEO strategies that we can work on for 2025? Planning I'd say adding more text to your website is something that doesn't require coding and is easy enough for everyone to do. Is Google feeds off text. The more text you have on every single page on your website, the easier it is for the search engines to read and really know what that page is about. And you have to Put text on every single page has to be original content. Google doesn't care who writes it anymore, AI or people, as long as it's accurate. Because again, AI is not accurate. So if you just copy and paste from AI, it might do more harm than good. But if you go in and tweak and edit it, that's perfectly fine. But you need to add text on every single page. It is really, really important. Doing that alone will almost guarantee you'll get more traffic. So you know, in, in our marketing plans, how can we, you know, add SEO into, you know, our marketing strategy? For your marketing strategy, you just want to try to figure out who your audience is and where they are and are they going to be on Google searching or they're on Google, where are they? Maybe they're on social media and you can optimize for social media or if they're on a directory or like TripAdvisor or Yelp or something like that, you can optimize for that and just trying to understand who your audience is, where are they and how do I get in front of them at the right moment? That's really the most important thing is where are they and how do I get myself in front of them when they're actively looking for my product or service? That's where sometimes you just have to take a step back and think, if you were looking for your product or service, where would you go? And then you kind of just piece it together and try to test and see what works and push more time and money into what's working and pull money and time away from what's not working. Yeah, I guess you know, as we've said, SEO is a really important part of building a website. You know, how can we use the research tools and to, you know, better get those important keywords that we need to have. Yeah, you want to look at those keyword research tools that I was talking about, like the Google Keyword Planner and you put your keyword in there and it'll show you how many people search for your keyword every single month. So then you go for the high search volume keywords. But just because it's a high search volume keyword doesn't always mean it's the best because it probably means it's very, very competitive. The more competitive the keyword is, the more time it's going to take to rank. That's where you just go in and search that keyword that you think you want to rank for on Google and see who ranks on that first page of Google. And if it's a bunch of big corporations and you're just a startup, might have to skip that keyword. But if it's a bunch of small or medium sized websites and you're a startup, go for that keyword. But that's where you have to go in and dive in and really take the time to find those low competition keywords that have good search volume. And what is it? You know, can you explain to me you know in the keyword search it tells you how many clicks there are, but there's other numbers in that sort of line. You know, that some people don't understand. So you've got, you know, clicks per conversion or clicks per something or other. I don't know what that, what exactly that it means. Can you explain to me you know what those numbers, all those numbers mean? When you're looking for a keyword, it. Depends where you're looking. Every platform is going to be different. If you're just looking at the Google Keyword Planner, it's going to show you the, how many people search for that keyword every single month. The competition, it's going to show you the cost. If you want to run paid ads, it'll show you how much each click will be. But it depends what platform you're on. If you're on a different third party tool, it might show you different data points. But Google Keyword Planner is going to show you competition, search volume, cost per click and the monthly searches year over year, how it's changed, if it's increased or decreased. Right, okay, so social media marketing SEO is quite important in that. I understand that. And how can we use SEO in our social media marketing? Well, you want to try to find like keywords that are good for SEO are going to be hashtags for social media. So the hashtag is where you put the pound sign in front of a word and it becomes a keyword per se. So you want to try to find good keywords that you want to use as hashtags and incorporate those into your content. Make sure your images or videos have file names that are descriptive before you upload them to social media. Really, really important. And just making sure, depending on what platform you're on, if you can write a title like YouTube, making a good title for your video. But every platform is different. It's just trying to figure out how to best optimize for the space that you're given and trying to look at your competition and seeing what are you doing, what type of keywords, imagery videos, what type of content are they posting and trying to replicate that and trying to sprinkle in those keywords to try to maximize the reach of that content. That's really important that we do our keyword research and just don't rely on AI to, you know, to spit out the hashtags or the keywords that we're looking for. So Actually sitting down and doing that research is really important, is what you're saying. AI is a, okay starting point, but to really get the numbers, you could ask AI to give you the numbers, but they're going to be completely off. So that's where it's okay to get some keyword ideas. But if you want to know the data points, the numbers, you gotta use a real tool like the Keyword Planner. Yeah. So now it'll change, but right now AI is just full of those inaccuracies. And we don't want to put something out and think that's good and it's really not good. And AI is doing, doing those AI hallucinations and it's not telling you that it's making it up, which is really weird. I feel like if it doesn't know, just tell us. You don't know, don't make something up because then a lot of people are just going to copy it and paste it and post it on their website. And it's a lawyer did that, I think recently or a couple years or a year or two back right when AI came out and they used AI to write their whole deposition and it was full of incorrect cases and I think they might have gone disbarred for that. So that's where you just got to really, really be careful. Yeah, absolutely. No, that's great advice. Now, Google Ads. Now I know I don't like Google Ads1 because they're expensive, but. But how can Google Ads better our reach? Well, unfortunately, most people that come to your website are going to leave immediately. It's that bounce rate, like around 50% of your traffic on average. On a normal website, half the traffic is going to leave. And that's where you can follow people around with banner ads. So if you ever looked at a product and you'll buy it, those ads will follow you around. That's all through remarketing on Google. And that's where you can follow people around and keep yourself top of mind and just keep those touch points for warm leads. So I like to run those ads indefinitely because you want to keep yourself top of mind. And half that traffic is going to leave. And you spent a lot of time getting that traffic to your website and following around with those ads is really, really cheap. You could get away with hitting a thousand people a day with your ads for $10. Really cost effective. And these are all warm leads of people have been to your website, but for some reason they didn't convert. And those ads I like to Run. There's lots of other ads you can run. Search ads. Those are very expensive. YouTube is owned by Google. They give you 30 seconds free ad space on YouTube. So if someone watches your video ad for 29 seconds and then skips it, you don't pay a penny after 30 seconds. It's free couple cents of you. It's really, really cheap and cost effective. And that's where it's all about testing. And not just running those expensive Google search ads, but running all the other ads that Google lets you do. But I would always run those remarketing because you always want to keep yourself top of mind. Especially for people that have been to your website and didn't make that purchase or call you follow them around. Great advice. But you know, is it advisable to get someone to do set up the ads for you or is it wise to do it yourself? It just depends on your time and your learning capabilities. It took me years to learn Google Ads and you can do it yourself pretty quickly with Google or with YouTube. I put a lot of classes out that teach people how to do it. But then you have to spend the time and then you have to go in the ads almost every single day to see what's working and what's not working. Stop the bleeding on wasted clicks. Because every click is costing you money. And that means every day you need to be going in and say stop showing me for these keywords or this audience like maybe males 20 to 25, they're clicking but they're not converting. Cut them out. Females 30 to 35, they're clicking, they're converting. Push more money to that. But you have to constantly be going in there and tweaking those ads. It becomes almost like a part time job because you're going to go in there almost every single day. If you're not going in there on a daily basis, you're just wasting money on clicks that are not converting. And that's what Google and all these platforms want you to do is set an ad up and forget it. You should never do that. You have to go in there constantly. Test. Yeah, so I guess it's advisable to have a a marketing company like yourself go in and do that because you've got the resources to, to spend the time to make sure that we're getting the ads right. That is important. But there's some stuff that you could do. But do you really have time to go in every single day? If you do great, but if you don't have time to do that, then it might be better to delegate to somebody else that could take that off your load. That way you can focus on other things. Because when you're a business owner, there's too many things that you have to do and to worry about. Google Ads, it's a whole new skill set. It's like me trying to change my engine in my car. It's like, I could do it, but it's probably gonna take me a month or two of or probably longer to figure out how to do that. So it just depends on how much time you have to invest in yourself, in learning a new topic and. Or learning a new skill set. But then also, how often are I going to use it? If I need to change my car's engine, is it worth me to spend a few months to learn that? And how often am I going to really need to do that? Probably once. Maybe once. Probably in your lifetime. Hopefully you don't need to do it more than that. So it's like all that time just to have a skill set that you only do once is. It's a lot of work. Absolutely. Now, talking about competitor analysis, what are some techniques that we can use for that? The best way is really understand that online and offline is different. And when you're searching online, whoever ranks on that first page of Google is your competitor. If you're selling dog food and Amazon ranks, that technically is your competitor, even though they sell everything. Whoever ranks on that first page of Google, that's your competition and that's who you want to analyze. So always think of online and offline different. Like, I get a lot of people that come to me and say, hey, here's a. Like, a restaurant will come to me and say, here's a list of restaurants that all are my competitors. And I search on Google and none of them rank. But I see, like, well, in America, Yelp is really big, or TripAdvisor or OpenTable or something like that, where it's a listing of restaurants ranks and it's not really a restaurant, but they rank on Google. So technically, that is your competition, and that's who we want to analyze their keywords, their backlinks, and their entire SEO strategy to see what are they doing and how can we do a better job of it. Like, a lot of work, though, Brandon. You know, as you say, business owners are busy. They don't have the time to do all this stuff. So, again, getting a digital marketing company or agency is probably your best advice. It's took me a while to realize that delegating is the best thing because I always wanted to hold on to everything, but you got to delegate some things that just don't have time to do, like accounting. I could do my QuickBooks, but I really want to spend a couple hours every single week essentially managing, making sure my balance, everything's balanced, or just pass it on to someone. That way I can focus on more important things like growing the business or doing podcast interviews or writing blogs and articles and doing my social media and all these other things that are on that list of to dos that I can't really give those off to people. I can't have someone be a guest on a podcast on my behalf. It's not really going to work. So there's only so much time in the day and sometimes you just got to let things go and delegate and it makes things much, much better in the long run. It's tough to let go at first, but once you do it, you're like, why did I do this years ago? Because it's giving me so much more free time to really focus on my core capabilities and my expertise. Yeah, absolutely. Now, your website, SEO optimizers.com, what can people find there? And you know, what can they expect? So everyone that made it to the end, I made a special gift for you. If you go to my website at s e o optimizers.comm forward/gift, that's s e o o P T I I z e-r s.com forward slash gift. And I can find that gift there along with my contact information and classes I've done over the years I've thrown out for free. So you can see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about with SEO. Google Ads, social media, all that stuff. I've created free courses that you can watch anytime. And also if they have a website and they want a website analysis, free consultation, I'm happy to check out their website from an SEO point of view and see what is working or what's not working and how to get you to that level that you want to be at. Very good. Excellent. Now you can find Brandon everywhere. He's on Facebook, he's on LinkedIn, he's on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok and Buzzsprout. Now, all these links will be put in the show notes when this goes to air. Brandon what else can people you know, what advice would you give people that are starting out with SEO or how to improve their SEO patience is key. Unfortunately, with SEO, it's not immediate. It takes time to get Google to trust you and to rank you. And a lot of people want that immediate results. With SEO, you're not going to get that social media, paid ads, that's the way to get that immediate traction. SEO is a slow, steady growth and over time you're going to get more and more and more traffic. But you have to be patient. And a lot of people get discouraged and give up. But it does take six months on average. It could take more to take less depending on the competition of those keywords. But just stick with it. Don't get discouraged if you don't see those immediate rankings. Absolutely. Great advice. Brandon. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining us here on Talking with the Experts. I look forward to sharing this with you, with you in the future and I hope you'll come back on one day. Thank you so much for having me on. You've been listening to Talking with the Experts, hosted by Rose Davidson. Make sure you have a look at our back catalogue over at talking with the experts.com and be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don't miss out on any episode. We look forward to your company next time.