How To Rank #1 On Google SEO Tips Podcast ClearBrand

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
When I first starteddoing SEO in 2007,
people were saying SEO is dead.
And people have been sayingthat forever.
And even if Google leaves,that's the.
Great thing about experience.
Great.
Yeah, no everyone's been sayingthat forever.
And I mean if Google leaves,there's going to be another
search engine maybe.
Or I mean as long as there'ssearch engines,
there's going to be SEO.
But if things change tosomething else where you're

(00:22):
not searching,then SEO is definitely gone.
But for the time being,I don't see that changing
because even with like.
AI,you're looking for neuralink and
you don't have to type anything.
Your brain will just connectdirectly to the Internet,
which is also terrifying.
But until then,people are going to be
searching for stuff.
Yep.
As long as they'restill searching,

(00:43):
then it doesn't matter ifthey're on Google or like
I was saying earlier,like it could be Amazon,
it could be Yelp, TripAdvisor.
Anywhere that there's asearch functionality,
there's going to be SEO and waysto optimize to make sure that
you get that visibilityand exposure.
So I don't worry toomuch about it,
but it's definitelygoing to change.
Welcome to the Clear BrandMarketing podcast where we take

(01:04):
the mystery out of marketing andhelp you get more leads and
sales with a clear brand andproven marketing tactics.
I'm your host, Alexander.
Today I'm talking withBrandon Leibowitz.
He runs and operates SEOOptimizers which was
founded in 2007.
SEO Optimizers is a digitalmarketing company that focuses
on helping small and mediumsized businesses get more online

(01:26):
traffic which in turn convertsinto clients, leads and sales.
Welcome Brandon.
It's good to have you.
Thank you for havingme on today.
So you've been doing this since2007 almost the birth of Google?
Not quite,but you've seen a lot I'm

(01:47):
sure over the years.
So I'm excited to get to learnfrom you and hear.
I mean how basically how do werank is kind of the whole point.
How do we rank and get clickedon so that we can do what
you guys talk about,which is get those
clients in sales.
And you founded this company,what made you want

(02:09):
to found this?
I'm kind of curious justto as we get started.
I've always had theentrepreneurial spirit and in
high school I made like askateboard, love skateboarding,
so made a clothing company forskateboarding and once I went to
college kind of focusedmore on school.
And not the company anymore,Even though I should have kept
building the company up becauseit was pretty well known

(02:30):
around my area.
But went to focus on my degree,which I got in business
marketing.
And after I graduatedfrom college,
one of the first jobs I got washelping a company out with their
digital marketing back in 2007,which I didn't really know much
about it back then. They said,don't worry,
we don't really knowmuch either.
We're going to learn with youand take you to classes and
workshops and seminars and wentto a few of these seminars that

(02:53):
they took me to aboutdigital marketing.
And a lot of these people talkedabout like how they do SEO,
but they also have like 10different websites and do drop
shipping and affiliate marketingand all this other stuff.
And it made me realize I couldwork full time at this company
and I could also go to like alocal dentist or doctor
or a lawyer or any.
Or a restaurant and try to seeif they want to help with SEO.

(03:15):
Because the companyI was working for,
they made 3D lenticularproducts,
which is very niche that hedidn't really have
much competition.
And I realized I couldjust build it up.
And worked at differentadvertising agencies over the
years as a director of SEO andbefore work and after work
and on my lunch breaks,I work on my own company and
eventually built it up to whereI was able to quit my job and

(03:36):
focus solely on this.
Just helping people really tapinto that free traffic.
That's great.
And that's the way to dothat's a great way to go about
starting a businesswhere you've got
regular income so you're notsuper stressed about where's the
next meal gonna come from.

(03:58):
And you built it up till youcould just go out on
your own there.
You seem pretty systematic inyour approach just from the
little conversationwe've had so far.
And does that kind of ringtrue with you?

(04:18):
How do you approachmarketing in general?
Is it kind of like hey,here's what we're going to do
today or are you doing a lot ofsystems and kind of back end
like engineering things?
Trying to make more systems andprocesses to streamline things
because there's only so muchI could do on my own.
And if I'm trying to really pushit and get it out there,
especially for more competitivekeywords,

(04:39):
there's a lot that needs to bedone with SEO and just
trying to kind of.
It's kind of like a check sheet,like making sure you check all
the Boxes that Google's lookingfor in terms of what we know
that they want to do or we knowthat Google's looking for to
help you build that trust andrelevance with those
search results.
So kind of is systemized alittle bit because you got
to make Google happy.

(05:00):
And Google has certain thingsthat they really put
a big emphasis on.
And if you skip that over,it means that the SEO is not
really going to havethat full impact.
It's kind of like a puzzle.
Tell people like,there's a lot of pieces
to that puzzle,and if you skip some
of these pieces,it's not going to
really work out.
And you have to just really makesure you tie everything together
and make Google happy so theyreward you with those rankings.

(05:23):
All right, well,I'm excited to hear.
I love systems.
And that always to me indicatesthat there's a higher chance of
success when people are actuallysystematizing following those,
you mentioned, checklists.
So we're going to have toget into all of that.
I'm just going touse this time to
learn and improve what wedo over at clearbrand.

(05:47):
But just for the folks who willgo through this quick,
because I know that a lot offolks are just want to hear
what's on that checklist.
But to start with,for the folks who might be newer
to SEO, can you share what,what SEO is and why it matters?
Yeah.
So SEO is search engineoptimization.
And that means ranking websitesin the different search engines,

(06:10):
which is really just Googleruns the show nowadays.
There's hundreds,thousands of other
search engines,but Google really
just dominates.
So it's really making sure thatyour website shows up when
people search on any searchengine, whether it's like Yelp,
even Amazon,it's a search engine you get
optimized to make your productsrank higher on Amazon.
But with Google,there's ads at the top.

(06:31):
Those are all paid ads.
Right below the ads are theorganic, the free listings.
There's 10 spots on thatfirst page, Google.
And we want to get your websitein one of those 10 positions.
But it's not just websites thatappear when you search on
Google. Images, maps, videos,products sometimes appear.
So we want to optimizeeverything and try to give you
as much free real estate aspossible on that first page of

(06:54):
Google without spendingmoney on paid ads.
That's really whatSEO is all about,
is just trying to tap into thatfree traffic from Google.
Okay, so it's pretty simple.
People go to Google tosearch for something,
and the goal is to optimize thecontent for the search engine so
that you rank on that first pageand actually get clicked.

(07:16):
So what,what rankings do you consider
to be a win usually?
Well,getting on that first page of
Google is always a win becausemost people are somewhere way
deep buried down onpage 10 or 12.
So getting you on to at leastthe first page of Google,
because most people don't reallygo on page two or three
or four or five.

(07:37):
Most people just go on Googleand whatever they see usually at
the top or somewhere around thetop middle is what's going
to get those clicks.
But of course we want toget you to the top,
that's the ultimate goal.
But initially it's trying tofind that low hanging fruit like
maybe you're on page two fora bunch of keywords.
Let's try to push these ones upand get those ones ranked
higher, faster.
But eventually you want toultimately try to get you to the

(07:59):
top because that's what peopletrust and their eyes are drawn
into the top and that'swhat they see first.
And if you're up there,usually you're going to get the
majority of those clicks.
Okay, so there's kind of stages.
It sounds like goal one, hey,let's get on the first page.
Goal two,let's move that up higher.
With the eventual, you know,the, the gold medal being let's

(08:20):
get into that first spot.
So there's some stuff happeningin the SEO world today,
especially with Google where AIis just changing the game.
I want to get therehere in a minute,
but let's just have a layout ofwhat are the basic principles of

(08:44):
how you get onto the first pageof Google and then we'll talk
about how AI is kind ofchanging everything.
I mean for the most part.
Well,it's not really a one size fits
all for every websiteis different.
But there are some generalthings that Google looks at,
which is the, well,Google looks at the code,
Google looks at your coding andthey want you to put keywords in
different places so they canbetter understand and know

(09:06):
what that page is about.
Because Google's just a robot.
And what they do is just readthat code line by line trying to
decipher what thatpage is about.
And the more places thatyou put keywords,
the easier it is for the searchengines to really understand
what that page is about.
And that requires you going inlike a title tag or meta
description and header tags,all this tactical stuff.

(09:27):
But one place that doesn'trequire any coding is just
adding more text to your websitebecause Google feeds off text.
And if you could add more textto every single page
on your website,that's really going to help the
search engines better understandand know what that
page is about.
But unfortunately theydon't trust you.
Or Google doesn't trust websitesbecause too many people have

(09:48):
gained the system over the yearsand put keywords on their
website, saying like,I'm a doctor. And Google's like,
really? Are you a doctor?
Because we don't want to justsend people to your doctor's
office and find outyou don't exist.
And Google The way Google becamepopular back in the 90s is they
said we're not just goingto look at keywords.
Were going to look at whatare called backlinks.
We want to see other websitestalking about you.

(10:09):
The more websites thattalk about you,
the more popular Google sees youas and the more trustworthy
Google sees you as,and the higher they're
going to rank you.
And that's really abig part of SEO,
is building backlinks fromsites that are relevant,
authoritative to build thattrust and Google to want
to rank you higher.
And what is a backlink?
A backlink is a clickable linkfrom another website that

(10:31):
points to yours.
So let's say for example,you're on like entrepreneur.com
you're reading an article andthere it says Brandon Lebowitz
and you click on it andit goes to my website.
I'd be getting a backlink fromentrepreneur.com so the more
websites that link outto that are related,
the higher your rank.

(10:51):
Okay, so we've got a couplethings so far.
We've gotsome technical stuff in having
the right words in the title,the meta description,
the headers, things like that.
And then you kind.
Of simplified it. And you said,well, an easy way to do this is
to add more content.
How much content would you say alanding page or a blog

(11:13):
should have?
You basically need to do morethan your competition.
In the past,a lot of people would say, like,
write 400 words or 800 wordsor a thousand words.
But that's not really how Googleworks because every search is
different and you have to reallytailor your content to that
person searching. And Google,Google wants to offer value and

(11:33):
wants to make sure that yourwebsite is offering
value to the user.
Because if it's not offeringvalue, you're like, google,
why are you showingme this result?
And you're probably going to notuse Google in the future.
So Google really makes sure thatthese websites solve the issue
or the question or whatever thatyou're searching into
the Google.
And you need to figure out howmuch text you need to
add to your website.
You need to take your keywordthat you want to rank for it,

(11:56):
whatever that keyword is,search it in Google,
Open up all those websites thatare on that first page of Google
skipping over the ads,because ads are not doing
the same thing as SEO.
But open up all the organic,the ones that are ranking there,
and you can see how muchtext they have.
And basically you have toaverage it all out.
So if everyone's writinga thousand words,
you should probably writethousand and 100 words.

(12:17):
If everyone's writing 50 words,you don't need to write
a hundred words.
So you don't have to writehundreds or thousands of words
and just need to do a little bitmore than the competition.
Okay, and,and so do you have a any
recommendations for toolsthat might do this or,
or do you guys kind of just dothat by hand where you're going
to go through that first page,you're going to,
you're going to basically do aword count on that page

(12:40):
or give a tool.
Theres paid tools thatare not cheap,
but like Surfer SEO is a toolthat you could pay for that
does it? But yeah,sometimes they'll do it by hand,
but it helps out using a tool.
But they do get pretty expensiveif you do a lot of searches.
So Surfer we use Surferat clearbrand.

(13:03):
What is your perspectiveon surfer SEO?
Surfer SEO is a great way tojust speed things up because
essentially you are trying tofigure out who's on that
first page of Google,how much SEO have they done and
how can you do a betterjob of it.
And Surfer will take stuffthat's really important,
like word count, headers,stuff like keywords that they

(13:25):
see commonly showing up.
But then it's just a tool.
You have to really write thecontent and make sure it offers
value. It's good content,and that's where you have
to have good writers,at least to help supplement
all that.
So it's not going to do thejob for you, but it has.
It's. It,it provides these metrics where
for anybody who hasn'tused Surfer SEO,

(13:47):
it it kind of does what Brandonwas just talking about,
where when you initially providethe keyword that you're going to
be writing an article about or alanding page or whatever it is,
it looks at the first page ofGoogle and it kind of counts up
the words of eachof these pages,
and it looks at the words thatare the specific words that are
being used on those pages.

(14:07):
And then it providesrecommendations for you based on
what it's finding on Google.
So in the sidebar, it gives you,like,
an overall ranking of how wellit thinks this page could rank
on a scale of 1 to 100.
But then it also has goals.
So how many words does itthink you should have?

(14:27):
And it gives you a range,and it gives you all these
keywords that it thinksyou should include,
and it tells you how many timesyou should include each keyword.
Now,it's not as smart as Google,
so it often includes, like,misspellings.
So we were writing one recentlythat included the
word nonprofit,and it wanted us to include
nonprofit as one word and nondash profit and non

(14:51):
space profit.
Now my understanding is Googleis smart enough to know that
this is all the same thing,but Surfer's not.
So how much do you trustSurfer's recommendations when it
says you need to have this exactkeyword in there 15 times,
whatever it is,do you actually just go through
and do exactly what it says,or do you guys have a little bit
of wiggle room whenyou're doing that?

(15:13):
I mean,there's always some legal room
because they're just guessing.
I mean,they're just looking at the
data and trying to guess,but nobody really knows
how Google works.
So Google might not even lookat some of that stuff.
I'm sure they look at the numberof times those words are
mentioned, the variation,synonyms, plurals,
reordering the words around.
But in terms of following it,you don't have to follow it

(15:35):
completely becauseit is not Google.
And it's just trying to guessat what Google wants. But, yeah,
It's a good starting pointat least to folk to
base your content off versusjust kind of cold going at
it blindly and saying,let me just write a thousand
words and let me put my keywordin here five times so I could
get that right. Density.

(15:55):
But is that really what mattersversus the competition?
And if you could spy on thecompetition and get
some insights,that's going to help you better
make that correct decisions.
And Google does a lot more thanwhat Surfer is doing as well.
There are these Google leaksrecently and one of the things I
maybe I was out of the loopon this. I don't know,

(16:16):
maybe it was new information.
But if you use Google Chrome,this is my understanding,
you can correct me here.
But if you use Google Chrome,they're basically just following
you everywhere.
And they're using their Chromeusers to determine how people
are interacting withthese websites.
And so they actually get to seethis live behavior and they

(16:36):
can use that to say, oh,this is helpful, or it's not.
So it's not just these keywords,but it's also, is it good?
So you can't just pump out an AIthing and call it good because
it has the right keywords in it.
It has to be helpful.
Have you seen the same thing inGoogle's kind of looking at
people's browsing behavior?

(16:58):
Yeah,they look at user experience as
another one that they've said.
They look at this onea long time ago,
which is like if someone goessearches on Google and clicks
on your website,but then all the people that
go to your website leaveimmediately. That bounce rate,
if Google sees a lot of peopleare clicking and then coming
back to Google,that's a negative signal
to Google saying,maybe you shouldn't be

(17:18):
ranked number one.
Let's move you down to numbertwo and let's move number one up
and see how do people behave.
But of course Google's going totrack everything if they
have Chrome. Yeah,going to track everything like
Gmail is free because they'rereading all your emails looking
for keywords to send you ads.
Like anything that Google putsout there for free is because
it gives them more data,like Google Maps.
All that stuff is just givingyou more data about,

(17:41):
are you going to the store,are you asking for directions
for this local business,are you calling them up
like what's going on?
And they could see all thatstuff and they're tracking
everything that they can.
Yeah.
So that kind of brings us tosome of the things that are
happening with Google anddepending on the SEO person

(18:03):
that you talk to,some folks are kind of freaking
out. I've had,I've talked to some owners of
marketing agencies recentlywho don't do SEO.
So of course they're going to bemore likely to say that
it doesn't work.
But one guy actually saidhe thinks SEO is dead.
I wouldn't go that far.
But what are some of the changesthat you've seen happening

(18:25):
recently and how is thatimpacting the SEO strategies at
your company? SEO Optimizers.
When I first starteddoing SEO in 2007,
people were saying SEO is dead.
And people have been sayingthat forever.
And even if Google leaves, Love,that's.
The great thing aboutexperience. Great.

(18:47):
Yeah. No,everyone's been saying that
forever. And I mean,if Google leaves,
there's gonna be another searchengine maybe. Or, I mean,
as long as there's searchengines, there's gonna be SEO.
But if things change tosomething else where you're
not searching,then SEO is definitely gone.
But for the time being,I don't see that changing.
Because even with, like,neuralink and you don't
have to type anything,your brain will just connect

(19:09):
directly to the Internet,which is also terrifying.
But until then,people are going to be
searching for stuff.
Yep.
As long as they'restill searching,
then it doesn't matterif they're on Google,
or like I saying earlier, like,it could be Amazon,
it could be Yelp, TripAdvisor.
Anywhere that there's asearch functionality,
there's going to be SEO and waysto optimize to make sure that

(19:30):
you get that visibilityand exposure.
So I don't worry toomuch about it,
but it's definitely going tochange in terms of how
people search.
Are they going to beusing AI more,
or is AI going to be inthe search results?
But Google's already been kindof doing that with featured
snippets, which they did like10 years ago,
where they'll kind of give youthe answer at the top,
which has taken a lot of trafficaway from people's search

(19:51):
or websites,because Google will just give
you the answer right there,which is kind of what
AI is doing.
And that's kind of what Google'sAI is doing right now,
where they're testing out AI,where there's like a big
featured snippet at the topof the search results,
which is kind of what they'vealready been doing.
So I'll have to see what'sgoing to happen,
how it's going to change.
But that Definitely takestraffic away,
especially from like sites likeWikipedia where you're like,

(20:13):
what is the birthdayof this celebrity?
And we don't have togo to Wikipedia.
They'll just give you thatanswer right there.
They'll have that knowledgegraph on the right
hand side too,showing like their date of
birth, like their spouse,their children,
all this stuff is pulled in.
Or if you're searching for likescores of like a basketball
game,they'll show you that in live
time, in real time, live on the,in the search results.

(20:34):
So was that.
And that takes away traffic fromlike the NBA's website.
So all this stuff is good andbad and it's good for users,
but it's bad for people that ownwebsites because that traffic is
now just staying on Google.
Because Google knows if you'researching for the score
of a basketball game,you're probably not going
to click on the ad.
So they want to keep you onGoogle as long as possible.

(20:54):
So you do a search maybe forlike that sports team jerseys
or something,and then you want to
buy that jersey.
Google hopes you click on an adbecause Google only cares
about making money.
So all the stuff that they'redoing is just to make
more money.
That's really whatthey care about.
Of course they want a good userexperience because that
makes them more money.
But that didn't make them money.
They wouldn't care about thatbecause they're just in it

(21:16):
to get that ad spend.
The more clicks on ads,the more money Google makes
and the happier Google is.
So one I prefer.
I appreciate the context there.
Just knowing that Google's beenchanging things since
the beginning.
People have been you know,like chicken Little crying that

(21:37):
the sky is falling sincethe beginning.
And even you pointing outthe snippets. Well,
Google has been taking clicksaway from websites
for a long time.
The snippets and the answers.
They had those dropdownquestions for a while.
And so AI isn't necessarilybreaking Google.

(21:58):
It's just kind of the nextstep in this iteration.
And it's kind of defined by thisconflict that Google has.
Well,we need our users to use Google,
but that's not howwe make money.
We make money on whenthey click on ads.
So it has to be functionalenough that people use it and

(22:18):
they keep coming back to it.
Like you were saying,people spending more
time on Google,but also they gotta get those ad
clicks. So we know that, like,AI can't go too far with
providing answers because thenthere won't be any ad clicks for
those. So there's a limit.

(22:39):
There's kind of these boundariesaround what Google can and might
change because they still needto get their revenue.
Yeah that's great context.
So how do you approachthese Google now,
has it changed anything in theway that you choose what to

(23:02):
write about or how that you,how you write articles
for your clients?
Not too much. I mean,it's still kind of the same.
It's just now he's gotto be aware of AI,
and now I got to make suremy writers don't use AI.
But Google said last year,we don't care who writes
the content.
If it's written by AI or humans,it doesn't matter as long
as it offers value.

(23:23):
Yeah.
And unfortunately,most of my writers are using AI
and then charging me full price.
I'm like, all right,do I still need to use you?
I still,I don't rely on AI because
it's not accurate.
So I could have them like anoutline on ChatGPT and then have
the writers write that content.
But if I just have it, like,write an article,
it's going to be full of thoseAI hallucinations where it makes

(23:44):
up stuff and it doesn't tellyou that it's making it up.
Which I feel like it should atleast tell you. Like, hey,
we don't know the answer.
We're making it up.
But a lot of people just copy itverbatim and then just post
it on their website. Like,I heard a lawyer did
that when Chat gtp,Chat GPT first came out.
They had it right.
Like a deposition,and it had incorrect information
and it got that lawyer in a lotof trouble. So if you use it,

(24:06):
like, as a tool and a reference,that's fine.
But if you're just havingit write your content,
it's not quite there yet,but it is a good kind of
starting point. Like,if you don't know what to blog
about and you're like,stuck on blog topics, be like,
hey,can you 20 blog topics that are
have positive sentiment andinclude this keyword or
variations of it.
So the More specific you get,the better it's going to be.

(24:27):
But still really in its infancy.
So you just got to kindof be careful with it.
But it does help you out andsaves a lot of time if
you do it properly.
Yeah, okay, so.
So if I'm hearing you right,AI isn't in terms of Google's
AI, it's not scaring you,and you guys are kind of just
going about business as usual,but in terms of like, using AI,

(24:50):
there's kind of limits.
So it's nice for an outline,it's nice for maybe
a first draft,but definitely not the final
draft because it'smaking stuff up,
pulling things offof bad websites.
I saw somebody type into thesearch bar when Google's AI
was first coming out,how many rocks should I eat a
day or something like this?
Did you see this?
And it had said everyone shouldeat one small rock per day.

(25:15):
And it had its source,and it was an old Reddit post
from 15 years ago where some.
Who knows if it's Reddit,so who knows if this is an
actual doctor or not,but some doctor had said that
small rocks help with digestion.
So Google, I mean,that's AI in general.
So if you're going to useit to write an article,

(25:37):
like you were saying,it's not going to be the final,
final draft.
Youve at least got to factcheck it and maybe,
maybe actually rewrite it.
AI is kind of boring.
ChatGPT writes in aboring way anyway.
I mean, is that kind of.
Am I hearing you right in termsof the approach and then the

(25:57):
way that you write it?
And that's also why Googlestill runs the show,
because Google just doesn'trely on keywords,
they rely on backlinks tosupport those keywords.
Because ChatGPT is just readingthrough and reading all that
text. But is it really accurate?
And if there's no backlinks?
The backlinks are kind of likepopularity, like a trust signal.

(26:18):
And right now I say, like,AI is kind of where it's just
the old search engines beforeGoogle, Link as,
or any of those other searchengines that didn't really
look at backlinks,they just looked at the
keywords, which,it's a good starting point
and it's great at like,compiling information really
quickly together.
But you still need to double andtriple check because who knows
what's real or what's not real?
And people could put up,like you said on Reddit,

(26:40):
you could put anything on Redditand You put anything on your
website and it's going to readit, is it really accurate?
Or like what's correct,what's not correct,
what's real news and fake news.
It's like, can't differentiate.
Like, people could barelydifferentiate what's real or
fake news and AI is not goingto be able to do that.
I mean, hopefully someone coulddifferentiate that,
but it's just, it's so tough,it's so complicated right

(27:01):
now that what is real,what's not real,
and how do you know what totrust and what's really
accurate?
Well, and that's a,that's a great comparison.
That's,that's a great reason for Google
to trust backlinks. I mean, I,I hadn't thought about that.
That ChatGPT is able to consumea lot of information and it's
able to summarize itin cool ways. But,

(27:23):
but it can't determine authorityis what basically was
what that means.
So let's actually go,let's go there to the backlinks,
because this is how Google isdetermining authority is by how
many and what backlinksyou have.

(27:43):
So a link on somebody else'swebsite that sends people
to your website.
When I'm telling a clientabout this,
I kind of describe it likehaving a recommendation
for a blind date.
You don't know anythingabout this person.
So if a stranger says to you,hey,
I have a friend that you shouldgo on a date with, no,

(28:05):
I'm not gonna.
You don't know me. You know,why would I,
why would I do that?
But if your best friend says toyou, oh, man, I've got, I just,
I've got the perfect person whoI think you should go on
a date with. Well,now there's this different
level of trust.
And so Google kind of approacheswebsites how we might approach

(28:26):
a blind date.
And the more websites thatrefer to your website,
it's kind of like the morefriends that you have saying you
should go on a blind datewith this person.
It helps to build that trustsince you don't have the ability
to know if they're trustworthyor not on their own,

(28:46):
since it's a blind date.
So we've got the numberof folks referring,
but we also have thetrustworthiness of the people
who are referring and also therelevance of the people
who are referring.
So walk me through your,your plan for backlinks.
I'm kind of stealingyour thunder here.
I didn't mean to do that,but how do you approach
backlinks at SEO optimizers?

(29:08):
Yeah.
Well first we would want to.
Well, everything that you saidis perfect and spot on.
It's like those recommendationsare referrals and trust signals.
And what we need todo is get you,
get your website moreof those backlinks.
And there's lots of differentways to build backlinks and some
are better than others and someare actually bad and will
do more harm than good.

(29:29):
And that's where the majority ofGoogle's algorithm updates are
really just to stop spammersfrom people gaming the system
and finding loopholes and waysto build backlinks that are
really low quality backlinksthat are not going to move the
needle and where the quality.
So we want to buildquality backlinks.
And a quality backlink to Googlemeans it comes from a site
that's related to what you'redoing and has some authority.

(29:51):
Like if you're selling T shirtsonline and you got a backlink
from a restaurant,looks a little weird.
Like why is a restaurant givingthis T shirt company backlinks?
I mean maybe they did T shirtsfor the restaurant so they
posted up there.
But if the majority of thebacklinks came from restaurants
pointing to a T shirt company,Google's going to get confused.
So you need to get the backlinksfrom sites that are related

(30:12):
to what you're doing.
And if you're selling clothing,you want websites about like
fashion, about style,about maybe the materials
that you're buying.
So anything somewhat relateddoesn't have to be another T
shirt company because you mightbe competitors and they probably
won't want to giveyou a backlink.
But anything somewhat related,that's what Google wants to see.
And then the more authoritythat website has,
the more SEO value that'sgoing to be passed on.

(30:35):
If I gave you a backlinkfrom my website,
it's a good backlink but it'snot the same as like a New York
Times or Wikipedia orWall Street Journal.
So the bigger the website,the more trust Google gives to
those websites and the morevalue that backlink has.
But relevancy really is very,very important.
You got to find those sitesthat are niche related.
And I usually start off bylooking at my competitors

(30:56):
backlinks using tools likeAhrefs or Moz or Semrush or any
of these paid tools tocheck backlinks.
You can look at your competitorsbacklinks and then one by one
try to figure out or try toreach out to the sites and
Figure out how did theyget that backlink?
Did they do an article,did they do a blog,
did they do a podcast,did they sponsor an event?
Did they join like a chamber ofcommerce or whatever it is?

(31:18):
You could pretty much reverseengineer their entire strategy
and see what's working and skipover the low quality backlinks,
ones that are like in foreignlanguages or just don't make
sense because you don't want tobuild every single backlink
that your competition has,but you want to find the ones
that have that relevancy andhave that authority.
Yeah,talking about some of this, man.

(31:41):
When we were justgetting started,
I had hired somebody on Upworkto provide some backlinks and
they label themselves aswhite hat and all this.
So black hat is typically what'sthe bad backlinks.
And I want to hear yourperspective on some of those.
What those are.

(32:01):
But here's one example.
So this person on Upworkwas like, hey, yeah,
we do white hat backlinks,high authority, all this stuff.
So I paid for the serviceand they put a spreadsheet
together with all the backlinksthat they had gotten.
And these guys werejust this person.
I don't know if they had a teamor not in another country.

(32:22):
So you never really know.
Andthey're just pumping them out.
They're just getting backlinksalmost every day.
But they were all weird.
So I, you know,I'm going through these sites
and it looks like they'rebasically just building websites
that are essentiallybacklink farms.
Sometimes they're building awebsite like a blog spot.

(32:44):
Is that what it's called?
Google Blogger or whatever?
Yeah it's called Blogger.
So it's likethis random string of letters
and numbers.blogspot.com andit's like hastily thrown up.
It's just a little bit ofcontent with no design

(33:05):
or anything. Oh,but there's the backlink. So.
This is an example ofa bad backlink.
What are some other backlinksthat you think people
should be avoiding?
Yeah, Those are called PBNs,private blog networks where
people build a bunch of websitesand make them look like
real websites,but they're just a blog

(33:25):
and they're about,usually they're on random topics
and you kind of spot them out.
If they're like writing aboutlike casinos or pharmaceuticals,
those are the types of sitesthat usually post on them.
So also that's a big thing ismaking sure that the website
that you get the backlink fromis only related to your topic.
If you see these backlinkscoming from sites that post
about every topic,it's not the best.
I mean there's Huffington Post,Forbes,

(33:47):
they write about everything.
But in general the sites thatwrite about everything are
usually fake. PBN blogs.
Yeah, those are high trust.
High trust,like news authoritative sites.
So I can see thatbeing different.
But you're saying you're talkingabout a site that writes
about everything and,and is low trust.
Nobody's ever heard of thisthing, potentially a weird URL.
So there's some ways thatwe can figure it out.

(34:10):
Okay so PBNs,public blog networks are bad.
What else would you sayis a bad backlink?
I think where it'stoo easy to get.
So blog comments are ones thathopefully no one's doing
that anymore.
But commenting on blogs orjoining forums just
to get backlinks,unless it's like really related.
So I had one client,they did car parts for Mercedes

(34:32):
and Mercedes has this forum.
So joining that forum andgetting backlinks from that
forum is really good and alsoget some, some traffic.
But if you just join hundredsof random forums,
that used to be a strategythat worked pretty well,
but again now it's all aboutrelevancy and making sure you go
for quality, not quantity.
So getting one or two goodbacklinks is going to be much

(34:53):
better than getting a thousandlow quality backlinks.
And anywhere where it seemstoo good to be true,
too easy to get a backlink,like even social media doesn't
really help out.
Those are all kind of blockedfrom Google. So Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn,Pinterest,
all that stuff doesn't reallyhelp out with SEO because also
they're not related towhat you're doing.
So find those nicherelated websites,

(35:15):
that is really number one.
And then trying to get a linksomewhere in the content,
not just as a blog commentor something like that.
So Google looks to where thebacklink Is and usually the
higher up the back,because Google reads
from top down.
So the higher the backlink is,the more likely they're going
to read it, trust it,and follow that backlink and
count it as a SEO backlinkfor your website.

(35:37):
Okay, so, so a few questions on,on what you're saying here.
So number one,let's say you do a guest post
on a website that is inyour industry, right?
So we know that it's relevantbecause it's topical,
it's in your industry.
Youre gonna do a guest post inexchange and you're gonna put a

(35:58):
link in there to linkback to your site.
Would you put thelink in the bio,
which tends to be at the bottom,or would you see if there's a
way to link back to your sitewithin the content of
the article or both?
It depends.
Like sometimes theydon't put bios.
So if they're notgonna put a bio,
then I definitely wantit in the content.

(36:18):
But if they're gonna put a biothat adds that authorship,
and that's also something thatdoes help out with SEO is
getting your author name on abunch of different websites.
So if you could get your nameauthored on those websites,
that's great.
And then usually they will saylike Brandon Lebowitz
from SEO Optimizers,and they'll give me that
backlink in the bio.
But in the content is alwaysgoing to be best.

(36:38):
But if you could have bothplaces, that works just as well.
But usually the higherup the better.
Great. Okay,so we want that to be high up,
relevant sites.
If it's too easy,it's probably too
good to be true.
What about so we just completedan SEO audit for a client and we

(37:00):
did exactly what you'retalking about.
Backlink gap analysis withSemrush is what we use for this.
And you know,we put in some of the top
competitors and it lists off.
Here's the backlinksthat you all have.
Here's the ones that yourcompetitors have and you don't.
And so some of the oneson that list are

(37:23):
do kind of seem toogood to be true,
but it's things like Indeed.
Right.
So there's a company profilepage on Indeed.
What do you think about linkslike that? Are they,
Is it worth going and creating acompany profile page on Indeed,
or would you not evenwaste your time?
Those ones I think are good,like clutch and Indeed.

(37:44):
And all these ones where they'rekind of like Business profiles.
But if you're just only relyingon those for backlinks,
that's not the best.
But to Google,a normal business would have
a mix of backlinks.
Like you don't want all yourbacklinks to be perfect from
sites how related to what you'redoing do follow looks
a little suspicious.
So having that mix and evensocial media like to Google,

(38:05):
a normal business should havelike a Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, LinkedIn,or at least some of them.
Doesn't have to have all them,but it just makes you look more
real, more legitimate,more trustworthy.
So having those pages on Indeedtells Google maybe
you're hiring.
But I know in the past a lotof people would just create
listings on like all thesecrowdsourcing,
crowdfunding type of websiteslike GoFundMe and they would

(38:27):
create listings on there,get backlinks.
So those ones where you createlike company profiles and like
weird or smaller sites mightnot be the best,
but like an Indeed or a Clutchor stuff like that helps out.
Especially for local,trying to rank locally,
getting your name,address and phone number and all
these different websiteswill move you up.
So it's a big strategy for localand it's not a bad strategy

(38:47):
for national either.
Just you don't wantto overdo it.
You got to have thatmix of backlinks.
So a few of them from there,not a big deal.
Okay, so if it,if it seems like it's actually
a legit company profile thatthat can help with the,
the trust, then and it's easy,so might as well.
That's kind of what I'm hearingyou say here. What about paid?

(39:09):
You know,when you start reaching out
to folks and saying, hey,do you want to swap backlinks or
can we do a guest post or stuff?
If you haven't done this before,you know,
for the listeners you will getpeople who say, oh yes,
we would love to put your linkon our website and
it'll be $200.
What is your thought on that.

(39:31):
I mean backlinks,unfortunately you gotta
pay to play.
And most websites do wantcompensation because they know
that you're doing this for SEO.
Of course,Google says don't buy backlinks,
but Google doesn't really knowif you're buying these
backlinks or not.
And it's not the best thing todo. I try to get the free ones.
I mean,Google wants you not even
to do any outreach.

(39:51):
Google says you writegood content,
people are naturally goingto link to you.
But that's not really the case.
You have to do some outreach andbuild those relationships.
It's not a bad thing to spendthe money on those backlinks.
But if you're just going to likeNew York Times and be like, hey,
here's $2,000,write an article about me,
which you can do that.
There's lots of writers thatyou could pay off.
On pretty much any websiteyou can imagine,

(40:12):
there's writers that you couldpay off and they'll write
articles for you and give youthose backlinks. Say,
maybe steer clear those.
But if a blog wants like $50because they say, oh,
it takes time for me to editit and publish it,
so they're trying torecoup those fees.
That's how they justify it.
I would pay for them sometimes,but I try not to if I can.

(40:33):
Okay, so you said somethinginteresting there, which is,
Google says don't do it,but we kind of have to.
How much do you feel likeyou know, we should.
You just blindly do whatGoogle says versus.
Cause I've seen otherthings where,
where Google says X orwhy doesn't matter.

(40:53):
And then there's some semrush orAhrefs report where they looked
at a million websitesand they said, well,
actually it does appear thatwebsites that do that
rank higher.
You know,what's your approach when you
see Google kind of put out arecommendation like that, like,
don't buy backlinks.
Yeah,you just gotta kind of take

(41:14):
everything with a grain ofsalt that Google says.
Because Google's maininterest is on ads.
And SEO is there because theyknow if they're for if Google
was just all ads,nobody would use Google.
So they have to have thatbalance of the SEO
and the paid ads.
But they want to make it toughand get people confused
and frustrated.
So you just give up and be like,all right, not ranking on Google

(41:36):
organically.
Let me just spend themoney on paid ads.
But Google does tell you somethings that matter,
like making sure your websiteis mobile friendly.
If it's not mobile friendly,they're not going to show
you on mobile devices.
But that's all comes downto user experience.
Like if you're searching onGoogle on your cell phone,
you click on a website and youhave to like, zoom in.
It's not a good user experience.
You're like, google,why are you showing me
this search result?
So it all just comes back tojust making sure Google

(41:59):
look good.
And the better youmake Google look,
the more they're going to Rewardyou with rankings essentially.
So, but yeah,like Google even said a few
months ago or recently that likebacklinks are not
that important,but never really seen a website
rank without backlinks.
Maybe they're putting a littlebit less emphasis on backlinks,
but I still say they are.
Probably the majority ofGoogle's algorithm is based

(42:21):
off those backlinks.
And it's still where I spendmost of my time is building
these backlinks alongwith the on page.
But building the backlinks isjust so important and it takes
a lot of time to buildthose backlinks.
So so Google,Google's ideal world would be
one where nobody is actuallytrying to game the system.

(42:41):
And so that's part of wheretheir recommendations come from.
That's kind of what I'mhearing you say.
But we all have to follow bestpractices and do the work that's
within our control to look goodand look trustworthy
and authoritative.
So there is maybe we wouldn'tcall it gaming the system,

(43:03):
but playing the game, you know,something along those lines.
So you just said that you spenda lot of time with your clients
building backlinks.
So when you put togethera strategy,
how much of your time isbuilding backlinks and how much
your time is doing other thingslike fixing the headers.

(43:24):
You know,you mentioned that earlier.
Fixing headers and title tagsversus writing content.
I would say,well probably 80% of my time is
building backlinks I would thinkbecause just depends. Well,
also depending how bigyour website is.
Yeah,because once you opt like if
you're a local business and youhave 10 pages on your website,
I'll go in and optimizeall those pages,

(43:45):
all the titles might asdo keyword research,
add schema make surethe sitemap,
all that stuff is in place.
And then I would be blogging ontheir websites like one or two
or couple times a monthdepending on how frequently they
want content on their website.
Because you have to add morecontent to the website,
but there's only so muchthat you need to be,
that needs to be done on thewebsite on the on page.
And once you're done with theinterlinking the pages together

(44:08):
and doing all the stuff thatGoogle wants to see for the on
page SEO, then it really.
Does come down to thosebacklinks and then touching up
the on page SEO, cleaning it up,adding new things that Google
might say like hey,let's add let's you had a blog
post from seven years ago,let's update it,
add some new content on it andlet's add a little little sip
of code saying this blogwas updated in 2024.

(44:31):
Whatever you're in.
So it shows that it's not likea 7 year old blog post which
Google thinks like if it's sevenyears old and someone wrote
something a month ago,let's try to show something ran
a month ago because it's moretopical and things like that.
But the backlinks justtake so much time.
Building relationshipswith these websites,
depending on what strategy youbuild but use but usually I'm

(44:51):
doing like blogger outreach andreaching out to niche
related websites,trying to build relationships
with them, talking to editors,seeing what type of content they
want, writing the content,sending it over to them to make
sure it gets approved andscheduled in a content calendar
and ultimately getting itpublished on a website.
And takes a lot of time findingthese websites,
finding good websites,building real relationships,

(45:12):
not just spamming people.
Because a lot of people that dothe guest posting just spam
websites and it'snot a good look,
but done properly itworks really well.
But doing it properly means youhave to take a lot more time and
invest time analyzingeach website,
making sure it's relevant,making sure they have
good content on it,making sure they have a
good backlink profile,making sure that all the things

(45:34):
that need to be in place for agood website are in there.
So you kind of essentially likeauditing these websites
like quickly,not spending too much time but
just doing like a quickhigher level audit.
So it sounds like there's kindof a flow here where you start
off with fixing the technicalSEO stuff, title tags,
meta descriptionsH1s. We should, you know,

(45:54):
for example we should onlyhave one H1 on each page.
So kind of going throughthat stuff,
cleaning up what they have iswhat I heard you say where you
start then you'd said thatyou update things
basically how muchGoogle expects.
So how much wouldyou say that is?
Well Google wants you to updateyour content or update your

(46:17):
website in general.
That's why blogging becamepopular 15 years ago,
because back then there was noWordPress and it was just like
Dreamweaver and custom coding.
And to update a website youneed to know some code.
But blogging made it easyto Update your website,
add fresh content.
So Google wants to,to make sure that you're
still in business.
Your website could have beensitting there for 10 years
and never been updated.

(46:38):
You're still in business.
But Google looks at it and saysare you still running this
business because you haven'ttouched it in 10 years.
So just updating it everyonce in a while.
You don't have to updateeverything all the time.
But if you have like a blog postfrom like 10 years ago and
it's still relevant,then just go in there and just
make a couple changes to it justto make sure that all the
information still is relevant.
And then you can change a datesaying now it's a blog post

(46:59):
instead from 10 years ago.
You could say it's a blog postfrom a month or a
couple days ago.
So it just helps withthat relevancy,
that freshness part ofGoogle's algorithm.
So when you update the date,you know,
let's say that we're inWordPress and in a WordPress
blog over in the right baryou've got the date of that

(47:21):
it was published.
Do you change that date or doyou add a line towards the top
where it says where you mightsay updated on and you'd
have a different date.
So then it has an original dateand then an updated online.
How would you go about that?
Yeah,I wouldn't change original date,
I would just update it sayinglike last updated on and then
you put that last date so itsays when it's first published

(47:43):
and then also shows whenit was last updated.
So it that's going to be thebetter because if you try
to change the dates,Google's going to see that.
And sometimes your URL structureis attached to the dates too.
They might break your URLs andcause all these other issues and
redirects that don'tneed to be done.
So that's where it's just betterleave it as is and just
have a little.
Or just put a sentenceat the very top.

(48:04):
Last updated last weekor whatever it is.
So when you say snippetof code you know,
let's say that we're in theback end of WordPress.
Are you saying like is paragraphtext fine or are you doing
something kind of fancywith this to
make it display for Googlein a different way?
Nothing too fancy,but you could add like

(48:26):
a H2 or H3 tag.
I'm going to do the H1 likeyou're saying you only want to
have one H. Ah1 tag per page,but you can make like an H3 tag
so it gives a little bitmore emphasis on it.
Still not saying this is themost important thing,
but we're bolding itor italicizing it.
Google looks at all that stuffa little bit. Not much,
but they still look atthat like, okay,
you bolded this word.
It must be somewhat important.

(48:48):
Okay,so putting the text in there
that says last updatedon with the date is acceptable.
And then if you make it anH3 or bold or something,
that can tell Google that it'sa little more important.
But just for our listeners,you don't have to go in
and code something.
You can throw some text in thereis what I'm hearing.

(49:09):
Yeah, just.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Do you want that at thetop or does it matter?
I would usually put at the topor wherever the date is,
because usually most blogs saywhen this is published.
So I would just have it nearthat date or at the top because
then people see it and peoplewill say, okay,
I'm reading an article from lastweek versus 10 years ago.
So got it.

(49:30):
So we're, you know,so we build a lot of websites
with WordPress with Divi.
And so Divi has this themebuilder function.
So we get to choose wherewe're displaying the,
the date that the blogwas published.
So you're saying just kindof put it near that Yep
Usually I'd put at the top forpeople because people are going

(49:50):
to read that blog and they'regoing to see that date and
they're like, okay,this is written or updated a
couple weeks ago. Awesome.
So it helps for people as well.
Okay, awesome. That's.
That is great advice.
So do you typically blog foryour clients once a month or
once every other week,or how would you approach that?
That strategy.

(50:11):
Just thinking we want Google toknow that this is being updated,
but we don't want to take toomuch time with the blogs because
link building is stillpretty important.
So how do you figure outthe frequency there?
Kind of varies. Like,some clients I have have written
hundreds of blogs. So it's like,let's go in and clean those up,
make sure we interlink them andjust fix those blogs. But again,

(50:33):
a lot of people have neverblogged and I'm starting from
scratch and got pumpmore content out,
but I don't want to overdo it.
So, yeah,usually like at most once
a week. I mean,it depends on your industry too,
like talking about somethingreally boring and stagnant
versus something like sportsor entertainment.
You could talk about thatevery single day,
but I'm talking about SEO.

(50:53):
Do you really want a blogpost every single day?
Some people would,but most people are like,
this is way too muchinformation.
Just give me like once a,or twice a month,
something like that.
So it's not as is overwhelming.
Okay, you mentioned interlinkingthe blog.
So how do you go about that?
What's your you know,your kind of checklist for

(51:15):
linking the blogs to each other?
So just like you build backlinksto your own website,
Google looks at your own linksthat point to other pages
on your website,and Google kind of follows them.
And it's like you're buildingbacklinks to your own pages.
And I'd make sure that you buildbacklinks to your own page or
interlink your blogs together.
So when you're writing a blogpost, also, it's for people,

(51:35):
too. So, like,if you're reading a blog and
there's no links in it,they get to the end of the blog
and they're like, all right,what do I do?
Do I leave a comment?
But if you have a blog and youhave all these links in it that
point to other blogs,that gets people to stay
on your website longer,read more content,
get more page views,and hopefully ultimately convert
into whatever your conversiongoal is.
But Google sees that backlink asa little kind of trust signal,

(51:57):
saying like, hey,this page is about this,
and this page is also linkingto this other page.
As long as they're relatedto each other.
Don't just link to random pages,but link to related blog posts
and then link it to one of yourservice or product or category
pages as well,just to help Google follow all
that and get that topicalrelevancy.
Okay, so,so if I'm hearing you right,

(52:17):
the, thethe pages that have more
links to them,even if they're from
your own website,Google sees as more important.
So we want to be emphasizingthat, but not just linking from
a rant, really.
We're approaching in internallinks the same way that we'd
approach external links.
We want there to be a level of.
So it's a similar topic.
So if it's an article.

(52:37):
So like on this podcast,for example,
when it's on our websiteit might make sense for us to
link to our SEO services pagefor our own internal link.
And we're going to linkto your website.
So you get a backlinkout of this,
and maybe we might have A linkthat says if you want to

(52:58):
learn more about SEO,here's another article.
And that might beon our website as well.
And we get anotherinternal link.
Would that kind of be howyou'd approach this?
It's all related to SEO,since that's our conversation,
that's the topic,and we can kind of choose
intentionally what pages we wantto boost with those links.
Is that the right approach?

(53:19):
Yep And then also looking at thetext that you use to build that
backlink, the anchor text,and making sure that you try to
pick anchor text that haskeywords related to that post
and also that is going tohopefully get someone reading
that blog post to want to clickon it and stay on your
website longer.
So kind of doing it for peopleand for Google more so for
Google for SEO purposes,but also for people just to keep

(53:42):
them on that site longer.
That way they don't just readthat blog and be like,
all right, what do I do next?
And then they just hit that backbutton and go back to Google and
they forget about your website.
Okay,so how do you give me an example
of good anchor text?
How do you write that?
And for the listeners,the anchor text is the text
that's hyperlinked.
So if it's I'll let you take itfrom there so that you can

(54:05):
include your example.
Yeah, the anchor text is.
Yeah, that,whatever that text is,
that's a clickable link.
That's called anchor text.
So if it says like click hereand you click on it,
click here is anchor text.
But Google looks at that askind of like the keyword.
So if you just say like clickhere and you have that link to
more blog posts about SEO,that's okay.
But it would actually be muchbetter to say like,

(54:27):
like read more SEO blogs here.
And then you have SEO blogsas a clickable link.
So making that clickable linkmore related to that page with
keywords in it helps out a lot.
That same with the backlinksthat you build to or when you're
building external backlinksfrom third party sites,
you want to make sure that theyput some keywords in
that anchor text.
You don't want just to be likeclick here. I mean it's okay.

(54:50):
You want to have some of themsay click here because if all of
them are just your main keyword,it looks a little weird.
But same with theinternal links,
like not all of them shouldjust be the main keyword.
Use synonyms and plurals andvariations and reorder the words
around and then some of themwould just say click here,
but majority of them should haveat least some keywords
that are related.
Google said should put like 33%of the keyword or 33%

(55:12):
of the backlinks.
Should be your mainfocus keyword.
33% or the anchor text, I mean,should be your main keyword.
33% should be like generickeywords like learn more,
click here.
And then 33% should be yourcompany name or your
website URL.
So just make it look naturalbecause if it's all
just one way,that looks very suspicious to
Google and they could followthose trails, those breadcrumbs,

(55:34):
and see that you're doing SEOand potentially penalize you for
doing over optimizations.
Too much SEO.
So do you build out aspreadsheet then when you're
doing this for a client so thatyou can keep track of what
the anchor text is?
I mean there's tools.
So like if you're usinglike WordPress,
there's tool or plugins thatcould help out with that.

(55:56):
Like Link Whisperer is a pluginthat can take care of it.
But not everyone I work with ison WordPress and sometimes you
have to manually keep track ofit through spreadsheets
and things like that.
But just depends.
So Link Whisperer,tell me how that one works.
I haven't used that one before.
It just kind of looks forkeywords and it tries to find

(56:16):
blog posts that have top ortitles related to that keyword
and tries to recommend saying,hey, you wrote a blog post
about link building.
And here's another seven blogposts about link building that
you could potentiallyinterlink together.
Recommends the anchortext as well.

(56:36):
Does it only do it for internallinks or for X for backlinks
as well?
Just internal links I believe.
I mean it's still very helpful.
Yeah Saves a lot of time.
So link whisperer for WordPress,but I don't think there's much
with like WIX or Squarespaceor Shopify.
Unfortunately it's a littlebit more closed.

(56:58):
Like WordPress is nice becauseanybody could build any tool for
it and you could customizeit however you like.
Whereas other platforms kind oflock you in those platforms and
don't let you fullycustomize them.
Okay, so link whispers for,for internal links and then
when you're reaching out you,you would tell somebody the

(57:19):
anchor text that you would like.
So let's say that you're goingto do a link swap and you've
identified a blog post fromanother website that you
would like a link on.
You'll reach out,initiate the conversation.
Obviously we're notgoing to say, hey,
can I get a link with this exacttext and this exact blog?
Tomorrow Nobody's goingto respond to that.

(57:41):
Sowalk me through how you do your
outreach for backlinks.
The outreach is offeringsomething.
So if I'm just askingfor a backlink,
they're not going to say yes.
But if I offer somethingof value,
that usually helps incentivizepeople,
like a blog post or being aguest on a podcast or something

(58:03):
where you're, like,giving your time and not just
asking for that backlink becausethey're going to say no,
or they're going to respond backsaying, like, pay me 500 bucks,
because you're just askingfor it, backlink,
but you offer somethingof value,
then it helps out a little bitmore. And if you're writing a,
like, if I was doing a guestpost for you,
then I would write that post.
I would put the backlink inthat content somewhere,
so I'd pick it out.
But if I'm a gueston your podcast,

(58:24):
you might just link out to mycompany, and that's fine too,
or that's not a bad thing.
So I try to just let it bemore natural and not, I mean,
if something's really off thatI'm like, all right,
can we change this?
But in general,as long as it seems good enough,
it's going to hit a differentvariation,
a different way of linking.
To me, that's good,because then it just mixes it up
and makes your backlink profilelook more natural.

(58:46):
Which is ultimately whatwe want to do,
is make it look as naturalas possible,
not just overemphasize. Like,only link out to me using the
word SEO company Los Angeles,because that looks a little
strange if every single backlinkwas like that. So in the past,
like back in 2007, I'd be like,yeah, change it to SEO Co.
Los Angeles. But think in, like,2011 or 2013,
they had an update that said,gotta diversify that anchor tax,

(59:08):
otherwise we're going to hit youwith the over optimization
penalty.
And we don't wantthat to happen.
So you reach out,you fill out a form on the site,
or you send an emailto the info, or you use a tool
like Apollo I.O.
to get somebody's email address.
You send them an email,you start off with an offer,
and you're offeringa guest post,

(59:29):
you're offering a podcastinterview. That's how we met,
was you reached out to to me,which is a great strategy.
It worked. So congratulations.
We receive a lot of these.
So we also receive alot where people
are telling us that they wantto link to our website.
And so for somebody who's kindof Uninitiated in the SEO world,

(59:52):
they might just get excitedthey might not know what it
means, number one. Number two,they might get excited and not
know what's goingto happen next.
And that's fine.
But if the person agreesto any of these things,
then kind of part of the dealis you've made this offer.
Theyre going to get somethingout of this. A link,
a guest post, podcast,interview, whatever it is.

(01:00:13):
And then part of the deal isyou're going to say, great,
can you link back to my website?
If it's a guest post,you're just going to build it in
assuming that they're goingto copy and paste. Great.
In a link swap, you know,we've had this folks reach out,
hey,we want to link to your website.
We have this blog that we thinkwould be great, awesome.

(01:00:33):
And now at this point I'm justlike, great, where do you want,
what page do you want tolink on? You know,
and they generally have an ideaof which blog or whatever that
they want us to put a linkto their website on.
And so it turns into thismutually beneficial trade.
Anything that you'd changeabout that summary?

(01:00:54):
No that is a good way to do it.
Yeah,I mean there's lots of ways to
do it doing the link swaps.
But you gotta be careful withthe link swaps because Google
said we don't want reciprocalbacklinks where it's like I link
to you and you link to me.
Google knows that we're probablyjust doing that for
SEO purposes.
And it they say itcancels it out.
Who knows really if they'rereally doing that?
But I try to try to get one waylinks that are inbound and try

(01:01:17):
not to link out tothe other person.
But sometimes it doesmake sense.
Like I was on your podcast,I probably would link or to,
or post the episode on my ownblog and link back to you.
So it does become a reciprocallink. It's like,
I'm helping you,you're helping me.
And then those links probablyget devalued a lot.
So instead of getting that fullSEO value, Google's like,
all right,maybe we're going to cut this
down and give you like 10%of the value or 20.

(01:01:38):
Who really knows?
They don't tell you.
But they have said ever sinceI started doing SEO,
like reciprocal linksdon't count.
They actually canceleach other out.
But I doubt they canceleach other out.
But I'm sure they drop the valueof that backlink and say
it's not as valuable,but it's a great way
and it still works.
But you could do like three way,four way,
five wavelength exchanges and dolink wheels and get like

(01:01:59):
20 people and yeah,still kind of picks up
on those patterns.
They're able to because they'repretty smart at it.
But that was a little bit.
So, so this is great.
This is something Iwasn't aware of, you know.
So guest posting and podcastswould be preferable because
you're offering the guest post.
So that's what theyget out of it.

(01:02:20):
And you don't have to exchange alink in a link swap scenario
you're recommendingwell, especially as an agency.
Well, we got a bunch of clients.
Well,what if I give you a link on one
of our clients websites?
What if you link to my websiteand I'll give you a backlink
from one of our clients?
Is that kind of what you'resaying? It's like tangential.
This is like the link wheel.
I idea.

(01:02:42):
Yeah, that's a better way.
Like I have a blog aboutsocial media.
It's on a whole different URL.
Then I have my SEO company,then I have a couple other
domains. So I could be like,yeah,
give me a backlink to my SEOcompany and I'll give you a
backlink from my socialmedia blog.
So it's not just that oneway reciprocal linkage.
Now it's three way link.
Google still kind of could pickit up, but it's a lot tougher,

(01:03:04):
especially if you have it ondifferent hosting and different
IP addresses.
And make sure it's like onebuilt on WordPress.
Another one could be builton Blogger or something.
Just kind of like you'rebuilding a pbn.
But these are all real websites.
I'm not just PBN sites.
So it's the same idea.
I see what you're saying.
So you have a social media blogthat really is just
for this purpose,Is that what you're saying?

(01:03:25):
I mean,it used to be my main focus.
When I first started doing SEO,I had this social media blog and
now I've kind of let it be on,put it on the sideline.
But it still has a lot of SEOvalue and can use that to just
make it look a littlebit more natural.
But I don't really get too manypeople offering link exchanges.
I mean I still geta decent amount,
but I just delete those emails.
I don't even look at them.
People that are offeringguest posts. Yeah,

(01:03:47):
I just Skip them over.
Because usually it's just low orthey're just hitting me up from
a random website in a differentcountry or foreign language.
I'm like, no, this is.
Or gambling website.
A lot of the guest posts,it's like I would not,
I would never post this.
I appreciate that you wrotethis, but like, no,
but that's part ofyour strategy.
So you just write better contentor that's the part

(01:04:09):
of your strategy.
Be more selective on the sitesthat I reach out to.
So not just reaching outto a hundred websites,
which in the past I've donethat, where it's just like,
spray and pray and like,hope someone gets back to you.
But it works.
But it doesn't really work aswell as picking and choosing 20
or 50 good websites and reallyhoning in on them and trying to
build a good relationshipwith those websites.

(01:04:32):
Okay.
And then, I mean,we work with clients who.
A number of clients who havemultiple arms of their business
that have multiple websites.
So that's a great strategy forfolks. If they own a lot of.
Not a lot,but maybe some business owners
own multiple companies.

(01:04:52):
Or some folks that we work withhave separated out like the
store to a different URL acompletely different URL
from their main site.
So anybody who has that canimmediately leverage that as
part of their strategy.

(01:05:13):
If somebody does not havemultiple websites,
is that something you recommendthat they spend some time doing?
Or what would you recommendfor them?
I mean,it's a lot of work and then
you're kind of likebuilding a pbn.
But if you make it a realwebsite and try to make that
like my social media blog,I was trying to get ad revenue
from it from like Google Adsenseand doing affiliate links
and things like that.

(01:05:33):
So it was like a real website.
But if you're just throwing up ablog just to throw it up there,
it's going to look like a PBNand it's not going
to do the job.
Yeah, well,and I would say this is
a great reason to.
For a company to workwith an agency,
it knows what they're doing,which, you know,
is surprising how fewof them actually do.

(01:05:53):
But to find an agency that knowswhat they're doing and has
a number of clients,the agency is able to leverage
this strategy on thatcompany's behalf.
They can engage in this, hey,we'll get you client links.
And then we've got to get theseother guys links too.

(01:06:14):
So we're going tobe putting links
in this company.
Of trade on yours,we'll put some of those trades
on theirs and it all ends upworking out.
They at least have the option touse their resources,
which would include theirclients websites to do something

(01:06:34):
that Google sees as moreauthoritative.
It's actually a great reason ifsomebody's on the fence about
working with an agency to findone that knows what
they're doing and,and go for it.
So is most of your strategyguest posting with your clients
or do you do some of this kindof link wheel stuff with them?
No,I try to do the guest posting

(01:06:57):
or trying to look at thecompetitors backlinks as well
and analyzing the competitorsstrategies and seeing are
they sponsoring events,are they giving out products
to influencers if it's an Ecommerce website or where
it may be. So yeah,everyone's going to be
different. But like E commerce,if you're selling like something
cheap or low cost,then try to give out product to

(01:07:17):
get bloggers to write about it.
That's a good way.
But if you're selling somethingthat's very expensive,
you can't really give it out.
Or you could be selective withwho you give it out to but it
adds up no matter what.
You're spending money somehow onthese daft links and any way
to minimize the costs,that's going to be the
best for the client.
Okay,so you start with looking at

(01:07:37):
the backlink analysis,seeing what the competitors
have, seeing what's relevant,seeing how they got those links
and then you kind of builda strategy from there.
And if you're going to dooutreach it sounds like guest
posting is the preferredstrategy over a link swap.
But I like that idea of likejust offering something.

(01:08:00):
Can we offer the product,can we offer an interview?
What else can we offer besidesjust a straight link swap?
Is that a decent summary orwould you add anything there?
No, no,just kind of offer value.
Like if you're just asking offervalue it might work but it's
probably not going to work.
If you offer some value andincentivize out of the person

(01:08:22):
then you're going to pique theirinterest and get them
to at least inquire.
It doesn't mean they're going togive you the backlink but at
least they're going to tryto learn more about it.
So try to just think like putyourself in that person's
point of view.
Like if you're receiving allthese cold emails about trying
to get blogs on your website,probably just going to
ignore most of them.
But if they offer value and belike, hey, I have an email list.
I'm going to share thisblog to 5,000 people.

(01:08:44):
I'm going to post it onmy own social media.
Ways to incentivize them anddifferentiate yourself
helps out.
Okay, cool. So even offering,well,
guest post will give you thispost to put on your site and
then we'll send it to our list.
That's value.
Thats great too.
Yeah, yeah.

(01:09:05):
That's another way totry to cut costs.
Especially if they're sayinglike, pay me 500 bucks,
that's a good way tooffset those costs.
Yeah,but this is also making the idea
of paying for a link moreattractive. That's value.
Money is value.
And if there is no other optionand it's a good website with

(01:09:27):
some good relevance,might as well.
So does this kind of encompassyour SEO strategy?
We've talked about sometechnical SEO,
getting the website cleaned up,which these tools that we've
mentioned, Semrush and Ahrefs,they can, they help with this.
They'll give you these they'lltell you what pages to focus on,
they'll tell you what tofix on those pages.

(01:09:50):
So you can,if you're new to this,
you can just jump in using thesetools which are expensive
but very helpful.
You can pay For SEMrush forone month, for example,
audit your site,go fix everything,
get the backlink analysis andthen don't pay for it

(01:10:10):
for the next month.
Just cancel this.
You could do that if you wantedto save some money.
So going through your strategy,we've got technical SEO,
we've got content,we've got backlinking.
Is that basically it or do you,is there,
is there more that you do whenyou're serving a client to get
them ranking higher on Google?

(01:10:30):
I mean majority of it is like onpage fixing all the coding,
technical issues and thenputting that trust through
backlinks and then depending onlike if they're E commerce,
trying to optimize that GoogleMerchant center feed,
if they're a local businesstrying to get them up on Google
business profiles.
Every website is different.
But in general it's like thecontent backlinks are two things

(01:10:51):
that every website needs.
And then it just depends onwhat type of business.
If you're a service,local service,
if you're E commerce,they're all going to have
slightly different strategies onstructure of the website
and hierarchy.
But it all comes back tothe on page SEO stuff.
Okay, so that, that and when yousay on page SEO,
that's where I was seeingthe technical stuff.

(01:11:14):
Is that right? Fixing that,making sure that the site is
like cleaning your house beforepeople come over.
You just got to make sure thatyour site is well done before
you go do this.
Because you can spend all yourtime doing backlinks.
And if your site's a messGoogle still wouldn't
trust you very much.
I've had lots of clients,like not lots of like one or two

(01:11:37):
clients where they've beenaround for like 25 years.
They have all these backlinks,all this trust built up.
But Google couldn'tread the website,
made a few changes and they wentfrom being nowhere to ranked
number three withinlike two months.
Normally it doesn'thappen that fast.
And now they're ranked numberone for pretty much all
their keywords.
Because now Google could readtheir website and this website's
like 25 years old.

(01:11:58):
Building backlinks consistently,it's just didn't have the
keywords at the correct places.
Missing a lot of importantelements.
Google couldn't readthe website,
so but it could be vice versa.
You could spend all your timecleaning your website.
If you don't build backlinks,they're not going to trust you.
So you got to do both.
But backlinks are where I'dspend a little bit more time.

(01:12:18):
Okay, well,and I'll add something too.
We've fixed some sites wherea web design agency had
basically messed up redirectswhen they launched the site had
www and then they launched itwithout it and they didn't
communicate that to Google or wehad somebody who's who another

(01:12:41):
company had launched their siteand they had changed and I can
see how this would bedone accidentally,
but they had changed allof the blog URLs.
So that was eitherduring an import,
like an export and import or itwas during when they were
setting up WordPress,they In WordPress there's

(01:13:02):
a setting for.
And you mentioned this earlier,is the date part of the the URL?
Or is the date notpart of the URL?
Is the category part of the URL?
And so they must have justselected a different option.
In the build process all of theblog URLs changed and they
didn't add redirects.
And so that's,that's part of what we've got to

(01:13:23):
be paying attention to as well.
Because if Google suddenly sayswell these blogs disappeared,
but look,there's all these New ones.
That really decreases trust.
We've got to make sure thatwe're doing these redirects.
Well.
Also that mostly mattersin a web redesign,
a website redesign.
Most of the time folks aren'tgoing to be changing URLs.

(01:13:43):
Although I have seen folks whowould randomly change the URL of
a page and not add a redirect.
So that's not great.
But you had mentionedthat earlier,
we really want to leavethe URL alone.
We want to leave the date of thepost alone and then add that
last updated on line instead.

(01:14:07):
Well this seems likea great strategy.
Anything else thatyou would add?
I just be patient with it all.
Like SEO does take time,so don't expect immediate
results. Unfortunately,if you want immediate results,
got to run like paid ads orsocial media or email.
But SEO is a long term playwhere you have to build it up
and build it and build it and ittakes time, so just work at it.

(01:14:28):
Build a couple backlinks everysingle month and that's
a huge win.
So don't think you have to builda hundred backlinks all at once,
but just slowly build it up.
And this, you know,this goes back to what we
mentioned earlier aboutthe systems,
like really just systematizingthese processes so that it
happens consistently.

(01:14:50):
Thats huge.
And the patience ishuge as well.
SEO is fantastic because it'llconsistently bring in leads once
you've got it figured outand you're ranking.
Unlike Facebook ads or GoogleAds where the minute you stop
paying, the leads are gone.
100%, just gone. Right.
But with SEO, your invest,it's more of an investment where

(01:15:12):
you're building this up and thenif for whatever reason
you're like, hey,we're gonna take a month off.
Well, you're not really gonnalose a lot in a month.
But if you had to take a monthoff from Facebook or Google Ads,
it's all gone until you turn iton and you start paying again.
So it is slower but it ends upbeing very high value overall.

(01:15:35):
Well I appreciate yourtime today, Brandon.
This has been insightful.
Clearly I've learned somethingwhile we're here and
that's exciting.
So where do people find youif they're like, man,
this guy's it and we gottahire him to do rseo.
So for anyone that wants tolearn more or stuck

(01:15:55):
around to the end,I created a special
gift for you.
If you go to my website at S E OOptimizers com that's S E O O P
T I I z e r s.com gift andyou can find that there.
Along with my contactinformation and classes I've
done over the years,I've also thrown out for free so

(01:16:16):
they could see step by step howto do a lot of stuff that
we talked about.
And also if they want afree website analysis,
I'm happy to check out theirwebsite from an SEO point of
view and they could book sometime on my calendar there
for free as well.
Okay,so this is high value stuff.
So you've got seooptimizers.comto find you.
You've got agift@seoptimizers.com gift

(01:16:39):
and then free audit, freeclasses and teaching that you've
done so really valuable today.
Brandon,I really appreciate it and hope
to have you on again soon.
Thank you for having me on.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}How To Rank #1 On Google SEO Tips Podcast ClearBrand

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

All Episodes

How To Rank #1 On Google SEO Tips Podcast ClearBrand

Stuff You Should Know