February 11, 2025 • 48 mins
Here's a fun and engaging first-person podcast description with emojis and hashtags for Brandon Leibowitz's appearance on the E-Commerce Podcast:
🚀 Hey, it’s me, Brandon Leibowitz, and I just had an EPIC chat with Matt Edmondson on the E-Commerce Podcast! 🎙️💡
We dove deep into the world of SEO, AI, and conversions—aka the secret sauce to getting more traffic, more clicks, and (most importantly) MORE SALES! 🛍️💰 If you’ve ever wondered how to rank higher on Google without selling your soul to paid ads, you’re in for a treat. I shared insider tips on:
✔️ SEO in 2024—what still works & what’s just ✨ wishful thinking
✔️ How to find hidden keywords (so you’re not competing with Amazon) 🔎
✔️ Why backlinks are your website’s best friend 🤝
✔️ AI & SEO: Friend or Foe? 🤖
✔️ How to make Google LOVE your product pages (Hint: It’s not just about keywords!)
Oh, and we even tackled the biggest SEO mistakes e-commerce brands make (spoiler: it’s probably hurting your rankings right now 😬).
If you’re serious about growing your online biz, this episode is a must-listen! 🎧📈
🔥 Got SEO questions? Let’s connect!
📩 DM me anytime!
🌎 More SEO tips & FREE resources: SEOoptimizers.com/gift
#SEO #EcommerceSuccess #DigitalMarketing #GoogleRankings #MoreTraffic #SEOOptimizers #MarketingTips #OnlineBusiness
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:13):
Well, hello and welcome to the ECommerce Podcast with me,
your host, Matt Edmondson.
Sorry,I got a little bit carried away
there. Just missed my cue.
But that's okay.
Welcome to the show.
It's good to have you with us.
Its a show that helps youdeliver E Commerce. Wow. Yes,
it is.
That's what we're here for.
And to help us do just that,today we are chatting with
(00:35):
Brandon Leibowitz about AI,about predominantly SEO,
about conversion.
Are we going to get into.
Oh, there's no doubt about itbecause we have an expert
on the show. Yes, we do.
So grab your notebooks,grab your pens.
You are going to want to findout and make note of all
kinds of stuff today.
So make sure you do that now.
(00:56):
If this is your first time withus, a very warm welcome to you.
And of course,if you're a long standing E
Commerce podcast listener,an extra warm,
extra warm welcome to you.
It's great that you're here.
Whether you're new,whether you're an old dinosaur
like me it's just good to bearound E Commerce folks.
So thanks for joining us today.
And of course,this show is brought to you by
(01:18):
the wonderful E Commerce Cohort.
If you haven't done so already,do check that out.
Ecommerce cohort.com.
it's our monthly mastermindgroup. You can come,
you can join in,you can take advantage of all
the workshops and stuff whichare going on in there.
It will be great tosee you in there.
So you can find outmore@ecommerce cohort.com.
(01:39):
so let's talk about today'sguest, shall we?
We're talking about E commerce,we're talking about how to,
you know,thrive online and all that sort
of stuff. So let's chat with Mr.
Brandon Leibowitz. Like I said,the mastermind behind
SEO Optimizers.
He's been doing that since 2007.
Where magic meets marketingfor small and medium sized
(02:02):
businesses with a sprinkle ofdigital wizardry as well. Oh,
yes.
He's on a quest to amplifyonline traffic,
turning clicks into clientsand searches into sales.
Are you ready to launch yourdigital presence into the
stratosphere? Well,let me tell you,
Brendan's your guy. Yes, he is.
Love that bio, Love that intro.
Brandon, welcome to the show,man. How are we doing today?
(02:25):
I am doing great.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, no problem at all.
All the way from sunny la.
So there's a bit of a timedifference between the two of us
as we can probably tell ifyou're watching the video,
a little bit of a difference.
But hey, we're making it work.
I see what technology is,it helps connect us all.
And mid evening for you.
(02:46):
But yeah, no, it's all good,it's all good.
I'm a big fan of la and I I cansee why people live out there,
you know.
And there's a little town calledSan Clemente just south of la
where a very good friendof mine lives.
And so quite often ifI'm in the States,
I'll go spend some time downthere, go the beach,
he'll go surfing,I'll go read a book because
(03:07):
frankly I can't surf. It's just,it's just never going to work.
But a beautiful partof the world.
So have you always been in LA orare you an import
into that area?
I grew up here and it's tough toleave with the nice weather.
So just been here prettymuch my whole life.
Yeah.
And do you do the wholesports thing?
That's a big thing over there,isn't it?
Like what is the LA Rams, thethe big football team,
(03:31):
do you do that?
Yeah, now that we got a footballteam like two years ago,
so been checking them outa little bit. But yeah,
now before that we didn't haveanything so we were just kind of
cried over here we had lotsof basketball teams,
no football team,and now we got two
football teams.
So they actually doubled downand went all in and gave us two
when we had none before.
(03:51):
Right, well thank you for that.
Yeah, yeah,we have this saying in England,
right, which isthey talk about how when you
wait for a bus, cause you know,a lot of people use
buses over here.
How when you wait for a bus ittakes a long time for one to
turn up, but when one turns up,they all turn up together,
you know,like so three turn up together.
It's a bit like that with yourfootball team, but yeah,
(04:13):
that's fascinating.
So tell me a little bit aboutSEO optimizers. You know,
we read in the bio there thatyou've been doing
that since 2007,which in digital years Brandon
is a flipping long time.
And so, you know,well done for staying
the course.
But how did you getinvolved in that?
I just fell into it.
(04:34):
After I graduated from schoolI got my degree in business
marketing and the first job Igot out or offered was helping
out a company with their digitalmarketing back in 2007,
which I didn't really know muchabout it back then. They said,
don't worry,we don't know much either.
We're gonna learn with you.
Kind of interesting.
And that's kind of helpful,right?
(04:55):
Yeah. I was like, all right,let's do this together.
And they took me to classesand workshops, seminars,
and kind of just after workingthere for a few months,
just kind of realized everyone'sprobably gonna have a website
in the future.
This digital thing is probablynot gonna go anywhere
anytime soon.
And there's lots of differentways to get traffic.
I was helping out.
They're like their social,doing paid ads,
(05:15):
doing email marketing,doing SEO and all that works to
get traffic. But I just thought,who doesn't want free traffic?
SEO is just a way toget free traffic.
And that's what I focusedon over the years,
working at different advertisingagencies as a director of SEO.
And before work and after workand on my lunch breaks,
I'd work on my own company andeventually built that up to
where I was able to quit my joband focus solely on this.
(05:37):
And been doing that ever since.
Fantastic.
And so you missedyou must enjoy it,
because I think with SEO,it's one of those things that
if you don't enjoy it,you don't stick it out.
Right.
There's got to be a deep passionfor it to be in it for
the long term.
Am I right in my assumption?
(05:57):
It's just one of those thingsI've always thought about
people in SEO,if you've been around
for a while and.
It'S kind of like a game,like trying to figure out how
Google works or trying toreverse engineer your
competition and seeing howthey're getting those rankings.
So makes it interesting.
It's not the same thingover and over again.
Google's constantlychanging and,
yeah keeps you on your toes,I imagine.
Actually,the Google of 2007 and the
(06:21):
Google of 2024 at thetime of recording,
I imagine they're actuallyquite different.
Much, much different.
It was a lot easier to rank backin 2007. Now it's. Well,
also there is more competition.
So that's a big thingwith SEO is. I mean,
we want to figure out how Googleworks and we want
to beat Google.
(06:41):
But Google changesevery single day.
So what really matters is who'son that first page of Google
for your keywords,how much SEO they
have they done,and how can we do a
better job of it.
And nowadays everyonehas a website,
so it just become verycompetitive, very saturated,
and becomes a Littlebit tougher.
And also Google's become muchmore sophisticated too.
Back then in 2007 you just throwa couple keywords on your
(07:02):
website, build some backlinks,and you would rank pretty
much instantaneously.
Now it's a lot morethat goes into it.
So it's interestingyou say that.
Actually there's a lot becauseI remember, you know,
when we launched our beautycompany in 2006, we were,
we were instantly on page onefor some quite key brands
of in back in the day.
(07:23):
And you know,competition's different now
and so on and so forth.
I kind of think if I was,if I started again today with
that beauty website,it would be so much harder to do
half the things that we did.
Right. And I'm not,you know It's just a good
thought experiment to go well,how would we do it differently
today?
So if someone is startingout in E commerce,
(07:45):
I mean do they have a chancewhere SEO is concerned? I mean,
how would you know,if there are.
If you go to pageone and type in,
or you go to Google and type insome of the beauty brands,
you know, there's.
How do I even think aboutgetting, you know,
high up in the SEO rankingsas a new player?
Yeah,that's where you just gotta find
something more unique anddifferentiating yourself.
(08:08):
So if you're just selling thesame thing that everyone
else is selling,it's gonna be very saturated
and tough to rank.
But if you could find somethingmore niche that helps make
yourself stand out, like maybe.
I mean,if you're selling like something
really general,like clothing or T shirts,
it's gonna be really tough.
You got Amazon,Walmart and all these big
corporate websitesthat rank for it.
(08:29):
But if you can find somethingmore niche,
like maybe sell organic cottonchildren's T shirts,
so something that helpsdifferentiate yourself,
it's still going tobe competitive,
but it's just going to be alittle bit less competition.
So that's where you got to kindof find like something that
helps you stand out.
Otherwise you're just going toget lost in the sea of other
websites out there.
And over time you can rankfor that keyword.
(08:50):
But if you're just starting out,it's going to take a long time
to rank for these reallycompetitive keywords.
So that's where you find theselow competition keywords,
target those and then eventuallybuild it up where you can go for
those bigger ones in the future.
So low competition keywordsthen. Let's start there.
Sorry Brandon we're just jumpingstraight into this.
I'm into this already.
(09:11):
Its one of those things whereit's easy to say, isn't it?
Just go choose low competitionkeywords and you should
rank for those.
I'm like well howdo I find them?
And if they're low competition,are they low competition
for a reason? I. E.
They're not really worth thetime and effort and energy in
doing it, if that makes sense.
(09:32):
Yeah.
I mean some of those.
Yeah.
When you do keyword research andI'll explain how you could
do it in a minute,but sometimes you'll find these
low search volume keywords thator that don't have much
competition and they might nothave any search volume either.
So they might not be thebest to go after.
Because just because it's lowcompetition doesn't always
mean it's the best.
Also you want buyer intent basedkeywords that are especially
(09:53):
for E commerce.
You want keywords that are goingto get those conversions.
But the way there's lots ofdifferent tools that you could
use for keyword research.
There's a free tool from Googlecalled the Google Keyword
Planner and that show you howmany people search for your
keyword every single month.
So you could go put yourkeywords into the Google
Keyword Planner,it's going to give you hundreds,
thousands sometimes of otherkeywords related to
(10:16):
your keyword.
Yeah.
And then if you go through allthose keywords and see which
ones get search volume,which ones get a decent amount
of monthly searches,but just because it gets a
decent amount of monthlysearches,
you want to actually take thatkeyword and search it in Google
and see who's on that firstpage of Google.
And if you just see it's all bigcorporate websites and you're
just a startup maybe notthe best keyword,
(10:36):
but if you're a big corporatewebsite then you can target
those keywords.
So it's all about knowing whereyou are in the business cycle
and targeting keywords that aresimilar inside or that websites
rank for those keywords thatare similar in size
to your business.
So if you search on Google forthe keywords that you find on
the Google Keyword Planner andit's a bunch of startup
(10:56):
companies or smaller businessesin your startup,
then I would say that's a goodkeyword to go after.
It's still going to be alittle tough at least.
But at least you know,now you're not targeting all
these big corporate websiteswhere you probably don't have
any chance of ranking for thatinitially. Over time,
if you build up the rightsignals to Google then
you can get up there.
But Google Keyword Planneris a free tool.
(11:17):
There's paid tools if you wantto buy a tool like Ahrefs or Moz
or Semrush or tons of otherpaid tools out there.
But they pretty much get alltheir data from the Google
Keyword Planner.
They just make it look nicer andprettier and easier to kind
of digest all that stuff.
But really you don't need topay for these paid tools.
The Google Keyword Plannerfrom Google.
(11:37):
So I would trust that more thanany of these other third
party tools.
But they're all good if you wantto pay for it. It's not bad.
But that's really interestingyou say that actually because,
you know, I, wethere aren't that I've never
heard actually someone say thatin terms of, you know,
these tools,they're okay if you're willing
(11:58):
to pay for them.
But they really take the datafrom, from Google anyway,
which you can get for free.
So the data we get out of Googlekeyword planner is 80% of it.
Right?
It's listening to you talk.
If I've understood it right,80% of it is just what.
You get for free from GoogleKeyword Planner.
So the other software might makeit easier to help you.
(12:21):
Okay so this is great.
So I can go to Keyword Planner,I can go and find some buyer
intent keywords,I can spend a bit of time
researching those.
And I can see whether bigcorporates are on there or
whether I think I've gota bit of a chance.
And I appreciate this is moresometimes an art than a science,
more sort of feelingthan reality.
But in my head, Brendan,there's two things that I'm
(12:47):
thinking about here.
There's the old schoolmethodology and maybe
it's still,maybe it's not old school still,
maybe it's still very real whichis to go away and find the
questions your customersare asking, specifically asking
them to Google.
So we were always told look atyour customer service enquiries.
(13:09):
What questions are peopleasking? Type them into Google,
see what comes up and then writea blog post around that question
that was sort of one wayand then the other.
The other one that I want to getinto a little bit is how we,
how we do SEO for our productsthemselves, you know,
on a product page.
But let's start with the blogs.
(13:30):
Is that,is that still a strategy?
Is that still working these daysor is that yesteryear?
No, those are still reallyimportant.
Blogs are really important.
But the questions,because people usually ask
questions into Google andwant to get an answer.
And you could just,if you don't know what
questions like,I mean if you don't have a
(13:50):
customer support or if you'renot getting lots of people that
are asking you the samequestions over and over again,
Then what I would do is go intoGoogle, search for your keyword.
Yep.
And then scroll down in Google.
There's a section calledPeople Also Ask.
These are all high search volumequestions that people
commonly ask Google.
So you can put your main keywordin there and then see all these
questions that Google constantlygets about that keyword.
(14:13):
And then you can incorporatethose into your website,
writing it as a blog post.
But also you can make FAQFrequently asked Questions
a section on each page.
So like your product pagesor your category pages,
you can add a FAQ section.
Ask copy those questionsverbatim as they are,
answer them in your own voice,don't copy the answers.
(14:34):
And if you mark it up withschema.org it's a programming
language that the search enginescreated like 10 years ago,
then you potentially might showup in that people also Ask,
you might get that featuredsnippet at the top of Google.
You also might show up for voicesearches because people
are asking questions,they want to get that answer.
So it's really beneficial and itgives you a lot of benefit by
(14:56):
taking those questions,answering them on your website,
either as a blog post,standalone blog post,
or making an FAQ sectionon each page,
answering those questions there.
And does it matter if you.
I, sorry to get in the weedsa little bit here,
but if I'm going to do the dothem as FAQs on my page,
(15:17):
does it matter if I dothem as an accordion?
Does that impact it, you know,where it sort of collapses
and I've seen that a lot.
Or do I have to have it all asexpanded text straight
off the bat?
No.
So as long as you're not hidingit, that's what matters.
So as long as you're not puttingin like font size 0.001 and
background is white and thenyou put a white font color.
(15:38):
We used to do that back in 2005.
I can't believe there's stillpeople doing that. You know,
you just make it white text on awhite background and keyword
stuff a page.
Yeah,hopefully you're not doing that.
But the accordion,if you search on Google,
that people also ask sectionis an accordion.
So Google's using an accordion.
So if Google's using it,then it's okay to do it.
(15:58):
I wouldn't worry too muchbecause you're not hiding it and
it doesn't make it looka little bit cleaner.
It's not so cluttered anddoesn't take up so much
space at accordion.
But just don't hide it.
That's number one is don't betrying to trick Google because
Google's been around for way toolong and they've seen all these
and they know them all.
And don't think that you'regetting creative by putting
(16:18):
in a font size.01.
Yeah, I don't.
They've definitely got moremoney than me to figure
this out. Right. So I,it's it's really interesting.
So what about then thinkingabout content marketing, SEO?
So we've gone,we've looked at some questions
and you know, you like.
I love your suggestion.
(16:39):
You know, in fact,if I let me pull up my keyboard
now let's do something.
I'm just going to go to Googlelet's go to google.com and let's
type in mechanical pencil.
Just because my daughter wasasking me for one earlier.
That's why it's top of my mind.
Mechanical pencil.
(17:00):
So I scroll down to thebottom of the page and
we've got related searches.
Mechanical pencil for drawing,mechanical pencil for writing.
So I suppose I can differentiatea little bit on those.
Scroll down.
It just seems to keep on goingand going and going.
Is that because I pickeda product?
(17:22):
No, it should have that.
People also ask section doesn'thave it for all searches,
But I'd say 90% of them have it.
That's interesting that it'snot done that. It just,
it's like an infinity.
I've never seen itdo that before.
So if I put in mechanicalpencil for drawing.
Let's choose the first one.
Oh, here we go. People also ask.
It's actually under the firstlisting. Okay,
(17:45):
so are mechanical pencilsgood for drawing? Right.
So I could put that as aquestion on my page.
Are mechanical pencilsgood for drawing?
And I could write anarticle about that.
Can I ask you a question?
Is it worth me doing a,I don't know,
four to seven minute video withthe same title where in effect
(18:06):
I'm saying the same thing asI've written in the video and
bring YouTube into it as well?
Yeah,that's definitely not a bad
thing to do because YouTube isthe second most popular website
on the Internet.
And if you could just capturemore traffic through YouTube.
Google owns YouTube.
Sometimes when you do searchfor keywords in Google,
you'll see YouTube videosappear or videos appear.
(18:28):
90 of the time it's goingto be a YouTube video.
So if someone is searchingfor mechanical pencil,
you could potentially haveyour website rank.
You could have your video rank.
If you optimize your images,images will rank.
If you optimize the productsthrough Google Merchant
center in that feed,then those products might rank
there and just gives youmore free real estate.
But I would definitely,if you are making that video,
(18:49):
embed that video onyour website.
And because people's attentionspans are so short,
they don't want to read anymore.
You don't want to. Yeah,it's tough.
So if you have a video there,people are probably going to
watch the video versus reading a400 or 800 or a thousand word
article or text block there.
Yeah, no,I'm definitely one of those
people that would watch thevideo rather than read the text
(19:12):
because I'm a lazy toe rag.
So this is.
So I've got the, I've got,I've got my understanding of
that. So let's Think then,if we can,
about the product page.
Let's dive into thata little bit.
What are some of the bestpractices I need to think about
for my mechanical pencil pagewith all my draw, you know,
(19:32):
where I'm doing my,my nice drawing,
mechanical pencil.
And shout out to Tom Studio,by the way,
Tom studio.com I think it is.
Got a lovely mechanical pencil.
I was looking at that earlier,but that's another story.
Love their website.
So yeah,so what are some of the best
(19:53):
practices that I need to sort ofthink about when it comes
to that product page?
I mean the title usually is themost important aspect is making
sure you have keywords in thattitle or make it descriptive and
then making sure you have text.
So if you just have a bunch ofimages and stuff like that,
that's okay.
But Google struggles to readimages and videos.
(20:14):
They can read the file nameon images. So if you,
whenever you add imagesto your website,
if it's a mechanical pencil,name it mechanical-pencil.jpg or
if you have like fivepictures of it,
maybe switch it up to mechanicalpencils Pencil that
mechanical jpeg.
So you're hitting on all thesedifferent variations.
Yeah.
And then upload the image.
(20:36):
It usually asks for likean alt text or alt tag,
making sure you add that as welland just pretty much copying
whatever the file name is.
For the alt tag or alt text.
That's going to help you rankfor Google image searches.
But you still need to put text,so.
So you need to describe whatthat is with like bullet points.
Like if you look at Amazon,they have like bullet points at
(20:57):
the top and then they have likewhen you scroll down a
big block of text.
Like so for user conversion orfor usability and conversions,
you don't want to have that bigblock of text at the top.
So Amazon makes it really easyto navigate through.
Has like 3 views, the price,the bullet points, the title,
the image right thereon the screen.
So you don't even have to scrolldown because the majority of
(21:18):
people will never scroll down ona website. It seems weird,
but most people don't scrollor don't swipe.
So whatever you see on thescreen is above the fold.
You have to have all yourprinted information up there,
make it easy to read for people.
And then once you scroll down,then you can put all
that stuff for SEO,like this big block of text,
all that content andthings like that.
Because Google's going toread from top to bottom,
(21:38):
so they're going to See allthat stuff, people,
they don't really scrolldown that far,
so they're just looking forwhat they're looking for.
And once they find it,that's all they're
going to look at.
They're not going to scroll allthe way to the bottom of the
website. Some people do,but most people do not
scroll down that far.
So making sure you havethat balance of SEO,
playing that content thereand then for people,
making it easy to read,easy to navigate through,
(22:00):
and just making it. Yeah,having that.
That balance for both.
So when you're creating theblock of text and you're
creating the bullet points,are you using relevant keywords
specifically in there as well?
Are you?
I guess in some respects. So,again, this might be old school,
(22:22):
but it used to be that I've seencopywriters sort of start with
the keywords and then build therest of the text around it.
I don't know if that's still apractice or whether you are
not that, you know,doesn't matter if you include
the keyword once or 20 times inthat text anymore. You know,
I don't know if there's aweighting to that anymore.
So the way to figure that out isyou have to go into Google,
(22:43):
search for that keyword.
So we're doing mechanicalpencils.
Search mechanical pencils,and open up all the websites
that rank on that first page ofGoogle, skip over the ads,
but open up all those websites,and then you could average out.
How much content is eachwebsite writing?
Is everyone writing 100 words?
Then you should probablywrite 150 words.
If everyone's writing2,000 words,
(23:05):
probably want to write2,100 words.
So you want to do a little bitmore than your competition.
But also you could try andthere's tools that could
help out with this.
Like surfer SEO is a greattool that will do it,
which will actually readthrough all those.
The first couple pageson Google.
Yeah.
And I'll show you, on average,most websites will write
mechanical pencils five to tentimes. So then you're like,
(23:28):
all right,I want to stay within the
average. I want to write.
Mechanical pencil should be onmy page five to 10 times,
somewhere in that average.
Because with SEO,it's not one size fits all.
Every website is different,Every keyword is different.
And we got to figure out,what have your competitors done
and how could we do abetter job of it?
And that's where you got toanalyze each website to
see what they've done,what keywords are
(23:48):
they using what?
Variations like long tailkeywords, synonyms, plurals,
and things like that.
So you want to put your highestsearch volume keyword in the
title and at the topof the page,
but then you want to blend invariations of long
tail keywords,reordering the keywords.
Maybe put pencil or mechanical.
(24:09):
Instead of putting mechanicalpencils,
you could say pencils that aremechanical. So mixing it up.
Because the way people search,it's always going
to be different.
The way I search and you search,it might be similar,
but we might add a wordor add remove a word.
So why try to tapinto all those?
And that's where the keywordresearch that we did initially.
Will show you what keywords thatyou potentially might
(24:30):
want to rank for.
Then you could sprinkle themin throughout that content.
So this,I mean this is fascinating and I
love this idea of likeif I go on to.
I'm on mechanical pencil fordrawing now and the first one,
which is not actually,it's bizarre because there's
no sponsored.
That's really interesting.
There's no sponsored ads.
(24:51):
So if I go to the firstone to casart.co.uk
mechanical pencils is the title.
They've got mechanical pencilsin like the breadcrumb
navigation.
Is that still important todo something like that?
For breadcrumbs,especially E commerce,
there's a way to just jump back.
(25:13):
Well,for people it's a way to jump
back to like a categorysubcategory. Sub subcategories.
But also for Google theylook at internal links.
So this is a link to internallyto another page on your website
and you want to link yourcategory to the subcategory,
you want to link yoursubcategory to the sub
subcategory and so on.
(25:33):
And you want to link thoseproducts to the sub subcat or
however you structure it,but you want to link
them all together.
Yeah.
So the breadcrumbs are justanother way to link everything
together.
Sometimes they show up inthe search results,
not all the time.
Google's kind of takingthat away.
But they did sometimesshow up in there.
So if you mark up thebreadcrumbs with schema,
that will get them topotentially show up in the
(25:54):
Google search results.
Yeah.
Okay, so they've got a,they've actually got under the
title on their category pagethey've got a small
paragraph of text.
Now remember we started doingthis for the beauty company
to help us rank better.
So rather than just havingmechanical pencils as the
category listing page and thenjust showing me, you know,
50 mechanical pencils,they've actually put a sort of
(26:15):
small paragraph oftext in there.
That which I find interestingbecause that's above all the
filters, all the sort by brand.
It's sort of the firstthing that we see.
And is that kind of thingimportant for something
like a category page?
Yep.
As you can see they're ranked onthat first page of Google.
(26:36):
And you'll see thatmost websites,
unless it's a big corporatewebsite,
big corporations don't reallyneed to put that text.
But if it's a small ormedium sized website,
they're going to have to havesome text like you can't just
have a bunch of images of yourproducts because Google
struggles to read images.
So they need that text tohelp them better read,
understand and know whatthat page is about.
And I usually tell people,put that text at the
(26:59):
very bottom.
It's okay to have like maybelike a couple sentences
at the top.
So have like one or two or threesentences at the top.
But you don't want to put 400words or 800 words at the top
because nobody wantsto read that.
If they're looking formechanical pencils,
how much do they really want toread about mechanical pencils?
Want to buy it.
But you need to have thatbalance. For Google,
having some text at the top andthen having a lot at the bottom,
(27:21):
which if you scrolldown on that page,
they might have a big block oftext at the very bottom,
which a lot of E commercewebsites will do just to help
Google better read that page andknow what that category.
This is fascinating.
I guess I'm listening to thisand in my head I'm thinking if
someone's starting out in Ecommerce, there's a lot here.
I mean you can,there's lots of rabbit trails.
(27:41):
I've already gone down andI'm hours into it.
Right.
Just doing all this researchand figuring out.
You mentioned surfer SEOwhich I have personally played
around on quite a bit actually.
But if you are a small company,it's just you or you and
a partner or something,you're doing this sort of E
commerce thing and it's, it's,it's consuming all your time.
(28:04):
SEO I think is one of thosethings that sort of gets pushed
down the list a little bit.
Is there,is there some AI that can help
us now or should we actuallyavoid AI when it comes to SEO?
I mean you could use AI,but AI is not accurate.
So that's the biggest thing is,yeah, make sure whatever you're
(28:24):
putting on your websiteis accurate.
If you just go intoChat GPT and say,
Write me a 500 word productdescription for mechanical
pencils,it'll write something up.
But if it doesn't know what towrite, it's going to make it up.
It's called AI hallucinations.
And it just makes up the answerand it doesn't tell you that's
making up the answer.
Which I feel like it should tellyou that if it doesn't know the
answer but makes it up and thenyou're just going to copy that,
(28:47):
post it on your website.
And Google said last year thatwe don't care who writes the
content because they can'ttell the difference.
Right.
They used to be able totell the difference,
but now the AI content is sogood that Google can't tell the
difference if it's writtenby humans or AI.
So they said we don't care whowrites the content as long
as it offers value.
And that really meansthat it's accurate.
So you could have AI help youout with like writing outlines.
(29:10):
That's really good for outlines.
But writing the content,it's not there yet. I mean,
it's getting really close to it.
So maybe in a year or two youcould use it to write
that content.
But I would still be a littleweary just because it's
not 100% accurate.
But it doesn't really matterwho writes it.
And that helps outfor E commerce.
If you're selling athousand products,
you have to write a thousandproduct descriptions.
(29:30):
That's a lot of content.
But nowadays you could help itor use AI to help out with it,
but just still got to double andtriple check it and make
sure it's accurate.
So the what if you don'tmind me asking,
what AI tools do you guys use?
Do you use ChatGPTand that's it,
or are there others that you'vesort of got on hand as well?
I mean,Google has their own version,
(29:51):
it's called Gemini.
And if we're doing SEO, well,ChatGPT is created by OpenAI,
which is Bing. So ChatGPT,if you ask it to write content,
this is actually Bingwriting it for you,
but Google has their ownversion, it's called Gemini.
So if we are tryingto rank on Google,
I would say use Google Gemini tohelp write that content because
then it's going to be Googlewriting the content for you and
(30:14):
hopefully they're going to do itin a way that they want
it written out,doesn't guarantee it, but hey,
at least you're getting Googleto write the content.
So it's a little bit better,I think for SEO purposes.
If you're just doing generalstuff like writing emails
and things like that,ChatGPT is fine.
But if you want to doSEO related tasks,
I'd say Google's version mightbe a little bit better.
(30:35):
They just redid their version.
They had one that was calledBard and they just rebranded it.
I haven't played aroundwith it too much.
I've used Bard a lot and it waspretty good because it gives you
a lot of insights to whatGoogle's looking for.
So if you say write me or like,help me do keyword research,
the keyword researchis not the best,
but it gives you like a list ofthings right below the keywords
(30:57):
that it recommends.
The Gemini or Google's version,saying like,
this is what we're looking for.
We recommend longtail variations.
We recommend doing thisand this and this.
So they're actually givingyou insights,
which Google really nevergives you help.
Usually you're tellingyou what not to do,
they're not tellingyou what to do.
So this is a little differentwhere they're actually saying,
this is what we want you to do.
Which is nice of them to do.
(31:18):
Yeah.
I mean, again,take everything with a grain of
salt that Google tells you,how accurate and how truthful
are they being?
Because do they really wantyou to do SEO? No,
they want you to run paid ads.
It's how they makeall their money.
So they're going to tellyou some things.
But I would still just take itall with a grain of salt.
Don't believe everythingthey tell you.
Yeah, it's very true. Very true.
And I've heard, I mean,I've heard a lot of good
(31:39):
things about Gemini.
I've not had too much chanceto play lots on it.
But I have heard some verygood things about it.
So I will take that.
Top tip there, Brandon.
Let's move on slightly,if I can. So, I mean,
we've talked a lot about,you know, if I'm starting out
in E commerce, these are some ofthe strategies.
What are some of the moreadvanced strategies that I
(32:01):
should be thinking about ormaybe even questions I should
be asking my marketing team,my SEO team, if I'm, you know,
already established in Ecommerce and we've got a,
a team working on stuff.
What should I be thinkingabout there?
Well we didn't talkabout backlinks.
And backlinks are what rankswebsites, right?
Backlinks are how Google becamepopular. So what is a backlink?
(32:22):
A backlink is a clickable linkfrom another website that
points to yours.
So let's say you're reading anarticle on entrepreneur.com and
there it says Brandon Leibowitz.
You click on it and itgoes to my website.
I'd be getting a backlinkfrom entrepreneur.com.
so the more websites that haveclickable links that
point to you,the more popular or trustworthy
(32:43):
Google sees you as,and then they look at those
keywords on your website.
But it doesn't work theother way around.
If you're not building backlinksGoogle's not going to trust you
and they're not going to link.
They don't trust. I mean,that's how Google,
their algorithm back in the 90s,yeah,
all these other search engines,they were just looking at
keywords, which, as you know,you could just throw any keyword
(33:04):
on your website.
That doesn't really mean that'swhat your website's about,
but that's how the searchengines worked in the past.
Google came along and said, no,no, no,
we're going to look at keywords,but we don't really care what
keywords you put on a websitebecause we know people
manipulate them.
So we want you to build trustby getting backlinks.
And still to this day,backlinks are such a big part
of Google's algorithm.
It's changed a lot how they lookat them over the years,
(33:25):
but they still do hold such abig impact on rankings where
I've never seen a website rankon Google without backlinks.
It's pretty much impossibleto rank without backlinks.
So this is, I mean,this is really interesting
both for,this is interesting for us as an
established company and also,I think if you're just
starting out,you've got to have then a
backlink building strategy.
(33:47):
And again,years ago it used to be you'd
just go and pay a company,whatever,
50 bucks and they'd put youon a thousand websites.
All of which Google probablyis very aware of right now.
So I wouldn't advise it.
How do I.
I guess that's the next keyquestion, isn't it?
What's a good backlink strategyfor me as a business?
How do I go about gettingthose backlinks?
(34:08):
There's tons of differentways to build backlinks,
but like you said,there's some tools where you
just click a button and you gethundreds of thousands of
backlinks instantaneously,which I had those tools
in the past,but they're really spammy
and it's low quality.
And nowadays it's all aboutquality, not quantity.
And with Google,what is the quality?
Backlink quality backlink meansit comes from a site that's
(34:28):
related to what you're doing.
So relevancy is very important.
If you're selling pencils,then we want websites.
It doesn't have to be otherpencil companies,
but anything somewhat related towhat you're doing. So like,
if you're doing like thedrawing pencils,
it could be like about artwebsites or about school
education,about children since children
might be using them.
(34:48):
Anything Somewhat related.
That's what matters to Google.
And then authoritativeness.
How popular,how big is this website?
If I give you a backlink from mywebsite, it's a good backlink,
but it's not the same as likeForbes or Wall Street Journal
or New York Times.
So the bigger the website,the more SEO value and the more
related to you, the better.
(35:09):
And there's lots of ways tobuild backlinks and there's
tools that will show me anywebsite's backlinks.
You have to pay for these tools.
The more popular ones would belike Ahrefs or Mods or Semrush,
where I would go into Google,search for your keywords,
see who's on that firstpage of Google,
write down all the website URLs,and then throw them into these
tools and look at theirbacklinks, right?
(35:29):
And one by one,you could start reaching
out to the website,started linking out to
your competition,because if someone is linking
out to your competitor,they would probably
link out to you.
You just have to figure out,how did they get that backlink?
Did a competitor writean article,
did they do a blog post,did they do a press release,
did they get an influencer towrite about a product
review about them?
Or do they do a podcast inter.
(35:50):
Or whatever it is?
You can pretty much reverseengineer their entire SEO
strategy and go after. Again,you don't want to go after every
backlink that they have becausesome are going to
be low quality.
You want to go afterthe good ones,
the ones that are relevant toyour industry and have
some authority.
Those are the two factors thatreally matter when you're
building backlinks so relevant.
To your industry and sitesof authority. And I mean,
(36:16):
for the British audiencelistening
I can, I can hear people going,oh, I don't want to reach out to
people. That's, that's,I'm going to annoy them.
You know, that's sort of,sort of tantamount doing
cold calling.
Whats your approach there? So,you know, you, you've obviously,
you found a backlink,it's going to a pretty
reasonable,authoritative website.
(36:37):
You figured out that,I don't know,
they wrote an article for theirwebsite or, you know.
Know something?
What's your approach?
How do you.
I guess how do I find the rightperson to talk to would
be one question.
And how do I come across asnot being a, you know,
a total doofus?
Yeah, I mean,if you just ask for a backlink,
not going to work.
But if you saw someone thatwrote an article on a website
(36:59):
and they mentioned youwere a competitor,
then you can reach out tothem and be like, hey,
I was reading your website oryour blog or whatever that
you read, and I offer,or I have a similar service or
product and I want to see if Icould write a free blog post for
you. So you gotta offer value.
So if they wrote a blog post,then you should offer them
a free blog post.
If you saw someonedid an interview,
(37:19):
then you could be like, hey,I'm in the same industry,
can you interview me?
Or if you saw that an influencerwrote a product review about it,
maybe you offer that influencera free sample of that product.
As long as it's nottoo expensive,
then you're gonna getthat backlink.
Or if you saw like someone did apodcast, you could be like, hey,
can I be a guest onyour podcast?
So it's all aboutoffering value.
(37:40):
If you're just askingfor a backlink,
nobody's going to say yes tothat. But if you offer value,
that's where you're going tohelp get people to be more
receptive and be like, okay,yeah,
you're going to write a blogpost for me? Sure,
I'll take a free blog post.
Or if you're going to giveme a free product, yeah,
I'll write a review for you.
Or if you're going to do ainterview, yeah, let's do it.
So trying to reverse engineertheir strategy also,
(38:01):
maybe you saw like they joinedlike the BBB or Chamber
of Commerce,or they're on Yelp or
TripAdvisor. I mean,maybe not for all your brands,
they might not be on it,but if they aren't,
then you gotta create a listingon that platform.
So sometimes you can just go inand create a listing
on these websites.
Some of them you might haveto pay for. But yeah,
all your competitors are on theBetter Business Bureau, the bbb,
(38:25):
which is pretty big inthe United States.
Then I would say spend the moneybecause they charge for that.
It's like a couplehundred dollars.
But all your competitorshave that backlink.
Then you want to have a similarbacklink profile to
your competition.
Sometimes you have to pay forthese backlinks. I mean,
most of the time youdo have to pay,
whether it's your timewriting a article,
your time doing an interview,you're,
(38:45):
you're giving out free products,so you're spending money.
So unfortunately, backlinks,in the past you could get them
for free pretty easily.
Nowadays it's not so easy andit's really tough to
get backlinks.
Thats really interesting.
So without putting words in yourmouth, Brendan, I'm curious,
what's the biggest mistake thatE commerce entrepreneurs are
making where SEO is concerned?
(39:07):
Is it the backlink strategyor is it something else?
Yeah,most people don't know about
backlinks and they've neverheard of them or. Yeah,
I get a lot of clients that cometo me and I tell them about
backlinks. They're like,I've never heard about
this before.
I've worked with other SEOcompanies in the past.
I'm just like,well they didn't build
backlinks.
I'm not sure what they werereally doing because
unfortunately withoutthose backlinks,
(39:29):
Google's not going to trust youand they're not going
to rank you.
So that's the biggest thing isthey don't know what backlinks
are or they do know whatbacklinks are and they've gone
to a site like Fiverr and theybought this gig for $10 where
they're getting a thousandbacklinks for $10,
which in the past back likein 2005, 6, 7, it worked.
Now it does not work and it'sgoing to do more harm than good.
(39:51):
So focusing on quality,not quantity,
which a lot of peopledon't realize,
you need to focus on like onegood backlink is going to be far
superior than the thousand lowquality ones that you buy.
Yeah.
And you use this word penalized.
And that's a question thatI have actually.
If you go down some of thesestrategies where you go on to
Fiverr and you buy likea thousand backlinks,
(40:12):
do Google understand whatyou're trying to do?
That you're trying to gamify thesystem and they're like,
not only are you out,you're like, you're negative,
you're in negativeequity right now.
Yep So they potentially canpenalize you and instead
of ranking higher,you're going to drop down in
rankings and they don't tellyou they've been penalized.
Sometimes they do in Googlesearch console,
(40:33):
they might tell you there,but they might not
also tell you.
So if you've been penalized theonly real way to see that is you
just see a drop in traffic.
So if you use Google Analyticsor Google Search Console you
just see a giant dipon one date.
Then you could try to piece ittogether and figure
out what happened.
Why did I get penalized?
They're really not goingto tell you why.
Sometimes they do but most ofthe time you don't know
(40:54):
if it's a backlinks,the content keyword AI
whatever it may be.
It's then it becomes like youhave to become an executive and
try to figure out what shouldI do and how do I fix this.
What about backlinksfrom social media?
So for example this weekone of the videos,
one of the short form videos wedid from one of our podcasts got
(41:17):
retweeted by someonequite retweeted,
reposted by someonequite famous.
Does that help me or doesthat not help me at all?
I mean it helps me in terms ofget video views but does it help
me from a backlink strategy?
Yeah,Google is blocked from social
media. So Twitter, Google or X,Google's partner with them.
So they could actually seetweets but other than that,
(41:37):
Google's block from Facebook,they could see your Facebook
page like how many likesand stuff like that.
But they don't really see yourposts and things like that.
So they're not able to see thatother people are posting
about you.
But it's not bad because if youare getting traffic from social
Google, Google can see that.
So Google sees that fromFacebook that person that
reposted you all of a sudden nowFacebook just sent a thousand
(41:59):
visitors to your website.
You will see that the socialsignal and a trust signal.
But the backlinks,they don't really count.
And also you want sitesare relevant.
If you're getting a bunchof social media sites,
Google's going to think thatyou're a social media site.
So if you're sellingbeauty products,
you want sites that are relatedto beauty, to wellness.
Doesn't have to be exactly whatyou're doing but you don't want
a bunch of social media sites tolink out to you. It's not bad,
(42:21):
but it just doesn't addthat relevancy aspect.
Brandon, let me ask you one,one more question.
I'm aware of timeand this one of the things which
intrigues me is in the past whenI've spoken to various marketing
companies and I'd love yourthoughts on this.
I get reports from variousmarketing Companies saying SEO
(42:44):
bought in an additional 20 grandworth of revenue this month.
Right.
So your SEO efforts has resultedin 20k's worth of sales.
I'm kind of curious on yourthoughts about this actually.
Is,is it straightforward to measure
the benefits and effects of SEOon sales directly like that,
(43:06):
or is it a bit more nuancedand complex than.
I shouldn't read too muchinto that figure.
I'm kind of curious aboutyour thoughts on it.
I mean, it's for E commerce.
It's nice because you couldtrack conversions
or actual sales.
Whereas like a service basedbusiness, I could be like,
all right, somebody called you,somebody filled out your form.
Like someone might be lookingfor a plumber,
(43:28):
but I don't know if theyactually use that plumber.
Whereas with E commerce,you could see the sales,
the dollar value there.
So I would definitelylook at that.
Because then you could lookthrough Google Analytics and see
SEO brought in this much sales,Facebook brought this
many sales, Instagram broughtthis many sales.
So you could see a dollarconversion,
how many conversions.
You also see the value ofrevenue that you're getting.
(43:50):
So I would look at that stuff.
But there are other ways tokind of look at it too.
But like indirectly,people might be going to your
website, they searched you,they found you,
they forgot about you,and then they see an ad that
pops up and then they click onthat ad, they buy from that ad.
So that ad's going to getthat attribution.
So it's not always going to bealways the correct attribution.
(44:10):
But SEO,I would say look at that,
the conversion value,the revenue through
Google Analytics.
It's a good starting point andit's definitely helpful to make
statistically informeddecisions.
Like then you're like, oh,SEO is bringing in the
majority of my sales.
Maybe I should really push moreof this SEO stuff. Yeah,
I'm running all paid ads.
They're not bringing inthat much revenue.
Maybe I should scaleaway from the ads.
(44:30):
Or maybe the inverse ishappening. Maybe, you know,
a bunch of sales from ads pushmore money in those ads.
If it's working.
As long as you're makinga return on ad spend.
Yeah, no, fair play, fair play.
Brandon listen.
Fascinating conversation.
I feel like we're justscratching the surface.
But so thank you forcoming on the show.
If people want to connect withyou, if they want to reach you,
(44:51):
get a hold of you,find out more about SEO,
optimum optimizers,what's the best way to do that?
Yeah.
So anybody that wants to learnmore and stuck around
to the end.
I create a special gift for themif they go to my website@SEO
optimizers.com that's S E OO-P-T I I Z E-R S.com
forward slash gift.
(45:12):
And they can find that giftthere along with my contact
information and a bunch ofclasses I've done over the years
I've thrown up for free so theycould see step by step how to do
a lot of stuff thatwe talked about.
And also they want a freewebsite 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.
Fantastic.
SEO Optimizers speltthe American way.
(45:34):
Dear British people,SEO optimizers.com forward/gift.
We will of course link to thatin the show notes as well,
which will be on the website.
So Brandon, listen man,anything else that's top of mind
for you that we've not talkedabout that we really should
be thinking about?
I would just say be patientwith it all.
SEO is a long term strategy anda lot of people love that
(45:56):
instant gratification and wantto see the results right away
and they get discouraged if theydon't see that traffic
coming in. Yeah,but be patient with it and
keep building it up.
And over time you're going tosee your traffic increase.
But don't just expectit to skyrocket.
I mean sometimes it does.
Sometimes you go viral and justget those like instantaneous
rankings.
But you have to work at it andjust keep working at it and
don't get discouraged if youdon't see that immediate
(46:18):
results.
You'll get there eventually.
Love that, love that patience.
Something that we're not knownfor in the world of E commerce.
Yeah, I'm sure many of yourclients like,
I want to be number one and Iwant to be there tomorrow.
How do I do that?
It's like.
I wish I could just flip thatswitch if you need that.
Immediate action.
(46:39):
Paid ads are good.
But this patience.
Patience is a virtue.
Patience is definitely a virtue.
Yeah, apparently brilliant.
Well Brandon,thanks for coming on man.
Genuinely great conversation.
Love meeting you,love hearing what
you had to say.
And yeah,it's still a big deal SEO.
So do check out Brandon's stuff.
Seoptimizers.com GIF but thanksbro, I appreciate it.
(47:03):
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Well, there you go,another fantastic conversation
wrapped up.
Thanks again to Brandon forjoining me today. Also,
big shout out to today's showsponsor, the E Commerce Cohort.
Remember, go check themout@ecommercecohort.com come
join us in the monthlyMastermind.
Be great to see you in there.
And of course be sure to followthe E Commerce podcast wherever
(47:24):
you get your podcasts from,because we've got yet more great
conversations lined up,obviously,
and I don't want you tomiss any of them.
And in case no one has told youyet today, let me be the first.
You are awesome. Yes,you are created awesome.
It's just a burden you have tobear. Brandon has to bear it.
I've gotta bear it.
You've gotta bear it as well.
(47:44):
Now the E Commerce Podcast isproduced by Pod Junction,
the new name for Oreo Media.
You can find our entire archiveof episodes on your favorite
podcast app. The the team,the wonderful, beautiful,
phenomenal, fantastic,amazing team that makes this
show possible is Sadaf Banonand Tanya Hutzlak.
Theme music was written by JoshEdmondson and as I mentioned,
(48:05):
if you would like to read thetranscript or show notes,
head over to the websiteecommercepodcast.net that's it
from me. That's it from Brandon.
Thank you so muchfor joining us.
Have a fantastic week whereveryou are in the world.
I'll see you next time.
Bye for now.
It.
Well, hello and welcome to the ECommerce Podcast with me,
your host, Matt Edmondson.
Sorry,I got a little bit carried away
there. Just missed my cue.
But that's okay.
Welcome to the show.
It's good to have you with us.
Its a show that helps youdeliver E Commerce. Wow. Yes,
it is.
That's what we're here for.
And to help us do just that,today we are chatting with
(00:35):
Brandon Leibowitz about AI,about predominantly SEO,
about conversion.
Are we going to get into.
Oh, there's no doubt about itbecause we have an expert
on the show. Yes, we do.
So grab your notebooks,grab your pens.
You are going to want to findout and make note of all
kinds of stuff today.
So make sure you do that now.
(00:56):
If this is your first time withus, a very warm welcome to you.
And of course,if you're a long standing E
Commerce podcast listener,an extra warm,
extra warm welcome to you.
It's great that you're here.
Whether you're new,whether you're an old dinosaur
like me it's just good to bearound E Commerce folks.
So thanks for joining us today.
And of course,this show is brought to you by
(01:18):
the wonderful E Commerce Cohort.
If you haven't done so already,do check that out.
Ecommerce cohort.com.
it's our monthly mastermindgroup. You can come,
you can join in,you can take advantage of all
the workshops and stuff whichare going on in there.
It will be great tosee you in there.
So you can find outmore@ecommerce cohort.com.
(01:39):
so let's talk about today'sguest, shall we?
We're talking about E commerce,we're talking about how to,
you know,thrive online and all that sort
of stuff. So let's chat with Mr.
Brandon Leibowitz. Like I said,the mastermind behind
SEO Optimizers.
He's been doing that since 2007.
Where magic meets marketingfor small and medium sized
(02:02):
businesses with a sprinkle ofdigital wizardry as well. Oh,
yes.
He's on a quest to amplifyonline traffic,
turning clicks into clientsand searches into sales.
Are you ready to launch yourdigital presence into the
stratosphere? Well,let me tell you,
Brendan's your guy. Yes, he is.
Love that bio, Love that intro.
Brandon, welcome to the show,man. How are we doing today?
(02:25):
I am doing great.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, no problem at all.
All the way from sunny la.
So there's a bit of a timedifference between the two of us
as we can probably tell ifyou're watching the video,
a little bit of a difference.
But hey, we're making it work.
I see what technology is,it helps connect us all.
And mid evening for you.
(02:46):
But yeah, no, it's all good,it's all good.
I'm a big fan of la and I I cansee why people live out there,
you know.
And there's a little town calledSan Clemente just south of la
where a very good friendof mine lives.
And so quite often ifI'm in the States,
I'll go spend some time downthere, go the beach,
he'll go surfing,I'll go read a book because
(03:07):
frankly I can't surf. It's just,it's just never going to work.
But a beautiful partof the world.
So have you always been in LA orare you an import
into that area?
I grew up here and it's tough toleave with the nice weather.
So just been here prettymuch my whole life.
Yeah.
And do you do the wholesports thing?
That's a big thing over there,isn't it?
Like what is the LA Rams, thethe big football team,
(03:31):
do you do that?
Yeah, now that we got a footballteam like two years ago,
so been checking them outa little bit. But yeah,
now before that we didn't haveanything so we were just kind of
cried over here we had lotsof basketball teams,
no football team,and now we got two
football teams.
So they actually doubled downand went all in and gave us two
when we had none before.
(03:51):
Right, well thank you for that.
Yeah, yeah,we have this saying in England,
right, which isthey talk about how when you
wait for a bus, cause you know,a lot of people use
buses over here.
How when you wait for a bus ittakes a long time for one to
turn up, but when one turns up,they all turn up together,
you know,like so three turn up together.
It's a bit like that with yourfootball team, but yeah,
(04:13):
that's fascinating.
So tell me a little bit aboutSEO optimizers. You know,
we read in the bio there thatyou've been doing
that since 2007,which in digital years Brandon
is a flipping long time.
And so, you know,well done for staying
the course.
But how did you getinvolved in that?
I just fell into it.
(04:34):
After I graduated from schoolI got my degree in business
marketing and the first job Igot out or offered was helping
out a company with their digitalmarketing back in 2007,
which I didn't really know muchabout it back then. They said,
don't worry,we don't know much either.
We're gonna learn with you.
Kind of interesting.
And that's kind of helpful,right?
(04:55):
Yeah. I was like, all right,let's do this together.
And they took me to classesand workshops, seminars,
and kind of just after workingthere for a few months,
just kind of realized everyone'sprobably gonna have a website
in the future.
This digital thing is probablynot gonna go anywhere
anytime soon.
And there's lots of differentways to get traffic.
I was helping out.
They're like their social,doing paid ads,
(05:15):
doing email marketing,doing SEO and all that works to
get traffic. But I just thought,who doesn't want free traffic?
SEO is just a way toget free traffic.
And that's what I focusedon over the years,
working at different advertisingagencies as a director of SEO.
And before work and after workand on my lunch breaks,
I'd work on my own company andeventually built that up to
where I was able to quit my joband focus solely on this.
(05:37):
And been doing that ever since.
Fantastic.
And so you missedyou must enjoy it,
because I think with SEO,it's one of those things that
if you don't enjoy it,you don't stick it out.
Right.
There's got to be a deep passionfor it to be in it for
the long term.
Am I right in my assumption?
(05:57):
It's just one of those thingsI've always thought about
people in SEO,if you've been around
for a while and.
It'S kind of like a game,like trying to figure out how
Google works or trying toreverse engineer your
competition and seeing howthey're getting those rankings.
So makes it interesting.
It's not the same thingover and over again.
Google's constantlychanging and,
yeah keeps you on your toes,I imagine.
Actually,the Google of 2007 and the
(06:21):
Google of 2024 at thetime of recording,
I imagine they're actuallyquite different.
Much, much different.
It was a lot easier to rank backin 2007. Now it's. Well,
also there is more competition.
So that's a big thingwith SEO is. I mean,
we want to figure out how Googleworks and we want
to beat Google.
(06:41):
But Google changesevery single day.
So what really matters is who'son that first page of Google
for your keywords,how much SEO they
have they done,and how can we do a
better job of it.
And nowadays everyonehas a website,
so it just become verycompetitive, very saturated,
and becomes a Littlebit tougher.
And also Google's become muchmore sophisticated too.
Back then in 2007 you just throwa couple keywords on your
(07:02):
website, build some backlinks,and you would rank pretty
much instantaneously.
Now it's a lot morethat goes into it.
So it's interestingyou say that.
Actually there's a lot becauseI remember, you know,
when we launched our beautycompany in 2006, we were,
we were instantly on page onefor some quite key brands
of in back in the day.
(07:23):
And you know,competition's different now
and so on and so forth.
I kind of think if I was,if I started again today with
that beauty website,it would be so much harder to do
half the things that we did.
Right. And I'm not,you know It's just a good
thought experiment to go well,how would we do it differently
today?
So if someone is startingout in E commerce,
(07:45):
I mean do they have a chancewhere SEO is concerned? I mean,
how would you know,if there are.
If you go to pageone and type in,
or you go to Google and type insome of the beauty brands,
you know, there's.
How do I even think aboutgetting, you know,
high up in the SEO rankingsas a new player?
Yeah,that's where you just gotta find
something more unique anddifferentiating yourself.
(08:08):
So if you're just selling thesame thing that everyone
else is selling,it's gonna be very saturated
and tough to rank.
But if you could find somethingmore niche that helps make
yourself stand out, like maybe.
I mean,if you're selling like something
really general,like clothing or T shirts,
it's gonna be really tough.
You got Amazon,Walmart and all these big
corporate websitesthat rank for it.
(08:29):
But if you can find somethingmore niche,
like maybe sell organic cottonchildren's T shirts,
so something that helpsdifferentiate yourself,
it's still going tobe competitive,
but it's just going to be alittle bit less competition.
So that's where you got to kindof find like something that
helps you stand out.
Otherwise you're just going toget lost in the sea of other
websites out there.
And over time you can rankfor that keyword.
(08:50):
But if you're just starting out,it's going to take a long time
to rank for these reallycompetitive keywords.
So that's where you find theselow competition keywords,
target those and then eventuallybuild it up where you can go for
those bigger ones in the future.
So low competition keywordsthen. Let's start there.
Sorry Brandon we're just jumpingstraight into this.
I'm into this already.
(09:11):
Its one of those things whereit's easy to say, isn't it?
Just go choose low competitionkeywords and you should
rank for those.
I'm like well howdo I find them?
And if they're low competition,are they low competition
for a reason? I. E.
They're not really worth thetime and effort and energy in
doing it, if that makes sense.
(09:32):
Yeah.
I mean some of those.
Yeah.
When you do keyword research andI'll explain how you could
do it in a minute,but sometimes you'll find these
low search volume keywords thator that don't have much
competition and they might nothave any search volume either.
So they might not be thebest to go after.
Because just because it's lowcompetition doesn't always
mean it's the best.
Also you want buyer intent basedkeywords that are especially
(09:53):
for E commerce.
You want keywords that are goingto get those conversions.
But the way there's lots ofdifferent tools that you could
use for keyword research.
There's a free tool from Googlecalled the Google Keyword
Planner and that show you howmany people search for your
keyword every single month.
So you could go put yourkeywords into the Google
Keyword Planner,it's going to give you hundreds,
thousands sometimes of otherkeywords related to
(10:16):
your keyword.
Yeah.
And then if you go through allthose keywords and see which
ones get search volume,which ones get a decent amount
of monthly searches,but just because it gets a
decent amount of monthlysearches,
you want to actually take thatkeyword and search it in Google
and see who's on that firstpage of Google.
And if you just see it's all bigcorporate websites and you're
just a startup maybe notthe best keyword,
(10:36):
but if you're a big corporatewebsite then you can target
those keywords.
So it's all about knowing whereyou are in the business cycle
and targeting keywords that aresimilar inside or that websites
rank for those keywords thatare similar in size
to your business.
So if you search on Google forthe keywords that you find on
the Google Keyword Planner andit's a bunch of startup
(10:56):
companies or smaller businessesin your startup,
then I would say that's a goodkeyword to go after.
It's still going to be alittle tough at least.
But at least you know,now you're not targeting all
these big corporate websiteswhere you probably don't have
any chance of ranking for thatinitially. Over time,
if you build up the rightsignals to Google then
you can get up there.
But Google Keyword Planneris a free tool.
(11:17):
There's paid tools if you wantto buy a tool like Ahrefs or Moz
or Semrush or tons of otherpaid tools out there.
But they pretty much get alltheir data from the Google
Keyword Planner.
They just make it look nicer andprettier and easier to kind
of digest all that stuff.
But really you don't need topay for these paid tools.
The Google Keyword Plannerfrom Google.
(11:37):
So I would trust that more thanany of these other third
party tools.
But they're all good if you wantto pay for it. It's not bad.
But that's really interestingyou say that actually because,
you know, I, wethere aren't that I've never
heard actually someone say thatin terms of, you know,
these tools,they're okay if you're willing
(11:58):
to pay for them.
But they really take the datafrom, from Google anyway,
which you can get for free.
So the data we get out of Googlekeyword planner is 80% of it.
Right?
It's listening to you talk.
If I've understood it right,80% of it is just what.
You get for free from GoogleKeyword Planner.
So the other software might makeit easier to help you.
(12:21):
Okay so this is great.
So I can go to Keyword Planner,I can go and find some buyer
intent keywords,I can spend a bit of time
researching those.
And I can see whether bigcorporates are on there or
whether I think I've gota bit of a chance.
And I appreciate this is moresometimes an art than a science,
more sort of feelingthan reality.
But in my head, Brendan,there's two things that I'm
(12:47):
thinking about here.
There's the old schoolmethodology and maybe
it's still,maybe it's not old school still,
maybe it's still very real whichis to go away and find the
questions your customersare asking, specifically asking
them to Google.
So we were always told look atyour customer service enquiries.
(13:09):
What questions are peopleasking? Type them into Google,
see what comes up and then writea blog post around that question
that was sort of one wayand then the other.
The other one that I want to getinto a little bit is how we,
how we do SEO for our productsthemselves, you know,
on a product page.
But let's start with the blogs.
(13:30):
Is that,is that still a strategy?
Is that still working these daysor is that yesteryear?
No, those are still reallyimportant.
Blogs are really important.
But the questions,because people usually ask
questions into Google andwant to get an answer.
And you could just,if you don't know what
questions like,I mean if you don't have a
(13:50):
customer support or if you'renot getting lots of people that
are asking you the samequestions over and over again,
Then what I would do is go intoGoogle, search for your keyword.
Yep.
And then scroll down in Google.
There's a section calledPeople Also Ask.
These are all high search volumequestions that people
commonly ask Google.
So you can put your main keywordin there and then see all these
questions that Google constantlygets about that keyword.
(14:13):
And then you can incorporatethose into your website,
writing it as a blog post.
But also you can make FAQFrequently asked Questions
a section on each page.
So like your product pagesor your category pages,
you can add a FAQ section.
Ask copy those questionsverbatim as they are,
answer them in your own voice,don't copy the answers.
(14:34):
And if you mark it up withschema.org it's a programming
language that the search enginescreated like 10 years ago,
then you potentially might showup in that people also Ask,
you might get that featuredsnippet at the top of Google.
You also might show up for voicesearches because people
are asking questions,they want to get that answer.
So it's really beneficial and itgives you a lot of benefit by
(14:56):
taking those questions,answering them on your website,
either as a blog post,standalone blog post,
or making an FAQ sectionon each page,
answering those questions there.
And does it matter if you.
I, sorry to get in the weedsa little bit here,
but if I'm going to do the dothem as FAQs on my page,
(15:17):
does it matter if I dothem as an accordion?
Does that impact it, you know,where it sort of collapses
and I've seen that a lot.
Or do I have to have it all asexpanded text straight
off the bat?
No.
So as long as you're not hidingit, that's what matters.
So as long as you're not puttingin like font size 0.001 and
background is white and thenyou put a white font color.
(15:38):
We used to do that back in 2005.
I can't believe there's stillpeople doing that. You know,
you just make it white text on awhite background and keyword
stuff a page.
Yeah,hopefully you're not doing that.
But the accordion,if you search on Google,
that people also ask sectionis an accordion.
So Google's using an accordion.
So if Google's using it,then it's okay to do it.
(15:58):
I wouldn't worry too muchbecause you're not hiding it and
it doesn't make it looka little bit cleaner.
It's not so cluttered anddoesn't take up so much
space at accordion.
But just don't hide it.
That's number one is don't betrying to trick Google because
Google's been around for way toolong and they've seen all these
and they know them all.
And don't think that you'regetting creative by putting
(16:18):
in a font size.01.
Yeah, I don't.
They've definitely got moremoney than me to figure
this out. Right. So I,it's it's really interesting.
So what about then thinkingabout content marketing, SEO?
So we've gone,we've looked at some questions
and you know, you like.
I love your suggestion.
(16:39):
You know, in fact,if I let me pull up my keyboard
now let's do something.
I'm just going to go to Googlelet's go to google.com and let's
type in mechanical pencil.
Just because my daughter wasasking me for one earlier.
That's why it's top of my mind.
Mechanical pencil.
(17:00):
So I scroll down to thebottom of the page and
we've got related searches.
Mechanical pencil for drawing,mechanical pencil for writing.
So I suppose I can differentiatea little bit on those.
Scroll down.
It just seems to keep on goingand going and going.
Is that because I pickeda product?
(17:22):
No, it should have that.
People also ask section doesn'thave it for all searches,
But I'd say 90% of them have it.
That's interesting that it'snot done that. It just,
it's like an infinity.
I've never seen itdo that before.
So if I put in mechanicalpencil for drawing.
Let's choose the first one.
Oh, here we go. People also ask.
It's actually under the firstlisting. Okay,
(17:45):
so are mechanical pencilsgood for drawing? Right.
So I could put that as aquestion on my page.
Are mechanical pencilsgood for drawing?
And I could write anarticle about that.
Can I ask you a question?
Is it worth me doing a,I don't know,
four to seven minute video withthe same title where in effect
(18:06):
I'm saying the same thing asI've written in the video and
bring YouTube into it as well?
Yeah,that's definitely not a bad
thing to do because YouTube isthe second most popular website
on the Internet.
And if you could just capturemore traffic through YouTube.
Google owns YouTube.
Sometimes when you do searchfor keywords in Google,
you'll see YouTube videosappear or videos appear.
(18:28):
90 of the time it's goingto be a YouTube video.
So if someone is searchingfor mechanical pencil,
you could potentially haveyour website rank.
You could have your video rank.
If you optimize your images,images will rank.
If you optimize the productsthrough Google Merchant
center in that feed,then those products might rank
there and just gives youmore free real estate.
But I would definitely,if you are making that video,
(18:49):
embed that video onyour website.
And because people's attentionspans are so short,
they don't want to read anymore.
You don't want to. Yeah,it's tough.
So if you have a video there,people are probably going to
watch the video versus reading a400 or 800 or a thousand word
article or text block there.
Yeah, no,I'm definitely one of those
people that would watch thevideo rather than read the text
(19:12):
because I'm a lazy toe rag.
So this is.
So I've got the, I've got,I've got my understanding of
that. So let's Think then,if we can,
about the product page.
Let's dive into thata little bit.
What are some of the bestpractices I need to think about
for my mechanical pencil pagewith all my draw, you know,
(19:32):
where I'm doing my,my nice drawing,
mechanical pencil.
And shout out to Tom Studio,by the way,
Tom studio.com I think it is.
Got a lovely mechanical pencil.
I was looking at that earlier,but that's another story.
Love their website.
So yeah,so what are some of the best
(19:53):
practices that I need to sort ofthink about when it comes
to that product page?
I mean the title usually is themost important aspect is making
sure you have keywords in thattitle or make it descriptive and
then making sure you have text.
So if you just have a bunch ofimages and stuff like that,
that's okay.
But Google struggles to readimages and videos.
(20:14):
They can read the file nameon images. So if you,
whenever you add imagesto your website,
if it's a mechanical pencil,name it mechanical-pencil.jpg or
if you have like fivepictures of it,
maybe switch it up to mechanicalpencils Pencil that
mechanical jpeg.
So you're hitting on all thesedifferent variations.
Yeah.
And then upload the image.
(20:36):
It usually asks for likean alt text or alt tag,
making sure you add that as welland just pretty much copying
whatever the file name is.
For the alt tag or alt text.
That's going to help you rankfor Google image searches.
But you still need to put text,so.
So you need to describe whatthat is with like bullet points.
Like if you look at Amazon,they have like bullet points at
(20:57):
the top and then they have likewhen you scroll down a
big block of text.
Like so for user conversion orfor usability and conversions,
you don't want to have that bigblock of text at the top.
So Amazon makes it really easyto navigate through.
Has like 3 views, the price,the bullet points, the title,
the image right thereon the screen.
So you don't even have to scrolldown because the majority of
(21:18):
people will never scroll down ona website. It seems weird,
but most people don't scrollor don't swipe.
So whatever you see on thescreen is above the fold.
You have to have all yourprinted information up there,
make it easy to read for people.
And then once you scroll down,then you can put all
that stuff for SEO,like this big block of text,
all that content andthings like that.
Because Google's going toread from top to bottom,
(21:38):
so they're going to See allthat stuff, people,
they don't really scrolldown that far,
so they're just looking forwhat they're looking for.
And once they find it,that's all they're
going to look at.
They're not going to scroll allthe way to the bottom of the
website. Some people do,but most people do not
scroll down that far.
So making sure you havethat balance of SEO,
playing that content thereand then for people,
making it easy to read,easy to navigate through,
(22:00):
and just making it. Yeah,having that.
That balance for both.
So when you're creating theblock of text and you're
creating the bullet points,are you using relevant keywords
specifically in there as well?
Are you?
I guess in some respects. So,again, this might be old school,
(22:22):
but it used to be that I've seencopywriters sort of start with
the keywords and then build therest of the text around it.
I don't know if that's still apractice or whether you are
not that, you know,doesn't matter if you include
the keyword once or 20 times inthat text anymore. You know,
I don't know if there's aweighting to that anymore.
So the way to figure that out isyou have to go into Google,
(22:43):
search for that keyword.
So we're doing mechanicalpencils.
Search mechanical pencils,and open up all the websites
that rank on that first page ofGoogle, skip over the ads,
but open up all those websites,and then you could average out.
How much content is eachwebsite writing?
Is everyone writing 100 words?
Then you should probablywrite 150 words.
If everyone's writing2,000 words,
(23:05):
probably want to write2,100 words.
So you want to do a little bitmore than your competition.
But also you could try andthere's tools that could
help out with this.
Like surfer SEO is a greattool that will do it,
which will actually readthrough all those.
The first couple pageson Google.
Yeah.
And I'll show you, on average,most websites will write
mechanical pencils five to tentimes. So then you're like,
(23:28):
all right,I want to stay within the
average. I want to write.
Mechanical pencil should be onmy page five to 10 times,
somewhere in that average.
Because with SEO,it's not one size fits all.
Every website is different,Every keyword is different.
And we got to figure out,what have your competitors done
and how could we do abetter job of it?
And that's where you got toanalyze each website to
see what they've done,what keywords are
(23:48):
they using what?
Variations like long tailkeywords, synonyms, plurals,
and things like that.
So you want to put your highestsearch volume keyword in the
title and at the topof the page,
but then you want to blend invariations of long
tail keywords,reordering the keywords.
Maybe put pencil or mechanical.
(24:09):
Instead of putting mechanicalpencils,
you could say pencils that aremechanical. So mixing it up.
Because the way people search,it's always going
to be different.
The way I search and you search,it might be similar,
but we might add a wordor add remove a word.
So why try to tapinto all those?
And that's where the keywordresearch that we did initially.
Will show you what keywords thatyou potentially might
(24:30):
want to rank for.
Then you could sprinkle themin throughout that content.
So this,I mean this is fascinating and I
love this idea of likeif I go on to.
I'm on mechanical pencil fordrawing now and the first one,
which is not actually,it's bizarre because there's
no sponsored.
That's really interesting.
There's no sponsored ads.
(24:51):
So if I go to the firstone to casart.co.uk
mechanical pencils is the title.
They've got mechanical pencilsin like the breadcrumb
navigation.
Is that still important todo something like that?
For breadcrumbs,especially E commerce,
there's a way to just jump back.
(25:13):
Well,for people it's a way to jump
back to like a categorysubcategory. Sub subcategories.
But also for Google theylook at internal links.
So this is a link to internallyto another page on your website
and you want to link yourcategory to the subcategory,
you want to link yoursubcategory to the sub
subcategory and so on.
(25:33):
And you want to link thoseproducts to the sub subcat or
however you structure it,but you want to link
them all together.
Yeah.
So the breadcrumbs are justanother way to link everything
together.
Sometimes they show up inthe search results,
not all the time.
Google's kind of takingthat away.
But they did sometimesshow up in there.
So if you mark up thebreadcrumbs with schema,
that will get them topotentially show up in the
(25:54):
Google search results.
Yeah.
Okay, so they've got a,they've actually got under the
title on their category pagethey've got a small
paragraph of text.
Now remember we started doingthis for the beauty company
to help us rank better.
So rather than just havingmechanical pencils as the
category listing page and thenjust showing me, you know,
50 mechanical pencils,they've actually put a sort of
(26:15):
small paragraph oftext in there.
That which I find interestingbecause that's above all the
filters, all the sort by brand.
It's sort of the firstthing that we see.
And is that kind of thingimportant for something
like a category page?
Yep.
As you can see they're ranked onthat first page of Google.
(26:36):
And you'll see thatmost websites,
unless it's a big corporatewebsite,
big corporations don't reallyneed to put that text.
But if it's a small ormedium sized website,
they're going to have to havesome text like you can't just
have a bunch of images of yourproducts because Google
struggles to read images.
So they need that text tohelp them better read,
understand and know whatthat page is about.
And I usually tell people,put that text at the
(26:59):
very bottom.
It's okay to have like maybelike a couple sentences
at the top.
So have like one or two or threesentences at the top.
But you don't want to put 400words or 800 words at the top
because nobody wantsto read that.
If they're looking formechanical pencils,
how much do they really want toread about mechanical pencils?
Want to buy it.
But you need to have thatbalance. For Google,
having some text at the top andthen having a lot at the bottom,
(27:21):
which if you scrolldown on that page,
they might have a big block oftext at the very bottom,
which a lot of E commercewebsites will do just to help
Google better read that page andknow what that category.
This is fascinating.
I guess I'm listening to thisand in my head I'm thinking if
someone's starting out in Ecommerce, there's a lot here.
I mean you can,there's lots of rabbit trails.
(27:41):
I've already gone down andI'm hours into it.
Right.
Just doing all this researchand figuring out.
You mentioned surfer SEOwhich I have personally played
around on quite a bit actually.
But if you are a small company,it's just you or you and
a partner or something,you're doing this sort of E
commerce thing and it's, it's,it's consuming all your time.
(28:04):
SEO I think is one of thosethings that sort of gets pushed
down the list a little bit.
Is there,is there some AI that can help
us now or should we actuallyavoid AI when it comes to SEO?
I mean you could use AI,but AI is not accurate.
So that's the biggest thing is,yeah, make sure whatever you're
(28:24):
putting on your websiteis accurate.
If you just go intoChat GPT and say,
Write me a 500 word productdescription for mechanical
pencils,it'll write something up.
But if it doesn't know what towrite, it's going to make it up.
It's called AI hallucinations.
And it just makes up the answerand it doesn't tell you that's
making up the answer.
Which I feel like it should tellyou that if it doesn't know the
answer but makes it up and thenyou're just going to copy that,
(28:47):
post it on your website.
And Google said last year thatwe don't care who writes the
content because they can'ttell the difference.
Right.
They used to be able totell the difference,
but now the AI content is sogood that Google can't tell the
difference if it's writtenby humans or AI.
So they said we don't care whowrites the content as long
as it offers value.
And that really meansthat it's accurate.
So you could have AI help youout with like writing outlines.
(29:10):
That's really good for outlines.
But writing the content,it's not there yet. I mean,
it's getting really close to it.
So maybe in a year or two youcould use it to write
that content.
But I would still be a littleweary just because it's
not 100% accurate.
But it doesn't really matterwho writes it.
And that helps outfor E commerce.
If you're selling athousand products,
you have to write a thousandproduct descriptions.
(29:30):
That's a lot of content.
But nowadays you could help itor use AI to help out with it,
but just still got to double andtriple check it and make
sure it's accurate.
So the what if you don'tmind me asking,
what AI tools do you guys use?
Do you use ChatGPTand that's it,
or are there others that you'vesort of got on hand as well?
I mean,Google has their own version,
(29:51):
it's called Gemini.
And if we're doing SEO, well,ChatGPT is created by OpenAI,
which is Bing. So ChatGPT,if you ask it to write content,
this is actually Bingwriting it for you,
but Google has their ownversion, it's called Gemini.
So if we are tryingto rank on Google,
I would say use Google Gemini tohelp write that content because
then it's going to be Googlewriting the content for you and
(30:14):
hopefully they're going to do itin a way that they want
it written out,doesn't guarantee it, but hey,
at least you're getting Googleto write the content.
So it's a little bit better,I think for SEO purposes.
If you're just doing generalstuff like writing emails
and things like that,ChatGPT is fine.
But if you want to doSEO related tasks,
I'd say Google's version mightbe a little bit better.
(30:35):
They just redid their version.
They had one that was calledBard and they just rebranded it.
I haven't played aroundwith it too much.
I've used Bard a lot and it waspretty good because it gives you
a lot of insights to whatGoogle's looking for.
So if you say write me or like,help me do keyword research,
the keyword researchis not the best,
but it gives you like a list ofthings right below the keywords
(30:57):
that it recommends.
The Gemini or Google's version,saying like,
this is what we're looking for.
We recommend longtail variations.
We recommend doing thisand this and this.
So they're actually givingyou insights,
which Google really nevergives you help.
Usually you're tellingyou what not to do,
they're not tellingyou what to do.
So this is a little differentwhere they're actually saying,
this is what we want you to do.
Which is nice of them to do.
(31:18):
Yeah.
I mean, again,take everything with a grain of
salt that Google tells you,how accurate and how truthful
are they being?
Because do they really wantyou to do SEO? No,
they want you to run paid ads.
It's how they makeall their money.
So they're going to tellyou some things.
But I would still just take itall with a grain of salt.
Don't believe everythingthey tell you.
Yeah, it's very true. Very true.
And I've heard, I mean,I've heard a lot of good
(31:39):
things about Gemini.
I've not had too much chanceto play lots on it.
But I have heard some verygood things about it.
So I will take that.
Top tip there, Brandon.
Let's move on slightly,if I can. So, I mean,
we've talked a lot about,you know, if I'm starting out
in E commerce, these are some ofthe strategies.
What are some of the moreadvanced strategies that I
(32:01):
should be thinking about ormaybe even questions I should
be asking my marketing team,my SEO team, if I'm, you know,
already established in Ecommerce and we've got a,
a team working on stuff.
What should I be thinkingabout there?
Well we didn't talkabout backlinks.
And backlinks are what rankswebsites, right?
Backlinks are how Google becamepopular. So what is a backlink?
(32:22):
A backlink is a clickable linkfrom another website that
points to yours.
So let's say you're reading anarticle on entrepreneur.com and
there it says Brandon Leibowitz.
You click on it and itgoes to my website.
I'd be getting a backlinkfrom entrepreneur.com.
so the more websites that haveclickable links that
point to you,the more popular or trustworthy
(32:43):
Google sees you as,and then they look at those
keywords on your website.
But it doesn't work theother way around.
If you're not building backlinksGoogle's not going to trust you
and they're not going to link.
They don't trust. I mean,that's how Google,
their algorithm back in the 90s,yeah,
all these other search engines,they were just looking at
keywords, which, as you know,you could just throw any keyword
(33:04):
on your website.
That doesn't really mean that'swhat your website's about,
but that's how the searchengines worked in the past.
Google came along and said, no,no, no,
we're going to look at keywords,but we don't really care what
keywords you put on a websitebecause we know people
manipulate them.
So we want you to build trustby getting backlinks.
And still to this day,backlinks are such a big part
of Google's algorithm.
It's changed a lot how they lookat them over the years,
(33:25):
but they still do hold such abig impact on rankings where
I've never seen a website rankon Google without backlinks.
It's pretty much impossibleto rank without backlinks.
So this is, I mean,this is really interesting
both for,this is interesting for us as an
established company and also,I think if you're just
starting out,you've got to have then a
backlink building strategy.
(33:47):
And again,years ago it used to be you'd
just go and pay a company,whatever,
50 bucks and they'd put youon a thousand websites.
All of which Google probablyis very aware of right now.
So I wouldn't advise it.
How do I.
I guess that's the next keyquestion, isn't it?
What's a good backlink strategyfor me as a business?
How do I go about gettingthose backlinks?
(34:08):
There's tons of differentways to build backlinks,
but like you said,there's some tools where you
just click a button and you gethundreds of thousands of
backlinks instantaneously,which I had those tools
in the past,but they're really spammy
and it's low quality.
And nowadays it's all aboutquality, not quantity.
And with Google,what is the quality?
Backlink quality backlink meansit comes from a site that's
(34:28):
related to what you're doing.
So relevancy is very important.
If you're selling pencils,then we want websites.
It doesn't have to be otherpencil companies,
but anything somewhat related towhat you're doing. So like,
if you're doing like thedrawing pencils,
it could be like about artwebsites or about school
education,about children since children
might be using them.
(34:48):
Anything Somewhat related.
That's what matters to Google.
And then authoritativeness.
How popular,how big is this website?
If I give you a backlink from mywebsite, it's a good backlink,
but it's not the same as likeForbes or Wall Street Journal
or New York Times.
So the bigger the website,the more SEO value and the more
related to you, the better.
(35:09):
And there's lots of ways tobuild backlinks and there's
tools that will show me anywebsite's backlinks.
You have to pay for these tools.
The more popular ones would belike Ahrefs or Mods or Semrush,
where I would go into Google,search for your keywords,
see who's on that firstpage of Google,
write down all the website URLs,and then throw them into these
tools and look at theirbacklinks, right?
(35:29):
And one by one,you could start reaching
out to the website,started linking out to
your competition,because if someone is linking
out to your competitor,they would probably
link out to you.
You just have to figure out,how did they get that backlink?
Did a competitor writean article,
did they do a blog post,did they do a press release,
did they get an influencer towrite about a product
review about them?
Or do they do a podcast inter.
(35:50):
Or whatever it is?
You can pretty much reverseengineer their entire SEO
strategy and go after. Again,you don't want to go after every
backlink that they have becausesome are going to
be low quality.
You want to go afterthe good ones,
the ones that are relevant toyour industry and have
some authority.
Those are the two factors thatreally matter when you're
building backlinks so relevant.
To your industry and sitesof authority. And I mean,
(36:16):
for the British audiencelistening
I can, I can hear people going,oh, I don't want to reach out to
people. That's, that's,I'm going to annoy them.
You know, that's sort of,sort of tantamount doing
cold calling.
Whats your approach there? So,you know, you, you've obviously,
you found a backlink,it's going to a pretty
reasonable,authoritative website.
(36:37):
You figured out that,I don't know,
they wrote an article for theirwebsite or, you know.
Know something?
What's your approach?
How do you.
I guess how do I find the rightperson to talk to would
be one question.
And how do I come across asnot being a, you know,
a total doofus?
Yeah, I mean,if you just ask for a backlink,
not going to work.
But if you saw someone thatwrote an article on a website
(36:59):
and they mentioned youwere a competitor,
then you can reach out tothem and be like, hey,
I was reading your website oryour blog or whatever that
you read, and I offer,or I have a similar service or
product and I want to see if Icould write a free blog post for
you. So you gotta offer value.
So if they wrote a blog post,then you should offer them
a free blog post.
If you saw someonedid an interview,
(37:19):
then you could be like, hey,I'm in the same industry,
can you interview me?
Or if you saw that an influencerwrote a product review about it,
maybe you offer that influencera free sample of that product.
As long as it's nottoo expensive,
then you're gonna getthat backlink.
Or if you saw like someone did apodcast, you could be like, hey,
can I be a guest onyour podcast?
So it's all aboutoffering value.
(37:40):
If you're just askingfor a backlink,
nobody's going to say yes tothat. But if you offer value,
that's where you're going tohelp get people to be more
receptive and be like, okay,yeah,
you're going to write a blogpost for me? Sure,
I'll take a free blog post.
Or if you're going to giveme a free product, yeah,
I'll write a review for you.
Or if you're going to do ainterview, yeah, let's do it.
So trying to reverse engineertheir strategy also,
(38:01):
maybe you saw like they joinedlike the BBB or Chamber
of Commerce,or they're on Yelp or
TripAdvisor. I mean,maybe not for all your brands,
they might not be on it,but if they aren't,
then you gotta create a listingon that platform.
So sometimes you can just go inand create a listing
on these websites.
Some of them you might haveto pay for. But yeah,
all your competitors are on theBetter Business Bureau, the bbb,
(38:25):
which is pretty big inthe United States.
Then I would say spend the moneybecause they charge for that.
It's like a couplehundred dollars.
But all your competitorshave that backlink.
Then you want to have a similarbacklink profile to
your competition.
Sometimes you have to pay forthese backlinks. I mean,
most of the time youdo have to pay,
whether it's your timewriting a article,
your time doing an interview,you're,
(38:45):
you're giving out free products,so you're spending money.
So unfortunately, backlinks,in the past you could get them
for free pretty easily.
Nowadays it's not so easy andit's really tough to
get backlinks.
Thats really interesting.
So without putting words in yourmouth, Brendan, I'm curious,
what's the biggest mistake thatE commerce entrepreneurs are
making where SEO is concerned?
(39:07):
Is it the backlink strategyor is it something else?
Yeah,most people don't know about
backlinks and they've neverheard of them or. Yeah,
I get a lot of clients that cometo me and I tell them about
backlinks. They're like,I've never heard about
this before.
I've worked with other SEOcompanies in the past.
I'm just like,well they didn't build
backlinks.
I'm not sure what they werereally doing because
unfortunately withoutthose backlinks,
(39:29):
Google's not going to trust youand they're not going
to rank you.
So that's the biggest thing isthey don't know what backlinks
are or they do know whatbacklinks are and they've gone
to a site like Fiverr and theybought this gig for $10 where
they're getting a thousandbacklinks for $10,
which in the past back likein 2005, 6, 7, it worked.
Now it does not work and it'sgoing to do more harm than good.
(39:51):
So focusing on quality,not quantity,
which a lot of peopledon't realize,
you need to focus on like onegood backlink is going to be far
superior than the thousand lowquality ones that you buy.
Yeah.
And you use this word penalized.
And that's a question thatI have actually.
If you go down some of thesestrategies where you go on to
Fiverr and you buy likea thousand backlinks,
(40:12):
do Google understand whatyou're trying to do?
That you're trying to gamify thesystem and they're like,
not only are you out,you're like, you're negative,
you're in negativeequity right now.
Yep So they potentially canpenalize you and instead
of ranking higher,you're going to drop down in
rankings and they don't tellyou they've been penalized.
Sometimes they do in Googlesearch console,
(40:33):
they might tell you there,but they might not
also tell you.
So if you've been penalized theonly real way to see that is you
just see a drop in traffic.
So if you use Google Analyticsor Google Search Console you
just see a giant dipon one date.
Then you could try to piece ittogether and figure
out what happened.
Why did I get penalized?
They're really not goingto tell you why.
Sometimes they do but most ofthe time you don't know
(40:54):
if it's a backlinks,the content keyword AI
whatever it may be.
It's then it becomes like youhave to become an executive and
try to figure out what shouldI do and how do I fix this.
What about backlinksfrom social media?
So for example this weekone of the videos,
one of the short form videos wedid from one of our podcasts got
(41:17):
retweeted by someonequite retweeted,
reposted by someonequite famous.
Does that help me or doesthat not help me at all?
I mean it helps me in terms ofget video views but does it help
me from a backlink strategy?
Yeah,Google is blocked from social
media. So Twitter, Google or X,Google's partner with them.
So they could actually seetweets but other than that,
(41:37):
Google's block from Facebook,they could see your Facebook
page like how many likesand stuff like that.
But they don't really see yourposts and things like that.
So they're not able to see thatother people are posting
about you.
But it's not bad because if youare getting traffic from social
Google, Google can see that.
So Google sees that fromFacebook that person that
reposted you all of a sudden nowFacebook just sent a thousand
(41:59):
visitors to your website.
You will see that the socialsignal and a trust signal.
But the backlinks,they don't really count.
And also you want sitesare relevant.
If you're getting a bunchof social media sites,
Google's going to think thatyou're a social media site.
So if you're sellingbeauty products,
you want sites that are relatedto beauty, to wellness.
Doesn't have to be exactly whatyou're doing but you don't want
a bunch of social media sites tolink out to you. It's not bad,
(42:21):
but it just doesn't addthat relevancy aspect.
Brandon, let me ask you one,one more question.
I'm aware of timeand this one of the things which
intrigues me is in the past whenI've spoken to various marketing
companies and I'd love yourthoughts on this.
I get reports from variousmarketing Companies saying SEO
(42:44):
bought in an additional 20 grandworth of revenue this month.
Right.
So your SEO efforts has resultedin 20k's worth of sales.
I'm kind of curious on yourthoughts about this actually.
Is,is it straightforward to measure
the benefits and effects of SEOon sales directly like that,
(43:06):
or is it a bit more nuancedand complex than.
I shouldn't read too muchinto that figure.
I'm kind of curious aboutyour thoughts on it.
I mean, it's for E commerce.
It's nice because you couldtrack conversions
or actual sales.
Whereas like a service basedbusiness, I could be like,
all right, somebody called you,somebody filled out your form.
Like someone might be lookingfor a plumber,
(43:28):
but I don't know if theyactually use that plumber.
Whereas with E commerce,you could see the sales,
the dollar value there.
So I would definitelylook at that.
Because then you could lookthrough Google Analytics and see
SEO brought in this much sales,Facebook brought this
many sales, Instagram broughtthis many sales.
So you could see a dollarconversion,
how many conversions.
You also see the value ofrevenue that you're getting.
(43:50):
So I would look at that stuff.
But there are other ways tokind of look at it too.
But like indirectly,people might be going to your
website, they searched you,they found you,
they forgot about you,and then they see an ad that
pops up and then they click onthat ad, they buy from that ad.
So that ad's going to getthat attribution.
So it's not always going to bealways the correct attribution.
(44:10):
But SEO,I would say look at that,
the conversion value,the revenue through
Google Analytics.
It's a good starting point andit's definitely helpful to make
statistically informeddecisions.
Like then you're like, oh,SEO is bringing in the
majority of my sales.
Maybe I should really push moreof this SEO stuff. Yeah,
I'm running all paid ads.
They're not bringing inthat much revenue.
Maybe I should scaleaway from the ads.
(44:30):
Or maybe the inverse ishappening. Maybe, you know,
a bunch of sales from ads pushmore money in those ads.
If it's working.
As long as you're makinga return on ad spend.
Yeah, no, fair play, fair play.
Brandon listen.
Fascinating conversation.
I feel like we're justscratching the surface.
But so thank you forcoming on the show.
If people want to connect withyou, if they want to reach you,
(44:51):
get a hold of you,find out more about SEO,
optimum optimizers,what's the best way to do that?
Yeah.
So anybody that wants to learnmore and stuck around
to the end.
I create a special gift for themif they go to my website@SEO
optimizers.com that's S E OO-P-T I I Z E-R S.com
forward slash gift.
(45:12):
And they can find that giftthere along with my contact
information and a bunch ofclasses I've done over the years
I've thrown up for free so theycould see step by step how to do
a lot of stuff thatwe talked about.
And also they want a freewebsite 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.
Fantastic.
SEO Optimizers speltthe American way.
(45:34):
Dear British people,SEO optimizers.com forward/gift.
We will of course link to thatin the show notes as well,
which will be on the website.
So Brandon, listen man,anything else that's top of mind
for you that we've not talkedabout that we really should
be thinking about?
I would just say be patientwith it all.
SEO is a long term strategy anda lot of people love that
(45:56):
instant gratification and wantto see the results right away
and they get discouraged if theydon't see that traffic
coming in. Yeah,but be patient with it and
keep building it up.
And over time you're going tosee your traffic increase.
But don't just expectit to skyrocket.
I mean sometimes it does.
Sometimes you go viral and justget those like instantaneous
rankings.
But you have to work at it andjust keep working at it and
don't get discouraged if youdon't see that immediate
(46:18):
results.
You'll get there eventually.
Love that, love that patience.
Something that we're not knownfor in the world of E commerce.
Yeah, I'm sure many of yourclients like,
I want to be number one and Iwant to be there tomorrow.
How do I do that?
It's like.
I wish I could just flip thatswitch if you need that.
Immediate action.
(46:39):
Paid ads are good.
But this patience.
Patience is a virtue.
Patience is definitely a virtue.
Yeah, apparently brilliant.
Well Brandon,thanks for coming on man.
Genuinely great conversation.
Love meeting you,love hearing what
you had to say.
And yeah,it's still a big deal SEO.
So do check out Brandon's stuff.
Seoptimizers.com GIF but thanksbro, I appreciate it.
(47:03):
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Well, there you go,another fantastic conversation
wrapped up.
Thanks again to Brandon forjoining me today. Also,
big shout out to today's showsponsor, the E Commerce Cohort.
Remember, go check themout@ecommercecohort.com come
join us in the monthlyMastermind.
Be great to see you in there.
And of course be sure to followthe E Commerce podcast wherever
(47:24):
you get your podcasts from,because we've got yet more great
conversations lined up,obviously,
and I don't want you tomiss any of them.
And in case no one has told youyet today, let me be the first.
You are awesome. Yes,you are created awesome.
It's just a burden you have tobear. Brandon has to bear it.
I've gotta bear it.
You've gotta bear it as well.
(47:44):
Now the E Commerce Podcast isproduced by Pod Junction,
the new name for Oreo Media.
You can find our entire archiveof episodes on your favorite
podcast app. The the team,the wonderful, beautiful,
phenomenal, fantastic,amazing team that makes this
show possible is Sadaf Banonand Tanya Hutzlak.
Theme music was written by JoshEdmondson and as I mentioned,
(48:05):
if you would like to read thetranscript or show notes,
head over to the websiteecommercepodcast.net that's it
from me. That's it from Brandon.
Thank you so muchfor joining us.
Have a fantastic week whereveryou are in the world.
I'll see you next time.
Bye for now.
It.
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