12 SEO Questions In 30 Minutes - Your 12_30

🚨 New podcast episode just dropped! I joined Mike on Your 12:30 to answer 12 rapid-fire questions in just 30 minutes — and we covered a TON of digital marketing gold 🔥

We talked:
 ✅ What SEO really means (and why it’s not just keywords + magic)
✅ The one thing your site needs that Google can actually read (hint: 📝)
✅ Why original content still rules the rankings
✅ Quick fixes that helped one of my car clients skyrocket traffic 🚗💨
✅ What to do when your social strategy doesn’t turn into sales
✅ How to test your own site + know if Google can even “see” your pages 👀
✅ And how I accidentally fell into SEO back in 2007 and never looked back

Plus… I shared a few of my favorite tips for:
 📈 Ranking higher
 📲 Reaching the right audience
📊 Tracking what works (instead of guessing)
🧳 And how I run my biz from anywhere with a laptop and decent Wi-Fi 🌎

If you're a small biz owner, entrepreneur, or just tired of pouring money into digital tactics that don’t convert — this one’s for you.

🎁 Grab my free SEO gift here: seooptimizers.com/gift
📺 Watch the full episode now (link in bio or below!)

#SEO #DigitalMarketing #BrandonLeibowitz #SEOOptimizers #Your1230Podcast #MarketingTips #GoogleSEO #OnlineTraffic #ContentMarketing #SmallBusinessSEO #EntrepreneurLife #WebsiteOptimization #GoogleRanking #SearchEngineOptimization #MarketingPodcast #FreeSEOtraining #BusinessGrowth #LaptopLifestyle #WorkFromAnywhere #MarketingThatWorks

Transcript

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Welcome back to your 12: 0:02

30. I'm Mike Sallucci, your host and this is the only podcast where our guests tell their story with the help of 12 questions in just 30 minutes. Today we are very excited to be joined by Brandon Leibowitz. Brandon runs and operates SEO Optimizers and has been doing so since 2007. They are a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium sized businesses get more online traffic which in turn convert into clients, sales leads, etc. Brandon, welcome. I'm very excited to talk to you this evening. Thank you for having me on today. You got it. Let's start there. Just to the uninitiated or just to level set SEO, what does that stand for? It means search engine optimization, which is ranking websites in the different search engines which primarily nowadays it's just Google. So when you search on Google, there's ads at the top. Those are all paid ads, but regular ads is organic results and that's what SEO is about. Getting you in the free listings, there's 10 spots on that first page of Google and just trying to get you in that free real estate so you don't have to spend money on paid ads. Very nice, very nice. I could see why that would be so valuable to small and medium sized businesses. What what are some kind of tactics or how do. I'm sure people try to get there on their own and, and fail because there's a lot behind it. What have you found is important for a company that wants to rank higher and either trying to do on their own or they come to you. What are some of the things that you'd like to see either on their website or that you do with them? I'll let you take that in any direction. Like there's a lot of different things, but one of the most important is content. So meaning text. Google can't really read images or videos or audio yet they're getting closer, but they rely on text. The more text you have on each page of your website, the easier it is for them to read, understand and know what keywords you're trying to focus on. Because they're really, search engines are just really a robot. They're not that smart. I mean they're getting smarter and smarter but they really need you to spoon feed them as much information as possible and adding text to each page, it's such an important thing and unfortunately it has to be unique. You can't just take text from one page and use it on the next page. Got to write original content and write it for the user. And that alone will definitely get people's traffic moving up. Just because, like, if you're an E commerce website and you're just selling jackets, let's say you have a bunch of pictures of jackets but no text, it's gonna be tough for the search engines to know what actually you are selling. But if you're selling jackets and then you have that text and you explain, like, what material is it for men, women, Cold, waterproof, like, what are all the details? But without that, it's tough to them to really decipher that. So add more text. That's one quick thing that you don't have to know coding for. Because SEO could get a little technical, but adding text is something everyone could do and that one is one of the most important things to do. That's a really good one to start because I don't know if most people know that. I think they hear content. It's like, oh, we need video, we need images, but it's going to be text that drives eyeballs and potential clients at the website. That's excellent to know. A good place to start. How did you get started in this line of work? I just kind of fell into it. Wasn't planning on it, but got my degree in business marketing. And the first job I got out of school was helping a company out with their digital. And I didn't really know much about digital marketing and they said, don't worry, we don't know much either. We're gonna take you to classes and workshops and went alongside with you. Which I was like, all right, sounds interesting. Let me check this out. And I was helping out with their social media, doing search engine optimization, helping out with paid ads, doing email marketing, kind of doing it all for them and all that stuff works to get traffic. But I just kind of focused more on the SEO over the years just because it's like, why spend money on paid ads when you can get up there for free? And over the years worked at different advertising agencies as a director of SEO. And before I work or after work and on my lunch breaks, I work on my own company and built it up to where I was able to eventually quit my job and focus only on this. And been doing that ever since. I love it. And it's a, it's a great origin story. And especially the not having no experience and kind of figuring out with you on the fly, what do you, what do you like about kind of the collaborations that you see now with these businesses I'm sure you've got businesses with all different types of level of savvy when it comes to digital marketing. But what do you what are you drawn to with your collaborations? Just making sure someone has a viable product or service and a good website is number one. But making sure you're not just selling T shirts. Because with SEO, we're not trying to be Google. We're trying to figure out who's on that first page of Google for your keywords and how much SEO have they done. And if you're just selling something very generic and don't have anything really unique, it's possible to rank there. But it's going to be a lot more time and effort and work that needs to be going into it. So just setting those realistic goals and trying to find something more niche, something a little bit unique or to help differentiate yourself and, and not have to compete with so many big players. So I'm glad, I'm glad you said it that way because kind of going back to how you started and then trying not to beat Google, I'm sure the formulas or the what Google is looking for changes fairly frequently or even regularly. How do you stay on top of what the algorithms are looking for, what Google's looking for to help your clients rank where they want to because I'm sure it's not just one of those things set it and forget it. Well, I got to constantly be on top of it reading and talking to other people, webmasters or people that do SEO and looking in Google Analytics, other tracking tools to see did all of a sudden rankings increase or decrease or did nothing happen. But trying to just piece it all together because Google doesn't really tell you. Sometimes they will, but majority of the time they're not really telling you about the algorithm updates because they don't want you to do SEO. They'd rather you just get frustrated and run paid ads and just help Google make more money. So sometimes they'll tell you, but like if they're going for mobile friendly, they want to make sure websites are accessible and mobile friendly or if they're going for speed, they'll tell you that stuff. But how it really works besides all that, they don't really tell you too much. Okay, that makes sense unfortunately. But yes, that I see that be how they operate. I assume that most companies could benefit from being found higher on Google. Is there a case where one industry in particular or one type of business that you say this is a must. Or what is your kind of rule of thumb when it comes to a business who maybe can't afford a full marketing suite of tools or consultants or professionals? Where should they start or what, what will make sense for company looking for SEO support? Well, I mean the number one thing is just knowing who your audience is and where they are. Are they going to be on Google, social media? Maybe none of those places, but try to figure out who your audience is and how to be in front of them. And most of the time it's probably going to be starting off on Google. People are going to search so you're not on Google. You're probably going to be missing out on traffic that your competitors are taking. But if you're selling something brand new like create a new invention or something with like music, not many people are really searching on Google. So that's where social might come into play. So just try to figure out who your audience is and where you need to be active on and where you need to be in front of your audience. I'm glad you brought up the both the audience knowing who they are, where they are as well as social. How how do you, if you do, do you counsel your clients on what, what the content on their website should be versus what they should post on social and to which sites and how does that work hand in hand? If it does? Well it doesn't really help out too much with SEO, but with social media it's just about knowing your audience and how frequently you could post. If I'm posting on my page for SEO, probably don't want me posting more than two, three times a week. But if I'm posting something about sports, I could post 20 times a day and you probably wouldn't be upset. So just about knowing your audience, knowing what you're promoting, if you're like an event venue and you have events going on the weekends, you probably want to start promoting them on like Fridays. But normally if you're service based business, you probably want to send out messaging on like Tuesdays and Thursdays in the middle of the week so people aren't bogged down with emails and they're not checking out on weekend mode. But if you're selling the parents then you might want to do it early in the morning before they're waking up their kids and or in the middle of the day when they have some free time. But it's a lot of people say do it this time, in this hour, but it's not one size fits all really just depends on your audience. And look at your competitors, see what they're doing, what platforms are active on, how frequently they're posting, and kind of get ideas from there. That makes sense. And you've referenced, know your audience a couple times, I guess, you know, to kind of dig into that further. It's, it's obviously the people who have bought your products or services, but how important is it to know who's looking at your website, who's looking at not buying, who is currently not being, you know, should be. Should be a client and is not yet. How do you figure out who your audience is? I guess is my question. Oh, that is not an easy thing. You just got to take a step back and pretend you've never heard of your product or service and try to think about where you would be searching, where you, where would you go, what websites would you be on? Ask clients, people that purchase from you, where they've been. You can look at Google Analytics, see if there's any like, forums or things like that that pop up, that bring in a lot of traffic. But it's all about just chop it to yourself in the user's point of view, which is tough for a lot of business owners. But you can take a step back with like a clean slate and that would really be the best. But talking to other people is usually helpful. Talking to business owners. Maybe if you're a lawyer in Los Angeles, you can reach out to other lawyers in New York or other states where you're not direct competitors. But like myself, I'm an SEO company. I can't really ask other SEO companies since we're all somewhat competitors. So just depends on what niche you're in, what industry. But if you can talk to other people that are not direct competitors, that are in your field, that's probably going to be the best. That's, that's a good point. So changing gear, gears a moment. If you were looking to maybe land a new client or talk to somebody about what you did, and they said, well, tell me about a win or a story that client you worked with that has an amazing result or something that really exemplifies what you do and how you help your clients, is there a story that comes to mind or thoughts like, yeah, I want, I want them to know this about me. If they take one thing away I mean, most recently had a car company, well, they lease cars out and their website was just built in a way that Google couldn't read and understand it. So cleaning up all the Coding, fixing all these errors, and pretty much restructuring their website pretty much once they launch that, their traffic just skyrocketed because Google can't read your website. Like I said at the beginning, you got to spoon feed everything into Google. If they're not able to read it, they're not going to know what keywords you're targeting. And sometimes there's ways that you build websites that aren't SEO friendly and could actually block Google from it or block Google from reading the important areas. So fixing all that pretty much shot them up. I mean, usually it takes a lot more time, but that was a quick win where it's just making sure Google and the search engines are happy. Because if they're not able to read your content and understand what you're promoting or what you're writing or listing out on your website, you're gonna have trouble because they're not gonna know what to do. So fixing little things like that, where it gets kind of technical, sometimes you have to look in the coding for little things that might be blocking them or blocking search engines and just trying to fix those errors. Okay, that, that's good to know and I guess kind of follow up there. How can I tell if I, if I'm running a small business, if Google can, besides, besides hiring you, is there a way I can tell on my own if I've, if I have, as you said, spoon fed them the information up front or is it obvious that I mean they're getting no traffic or Google's telling me, hey, we can't read this? I mean if you want to see what pages Google's found and indexed in their search engine, you just type in you. Well, you go to Google, type in the word site, S, I, T, E and then put a colon and then put your URL. So whatever your website is, HTTPs www.yourwebsite.com and it'll show you all the pages that Google's found. So you can see, I have 5,000 products, but I only see 10 pages here. Something's wrong. Google hasn't found them. And then you might want to create what's called a site map. And a site map is a listing of all the pages on your website. And that kind of is like a roadmap to Google saying like, here is all the pages on my website. Please index them and show them in the results. Even that doesn't guarantee they'll find them, but it helps them at least speed it all up. So definitely go in, create a site map. And most websites have it. If you want to, just go to whatever your website is, dot com sitemap, xml, and usually you'll have a sitemap. And then what you need to do is submit it to Google Search Console, which is a free tool from Google. It's like Google Analytics, but Google Search Console is all for SEO, and it'll show you any errors, what pages Google's found, what keywords you rank for, what position you're in, and a ton of other information, all for free. Thats That's awesome. Thank you for that. That, I think, is going to be helpful to a lot of our listeners both to realize, okay, these are the basic things I can do. And second, if I didn't know that, what else do I not know? And what do I need to get Brandon on board helping me with. And hiring him to help our company along with So I guess in that question, in your engagement with clients, is this kind of a one on one? Is it a done for you? Is it a done with you? What does it look like if a company is looking to work with you? Depends. Usually I'll do it for them so they can just focus on the business. But some people want to do it themselves or be more hands on. It could definitely help out, but most people just want to set it and forget it and not have to worry about writing articles and writing blogs and doing press releases and doing all this stuff. That takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. A lot of content, writing a lot of content, a lot of writing articles and blogs and business owners don't always have time for that. But if they have people in house and I could train them how to write SEO friendly content and then I'd go in and optimize it, clean it up and make sure that everything is done properly. That way Google's happy and can read it and targets all the right keywords. Okay, so I mean that, that's, that's helpful that there's kind of the options there that it can be done. You know, again as you said, time is something that a lot of business owners don't always have extra of. So if it's something they can take off their plate and give us to a trusted professional like yourself, that, that makes it easy. And also having trained staff puts puts them in place for long term success as well. So kind of in that time theme when I'm looking at my digital marketing piece, I'm looking at content creation social media, I'm looking at SEO, I'm looking at optimizing my, my, my website in general. If I don't have kind of the ability to do all of these things, what, what is obviously SEO is important, but where should I start and how can I tell what's of most importance? You know, I know I want to reach my audience, but what, what, what kind of you know, we'll say depth chart do you walk clients through or potential clients through to figure out where they, they need to go first? Well, gotta track everything through Google Analytics, so gotta see where your traffic is coming from. But it just depends. Every business is going to be different. If you're an SEO company like myself or a doctor or a lawyer, probably no one's going to be going on social media. So I start with SEO, but if you have like a New invention that no one's ever heard of and they're not searching on Google. And social media might be the way to go about it, but it just depends on who your audience is and what your product or service is and how you want to reach them. But kind of literally just kind of throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. Push more time and money into what's working, pull money away from what's not working and just optimize from there. Because you never really, really know until you test. That's a, that's a helpful answer as well. And kind of, I guess a different question here. Is there ever a case where it makes sense for a business owner to get, unless they're working in SEOs, be well versed in SEO, or is it always one of those things? I know this is important. I need to surround myself with good people, with a good team that can do this. Is it ever important to know why or how my company's ranking or is it it's just more important to rank? Try a little bit of both. You got to make sure you know what you're doing and make sure that whoever you hire knows what they do. That way you could vouch and make sure that they're actually performing instead of just hoping and trusting them and just searching a couple keywords and seeing that you rank, but actually seeing phone calls or emails or conversion sales, whatever that is, start coming through Google Analytics or however you're tracking, but definitely track everything. If you're not tracking, you're just going at it blindly. You don't know what's going to work and what's not going to work and you're just hoping. Okay. And if our listeners want to find out more about you, find out more about your company, SEO optimizers, where can they do that? So everyone that wants to learn more, I actually create a special gift for them if they go to my website@seoptimizers.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 bunch of classes I've done over the years I've thrown up there for free. So if they want to see step by step how to do a lot of stuff, they could watch those there and they want to book some time on my calendar. Happy to check out their website from an SEO point of view for free and give them some feedback about what's working and what's not working and they can Book some time on my calendar there as well. Okay, nice. So I will post all of that so they can click right through and get that gift and then book a call with you if that makes sense. So I guess with the consultation upfront, do you get a lot of pushback of no, my website is good, it's good enough, or you know, we did it this way for a purpose or you know, help. I, I've created my website in a way that it can't be saved. What does that first conversation usually look like? Trying to help them out, trying to give it to them easily and not just say, oh, this is completely wrong, but show them all the good things and then point out some of the things that might be hindering and causing them not to get the result that they're looking for. But it's not really one size fits all after that's I always do a free consultation because every website is going to be different. It's just trying to figure out what's been done to your website versus the competitors and how much time and effort is it going to take because some people, it's going to be a lot quicker. Like the car company I was talking about versus someone else maybe selling T shirts. It's going to take a lot longer if they're a brand new website. So just trying to figure out where they are versus the competitors and how to get them to that level that they're looking to be at. So I guess in summary with, with SEO, step one, talk to Brandon, have the consultation go to that path. But if someone can't do that for whatever reason, what are three things a small or medium sized business can do tomorrow that they may not be doing today that can help them get on the right SEO path? Well, definitely adding more text, more content to each page, creating more pages. The more pages you have, the more keywords you could target. Each page could only really target about three to five words. After that it loses relevancy. So the more pages, the more keywords you're able to target. And just blogging another way to add more content to your website. So another way to add more text. And if you're doing like video content or audio content, maybe transcribing that into text or summarizing it because they're not going to be able to really understand it. They're getting closer, but they're still not there yet. So they need to really spoon feed them as much information as possible and make it as easy for them to understand what this text Content is. And text is a way that they're able to read it nowadays. That's such a great, that's such a great takeaway and I'm glad you brought it back to the text with the content because I think a lot of people audio, video, again, images and then don't think that it's the, the text that will bring the eyeballs. But if, if it is Google, they're looking to be found, you know, that's. And they can't find it, then it's not going to be all that helpful. So thank you for kind of bringing that back. Changing gears completely here. So we've talked a lot about what your professional life looks like. What do you do for fun and when you are not optimizing other companies, websites. Yeah, no, try to get that work life balance and get away from the computer because can't just sit behind the computer all day and try to go out. I live close to the beach, so in Los Angeles I'll go down the beach or skateboarding, snowboarding or just try to hang out friends, concerts, travel, but definitely try to get away hiking but like the beach since I'm so close to it. So enjoy just hanging out there and nice and relaxing. Very nice. Can't argue with that. And I'm going to, I'm going to go with one more work question. Because I wanted to ask you are in la, does it make sense to work with somebody locally when we're talking SEO or you, you have international clients? What, what makes the most sense do you think? It doesn't really matter for the most part. I mean you want to find someone that speaks your language. So I can help people in like Australia. But if you're speaking another language then we have to transcribe it and translators don't always work properly online. So definitely got to find some that natively understands your language. But I mean nowadays with everyone connected on zoom and everything, you don't really need to be local. I mean sometimes it helps to meet in person but I mean it's not really necessary. I mean I've never, I've had clients all over the world ever since I started from to do in SEO. And still to this day, as long as they're in English, that's number one is making sure you speak the language and can write and understand the depth and because that's such a big part of SEO is text writing good content that understands the English or whatever human language that you're targeting and doesn't just sound like filler content or it sounds like it's written by some robots or AI and stuff like that, where God shows some personality and spice it up and give it something that makes it more unique. That's a good answer and I of course have another follow up. You mentioned language there, which I think especially us Americans just assume everything is in English. Is it important to have a website that translates to different languages, that is available in different languages? I know there's accessibility that is obviously important. But how about language? That's something that you will help with, that you counsel with or that's not that that's not a top priority. It just depends if they're selling like if you're like a big corporate like corporation like McDonald's, then they'll have McDonald's forward slash en for English or forward slash JP for Japan or Japanese or they're always going to change up like that. So if you're like big like that, but if you're just a e commerce website, you don't necessarily need to do all that because Google will translate like if I'm in India, Google will translate it to whatever dialect I'm at in that country because they know your geolocation and things like that. So they'll automatically, if you go to a website and it's in another language like French, it'll say at the top. Usually if you're on Chrome, every browser might be different, but it'll say do you want us to translate this website for you or web page? So they try to do that automatically for you, which is nice nowadays. In the past it was a lot of work, kind of confusing. Now Google will do it, but it's not perfect. That's why the big corporations still manually do it for you because they want to make sure everything reads grammatically correct and makes sense and flows and that. That makes sense because that's the last thing that you need is to try to be selling a product in a different country. And then the you know, the translation doesn't exactly line up and it's a, at worst a bad translation or at best a bad translation. At worst it's something that is completely misunderstood. So that's a good answer. So I'll get it, I'll get us out of here on this. You mentioned concerts or traveling. I'll leave it up to you. What's your next concert or trip that you've got planned or looking forward to. Traveling maybe possibly going to Costa Rica In a month or so. But it's playing out a trip in Europe, but that's in October. So that one definitely looking forward to going like Eastern Europe and traveling around there. So that one should be a lot of fun. But maybe Costa Rica. We'll see. That's the one thing about, like, about that really drew me into the digital marketing as SEO is that I could work full time at these companies when I first started and build up my freelance portfolio. Just find clients here and there and eventually build it up to where I was able to quit my job. And as long as you have a computer, well, and Internet, then I'm good to go. That's why I wanted to make sure you could have Internet access. But it makes things a lot easier. So you can just kind of pick up and be a little digital nomad if I wanted to be and travel around. So try to take advantage of that as much as I can. That's another fantastic answer. And I said I was gonna let you go. I have one more based on that. So digital being digital, Matt, obviously very well done and it's something that people want to do or looking to do. And you mentioned the Internet piece. Is there a way to test before, you know, I book that 45 day Airbnb in Costa Rica to make sure I've got a good signal or that the Internet is going to support my business if I am looking to do that or how, how, how, how are you doing it if you do it? Yeah I haven't stayed for that long unfortunately. I usually just go for like a couple days or a week. But yeah, I mean there's no way unfortunately. But one way you just kind of find out is the hard way. But I found that out one time went to the Galapagos and they did not have good reception

there except from Like 2: 25:15

00am to

6: 25:18

00am when everyone's asleep. So just finding those loopholes or. I mean nowadays there's hot spots that are a lot better on the cell phone. So those could be the backup. But yeah, you got to have a backup plan just in case or get a satellite or something. But so I realized you can't just pick up and go anywhere. You got to make sure you have cell phone or WI fi connection. Other than that you're good to go. But WI fi is kind of important nowadays. I mean we're laughing about it, but you're absolutely right that it's one of those things that to know what the situation on the ground looks like is important. I had a call with someone in South Africa and they mentioned that they had a 8 or 12 hour period where their, I think it was their neighborhood, if not their entire town was being shut off from the electrical grid because of load usage. And that was just normal that for one or two days a month. That's, that's how it was. So, you know, when you wait, digital being digital. Nomad sounds great, but making sure that you can get the work done that you need to from where you're going to be is also important. Brandon I ran through a lot of questions with you. I think we covered a good amount of material. Is there anything I didn't ask you that I probably should have? I think that covers the majority of it and they do want to learn more to watch those videos. I would say it's going to be the best to see how to actually implement that stuff. And they could watch that on my website or if they just search my name on YouTube. I've thrown them up showing how to do SEO, social media, paid ads, Google Analytics, Google search console, and ton of other videos I put up there for free to watch. Awesome. Thank you, Brandon. This was a ton of fun and look forward to doing it again. You have a good night. Thanks for having me on. Take care.