January 21, 2025 • 25 mins
🌟 SEO Secrets Unleashed with Brandon Leibowitz! 🌟
I had an absolute blast chatting with Stephanie Smith on her podcast Getting to the Bottom Line! 🎙️✨ Stephanie is the mastermind behind New Light Financial Solutions, where she helps business owners discover the 16 financial drivers that boost cash flow and revenue. 💵 But this time, we dove into my specialty—SEO! 🌐
From my accidental journey into digital marketing back in 2007 (who knew a college grad would stumble into SEO?) to how I’ve helped businesses climb the Google ranks and avoid pricey ads, we covered it all. 🚀 I shared the juicy details about optimizing websites for search engines, building trustworthy backlinks, and how mobile-first design is the key to winning over today’s audiences. 📱💡
We also talked about:
➡️ Why SEO is a long game and patience pays off 🕰️
➡️ The do's and don’ts of backlinks (spoiler: Fiverr isn’t your friend here) 🚫
➡️ How tiny tweaks to your website can DOUBLE your leads 📈
Oh, and I dropped a little something special for all you listeners. 🎁 Head to SEOOptimizers.com/gift for free classes, a website analysis, and tools to get your SEO game on point! 👊💻
If you're curious about how SEO can impact your bottom line or you’re ready to level up your digital presence, tune in to this episode. You won’t want to miss it! 🚀
#SEOOptimizers #GettingToTheBottomLine #DigitalMarketingMadeEasy #SmallBusinessTips #SEOStrategy
🎧 Listen now and let me know what you think! 💬
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Foreignwelcome to another episode of
Getting to the Bottom Line,where I'm your host,
Stephanie Smith,owner of New Light Financial
Solutions,where we help business owners
walk the one clear path togenerating more cash
(00:20):
in their business.
And we do this by looking at 16financial drivers that
impact your revenue,profit and cash flow. However,
we know that the things that welook at aren't the only things
that impact your bottom line.
So that is the goal of Gettingto the bottom line is to see
what other things to put intoperspective the various things
in business that impactyour bottom line.
So I'm excited to have with mehere today Brandon Leibowitz.
(00:44):
Brandon runs and operatesSEO Optimizers,
and he's done that since 2007.
They're a digital marketingcompany that focuses on helping
small and medium sizedbusinesses get more online
traffic that converts intoclients, sales leads,
or whatever it is you want.
So thanks so much for joiningme today, Brandon.
Thank you for havingme on today.
(01:05):
I'm excited to have thisconversation because we were
chatting right beforehand andI was saying I don't,
we're going to focus on SEO.
I don't do SEO in my businessand I know I should or shouldn't
focus on it.
I should focus on it more.
So I'm glad to have you here sowe can talk more about it.
But first,why don't you tell us how you
got into what you're doing.
(01:25):
I kind of fell into it.
I graduated from college in 2007and after I graduated, well,
got my degree in businessmarketing.
And one of the first jobs I wasoffered was helping a company
out with their digitalmarketing, which I don't really
know much about it.
Back then they didn't reallyteach that in school and the
company knew that and said,it's okay,
we're gonna take you to classesand workshops and
(01:47):
learn with you.
And after going toa few workshops,
just realized back in 2007 thateveryone's probably gonna
have a website.
Digital marketing's not goinganywhere anytime soon.
And SEO is just a wayto get free traffic.
And who doesn't wantfree traffic?
So I really focused more onthe SEO side of things.
But in general with digitalmarketing, Google Ads or ads,
(02:09):
social media, email marketing,it all works to get traffic.
And I'd recommenddoing all that.
I just really focus more on theSEO side of things just to help
people avoid spendingmoney on those ads.
And over the years I worked atdifferent advertising agencies
as a director of SEO and beforework and after work.
Now my lunch Breaks.
I work on my own company andeventually built that up to
(02:30):
where I was able to quit my joband focus solely on this and
been doing that ever since.
That is so awesome.
It's such a story I think a lotof people recognize and are
familiar with, right.
Transitioning from corporateor other jobs to their own
business. But starting in 2007,that was a long time
ago at this point.
I'm sure you've seen a lot ofchanges over the years.
(02:50):
Is there any significant thingyou've noticed over the past
year since you've gotteninto everything?
I mean it's always changing.
The biggest change right now Ifeel like AI is such a big
change compared to all the otherchanges. We're big changes.
Like mobile has takenover everything.
Mobile first for buildingwebsites and just,
(03:11):
just most of your traffic,majority of your traffic
will come from mobile.
That happened aroundlike 2013 is.
Google started switching overfrom desktop to mobile focused
optimizations.
But AI is just something that'sso new and we'll have to see
what's going to happen.
Where is it going to go orpeople are going to use AI or
search on AI versus Google.
Or it's just that kind of that.
(03:33):
Mystery box right now I did,I do have chat gbt so I use it
and it did ask me if I wanted touse like chat chat GBT as my
search. I did it one time.
I was like this feels weird andI went back to just regular
Google. But I completely get it.
The landscape is changing.
So keeping up with that,we need someone like you so you
(03:54):
can keep up with the landscapechanges and tell us how it
impacts what we're doing.
But tell me,tell me more about what it is
your business does and how youhelp people specifically
in this world.
So we make sure that when you,when people search on Google for
keywords related to yourbusiness, your product,
your service,whatever it is that you show up
on Google underneath the ad.
(04:16):
So the ads,you'd have to pay for each click
anytime somebody searcheson Google.
And if you click on an ad,that company,
that company has to payfor each click.
Could be a couplecents per click.
Could be a couple dollarsfor one click,
it could be a hundred dollarsfor one click.
Gets pretty expensive.
I mean as long as you're makingmore than you're putting in,
you don't have to worry about.
(04:37):
You could keep running ads,but you don't want to
always run them.
That's why the SEO is rightbelow the ads. Organic,
the free listings and that'swhat I focus on is helping your
website appear in those freelistings so you could just
capture that traffic whenpeople are searching.
Because people searchingon Google,
they usually have some intentbehind those searches to make a,
or learn more about aspecific question,
(04:58):
need help with something,and then eventually it might
lead to them buying a productor using your services.
And that's really whatthe goal is,
is getting people from Google toyour website and then ultimately
having them reach out to you orwhatever that conversion
goal is.
Right.
We want people to find us andbuy from us as business owners.
Right. That's the ultimate goal.
(05:20):
So tell, tell me,I'll say someone who isn't
as familiar with SEO,like what exactly does that mean
that you're optimizing? Like,how do you. What's then.
And dumb it down for me to,to real easy,
easy understand language. What,what is it that you're
doing on my website?
With SEO doing a few differentthings depending on what type
(05:43):
of website you have.
But there's some commonalitieswith all websites where
Google feeds off text.
Google loves content, really.
Text, images, videos, audio.
They getting much,much better at it,
but they still rather have text.
The more text you put into yourwebsite on every single page,
the easier it is for the searchengines to really read and
(06:05):
understand and know whatthat page is about.
Because search engines are justrobots and the more
you give to them,the more you spoon feed to them,
the easier it is for them tounderstand that page and rank
you for the correct keywords.
But keywords really mean nothingto the search engines because
they just don't trust anythinganybody puts on a website.
I could build a website andI could say like Brandon's
(06:27):
dentist.com and Google's like,all right,
are you really a dentist?
Because we don't believe you andwe don't want to just rank you
and then have people go to yourdental office and find
out you don't exist.
It's a bad user experience.
People are probably going to getfrustrated and say, Google,
why are you showing me thisdental office that
doesn't exist?
And they're probably going toswitch over to Bing or ChatGPT
or some other search engine andGoogle doesn't want
(06:50):
that to happen.
So Google wants to see thatother websites are talking
about you.
And that's a trust signal totell Google that you
are trustworthy.
It's called building whatare called backlinks,
getting other websitesto link out to you.
So if you're a dentist,you'd probably want other
websites related to healthand wellness.
So other maybe dentists in otherstates or get on like WebMD or
(07:12):
Yelp or Wikipedia or join yourchamber of commerce
in your area.
But the more websites that talkabout you, the more popular,
the more trust Googlegives to you.
And then they look at thosekeywords to figure out what
keywords to rank you for.
So when you work with someone,you work with them to figure out
how they can get these backlinksin other places to
(07:34):
help their SEO.
Yep.
Or sometimes I have clients thathave been around for 20 years,
have a lot of backlinks builtup, a lot of trust built up.
But their website's just builtin a way that Google can't read
it and going in andcleaning it up.
Because Google looks at code,they can't see the website.
What we see is notwhat Google sees.
Search engines just look at thecode and the code is all text.
(07:56):
That's why it gets alltripped down to text.
And if you have the code in aweird format or you sometimes
might block the search engines,they're not able to read that
and they're not going to be ableto know what keywords
to rank you for.
And that's really important.
That feels like a puzzle.
You got to put all thosepieces together.
You can't just do one thingor do another thing.
You have to really do it all tomake sure that you maximize that
(08:16):
trust and then make sure thatyou get the correct keywords
ranking on the search engines.
So doing what you'vedone for so long,
like what are the biggestmistakes that you see that
impact people's SEO?
The backlinks are the trickiestpart because either people don't
know about backlinks and havenever heard about them,
(08:37):
or they know what backlinks areand they're going on sites like
Fiverr and buying a thousandbacklinks for $5.
And unfortunately,if you build a wrong
type of backlinks,instead of ranking you higher,
it's going to drop you down.
And Google knows there's allthese ways to like trick
and game the system.
And going on Fiverr,you're getting all these
low quality backlinks.
And what you want to do is getquality backlinks into Google.
(08:59):
A quality backlink just means itcomes from a site that's related
to what you're doing. So if,depending on whatever
you're doing,like if you're selling shoes you
want websites are about likeshoes or about fitness
or about style.
If it's stylish anythingsomewhat related.
It doesn't have to be other shoecompanies like I do SEO.
Probably not going to get otherSEO companies to link out to me
(09:21):
because we're all prettymuch competitors.
But I could find SEO blogs orfind podcasts about marketing
or about advertising or justanything that's somewhat related
to what I'm doing.
That's what I want to be on.
That makes sense.
And I didn't know you canbuy backlinks on Fiverr,
so that's news, news to me.
But okay, so note to self,don't do that.
(09:45):
Where are they putting thoselinks, you wonder?
It's commenting on blogs.
So that's why most blogsdon't allow comments.
Because back when I firststarted doing SEO,
there's a tool with and stillout there. And I,
with the click of a button,you'll comment on whatever
amount of blogs, 5,000,10,000 blogs.
And Google knows that blogcomments anytime you have
(10:08):
a comment. And well,in the old way you always
used to say name,website and email address.
So you put that in there,you're always getting
a backlink.
So a lot of peoplejust go in there,
put their name as a keyword andput their website URL in there
and that became aclickable link.
And you're able to dothat on some really,
really big websites.
And that's why Google alwaysupdates their algorithm.
(10:30):
Like in 2011 they changed itsaying, hey, these backlinks,
it's not the number of backlinksanymore because it's too easy to
spam and get a bunch oflow quality backlinks.
We want good quality backlinks.
So now really what you need todo is build a couple or more
backlinks than your competitors.
But usually that's around like100 or so backlinks.
So if you're buying a thousandbacklinks from Fiverr,
(10:50):
that looks really suspiciousto Google.
A normal website would only begetting a couple backlinks
every single month,depending how big you are.
If you're a big corporation,then of course you're probably
going to get more. But small,medium sized businesses get a
couple backlinks everysingle month.
So naturally you just want toget a few and build it
up and build it up.
And over time that's going tosee Google getting
you more trust.
(11:10):
But that's why SEO takes so muchtime because Google just
doesn't trust you.
And to build trust is not easy.
So you're in the long gamewhen it comes to SEO.
How how speaking of that.
So how long do you usually seethat it takes for people get
results from focusing on this?
(11:31):
It really depends on thecompetition of those keywords.
The more competitivethose keywords are,
the more time it'sgoing to take.
But also how old yourwebsite is.
Like if I go back to that oldexample where I had a client
that had website that's20 over 20 years old,
it has the word Amazon in it,I'm like,
how do you get the word Amazonin it? He's like,
I have this website beforeAmazon existed.
So his website's really,really old.
(11:53):
It was just built in a way thatwas really hard for Google to
read it. But we went in,changed a bunch of coding things
in the or changed a lot of thecode and pretty much in a month
they shot up to like the firstthree positions for almost every
single key, what they,they wanted to rank for.
But that's really rare.
Usually it's the opposite whereI get someone that doesn't have
any backlinks and is a brand newwebsite and we have to build
(12:15):
that trust up and that's whereit just depends on
that competition.
So if you can niche down andfind something more unique that
helps differentiate yourself,that really helps out.
Because the more competition,the longer it's going to take.
If you're just selling T shirts,lot of competition.
If you can find somethingmore niche,
like maybe sell organic cottonT shirts for toddlers,
(12:37):
still very competitive,but a little bit more niche.
So the more niche you get, the,the faster you're going
to see results.
With SEO that makes sense.
And have you seen anyone?
Because we're talking aboutthings that impact your
bottom line. Right.
So I'm going to ask.
Have you seen anyone really getlike a lot more sales or
(12:57):
increase their revenue fromdoing this and focusing
on SEO specifically?
Yep.
So usually once they startgetting more traffic,
that's where also the websitehas to convert.
And that's why I try to workwith the web or the owner of the
business and the web developersand just making sure that your
website is optimized forconversions because a lot of
people will spend money on paidads and they're like I'm not
(13:19):
getting any conversions orthey'll do SEO and they're
getting all this traffic.
But traffic doesn't really meananything unless you get that
traffic to convert.
And that's where you have tobuild trust for people when
they get to your website.
So for SEO I have to build trustfor Google to get Google
to rank you.
And once we get Googleto rank you,
then how do we get peopleto convert?
And that's where tryto figure out.
(13:40):
Let's make your website lookreally easy to find everything.
Don't clutter it up.
Make sure it looks good onmobile, it's easy to purchase.
If you're E commerce,make sure it's easy to buy.
Make sure that add to cardbutton is on the top of the
screen because whatever you seeon a screen is called
above the fold.
And most people don'tscroll down.
Majority of people never evenscroll down on the website.
(14:01):
So if you don't have all yourimportant information
at the top,like a value proposition
of what's in it for me,maybe a video or a couple bullet
points and then your callto action. A form,
if you want people to fill out aform all needs to be on
the top of the screen.
And that's where a lot of timeswhere I'll get people traffic
and then they're just like hey,leads aren't coming in and I'm
like we need to move this aroundand we need to tweak this.
(14:23):
And doing little changeshas had big impacts.
Like one of my clients,they had a,
they were a lead generationwebsite and they had a really
long form on the website for thecontact page asked a
lot of questions.
Like it had first name,last name, separate,
it was asking for their address,their city, state, zip code,
all these things where you couldkind of merge some
(14:44):
of them together.
So you just ask for a nameinstead of having two fields.
Instead of asking for theaddress like the street,
the city, the state,you just say zip code because
from zip code you could get the,or you get the city and state
from There because theless fields you have,
the more conversions you'regoing to get,
especially on mobile.
And by cleaning up their form,we pretty much doubled their
leads that they were getting.
(15:05):
Because especially on long form,like you got to think about,
do you really want to fill outall this information
on your cell phone?
And nobody has time for that,even on desktop at least it kind
of auto fills it for you,which is great.
But on mobile and you reallyhave to understand or think
anytime you're building yourwebsite or looking
at your website,look at it from a mobile first
perspective because that's whereyou're going to get.
(15:25):
60 of traffic nowadays comesfrom mobile and it
keeps increasing.
And you can check GoogleAnalytics,
it's a free tool from Googlethat will show where your
traffic's coming from and youcan see how much is really
coming from mobile or desktop ortablet and gives you a wealth
of information in there.
Yeah,that's all great information.
Yeah.
And then two of the drivers thatI mentioned at the beginning
(15:47):
that we look at is leads andconversion rate. Right.
So you want people to find outabout you and you want them to
convert into either sales oreven if you're having people on,
on your website,convert into a lead,
depending on what youcan consider a lead.
So that makes sense.
I mean I look at my phoneand if it doesn't load,
I feel like we're all like that.
Right.
If your page doesn't load fastenough or if you can't see what
(16:08):
you need or I agree with you,forms are way too long,
you might just abandon ship.
So that's really great advice.
And so you help people beyondjust the SEO to help improve
their website to,to get those conversions.
Sounds like.
Yeah,because I realized over the
years SEO just gets you traffic,but traffic isn't a
(16:30):
means to an end.
And even I help out a little bitwith paid ads because a lot of
people that come to yourwebsite, no matter what,
are going to leave immediately.
Feel like half the traffic thatcomes to any website leaves
immediately that bounce ratefrom Google Analytics.
And if you can just followpeople around using remarketing,
that keeps you top of mind andgets gets people that were warm
(16:52):
leads back into your funnel,hopefully.
So those ads are very,very cheap.
Where if you look at a producton Amazon and you see those ads
that follow you arounddoing the same thing,
and I do it for my website,that people come to my website
and don't watch one ofmy free classes,
I'm going to follow them aroundwith ads for my free class.
You've gone to my class butyou haven't booked a
free consultation.
(17:13):
I'm going to follow you aroundsaying like, hey,
book a free consultation.
And if you have booked aconsultation but haven't
signed up as a client,then I'll follow you around with
like testimonials and reviewsso you could sell all these
different custom audiences.
And the more trust pointsyou have, the more,
the more trust you'regoing to build,
especially for things thataren't the cheapest.
Like if you're just sellingsocks or something really cheap,
then you probably don't want tospend money on those ads.
(17:34):
But SEO,I've had people come to me five
years later taking one ofmy classes saying, hey,
I was in startup mode.
I'm now ready to start the SEO,which just took me a little
while. But you,it's a long buying cycle.
That's where you have tounderstand your audience and
just how to really resonate andconnect with them at
the right moment.
That makes sense.
So you help with SEO and you'llhelp with these other things
(17:57):
and you have classes.
Is there anything else that youdo to help business owners
in this area?
Those are really the mainthings. I mean,
I'll guide them on social media,email marketing, but emails,
usually we have to have a reallygood lead magnet to get people
to sign up or give theiremail address up.
But after that I usuallyjust tell the business,
business owners,you should probably write the
(18:18):
emails because if youhave somebody else,
it loses that authenticity andyou know your business best
and how to speak with the,with your audience and keep that
tone and everything likethat on point.
So I usually help guidethem with that stuff.
But in general I just try tofigure out where their audience
is and how to get them in frontof their audience at
the right moment,whether it might be social.
(18:39):
Like sometimes SEO doesn't work.
If you have a new product andnobody's searching for it,
there's not much youcould really do.
So social media would bea little bit better.
And it's just trying tofigure out where,
where your audience is and howto get you in front of them.
That makes sense.
Which which of those things doyou like doing the most?
Is it the SEO?
I like the SEO is the betterlong term strategy.
(19:02):
I feel like Google's not goinganywhere anytime soon.
Except for AI is kindof mixed that up.
But social and everything,I'm like,
you can put all your eggs in onebasket and focus on Facebook,
but Now Facebook is kindof the foresight.
Instagram took over andthen now it's TikTok.
So you have to keepjumping platforms.
And to get your audience fromone platform to another
is not the easiest.
Even if you have a really bigaudience to get them from
(19:24):
Instagram to TikTok doesn'talways work. It sometimes does,
but it's tricky.
So that's why I like the SEO isone of my better strategies.
But email is always the bestas well. Because email.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, it's just you getthe full reach.
So if you have 10,000 people onyour email list and you email
all them all are going to getthat email. With social media,
(19:46):
you post on social media andreach is so low that you don't
really get that full engagement.
I mean that makes sense.
I feel like you can postsomething and you,
you don't know how many peopleactually see it.
Its usually a small number.
I know I don't see half the halfthe people I follow on Facebook
anyway when they post stuff.
So all good focus areas.
(20:08):
So if I'm a business owner and Iwant to get started with SEO,
where would you recommendpeople begin?
I would first start off withbuilding backlinks and working
on their website,their structure of
their website.
Because the sooner youbuild backlinks,
the sooner you get rankings.
Backlinks,I mean it takes about six months
to get Google to trusta website.
(20:28):
So if you're thinking aboutbuilding a new website or
starting a business,I would buy your domain name
right away and then try to startbuilding some hyper about it.
Maybe do a press releasesaying like,
this website's launching soon.
That's a way to getsome backlinks.
Not the best backlinks becausethey're just kind of
general news sites.
But it doesn't hurt just to tryto get some hype around it,
(20:49):
get Google to see that otherwebsites are talking about you
and hopefully speed up thatprocess because it is a more of
a patience game with SEO,you got to stick with it.
How do I know where I rank?
I use Google Analytics.
It's a free tool that everyoneshould be using to track
their traffic.
WordPress and Shopify and Wixand all these platforms will
(21:11):
give you analytics,but it's not the same
as Google Analytics.
It just shows so muchinformation.
It's like big data overload.
A lot of people look at justdon't know where to go.
And I just say clickon everything.
You're not going tobreak anything.
And you're just going to learnso much information about your
traffic, where they come from.
There's also GoogleSearch Console,
that's another freetool from Google.
(21:32):
Search Console isreally for SEO.
I'll show you what keywordsyou rank for,
what position you're in,how much traffic you're getting.
Google Analytics is justfor all traffic,
just general information.
And then Google Search Consoleis for SEO specifically.
It'll show you if you've beenpenalized for doing some things
that Google doesn't want youto do. It'll tell you,
(21:54):
it'll show you how fastyour website loads.
It shows you a ton ofinformation on there.
Interesting.
So knowing that all there's allthese tools that we should
know about and be using,I assume you have some courses
to help people, you know,learn how to use these tools and
do things better, is that true?
Yep.
I do a lot of classes to helpeducate people and do them on.
(22:19):
Well nowadays, mainly online,doing one in person and watch me
in like three days for thefirst time in a long,
long time in Los Angeles.
So if you are around LosAngeles, come out. But yeah,
usually they're on person.
So or online,which is nice because now we
can watch them anytime.
It connects everybody and itmakes it so if you're in another
country you can just login and it's all good.
(22:41):
You don't have to drive.
Find parking in Los Angeles.
It's not the easiest and usuallythey're like after work or on
lunch break. So can be tricky.
But I like that Zoom hasconnected everyone and made
things a little bit nicer.
Even though it's still niceto do them in person.
I'm excited to do it in person,but online it just makes it so
much easier for everybody.
Sometimes it feels like Covid'sstill happening.
(23:04):
We all went online andnever came back.
So maybe some of my listenersmight come see you in person or
come see one of your classes.
So I would love to know if therewas one thing you would want
someone to take away about SEOand the conversation that we
had, what would it be?
That you have to work up SEO andit takes time. A lot of people,
(23:28):
I mean everyone wants thatinstant results just to shoot up
those rankings. But with SEO,it is a long term play.
You have to build it up andbuild up and building trust
with Google takes time.
So just be aware that the sooneryou start building backlinks,
the sooner you start gettingGoogle and other search
engines to trust you.
And that's going to get yourtraffic to slowly move up.
(23:48):
Sometimes it just jumps reallyfast. But in general with SEO,
we just got to keep buildingit up and building it up.
And over time,you're going to see that traffic
just slowly but surelyincreasing.
I love that. It's the long game.
It is the long game.
Listen,one of my takeaways is thinking
about the mobile firstexperience.
So when you're building yourwebsite mobile first and
(24:09):
remember that people don'tlike to scroll too far.
So starting with something thatgets the interest and the action
that you're looking for.
But this was a greatconversation.
Thank you so much for coming.
I want to know,if people did want to find out
more about you or takesome of your classes,
where is the best placefor them to find you?
(24:30):
I create a special gift foreverybody if they go to my
website@seoptimizers.comforward/gift.
That's S E O O P T I I ze r s.com forward/gift.
And they could find that giftthere along with my contact
information and some classesI've done over the years,
(24:52):
I've thrown up for free there sothey could watch classes to see
I do a lot of stuff thatwe talked about.
And also if they do have awebsite and they want a
free website analysis,I'm happy to check their website
out from an SEO point of viewand they can book some time on
my calendar there as well.
Awesome.
I will put the links to that toyour website and where they find
(25:12):
your free gift inthe show notes.
Everyone can find that becausewho doesn't like a free gift,
right?
And if you're looking to findout more about me and what we
do at New Light FinancialSolutions,
you can find us online@newlightfs.com but that is all that that
we have today for thisconversation of getting to the
bottom line. Thank you again,Brandon, for coming on the show.
(25:33):
I hope you all have a wonderfulday and we will see you next
time. Bye, everyone.
Thanks for having me.
Foreignwelcome to another episode of
Getting to the Bottom Line,where I'm your host,
Stephanie Smith,owner of New Light Financial
Solutions,where we help business owners
walk the one clear path togenerating more cash
(00:20):
in their business.
And we do this by looking at 16financial drivers that
impact your revenue,profit and cash flow. However,
we know that the things that welook at aren't the only things
that impact your bottom line.
So that is the goal of Gettingto the bottom line is to see
what other things to put intoperspective the various things
in business that impactyour bottom line.
So I'm excited to have with mehere today Brandon Leibowitz.
(00:44):
Brandon runs and operatesSEO Optimizers,
and he's done that since 2007.
They're a digital marketingcompany that focuses on helping
small and medium sizedbusinesses get more online
traffic that converts intoclients, sales leads,
or whatever it is you want.
So thanks so much for joiningme today, Brandon.
Thank you for havingme on today.
(01:05):
I'm excited to have thisconversation because we were
chatting right beforehand andI was saying I don't,
we're going to focus on SEO.
I don't do SEO in my businessand I know I should or shouldn't
focus on it.
I should focus on it more.
So I'm glad to have you here sowe can talk more about it.
But first,why don't you tell us how you
got into what you're doing.
(01:25):
I kind of fell into it.
I graduated from college in 2007and after I graduated, well,
got my degree in businessmarketing.
And one of the first jobs I wasoffered was helping a company
out with their digitalmarketing, which I don't really
know much about it.
Back then they didn't reallyteach that in school and the
company knew that and said,it's okay,
we're gonna take you to classesand workshops and
(01:47):
learn with you.
And after going toa few workshops,
just realized back in 2007 thateveryone's probably gonna
have a website.
Digital marketing's not goinganywhere anytime soon.
And SEO is just a wayto get free traffic.
And who doesn't wantfree traffic?
So I really focused more onthe SEO side of things.
But in general with digitalmarketing, Google Ads or ads,
(02:09):
social media, email marketing,it all works to get traffic.
And I'd recommenddoing all that.
I just really focus more on theSEO side of things just to help
people avoid spendingmoney on those ads.
And over the years I worked atdifferent advertising agencies
as a director of SEO and beforework and after work.
Now my lunch Breaks.
I work on my own company andeventually built that up to
(02:30):
where I was able to quit my joband focus solely on this and
been doing that ever since.
That is so awesome.
It's such a story I think a lotof people recognize and are
familiar with, right.
Transitioning from corporateor other jobs to their own
business. But starting in 2007,that was a long time
ago at this point.
I'm sure you've seen a lot ofchanges over the years.
(02:50):
Is there any significant thingyou've noticed over the past
year since you've gotteninto everything?
I mean it's always changing.
The biggest change right now Ifeel like AI is such a big
change compared to all the otherchanges. We're big changes.
Like mobile has takenover everything.
Mobile first for buildingwebsites and just,
(03:11):
just most of your traffic,majority of your traffic
will come from mobile.
That happened aroundlike 2013 is.
Google started switching overfrom desktop to mobile focused
optimizations.
But AI is just something that'sso new and we'll have to see
what's going to happen.
Where is it going to go orpeople are going to use AI or
search on AI versus Google.
Or it's just that kind of that.
(03:33):
Mystery box right now I did,I do have chat gbt so I use it
and it did ask me if I wanted touse like chat chat GBT as my
search. I did it one time.
I was like this feels weird andI went back to just regular
Google. But I completely get it.
The landscape is changing.
So keeping up with that,we need someone like you so you
(03:54):
can keep up with the landscapechanges and tell us how it
impacts what we're doing.
But tell me,tell me more about what it is
your business does and how youhelp people specifically
in this world.
So we make sure that when you,when people search on Google for
keywords related to yourbusiness, your product,
your service,whatever it is that you show up
on Google underneath the ad.
(04:16):
So the ads,you'd have to pay for each click
anytime somebody searcheson Google.
And if you click on an ad,that company,
that company has to payfor each click.
Could be a couplecents per click.
Could be a couple dollarsfor one click,
it could be a hundred dollarsfor one click.
Gets pretty expensive.
I mean as long as you're makingmore than you're putting in,
you don't have to worry about.
(04:37):
You could keep running ads,but you don't want to
always run them.
That's why the SEO is rightbelow the ads. Organic,
the free listings and that'swhat I focus on is helping your
website appear in those freelistings so you could just
capture that traffic whenpeople are searching.
Because people searchingon Google,
they usually have some intentbehind those searches to make a,
or learn more about aspecific question,
(04:58):
need help with something,and then eventually it might
lead to them buying a productor using your services.
And that's really whatthe goal is,
is getting people from Google toyour website and then ultimately
having them reach out to you orwhatever that conversion
goal is.
Right.
We want people to find us andbuy from us as business owners.
Right. That's the ultimate goal.
(05:20):
So tell, tell me,I'll say someone who isn't
as familiar with SEO,like what exactly does that mean
that you're optimizing? Like,how do you. What's then.
And dumb it down for me to,to real easy,
easy understand language. What,what is it that you're
doing on my website?
With SEO doing a few differentthings depending on what type
(05:43):
of website you have.
But there's some commonalitieswith all websites where
Google feeds off text.
Google loves content, really.
Text, images, videos, audio.
They getting much,much better at it,
but they still rather have text.
The more text you put into yourwebsite on every single page,
the easier it is for the searchengines to really read and
(06:05):
understand and know whatthat page is about.
Because search engines are justrobots and the more
you give to them,the more you spoon feed to them,
the easier it is for them tounderstand that page and rank
you for the correct keywords.
But keywords really mean nothingto the search engines because
they just don't trust anythinganybody puts on a website.
I could build a website andI could say like Brandon's
(06:27):
dentist.com and Google's like,all right,
are you really a dentist?
Because we don't believe you andwe don't want to just rank you
and then have people go to yourdental office and find
out you don't exist.
It's a bad user experience.
People are probably going to getfrustrated and say, Google,
why are you showing me thisdental office that
doesn't exist?
And they're probably going toswitch over to Bing or ChatGPT
or some other search engine andGoogle doesn't want
(06:50):
that to happen.
So Google wants to see thatother websites are talking
about you.
And that's a trust signal totell Google that you
are trustworthy.
It's called building whatare called backlinks,
getting other websitesto link out to you.
So if you're a dentist,you'd probably want other
websites related to healthand wellness.
So other maybe dentists in otherstates or get on like WebMD or
(07:12):
Yelp or Wikipedia or join yourchamber of commerce
in your area.
But the more websites that talkabout you, the more popular,
the more trust Googlegives to you.
And then they look at thosekeywords to figure out what
keywords to rank you for.
So when you work with someone,you work with them to figure out
how they can get these backlinksin other places to
(07:34):
help their SEO.
Yep.
Or sometimes I have clients thathave been around for 20 years,
have a lot of backlinks builtup, a lot of trust built up.
But their website's just builtin a way that Google can't read
it and going in andcleaning it up.
Because Google looks at code,they can't see the website.
What we see is notwhat Google sees.
Search engines just look at thecode and the code is all text.
(07:56):
That's why it gets alltripped down to text.
And if you have the code in aweird format or you sometimes
might block the search engines,they're not able to read that
and they're not going to be ableto know what keywords
to rank you for.
And that's really important.
That feels like a puzzle.
You got to put all thosepieces together.
You can't just do one thingor do another thing.
You have to really do it all tomake sure that you maximize that
(08:16):
trust and then make sure thatyou get the correct keywords
ranking on the search engines.
So doing what you'vedone for so long,
like what are the biggestmistakes that you see that
impact people's SEO?
The backlinks are the trickiestpart because either people don't
know about backlinks and havenever heard about them,
(08:37):
or they know what backlinks areand they're going on sites like
Fiverr and buying a thousandbacklinks for $5.
And unfortunately,if you build a wrong
type of backlinks,instead of ranking you higher,
it's going to drop you down.
And Google knows there's allthese ways to like trick
and game the system.
And going on Fiverr,you're getting all these
low quality backlinks.
And what you want to do is getquality backlinks into Google.
(08:59):
A quality backlink just means itcomes from a site that's related
to what you're doing. So if,depending on whatever
you're doing,like if you're selling shoes you
want websites are about likeshoes or about fitness
or about style.
If it's stylish anythingsomewhat related.
It doesn't have to be other shoecompanies like I do SEO.
Probably not going to get otherSEO companies to link out to me
(09:21):
because we're all prettymuch competitors.
But I could find SEO blogs orfind podcasts about marketing
or about advertising or justanything that's somewhat related
to what I'm doing.
That's what I want to be on.
That makes sense.
And I didn't know you canbuy backlinks on Fiverr,
so that's news, news to me.
But okay, so note to self,don't do that.
(09:45):
Where are they putting thoselinks, you wonder?
It's commenting on blogs.
So that's why most blogsdon't allow comments.
Because back when I firststarted doing SEO,
there's a tool with and stillout there. And I,
with the click of a button,you'll comment on whatever
amount of blogs, 5,000,10,000 blogs.
And Google knows that blogcomments anytime you have
(10:08):
a comment. And well,in the old way you always
used to say name,website and email address.
So you put that in there,you're always getting
a backlink.
So a lot of peoplejust go in there,
put their name as a keyword andput their website URL in there
and that became aclickable link.
And you're able to dothat on some really,
really big websites.
And that's why Google alwaysupdates their algorithm.
(10:30):
Like in 2011 they changed itsaying, hey, these backlinks,
it's not the number of backlinksanymore because it's too easy to
spam and get a bunch oflow quality backlinks.
We want good quality backlinks.
So now really what you need todo is build a couple or more
backlinks than your competitors.
But usually that's around like100 or so backlinks.
So if you're buying a thousandbacklinks from Fiverr,
(10:50):
that looks really suspiciousto Google.
A normal website would only begetting a couple backlinks
every single month,depending how big you are.
If you're a big corporation,then of course you're probably
going to get more. But small,medium sized businesses get a
couple backlinks everysingle month.
So naturally you just want toget a few and build it
up and build it up.
And over time that's going tosee Google getting
you more trust.
(11:10):
But that's why SEO takes so muchtime because Google just
doesn't trust you.
And to build trust is not easy.
So you're in the long gamewhen it comes to SEO.
How how speaking of that.
So how long do you usually seethat it takes for people get
results from focusing on this?
(11:31):
It really depends on thecompetition of those keywords.
The more competitivethose keywords are,
the more time it'sgoing to take.
But also how old yourwebsite is.
Like if I go back to that oldexample where I had a client
that had website that's20 over 20 years old,
it has the word Amazon in it,I'm like,
how do you get the word Amazonin it? He's like,
I have this website beforeAmazon existed.
So his website's really,really old.
(11:53):
It was just built in a way thatwas really hard for Google to
read it. But we went in,changed a bunch of coding things
in the or changed a lot of thecode and pretty much in a month
they shot up to like the firstthree positions for almost every
single key, what they,they wanted to rank for.
But that's really rare.
Usually it's the opposite whereI get someone that doesn't have
any backlinks and is a brand newwebsite and we have to build
(12:15):
that trust up and that's whereit just depends on
that competition.
So if you can niche down andfind something more unique that
helps differentiate yourself,that really helps out.
Because the more competition,the longer it's going to take.
If you're just selling T shirts,lot of competition.
If you can find somethingmore niche,
like maybe sell organic cottonT shirts for toddlers,
(12:37):
still very competitive,but a little bit more niche.
So the more niche you get, the,the faster you're going
to see results.
With SEO that makes sense.
And have you seen anyone?
Because we're talking aboutthings that impact your
bottom line. Right.
So I'm going to ask.
Have you seen anyone really getlike a lot more sales or
(12:57):
increase their revenue fromdoing this and focusing
on SEO specifically?
Yep.
So usually once they startgetting more traffic,
that's where also the websitehas to convert.
And that's why I try to workwith the web or the owner of the
business and the web developersand just making sure that your
website is optimized forconversions because a lot of
people will spend money on paidads and they're like I'm not
(13:19):
getting any conversions orthey'll do SEO and they're
getting all this traffic.
But traffic doesn't really meananything unless you get that
traffic to convert.
And that's where you have tobuild trust for people when
they get to your website.
So for SEO I have to build trustfor Google to get Google
to rank you.
And once we get Googleto rank you,
then how do we get peopleto convert?
And that's where tryto figure out.
(13:40):
Let's make your website lookreally easy to find everything.
Don't clutter it up.
Make sure it looks good onmobile, it's easy to purchase.
If you're E commerce,make sure it's easy to buy.
Make sure that add to cardbutton is on the top of the
screen because whatever you seeon a screen is called
above the fold.
And most people don'tscroll down.
Majority of people never evenscroll down on the website.
(14:01):
So if you don't have all yourimportant information
at the top,like a value proposition
of what's in it for me,maybe a video or a couple bullet
points and then your callto action. A form,
if you want people to fill out aform all needs to be on
the top of the screen.
And that's where a lot of timeswhere I'll get people traffic
and then they're just like hey,leads aren't coming in and I'm
like we need to move this aroundand we need to tweak this.
(14:23):
And doing little changeshas had big impacts.
Like one of my clients,they had a,
they were a lead generationwebsite and they had a really
long form on the website for thecontact page asked a
lot of questions.
Like it had first name,last name, separate,
it was asking for their address,their city, state, zip code,
all these things where you couldkind of merge some
(14:44):
of them together.
So you just ask for a nameinstead of having two fields.
Instead of asking for theaddress like the street,
the city, the state,you just say zip code because
from zip code you could get the,or you get the city and state
from There because theless fields you have,
the more conversions you'regoing to get,
especially on mobile.
And by cleaning up their form,we pretty much doubled their
leads that they were getting.
(15:05):
Because especially on long form,like you got to think about,
do you really want to fill outall this information
on your cell phone?
And nobody has time for that,even on desktop at least it kind
of auto fills it for you,which is great.
But on mobile and you reallyhave to understand or think
anytime you're building yourwebsite or looking
at your website,look at it from a mobile first
perspective because that's whereyou're going to get.
(15:25):
60 of traffic nowadays comesfrom mobile and it
keeps increasing.
And you can check GoogleAnalytics,
it's a free tool from Googlethat will show where your
traffic's coming from and youcan see how much is really
coming from mobile or desktop ortablet and gives you a wealth
of information in there.
Yeah,that's all great information.
Yeah.
And then two of the drivers thatI mentioned at the beginning
(15:47):
that we look at is leads andconversion rate. Right.
So you want people to find outabout you and you want them to
convert into either sales oreven if you're having people on,
on your website,convert into a lead,
depending on what youcan consider a lead.
So that makes sense.
I mean I look at my phoneand if it doesn't load,
I feel like we're all like that.
Right.
If your page doesn't load fastenough or if you can't see what
(16:08):
you need or I agree with you,forms are way too long,
you might just abandon ship.
So that's really great advice.
And so you help people beyondjust the SEO to help improve
their website to,to get those conversions.
Sounds like.
Yeah,because I realized over the
years SEO just gets you traffic,but traffic isn't a
(16:30):
means to an end.
And even I help out a little bitwith paid ads because a lot of
people that come to yourwebsite, no matter what,
are going to leave immediately.
Feel like half the traffic thatcomes to any website leaves
immediately that bounce ratefrom Google Analytics.
And if you can just followpeople around using remarketing,
that keeps you top of mind andgets gets people that were warm
(16:52):
leads back into your funnel,hopefully.
So those ads are very,very cheap.
Where if you look at a producton Amazon and you see those ads
that follow you arounddoing the same thing,
and I do it for my website,that people come to my website
and don't watch one ofmy free classes,
I'm going to follow them aroundwith ads for my free class.
You've gone to my class butyou haven't booked a
free consultation.
(17:13):
I'm going to follow you aroundsaying like, hey,
book a free consultation.
And if you have booked aconsultation but haven't
signed up as a client,then I'll follow you around with
like testimonials and reviewsso you could sell all these
different custom audiences.
And the more trust pointsyou have, the more,
the more trust you'regoing to build,
especially for things thataren't the cheapest.
Like if you're just sellingsocks or something really cheap,
then you probably don't want tospend money on those ads.
(17:34):
But SEO,I've had people come to me five
years later taking one ofmy classes saying, hey,
I was in startup mode.
I'm now ready to start the SEO,which just took me a little
while. But you,it's a long buying cycle.
That's where you have tounderstand your audience and
just how to really resonate andconnect with them at
the right moment.
That makes sense.
So you help with SEO and you'llhelp with these other things
(17:57):
and you have classes.
Is there anything else that youdo to help business owners
in this area?
Those are really the mainthings. I mean,
I'll guide them on social media,email marketing, but emails,
usually we have to have a reallygood lead magnet to get people
to sign up or give theiremail address up.
But after that I usuallyjust tell the business,
business owners,you should probably write the
(18:18):
emails because if youhave somebody else,
it loses that authenticity andyou know your business best
and how to speak with the,with your audience and keep that
tone and everything likethat on point.
So I usually help guidethem with that stuff.
But in general I just try tofigure out where their audience
is and how to get them in frontof their audience at
the right moment,whether it might be social.
(18:39):
Like sometimes SEO doesn't work.
If you have a new product andnobody's searching for it,
there's not much youcould really do.
So social media would bea little bit better.
And it's just trying tofigure out where,
where your audience is and howto get you in front of them.
That makes sense.
Which which of those things doyou like doing the most?
Is it the SEO?
I like the SEO is the betterlong term strategy.
(19:02):
I feel like Google's not goinganywhere anytime soon.
Except for AI is kindof mixed that up.
But social and everything,I'm like,
you can put all your eggs in onebasket and focus on Facebook,
but Now Facebook is kindof the foresight.
Instagram took over andthen now it's TikTok.
So you have to keepjumping platforms.
And to get your audience fromone platform to another
is not the easiest.
Even if you have a really bigaudience to get them from
(19:24):
Instagram to TikTok doesn'talways work. It sometimes does,
but it's tricky.
So that's why I like the SEO isone of my better strategies.
But email is always the bestas well. Because email.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, it's just you getthe full reach.
So if you have 10,000 people onyour email list and you email
all them all are going to getthat email. With social media,
(19:46):
you post on social media andreach is so low that you don't
really get that full engagement.
I mean that makes sense.
I feel like you can postsomething and you,
you don't know how many peopleactually see it.
Its usually a small number.
I know I don't see half the halfthe people I follow on Facebook
anyway when they post stuff.
So all good focus areas.
(20:08):
So if I'm a business owner and Iwant to get started with SEO,
where would you recommendpeople begin?
I would first start off withbuilding backlinks and working
on their website,their structure of
their website.
Because the sooner youbuild backlinks,
the sooner you get rankings.
Backlinks,I mean it takes about six months
to get Google to trusta website.
(20:28):
So if you're thinking aboutbuilding a new website or
starting a business,I would buy your domain name
right away and then try to startbuilding some hyper about it.
Maybe do a press releasesaying like,
this website's launching soon.
That's a way to getsome backlinks.
Not the best backlinks becausethey're just kind of
general news sites.
But it doesn't hurt just to tryto get some hype around it,
(20:49):
get Google to see that otherwebsites are talking about you
and hopefully speed up thatprocess because it is a more of
a patience game with SEO,you got to stick with it.
How do I know where I rank?
I use Google Analytics.
It's a free tool that everyoneshould be using to track
their traffic.
WordPress and Shopify and Wixand all these platforms will
(21:11):
give you analytics,but it's not the same
as Google Analytics.
It just shows so muchinformation.
It's like big data overload.
A lot of people look at justdon't know where to go.
And I just say clickon everything.
You're not going tobreak anything.
And you're just going to learnso much information about your
traffic, where they come from.
There's also GoogleSearch Console,
that's another freetool from Google.
(21:32):
Search Console isreally for SEO.
I'll show you what keywordsyou rank for,
what position you're in,how much traffic you're getting.
Google Analytics is justfor all traffic,
just general information.
And then Google Search Consoleis for SEO specifically.
It'll show you if you've beenpenalized for doing some things
that Google doesn't want youto do. It'll tell you,
(21:54):
it'll show you how fastyour website loads.
It shows you a ton ofinformation on there.
Interesting.
So knowing that all there's allthese tools that we should
know about and be using,I assume you have some courses
to help people, you know,learn how to use these tools and
do things better, is that true?
Yep.
I do a lot of classes to helpeducate people and do them on.
(22:19):
Well nowadays, mainly online,doing one in person and watch me
in like three days for thefirst time in a long,
long time in Los Angeles.
So if you are around LosAngeles, come out. But yeah,
usually they're on person.
So or online,which is nice because now we
can watch them anytime.
It connects everybody and itmakes it so if you're in another
country you can just login and it's all good.
(22:41):
You don't have to drive.
Find parking in Los Angeles.
It's not the easiest and usuallythey're like after work or on
lunch break. So can be tricky.
But I like that Zoom hasconnected everyone and made
things a little bit nicer.
Even though it's still niceto do them in person.
I'm excited to do it in person,but online it just makes it so
much easier for everybody.
Sometimes it feels like Covid'sstill happening.
(23:04):
We all went online andnever came back.
So maybe some of my listenersmight come see you in person or
come see one of your classes.
So I would love to know if therewas one thing you would want
someone to take away about SEOand the conversation that we
had, what would it be?
That you have to work up SEO andit takes time. A lot of people,
(23:28):
I mean everyone wants thatinstant results just to shoot up
those rankings. But with SEO,it is a long term play.
You have to build it up andbuild up and building trust
with Google takes time.
So just be aware that the sooneryou start building backlinks,
the sooner you start gettingGoogle and other search
engines to trust you.
And that's going to get yourtraffic to slowly move up.
(23:48):
Sometimes it just jumps reallyfast. But in general with SEO,
we just got to keep buildingit up and building it up.
And over time,you're going to see that traffic
just slowly but surelyincreasing.
I love that. It's the long game.
It is the long game.
Listen,one of my takeaways is thinking
about the mobile firstexperience.
So when you're building yourwebsite mobile first and
(24:09):
remember that people don'tlike to scroll too far.
So starting with something thatgets the interest and the action
that you're looking for.
But this was a greatconversation.
Thank you so much for coming.
I want to know,if people did want to find out
more about you or takesome of your classes,
where is the best placefor them to find you?
(24:30):
I create a special gift foreverybody if they go to my
website@seoptimizers.comforward/gift.
That's S E O O P T I I ze r s.com forward/gift.
And they could find that giftthere along with my contact
information and some classesI've done over the years,
(24:52):
I've thrown up for free there sothey could watch classes to see
I do a lot of stuff thatwe talked about.
And also if they do have awebsite and they want a
free website analysis,I'm happy to check their website
out from an SEO point of viewand they can book some time on
my calendar there as well.
Awesome.
I will put the links to that toyour website and where they find
(25:12):
your free gift inthe show notes.
Everyone can find that becausewho doesn't like a free gift,
right?
And if you're looking to findout more about me and what we
do at New Light FinancialSolutions,
you can find us online@newlightfs.com but that is all that that
we have today for thisconversation of getting to the
bottom line. Thank you again,Brandon, for coming on the show.
(25:33):
I hope you all have a wonderfulday and we will see you next
time. Bye, everyone.
Thanks for having me.
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