Digital Marketing in Athletic Recruiting - Plates & Pancakes Podcast

🎙️ Just wrapped up an awesome chat on the Vudu Power podcast with Plates and Pancakes! 🍽️🥞

I had a blast diving deep into how I help small and medium-sized businesses (and even sports teams!) drive more traffic to their websites and OWN their online presence. I shared why your website is your most valuable digital asset (yep, you own it — unlike social media, where you’re basically renting space).

We talked about everything from creating athlete pages for better recruiting, optimizing images and videos with alt text, to how keywords and backlinks can totally change the game. I even geeked out a bit about skateboarding culture and my favorite skaters — shoutout to Jeff Rowley and Nyjah Huston! 🛹🔥

Whether you’re an athlete trying to build your personal brand, a coach looking to recruit top talent, or a business owner ready to dominate Google, I dropped some serious gems on how to get found online and stay there.

We also talked about how important it is to have your own website as your digital home base, plus how to use social media to drive visitors back to it.

Had so much fun connecting and sharing my journey from skateboarding streets to helping businesses grow online. 🤙

Check it out if you want to learn about SEO, personal branding, and turning your passions into powerful online visibility.

#SEO #DigitalMarketing #Skateboarding #BrandBuilding #WebsiteOptimization #Backlinks #SocialMediaMarketing #AthleteBranding

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the Vudu Power podcast. Welcome to Plates and Pancakes. We're sitting down today with Brandon Leibowitz. Brandon is the owner of SEO Optimizers. They are a digital marketing business that helps small to medium sized businesses capitalize traffic to their website. So welcome to the show, Brandon. Thank you for having me on today. Now, I've listened to quite a few of your podcasts. I spent, you know, the last couple weeks researching, trying to get ready for the show. What you do on the surface doesn't look like it. It kind of fits the show that I normally do with coaches and athletes and things like that. But in today's day and age, with recruiting organizations, you're, or as an organization, you're trying to bring athletes in, but you're also trying to promote your athletes. Actually with the website and how you optimize, it's kind of set up to be somewhere that maybe coaches should pay more attention to. Driving people to your website's key, would you say? Yep. You own that website, so you get full control. Whereas social, you're just kind of renting space off these websites where they could take you down anytime. But more importantly, like, you don't have much reach anymore. Where if you have, let's say on Facebook, 100 people that like you, only five of those 100 people will ever see what you post without having to advertise and click that blue little button says boost this post up. So kind of pay to play platform. But your website, that's where you get full control. You own that forever and that's yours. So you want to always send traffic to your website. Everything should be used as a way to get traffic to your website, social way to get traffic to your website, Email marketing way to get people to your website. If you do TV or radio or whatever you're doing, ultimately you want to send them to your website because that's where you have full control over everything. Okay, so in today's day and age, competitive sports are huge. I mean that's, that's where a lot of your kids are getting recruited from more so than high schools, which back in the you know, back before competitive sports, everything went through high schools. Now it's changed. So as a competitive organization, you're looking to bring kids in. Obviously you need talent to build your organization, but then you also want to promote your kids. So as an organization, I start a website, let's say. What are the key components? First, just that a website should have, I guess, going forward to really help people once they're in there, kind of find what they need. I mean, there's a lot that you want to do. But if you're doing athletes, I would make a directory of every athlete that's been there, past or present. Because then if someone's searching for that person's name, your website's going to show up. And that's where, I mean, I love skateboarding. So follow skateboarding. And I've looked at, when I search for skateboarding company or skateboarder names, a couple websites that list them all out because they were in competition. So there's this website where they have all these competitions and anytime there's someone that enters the competition, they always put their name in there. They create a page about them. They put all their sponsors, what stands they are, how old they are, their hometown. So it has some basic information because Google wants content. You can't just throw a picture up there. You have to have some stuff there, some original text. And they rank for almost every skateboarder's name when you search on for them. So creating a page for every athlete or anyone that students, coaches, anyone that's on the team, create a page for them. And that's really going to help out. But Google relies off text. They can't really read images or videos. So if you just have a bunch of images and videos on those pages doesn't really help out. That's why they listed like some text, like their sponsors, their age, their hometown, things like that. Maybe you get a couple sentences of something unique about each person and that's going to really help them rank on Google. So when you search for that person's name, your website will show up each page. The more pages you have on your website, the more keywords you could target. Because each page can only target about maybe like three to five words. After that kind of loses relevancy. So the more pages, the more keywords you could target, the more opportunities you have to rank on Google and the more visibility and exposure you're going to get, Especially just creating those pages alone for athletes, especially if some of them, like, become really famous and popular. Like, that page is still going to be there. It's going to be old. And Google looks at history, how old these pages are. The older pages get more trust. So that would potentially get you ranked higher. Okay, so now like you said, with images and pictures, you don't get a whole lot of text. Should you, if you're maintaining a website, use alt text? Would that help with keywords and maybe drive some people in or rate you higher with Google. Yep. So for images, videos, audio, podcasting, any of that stuff, you need to make sure your file name has descriptive words before you upload it. So if you're uploading an image to podcast or Spotify or wherever, I mean a podcast, you're uploading it. Don't just name it like podcast, MP4, whatever, name it something that describes what that podcast is or images or videos, all that very, very important. Make sure the file name has those descriptive words. When you upload images onto your website, then you could add what's called an alt tag. So, so alt tag also helps the search engines know what this image is supposed to be because they want to make sure the Internet's accessible for everyone. So there's an alt tag where if you're visually impaired or you have an old website or an older computer that doesn't show images, instead of the image appearing, that alt tag is going to appear. So if you're visually impaired and you can't see, there's a screen readers that read out the text, but when they get to images, they're just like, what do we do? They're going to read out that alt text. So Google wants you to have alt text that describes what that image is about. That's going to help out to make sure that your images sometimes show up in Google search results or Google image searches is by optimizing the file name alt tag, the text around that image needs to be related to what that image is about as well. So not just having an image there, but having some text before that image and after that image with those keywords that you're trying to target really helps out. Maybe resizing the image too to like, if it's 521 by 531 pixels, maybe you make it 500 by 500. Because people search by image size as well too. So just trying to make it easier and more streamlined. And if you want to take it one step further, you can right click on an image before you upload it to your, to the website. And then you can get click on properties. And in properties you could add the date, the photographer's name, what type of camera it was. You can add a ton of details in there. So it's all this metadata that you can add to the image. And that's just going to really take it one step further. Where most people don't do any of that stuff and they might name their image file with some words, but alt tag and the metadata really help differentiate yourself. And take you one step above your competitors. Okay, that's. I mean, there's a ton of information right there that you just kind of went through. So as we're talking about this, obviously your company is called SEO Optimizer Search Engine Optimization, and we discuss keywords. How important are the keywords in getting your website ranked higher in Google? No, they're very important because you want to make sure you rank for the right keywords. You don't want just someone finding you for random keywords or keywords that don't have much search volume. So there's tools that will let you see how many people actually search for that keyword every single month. And it's free. It's from Google. It's called the Google Keyword Planner. So what you do is take a list of keywords that you think you want to rank for, throw it into the Google Keyword Planner, and then it'll show you how many people actually search for that keyword. So let's say I'm doing like skateboarding classes. I could say all right. Do I want To rank for the word skateboarding class? Skateboarding or skateboarding classes. Which one gets more searches. And I could see using that tool that maybe skateboarding class gets 100 people searching a month, whereas skateboarding class is the plural version, might get 5,000 people searching. Where adding an S or making a synonym or plural has a big impact on search volume. And you don't want to just guess at what keywords. You want to actually do some research. And you can look at your competitors keywords too. And the easiest way to do that is just searching Google for your keywords and skip over the ads. But look at the organic listings. Whoever's ranked on that first page of Google, Google's rewarding them. They've done something right. And you can look at that blue clickable link, that's called the SEO title tag. That's where everyone's putting their keywords. So you could quickly look at all of your competitors and see what keywords you're using in there. Are they using some like industry jargon or slang terms that you've never heard of? Maybe you want to maybe use that word. If you see everyone's using it, that might be something that you want to incorporate. So look at your competitors, get some ideas, and then throw them into the Google Keyword Planner to make sure people actually search for it and then try to incorporate those keywords into your website. That makes sense there that you need to be researching what I guess the People you're competing against are doing, and if they're doing better than you, then you have to figure out a way to become more competitive on Google or whatever the case may be. So how could you utilize keywords in your URL? And is that going to make a difference? I mean in the past Google rewarded what are called exact match domains. So if you bought the website skateboarding classes.com and someone searched for skateboarding classes would always rank at the top of Google. But now it's not the URL or the keywords in the URL, but having a page inside your website about that topic, it's just like the images, like you want to name them each page with something descriptive. So if you have a page about skateboarding tutorials, it should probably be skateboarding tutorials or your website.comforward/skateboarding tutorials. It shouldn't just be like your website.comforward/forward 4, 5, 6, 7. Like putting some numbers or random letters, you want to make it somewhat descriptive and most platforms will do that for you automatically. So you don't have to worry about that too much. But should be aware that each page should have a URL that kind of describes what that page is about. It's all about relevancy. Google looks at the URL, they look at all the technical coding stuff, they look at the content on that page to make sure it's all related and that it all makes sense when someone search for that keyword, that your page should hopefully be relevant and then Google will want to display it. So now that you're starting to kind of narrow that down, you got your URL figured out, you've got pages, you got a directory of all your players. You could do more because content's king when it comes to your website. So you're looking at any article you could write. So blogging recaps of games recaps of tournaments, anything like that is going to help drive up your traffic. And those are easy blog posts because a lot of people get stuck about what to blog about. And you blog about the different games, events, maybe you got a new player or you won a championship. All that stuff is easy. Content where usually business owners like what do I blog about? How do I blog all the time? That's the easy way to you for you to have content and then you could use that for social media content as well to cross promote it and definitely yeah tap into that stuff and write blog posts about different events like that, different players matchups different schools or whatever it is, but leagues that you're in. And that's going to really help out for when people search for that stuff that you show up. Yeah. So a lot of this stuff is very new to me. I think it's very important with where recruiting's going, both to get out to college coaches, but also to bring players into your organization. So working through all this, I mean, it's not as easy as one might think. It takes a lot of work to keep your website up and know how the keywords are changing. So let's say you have a skateboard team. You're trying to promote your skateboard team. You know, you need really good skaters. How are you going to build a website to kind of get out there and maybe draw some attention and try to get guys into your organization? Yeah. So for sports, I feel like social might be a little bit easier because people want to see that stuff where it's like, it goes viral. People want to see skateboarding or basketball or football or wrestling. They can watch that over and over again all day long on social, where you can post 20 times a day on Facebook or Instagram and Twitter or TikTok and no one's probably going to be mad. Whereas if I post for my SEO company every day, everybody like, this is too much information about SEO. So it's all about just knowing your audience. I feel like social is a great place to build that up because most these players want that traction. But for your website to get your traction as well is having, well, having all that text, having all that content, but also having what are called backlinks. It's getting other websites to talk about you. The more websites that talk about you, the more trust Google is going to give to you and the higher they're going to rank you. So if you're an organization and let's say you're in like, City of LA or whatever, you can try to reach out to the City of LA website and get them to link out to you or talk about you, or you can reach out to like different parks or schools that you have events, or if you're in a league, you reach out to that league and see if they would potentially link out to you. So a backlink is a clickable link from another website that points to yours. So let's say you're reading an article on the newyorktimes.com and in there it says Brandon Liebolitz. And you click on it and it goes to my website. I'd be getting a backlink from the newyorktimes.com so the more websites that talk about you, the more trust Google is going to give to you. And if you could get organizations or players or if you're in tournaments, you could sponsor events and sponsor different things. And usually they'll list you on that website and you get that backlink. And the backlinks are really what ranks websites. The more backlinks you have from sites that are related to what you're doing, the more trust Google is going to give to you and the higher they're going to rank you. Without backlinks, you can make a perfectly optimized Website, Google doesn't care. They just don't trust you. They don't believe you are who you say you are. But backlinks, if you get schools, organizations, anything like that to link to you is going to really help move you up the rankings really quickly. Okay, that I had something in there on that. Now you covered two different points, so I want to kind of take them one at a time. You kind of hit on social media and, and we can push that to the side for a minute. Backlinks. So if you have an organization and you have athletes, you really want them to get out there and do podcasts, to do interviews, to do different things that would help you create backlinks to come back to the website that will eventually help them out, but you're driving people back to your website. Does that sound pretty accurate? Yep. So if someone's doing an interview, ultimately. Well, if they're doing an interview, they're probably going to promote their social, their Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all that stuff. But that's just helping all those social media sites rank higher on Google. You want to tell them to link out to your website if possible. Or if the athlete has their own website, they should get a link to their website. That way they could start building their brand. And essentially, if you can, you should have all these athletes, if they're trying to really make it, build a website. Because that website is like a portfolio. It's like a resume for them. Just like social media is a resume for them, that website is also another resume, and they own that. And the more places you're on, the more visibility, the more exposure, the more people are wanting to recruit you. Because if they have someone that's really good, but they only have a couple hundred people following them on social media, and there's someone that's equally good and they have hundreds of thousands of followers, they're going to want the bigger person because they're getting more eyeballs to their games and more visibility and exposure to the overall organization. Unfortunately, that's kind of how it works. All right, so you hit on something there that I was going to ask a little bit maybe later on, but now that we're there, should an individual athlete be looking at the investment of building a website? It sounds like you would say yes. Nowadays it's not that tough to build a website. It's pretty not easy, but a lot easier with like WordPress or Wix or Shopify and Squarespace. All these platforms make it pretty easy. And it's not a big Barrier to entry. Where in the past you need to know coding. If you just get a basic website up with a couple pictures, videos, and most kids nowadays are able to do that, that's gonna really be great. Buy your domain name, your name.com, and just build that brand out. If you can't, if you can't buy your name, buy like a variation or the dot net or the dot org. It doesn't really matter because if you have a really common name, you might not be able to get the dot com, but try to get some variation of your name and use that to build your brand. Because ultimately you are who your marketing is, yourself, and you get full control on that website to put whatever you want up there and make it look as good as you want and use that as a like resume, portfolio kind of thing. That was a question I had. You want to get out there and you want to claim your business name. Now if you're an athlete, your, your name is your business name. And then I know social media is huge. As far as YouTube, where does YouTube fall? I mean, it comes up on Google, but it's not necessarily a website. So if a kid's running a YouTube page, how does that affect Google? No, Google owns YouTube and they're going to show YouTube majority of the time when you search in Google. So when you search in Google, sometimes ad, I mean sometimes videos appear and those videos, when they appear, 90% of the time it's going to be YouTube because Google doesn't want to promote Facebook videos or any other platforms. Occasionally they will, but they'd rather show YouTube because they only care about making money. When you search on Google, if you don't click on any ads, they're not making any money. But you search on Google and you click on a YouTube video, the first thing that appears. Anytime you watch a YouTube video, there's always an advertisement. So YouTube is making money, which is really Google making money. And they're going to really push YouTube as much as they can. And YouTube is the second most popular website on the Internet. So building a presence up sooner than later is going to be good because social media is good. But YouTube is owned by Google and Google's going to promote YouTube as much as they can. Whereas other social media, they kind of come and go. I don't feel like YouTube's gonna go anywhere anytime soon. Whereas Instagram is kind of on the decline. I mean, it's still growing, but Facebook is on the decline. Instagram's kind of bouncing around. TikTok is really growing, but they're all trends, and eventually they're going to grow and then start declining. Whereas YouTube, Google's gonna push and push and push YouTube as much as they can. Because anytime, huh, you watch a YouTube video, there's always an advertisement, and that's what they want. Let's say you have your skater organization, you've got some skaters that are looking at going pro. You're trying to help them, because the more kids you get pro, the more kids you bring in your organization. So you've talked them into building a website. Now you would talk them into a YouTube page and then link the website and the YouTube, and then from the YouTube, they could put all the tricks that they're doing. If they go out in public and they're starting to, you know, run rails or whatever it is they're doing, you want to get that on YouTube and then link back to your website. Is that kind of how you would, you know, and then that would promote your website also. Is that kind of how you start building a little bit of a brand and get your guys out there? Yep. And I would say post on every platform, so get your name on Facebook, on Twitter, on Pinterest, on Tick Tock, on all them. Because there's tools like Zapier, Zap Ier, where it'll automate it. Also, you pick a platform like Instagram, say, all right, I want to post on Instagram. That's where my main audience is. Anytime I post on Instagram, share that video on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on my website. So it kind of automates it for you. That way, it post it one time. You don't have to post on 8 different websites and keep it all active. And by doing that, I've had platforms grow to tens of thousands of followers. I was like, I don't really think my audience is on this platform. But just having an auto post grew that platform where I love skateboarding. So I have a page on Instagram and grew it to a couple hundred thousand followers. But I posted my skateboard videos on Twitter, which I think Twitter would really be my audience. It's grown to 50,000 followers just by me having Zapier automatically post from Instagram to Twitter. I'm not manually posting on Twitter. Twitter, it just automatically does it. And it's grown to 50 thousand followers organically. And you never know where your audience is going to be. And automated as much as you can with social, because social does take a lot of time. Now, social, we'll get into that Now, I kind of pushed that aside a little bit ago. That's not going to create your backlinks. That's not going to move you up on Google. But what that does is it builds your platform and then from that point, is the goal to drive it back to your website? Yeah, for the most part. Or just grow those numbers and you could get sponsorships and brand deals and partnerships and things like that, or get some ad revenue, but ultimately you want to diversify and have everything go back to your website. Because five years from now, is Instagram going to be Instagram? Probably not. TikTok might still be around. There's probably some new one that's emerging. But your website, you build up that audience there, and ultimately, hopefully you get like an email address or something to stay in touch with them. And that's where you have that full control to reach out to them all the time. So let's go a little bit off topic and get on maybe something I can talk a little bit more freely about for a few minutes. But of all time, who is your favorite skater? That one stuff I like, Jeff Rally, who's a street skater from when I was growing up. That was really good. And. But I mean, Nyjah Houston is just too good. One of the craziest ones nowadays, where it just jumps down every. Anything and everything. And it's really impressive. I was trying to tie it all back in, you know, as I was working on the interview this week, and. And you look back at guys like Jason Lee, you know, who lucked into the career. I mean, he was a great skater, but he lucked into the Hollywood side. If, if he would have had these tools back then, what could he have done to make his rise, I guess, so much easier? I mean, he could have had Instagram, he could have had a Twitter, a YouTube, a webpage. You know, you see him in movies now, but really he just worked his butt off. Where, if he would have had those tools, would it have made it easier? Yeah, probably would have made it much easier because now you have that voice, that exposure, and you get sponsorships where if you have a couple hundred thousand or even a few tens of thousands of followers, you start doing brand deals and getting some money that way. And then you could be a little bit more okay, where you're not like, I have to do all this stuff now. I could focus more on skateboarding instead of trying to get money now I have this way to get some passive income, which is helping skateboarders out or any athlete out is Just given that voice to, like, tap into their audience, too, and speak directly to their audience and build a bigger fan base and engage with them and respond to comments and DMS and things like that. We could really build your. Build your connection up with your fans. Now, the one thing to think about, I guess, in all this is you take somebody like Chad Minska, who got real big. You know, the Internet was just starting to come on. All of a sudden, he ended up in the social eye, and it wasn't all good content for him, and it actually sabotaged his career. So I guess when you're building these websites in your Instagram and you're looking at college coaches looking back at what you're posting, good content is going to get you way further than shock content. Most people didn't realize that I was going to take over and that everything is going to be there permanently. And back then they just didn't realize it. But nowadays, everyone's realizing, like, your history is out there. You can. It's online. It's going to be up there somewhere. Even if you delete it, it's still around. And just don't be posting anything. Be careful, and don't be going crazy thinking that, oh, I can just post this video and no one's going to see it, or only my friends will see it. Somehow it's going to get out there. And if it's private, hidden, there's ways for people to get it. And that access to that information has hurt a lot of kids that didn't ever expect that, you know, a college coach would see that. And then, you know, I've been around some recruiters and watched them at ball games, and it seems like if they got a kid they're interested in, almost the first thing they do is go to social media and see what that kid's page looks like. We got off a little bit. But going back to backlinks. Backlinks are clickable links. Is that correct? Anything you can click on? Yep. So you have to be able to click on it. So if you're reading like an article in Sports Illustrated, it says Brandon Leibowitz, and you click on it and it goes to my website, then I'd be getting a backlink. If they just mentioned my name. That's not a backlink. It has to be a clickable where they click on it and it goes to my website. Okay. So when you're emailing and you're trying to get, you know, I mean, part of the recruiting process is tons of emails. You're sending emails all the time to coaches. Do you want to add your website's clickable link and all that stuff to your email so that your coaches can go back? Is there any value in doing that? I mean, a little bit. It's not the same as a backlink because Google wants to see that you publish on a website. They know that you just send out millions of emails and those would not really be backlinks. So you gotta be on websites that are related to what you're doing. If you're doing wrestling, you want to be on sites related to sports. It doesn't have to be exactly what you're doing, but I think somewhat related. So find maybe other wrestling teams in other states where you're not direct competitors or coaches or gyms or wherever you're practicing, whatever like you could get sponsorships of. And that's somewhat related to what you're doing and getting published on those websites. That's what Google wants to see. So that's what you help people do. You help people get to the top of the Google search engine. The first page of Google is what, 10? 10 websites? Not counting the ads? Yep, 10 spots. So if you're going to help somebody start to make the climb from the second page to the first page. Where's the first page? Where is the first place you start? Well, it's not really one size fits all. So I gotta kind of evaluate each website and look at what you're doing versus the competitors. Because we're not trying to be Google. Google's algorithm changes every single day. We're. What matters is who are your competitors, meaning who's ranked on that first page of Google for your keywords, and how much SEO have they done? Because we got to do a better job at SEO than they've done. And really what it comes down to is. Is how many backlinks do they have versus you? And there's tools. You have to pay for them, but they'll show you anyone's backlinks. You have to pay for them. They're about $100 a month. The more popular ones would be, like, Ahrefs or Moz or Semrush, and buy this tool, and then you could throw any of one of your competitors into these tools, and you can see all their backlinks, and you can see, how many backlinks do you have, and you can try to figure out what that disconnect is and how do you build more quality backlinks. And your competitors, you could see all their backlinks one by one. You could start reaching out to those sites and trying to figure out, like, did they get an interview over here or did they do a sponsorship or were they in a championship game and someone wrote about it and, like, a local newspaper or whatever it may be? And I get creative. Like, did someone get interviewed and then reach out to that author that wrote that article and figure out, can they interview one of my players? Like, how do I. It's all about getting creative. Like, are they in Yelp? Are they on the Chamber of Commerce? Are they in. Whatever it may be. But you could see their entire strategy using those tools, like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush to look at all their backlinks. All right, so if your athletes are out and about and they're starting to get noticed by people, should they be asking the person they did the podcast with or the article with, should they be asking them to add a clickable link to help increase your organization's backlink, but also the individual's backlink? Is that. Is that the overall goal? Definitely. Definitely. That's where a lot of people miss that. And just think, all right, let me link to my socials, which is good. You might get some extra followers, but really, you want to link to your website. That way you get Google trust you and make you higher for your keyword. So when someone searches for that player's name in the future, your website will show up with all Their accomplishments, their videos or images. So it's like a resume or kind of like a portfolio on your website showcasing their experience, what they've done for your organization. And it's just another place for them to get more visibility and exposure online. So instead of just searching for that person's name on Google and seeing their Instagram and Facebook and socials, now they see your websites there and they see all these other third party sites are talking about them. And that's going to look a lot better for recruiters versus just a Facebook page or an Instagram or a TikTok. All right, so let's take this a little bit different of a direction. So let's say you're in college now with the Nil deal. You have ways of making money while you're in college and playing in your sports. I know that you've talked about in the past on some of your other websites that when you were in high school you kind of branded yourself a little bit, had a little bit of a skateboarding clothing line or apparel line. So let's say an athlete wants to do that. Is it all about the same process? Good clickable links, good content stuff? People want promoting yourself as a business to try to get other people to essentially pay you to advertise their stuff? Essentially, yeah, it's for the most part the same strategies. It's just you're change the keywords from like if you're promoting yourself to promoting a clothing line, you're finding clothing related keywords and the backlinks now need to be related to clothing or fashion or whatever it is that you're promoting. So relevancy is really important. But overall the same strategies kind of are important. Having good text on your website, building good backlinks and that is just changing it up for whatever business you're in. Now all this takes, this takes time. This is not an overnight thing. So the earlier you can start while then understanding that you have to build your credibility is going to take a little bit of time now, especially if you're doing it on your own. So a company like you, you're able to help somebody probably get there faster. But the downfall of that may be are you ready to be there faster? So how do you help people understand that they just skipped a huge section of knowledge? How do you keep people growing without getting in over their head? Usually I take care of it for them. So do more of it done for you. Kind of letting them focus on their business and not worry about updating their website with Keywords or blogging or doing articles or press releases or interviews and podcasts or whatever it is that they're using to get visibility and try to let them focus on their core capabilities. If they're an athlete, focus on being an athlete. Don't focus on learning SEO unless you want to do that on the side. But usually you should focus on what you know and focus and delegate to others and that way you get more time to really working on your core capabilities and skills. Now we'd gotten know into your business a little bit right then and kind of what you do now, you provide an enormous amount of training on your website that's free content that people can go to and kind of look up the different things we've talked about. Do you find that that helps in two different ways? Maybe it gets people to your website, but then again it, it builds some credibility with what you're trying to do. Yep It's another way for people to find me. Take classes I've done over the years, I've done them up for free. So if they go to my website or just search my name on YouTube, they can see a lot of classes I've done over the years and watch them and yeah, helps build trust up. And I just know by teaching over the years that unfortunately most people don't take action. So a lot of people read or listen or watch something, but I don't really take that action. And I taught lots of classes and show you step by step how to do everything. And still most people just like, I'd rather have you do it because this is a lot more than I thought with SEO, it's not just let's do this and set it and forget it, it's let's set it up and then main maintain it and continuously optimize to keep Google happy. Yeah, so this is an avenue you want to pursue. It takes an incredible amount of time. So using somebody like you could definitely relieve the stress. I mean, you're trying to coach, you're trying to recruit players, you're trying to run practices. You know, in the grand scheme of things, what is this going to cost? The budget? Not that I need you throwing out prices, but I mean, is this a, is this a spendy thing or is this something that's manageable for your everyday, average person? It varies depending on the competitiveness of those keywords and the sport. So if you're in a big city or if you have like a very popular sport, it's going to be a little bit tougher. To rank versus some obscure, less competitive sport. Because it comes down to the competition. The more competitive it is, the more backlinks you have to build. That's really what it comes down to is the more people that rank on that first page of Google that are doing what you're doing, the more backlinks you're necessarily going to build and the more time it's going to take. And also, how old is your website? If you're brand new, it's going to take a lot longer versus someone that's been around for five or 10 years, that's been more established. Google's going to trust you a lot more. So anyone. I always offer a free website analysis anytime anyone wants to learn more and happy to check out their website and see what's working, what's not working. And they can always book some time on my calendar that way. Really give them a roadmap of realistically what it's going to take, how much time, how much money. Because it's different for every business, unfortunately. It's not just set it and this is it. It's really gotta be looked at for each website individually. Right. And then you just grow your presence. It kind of grows like a tree and less like grass. I mean, it's going to take a little while with a lot of with a lot of time and nurturing to get it to grow into what you want it to grow into. But if you're in it for the right reasons, you're going to be there in 10 years anyhow. Yeah. Build that foundation, get those roots planted. And then over time it just builds it up and keeps going and building it up and getting that visibility and growing. So once you get your presence out there, then it just opens up a whole new arena of more, more talent coming in. You're sending more talent out. You know, I was looking back over the week back at old skaters, you know, back from when I was a kid. And you take a kid like well, he's not a kid anymore, but Rodney Mullen, I mean, he was in nowhere Florida in his dad's garage revolutionizing skateboarding. And nobody knew about it until he come out to a few shows. And then all of a sudden, I mean, he totally changed skateboarding. So if your website is set up right, and then now you have a kid like that that nobody knows about, looking to join a skateboarding team, your website comes up in the first few, oh, Google, Google profiles. Well, you have a better chance of grabbing that kid than somebody else. That's you know, three pages back. Nowadays, Internet's connected everyone and made it much easier to find. And I think there's probably some other kid that was maybe equally as good, but just to get that visibility exposure and just gave it up after a few years and just left it behind. But if they had that medium to get the name out there, get their videos out there, they could have been somewhere similar to what Rodney was doing back then. But yeah, it's all about nowadays the visibility and the connectiveness of the Internet's really changed everything. Especially social media has really changed everything where everyone's got a voice and is able to connect. Whereas in the past you need to build a website, there's a kind of a higher cost of barrier to entry. Nowadays it's easier to build a website, but social, you just log in and you have a page right there. It sounds like you were pretty immersed into the culture. I mean, everything about skateboarding you really liked. So what was your favorite skater band? Logging Molly is a good skateboarding band. I forgot. Whos the main one? I know Mike Valelli has a band too, but haven't really listened to too much of his music. But I've heard the flogging Molly one around, like, St. Patrick's Day. They're pretty good, kind of famous band that's kind of taken off and they're pretty popular. And I don't. I don't know how old you are, so, you know, kind of like the Blink 182s and stuff like that always kind of popped into my head. You know, I was trying to throw you for a little, little bit of a loop with the question. I mean, I've listened to a lot of your. Your podcast, and it seems like a lot of them are strictly business, but you have a lot more to talk about than just business, I'm sure. Sure. Yeah no, definitely like the other questions mixing it up. But yeah, I was thinking skateboarder band, like where it's like a pro skateboarder, but yeah, like a two stuff was that like skater inspired kind of music, but vlogging Molly, old pro skateboarder created that band and is still a really good skateboard to this day. Was you around when you still had to order VHS tapes out of the back of Thrasher magazine to see skateboarders? Or were you starting to get into the Internet era where you could search? No, I have the VHS and still have some at home. So got the V8. Don't have a VHS player but got a couple. VHS is where got one where it's like Tony Hawk's old skateboarding video and got him to sign the vhs. I was like, all right, this one I probably should save. All the other ones I could probably just throw away because they're all online nowadays. But got Tony Hawk signature on a skateboard video. That was his company, it's still his company, Birdhouse. And like that one's probably something good to save as a collector memorabilia. Do you ever listen to his podcast? No, I did not know he had one. But there's a skateboarding podcast called the Nine Club. Oh, that's a. It's a really good podcast. I'm have to check that out. Yeah, definitely open to new stuff because it's always good to hear from and see what his perspective is on everything and how he took off and hear his whole career and life story. So staying with the skateboard culture, did you ever think Vans would become what they are now? It was a tough one. I mean, never know who's going to blow up in bands, but been around for a while. So I feel like that's why they got the credibility from being around. I think like 66 is when they started, so they got that history. Whereas a lot of skateboard shoe companies came out like in the 90s, so they're more new but they're still sticking around. It's just nowadays it's all big corporate kind of Nike Adidas kind of taking over New Balance. I mean, I think back to you know, Fast Times at Ridgemont High with Spicoli. He's got the vans and he's whacking them on his head. You know, you had to kind of be in that culture to wear them. And now you go in, there's a van store in every city and you're paying. I don't know, man, what are you paying 50, 60 bucks for a set of canvas vans that back when I was a kid, you were buying for 10, 12 bucks. Crazy. It's a big difference. But nowadays like skateboard shoes are like a hundred for like some normal ones which are like Nike's 150. It's, it's a little steep. Especially when you know you're going to get those shoes, shoes ruined, they're going to get scratched in holes and ripped up and can't wear them for fashion. You guys got to know that these are going to get destroyed. So what did you, what did you do? Were you more of a street skater or did you like the ramps? Where did you kind of fall? More street. Weren't many ramps when I was growing up. Now there's a lot of pools and stuff coming back. But when I was growing up more just the streets. But I like it all. All right, so I guess we'll bring it back around a little bit. Full circle skater, counterculture, all the things that go with it. How did you end up in tech? Just fell into it. Wasn't planning on it but got my degree in business marketing. And that first job out of school was like we're doing digital marketing and want you to help out with digital. And that was back in 2007 and I was just like wait. After working here for a few months I feel like this is the future. Everyone's going to be online with websites and maybe I should just stick with this digital stuff. Even though had no idea about it, wasn't planning on it, but just kind of fellow into it and never looked back after working there for a few months because I realized I could do freelance work and work full time and also find clients like a restaurant nearby and see if they want to help with marketing and happy to have a full time job and some extra side income on the side. Yeah, I've heard you talk about that a little bit before. So you just slowly worked into what you do now. Now do you enjoy this working for yourself? You can kind of go anywhere. We talked about that a little bit pre show you could be a nomad if you want. Do you like that freedom? Yeah, I feel like everyone should have that freedom because going in an office for a 9 to 5, especially with everything that's been going on, if you're able to work remotely, like work remote, as long as you get your work done, doesn't really matter where you're at. But it is nice to go in office every once in a while, like talk to people. So do Miss that every once in a while. But like the freedom that I have is flexibility. Now I spent a little bit of time looking at your website and going through it. You have a tremendous amount of testimonials. You've, you've helped a lot of businesses gain some traction on Google. How were you able to build up such a good, I guess wide variety of clientele over the years? Been doing it since 2007. So I've been doing it for a while and just found clients here, there they'd find me through my website, through classes I teach and just through word of mouth referrals. But yeah, just kind of all over the place. Not really focusing on one specific industry or niche or type of business. Just as long as you have a viable product or service and website that I think could rank, I'll try to help you out and get you that, that exposure online. And we can hit back on backlinks a little bit because of the importance of them. Now Google is what Google is and they're Google for a reason. The backlinks have to be credible. There was people that tried cheating backlinks to move themselves up in the Google rankings. How did Google kind of put a stop to that? Google seen all the tricks over the years and in the past it was If I have 100 backlinks and you had 200, you would rank higher than me. The more backlinks you would have the higher rank. But over the years, people game the system and find found ways to build low quality backlinks. And Google said it's not the number of backlinks, it's a number of quality backlinks. And what is a quality backlink to Google? A quality backlink is a website that's related to you. So if you're a sporting team, like if you're a baseball team and you're getting a backlink from like a auto body mechanic, that might look a little strange, like why is the mechanic linking out to this baseball team? But if you're a baseball team and you're getting another website about sports or entertainment, anything somewhat related doesn't have to be another baseball team, but anything somewhat related, that's what Google wants to see. So relevancy and then authoritativeness. How popular, how big is this website for getting a backlink from my website? It's good. But if you could get backlink from like the LA Times or New York Times or Forbes or Wall Street Journal, the bigger the website, the more SEO value. All right, now Google uses AI, don't they to figure out how to rank websites. Yeah, they have machine learning. So nowadays they don't even know how it really works. It's just learning by itself. Just kind of weird and scary. But that's the future. How has that changed what you do? I mean, in the beginning it was pretty straightforward. Now it's, now it's changed quite a bit with AI, hasn't it? It's made it more complicated, but just same overall principles. Just provide good value content, get good quality backlinks and reward. You just don't do anything spammy or, and that seems too good to be true, where it's like adding like font size 0.001 text on your website where you're like hiding stuff and anything that seems like you're manipulating or gaming the system, Google's seen it and if they catch you doing it, they're going to penalize you and drop you down in. Rankings at any time. Yeah, they can drop you off their platform. That would be YouTube, Google, just like any other social media link. So keeping the quality at a high level is the place to start. Mm, quality over quantity. Yeah. And then the people that are looking for you will, will find you with a little bit of work, either with a professional like you, or studying it out on your own and slowly learning like you had to learn. So while on the surface, digital marketing for business doesn't seem like, you know, it fits the show, I think as we've talked through does make sense if you're trying to get a scholarship or play on a team or you have a team and you're trying to bring kids in. I mean this is, this is an avenue to do it with the way the world's changed. Yeah. Not many people are thinking about websites with sports, but websites, you own it, you get full control and that's just another place to get your name out there with an Instagram, a TikTok, a YouTube, all these different social sites. But now you have a website and that's just another place that you actually own and have full control of where everywhere else you're just kind of renting space, which they're going to give you visibility and exposure, but you don't own any of that stuff, your website that's really yours, that you get full control. I don't have a whole lot more questions for you. I don't I, I don't know this stuff well enough. So having you on as a guest, maybe getting some of these questions answered and, and some new ideas out there might Help somebody that's trying to start something. I mean, all this relates back to business too. If you have a business, you're going to do the same thing. If, if you have a sports team, you're going to do this. It's, it's all the same thing. It's just how you package it. Is that correct? Pretty much. For the most part it's, yeah, just changing it up from whatever you're doing to if you're doing baseball or football or whatever that sport is, or business is just changing those keywords there. And so sending Google the right signals. They just really want you to build trust up, get them to get Google to trust you, because Google just doesn't trust anybody. And those backlinks help Google start to trust you a little bit more. And the more trust Google gives to you, the more they're going to rank or the higher they're going to rank you. And that's where they look at those keywords on your website to figure out what keywords, what athlete names, whatever you're putting in there to rank you for. That all makes sense. And I and hopefully this helps some organizations that are trying, or some, you know, some teams out there that are trying to build up and, and become something. You know, I know, I know out where you are. Softball is, well, every sport super competitive. But knowing what I know about softball, softball out there is super competitive. So I would imagine that the better your website is, the more traffic you have on top of the quality you're putting on the field is what's going to drive girls into your organization. And then you can decide, you know, the talent level when you get them there for tryouts or whatever the case may be. But you've got to get the girls to show up if you're going to compete at the level that California plays. And I'm sure that's, I'm sure that's the same all over the country. You go to other, other places in the country, you know, I'm sure you go up to Michigan hockey or or something like that, you know, Iowa, Pennsylvania, wrestling. So understanding your audience and getting your information out there is the goal. Thats the most important. Yeah, I know who your audience is and speak to them and have it resonate and just try to get in front of your audience. Gotta figure who is your audience and where are they and how do I get in front of them? And almost everyone's on Google and almost everyone's on social nowadays and getting in front of them and those Multiple. And having multiple touch points just really gets you out there and gets people to remember you. Because the more places you're seeing, the more likely they're going to remember you versus just seeing you one time. They might forget about you. But if they see you over and over again on all these different platforms, like, wow, okay, you're all over the place. Let me check you out a little bit more and see what, what's really going on here. No, that's a good deal. And I, I know you came on, you're wrapping your day up. You're probably ready to sit down, have some supper. I. I appreciate you spending some time and going over all this stuff. What is your website? If people just want to check it out. Yeah. So everyone that's listening, I create a special gift for them. They actually go to my website@SEO optimizers.com that's S E 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 thrown up there that they could see step by step how to do a lot of this stuff. And also if they want to book some time on my calendar happy to check out their website from an SEO point of view for free. And they could book some time there where I'll check it out and see what's working, what's not working, and how to get them to the level that want to be at. All right, man. Well, thank you very much and I hope you have a wonderful evening. Thanks for having me on.