A Masterclass in SEO Excellence | Brandon Leibowitz

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers. Brandon's journey began in 2007, right after graduating from college with a degree in business marketing. His initial job involved managing the marketing aspects of an e-commerce website, and back then Brandon admits to having limited digital marketing knowledge. He says he had no idea what he was doing and neither did the company he was working for. So Brandon spent a lot of his time reading books, watching videos, talking to other marketers, reading blogs, and joining digital marketing forums to learn as much as possible about this new type of marketing. Today, Brandon's company, SEO Optimizers is dedicated to assisting small and medium businesses to drive more online traffic, leading to increased clients, sales, and valuable leads. Brandon, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Brandon Leibowitz: Thank you for having me on today. David McBee: Brandon, I want to start by saying how much I relate to your journey. I transitioned from print yellow pages to digital marketing around that same time period, and I remember feeling a little clueless myself, but it sure was fun, wasn't it? Adopting new technology and learning through trial and error. Did you find that to be the case for you as well? Brandon Leibowitz: Yep. It's a lot of trial and error testing, playing with things, seeing what works, what doesn't work. Still to this day, a lot of trial and error, just buying fake websites and just playing around, seeing does this work? Does this not work? Because you don't want to try it out on a client's or a main website, but testing, it really never ends. David McBee: It never does, and it changes so much, so drastically, so often we have to stay on top of our game and I'll bet you're still using a lot of those same forums and blogs and podcasts, aren't you? Brandon Leibowitz: Yeah, they haven't really changed too much, except nowadays Facebook groups are pretty popular versus forums are still good, but I feel like Facebook groups just have a little bit more activity in them. So get a little bit quick responses and more insights from other points of views and perspectives. David McBee: All right. That's a good nugget right off the bat. Thanks for that. Our listeners are probably very similar to you in that they do and have been doing SEO for years, and in that time a lot has stayed the same. The importance of tile tags, keywords, authentic content to name a few, but I'm sure a lot has also changed. So what are some of the advanced strategies that are working for SEO in 2023? Brandon Leibowitz: I mean, for the most part, the strategies are similar. It is just less spam. So finding ways not to game the system, but just providing value, providing valuable content, valuable backlinks, not just trying to get as many articles written by AI and just throwing them up there, just hope that they rank, which is a way that used to do in the past, and people still do it, but it's not the best. It's much more efficient to go for quality. So focus on a few high quality blogs or quality articles, quality content on your website, versus just trying to throw everything at Google and seeing what works. Because nowadays, Google said, "We don't even care who writes the content if it's human or AI, as long as it offers value." So make sure the content offers value, make sure your backlinks are from relevant, authoritative sites. Don't go for just any random site, but going for targeted sites, which is the basics over the years, but nowadays, I guess a big thing is user experience. How do people behave on your website once they get to your website, making sure that they stick and they stay and they read, and don't just hit that back button because that's a negative signal to Google showing that maybe your result isn't the most relevant or that people aren't finding what they're looking for. But as long as you offer value and good quality content, good quality backlinks, good quality everything, that's really what matters nowadays. David McBee: So I guess what I'm hearing is that authenticity is really the key, that the content on a website needs to be authentic and helpful and engaging and entertaining, and all those wonderful things that we expect when we get to a website. Really just make your website awesome, right? Brandon Leibowitz: Yeah, pretty much take a step back and pretend you were looking at your website for the first time as a perspective buyer. Does it convey what you're looking for? Does it have the right information there, or do you have to scroll down and go through clicking multiple pages to find what you're looking for? If so, it's probably not the best experience. If you find everything right there, it's easy to look through, it's easier to navigate, looks good on mobile, desktop, looks good on all the devices, the iPhone, the Galaxy, iPhone 10 versus 14 versus 7, they're all going to look slightly different on all those screens. So just making sure it looks good across the board and making sure it's easy to find what you're looking for. David McBee: So what do you say to the SEO expert that is working on his client's website and his competitor has all those things? How do you get ahead? They're already doing great blogs and they're doing all the things you've just talked about. They're authentic, they have a good user experience, good navigation, looks good on phones, how do you beat them? Brandon Leibowitz: That's where you got to look at all the little factors and try to see what exactly you're doing because they got the basics covered, and then you got to go for the things that have an impact, but not as big of an impact like schema or site speed and things like that where it's all very important. But the more important aspects really for SEO or content, backlinks, those really move the needle first. But once you've done all the basics, then you're like, all right, how do I differentiate myself? Do I get some more authoritative backlinks from older, more established domains? Pretty much I would look at your competitors' backlink strategy and reverse engineer it and see where they're getting backlinks. Are they doing trade shows? Are they doing podcasts? Are they doing interviews? Whatever they're doing, you could probably see what they're doing and try to incorporate what seems like a relevant authoritative backlink into your own strategy and weed away the ones that don't seem relevant. You go look at your competitors, see how they structure their website, how they built it up with the hierarchy, how frequently they're blogging. If they're blogging once a month, maybe you could try blogging twice a month to try to do a little bit better. Or you could see what type of blogs, how in-depth are they, are they really writing deep, insightful content, or is it just thin couple hundred words and throwing it up there? If so, then you could try to do a better job and write more in-depth user experience guides that really answer the full topic versus just giving them the basics of what they want to see or read. David McBee: So you must do a lot of competitive research. I'll bet you spend a lot of time on the websites of the advertisers who are beating your clients. Am I right? Brandon Leibowitz: Definitely competitive analysis is one nice thing about digital is I can see everything you're doing. You can see everything I'm doing if you look in the right places. So if you know where to look in the coding, in the backlinks, you can pretty much see exactly what they've done and see what's working, what's not working, and try to figure out how do I incorporate what's working into my own website and cut away what doesn't seem like the best strategy. David McBee: I know that a lot of SEO efforts are about ranking. That's the main goal of SEO, but I think more and more advertisers are focused on conversions. So let me ask you, how should we be optimizing websites for conversions? Brandon Leibowitz: That is a big part of marketing, where in the past when I started doing SEO, I was like, "All right, I'll rank you for your keywords, and that's it." But business owners don't care about rankings. They want sales, leads, phone calls. So that's why we got to figure out how to make or convert visitors into whatever that conversion goal is, and that's where, got to make sure your website looks good on all the devices like I was talking about earlier, but making sure it looks good on Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer. It's all going to look different, but making sure that you really have everything what's called above the fold. When you look at a screen, it's called above the fold. Once you start scrolling down, that's below the fold, and the majority of the people will never scroll down on a website or swipe down on a mobile device. So you have to have all your really important information at the top, above the fold. Having a value proposition, let people know what's in it for me from using your product or service. That should be at the very top. Then you could have maybe a couple bullet points or video or something where it's not just a big chunk of text, but something where it's easy to digest really quickly because attention spans are so short. So having some bullet points or a video is really easy for people to scan through. Having a call to action and all this needs to really be above the fold because if you put it below the fold where people have to scroll, you already lost a majority of your traffic, they're not going to see all that content. So that's really one important aspect is just make sure everything is there, it's concise. I would even look at your competitors, see what they're doing, get ideas off of them. But I'll look at bigger corporate websites to see what these big, big corporate websites are doing because that's where they're doing a lot of AB testing and saying, "All right, what works better? Should I move the add to cart button up two pixels or a couple centimeters? Is this going to have an impact on conversions?" Which it will positively or negatively impact conversions and if you look at these big corporate sites, they're doing a lot of this testing for you that you get ideas. I want copy it verbatim, but you get ideas of what might be good to incorporate into your own website to help maximize the value of every visitor, to get them to hopefully convert into that phone call, that email, that sale, whatever that conversion goal is. David McBee: That's great stuff. I feel like this has been a best of SEO tactics in 10 minutes or less, so thank you for that. Do you have a favorite podcast or a book or a website that you feel is instrumental in your ongoing success? Brandon Leibowitz: I would say probably, I mean, books are tough because they get outdated so quickly. So what you talked about earlier, forums are really good or blogs because they're updated in real time or Facebook groups. So there's a few Facebook groups I really like SEO Signals is a pretty good one, and I forgot the names offhand, but I really go into Facebook groups more nowadays because it's just updated in real time. It's quicker. It seems like there's a little bit less spam there because there's so many mods and admins that clean it up. Forums, I don't know. In the past, they worked really well, but now I feel like the quality of content on these forums isn't the same anymore, so I'm just trying to get information from as many places as possible and then test and take action. Don't just read or listen or watch something. You got to take action. Try it out to see, does this work? Does this not work? Because what someone put out there, it might've worked in the past, but tomorrow Google changes and it's not going to work. So if you're just reading and just thinking, okay, this is going to be a great strategy. You got to try it out and take that action. David McBee: Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you for sharing all that. What is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Brandon Leibowitz: I actually created a special gift for everyone that wants to learn more. They go to my website at seooptimizers.com. That's seotptimizers.com/gift. They can find that there, along with my contact information and a bunch of classes I've done over the years, I've thrown up there for free. So they could see step-by-step how I do a lot of stuff that we talked about. And also, if they want to book some time on my calendar, I'm happy to check out their website from an SEO point of view, and they could book some time there as well. David McBee: Awesome. Thank you so much for being my guest today on Simpli.fi TV. Brandon Leibowitz: Thanks for having me on today. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simply.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee, be awesome, and we'll see you next time.