The Art of SEO - PR After Hours Podcast

🎙️ I had a blast being a guest on this podcast!

We dug deep into all things SEO — what it is, why most people still don’t fully understand it, and how to use it to get more traffic, leads, and sales (without spending a fortune on ads 💸).

Since 2007, I’ve been running SEO Optimizers, helping small and mid-sized businesses grow online. In this episode, I broke down my process, shared actionable tips, and even revealed why SEO is both an art and a science. 🧠🎨

We talked about:

• Why short keywords won’t cut it anymore
• How to spy (ethically!) on your competitors
• What Google looks for in a website
• Why do you need content, even if you hate writing ✍️
• How paid ads and SEO work together (not against each other)
• And why remarketing might be your secret weapon 🔁

If you’ve ever wondered how SEO works (or why your website isn’t ranking), you’re going to love this one.

Check it out now and let me know your favorite takeaway!

#SEOtips #MarketingStrategy #SmallBusinessGrowth #DigitalMarketing #SEOStrategy #GoogleSEO #OnlineVisibility #EntrepreneurLife #TrafficToSales 🚀

Transcript

0:03

So you've been searching high and low to figure out how to use SEO. Pardon that pun. That was terrible. I know, I know. But you know, it's. It seems like every other day people who offer SEO services are seeking me out. I bet it's the same for you. And I think the problem for a lot of SEO companies may be, and we're going to find out because I'm going to ask our guests. It may be that people just don't know enough about it to even think to ask about it or to call or find an SEO company that may be a problem. I don't know. We're going to find out. That's why I'm excited to have our great guest today. Brandon Lebowitz. He runs and operates SEO Optimizers. Since 2007, he's been doing this. They're a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium sized businesses get more online traffic, which in turn converts into clients, sales leads, wealth beyond your wildest dreams. Well, you hope. But it, at the very least, it will help you build your business. Brandon, welcome to the virtual lounge. Thank you for having me on today. My pleasure. So am I nuts or what? I mean, do you think people just don't still at this point know enough about what you do to seek out an SEO firm? I think it's just ambiguous and it changes all the time. So people get confused and overwhelmed. It's not really tangible. It's tough to really put into words or put into actually a way to physically see what's going on versus waiting few months to get some traction and then seeing that growth. But yeah, I think that's the tough part is that intangible and the weight, because it's not immediate. SEO does take time, but it is the better long term strategy. It really is. So let's just, hey, let's boil this down here. Lets just say let's assume people in the audience just don't know what SEO is. Can you, can you give us your elevator pitch? So SEO is search engine optimization, which means ranking websites in the different search engines, which nowadays is just primarily Google. When you search on Google, there's ads at the top. Those are all paid ads, but right below the paid ads are the organic, the free listings. And SEO is about getting your website listed in those free listings. There's 10 spots on that first page of Google. So they're trying to get you into that free traffic so you're not paying every time someone clicks on your Website. There's. It's a science. But what do you say, Brandon? It's also kind of an art. Because I just, for example, I'm a. I've got several books out on Amazon and one area is where I've fallen short. Just, just as an example is the keywords. I just put like one or two keywords, not phrasing or anything. And I didn't really think about the seven or eight keywords that are phrases that people used to search. Right. Its just not enough to put mystery novel. I mean, you're not really gonna get found if you just put mystery novel. But if you put quirky mystery novel set in Nebraska, you're more, you know, people might, might actually be looking for that. That's just a weird example. But. But would you say that that's part of what you're doing is like when you, when you settle in with a client, you already said to the, the true statement that of course it's not going to happen overnight. You have to, you know, you have to keep working at it. But is it kind of an art to figure out just exactly how people are searching for your clients? I'd say that's definitely one of the first starting points, is figuring out those keywords. Because if you're targeting the wrong keywords, it's not going to do much. So you got to go and do the keyword research by figuring out what keywords people actually search for using different tools such as, like the Google Keyword Planner. It's a free tool from Google that will show you how many people actually search for that keyword every single month. So you see, is this a good keyword? Should I change it? But like you said, putting like one word keywords are not the best you want to really put because people don't really search one word. People usually search multiple words. So the longer the keyword, the less people that use it or. But the more intent behind it. Someone just searching for book. What does that mean? It can mean a million different things. What is that? Or mystery book. It's a little bit more specific but still pretty broad. So the more words the better. So if someone's looking for like mystery book, detective murder or something like that, and writing about that's going to be a lot more specific. Ver. So definitely getting more granular is going to be a lot better with SEO, with the keywords especially. Yeah. And sometimes too, I've, I've seen and I'm trying this out a little bit. You Know, Knives out and Glass Onion are pretty popular mystery movies and maybe people are like mystery novel, like Knives Out. I mean, I, I don't know if that's going to work or not, but sometimes you just gotta, you gotta try, you gotta kind of experiment a little. Don't. You never know until you try. So it's all about, with SEO, it's all about testing, seeing what works. If it works, keep doing it, if not, cut it back. But it's all about testing and testing and testing to figure out what that sweet spot is to, to get, actually to, to get that traction, to get that growth. So let's let's kind of go through some steps here. Let's pretend like you're, you're onboarding me, my company. Okay. And how would that work? You already stressed and I want to restress this to the audience as well. It's kind of like pr, which is mostly what I do. It doesn't happen overnight or rarely does it happen overnight. But can you kind of walk us through? Say I' small to mid sized business. And I've decided I come to you and I say, Brandon, here's the deal, man. I, I can't get anywhere near page one. You know, the phone's not ringing. I don't know if my website's any good. I don't know if my social media is helping or hurting. Well, how does this work? Let's say I just signed the contract. What do you do? What are your steps? Well first is always a website analysis because it's not a one size fits all. So gotta look at your website, analyze it versus the competitors and try to figure out what the disconnect is, what's working for you or what's not working for you. And same with your competition. What's working for them, what's getting them to the top and how can we implement what's going on into their websites onto yours? And that's really looking at like their keywords, looking at their backlinks. And with SEO, everything's transparent. I can see what you're doing, you can see what I'm doing. So if you just look in the right places, you'll be able to kind of see what strategies people are incorporating and try to forgot how to put it into your website. But that's the other style one size fits all. So I always do a free website analysis to try to just figure out where you are and where your competitors are and how to get you to that level. Would you say though, that. Let's say, you know, you were signed on and we're doing a And I don't even know what you'd recommend. I think it probably depends client to client. But let's say I'm spending the amount of money you say I should spend on, on on not only keywords, you know, with you doing the keyword stuff, but also maybe some Google Ads. Does that, does spending a. Does an ad spend with Google help with Google, or is that something that you, you would never know, but you could basically assume it might help or how does that work? No, no, they're separate. So Google's not going to help rank you higher just because you're spending money on ads. Unfortunately, they would get a lot of trouble for that. So they don't do that. But what they do is you run. If you do SEO and then you run paid ads, your cost per click might be a little bit cheaper because Google wants you to optimize your landing page and do all these things to help reduce cost per clicks, but it's not going to help you rank higher for organically. Do you typically, though advise that you do some advertising to kind of speed things along? What if they're like me and they're really impatient? They're like, like, dude, I want to get, I want to get some results in the next six months. Would you recommend ads with the keyword work or what? I always recommend some remarketing ads. So anytime someone goes to your website and doesn't make a purchase, follow them around. Because fortunately half the traffic is probably going to leave your website immediately. Got to capture them and keep yourself top of mind. And that's where you're running these paid ads. We'll follow them around and keep you top of mind for like, warm traffic. If you want to do cold outreach, you could do that, but it gets pretty expensive. It just turn. Depends on your turn on ad spend, making sure you hit a positive return on ad spend and you're not bleeding more money out than you make again. So as long as you're making more than you're putting in, then I would say run those ads. But definitely the remarketing where you follow people around and just keep yourself top of mind. So, so putting in a pixel trying to capture email addresses. Do drip campaigns. Does that, does that figure in? The more touch points, the better. So you don't want to just focus on SEO or paid ads. You want to do social media marketing, you want to do email Marketing, you want to get traffic from as many different sources as possible. The more the better. So don't just think you should do one thing. You want to diversify and try to capture that traffic from as many different places as possible. Yeah let's talk about strategy a little bit here. What do you think of the strategies that are most effective right now? Well, it's definitely adding content to your website. So adding text to every single page. Google feeds off text. They can't really read images or videos yet. But the more content you have on each page, the easier it is for them to read, understand and know what keywords you're targeting. So got to make sure you put text on every single page. Not just the homepage, but any page that you want to rank needs a couple hundred words of content. And that's going to really help the search engines read and know what keywords are targeting. A lot of people, especially E commerce websites, don't put much text on their website, so it becomes tough for the search engines to know what keywords you're focused on. So you go in and clean up or I mean just add some text to each page. Unfortunately it has to be original content. You can't just take text from one page to another. Right. Have to be 100% unique. But you take that text from one page to another and I mean, if you write unique text for each page, that's going to really help out search engines a lot. And I know a lot of people probably don't want to put a bunch of text on their website, but it doesn't matter where you put it on the top, the middle, the bottom of the page. As long as Google sees it, that's all that matters. Just don't hide it. Don't put in like font size 0.001 with white text. If your background is white text, that's going to potentially get you in trouble. But as long as you put the very bottom of your page, most people never really scroll to the bottom. But Google will read from top to bottom and see that content. And that's just going to help out with their with their understanding of what your website's about. Because Google's just a search engine, they're just a robot. They're not that smart. They need to really spoon feed them as much information as possible. The more you give them, the easier it is for them to know what keywords to rank you for and ranking for the correct keywords. Yeah, I mean, it's a prettier site when it's images that are moving and, and you know, great images and visuals and that kind of thing. But as you say you know, Google's not really stiffing around for that. They need to see the words. Right. So I appreciate that. That's a good thought. And I hadn't thought about even if your site is just very geared toward that and it's an aesthetic where it's just mostly a visual and not a lot of words put them in there somewhere. That's even at the bottom. That's a fantastic thought. I've never considered that. But can it can a site? Okay, here though. This speaks to me. I'm asking this for me. Can, can your site be too wordy, too many, too much on a page? Yeah So Google says, just put the right amount that needs to be there. So if you're writing an article or you're someone's right answering a question, what's two plus two? And you have 10,000 words, that might be a little too much. But if you're saying, if you have an article about like how to fix your car engine, that could be potentially 10,000 words. So it just depends on what the content is and how much text needs to really be there. If you don't want to just add extra text to add it, you just need to write what needs to be there. So writing for people, not writing for search engines, don't write extra tax just because it should be there. What you want to do is search in Google for all your keywords and, or I mean searching Google for your keyword and open up all the websites on that first page of Google and see how much. We'll skip over the ads, but open up all the organic listings and see how much text each website's using. And then what you're going to do is average it all out. So if you see everyone's writing 500 words, you should probably write 550 words. If you see everyone's writing a thousand words, you should probably write thousand words. So that will kind of give you insight of what, how much text should be there. That's, that's a great point. That's a fantastic. Well, let's, let's go back for a second to keywords then. How do you research the keywords? So is it, are there sites that people can use? You did mention the Google site that's free, but I can't imagine it's anywhere near as good as the stuff that you bring to the table. Do you bring kind of a, a big gun to the table, so to speak, for that kind of thing that you can't just get for free? No. The best is really Google Keyword Planner because it's going to show you all the data about what keywords or I mean how much search volume each keyword gets because there's no third party tools that are able to see that data. Google gets all that data and then all these third party tools that do keyword research just pull that data in and make it look pretty. But it's all pulled from the Google Keyword Planner because there's no other tools that are able to see what the data that Google has. Google keeps that private except for search volume, which is kind of nice that they give you that. But other than that, everything else is pretty much kept top secret. Yeah, but, but you do bring to the table the expertise how to use that. And there, as I said earlier, that's an art and a science to what we're doing here and what you're doing here for your clients. Right. So it's, it's, that's why it's beneficial. And I just can't imagine a lot of my. Okay. You know, I'm a PR agency. I can't imagine most of my clients having the time and really just, just the, don't take this the wrong way. Clients who are eliciting, but the, the sophistication in that particular area to do it effectively, you know, Time wise and, and just knowing what's, you know, kind of knowing how to do the process. It just seems like it's a, kind of a bit of a learning curve and be a little easier just to hire a firm to help. Yeah, no, definitely gotta, just having a tool doesn't do anything. You gotta make sure you use the tool the right way. So having tools is great, but if you're not using it in the proper way, then it's not going to help out or it might do more harm than good. So definitely I know how to, how to navigate through those tools, what to look for, what are red flags, what are green flags? To go ahead with this keyword and just try to figure out that you're on the right track and not just wasting time. Yeah. So tell me your, your firm, you say you work with mostly small to mid sized companies. Is there a general term that people work with you? Is it more of a short term deal or do you work with people year over year? How does that look? It varies. So some people will be on for a few months, some will stay on for years. It just depends on, really depends on the competition. If there's no competition, once you rank at the top of Google, then you pretty much you're going to be up there. But if you have competitors, there's only 10 spots on that first page of Google, so they're going to be fighting for it and trying to get to the top. So it just depends on how competitive that industry is and that lets people know how much time they need to do to keep, to keep those rankings up. Because you don't want to just rank and then drop them down. You want to keep those rankings. You don't want your competitors to outrank you. Because what's gonna happen is once you get to that first page of Google, they're gonna look at all the keywords, all the backlinks, everything that you've done and try to do a better job of doing it. Just like that's what I would do. And anytime I get a new client, I look at all the competitors, see what they're doing and try to do a better job of it. So it's kind of like a back and forth battle, keeping those rankings. Very good. And are there, there are some other ways to kind of leapfrog, aren't there to. What about if you use a good solid, have a good solid Google business presence that, what does that do for you? Google business? Google Maps is more local. So if you're a local business then you definitely want to be on like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing maps, yellow pages, MapQuest, all these different maps. Because if you're a local business you want to get that local presence and show up for local searches. But if you're international business then, then the local is not the most important. But definitely if you're like a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist, something like that, you gotta be on Google my business. That way you make sure that you show up when people search for you locally and capture that traffic. So just trying to take up more free real estate on that first page of Google because Google will show, they'll show websites, they'll show maps of your local business, they'll show images, they'll sometimes show videos if you have any videos that are optimized. So really want to try to take up as much free real estate as possible on that first page of Google with, without spending money on ads. Right, right. Yeah. Like for example you search Kansas City Public Relations and if you go into the business after you get through with the million ads at top, you go to the businesses thing, click on that and then all of a sudden we're, we're in a good position there and we get a lot of traffic. Although we're working on getting away from just being in that little subsection. My agency is. But you know, so what about LinkedIn? I've heard it tell that LinkedIn has such tremendously good you know for want of a better term credibility with Google that having a LinkedIn presence can also be beneficial in SEO. Is that true? I mean Google is blocked from most social media so they can't really see what you're doing. They can see if you have a profile but they can't see beyond that. So they can see because most businesses want Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, all the kind of basic ones, tick tock, stuff like that. But beyond that they can't see how many followers or how active you are. And all Those, except for YouTube, they own YouTube. So right. Twitter, they partnered with Twitter so they could see that. But other than that, but to normal business, Google wants to make sure that you, I mean a normal business should have, social media should have like an About Us, a Contact Us page, a privacy policy page, a Terms of Service page, a phone number that's easy to find or an email address that's easy to find. If people don't have that stuff then it looks like you're not a real business to Google because a New real business would have most of that stuff. Even if you're not active on LinkedIn, as long as you have a presence, it shows that at least you were at some point a real business. It doesn't tell Google that you're still active. And that's where these backlinks come to help Google see that you're still a real business and people are still talking about you. Very good, Very good. Yeah, there's just so much out there. And you, you can tell with some of my questions where you're, you're being polite and going, I don't know where you heard that crap. But, you know, you just hear stuff as a business owner all the time though, you know, oh, well, you got to do this, you got to do that. And but that's the other thing too is you bring the expertise to say yeah, have that presence, but don't waste, you know, all your time on it. You've got other things you should do to, to to turn up in the page. So if would you say on, if you don't mind me asking, do you. Do you think that Facebook advertising at all is beneficial compared to Google, or does it just depend or any thoughts on that? Kind of just depends. If you're a new business where no one's searching for you and people aren't gonna be searching on Google, then I would say social media might be better because if no one's searching, it's gonna be tough. Yeah. If you create a new product or invent something, but people are searching on Google, then you definitely want to probably run Google Ads, because social media, you're just interrupting people based off interests, but doesn't necessarily mean they care or want to use your product or service. In the past they might have, or in the future they might, but doesn't mean they want to now versus Google, people are searching, they're showing intent, they're actively looking. So, right, a little different with that. Where I would always say Google is going to be a lot better because people search, they're actively looking versus you interrupting people hoping they're interested. But it just depends on intent. But yeah, you definitely want to be in front of your audience at the right moments at the right times. And that's where Google, SEO, social media. You just got to figure out who your audience is, where they are, and how to be in front of them at the right time. Because you don't need to be everywhere. I mean, the more places you are, the better. But you just really need to be in front of your audience. And you just got to figure out who your audience is and how to get in front of them at the right moments. So if I'm hearing you correctly, yeah, Google number one. But I guess, and you're right, nobody, especially on social, you know, quit interrupting. You know, that guy. That's. You're right. But if they follow you on, let's say follow your Facebook fan of yours or follower, and every now and then you might want to boost a post about a special you're doing or just a post that's got some traction so more people see it. Would that go along with what you said earlier about, you know, you want to, you know, constantly touch your friends and fans and potential customers in that way? Because that's less, that's a little less intrusive because you kind of signed up and said, hey, look, I'm a fan. As long as you don't abuse the privilege. Would you. So I guess what I'm asking is, in the right mix, Facebook advertising could help. But it's as. Again, back to what you said. It's not. It should not be your primary. Yeah, I would do Facebook after you exhausted Google. So spend all the money on Google Ads because that's where you get the most sales. Social media is cheaper for a reason. It's lower quality traffic. Right. A lot of different types of ads you can run on Google. Like Google owns YouTube, so you can run YouTube ads. And yeah, YouTube gives you 30 seconds free ad space. So if somebody watches your YouTube video ad for 29 seconds and then skips it, you don't pay a penny after 30 seconds. Then you pay like 10 cents a view. So there's a lot of other ad platforms that are cheaper than Google. Well, Google owns YouTube, so still technically them, but people also buy off people. And video is going to be a lot better at conveying a message than a couple of lines of text on a Google search ad would be. So there's lots of ways to try to tap into that free traffic that Google's giving you. Even though it's not necessarily free. You have to pay after someone watches 30 seconds. But it's much cheaper and much more affordable in the long term. Oh, fantastic. So Brandon Lewis if people want to learn more, is it SEO optimizers.com, is that correct? Yeah. So I actually created a special gift for everyone that's listening. If they go to my website@seoptimizers.com that's S E O O P T I I z e r s.com forward/gift. And they can find that there, along with my contact information and a bunch of classes I've done over the years. I've throw it up for free so they can watch them anytime. And if they want to also book some time on my calendar for a free website analysis, I'm happy to dive in and see what's working, what's not working, and how to get them to the level that they want to be at. And they can book some time on my calendar for free as well there. That's fantastic. I'm looking at the site right now, folks. It's a great site. It explains everything in simple terms. Theres more details about every little thing that is available. And boy, after listening today, I've certainly learned, obviously learned a few things about some assumptions I had or some things I'd heard that weren't necessarily true. That's one of the main reasons you're going to want to talk to Brandon and his team and see about what they can do. Brandon Lieboots, thanks again for joining us. We learned a lot. Dad, thank you for having me on today.