June 11, 2025 • 30 mins
🎙️ Just hopped on the Technically Speaking podcast with the Speaker Flow crew — and wow, what a ride! We unpacked all things SEO, from my journey starting in digital marketing back in 2007 (when no one really knew what SEO was 😅) to the powerful role backlinks, user behavior, and keyword strategy play in today’s search game.
I shared how I built my own agency, SEO Optimizers, from the ground up while juggling a 9-to-5, and dropped a bunch of real-world tips you can use to boost your organic traffic. We also got into some 🔥 myths around backlinks, AI’s growing role in SEO, and how to actually get Google to trust your site.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by SEO — or wondered how to stay competitive as algorithms evolve — this episode is for you.
We kept it real, made it fun, and gave you tactical advice you can use today 💡
🎧 Tune in and let me know your favorite takeaway!
#SEOtips #DigitalMarketing #Backlinks #GoogleSEO #EntrepreneurLife #MarketingStrategy #BrandonLeibowitz #SEOOptimizers #PodcastGuest #SpeakerFlow #TechnicallySpeaking #OnlineVisibility #SEO2025 #SmallBizTips #SearchEngineOptimization #LinkBuilding #AIandSEO #GrowthHacking
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
You know those moments whenyou're doing what you love
in your business?
Maybe it's standing on stageor creating content.
Whatever it is,you're totally immersed and time
just seems to slip by.
This is called the flowstate at Speaker Flow.
We're obsessed with how to getyou there. More often each week,
we're joined by a new expertwhere we share stories,
strategies,and systems to help craft
a business you love.
(00:28):
Welcome to Technically Speaking.
Boom.
All right, we are live.
Brandon, man,thank you so much for
joining us today.
We appreciate taking sometime out of your Friday.
Yeah,thanks for having me on today.
Yeah, of course, man.
(00:49):
This is this is one of ourfavorite topics because it's
where it's like one of the areaswhere sort of like the art and
science of something have ajuncture because you know, like,
there's lots of components toSEO that are pretty procedural
and repeatable,but it also very much has to be
tailored to the business thatyou're working with.
And there's the per.
(01:12):
Theres just the,like being able to dig into the
details to really makethe impact happen.
Part of it that I thinkis where, like,
some people get lost and whythere's lots of YouTube content
out there and stuff about thisstuff that people can watch but
doesn't really help them.
So anyways,we're excited for you to come in
and sort of help us unpack whatfeels pretty intimidating,
(01:32):
I think, to a lot of people.
So, once again,thank you for being willing to
do that for our listeners.
Glad to demystify it.
So hopefully can make it alittle bit more understandable
and easier and less confusing.
Hey we say the whole time thetrue mark of an expert is
somebody that takes somethingvery complex and makes it easier
to understand for somebodythat has no box for this.
(01:55):
So tell us, man,what led us here?
How did you get intothe SEO space?
What's it been like so farthat's brought you to where
you're at today?
Well,I got my degree in business
marketing, and after I graduatedfrom school,
the first job I got out ofschool was helping the company
out with their digitalmarketing.
And I really know much aboutdigital marketing.
(02:16):
This is back in 2007, they said,don't worry,
we don't know much either.
We're going to learnalongside with you.
Which that was kindof interesting.
And decided to check it out andafter working there
for a few months,just realized this is
probably the future.
Everyone's going tohave a Website.
And there's a lot of differentways to get traffic, like SEO.
I was helping out with theirpaid ads, doing email marketing,
doing social media,doing it all.
(02:37):
And everything works to gettraffic, which I'd recommend.
Everyone should try to gettraffic from as many different
sources as possible.
But SEO is just one that getsyou free traffic. And I thought,
why spend money on paid ads ifyou get up there for free?
And over the years,just work at different
advertising agencies or.
And before work or after workand on my lunch breaks,
I work on my own company.
Built that up to where I wasable to eventually quit my job
(02:58):
and focus solely on this andbeen doing that ever since.
Wow. Very cool.
That sounds like a naturalkind of segue.
Like what made you to go downthe path of starting
your own company?
That's obviously not for thefaint of heart. So what,
what led you down? Down?
ThatI always had an entrepreneurial
spirit growing up and knew thatI wanted my own company one day.
(03:19):
And in high school,I made a skateboarding company.
So always had an idea that Imight want to do something with
having my own company.
Just didn't know whereit would take me.
And after I got my degree inbusiness marketing and I got
that first job and went to.
Actually went to a coupleconferences and they were
talking about digitalmarketing and SEO,
and a lot of the speakers weretalking about how they have
their own company and they'reworking or. Yeah,
(03:41):
for themselves.
They have like an affiliateor drop shipping.
This is back in 2007.
And that kind of spark manager.
So I was like, all right,I could work full time at this
job and I could also pick upfreelance clients here or there.
I could go like a restaurantor a doctor,
anything where it wasn't aconflict of interest and
pick up clients.
And it's only going to help megrow because I'm learning
SEO after work.
So it's helping them when I showup for work to better know what
(04:05):
tactics and strategiesto utilize.
And just kept going fromthere ever since.
Yeah well,that's kind of the true
entrepreneurial story.
Somebody that knows that theywant to start a business,
and then when the opportunityor the gap presents itself,
you hone in on it.
And it almost sounds like youfound the passion in it as you
really began doing it,instead of like,
(04:27):
knowing that that's where yourheart was going to be
from the start.
Is that an accurate assumptionthat I'm making?
Yeah.
I didn't really know much aboutSEO or digital marketing in
2007, so new more traditional.
That's what they teach you inschool. So they don't really.
They taught a little bit aboutdigital, but not much.
So after I got that first job iswhere I got introduced it and
just realized this is future,and this is a way to get people
(04:49):
exposure online and, like,helping businesses succeed.
And this is a way that I couldhelp them grow online.
Yeah, well, damn,you definitely bet on the
right horse, my friend,because that is the
only way anymore.
Yeah.
So I think most people hear SEOand immediately think blogging
and that's obviously a factor,but can you maybe just like,
(05:12):
start this conversation off bygiving us a breakdown of the
different factors or elementsthat fit into the SEO umbrella?
There are over 200 factors,but I like to say it's
like a puzzle.
There's a lot of pieces to thatpuzzle, over 200 pieces,
but some pieces are much biggerthan others. So, like,
important thing is contenton your website.
(05:32):
So making sure that you havethe right keyword. Well,
first from a keyword research,figuring out what keywords you
want to put in your website.
Then make sure you put the rightkeywords in the different
areas on your website.
All these technical kindof coding areas.
But one place that's easy thatyou don't need no coding is just
adding text on your website.
Google feeds off text.
They can't really read imagesor videos or audio yet.
They're getting better at it,but they still really rely
(05:53):
heavily on text.
So the more text you have onevery single page
on your website,the easier it is for the search
engines to read, understand,and know what your website's
about. But unfortunately,they don't really care what you
put on your website because theyjust don't believe anything that
you put on the website.
Because too many people havetricked Google over the years
that they just look at anywebsite and say, all right,
how do we know you reallyare who you say you are?
Because we don't want to justsend people to your website and
(06:16):
find out that you don't existor you're scamming people
or whatever it may be.
So you have to build trust up.
And the way to build trust isby getting what are
called backlinks,getting other websites
to talk about you.
The more websites that talkto you, talk about you,
the more trust Google'sgoing to give to you.
And then they look at thosekeywords on your website,
but doesn't work theother way around.
And a backlink, for example,would be a clickable link from
(06:37):
another website thatpoints to your.
So let's say you're reading anarticle in entrepreneur.com
in there.
It says Brandon Leibowitz.
If you click on that andit goes to my website,
I'd be getting a backlinkfrom entrepreneur. Com.
So the more websites thattalk about you,
it's kind of like a popularitycontest, the more test Google is
going to give to you.
Yeah.
So as far as backlinking goes,like,
is that something that peopleshould be pursuing on a regular
(07:00):
basis or is it something thatshould happen naturally in
your opinion? Of course,we're talking shoulds here based
on the content that you have andthen people just naturally
linking to you becauseof the good content.
Or do you think there should bean outreach strategy involved?
Both.
You want to write good contentthat naturally attracts people,
but how are they going to findyou if you don't start and
initiate that traction?
(07:21):
So if you're a brand newbusiness and you're just writing
really good content,it's going to be tough for
people to find you.
If you share on social,you might not have a
big following yet.
But the more you share thatcontent and get the exposure and
collaborate with other peoplethat they could share,
maybe your blog on theirInstagram or their Twitter,
and they might havebigger audience.
So you're kind of tapping intotheir audience and kind of have
(07:42):
to nudge it a little bit.
Every company does initially.
Once they get bigger,you don't really have
to do the outreach.
But once you're starting off,you got to do some initiation
to get that traction going.
Is that something that like isstraightforward to do? I'd say,
like,are publications or places that
accept backlinks regularly?
(08:03):
Like,is this a hard conversation to
have with somebody or is itenough to just be able
to create, let's say,a great piece of content for
their audience specifically.
You just got to buildthat relationship.
That's the tough part isbuilding a relationship because
you got to think how manywebsites get messaged all day
long about contributors.
So a way around that is you canlook at your competitors
(08:24):
backlinks.
There's tools that will showme any website's backlinks.
I can look at my competitors.
So you,on that first page of Google
for my keywords,throw them into different tools
like Ahrefs or Moz or Semrush.
You have to pay for these tools,but they'll show you all of your
competitors backlinks.
And then one by one you can lookat which backlinks are relevant
and authoritative and reachout to those sites.
Because if your competitors areranked on that first
page of Google,it's more than likely because
(08:45):
of those backlinks.
And if you could build similarbacklinks that are of
quality quality,meaning that they're relevant
and authoritative,not just picking any backlink.
Because in the past there's justthe number of backlinks was how
you'd rank. If I have 100,you have 200,
you would rank higher than me.
But now it's not the numberof backlinks,
it's the number of qualitybacklinks and was a quality
backlink to Google.
Quality backlink just means it'sfrom a site that's related to
(09:06):
what you're doing that'sreally important.
So if you're sellinglike tennis shoes,
you want a backlink from anotherwebsite about like fashion
or clothing.
Doesn't have to be anothershoe company,
but anything somewhat related.
If a doctor is linking out tothe shoe company, it's like,
looks a little weird.
It doesn't really align.
So relevancy is reallyimportant.
And then authoritativeness.
How big is this website?
If you're getting a backlinkfrom my website,
(09:26):
which is not a bad one,it'll be good,
but it's not the same quality aslike a Forbes or New York
Times or LA Times.
So the bigger the website,the more SEO value and the
more relevant, the more,the better it's going to be.
Sure, that makes perfect sense.
Doesdoes reputation have anything to
do with SEO? Like reviews,testimonials,
(09:49):
these types of things?
And if so, like,where would they need to be in
order to boost yourorganic presence?
I would say that's morefor like local.
So if you're trying to getranked on Google Maps,
you'll see the reviews there.
Or like Yelp,you'll see reviews,
but it's not the numberof reviews,
it's Because you could search onGoogle for dentists near me,
(10:12):
and the first one on Google mapsmight have five reviews.
The second one couldhave 100 reviews.
The third one couldhave 200 reviews.
So it's not really a number ofreviews, but it's a number.
Well, there's a lot of variablesin it,
but one thing that's reallyimportant is keywords in
research. Reviews.
That is so very importantbecause you can put keywords all
over your description about yourbusiness, who you are.
You want to fill all thatstuff out completely.
(10:33):
Like if it says write 500characters about your business,
you want to write500 characters.
You don't want to write 200characters because text is what
all these websites feed off.
So you want to fill it up withas much content as possible.
And then you want to also makesure your images have keywords.
So you don't want to just uploadimages to your website or
to Google Maps or Yelp.
You want to name these imageswith descriptive words or
podcast episodes beforeyou upload them.
(10:55):
And then you want to getreviews with keywords.
So if you know someone's goingto write a review,
you can maybe ask them, hey,can you mention a city
that I live? Like,I do SEO in Los Angeles.
So if I could get someone towrite a review that I was
looking for an SEO company inLos Angeles. I found Brandon,
he lives in Venice and helped meout ranking my business
in Santa Monica.
So hitting all these differentkeywords in the review,
(11:17):
that really moves you up.
But it's not really a number ofreviews and I don't think
they're gonna rank a websitethat has low quality reviews.
So if you're like aone star business,
but you have all these keywordsin your reviews,
I don't think that's gonnareally help out.
They wanna show quality,so I'm not sure what the cutoff
is that their threshold thatthey're not gonna
show below that,probably three stars or higher,
I believe.
(11:37):
But just making sure you getthose reviews with keywords,
that helps out so much on prettymuch every platform. Google,
Yelp, Amazon,pretty much anywhere where
you can write reviews,if you can put keywords
in there,that's going to really shoot you
up the rankings very fast.
Does that only apply to localthough or service based
businesses as well?
Because if we think about thecontext of our audience,
I could imagine even if youserve a nationwide audience and
(12:00):
you're a service based business,if you were tapping into,
let's say Google,my business for putting in
reviews and people werementioning your speaking or your
topics or whatever, I mean,that has to help to some degree,
right?
For the local presence? Yeah,for national,
it's not going to help too much.
It might have a littlebit of impact,
but I would definitely putreviews on your website for
(12:21):
people to see because that'sgoing to help people
trust you more.
I don't know how much it'sgoing to help Google.
It adds more textto your website,
which is always a good thing.
More text.
As long as it's nota screenshot,
you embed those reviews as text,that would be beneficial.
But if it's just screenshots,I don't think they're
going to do much.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So with all these different,like methods, I guess,
(12:42):
of improving SEO,what do you feel like are the
ones that are maybe the most,like,
underutilized relative to theimpact that they can have?
Yeah, probably the backlinks.
Backlinks are so important.
And you gotta build the righttype of backlinks because if
you build the wrong type ofbacklinks instead of
ranking you higher,it's gonna drop you down.
So you gotta make sure you findsites that are related to what
(13:04):
you're doing and just focuson quality, not quantity.
But a lot of people don't knowabout backlinks or don't
build backlinks,or they'll build the wrong type
of backlinks. And they.
That's where it's justso important.
Google's whole algorithm startedbased off backlinks,
still heavily based offbacklinks. I mean,
it's changed a lot howthey look at them,
but still has a big impacton the rankings. I mean,
that's why Google became popularis they ranked websites off
backlinks versus whatever Yahooor ash GS or every search
(13:27):
engines were doing before,which was probably just based
off keywords and not lookingat backlinks.
Wow.
Yeah.
So, like,what are some of the other
areas that you've seen, like,change over time in this
capacity either related tobacklinks or otherwise?
Im sure over the past, what,what, 15 years or something that
you've been in this space now,there's been some major changes
(13:50):
beyond just the tried and true.
Is there anything maybe upandcoming that you feel like people
should be aware of?
Google's looking a lot at, like,user experience,
how people behaveon your website.
Because in the past I could justrank you for your keywords
and you would rank.
But now Google's like,all right,
so if you're ranked number oneand everyone goes to your
website and they hit that backbutton after a few seconds,
that's probably a negativesignal and that's a bad
(14:11):
user experience.
So that's one thing that'sGoogle's looking at now is how
do people behave once theyget to your website?
Do they hit that back buttonimmediately? If so,
then they'll drop you down andjust making sure that people
stay on your website.
That's part of what Google'slooking at nowadays.
They've been doing thatfor a couple years,
but that's seems like it'smore prevalent nowadays.
Yeah, sure, that makes sense.
I expect is as much about likehow the website is like designed
(14:35):
and organized as it is about therelevant relevancy of the
traffic that's going there.
Right.
Is this one of the reasons whyyou said maybe the wrong
backlinks could happen is you'repushing the wrong traffic and
because they don't actually careabout what's there and now
they're bouncing and you'regetting that negative
hit to Google.
Yep. It all ties together.
So gotta make sure you'regetting the right,
putting the right keywords onyour website because people be
(14:56):
like, I what's trending?
Let me put these keywords on mywebsite because it's trending.
But putting Justin Bieber onyour website is going to get
you a lot of traffic.
But is it the right trafficif you're trying to
sell E commerce?
Unless you're selling JustinBieber fan stuff, but if not,
you got to figure out who youraudience is because traffic
is just traffic.
If it's not targeted,it's not going to do much.
Yeah where does video fit intothe mix of all this now?
(15:20):
Especially with Google'sacquisition of YouTube a while
back and you know,SEO being prevalent there and it
functioning practicallylike a search engine,
especially now that the twoare fairly integrated.
Do you find be there a bigbenefit to using SEO
and video as well?
If you have video content,you want to optimize it that way
it shows up on YouTube orwhatever platform you're on.
(15:42):
But also you want to makesure that, yeah, you,
when you search on Google,sometimes you'll see video shows
up in Google search results.
So having a presence on YouTubecould get you more free real
estate on Google becauseGoogle owns YouTube.
And when you search on Googlethey're not really going
to show Facebook video.
Sometimes they will,but most of the time it's going
to be YouTube because Googleonly cares about making money.
(16:03):
And the first thing that happenswhen you search on Google is
there's ads at the top.
If you don't click on an ad,Google's not making money.
But if you scroll downand there's websites,
then there's videos.
And if it's a YouTube videoand you click on it,
the first thing that appears,anytime you watch a video,
there's Always an advertisement.
So YouTube is making money,which is really Google
making money.
So they're gonna keep pushingYouTube as much as they can.
(16:24):
And if you have video content,definitely throw it
up on YouTube,optimize it similarly to how
you'd optimize a pageon a website.
Like having doing key research,putting keywords in the
title description.
If you can transcribe the video,because again text is
very important,or if it's a long form video,
like an hour long video,probably don't want to
transcribe the whole thing,but you can timestamp it and
(16:45):
write a description.
Because if not Google's notgoing to know what that page or
YouTube's not going to reallyknow. They're getting better,
but they still need your help.
And then you can takethat video, you can embed it on
your website,you can make it a blog post,
you create content around it.
Because the more websitesthat embed your video,
it's like backlinks to YouTube,the higher they're going
to rank that video.
And also if you embed that videoon a website and it
(17:06):
gets 10,000 views,those 10,000 views get
attributed to yourYouTube channel.
So you want to try to get asmany third party sites
to embed that video,but also share it on Facebook
video, YouTube,I mean uploading it separately
from YouTube, from Facebook,from Instagram,
from LinkedIn to Twitter.
You don't want to share aYouTube video on Facebook.
Not going to work.
They're not going toshow the video.
(17:26):
You have to upload it nativelyto those platforms.
So but you could try crosspromoting and see if your
audience would want to tap in.
But share as many places aspossible to get that exposure.
You get the same type of likeeffect from a link being shared
on social media as you wouldsomething like, you know,
Forbes or something like that.
Nah Google doesn't reallycount social media.
(17:48):
So anything where it'stoo easy to backlink,
it's probably not going to help.
So social media doesn't reallyhelp out because,
and also it's not relevant likeit's all about relevancy.
So you're getting a backlinkfrom social media sites.
Unless you're doingsocial media,
you probably don't want all yourbacklinks coming from social
media because then Google'sgonna just think of your
social media website.
So relevancy is number one.
Forbes is okay,but there's no real relevancy
(18:10):
with those sites either.
It's really authoritative,it's a big site,
but there's no real relevancyand most of those big sites
unfortunately are not goingto count for SEO.
It's a tag that Google made like10 years ago for websites like
Wikipedia where too many peopleare just going to Wikipedia,
making changes,putting their backlink at
the bottom of Wikipedia.
And Wikipedia is like hold on,we're getting way too much spam.
This is not good. Google's like,here's a tag called NoFollow.
(18:33):
You put this on your websiteand it's not going to,
it's going to tell us not tocount any of these backlinks
for SEO.
So all social media has nofollow any of these big websites
like Forbes, Huffington Post,New York Times, LA Times,
they've all been spammed a lotbecause there's writers
that you could pay,they'll write content about you.
And Google's like, hold on,we don't want people just paying
couple thousand dollarsto these writers.
(18:54):
Really kind of sketchy and shadywhere you'll pay writers and
they'll throw a backlink inthere or a quote from you in
these websites and you'llget a backlink.
And used to work really well.
Now it doesn't work so much.
But just got,I wouldn't overthink it too much
looking for the no follow tag.
If it's in the page, it's there.
And it's not bad because of allyour backlinks came from what's
called do follow links.
(19:14):
That also looks a little weird.
Like should have some,a mix of nofollow and do follow.
And it's fine to have somesocial media but the majority of
backlinks need to come fromrelevant websites.
That's really themost important.
Yeah.
Wow So it sounds like they needto do like if you're going to
do backlinking strategyeffectively,
you've really got to findpublications and blogs and
(19:35):
companies within your niche thataren't like paid PR
media strategies.
They're just kind ofsmaller entities that have
relevant information.
And that's going to giveyou the most power.
Am I capturing that right?
Yep.
You just got to goton relevant sites.
Sometimes they'll ask forcompensation and not supposed to
pay these sites but peopledo all the time.
(19:57):
So you want to try to,like we talked about earlier,
try to get it naturally youdon't want to be asking for
these backlinks but sometimesyou have to start that
conversation,initiate it or they'll even
reach out to you and say hey,I have these backlinks for sale.
Would you like to buy it?
And then I'd be careful makingsure that they're good
quality ones,because people doing that are
usually selling youspammy backlinks.
Sure, that makes sense.
(20:19):
I feel like that's somethingthat gets talked about so often.
So I'm glad you canceled thatmyth out for those that may have
been tempted to jump onone of those offers.
Go ahead, Daler,I cut you off there.
Oh, yeah,I was just thinking of a
scenario in my head. So, I mean,who knows?
We're kind of just speculatinghere because we don't really
know the ins and outs of any ofthese algorithms necessarily.
(20:41):
But let's say there's a highauthority website,
not the most relevant.
Versus a lower authoritywebsite, but much more relevant.
And those two backlinkingscenarios,
which one do you thinkhas more power?
Let's say the more relevantone because, for example,
(21:02):
they might be starting off andthey might be a new blog and
they're really relevant,but they don't have much
authority because they're new.
But in a year or two,if they keep working at
it and building it up,which you hope they do,
and hope they don't just giveup and go out of business,
but if they keep building it up,then their authority will go
up and it's from a really,really relevant website.
So I'd focus on relevancy.
Number one.
Authoritativeness is secondary.
(21:22):
But relevancy is just soimportant because that's such.
Because when Google searches,or when someone searches
on Google, they want to give yourelevant results.
And the way they figure outwhat's relevant is they look at
the content on your website,but they also look at the
backlinks and where thosebacklinks are coming from.
For relevancy,they just want everything to
align and be as relevantas possible.
Right.
Wow.
It makes sense because they'retrying to craft the best user
(21:43):
experience possible.
So the way that they can do thatis by showing you the most
relevant things,I would imagine.
Yeah, yeah,that's the main focus is
relevancy, good user experience.
So you stay on Google and don'tgo to Bing or Yahoo or any of
the other search engines.
Yep.
Are those other search enginesworth thinking about if we're
(22:03):
talking about SEO here? Yeah.
Like, does it carry over if youoptimize for Google? Let's say.
I mean, they're all differentalgorithms, but they're similar.
Ish, for the most part.
But I would check tools likeGoogle Analytics or any tracking
tool to see what,where your traffic's coming from
so you can optimize forthose platforms.
But I don't think I've ever seena website bring in more
traffic than Google.
And this is me looking atprobably thousands of websites
(22:24):
over the years.
Google probably brings in maybelike 20 to like 60%
of the traffic.
Bing will bring about 1%,Yahoo will bring about 1%,
DuckDuckGo might bringhalf a percentage.
And then the rest is gonna comefrom like people typing your
website indirectly.
Social media, email marketing,paid ads, or ton of other ways.
But majority of the traffic forthe most part is going
(22:45):
to come from Google.
But every website is different.
So you should check if you seethat you're getting a bunch
of traffic from Bing.
Or another search engine,you could try to figure
out what's going on.
How can I optimize betterfor that search engine?
But in general,Google just kind of runs
the show for now.
Sure. Yep.
Well more power to them,I suppose.
What are some other things thatyou see people talking about
(23:07):
relating to SEO that don't workthe way that maybe they're,
they're sold to work?
Like the whole buya backlink idea.
Is there anything elseyou can think.
Of, like page speed?
Everyone thinks that's reallyimportant and it's important for
people when they get to yourwebsite that it loads quickly.
But everyone's like,you have a fast loading website.
Google said that you have tohave a fast loading website.
(23:28):
And there's tools like GooglePage speed insights.
I will show you how fastyour website loads.
And almost every websitefails that test.
And I'll look at my competitorsthat are ranked on that
first page of Google.
They'll usually fail that test.
So page speed,a lot of people put a lot
of emphasis on it,which it's definitely important
for people.
Like if I go to your website andit loads in five seconds,
especially on mobile,you hit that back button,
(23:49):
I'm like, come on now.
There's 10 other results on thatfirst page of Google + ads
+ videos, images, maps.
There's a lot of noise anddistractions there.
Plenty of options.
So if you don't capturethem right away,
they hit that back button.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Yeah.
And that translates then topoor user experience,
meaning bounces, meaning worse.
SEO in Google's eyes. Again,tie this all back together.
(24:12):
Yeah, yeah.
So it's not like Googleoutranking because you have.
But it's the user experiencethat's suffering.
So it kind of creates that,you know, compound effect,
it seems.
Yeah.
Okay, so So let's say I mean,let's just start from scratch
here. Let's. Let's say,you know,
somebody hasn't put a lot ofemphasis into SEO over time.
(24:33):
Maybe they're pretty, you know,inconsistent with writing blogs.
Certainly no backlink outreach.
Like there are so many.
They could focus onYouTube as well.
Like there's so many things tobe doing on top of all the other
things we need to be doingas business owners too.
Like what's the order ofoperations that you find to be,
you know,reasonable for somebody,
you know,venturing down the path of
(24:54):
working on their own SEO?
If they're kind of startingfrom ground zero,
what are the things that they,they should be,
be Doing and what'sthe order of them?
Keyword research.
Start off figuring out whatkeywords you want to rank for.
That way you don't have tobacktrack and use tools like
the Google Keyword Planner.
It's a free tool.
It'll show you how many peoplesearch for your keywords
(25:14):
every single month.
I'll also show you how manypeople search for the synonyms
and plurals and variations thatyou might not have thought of.
And you can pick and choose whatkeywords are relevant,
throw them into the website.
So first,doing the keyword research,
then optimizing your website,but also in conjunction,
building backlinks.
Because if you optimize yourwebsite but you don't
have any backlinks,you can make your website
perfectly optimized.
(25:35):
But without backlinks,they're just not going to trust
you, unfortunately.
So I'd actually start buildingbacklinks as soon as possible
and optimizing what wewere talking about,
doing the keyword research,putting the keywords in
different places on the website.
Start building out your website.
Start building out as manypages as possible,
because the more pages you have,the more keywords you
could target.
Because each page can onlyreally target about three
(25:57):
to five words max.
After that kind ofloses relevancy.
So the more pages you have,the more keywords you can target
and the more exposure andvisibility you're going to get.
So that's why blogging becamepopular. It's like,
I create all these pages aboutall the services I offer.
I don't know what to create.
Like,I don't know what other pages,
but blogs are like, okay,you write blogs,
and this is a way toadd more content.
(26:17):
New pages to your website alsotells Google that you're still
relevant because Google looks athow or if your website's
been updated.
And if your website hasn't beenupdated in, let's say,
five years, Google's like,are you still in business?
Even though you probably are,or you might still be,
but to Google,they might be like, all right,
no one's updated this website.
Are they still around?
So little updates like blogshelp keep Google coming to your
(26:39):
website and knowing that you'restill in business,
you're relevant,and that you're.
That you should hopefully beshown for those keywords.
Sure.
One thing I'm thinking about,so challenging to, like,
try to keep track of allof these things.
I cut you off again, Taylor.
Sorry about that.
We're going down the same path.
It's crazy that there are justall these Tiny little factors
and I'm sure that are beingupdated every day that you've
(27:00):
got to stay on top of.
It's obvious.
I just empatheticallyI feel like,
I feel for the amount of workthat you must put in to try to
stay on top of all of thechanges that are being made.
It is tricky because Googlechanges every single day.
So o today doesn't necessarilywork tomorrow.
But for the most part Google'sreally just looking for spam and
trying to like stop spammers.
(27:21):
So as long as you're not doinganything weird or sketchy you
don't have to worry too much.
But Google's constantly changingwhat keeps it interesting but
also keeps, makes it tough.
Yeah, for sure.
I can already hear some of thepeople on the other end of this
interview just kind of listeningin especially when it comes to
like keyword optimization andlike research and so on.
And you know I think it can beeasy to jump to like
(27:43):
keyword stuffing.
You know if you land on akeyword like I don't know,
leadership speaker,you build a page and you're
just repeating that every,I don't know other word.
It seems likebut it's not really enticing or
exciting to write like what'sthe balance between making sure
your pages are optimized andfor a certain keyword and,
but still preservingthe human element.
(28:03):
I would just write for people.
Don't worry about puttingkeywords in 10 times for every
hundred word or 400 words orwhatever people say nowadays
where it's like that stuff usedto work in the past but as long
as you just write for peoplebecause Google's nowadays
they're,it's called Schematic web and
Google started this back and Ithink like 2013 where they're
understanding the human languagelike AI that they started back
(28:25):
then and they're still prettyfar away from it but they're
trying to understand the humanlanguage and sometimes people
search with words thataren't necessarily keywords
where I'll see people searchingfor like a phrase and then when
I go to these websites on thatfirst page of Google they're
mentioning other keywords thatare more high search volume.
So in the past I'd saykeyword research,
I mean it still is prettyimportant but in the future it's
(28:48):
probably not going tobe as important.
But for now it still has a,you definitely still
want to do it.
But I would just find those highsearch volume keywords that
using like the Google keywordplanner and just try to put
them in there naturally.
Don't try to overstuff them.
The most important place isthe title of the article,
blog press release, podcast,whatever you're doing.
But that's where you need to putthose keywords is put as many
(29:09):
keywords as possible in thattitle without repeating them.
That's where you can dothe keyword research.
Figure out do I want to use asingular or plural for the
title? Because it's really,really important in the title of
whatever content you'reputting out there.
That's where you need to makesure those keywords are.
And then sprinkled in withoutthroughout the text should
be those keywords.
If they don't emerge then you'reprobably not writing about
the right topic.
But you don't want to justthrow them in there.
(29:30):
Just to throw it in there.
But it should definitely bethere at least once or twice
in that content.
You just don't want tooverdo it too much.
Yep. Well, I, I,I know we're getting close here,
but this brings up a questionthat I feel like I have to ask
and that's how is AI affectingSEO moving forward?
Right where I,I take probably a third of the
(29:51):
questions that I used to putinto Google and put them into
ChatGPT now and is is thereanything that people should be
thinking about as it relates tothese emerging technologies?
Let's call them.
Yeah,that one is so new that we don't
really know how or yeah how tooptimize for those but it's kind
of like featured snippet or likecre where you ask it a question.
(30:13):
It's just going to go intoGoogle or whatever search engine
it's using and or Alexa.
Same thing where it's going topull the first website and
pull the first answer.
So if you're not ranked numberone then you're not going to get
that answer sent out toyou or given to you.
But we still got to figure outhow exactly they're pulling
that content.
Are they going to websites butdoesn't really work for
transactional like E commerce.
(30:33):
You can't really buyon chat GPT yet.
We'll have to see if theyincorporate that in the future.
But stuff like that stillprobably going to be
more Google heavy.
But we'll have to see whathappens in the future because
no one knows.
Everything changes so quicklynowadays which keeps it
interesting. Sam.
You know those moments whenyou're doing what you love
in your business?
Maybe it's standing on stageor creating content.
Whatever it is,you're totally immersed and time
just seems to slip by.
This is called the flowstate at Speaker Flow.
We're obsessed with how to getyou there. More often each week,
we're joined by a new expertwhere we share stories,
strategies,and systems to help craft
a business you love.
(00:28):
Welcome to Technically Speaking.
Boom.
All right, we are live.
Brandon, man,thank you so much for
joining us today.
We appreciate taking sometime out of your Friday.
Yeah,thanks for having me on today.
Yeah, of course, man.
(00:49):
This is this is one of ourfavorite topics because it's
where it's like one of the areaswhere sort of like the art and
science of something have ajuncture because you know, like,
there's lots of components toSEO that are pretty procedural
and repeatable,but it also very much has to be
tailored to the business thatyou're working with.
And there's the per.
(01:12):
Theres just the,like being able to dig into the
details to really makethe impact happen.
Part of it that I thinkis where, like,
some people get lost and whythere's lots of YouTube content
out there and stuff about thisstuff that people can watch but
doesn't really help them.
So anyways,we're excited for you to come in
and sort of help us unpack whatfeels pretty intimidating,
(01:32):
I think, to a lot of people.
So, once again,thank you for being willing to
do that for our listeners.
Glad to demystify it.
So hopefully can make it alittle bit more understandable
and easier and less confusing.
Hey we say the whole time thetrue mark of an expert is
somebody that takes somethingvery complex and makes it easier
to understand for somebodythat has no box for this.
(01:55):
So tell us, man,what led us here?
How did you get intothe SEO space?
What's it been like so farthat's brought you to where
you're at today?
Well,I got my degree in business
marketing, and after I graduatedfrom school,
the first job I got out ofschool was helping the company
out with their digitalmarketing.
And I really know much aboutdigital marketing.
(02:16):
This is back in 2007, they said,don't worry,
we don't know much either.
We're going to learnalongside with you.
Which that was kindof interesting.
And decided to check it out andafter working there
for a few months,just realized this is
probably the future.
Everyone's going tohave a Website.
And there's a lot of differentways to get traffic, like SEO.
I was helping out with theirpaid ads, doing email marketing,
doing social media,doing it all.
(02:37):
And everything works to gettraffic, which I'd recommend.
Everyone should try to gettraffic from as many different
sources as possible.
But SEO is just one that getsyou free traffic. And I thought,
why spend money on paid ads ifyou get up there for free?
And over the years,just work at different
advertising agencies or.
And before work or after workand on my lunch breaks,
I work on my own company.
Built that up to where I wasable to eventually quit my job
(02:58):
and focus solely on this andbeen doing that ever since.
Wow. Very cool.
That sounds like a naturalkind of segue.
Like what made you to go downthe path of starting
your own company?
That's obviously not for thefaint of heart. So what,
what led you down? Down?
ThatI always had an entrepreneurial
spirit growing up and knew thatI wanted my own company one day.
(03:19):
And in high school,I made a skateboarding company.
So always had an idea that Imight want to do something with
having my own company.
Just didn't know whereit would take me.
And after I got my degree inbusiness marketing and I got
that first job and went to.
Actually went to a coupleconferences and they were
talking about digitalmarketing and SEO,
and a lot of the speakers weretalking about how they have
their own company and they'reworking or. Yeah,
(03:41):
for themselves.
They have like an affiliateor drop shipping.
This is back in 2007.
And that kind of spark manager.
So I was like, all right,I could work full time at this
job and I could also pick upfreelance clients here or there.
I could go like a restaurantor a doctor,
anything where it wasn't aconflict of interest and
pick up clients.
And it's only going to help megrow because I'm learning
SEO after work.
So it's helping them when I showup for work to better know what
(04:05):
tactics and strategiesto utilize.
And just kept going fromthere ever since.
Yeah well,that's kind of the true
entrepreneurial story.
Somebody that knows that theywant to start a business,
and then when the opportunityor the gap presents itself,
you hone in on it.
And it almost sounds like youfound the passion in it as you
really began doing it,instead of like,
(04:27):
knowing that that's where yourheart was going to be
from the start.
Is that an accurate assumptionthat I'm making?
Yeah.
I didn't really know much aboutSEO or digital marketing in
2007, so new more traditional.
That's what they teach you inschool. So they don't really.
They taught a little bit aboutdigital, but not much.
So after I got that first job iswhere I got introduced it and
just realized this is future,and this is a way to get people
(04:49):
exposure online and, like,helping businesses succeed.
And this is a way that I couldhelp them grow online.
Yeah, well, damn,you definitely bet on the
right horse, my friend,because that is the
only way anymore.
Yeah.
So I think most people hear SEOand immediately think blogging
and that's obviously a factor,but can you maybe just like,
(05:12):
start this conversation off bygiving us a breakdown of the
different factors or elementsthat fit into the SEO umbrella?
There are over 200 factors,but I like to say it's
like a puzzle.
There's a lot of pieces to thatpuzzle, over 200 pieces,
but some pieces are much biggerthan others. So, like,
important thing is contenton your website.
(05:32):
So making sure that you havethe right keyword. Well,
first from a keyword research,figuring out what keywords you
want to put in your website.
Then make sure you put the rightkeywords in the different
areas on your website.
All these technical kindof coding areas.
But one place that's easy thatyou don't need no coding is just
adding text on your website.
Google feeds off text.
They can't really read imagesor videos or audio yet.
They're getting better at it,but they still really rely
(05:53):
heavily on text.
So the more text you have onevery single page
on your website,the easier it is for the search
engines to read, understand,and know what your website's
about. But unfortunately,they don't really care what you
put on your website because theyjust don't believe anything that
you put on the website.
Because too many people havetricked Google over the years
that they just look at anywebsite and say, all right,
how do we know you reallyare who you say you are?
Because we don't want to justsend people to your website and
(06:16):
find out that you don't existor you're scamming people
or whatever it may be.
So you have to build trust up.
And the way to build trust isby getting what are
called backlinks,getting other websites
to talk about you.
The more websites that talkto you, talk about you,
the more trust Google'sgoing to give to you.
And then they look at thosekeywords on your website,
but doesn't work theother way around.
And a backlink, for example,would be a clickable link from
(06:37):
another website thatpoints to your.
So let's say you're reading anarticle in entrepreneur.com
in there.
It says Brandon Leibowitz.
If you click on that andit goes to my website,
I'd be getting a backlinkfrom entrepreneur. Com.
So the more websites thattalk about you,
it's kind of like a popularitycontest, the more test Google is
going to give to you.
Yeah.
So as far as backlinking goes,like,
is that something that peopleshould be pursuing on a regular
(07:00):
basis or is it something thatshould happen naturally in
your opinion? Of course,we're talking shoulds here based
on the content that you have andthen people just naturally
linking to you becauseof the good content.
Or do you think there should bean outreach strategy involved?
Both.
You want to write good contentthat naturally attracts people,
but how are they going to findyou if you don't start and
initiate that traction?
(07:21):
So if you're a brand newbusiness and you're just writing
really good content,it's going to be tough for
people to find you.
If you share on social,you might not have a
big following yet.
But the more you share thatcontent and get the exposure and
collaborate with other peoplethat they could share,
maybe your blog on theirInstagram or their Twitter,
and they might havebigger audience.
So you're kind of tapping intotheir audience and kind of have
(07:42):
to nudge it a little bit.
Every company does initially.
Once they get bigger,you don't really have
to do the outreach.
But once you're starting off,you got to do some initiation
to get that traction going.
Is that something that like isstraightforward to do? I'd say,
like,are publications or places that
accept backlinks regularly?
(08:03):
Like,is this a hard conversation to
have with somebody or is itenough to just be able
to create, let's say,a great piece of content for
their audience specifically.
You just got to buildthat relationship.
That's the tough part isbuilding a relationship because
you got to think how manywebsites get messaged all day
long about contributors.
So a way around that is you canlook at your competitors
(08:24):
backlinks.
There's tools that will showme any website's backlinks.
I can look at my competitors.
So you,on that first page of Google
for my keywords,throw them into different tools
like Ahrefs or Moz or Semrush.
You have to pay for these tools,but they'll show you all of your
competitors backlinks.
And then one by one you can lookat which backlinks are relevant
and authoritative and reachout to those sites.
Because if your competitors areranked on that first
page of Google,it's more than likely because
(08:45):
of those backlinks.
And if you could build similarbacklinks that are of
quality quality,meaning that they're relevant
and authoritative,not just picking any backlink.
Because in the past there's justthe number of backlinks was how
you'd rank. If I have 100,you have 200,
you would rank higher than me.
But now it's not the numberof backlinks,
it's the number of qualitybacklinks and was a quality
backlink to Google.
Quality backlink just means it'sfrom a site that's related to
(09:06):
what you're doing that'sreally important.
So if you're sellinglike tennis shoes,
you want a backlink from anotherwebsite about like fashion
or clothing.
Doesn't have to be anothershoe company,
but anything somewhat related.
If a doctor is linking out tothe shoe company, it's like,
looks a little weird.
It doesn't really align.
So relevancy is reallyimportant.
And then authoritativeness.
How big is this website?
If you're getting a backlinkfrom my website,
(09:26):
which is not a bad one,it'll be good,
but it's not the same quality aslike a Forbes or New York
Times or LA Times.
So the bigger the website,the more SEO value and the
more relevant, the more,the better it's going to be.
Sure, that makes perfect sense.
Doesdoes reputation have anything to
do with SEO? Like reviews,testimonials,
(09:49):
these types of things?
And if so, like,where would they need to be in
order to boost yourorganic presence?
I would say that's morefor like local.
So if you're trying to getranked on Google Maps,
you'll see the reviews there.
Or like Yelp,you'll see reviews,
but it's not the numberof reviews,
it's Because you could search onGoogle for dentists near me,
(10:12):
and the first one on Google mapsmight have five reviews.
The second one couldhave 100 reviews.
The third one couldhave 200 reviews.
So it's not really a number ofreviews, but it's a number.
Well, there's a lot of variablesin it,
but one thing that's reallyimportant is keywords in
research. Reviews.
That is so very importantbecause you can put keywords all
over your description about yourbusiness, who you are.
You want to fill all thatstuff out completely.
(10:33):
Like if it says write 500characters about your business,
you want to write500 characters.
You don't want to write 200characters because text is what
all these websites feed off.
So you want to fill it up withas much content as possible.
And then you want to also makesure your images have keywords.
So you don't want to just uploadimages to your website or
to Google Maps or Yelp.
You want to name these imageswith descriptive words or
podcast episodes beforeyou upload them.
(10:55):
And then you want to getreviews with keywords.
So if you know someone's goingto write a review,
you can maybe ask them, hey,can you mention a city
that I live? Like,I do SEO in Los Angeles.
So if I could get someone towrite a review that I was
looking for an SEO company inLos Angeles. I found Brandon,
he lives in Venice and helped meout ranking my business
in Santa Monica.
So hitting all these differentkeywords in the review,
(11:17):
that really moves you up.
But it's not really a number ofreviews and I don't think
they're gonna rank a websitethat has low quality reviews.
So if you're like aone star business,
but you have all these keywordsin your reviews,
I don't think that's gonnareally help out.
They wanna show quality,so I'm not sure what the cutoff
is that their threshold thatthey're not gonna
show below that,probably three stars or higher,
I believe.
(11:37):
But just making sure you getthose reviews with keywords,
that helps out so much on prettymuch every platform. Google,
Yelp, Amazon,pretty much anywhere where
you can write reviews,if you can put keywords
in there,that's going to really shoot you
up the rankings very fast.
Does that only apply to localthough or service based
businesses as well?
Because if we think about thecontext of our audience,
I could imagine even if youserve a nationwide audience and
(12:00):
you're a service based business,if you were tapping into,
let's say Google,my business for putting in
reviews and people werementioning your speaking or your
topics or whatever, I mean,that has to help to some degree,
right?
For the local presence? Yeah,for national,
it's not going to help too much.
It might have a littlebit of impact,
but I would definitely putreviews on your website for
(12:21):
people to see because that'sgoing to help people
trust you more.
I don't know how much it'sgoing to help Google.
It adds more textto your website,
which is always a good thing.
More text.
As long as it's nota screenshot,
you embed those reviews as text,that would be beneficial.
But if it's just screenshots,I don't think they're
going to do much.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So with all these different,like methods, I guess,
(12:42):
of improving SEO,what do you feel like are the
ones that are maybe the most,like,
underutilized relative to theimpact that they can have?
Yeah, probably the backlinks.
Backlinks are so important.
And you gotta build the righttype of backlinks because if
you build the wrong type ofbacklinks instead of
ranking you higher,it's gonna drop you down.
So you gotta make sure you findsites that are related to what
(13:04):
you're doing and just focuson quality, not quantity.
But a lot of people don't knowabout backlinks or don't
build backlinks,or they'll build the wrong type
of backlinks. And they.
That's where it's justso important.
Google's whole algorithm startedbased off backlinks,
still heavily based offbacklinks. I mean,
it's changed a lot howthey look at them,
but still has a big impacton the rankings. I mean,
that's why Google became popularis they ranked websites off
backlinks versus whatever Yahooor ash GS or every search
(13:27):
engines were doing before,which was probably just based
off keywords and not lookingat backlinks.
Wow.
Yeah.
So, like,what are some of the other
areas that you've seen, like,change over time in this
capacity either related tobacklinks or otherwise?
Im sure over the past, what,what, 15 years or something that
you've been in this space now,there's been some major changes
(13:50):
beyond just the tried and true.
Is there anything maybe upandcoming that you feel like people
should be aware of?
Google's looking a lot at, like,user experience,
how people behaveon your website.
Because in the past I could justrank you for your keywords
and you would rank.
But now Google's like,all right,
so if you're ranked number oneand everyone goes to your
website and they hit that backbutton after a few seconds,
that's probably a negativesignal and that's a bad
(14:11):
user experience.
So that's one thing that'sGoogle's looking at now is how
do people behave once theyget to your website?
Do they hit that back buttonimmediately? If so,
then they'll drop you down andjust making sure that people
stay on your website.
That's part of what Google'slooking at nowadays.
They've been doing thatfor a couple years,
but that's seems like it'smore prevalent nowadays.
Yeah, sure, that makes sense.
I expect is as much about likehow the website is like designed
(14:35):
and organized as it is about therelevant relevancy of the
traffic that's going there.
Right.
Is this one of the reasons whyyou said maybe the wrong
backlinks could happen is you'repushing the wrong traffic and
because they don't actually careabout what's there and now
they're bouncing and you'regetting that negative
hit to Google.
Yep. It all ties together.
So gotta make sure you'regetting the right,
putting the right keywords onyour website because people be
(14:56):
like, I what's trending?
Let me put these keywords on mywebsite because it's trending.
But putting Justin Bieber onyour website is going to get
you a lot of traffic.
But is it the right trafficif you're trying to
sell E commerce?
Unless you're selling JustinBieber fan stuff, but if not,
you got to figure out who youraudience is because traffic
is just traffic.
If it's not targeted,it's not going to do much.
Yeah where does video fit intothe mix of all this now?
(15:20):
Especially with Google'sacquisition of YouTube a while
back and you know,SEO being prevalent there and it
functioning practicallylike a search engine,
especially now that the twoare fairly integrated.
Do you find be there a bigbenefit to using SEO
and video as well?
If you have video content,you want to optimize it that way
it shows up on YouTube orwhatever platform you're on.
(15:42):
But also you want to makesure that, yeah, you,
when you search on Google,sometimes you'll see video shows
up in Google search results.
So having a presence on YouTubecould get you more free real
estate on Google becauseGoogle owns YouTube.
And when you search on Googlethey're not really going
to show Facebook video.
Sometimes they will,but most of the time it's going
to be YouTube because Googleonly cares about making money.
(16:03):
And the first thing that happenswhen you search on Google is
there's ads at the top.
If you don't click on an ad,Google's not making money.
But if you scroll downand there's websites,
then there's videos.
And if it's a YouTube videoand you click on it,
the first thing that appears,anytime you watch a video,
there's Always an advertisement.
So YouTube is making money,which is really Google
making money.
So they're gonna keep pushingYouTube as much as they can.
(16:24):
And if you have video content,definitely throw it
up on YouTube,optimize it similarly to how
you'd optimize a pageon a website.
Like having doing key research,putting keywords in the
title description.
If you can transcribe the video,because again text is
very important,or if it's a long form video,
like an hour long video,probably don't want to
transcribe the whole thing,but you can timestamp it and
(16:45):
write a description.
Because if not Google's notgoing to know what that page or
YouTube's not going to reallyknow. They're getting better,
but they still need your help.
And then you can takethat video, you can embed it on
your website,you can make it a blog post,
you create content around it.
Because the more websitesthat embed your video,
it's like backlinks to YouTube,the higher they're going
to rank that video.
And also if you embed that videoon a website and it
(17:06):
gets 10,000 views,those 10,000 views get
attributed to yourYouTube channel.
So you want to try to get asmany third party sites
to embed that video,but also share it on Facebook
video, YouTube,I mean uploading it separately
from YouTube, from Facebook,from Instagram,
from LinkedIn to Twitter.
You don't want to share aYouTube video on Facebook.
Not going to work.
They're not going toshow the video.
(17:26):
You have to upload it nativelyto those platforms.
So but you could try crosspromoting and see if your
audience would want to tap in.
But share as many places aspossible to get that exposure.
You get the same type of likeeffect from a link being shared
on social media as you wouldsomething like, you know,
Forbes or something like that.
Nah Google doesn't reallycount social media.
(17:48):
So anything where it'stoo easy to backlink,
it's probably not going to help.
So social media doesn't reallyhelp out because,
and also it's not relevant likeit's all about relevancy.
So you're getting a backlinkfrom social media sites.
Unless you're doingsocial media,
you probably don't want all yourbacklinks coming from social
media because then Google'sgonna just think of your
social media website.
So relevancy is number one.
Forbes is okay,but there's no real relevancy
(18:10):
with those sites either.
It's really authoritative,it's a big site,
but there's no real relevancyand most of those big sites
unfortunately are not goingto count for SEO.
It's a tag that Google made like10 years ago for websites like
Wikipedia where too many peopleare just going to Wikipedia,
making changes,putting their backlink at
the bottom of Wikipedia.
And Wikipedia is like hold on,we're getting way too much spam.
This is not good. Google's like,here's a tag called NoFollow.
(18:33):
You put this on your websiteand it's not going to,
it's going to tell us not tocount any of these backlinks
for SEO.
So all social media has nofollow any of these big websites
like Forbes, Huffington Post,New York Times, LA Times,
they've all been spammed a lotbecause there's writers
that you could pay,they'll write content about you.
And Google's like, hold on,we don't want people just paying
couple thousand dollarsto these writers.
(18:54):
Really kind of sketchy and shadywhere you'll pay writers and
they'll throw a backlink inthere or a quote from you in
these websites and you'llget a backlink.
And used to work really well.
Now it doesn't work so much.
But just got,I wouldn't overthink it too much
looking for the no follow tag.
If it's in the page, it's there.
And it's not bad because of allyour backlinks came from what's
called do follow links.
(19:14):
That also looks a little weird.
Like should have some,a mix of nofollow and do follow.
And it's fine to have somesocial media but the majority of
backlinks need to come fromrelevant websites.
That's really themost important.
Yeah.
Wow So it sounds like they needto do like if you're going to
do backlinking strategyeffectively,
you've really got to findpublications and blogs and
(19:35):
companies within your niche thataren't like paid PR
media strategies.
They're just kind ofsmaller entities that have
relevant information.
And that's going to giveyou the most power.
Am I capturing that right?
Yep.
You just got to goton relevant sites.
Sometimes they'll ask forcompensation and not supposed to
pay these sites but peopledo all the time.
(19:57):
So you want to try to,like we talked about earlier,
try to get it naturally youdon't want to be asking for
these backlinks but sometimesyou have to start that
conversation,initiate it or they'll even
reach out to you and say hey,I have these backlinks for sale.
Would you like to buy it?
And then I'd be careful makingsure that they're good
quality ones,because people doing that are
usually selling youspammy backlinks.
Sure, that makes sense.
(20:19):
I feel like that's somethingthat gets talked about so often.
So I'm glad you canceled thatmyth out for those that may have
been tempted to jump onone of those offers.
Go ahead, Daler,I cut you off there.
Oh, yeah,I was just thinking of a
scenario in my head. So, I mean,who knows?
We're kind of just speculatinghere because we don't really
know the ins and outs of any ofthese algorithms necessarily.
(20:41):
But let's say there's a highauthority website,
not the most relevant.
Versus a lower authoritywebsite, but much more relevant.
And those two backlinkingscenarios,
which one do you thinkhas more power?
Let's say the more relevantone because, for example,
(21:02):
they might be starting off andthey might be a new blog and
they're really relevant,but they don't have much
authority because they're new.
But in a year or two,if they keep working at
it and building it up,which you hope they do,
and hope they don't just giveup and go out of business,
but if they keep building it up,then their authority will go
up and it's from a really,really relevant website.
So I'd focus on relevancy.
Number one.
Authoritativeness is secondary.
(21:22):
But relevancy is just soimportant because that's such.
Because when Google searches,or when someone searches
on Google, they want to give yourelevant results.
And the way they figure outwhat's relevant is they look at
the content on your website,but they also look at the
backlinks and where thosebacklinks are coming from.
For relevancy,they just want everything to
align and be as relevantas possible.
Right.
Wow.
It makes sense because they'retrying to craft the best user
(21:43):
experience possible.
So the way that they can do thatis by showing you the most
relevant things,I would imagine.
Yeah, yeah,that's the main focus is
relevancy, good user experience.
So you stay on Google and don'tgo to Bing or Yahoo or any of
the other search engines.
Yep.
Are those other search enginesworth thinking about if we're
(22:03):
talking about SEO here? Yeah.
Like, does it carry over if youoptimize for Google? Let's say.
I mean, they're all differentalgorithms, but they're similar.
Ish, for the most part.
But I would check tools likeGoogle Analytics or any tracking
tool to see what,where your traffic's coming from
so you can optimize forthose platforms.
But I don't think I've ever seena website bring in more
traffic than Google.
And this is me looking atprobably thousands of websites
(22:24):
over the years.
Google probably brings in maybelike 20 to like 60%
of the traffic.
Bing will bring about 1%,Yahoo will bring about 1%,
DuckDuckGo might bringhalf a percentage.
And then the rest is gonna comefrom like people typing your
website indirectly.
Social media, email marketing,paid ads, or ton of other ways.
But majority of the traffic forthe most part is going
(22:45):
to come from Google.
But every website is different.
So you should check if you seethat you're getting a bunch
of traffic from Bing.
Or another search engine,you could try to figure
out what's going on.
How can I optimize betterfor that search engine?
But in general,Google just kind of runs
the show for now.
Sure. Yep.
Well more power to them,I suppose.
What are some other things thatyou see people talking about
(23:07):
relating to SEO that don't workthe way that maybe they're,
they're sold to work?
Like the whole buya backlink idea.
Is there anything elseyou can think.
Of, like page speed?
Everyone thinks that's reallyimportant and it's important for
people when they get to yourwebsite that it loads quickly.
But everyone's like,you have a fast loading website.
Google said that you have tohave a fast loading website.
(23:28):
And there's tools like GooglePage speed insights.
I will show you how fastyour website loads.
And almost every websitefails that test.
And I'll look at my competitorsthat are ranked on that
first page of Google.
They'll usually fail that test.
So page speed,a lot of people put a lot
of emphasis on it,which it's definitely important
for people.
Like if I go to your website andit loads in five seconds,
especially on mobile,you hit that back button,
(23:49):
I'm like, come on now.
There's 10 other results on thatfirst page of Google + ads
+ videos, images, maps.
There's a lot of noise anddistractions there.
Plenty of options.
So if you don't capturethem right away,
they hit that back button.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Yeah.
And that translates then topoor user experience,
meaning bounces, meaning worse.
SEO in Google's eyes. Again,tie this all back together.
(24:12):
Yeah, yeah.
So it's not like Googleoutranking because you have.
But it's the user experiencethat's suffering.
So it kind of creates that,you know, compound effect,
it seems.
Yeah.
Okay, so So let's say I mean,let's just start from scratch
here. Let's. Let's say,you know,
somebody hasn't put a lot ofemphasis into SEO over time.
(24:33):
Maybe they're pretty, you know,inconsistent with writing blogs.
Certainly no backlink outreach.
Like there are so many.
They could focus onYouTube as well.
Like there's so many things tobe doing on top of all the other
things we need to be doingas business owners too.
Like what's the order ofoperations that you find to be,
you know,reasonable for somebody,
you know,venturing down the path of
(24:54):
working on their own SEO?
If they're kind of startingfrom ground zero,
what are the things that they,they should be,
be Doing and what'sthe order of them?
Keyword research.
Start off figuring out whatkeywords you want to rank for.
That way you don't have tobacktrack and use tools like
the Google Keyword Planner.
It's a free tool.
It'll show you how many peoplesearch for your keywords
(25:14):
every single month.
I'll also show you how manypeople search for the synonyms
and plurals and variations thatyou might not have thought of.
And you can pick and choose whatkeywords are relevant,
throw them into the website.
So first,doing the keyword research,
then optimizing your website,but also in conjunction,
building backlinks.
Because if you optimize yourwebsite but you don't
have any backlinks,you can make your website
perfectly optimized.
(25:35):
But without backlinks,they're just not going to trust
you, unfortunately.
So I'd actually start buildingbacklinks as soon as possible
and optimizing what wewere talking about,
doing the keyword research,putting the keywords in
different places on the website.
Start building out your website.
Start building out as manypages as possible,
because the more pages you have,the more keywords you
could target.
Because each page can onlyreally target about three
(25:57):
to five words max.
After that kind ofloses relevancy.
So the more pages you have,the more keywords you can target
and the more exposure andvisibility you're going to get.
So that's why blogging becamepopular. It's like,
I create all these pages aboutall the services I offer.
I don't know what to create.
Like,I don't know what other pages,
but blogs are like, okay,you write blogs,
and this is a way toadd more content.
(26:17):
New pages to your website alsotells Google that you're still
relevant because Google looks athow or if your website's
been updated.
And if your website hasn't beenupdated in, let's say,
five years, Google's like,are you still in business?
Even though you probably are,or you might still be,
but to Google,they might be like, all right,
no one's updated this website.
Are they still around?
So little updates like blogshelp keep Google coming to your
(26:39):
website and knowing that you'restill in business,
you're relevant,and that you're.
That you should hopefully beshown for those keywords.
Sure.
One thing I'm thinking about,so challenging to, like,
try to keep track of allof these things.
I cut you off again, Taylor.
Sorry about that.
We're going down the same path.
It's crazy that there are justall these Tiny little factors
and I'm sure that are beingupdated every day that you've
(27:00):
got to stay on top of.
It's obvious.
I just empatheticallyI feel like,
I feel for the amount of workthat you must put in to try to
stay on top of all of thechanges that are being made.
It is tricky because Googlechanges every single day.
So o today doesn't necessarilywork tomorrow.
But for the most part Google'sreally just looking for spam and
trying to like stop spammers.
(27:21):
So as long as you're not doinganything weird or sketchy you
don't have to worry too much.
But Google's constantly changingwhat keeps it interesting but
also keeps, makes it tough.
Yeah, for sure.
I can already hear some of thepeople on the other end of this
interview just kind of listeningin especially when it comes to
like keyword optimization andlike research and so on.
And you know I think it can beeasy to jump to like
(27:43):
keyword stuffing.
You know if you land on akeyword like I don't know,
leadership speaker,you build a page and you're
just repeating that every,I don't know other word.
It seems likebut it's not really enticing or
exciting to write like what'sthe balance between making sure
your pages are optimized andfor a certain keyword and,
but still preservingthe human element.
(28:03):
I would just write for people.
Don't worry about puttingkeywords in 10 times for every
hundred word or 400 words orwhatever people say nowadays
where it's like that stuff usedto work in the past but as long
as you just write for peoplebecause Google's nowadays
they're,it's called Schematic web and
Google started this back and Ithink like 2013 where they're
understanding the human languagelike AI that they started back
(28:25):
then and they're still prettyfar away from it but they're
trying to understand the humanlanguage and sometimes people
search with words thataren't necessarily keywords
where I'll see people searchingfor like a phrase and then when
I go to these websites on thatfirst page of Google they're
mentioning other keywords thatare more high search volume.
So in the past I'd saykeyword research,
I mean it still is prettyimportant but in the future it's
(28:48):
probably not going tobe as important.
But for now it still has a,you definitely still
want to do it.
But I would just find those highsearch volume keywords that
using like the Google keywordplanner and just try to put
them in there naturally.
Don't try to overstuff them.
The most important place isthe title of the article,
blog press release, podcast,whatever you're doing.
But that's where you need to putthose keywords is put as many
(29:09):
keywords as possible in thattitle without repeating them.
That's where you can dothe keyword research.
Figure out do I want to use asingular or plural for the
title? Because it's really,really important in the title of
whatever content you'reputting out there.
That's where you need to makesure those keywords are.
And then sprinkled in withoutthroughout the text should
be those keywords.
If they don't emerge then you'reprobably not writing about
the right topic.
But you don't want to justthrow them in there.
(29:30):
Just to throw it in there.
But it should definitely bethere at least once or twice
in that content.
You just don't want tooverdo it too much.
Yep. Well, I, I,I know we're getting close here,
but this brings up a questionthat I feel like I have to ask
and that's how is AI affectingSEO moving forward?
Right where I,I take probably a third of the
(29:51):
questions that I used to putinto Google and put them into
ChatGPT now and is is thereanything that people should be
thinking about as it relates tothese emerging technologies?
Let's call them.
Yeah,that one is so new that we don't
really know how or yeah how tooptimize for those but it's kind
of like featured snippet or likecre where you ask it a question.
(30:13):
It's just going to go intoGoogle or whatever search engine
it's using and or Alexa.
Same thing where it's going topull the first website and
pull the first answer.
So if you're not ranked numberone then you're not going to get
that answer sent out toyou or given to you.
But we still got to figure outhow exactly they're pulling
that content.
Are they going to websites butdoesn't really work for
transactional like E commerce.
(30:33):
You can't really buyon chat GPT yet.
We'll have to see if theyincorporate that in the future.
But stuff like that stillprobably going to be
more Google heavy.
But we'll have to see whathappens in the future because
no one knows.
Everything changes so quicklynowadays which keeps it
interesting. Sam.
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