SEO for Lead Generation Businesses Profits Unleashed Podcast

🎙️ I hopped on the Profits Unleashed podcast with Karen Roberts, and we got into the thing nobody wants to hear: your website can look gorgeous and still bring you zero leads. 😬

Here's my honest take. Google doesn't rank pretty. Google ranks trust. 🤝

In this episode I break down:
✅ Why adding more text to every page is the easiest win nobody does
🔗 Why backlinks are the piece most people ignore (and why those $5 Fiverr links quietly wreck you)
📞 The boring trust signals that matter more than you think: phone number, Contact Us page, About page, privacy policy
🕵️ How I reverse engineer a competitor's backlinks and just... take the same ones
🎧 Why every podcaster is sitting on free backlinks and doesn't realize it
📈 What "above the fold" really means and why half your visitors bounce before they scroll
🧪 The A/B testing habit Amazon uses that you can copy today

I also share how I fell into SEO by accident back in 2007, right out of college, with zero clue what the letters even stood for. 😅 Almost 20 years later, I'm still here.

Fair warning: SEO takes about 6 months to a year to really kick in. It's a long game. But it's your website, you own it forever, and nobody can take it down. That's more than you can say for Spotify or YouTube. 🚀

Grab my free gift at seooptimizers.com/gift 🎁 (free classes, my contact info, and you can book a free website review on my calendar)

Give it a listen and tell me what you think. 👇

#SEO #DigitalMarketing #SmallBusinessMarketing #Backlinks #LocalSEO #ContentMarketing #PodcastMarketing #WebsiteTraffic #LeadGeneration #SearchEngineOptimization #PodcastEpisode #MarketingTips #GrowYourBusiness #SEOTips #ProfitsUnleashed

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Your website might look great, but if you're still not getting leads, there's a reason. Google doesn't rank looks. It ranks based off trust. In this podcast episode, I share what actually gets Google on your side, the type of content it cares about, the backlinks that move the needle, and the trust factors that most businesses skip without realizing it. I'm Brandon Liebowitz, Founder of SEO Optimizers, and I joined Karen Roberts on the Profits Unleashed podcast to break down how to turn your online presence into something that actually brings you clients. Stick around, this one will shift how you think about SEO, and if you want more like this, hit that subscribe button. So welcome to another episode of the podcast, Profits Unleashed podcast, the show where we empower coaches and experts to use podcasting as a powerful tool to drive sales and grow your business. Now, I'm your host, Karen Roberts. Now, after the break, I will be sharing how coaches can use podcasting to tell targeted stories that don't just show their real self, but also solve a specific problem that their ideal client has. But Before that, I'm here with Brandon Lebowitz, and he is the founder of SEO Optimizers, a digital marketing company that he's been running since 2007. So I would say he's pretty much an expert on SEO. He specializes in helping small and medium-sized businesses increase their online visibility and drive traffic that converts. Did you hear that? Converts is the key thing into clients, leads, and sales. So welcome to the show, Brandon. Thank you so much for having me. So would you like to start with— you've been doing this a while, right? So what initially inspired you to even go into the world of SEO? Probably graduating from college and getting my degree in business marketing. One of the first jobs I got out of university was doing SEO, which I had no idea what that meant. I wasn't planning on it. I got my degree in business marketing in 2007, and I told the company, like, they don't really teach you SEO, digital marketing, in college. Maybe nowadays at least they hopefully do, but back then they didn't really teach it to you. And I told them that, and they said, don't worry, we're new to this as well, and we're going to learn with you. And take you to classes and workshops and seminars. And I was like, all right, this sounds interesting, let me give it a shot. And after going to some of these seminars, I'd hear people talking, saying like, back in 2007, I have 10 different websites and I'm doing all this dropshipping and affiliate marketing and all these things. And it made me realize I could work full-time doing SEO at this company, and I could also go to a local pizza place or a dentist or any local business and try to get clients here or there and pick up freelance clients here or there. And after doing that for a few months, I just realized this is the future and I should just keep sticking with this. And really never turned back after that. And so many people, I, I don't think really understand SEO. They think all they've got to do is build a website. It is back to that build it and they will come. And There's so many different websites. So you've got WordPress, you've got Wix, you've got— and then I know what we use is GoHighLevel, so we can create funnels or websites within that. There's so many different things out there, and yet they're building, they want to make it look pretty, but not enough focus is on the backend work, which they don't understand. So you must have Some kind of process to really help people get organic traffic from Google and get Google to love them. So what is your process? How do you do this? It's a little different for every website because every website's unique, but there's some overlapping commonalities with every website that Google always looks at, which is like text or the coding. So Google, what we see and what Google sees are different. When search engines look at a website, they look at the code for you to put keywords in different places. So the first step is always going in your website, whether you're on WordPress or Shopify or Wix or Squarespace or whatever platform, Magento, Joomla, they're all— you're all able to go in there and make changes in different areas that way Google better read and understand and know what that page is about. Which gets a little technical, but one place that doesn't require coding is just adding more text to every single page, which is something everyone could do, is just add more text. Google feeds off text. They struggle with images and videos and audio. They're getting much better at it, but they want text. So if you're doing podcasts, transcribe it or timestamp it or summarize it, but just add text to that YouTube video description. Or if you're putting the podcast episode on your website, add text about it. It's so very important, and that doesn't require any coding. And that alone, I can almost guarantee would get everyone more traffic to their website, just having more good original quality content. But none of that really matters to Google without trust. And Google just doesn't believe anything anybody puts on the website because I could build a website and say brandonsdentist.com. Google's like, are you really a dentist? Because we don't want to send people to your dental office and find out you don't exist. So if I create a website, Google sees all these keywords, but they're like, no, they're not going to rank you for any of these keywords unless we see other websites talking about you. The more third-party sites that are talking about me, the more trust Google gives to me and the higher they're going to rank me. So if I'm a dentist, I should be on like WebMD, I should be on Wikipedia, I should be on Google Maps, I should be on MapQuest, I should be on Apple Maps. And the more websites that I'm on, The more popular, the more trust Google gives to you. And then they look at those keywords. That's how SEO works without getting too technical in the weeds for commonalities. But then every website's different. If you're local, we want to get you on the maps. If you're e-commerce, we want to get your products to show up on Google Shopping and just trying to capture all that free real estate that Google offers. Mm. So you're talking about backlinks there, right? The more other websites are pointing to your websites, the more Google is going to trust you. Yeah. Yep, you got to get those third-party sites to talk about you. And it's like this website is voting for you saying, hey, if we're talking about you, that means we trust you. And if Google sees all these other websites that are related to what you're doing mention you, that tells Google that you must be at least somewhat relevant, somewhat trustworthy. Are there any other sort of tips that people should include on their website? Would it be better to have a WhatsApp button or somewhere where people can call you and have your email? Are all those things that count? For Google trusting you more? Well, Google wants to see a phone number. So having a WhatsApp clickable link doesn't matter, but having a Contact Us page with your phone number, your email address, because I have people that come to me with a website and they're selling products and there's no Contact Us page. And I was like, well, if I'm buying your product, what's going to happen if I don't get the product? How am I going to contact you? And if I've never been to your website and don't know who you are, why would I How will I trust you? I'd rather just go on Amazon because there's no phone number. And it's little things like that that Google looks at as trust signals, like phone number, your email address, your address, if you can put it there. If you don't want to put your address, put the city and state, but just anything that you think would help build trust. Imagine you go to your website and there's none of that stuff there. Would you buy off of this website? That's how you have to look at it. If Google's not going to— People aren't going to trust you, Google's not going to trust you. having an About Us page, a privacy policy, terms of service. All these are just basic pages that to Google, a normal business that's a real business would have it. And doesn't take that much time to create those pages, but they're really important to have anything to just help build trust. So what do you think is— because a lot of people do have websites and that's going to— the main thing is, yeah, they're not getting traffic. So what is it they're The number one thing that they're doing wrong? Usually it's backlinks. Either people build the wrong type of backlinks by going on a site like Fiverr and buying 1,000 backlinks for $5, and— or they don't know what backlinks are or don't realize how important they are. But backlinks are one of the biggest pieces to that SEO puzzle that if you're building the wrong type of backlinks, it'll actually do more harm than good. Where instead of ranking you higher, it's going to drop you down. And I've seen too many times where people have backlinks where there's tools that will let me look at any website backlinks, and I'll see their backlinks have been like this, and then all of a sudden just shoots up and they get like 1,000 backlinks in one month, and that just drops and continues to drop. And to Google, they're gonna be like, how do you get all these backlinks when over the past 5 years you've only gotten 20 backlinks? And then all of a sudden one month you're getting this huge influx of backlinks. Maybe went viral, but usually that's not the case and it's somebody trying to game the system. And so what are some of the things that people could do to build these backlinks organically? How are they encouraging people to put their link on their website? That is the tough part, is how do you get someone to mention you on their website? But there are tools that will let you look at any website's backlinks. I could look at your backlinks and let's say you're my competitor. I would say, all right, Let's look at your backlinks and look at anyone that's linking out to you, because if someone's linking out to you, they would probably link out to me. I just got to get creative and figure out why did they link out to you. Did you do an interview? Did they write— did you write an article? Did you do a blog post? Did you do a podcast? Did you sponsor an event or a trade show? Or are you a local business? Did you join like your Chamber of Commerce or the BBB or TripAdvisor? Whatever it is, you could reverse engineer anyone's website using tools like Ahrefs or Moz or Semrush. They're not free, they're all a little pricey, but they'll let you spy on your competitors' backlinks and pretty much replicate what's working. Okay, and, and I suppose for pod— this is another thing for podcasters, they don't realize that you can do SEO behind your podcast. And I suppose, so is that going to help people, like in the show notes, make sure you have your Have a link to your website and your guest. And if you, the beauty is then if your guest posts that you're going to have a backlink from them. So it's a win, isn't it? So the more you can do to add these links in, and like you say, create a blog post out of every episode that you have. It's so easy. We've got so many tools that are at our fingertips that can just take the transcription and just turn it into a blog. It doesn't have to be difficult. It's still unique content, and I think this is where maybe some of the fear comes from, because you, you mentioned earlier about it's got to be unique content, and the problem may arise because everybody Everybody's using ChatGPT and they're using AI to write stuff. Whereas the beauty of a podcast is that you get to show up authentically and just have a conversation. Then from that conversation, you can still utilize AI, can't you, to turn it into a blog post? Because it's still going to be unique content. Would that be right? Yeah. The crazy thing about AI is every single time you use it, it's unique content. If a million of us all ask it the same prompt, it's going to give us all 100% unique content, but it's not accurate. And Google said a couple years, like 2 years ago, we don't care anymore who writes the content. AI can write all your content, but you have to edit it and make sure it's useful and beneficial to the reader, because if it's not, they'll penalize you. But it's always unique, which is the craziest thing. I don't know how it does that, but It is much better to have a transcript and have it, because if you just use AI and we all write the same thing, it's going to be very similar and it's not going to really be the best. But if you use those tools to help you just transcribe the video, transcribe the audio, and then timestamp it, summarize it. I always tell every podcast I'm on, you guys have the easiest opportunity to build backlinks. You actually have to do nothing except for make a page for every episode that you have a guest on. And share that with your guests because a lot of podcasts will just be like, hey, I posted you on YouTube or Spotify, here's a link to Spotify. And what am I going to do? I'm going to share that link to Spotify with my audience. And what's that going to do? That's going to help Spotify get more traffic, get more backlinks, get more social signals. It's not really going to help you. It's going to help you a little bit to get more listeners, but ultimately, like, if you send someone to YouTube, there's ads, there's a lot of distractions to get that person to forget about you really quickly, whereas If you make a page for every episode, embed that YouTube video on that page, have some good content on it, then you share that with your guests. Your guests will definitely share that on social media, get you some social signals, but they also might share it on their website and get you that SEO backlink where now you don't really have to do anything to get a backlink except for just have good guests on and share those episodes as blog posts on your website because your website, you own that. Mm-hmm. You don't own social media. You don't own Spotify, iTunes. You're renting space. They could take you down anytime and you have no control over that, whereas your website is yours forever and you need to have a website. Oh yeah, that is just so true. And I do think that— I think the thing is that so many people think it's so easy to start a podcast. All I've got to do is interview this person and upload it into Apple. But yeah, you're so right. People are missing out on so much. If you've not got it, then turned it into a blog. I suppose I probably bombard people. I've actually got 2 blogs, one on my karenrobertscoaching.com website and one under my podcast Profits Unleashed. So the blog posts are slightly different, but they're still, you can still embed the episodes. So you're still going to get a listener out of it. And then, yeah, for double whammy, I'll put the YouTube video at the bottom. So then you're dealing with people who like to read, people like to watch, people who like to listen, all in. So great tips there. But what else do you think scares people? What you mentioned earlier about the problem is that, and they do this unknowingly, right? Going to Fiverr, somewhere like Fiverr, and asking They think, oh, I can get backlinks. And they don't realize that these are not really organic ones and it's going to do them harm. Do you think it's the same thing when people are searching for somebody to help them with SEO? Why are people not getting this right? They've taken all the time to build. They might've spent thousands having a website built, but if the SEO isn't right, it's not really going to help them. So what do you think's stopping people? I feel like most people just don't realize backlinks are important. Web developers say, we're going to build a website, we're going to make it SEO-friendly, but they're putting keywords in the coding but they're not building backlinks. And you can put keywords all over your website, but without those backlinks, those keywords don't really matter much to Google because they just don't believe you. And you got to get those backlinks. A lot of people just have misinformation, don't understand what backlinks are, or there's so much information about backlinks that they're like, hey, I could go on Fiverr and buy a bunch for $10, $20. Why would I want to invest all this time and join the BBB, which costs $500 a year, or join a Chamber of Commerce, which costs $500 a year, when I could just get it for cheap? But Google sees that you're spending money paying$500 to get in a local Chamber of Commerce. A scam, a fly-by-night website would never spend that money. So all these little things that you have to put money into, you have to invest in your business and get those backlinks. And unfortunately, backlinks aren't free either. They might be free, but it requires your time. But usually it requires money, and you're not building those backlinks. You're just building 1 or 2 a month. That's still a huge win. You don't have to build a ton of backlinks. Most websites, it depends on the competition, but in general have around 100 backlinks. So if you could build a couple every single month, that's going to get Google to slowly build you up and build you up and trust you more. You just don't want to go all in and then never build a backlink again. That looks really strange. Love that. Great advice. Great tips there. So what I'm hearing from you, it really is about building the know, like, and trust. People have said it before a thousand times, but really this is how Google sees if they don't like and trust you. They're not going to push you up. And so you're not going to have as many visitors to your site. But also one thing you said earlier about it, it isn't even just that, because even if you're getting traffic to your website, if your website isn't converting into clients, then getting more traffic isn't going to help scale your business. So what would you say are the biggest tips for people to get that part of the equation right? So that one is just making a website that isn't pretty but optimized for conversions, because a lot of people just think, I want to make a nice website. But what does a nice website do? It's a good resume, good portfolio. But if you want conversions, you have to make a website that's optimized for conversions. And that means you have to make sure all your important information is at the top of the screen. Whatever you look at right now, if you're open— if you're on a website is called above the fold. Once you start scrolling, that's below the fold, and most people will never scroll down on a website. If you don't have all your important information at the top, that person's going to hit that back button, and in general, about half your traffic is going to leave immediately— that bounce rate from Google Analytics— and that's just normal. But anything that you could help to minimize that, which is making sure your website has a good value proposition right on the top of every single page, it's easy to read, and know what that page is about. Maybe have a video, some bullet points at the top of the page, and a call to action. Lower down the page, you can have all this content, this text for SEO, but the top of the page needs to be simple, easy to scan, easy to look through as a Z, because people scan left to right depending on what country and how you read, but left to Z, zigzagging and quickly looking for words that pop out. If you just put your company name there or put things that aren't going to sell, like I could say I've been in business since 2007. They don't care about— people don't care about that. They want to know what's in it for me. What am I going to get from using your product or service? So for mine, my homepage, my value proposition is stop spending money on ads or increase your website sales and leads without spending money on ads. So that's why I put it on the homepage, but every page has a different value proposition because I have a page about link building. I'm going to tell them like, get good quality backlinks without jeopardizing your website or something like that. So it speaks more to them. And that's really important is to tell people what's the benefits, what's the value, what am I going to get from reading this page, from reading this article, listening to this podcast episode, from using your product, buying, using your services. Ultimately, people are selfish and want to know what am I going to get? And if you could quickly convey that in a few seconds, that's going to get people to stay on your website. Still not going to get them to convert, but at least they stay on your website. And that's why having that call to action above the fold makes it easy for people to find that phone number or that add to cart button, or if it's a form you want people to fill out. But you got to make it easy. If you're an e-commerce website, look at Amazon. You can see they have all the important information at the top of the page, and then below, once you start scrolling, it's all this text. At the top of it, it's really optimized for people because most websites— Amazon is going to be A/B testing and they're great way you could test is A/B test your website and send half of your traffic to one version of your website and half the traffic to another version and see what gets more conversions. Maybe you could change your phone number, the font, the color, where it's placed, and see, does that get me more leads or less leads? And if it drops down and you don't get more leads, change it back. But always be testing. There is no perfect website. Even Amazon, they're spending Tens of millions of dollars. If we all look at Amazon, we're all gonna get a slightly different version. We're not gonna see the difference because it's so tiny, but they're constantly testing to maximize every visitor to get them to convert. Brilliant. And so look, what should the listeners do next if they're out there thinking, oh, I've just left my website and I would like to have more traffic and I would like to turn those— that traffic into leads, sales, clients? What should they do next? They should just little by little start making, implementing the changes that we talked about. And with SEO, it's a long-term strategy, long-term play, and you have to stick with it. A lot of people just start doing some SEO and then a few months later they're just like, it's not working. And it's because it takes time. On average, it takes about 6 months. It could take longer. Could be shorter depending on the competition and the competitiveness, but on average it takes about 6 months to a year. And if you don't stick with it, it's not going to fully work and you just got to keep going with it. Cool. So where, where can they reach out to you if they want help? Where do they find you? So anyone that wants to learn more, I created a special gift for everybody if they go to my website at SEO Optimizers. That's seooptimizers.com/gift, and they can find that gift there along with my contact information and classes I've done over the years. I've thrown up for free so you can see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about for SEO. And also, if you do have a website and you want me to check it out from an SEO point of view, you can book some time on my calendar for free there as well. Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today. It is, it is an interesting subject. A lot of people think, oh my God, SEO, they don't want to know because it is tech, technical stuff, but it's so important. Who doesn't want to get free traffic, right? Who doesn't want to not have to pay ads and get, have a continual flow of traffic into their website that you can convert into clients? So.