Navigating the SEO Landscape Insights and Strategies - Business Growth Podcast

Ever wonder why competitors rank above you even when your business is better? 🤔
I break it all down in this episode of the Business Growth Show with Jenny White 🎙️

I’m Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers, and I joined the show to share what I’ve learned since jumping into SEO back in 2007 🚀 We talk about simple SEO moves you can make today, how AI is changing search (and where it still falls short 🤖), and the exact strategies I use to help businesses show up everywhere their customers are searching — without wasting money chasing shortcuts.

We also dive into real stories from growing my agency, what actually works for local businesses and eCommerce brands, and why SEO is a long-term brand play, not just rankings 📈

If you want practical SEO advice, honest insights on AI, and a behind-the-scenes look at how businesses really win online, you’ll love this conversation.

Give it a listen and don’t forget to subscribe for more growth tips 👊

#SEO #DigitalMarketing #BusinessGrowth #AISEO #LocalSEO #EcommerceSEO #MarketingPodcast #Entrepreneurship #OnlineVisibility

Transcript

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If you've ever wondered why your competitors keep ranking above you even when your business is better, this episode explains it all. We cover simple SEO moves you can make today, the big shifts happening with AI and the strategies I've used since 2007 to help businesses show up everywhere their customers are searching. I'm Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers, and I jumped on the Business Growth show with Jenny White to share my story and what's working right now. Enjoy, and don't forget to subscribe if you want more SEO tips. Just like this. Hi, everybody, this is Jenny White. Welcome back to the Business Growth Show Today. I'm here with Brandon Leibowitz. He's the CEO and founder of SEO Optimizers, and today he's going to be sharing with us some really cool tips and stories, from his growth for his agency that he started years ago and all the good work that he does in, helping companies with their local business optimization. Thank you so much, Brandon, for joining us. Thank you for having me on today, for sure. So we were just chatting a little bit about, your journey with SEO. You, go way back, back pretty, pretty far. I don't think there's a lot of people I've talked to that actually have the wealth and, length of experience that you've had with SEO. Why don't you share with us a little bit about your story and where you came from. My name is Brandon Lebowood, and I've, been involved with digital marketing since 2007. Just kind of fell into. Wasn't planning on it, but I got my degree in business marketing, and after I graduated, my first job is helping a company out with their digital marketing, which I don't really know much about it. They said, don't worry, we don't know much either. We're gonna, like, learn with you and take you to classes, workshops, and seminars, which I was like, all right, this sounds, interesting. Let me check it out. And after we're done a few months, just realized this is probably the future that everyone's going to have a website. And this is back in 2007, and there's lots of different ways to get traffic, like email marketing, paid ads, social, media, search engine optimization, and all that works. But I kind of focus more on the SEO side of things over the years, just try to tap into that free traffic and worked at different advertising agencies. And before work, after work and on my lunch breaks, I work on my own company. And eventually that up to where I Was able to quit my job and focus solely on this and been doing that ever since. Just helping people get more traffic to their website. Yeah, absolutely. Do you, we, we talked a little bit about, AI and what it's doing as far as SEO, but yet the still necessary component of the human, you know, touch. what, what do you see as far, I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to conjecture, you know, what's coming around the bend. But I, I know that we're using AI in our daily operations from, you know, article writing to, you know, helping us come up with new ideas and things. But what do you think is going to be the next thing that AI is going to provide or assist with with regards to SEO? Any, any insights into that? It's tough to predict because it changes so quickly. Every day it's changing and adding something new. But right now it's pretty good. Well, it's not the best. But because the results aren't accurate. So that's the one downside with AI ChatGPT or Google Bard is you could ask questions and we'll give you answers, but if it doesn't know the answer, it does AI hallucinations and it just makes things up. So you can ask it. Like, can it give me, do keyword research for me and give me a list of keywords. If you're a restaurant related to Italian, food near me and you can say, give me search volume and the competitive data and we'll give you all. But when I double check it, I'm like, all right, the search volume is way off. Like, this is not correct. So once it gets more accurate, feel like it's more reliable. But right now it's kind of hit or miss where it's just take everything with a grain of salt and use it as a tool, but can't really rely on it solely. Same with like content creation, writing articles and blogs and doing like service pages, product descriptions, prices, do social media content, do it all. But the more prompts you give it, the better. So not just write me an article about Italian food, but getting really detailed and granular thing, here's the keyword I want. Give me a list of like topically related keywords to this keyword and then you could say, all right, here's the keyword I now want to focus on and give me a list of like 10 blog post topics. And then from there you pick which one to seem relevant. And then you, have it write you an outline. Yeah. Along the whole way you should be Editing it, making sure it aligns with your business, making sure that has all the correct information. Because if you just say, write me an article, it's probably gonna just be some generic stuff that everyone is asking it. But if you get really granular and specific, that's where you could see some benefits with SEO. Yeah, I think, you know, business owners may think that they. Okay, well I can just do this myself. But the number of touch points that you just mentioned are numerous and consistent throughout the entire process. So as much as somebody wants it to be completely done for them the minute they enter in their query, that's not necessarily the case. and it takes multiple iterations and to corrections, and validations like you're saying, like you have to take that information and then cross reference it against, you know, your, your SEO tools and confirm if that's correct or not. Because if it's not, then you're going to dump money in a wrong direction that doesn't pay you back. Yeah, we don't want to be doing that. Can't be wasting money on the AI hallucination. So got to really check everything and just take it with a grain of salt and just be aware of that. It's not the best, but the. There are Google Bard is another AI version which is Google's version. So when I'm doing SEO, I always tell people I probably look at Google Bard vs Chat GPT because Chat GPT is owned by Bing. No one really goes on Bing. Everyone's going SEO, it's all about Google. And if Google's going to give you an AI and it's going to do keyword research and it'll even write like coding for. You could do title tags, do mass descriptions. It's not the best, but if it's from Google, I would look at it just with a grain of salt and just. Of course, absolutely. It's worth way more coming from Google. Obviously. Obviously it was like the number one search engine. Yeah, that's, that's a wonderful point. so Brandon, tell me about the types of businesses that you serve and some of the outcomes that you've had and how you've grown those into getting you more business. I know probably your primary delivery of, new clients to your business is from SEO, so. So it's a great use case for you to users and their clients. But, tell me a little bit about your, your client experience. Client journey through. Yeah, pretty much niche agnostic, not focusing on any specific industry, but mainly focused on like local businesses and E commerce. Are the two more commonly ones that I get. But to work with pretty much anyone that has a website and a viable product or service, as long as you're not just selling something generic, you're just selling like T shirts, it becomes hyper competitive and it's just gonna take a really long time. So finding something niche. And that's where I have clients where they're in the fashion industry. But one of them focuses specifically on like music festivals. So it's a little bit more niche where it's not just here's anybody and that feasible. And working with them over the years was able to get them to the top position for music festival clothes closer music festivals and all the different festivals like Coachella Music or Coachella Fashion, all that stuff. And yeah, took a while. But the main way we did it was well first going on the website and creating a lot of content. So Google feeds off content reading text. They can't really read images or videos or audio yet. I mean getting better at it. But the more text you have, the easier it is for them to read, understand and know what that page is about. So we create pages for pretty much every music festival because if someone's searching for like Coachella fashion, take them to the homepage, that's not what they're looking for. It's not, user intent. So making sure that we go after these buyer intent keywords and crane pages specific to that, that lets Google know, okay, if someone's searching for Coachella fashion, this page is hyper relevant. Let's show this page. So it took a while creating all this content for all these festivals. And it keeps changing because new ones merge and disappear. But that really helped out along with building backlinks. So creating content, adding content on your website helps out a lot. But Google just doesn't believe anything anybody puts on a website needed to build that trust up. And the way to build trust is by getting other websites to talk about you. So the more websites that talk about you, the more popular Google sees you as. And then they look at those keywords on your website. So when we were building backlinks for that one, we were reaching out to like the music festivals, to promoters, to venues, to anything related to music. Because you want to get other sites that are niche related to link back. Yeah. And that's where it's just kind of getting creative and trying to think outside the box. There's tools. Yeah. They can pay for that will show you any website's backlinks. Yep. Like Ahrefs or mods. Sunrush and those are really good too to look at our competitors backlinks and try to try to reach out to the sites that are looking out to every competition. Because if they're linking to your competitor, they would probably link to you. You just gotta get creative, figure out what do they do. Do they do an article, a blog, press release, a podcast, an interview, sponsor, trade show, whatever it may be. You can reverse engineer their entire strategy and by doing that, was able to get them to that first page of Google within about six months for their keywords and then got them to the first three positions within a year. Now I think they bounce off between number one and two keywords. Yeah, but it takes time. That's the biggest thing with SEO. It's not immediate. How do you get your clients to take a bite of that apple, you know, and to keep biting that apple for a year? You know, I know, I know a lot of it is on the deliverables and the, you know, really the communication, from your agency to the client. But how do you get them to even take that first bite? It is tough. But I let them know they'll see movement right away. Well within like the first few months. It's not like you're not gonna see anything. But to really get Google to trust you, it's the backlinks. And the backlinks take time for Google to find the backlinks. It's like I could create all these backlinks. Google might find them for a couple days, a couple weeks, months. They might never find the backlink that I create. So that's where it's kind of waiting game for Google to find them. Build that trust up. And it's really just letting the client know like here's how much traffic you're getting right now. Using like tools like Google Analytics, we can track all that and show them month over month, week over week, how the traffic is improving from Google organic searches and tracking keyword positions. So maybe when we first start working together, they're position 97. Like all right, now next week you're position 90, so you're dropping down and six months later your position 40. Not many people are going to page four looking for stuff, but you can see that you're slowly getting to the area that you want to be at. So showing them the little incremental mind or movement that they're getting. Right. How do you, with E commerce, you know, how do you get them off of. I guess also just like the immediate roi, like okay, yes, we're increasing but we're not getting checkouts or we've only gotten, you know, X amount. Like, I guess it's just, it's just an interesting species of, of person that can, that can withstand that, that growth. You know, I'm sure you, I'm sure you've heard it all. And I mean, you've definitely got the years of watching this. I can only imagine the wealth of knowledge that you have from 2007 to now. I mean, but how do you get these, these, clients, these business owners to, to get off of that immediate gratification roller coaster and, you know what I mean? Like, like if they want to see dollars coming in the door, you know. Yeah. That's where I've realized over the years that SEO is just half the battle. Because once you get people to your website, most of these people or half the people are going to leave that bounce rate. So I realized that, just do an SEO and getting traffic isn't really what people are looking for. Like, they don't care what position they're in. They want sales, leads, phone calls. So I realized over the years, got to help out with more than just SEO. So help out with like the paid ads and doing some remarketing. So anyone that goes like web, like e commerce website, anyone that goes to that website adds a product to the shopping cart but doesn't check out, let's follow them around. Keep yourself top of mind because these are all warm leads and let's try to capture them. Or let's offer a lead magnet, something for free on your website. So you capture people's email addresses, right? Start sending out emails and just having those multiple touch points. And the more touch points, the more likely someone's going to trust you and want to make that purchase. I tell them like, hey, it's a long cycle, but we're gonna build your brand up across all these platforms and get, or get people, get Google to trust you, but also get people to trust you as well. Oh, that's it. That's it. Because that's the part that, you know, oftentimes I talk to people and they're like, I just want ads. And then I'll go and look at the site. And I'm like, I don't think that's a good idea. You know, so there's a lot of conversion rate optimization that needs to be done. Oftentimes, customer journey, of course, needs to be acknowledged, like you said. And then the multiple touch points, because you know what, it was two years ago Is not what it was a year ago, is not what it is now. We all know it. And there's fatigue. I think that happens also. so from, from both standpoints, from the client's perspective and I think also from the customer's perspective. At the same time though, if you're providing value, then you've won that customer and you've validated yourself through all of these different iterations of where you've shown up. yeah, which is, which is why SEO is more than just array. It's, it's a brand development play. and it's for people that want to have staying power. You want to be here, you know, three, five years from now. Then it's something that you have to invest in. Yeah, it's a long term play and it's going to build you up and get you that traffic where you don't have to do anything after you start ranking. I mean, you have to maintain it, but you'll start getting that traffic and keep you in that traffic. Whereas like with paid ads, stop running the paid ads, you just disappear and you're just gone. But with SEO, you build that brand up, build that traffic up and it's going to bring that steady supply of traffic to your website for the most part. As long as your competitors don't do more SEO than you do. Which they're going to try to do that because there's 10 spots on that first page of Google. And once you get to that first page, someone gets to that second page, they're not gonna be happy about it. They're gonna look at your keywords, your backlinks, your site structure, all the coding, the technical things, and yeah. outrank you. Yeah, it's like Tom and Jerry. They're just going to constantly chase each other around. Right. Never ends. I tell people sometimes I'm like, I feel bad. I mean, this is the nature of the beast. I didn't invent the game. We just play it, you know, and so what, what can we do? You know, we're just trying to help businesses get to where they need to be and stay there. but you're right, it is, it is cat, mouse, you know, and that's why it does require, you know, sometimes I talk to people, they're like, okay, so then once I'm done with that, six months to a year, am I done? And I'm like, you can be. Or if you want to stay there, you're probably like, now people are going to. Exact same thing as what you just said, so, yeah, but that's. Look, we can't solve every problem. For them to make their business profitable and maintain it is on, on their, on that, on that side. For us to be able to get them to where they need to be so they can have the opportunity to have that business is on our side. Yeah. Yeah. We could only lead them and guide them and give them as much insight as possible and then let them, see firsthand how it really works. Because it is very compatible, depending on your keywords. But most keywords are pretty competitive nowadays. There's a low barrier of entry to create a website. Whereas, like 10, 15 years ago, I first started getting into the marketing, digital marketing. It was w competition. Now so easy to create a WordPress, Shopify with Squarespace. It makes it really easy with the templates and themes to throw something up. And now you have another competitor and it's infinite how many websites there are. It's sure it's never ending. It's not going to go away, but I do feel that SEO is going to be here to stay in whatever iteration that will become in the future. You know, who knows? but, if you guys ever need SEO and you want an absolute expert, to talk to you, I definitely recommend talking to Brandon Lebowitz. Thank you so much for your time today. I enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for having me on today. All right, take care. Bye.