Scaling Business Heights Through Strategic SEO with Brandon Leibowitz

Tim Melanson: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of the work at home rock star podcast.

I’m excited for today’s guest. He is the owner of SEO optimizers. And what he does is he helps people to get more traffic, get more leads to their business, uh, SEO, all that kind of stuff. So I’m excited today to be rocking out today with Brandon Lebowitz. Hey, Brandon, you ready to rock?

Brandon Leibowitz: Oh yeah. Thanks for having me on today.

Tim Melanson: Awesome. Cool. So we always start off here in a good note. So tell me a story of success in your business that we can be inspired by.

Brandon Leibowitz: No, probably success was helping. Well, the biggest problem is probably being able to quit my job. So working full time, helping other, or an advertising agencies to an SEO before work, after work on my lunch breaks, I’d work on my own company, trying to get new clients and building it up and building it up and over the years took some time, but built it up to where I was.

Comfortable and making the same amount as these advertising agencies as the director of SEO and was able to quit my job and [00:01:00] work from home and been able to be kind of like a digital nomad and be able to pick up and travel as long as I had my laptop and the internet connection. I could do my work, which makes it pretty nice.

And that was probably the biggest success was. Just let me go that nine to five and being able to follow my passion. That’s awesome.

Tim Melanson: And it’s a really smart way to do it too. Like you’ve got that kind of paycheck coming in. So you’re not desperate about anything. You can just build it on the side. How was that experience?

Like you probably a lot of late nights, early mornings, right?

Brandon Leibowitz: Or. Yup. Still a lot of late nights and early mornings, but at least now I can pick and choose my hours and it’s a little bit more flexible, but yeah, it was definitely a little tricky waking up before work, working on my own stuff and then going to work and then.

Working at my normal head of five, I’m in the mouth, but luckily I was doing SEO at both or at that nine to five, and then I freelance was nine SEO. So it all ties together and helps out where I’m not actually just learning about [00:02:00] SEO, digital marketing strategies at work, and then could help out my clients and can also help out my advertising agency clients.

So that made it a little bit easier where I wasn’t doing two separate things that were completely different, but, but it definitely was a little stressful and tough at times, but worth it in the long run. Yeah.

Tim Melanson: Why did you decide you wanted to start your own thing when you already had a business, you know, a job doing, doing that?

No, I think after I got my,

Brandon Leibowitz: well, I was an entrepreneur of spirit and after I got my first job, do an SEO, I realized I could work full time at this company, helping them out. But I also could go down to like a lawyer or a dentist or a restaurant and see if they need help with their marketing and picked up a few freelance clients here or there.

We had a little side income and realized that I should probably just go all in with this because people seem to want it and it was new and it’s still kind of is new to the day, but people are just kind of interested in it as a way to just get a new traffic source to the website. [00:03:00] I was able to just jump in early and build it up as much as I could, but always just knew I wanted to do something on my own and didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but just knew I wanted to have my own business eventually.

Tim Melanson: Right on. Okay. So you kind of had that idea of being a business owner right from the start, like you sort of chose the path on purpose,

Brandon Leibowitz: right? Yep. I knew that back in high school or probably earlier that I wanted to have my own company. Well, one day just didn’t know exactly what it would be. And it all kind of just fall into place after I graduated from college and got my degree in business marketing.

And that first job was doing SEO back in 2007. Wow. That’s awesome.

Tim Melanson: So, okay. So now along with the good notes, sometimes things don’t go as planned, right? Uh, and there’s some mistakes that you make along the way. Can you share something like something that just didn’t go as planned that we can learn from and maybe we can avoid it?

Brandon Leibowitz: Initially, I didn’t really know too much about website design and building websites and had my website just a little too complicated where SEO is very [00:04:00] technical and I just made it way too complicated, way too technical, the website and with mentors over the years, they’re like cut down by like 80 percent of your website and just make it easier to understand less is better sometimes where you’re not.

Overcomplicating things. And that was really tough for me to do because I thought the more information I give out the better, but cutting it down and stripping it down to. Really what business owners care about instead of getting super technical with all the little fine nuances and details, which they don’t really care about.

Just focusing on value benefits and what I have to offer that really changed my business around and got me to really pick up and get some exponential growth before that. It’s kind of here. There’ll be growing, a lot of referrals, a lot of word about, but not many people would convert off my website. But once I made all those changes and really optimize the website conversions for people, not just for Google, because I was really focused on Google by just adding a bunch of text, doing all the SEO [00:05:00] things that Google wants to see, but not realizing after that balance for people and for Google, and that really helped out a lot.

Tim Melanson: That’s a really relatable thing. I mean, I know it happened to me too that, you know, cause I’m an IT guy as well. And, you know, you put all this technical stuff on your, it’s like your resume, right? I mean, you’re like, Oh, look at all this cool stuff that I know how to do. And, but to the end user that needs your services.

I think what I realized is that the only people that really understood my website were my competition. And they’re not going to hire me. Why? Right. So, uh, so that’s really good advice to just kind of like tone that back and really just keep it towards, you know, what the customer is looking for. Right.

Brandon Leibowitz: Yep.

Yep. No, I agree. Yeah. I was pretty much writing a website for my customer, for my competitors to read my strategies, see what I’m doing. But the end user that really wants my services was not interested in all that fine nuances, all that really technical coding [00:06:00] changes and things like that, that I would be doing.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Yeah. They’re more, they’re more interested in like the problems that you solve rather than how you solve them. Right. Right. Yep.

Brandon Leibowitz: Um, they want to know what’s in it for me. What are you going to do for me? You’re going to get me more traffic. Okay, great. You don’t have to get into all these fine details.

Just let me know kind of like a higher level strategy. Like what you’re gonna do keyword research. All right. I put these keywords on your website or in my website, but you don’t have to tell me. We’re going to do a title tag or a better description or head of tags or schema tags or site maps, all these technical things.

Just let me know. You’re going to find the high search volume keywords, incorporate them into my website. That way Google knows what my website is about, but not get into the, all of those really technical details.

Tim Melanson: So let’s talk a little bit about getting fans. So, so getting people, you know, some eyeballs onto your work.

And so actually I do have a question for you. Like what’s, what’s better for a small business? Is it better for them to go and try to get traffic from. Like social media or would they go straight to search [00:07:00] engines? Like what, what do you think?

Brandon Leibowitz: It just depends on their audience and who are they targeting?

Cause really you don’t need to be everywhere. I mean, it’s good to have a presence everywhere, but really to be active, you got to figure out who is my audience and where are they? Like for myself, I do SEO or like a dentist. They’re dentists. They’re not going to get much traffic from Instagram or TikTok or Facebook.

I mean, we’ll get some people off of it, but most people are probably going to go. To Google or Yelp for a service based business, if you’re selling, or if you’re doing like comedy or news or sports or entertainment, that’s perfect for social media, but it’s all about just understanding who your audience is and how they engage.

Or even like for music, people are going to be searching on Google for new music. They’re probably going to be on Spotify or something like that. Sounds out, try to just browse around. So it’s all about just really understanding who your audience is trying to take a step back and thinking if they were looking for your product or if you were looking for your product or service.

Where would you go? And that kind of helps [00:08:00] you along that way. And also looking at your competitors, seeing where they’re active. Are they active on Instagram? Are they posting five times a day on Instagram, but nobody’s commenting. Nobody’s liking it. Maybe Instagram isn’t the best place, or maybe they’re just doing it wrong, but more than likely, it’s probably not where your audience is at.

So that gives you a little bit of insight to kind of look at what your competition is doing in. Get ideas based off them. Nice.

Tim Melanson: I like that strategy. Yeah. If you go to your competitors, you know, social media pages, you can see, you know, what’s going on. You can see how they’re, how people are reacting to them.

Right. That’s really cool. So now let’s just say that you, you know, they’ve, they’ve figured out, you know, what the best channel is, what’s the next

Brandon Leibowitz: step, what, what, what do they do next? And that would just dependent on that channel that they’re on. So if it’s for SEO, that means doing all the right things to make Google happy, which keyword research.

Find out what keywords people actually search for. Well, same with social media. Well, usually in general with [00:09:00] any marketing, you want to figure out what keywords are people searching for? There’s tools, free tools, ad paid tools. There’s a free tool from the Google called the Google keyword planner. And that will let you see.

So instead of just guessing and saying, all right, I think this is a good keyword. There’s a tool that will show you exactly how many people search that keyword versus a synonym or plural version or another variation of it. So you can figure out, is this the best version or. Maybe I should go with a different keyword, like for the dentist example, if they might offer teeth cleaning, but the dentist might say it’s called dental cleaning.

And we could check to see how many people search for dental cleaning. I might see that a thousand people search for dental cleaning a month, but 2000 people search for teeth cleaning. So then I’d go back to that dentist and be like, dental cleaning is good, but we should probably go for teeth cleaning because it gets double the amount of searches.

Same intent behind that search. So just figure out those keywords and then I figured out how to incorporate them through [00:10:00] social media, into your social media posts with hashtags, or just putting it in the actual description with SEO, you got to go into the coding and make a lot of kind of technical changes, but one easy thing for SEO is just add more texts to your website.

So adding more texts doesn’t require any coding. And every single page on your website needs to have text. Google feeds off text. The more text you have on your website, the easier it is for them to read, understand, and really know what that page is about.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. And then there’s, of course, like the, like you said earlier, there’s a bit of a balance right between, you know, the text for the search engine plus, you know, versus the text that makes it easier to flow on the

Brandon Leibowitz: website.

Right. Yeah. So having the top of your website is kind of, I’ll say, no, go ahead. Yeah. Having the top of your website. Kind of clean and easy to read with like bullet points or not just big blocks of text at the very bottom of your page. That’s where you could have all this text, but at [00:11:00] the top, it’s called above the fold.

That’s what, whatever you see on the screen is above the fold. Once you start scrolling, that’s below the fold. And most people do not scroll down on the website. So having it really nice and clean at the top with like images or a video, bullet points, a value proposition, like what’s in it for me. And then lower down on the page, that’s where you could have all of that.

SEO stuff for Google, where you’re just putting a bunch of texts there to make Google happy, but you got to get that balance. If you just put a bunch of texts at the top, probably going to deter a lot of people because they don’t want to read that, especially on mobile. They don’t want to read a lot.

Tim Melanson: Wow.

Okay, cool. That’s awesome. So then, uh, you know, we’re going to talk about instruments and, you know, tools that you could use to become successful. Now you’ve already mentioned a couple. There’s like the keyword search tool that you just mentioned earlier. Are there any other tools that you use? You know, regularly to get success in your, in your business with your client.

And for SEO,

Brandon Leibowitz: there are a lot of tools. Well, some are free, some are paid, but one or a couple of [00:12:00] important ones, just. Not even for SEO, just in general for marketing, like Google analytics, tracking, where is my traffic coming from? What pages are they visiting? How long are they staying on my website? That one’s another free tool for SEO.

There’s another one called Google search console, which is similar to Google analytics, but this one is all geared towards SEO. So you could see your SEO performance, what keywords you rank for, if there’s any errors on your website, if your website loads slowly, it’ll give you all those errors and pay tools.

Well, a big part of SEO is looking at backlinks. So finding other websites that talk about you, the more websites that talk about you, the more popular Google sees you as and the higher they don’t make you. So you want to get other websites to talk about you, which is essentially called building backlinks and there’s tools that will show me your website’s backlinks or edit websites backlinks.

So if you’re my competitor. I could throw you into these tools and one by one, look at all the websites that link [00:13:00] out to you and start reaching out to them to see if they would potentially link out to me because they are linking out to you and you’re my competitor. They might link out to me. I just got to get creative and figure out what did you do to do write an article?

Did you do an interview? Did you do a blog post? Did you maybe do a podcast interview or whatever it may be reverse engineering that entire strategy? These tools are a little expensive, but the more popular ones would be like Ahrefs or Moz or SEMrush. Those, you don’t have to buy all of them. You just pick one and use that tool.

But those tools are invaluable and help save a whole lot of time. So those would be like the main ones. There’s a lot of other tools that you can get out there, but those are the kinds of ones I use on a pretty consistent basis. Okay. So for all these

Tim Melanson: tools and all this SEO stuff, like. How would you rank it in terms of like, let’s just say that somebody is fairly technical, right?

But not necessarily, you know, a guru race like that. Would this all be stuff that, you know, a fairly technical person could figure out how to [00:14:00] do and how to use themselves? Or would this be something that you’d really want to start to hire out somebody else? It’s a little bit of a learning

Brandon Leibowitz: curve. Some of them, I mean, well, not sure if you got into Google analytics, but a lot of my clients go into Google analytics.

There’s like, I don’t even know where to go from here. And it’s huge. Yep. It could be a little overwhelming at times. So walking, but once you know where to go and it’s a little bit easier. So I give them like bookmark or create shortcuts and reports saying, all right, here’s the section that you need to go to.

It’s good to look at everything, but it gets a little overwhelming and it gets a little, yeah, a lot of people just. Get overwhelmed and close it. But I’m like, here’s the places that you should go. And then they could see, all right, these are my top traffic sources. This is where I mean, all my traffic, I could see Google’s bringing in this amount of traffic being is bringing them out this amount and this much from Facebook, this much from email, this much from people just typing my website in.

So you could see that or showing them which pages get the most traffic. Especially for e commerce that you say, okay, this product is getting the most traffic. 90 percent of the [00:15:00] people that come to this product page, they leave immediately. What’s wrong with this page? Why is everyone leaving? Is the price too high?

Or does it load slowly or image is bad? So that gives you more insight versus just saying, all right, yeah, a ton of traffic, but nobody’s buying. Why is it going out of legs? Let’s see, become like a detective and try to just figure out what exactly is causing this issue. Well, it doesn’t tell you what’s causing the issue, but it gives you insight.

Like something’s wrong with this page. It’s not going to tell you what’s wrong with that page. And that’s where you got to do AB testing and play around with it. But at least he has some more insights and these tools are free. They do have a little bit of a learning curve and I’ve done classes over the years that show you.

How to use Google analytics and search console in these tools. So they could just search by name, Brandon Lebowitz on YouTube and see some of those classes. But it does get a little overwhelming at times. It might be best to have some, at least help out at the beginning. Once you know where to go, then it’s a little bit easier.

But at the beginning is just. It is overwhelming. Hey

Rockstar.

Tim Melanson: I hope you’re enjoying this episode of the Work at Home Rockstar podcast. If you [00:16:00] didn’t know already, my business is Creative Crew Agency. We build websites. Now let’s talk about your website for a minute. Most people realize that at this day and age, we need a website, but we don’t really know what the website is supposed to do.

And sometimes you’ll just go and build a website for the sake of building a website. What I do is I make sure that your website actually accomplishes a goal. Now there are three main goals. To most websites. Number one is to provide information and build credibility. Number two is to schedule some sort of appointment and get them onto a sales call.

Number three is to sell something like an e commerce site. Now, when you’re setting your website, you have to be very mindful that the visitor doesn’t know what to do. And so you have to provide them with a roadmap that leads them down a path to wherever you want them to go. On my website, I want them to be on a free consultation.

So that’s why when you go to creativecrewagency. com, you’ll see information about scheduling a free consultation. Now, for you though, I’m going to provide you with an extra link [00:17:00] so that you can get your free website audit. Go to creativecrewagency. com forward slash free website audit and schedule an audit with me.

And I’ll go through your website live and determine what we can do to improve your conversions and make sure that you’re getting the business from your website. Go to creativecrewagency.

Brandon Leibowitz: com and we’ll see you there. Yeah,

Tim Melanson: I, and I’m, you know, I’ve got a technical background and I’d find it pretty eligible for me.

You know, for all this stuff, it’s definitely not built for the average, you know, person it’s, it’s built for someone who, you know, actually knows what they’re doing, I think, really. Um, but like you say, there’s, there’s ways you can learn these things, right. And, you know, that kind of leads to the next topic, which is learning for the best.

So, you know, what is your approach? Like, how do you stay up on, you know, all the courage? And like, do you, you know, do you take courses? Do you, you know, hire coaches, all that stuff? What’s, what’s

Brandon Leibowitz: your approach? That is how I first learned the SEO digital marketing. It was that first job I got out of school, helping a company out with their [00:18:00] SEO.

They didn’t really know much about SEO. I told them I didn’t know much either. They said, don’t worry, we’re going to learn with you and take you to classes and workshops and seminars. And that’s really what got me started was by going to one of these seminars and learning about SEO digital marketing.

And that is a great way to keep learning. Yeah. Go to paid seminars, like nowadays with YouTube, there’s so much content out there where podcasts and just in general blogs, there’s a ton of valuable information. Good place to go nowadays would be Facebook groups seem to be pretty active in the past. I’d go to like forums, but they’ve kind of died out or fizzled out.

They’re still active, but Facebook groups just seem to be updated in real time. And a lot of active members in these groups, you can find a group for SEO or. Social media or whatever it is that you’re looking for. And nowadays there’s groups on almost everything and just find a big group. That’s not just full of spam, but it’s actually providing value.

And then that’s where I usually get the most [00:19:00] insights from, but try to learn from as many places as possible. articles, blogs, podcasts, classes, having mentors and the more, the better. Cause

Tim Melanson: from what I understand, things kind of change frequently in that space. Don’t they? Or, or is it pretty much the same thing you did five years

Brandon Leibowitz: ago?

No, Google changes it every single day. I mean, they make little changes, but every few months they have big, big changes, but yeah, it’s constantly changing. All the time, which makes it interesting, but also makes it tricky at times too, because they don’t tell you what they’re changing. Sometimes they do, but.

Most of the times they don’t want you to know because they want you to get frustrated, give up and run those paid ads because that’s how they make all their money is through paid ads.

Tim Melanson: Oh, okay. I understand. So, so basically that that’s when you do the AdWords and all that stuff, right? You pay for the, for the advertising instead of going to your website and having to change what to make it, to make it, uh, show up

Brandon Leibowitz: higher.

Is that how it works? [00:20:00] Well, hopefully you don’t have any issues with the algorithm updates, because you do the wrong things. Google’s actually going to drop you, which we don’t want to happen. But if someone did do something that caused them to drop in the past, then ads might be a way to supplement that traffic until we can get them back up.

But hopefully they don’t have any issues. We don’t want them dropping down, but ads aren’t bad. As long as you’re making a positive return on your ad spend, then something wrong with really running ads, but it’s got to make sure that you’re making more than you’re putting in. Okay. So

Tim Melanson: when you, like, when you work with a client.

Your strategy is more like the organic or is it

Brandon Leibowitz: ads? Uh, it’s more holistic cause I realized just do an SEO doesn’t really do much. I mean, it does a lot, but unfortunately just no matter what, half your traffic is going to hit that back button just in general, no matter what from. Email from social media or from SEO, it’s called the balance rate.

If you look in Google analytics, you’ll see that probably gonna have like a 40 to 60 percent bounce rate, meaning that so many people can be [00:21:00] website just left. So how do you keep yourself top of mind? You could do those remarketing ads where you follow people around that been to your website, but didn’t.

Do a specific conversion action. Like if you go on Amazon, you’ll get a product and you don’t buy it. You’ll see those ads that follow you around. Yeah. Doing the same thing. So if someone comes to my website, I don’t sell products, but I have a service and someone goes to my website and will offer free classes.

So if they come to my website and don’t go to my free class, then I’m going to follow them around offering my free class. After they’ve gone to my free class, they haven’t signed up for a free consultation. I’m going to follow them around saying, book a free 15 minute call or 30 minute call with me to discuss your website.

And then after they’ve done that, they haven’t signed up. I’ll follow them around with testimonials. So city, so you’re not just following them around with the same ads, because that’s not really going to work. You have to kind of be a little bit more strategic about it, especially for a service for e commerce, it’s like they looked at this product, they didn’t buy it.

Follow ’em around with that product. It’s a little bit more [00:22:00] basic, but straightforward. The services, you gotta kind kind of creative and figure out how do you want them into that funnel and understand that there’s different audience segments. Even for e-commerce, people that went to your website, added a product to the shopping cart and didn’t check out.

Those are our cart abandoners. Those are closest to making a purchase. That’s where you really wanna push a big budget because they were about to make a purchase. Some to discourage them, maybe the price or shipping, or maybe they’re on their phone and somebody called them, they got distracted. They forgot about what website they were on.

So keeping yourself top of mind and having those multiple touch points really helps out. And that’s what I’ve learned over the years is SEO isn’t really a means to an end. It’s just one way to get traffic. Same with the ads. It’s all just a way to get traffic, but you have to have multiple touch points and really build trust up with the human to mock them to make a purchase.

Especially when it’s a big ticket item. Like we’re just selling like a t shirt. All right. You can kind of get away with it. But if you’re selling like a car or anything that’s kind of more expensive, that’s where you got to really build [00:23:00] that trust up. And it takes time. They’re not just going to go to your website and make a purchase of a brand new car.

You have to really build that trust and trust up. And that takes time.

Tim Melanson: So, I mean, all this stuff. Sounds awesome. And I’m wondering, like, you know, for, is this really accessible to a small business? Like, like how much is this going to cost to get all this stuff all set up and running? Like, is there a ballpark

Brandon Leibowitz: for that?

It varies depending on really keywords that you’re targeting. So if you’re a restaurant in Los Angeles. There’s a lot of restaurants and only 10 spots on that first page of Google. You’re fighting a lot of restaurants to get up there. So that’s where it becomes the more competition, the more time it takes for me to get you up there versus if you’re in some, in some tiny town where there’s only like.

It’s not going to be that hard to get you up there. You still want to maintain it and get you to the very top, but at least you’ll always be on that first page of Google. So less competition means it’s a lot easier for me to get you up there. [00:24:00] And that means less time, less money, but it’s not really one size fits all.

Every website’s different. And that’s, I always offer that free consultation. That way I can really look at their website. So we’re going to be looking at the competitors and try to figure out what’s going to be the best strategy. Maybe SEO might be a little too expensive or maybe it’s not going to work because people aren’t searching for your keywords.

Let’s cut that out and let’s try the Google ads because or social media or whatever it may be. So it’s really just try to figure out what fits best for their audience and how to really get their audience to become aware of what their product or services.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Yeah. And that makes sense. I mean, especially nowadays when anybody can run a business from home, right?

Like you, the competition, it’s just getting bigger and bigger and bigger as time goes on, right. And just about every industry, uh, especially if you’re offering a digital service, if you’re offering digital service, well then now it’s not even location specific, right? You’re, you’re competing with everybody in the

Brandon Leibowitz: world.

Right. Yep. And that makes it even more competitive. So that’s where [00:25:00] you just got to figure out who exactly is your audience and. How to get ahold of them. And maybe if you’re doing a digital product, like, all right, it’s in English. Let me put first focus on the United States. Then you can expand to Canada, then maybe do Europe.

And then if you want to start translating it to other languages, you can do that. But I’d say initially just focus on one. Don’t just break yourself too thin and try to be everywhere. Cause you can do that, but that’s where it becomes very, very expensive. And that’s probably later down the stage of your business.

So like, let’s

Tim Melanson: just get some ballparks then. I mean, if, if let’s just say you’re in a small town, not a whole lot of competition, you know, what would be sort of like a ballpark figure? We talking like hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to get something going? No,

Brandon Leibowitz: probably thousands. Or if it’s like a really, really tiny one, so it should be that much, but it’s very competitive.

Then it might be a little bit more, but if it’s from small, obscure town, it shouldn’t be too much. And the next thing is, once you get up there, you’re probably not going to drop down right away. Whereas like if you’re in Los [00:26:00] Angeles. Those restaurants are going to be looking at your backlinks using those tools that we talked about earlier, and they’re going to be trying to fight for that top spot because they don’t want to be on page two.

They want to be on page one. So that’s where you just gotta be aware that they’re going to be constantly on top of everything you’re doing. And that means you have to be constantly on top of everything that they are doing that way. You could just make sure that you don’t slip down and fall. Yeah,

Tim Melanson: well, yeah, I mean, if you’re in a big city, uh, you also got to think about the budgets of them because you’re literally like competing against other people’s budgets, right?

I would assume, right? I mean, because it takes time. It takes, it takes time to get these things done. So, you know, if you’ve got 10 massive companies that are your competition, right? They probably have bigger budgets than you do, right? And then it could be tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Wouldn’t it be to

Brandon Leibowitz: try to compete with them? Yeah, you might have corporate chains that are there and they have big budgets or franchise or [00:27:00] Yelp would rank up there usually for restaurants. And even though they’re not technically a restaurant, if they rank for your keywords, they technically are a competitor online.

Offline is different, but online, it’s whoever’s ranking for the, for your keywords, that is your competition. And that’s where you just got to figure out how can I. Do a better job of what they’re doing, man. That’s really by building better backlinks really comes down to backlinks for SEO for the most part.

There’s a lot of other stuff, but backlinks are just such a big piece of it and looking at your competitors backlinks and just trying to build more quality backlinks. Yeah. We’ll just get, get on

Tim Melanson: podcasts, right? It’s like for that kind of stuff,

Brandon Leibowitz: right? Yep. Any way to get a backlink from a site that’s related to what you’re doing is always going to be beneficial.

So if you’re able to be a guest on someone’s podcast and. They post a podcast on their website, then you’re in a backlink from the website. They’re just posting on YouTube, Spotify, all those other like podcast sites. That doesn’t really help out too much, but maybe on websites that are related to what you’re doing, because if you’re just on Spotify and YouTube [00:28:00] and like Google podcast platforms.

They’re just going to think that you’re a podcast, but I’m going to be on sites that are related to what you’re doing related. So like I do SEO, I’m not going to get other SEO websites or competitors to link out to me, but I could find websites about marketing about traditional marketing. It doesn’t have to be digital marketing, but I think somewhat related.

That’s what Google wants to see. Nice.

Tim Melanson: All right, Brandon. So it’s time for your guest solo. Tell me what’s

Brandon Leibowitz: exciting in your business right now. Oh, right now, just trying to keep it growing, seeing what’s going on with the AI since that’s such a big part of everything nowadays, and just trying to figure out how to use it in a way that offers value and offers correct information instead of just using it just to rely on it because it’s like a tool.

It just depends on how you use that tool, but just trying to figure out how to use that tool to help with my clients and maximize. Their visibility and exposure and just trying to see what’s going to happen with the future of SEO because Google’s now talking about putting [00:29:00] AI in the search results. Not to see how that comes into play and just trying to adapt and adjust because there really is no constant, but digital marketing is always changing.

And there’s some big changes happening right now. We’ll have to see if they last, because there’s always fads that come and go. And this AI one doesn’t seem like it’s a fad. That’s going to disappear anytime soon. I feel like it’s here for the long run, but yeah, that is really what I just try to figure out and offering some more courses and just offering more client work and just trying to keep growing the business and helping people get more traffic to their websites.

So tell me what, what would be

Tim Melanson: like the ideal client that would get the most out of working with, with you?

Brandon Leibowitz: Someone that has. A product or service where they’re not just selling like t shirts or something really generic, but something a little bit more unique. So if you’re selling t shirts, that’s fine.

But we have to find something that differentiates yourself. Like maybe you’re selling organic cotton t shirts for toddlers or something like that. Versus just selling t shirts. [00:30:00] Then you’re competing against all these big corporations. And if you have a big budget, then we could do it. If you’re just a startup or a mom hop shop, it’s gonna be really, really tough.

So that’s where it’s just understanding who you are. In the buying cycle or in the business life cycle and try to make sure that it’s actually feasible and make sure that usually I work with like local businesses or e commerce website. So if you’re selling a product or on your website, copy out, or if you’re a local business, those are the two that I really focus on primarily.

But as long as you have a website, a viable product or service. There’s potential and I go check it out and see, can we get you up there? How long is it going to take? And it is going to get you a positive return on investment.

Tim Melanson: Yeah. Yeah. Because, uh, I mean, what you mentioned before about the, you know, the, the city with a bunch of restaurant, like you could also, if you’ve got a digital product, try to figure out how to.

Make that unique as opposed to all of your other clients so that people looking for you that you they’re looking for something specific, right? You’re kind of like niching down Do [00:31:00] you help them to figure that out to to figure out how to how to make their product sound unique? Sometimes I’ve done

Brandon Leibowitz: that in the past and also it kind of backfires where then a lot of owners like, Nope, this is my product.

This is my baby. Don’t tell me to do that. But I’m just trying to help them out. And I’ve realized that maybe I shouldn’t do that. Someone actually, I was doing a free consultation with somebody. I said, all right, you’re selling this something. This really, really generic product might not work on SEO unless we can do something to differentiate it.

And then she got really mad and she’s like, I’m going to write you a negative review on Yelp and Google and all these places. And I was trying to help her out. So now I realized maybe I shouldn’t say stuff like that, even though I want to help you out, but. People just take it the wrong way sometime. And they’re like, this is my baby.

This is my product I’ve been working on, but found them like with SEO might not work, but there’s other alternatives that we can do like the paid ads, social media, but sometimes people don’t want to hear that.

Tim Melanson: No, it’s, it’s funny that you say that. Cause, um, I, uh, [00:32:00] like, cause we work in similar fields, right?

I, I build websites, uh, for the most part. I don’t do a whole lot of like SEO work. I focus on more, you know, organic marketing with, uh, uh, with like social media and stuff, but. Um, I do have, it’s quite often that you have a client that’ll come to me and they’ll say, Oh yeah, you know, I had this SEO person and they were doing it.

And, and, uh, the way it sounds is that the SEO person didn’t tell them that there was no way they were going to get on the first page of Google because they did have a very generic, you know, product that everybody else is offering. And a lot of people come to me as their coaches, right? That’s super generic.

Like, how do you get number one as a coach? Hey, I mean, there’s, there’s got to be something, but, but now I can get it. Cause, uh, you know, it’s possible that maybe they just got upset when you said, well, I’m not going to get you a number one on Google. It’s just not going to happen. Like we need to figure out how to niche down to your coaching services, right.

In order to [00:33:00] get you on the first page. But like you said, people get sad about that sometimes, right. Cause it’s, it’s what they offer. They just want, they just want you

Brandon Leibowitz: to figure it out. Right. We have to walk that thin line and sometimes you have to turn clients away saying, all right, I’m not going to tell you that this isn’t going to work, but I was going to tell you that it’s probably not going to be feasible to get trapped there on Google.

There’s other alternatives, but I don’t want to push them the wrong way and think that I’m saying their product or service is not a good one, which it is. It’s just, you have to understand the competition, but the SEO, it’s whoever ranks on that first page of Google. Is a competitor. If you’re designing something really generic and you have all these big brand corporations there, it’s going to be really, really tough to rank you up there.

I mean, eventually maybe you could get up there, but if it’s all like Amazon and Target and Walmart and Nordstrom’s and Macy’s, which I have clients like that, I’m like, you need to figure out something more unique. Otherwise this is just, yeah, I think they have whole teams of people doing their SEO. So probably pushing a little way.

Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month into their SEO. And if you’re not going to [00:34:00] be able to do that, then we got to figure out something that’s going to get you up there, but not be convenient with these big, big corporate websites. Yeah.

Tim Melanson: So how do we find

Brandon Leibowitz: out more about you then? No.

So anyone that wants to learn more, I created a special gift for them. If they go to my website at SEO optimizers. com that’s SEO. O P T I M I Z E R S dot com forward slash gift and they can find that their alumni contact information. And classes I’ve done over the years, I’ve done it for free. So you could see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about.

And also if they want a free website analysis, I’m happy to check out their website from an SEO point of view. And I could book some time on my calendar there as well. Nice. Right

Tim Melanson: on. Well, thank you so much for rocking out with me today, Brandon. This has been a lot of fun.

Brandon Leibowitz: Thanks for having me on awesome to

Tim Melanson: the listeners to make sure you subscribe, rate, and comment.

And we’ll see you next time on the work at home rockstar

Brandon Leibowitz: podcast. Thanks for listening to learn how you can become a work at home rockstar or become a better one. Head on over to work at [00:35:00] home rockstar. com today.