Stop Wasting Time On Content No One Finds – Do This Instead

Welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Now, if you are thinking about SEO search engine optimization and you're wondering how it works, why it's important to you, and maybe the impact of AI and whether you can actually use AI to do some of the SEO work for you, then this episode is for you. Because I am talking with Brandon Leibowitz, who runs a company called SEO Optimizers. Been running the company for nearly 20 years now, which is pretty incredible as an entrepreneur, but also it means he has a huge amount of experience. Brandon, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me on today.

Well, I'm delighted to have you on the show, but I am going to call you on something because you shared with me before we started recording the hidden agenda behind being on podcast. Explain to me what why being on a podcast is so good for an entrepreneur and why you're doing it.

Well, there's lots of reasons to be on a podcast. There's reaching new audiences, getting more visibility, exposure, making yourself known as a subject matter expert in your industry and gets the authority and. But for me, I do SEO, and big part of SEO is getting what are called backlinks, getting other websites to talk about you. The more websites that talk about you, the more popular Google sees you as and the higher they're going to rank you in the search results. So I also go on podcasts that have a website and then hopefully they publish that podcast episode on their website and will give me a clickable link back to my website. So I get an SEO backlink and also get that visibility exposure. But that backlink is really invaluable for SEO because it really helps you rank higher and get more traffic from Google.

So how about that? You know, Brandon is really telling us in sort of two different areas. One is using a podcast as a guest to share his brand. But I had never really thought of it in terms of being a way for a guest to get another backlink. And that's why I was so keen to have Brandon on the show because I plainly am too ignorant about SEO. So we're going to talk with Brand about how search engine optimization works and how we can use it on our websites. But he's an entrepreneur in his own right. So we're going to talk first of all with Brand about being an entrepreneur, how he's built his own company, SEO Optimizers, before we move on to some of the depths of SEO and how you can use it, SEO and AI and any mistakes that. That he sees people making when it comes to AI. So Brandon, take us through SE optimizers, SEO optimizers. What do you do and who for?

We help people get more traffic to their website. So if you have a business, I mean a website, then we make sure that when people are searching on Google for your keywords for your product or service or whatever it may be that you're promoting, that you show up at the top of Google, but also making sure that we get you targeted visitors that are hopefully going to convert into phone calls, sales leads, whatever that conversion goal is specifically that you're focused on. So not just worrying about traffic because traffic is really just half the battle once people get to your website, how you get them to convert, and that is a tricky part as well. It's more called conversion rate optimization. Just trying to figure out how to make that website convert traffic into leads for your business or sales.

Brandon, so many of us are told to create content, create content, create content, you know, produce blog posts and so on. Are you saying to some degree that that's completely useless, that it's a waste of time because you're putting it out there, but it might be indexed at some stage by the search engines, but it's not really SEO friendly. Help help us to understand whether we're wasting our time in content creation.

No, no, you're definitely not wasting your time with content creation. Because Google, ever since I've been doing SEO 2007, Google said content is king. Like we love content, meaning text primarily. They can't really, I mean they're getting much better at images and videos and audio, but they still really rely heavily on text. So you putting content on your website is a good thing. Adding blogs, adding content about your services or your products, or just adding more text in general to all the pages on your website. Google loves that. But Google is not just going to rank you because you put content on your website or if you put keywords in there and make your website fully optimized from an on point on site perspective, fixing like title tags or meta descriptions, all these technical things, Google doesn't really care what you put on there because they just don't trust anybody. And you have to build trust up with Google. And the way to get Google to trust you is by getting other websites to talk about you. It's kind of like a popularity contest. The more websites that talk about you, the more popular Google sees you as. And then they look at those keywords on your website. It doesn't really work the other way around. If you're not building what are called backlinks like we were talking earlier, then Google's not going to trust you, and they're not going to rank a website that they don't trust in. What is a backlink? A backlink is a clickable link from another website that points to yours. So, for example, if you're reading an article on entrepreneur.com in there, it says Brandon Leibowitz. If you click on that and it goes to my website, I'd be getting a backlink from entrepreneur.com so the more websites that have that clickable link that points to your website, the higher you're going to rank. So SEO is like a puzzle. There's a lot of pieces to that puzzle. Some are bigger than others, but you need to put all those pieces together to get Google to rank you. And backlinks are a really, really big piece of that puzzle, as well as content on your website. And then there's all these other things, but those two alone are very, very important.

So, Brandon, that's really interesting because I got over 400 guests now on my show, and I've created pages for each of those and articles and videos. So counsel me. What should I be doing? Because one of the challenges seems to be to get someone else, for example, a guest. If I have a guest and I give them the article, they don't want to link back to me. Because as far as they're concerned, if they've got someone on their website reading about them, they want that person to stay on the website, go through their funnel, and enter their CRM. For example, how do you help someone like me get people to give the backlinks rather than, if you, like, be selfish and keep the traffic on their own website?

No, most people would probably want to promote their episode. So when I'm a guest on people's podcasts, people will sometimes give me a link to, like, a YouTube video or a Spotify link. And then if I promote that, I'm just. I'm going to promote that with my audience. I'm going to share it on social media. I might even post it on my website saying, like, as featured on. But now I'm going to link back to YouTube or to Spotify. But if you have your own website and you post episode on there, you post the YouTube video on that page, you write an article about that person, then if you send that to me, I'm going to share that with my audience. That page on, like, Facebook, Instagram. Well, maybe I started, but like Twitter, LinkedIn, anywhere where I could share that URL and share that with my audience, well, and on Instagram, letting people know, check out this podcast episode and trying to direct people to your page because now that's where everything is encompassed and it's all there. So most people I feel like would be inclined to share that page, but because. And then they might also put on their website like as featured on. And they have a whole section with podcast episodes, which is what I do. So I have a page where I showcase all, not all of them, but majority of the episodes I'm on. So people go listen. And then if you give me a link to your website, I would probably link back to you. So you probably do have a decent amount of backlinks if you're sharing your website URL. But if you give people links to Spotify and YouTube, then they might share those and give backlinks to Spotify instead of you. So that's why just giving everything on your website, having a page that has everything in there is going to be much better than giving them a bunch of links and that's going to hopefully get them to give you some backlinks. Because I always tell people that are guests or hosts, it's kind of easy to get backlinks. Like if I became a host of a podcast and had a lot of guests on, I would just create pages about them, make it really look good and really optimized and then share that URL with them so that hopefully they share that with their social media following but also post it on their website, hopefully to get me that SEO backlink which not everyone's going to post on the website, but I feel like a majority of them are definitely going to share it on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and places like that where they have a big following. You're just tapping into that following, getting more traffic to your social media which then hopefully you can convert that social media traffic to your website. It's a long process. It's a lot of steps and layers that go into it, but it's just that trickle down effect.

Brandon. And if people want to have a consultancy with you at the end of the show, you're going to give a link to a free consultation, I think, aren't you Brandon? So that'll be great because it is a big topic. And I asked Brandon before we started, well, how much does it cost? And he said, well, really it depends on so many variables that you can't give an individual price or even work scope. So I want to move on because it's plainly a topic that comes down to Trust actually, doesn't it that Google trusts your website if other people link to your website as opposed to as you say go Google trusting you because you say things about yourself. So in a way it mirrors what society does in terms of it's about reputation really, isn't it? Brandon, with SEO we can't talk about really anything these days without including AI and the impact of AI on SEO. Tell us, how is it impacting people's SEO strategies?

Well, it's just helping people create content. I feel like people are just pushing content out with AI, but you got to make sure that what you're putting out is accurate and AI is not accurate yet. It's getting better. But if it doesn't know the answer, it just makes it up, does what's called AI hallucination. And it's not going to tell you that's making the answer up. So if you are selling tennis shoes and you say write me a blog post about tennis shoes, it might just make a bunch of stuff up and if you just copy it verbatim, post on your website, it's not the best. So if you go in and properly optimize or use it as like a guideline, maybe have AI write you an outline, that's gonna be much better than just saying write me a whole article. Because article could be full of misinformation and if you put out incorrect information, Google is not gonna want to rank that page. So Google said we don't care who writes the content last year because it can't differentiate AI versus human content. But if it's full of incorrect information, then that's where Google doesn't want that. So that's something that you could use to help speed things up a little bit with content creation. But again, you got to take everything with a grain of salt that AI puts out there, double, triple check everything because it is not there yet. But it is a good starting point. It's a tool and just depends on how you use that tool.

And it sounds as though, Brandon, that it's not so much about having content that you write that's on your website, it's about getting content that you can contribute to someone else's website, whether it's an article for example, or a write up and having that other website linked back to you, isn't it? So it's as much about the outreach. And I had a company called Respona on the show. Farzad Rashidi, the founder of that business came on talk about the platform they've got that actually goes out and helps you to build backlinks. So there are some tools. What about AI tools for evaluating the SEO performance of my website and socials?

Yeah, I don't think AI could do that yet. I mean, there might be, but you have to probably pay for a paid tool to get that stuff because there might be some free ones out there that will evaluate it like screaming frog. But it is very, very confusing and technical if you're not that good, versus just paying for a tool that makes it really easy, visualizes it much better. But Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that will show you any or some mistakes. It's not going to show you much, but shows you if your website loads slowly or if pages aren't being found or indexed and things like that. So you could see some of those errors from Google Search Console for free. But most of the time probably have to pay for a tool that will do a full site audit like Ahrefs or something like that.

Okay. And so I've heard of Ahrefs and also I think Semrush is another one that people use. Is that right?

Yep. Or Moz, or there's so many out there, it's just finding one that you like and just picking one. You don't need to buy all them. Just find one tool and just go for that.

Okay, so is it something I say, something? Is SEO strategy something that an individual entrepreneur can and should do or should they really look for help? Brandon?

I mean, it depends on how much time they have in the day. If they want to learn a whole new skill set and have time to do it, then go for it. But SEO does become like a full time job because it never really ends. So initially, if you have time, go for it. But in the long run it's, it does become a little te. The backlinks are what takes a lot of time. So you can make some basic changes, put some keywords on your website, start blogging. That's all pretty easy to do. But some backlinks, that takes time to find websites, build relationships with them, qualify them, make sure they're relevant, authoritative. Because if you build the wrong type of backlinks, it'll actually do more harm than good. So you have to be careful and kind of tread lightly with all that stuff.

Very, very interesting. And I think what you're also clarifying is that SEO is never done, right? It's, it's constantly in motion because there's more and more content being, you know, produced and published. Okay, Brandon, So now I'm Equally clear that SEO is a big, a big task, one that I need to find an expert on. So as an entrepreneur, Brandon, just tell us a little bit about what you've been doing to get noticed. You've done the podcast and you're doing SEO as well. How is that working? And is I noticed you've got clients around the world. How are you attracting clients from around the world?

Well, lots of different ways, by doing SEO on my own website, making sure that my website ranks on Google, doing podcasts, having my own YouTube channel, doing my own podcast in the past, building up email lists, doing some paid ads, remarketing. So anyone that comes to my website and doesn't watch my class, I'll follow you around with ads saying, like, watch my free class. Anyone that's watched my free class but hasn't signed up for a free consultation, I'll follow you around with ads saying, like, book a time for a free call. Anyone that's booked a call but hasn't become a client, I'll follow you around with, like testimonial ads. So trying to just keep myself top of mind, have multiple touch points because that's the biggest thing is just making sure that once people get to your website, unfortunately half the people are going to hit that back button, that bounce rate. So you have to keep yourself top of mind, try to collect email addresses. I do classes, so that's another way that I teach a lot of classes for free and paid classes, but free one get me visibility, exposure and opens me up to a pretty wide audience.

That's interesting when you talk about teaching classes, Brandon, what, what platform are you teaching those on and what frequency and what content because that sharing is such a powerful way of building your brand.

So there's the Small Business Associ association, the SBA teach there. Then there's like a college that was for digital marketing. It's called General Assembly. Kind of like all over the world, they have little because they realize most schools don't really teach digital marketing. So they do that and help people out with that. But I have my own meetup group that I use and promote my classes on my website and my social media through my email list. So all those platforms help me get or help people find my classes.

That's impressive and looking. Now you've got over 100,000 followers on your social and the 25,000 subscriber list. So those are impressive numbers even for a big company, Brandon, let alone for, you know, an SME, which, if you don't mind me saying, you know you're a team in la, owner operated with plainly a global footprint. So congratulations on that. Brandon, I will ask you my troublesome question though, a mistake that you might have made that you'd share as a cautionary tale for me and my fellow unnoticed entrepreneur about a marketing campaign or activity that hasn't gone quite as planned.

Well, the SEO at first was a big thing where I would do search engine optimization for myself. My clients get them ranked for keywords, but they weren't getting sales, phone calls, leads, whatever that conversion goal is that they were looking for. So as I realized over the years, SEO is just one piece of the puzzle you have to kind of look at holistically and try to have, like I saying earlier, those multiple touch points. So someone goes to your website but doesn't make a purchase, let's follow them around with ads. Or someone goes to your website, let's try to get their email address by offering something for free, not just asking for their email address. Because no one's going to give you your email if you just say subscribe to my newsletter, which is something I had up on my website for years and was wondering why no one ever subscribes. Then once I change it to a free ebook, I got a few people or joining my email list. But then once I started doing like free classes, that's where I got a lot of people during that free class. So trying to just figure out, playing around with things and seeing what works because offer value and that's really what I've learned as well is don't really promote myself, but just offer value, give out, tell people what to do, give them insights, tips, knowledge and don't really promote yourself because in the past I was promoting myself a little too much where now it's just share that knowledge. If they want to learn more, they're going to look you up, learn more. You could subtly promote yourself, but don't just go all about why they should use you because people don't care about that. They want to know what's in it for me. What are you going to do to help me improve my business essentially?

Brandon, that is such great advice. I will just pick you up on one thing you said there about your classes and linking those on meetup. Can you just tell us the mechanics of that? Because you're the first person that I've spoken to that has promoted sign up for the newsletter to come to my classes. Can you just tell us not in in too much detail, but just the mechanics of that?

Well, yeah, I have the classes listed on my website and I share them on Meetup, Facebook events, LinkedIn events, and there's like a bunch of other event based websites that you could share your events on. And then I have my own meetup group that I've had for years, which I wouldn't say get a meetup now because it's so expensive, but when I first started doing it, it's much cheaper. They just keep doubling the prices. And my meetup has like 5,500 people in it, so it's kind of tough to cancel it when it's so big. If it didn't have that many people in it, I would have probably canceled it a long time ago. But it does get me people and new visibility and new exposure. But it's just the price, especially if you're just a startup, it's gone so expensive that it doesn't really work as well as it did before. But that's why I like platforms like YouTube are great because you just post your class that you've done, throw it up on YouTube and then the world could see it and then it becomes like evergreen content. So they don't have to be at that class at that moment, but they could just find you on YouTube or other platforms.

Granted. Lee, which I will ask you what's. If you like your. Your number one piece of advice because you've mentioned a number and a holistic approach, which is absolutely right. Although difficult to implement all of those things simultaneously. If there's one marketing activity, and I am going to ask you not to say SEO because that sort of. You're definitely your bread and butter. But if there's one marketing activity that's really moved the needle for you and SEO optimizers, what would that be?

Email for everybody. But not many people take advantage of email. But email is the most powerful marketing strategy by far. Nothing will compare to email for now. Email is just so powerful because now you've. Well, if you collect email addresses, don't buy an email list. But if you collect email addresses, then you have that list, you can nurture it and you send an email out to. You have a thousand people on your list. All thousand people will get that email. Doesn't mean they're going to open it. But it's not like we're social media where if you have a thousand followers on Instagram, you post on Instagram, 20 of those people might see it, post on Facebook, might get like 3% engagement. So these platforms really kind of limit what engagement you get without you paying. So a Lot of social media is now pay to play, whereas email, you collect those emails, you're not paying. I mean, you have to pay a company to help manage them, but you're not paying them to show it to your whole subscriber list. You post your email, send it out to your audience. And email really is invaluable as long as you offer value. If you're just promoting yourself, doesn't really work too well. But if you're offering value, like, maybe I could, after this podcast is done, I could tell people in my email list, check out this podcast episode I did. So then they're like, oh, Brandon's offering value. He's giving me expert knowledge. He's not just promoting himself. He's not just saying, hey, come to my website and sign up for a free consultation, because that works. But it doesn't work as well as offering value and giving some knowledge and dropping some tips and advice.

Okay, that's wonderful. That's wonderful advice, Brandon, and very generous as well. I mean, you're starting obviously from a place of generosity there. Can you give us an idea maybe of a book or a podcast that you go to to give you inspiration or, you know, energy insights about any topic, business or otherwise?

Yeah, there's a lot out there. I like this one guy called Lex Friedman Podcast. It's kind of interesting and talks about a variety of topics, but gets kind of deep into stuff and gets into, like, just really personal stories and talks to founders of really big companies to small companies. And it's really interesting the way he interviews and his perspective on things, and it keeps me entertained, especially sometimes I'm doing some tedious work, I'll just throw that podcast in in the background, and it is a great way to just help get the day go by.

That's wonderful. That's wonderful. Well, Brandon Leibowitz, if you want to get hold of you and possibly interrupt you listening to the Lex Friedman podcast, just to get a little bit of your insight about SEO, how can they do that?

So I created a special gift for everybody. If you go to my website at s e o optimizers.com that's s e O P T I M I z e r s.com forward/gift. You can find that gift there along with my contact information and some classes I've done over the years. I've thrown up there for free so they could see step by step how to do some of the stuff that we talked about. And also if they want to book some time on my calendar, they could book some time for free there as well for free website analysis.

Brandon, thank you so much for that. I'm really pleased that you've mentioned about the gift, because I'm just launching my podcast, Guest Blueprint, and a key module is about guests having a gift or an offer for the audience. And it's remarkable how few people come on a podcast with a way to connect with the audience and give the audience a reason to reach out and ultimately to get these listeners into your CRM. So really pleased that you've done that. Not just because there's a gift, but also it kind of validates something that I've been saying and putting into this course. Thank you for that. Thank you for the generous offer. Brandon Leibowitz, SEO Optimizers Founder, thank you very much for joining me today from la.

Thank you for having me on today.

Well, I never know with SEO if I should talk about it on the show or not because on the one hand I'm learning about it, on the other hand I feel like the more I learn, the less I know. Thank heavens for having experts like Brandon on the show to explain it, but also to offer some consultation and in some classes as well on his website and on his YouTube. So fascinating. But apart from all of that, what does come here for me is the need to build content that has trust at its core. Generating content for the sake of generating content really is a waste of time. Although it's, if you like, it's popular, it's not necessarily profitable use of time to get other people to trust you enough and like you enough to want to put something about you on their website and to connect it to you. Ultimately, that is the secret to gaining ranking and some superiority and some deal flow into your website. So brilliant. Brilliant to get closer and closer to that truth. Thank you for joining me, Jim James today with Brandon Leibowitz in la. And I'm just here in sunny UK and hopefully you've enjoyed this. If you have, please do review the show and follow the show because I don't want you to miss another episode of this episode called the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.