Episode 086 - All Stuff SEO To Get You More Free Traffic

This episode of the Content Amplification Podcast is sponsored by eWebinar. Are you tired of doing the same webinar over and over again? Well, use eWebinar.com. Designed for customer success and marketing teams, eWebinar delivers the perfect webinar again and again without you even being there. You can try it for free for 14 days at eWebinar.com. Now let's get started with this episode. Today we're going to dive into the interesting world of SEO, search engine optimization. My guest today is Brandon Lebowitz from SEO Optimizers, and we had a great discussion about what you should be thinking about when it comes to your business, your website, and your content, and how it can help you with organic reach.

Brandon, thank you so much for being on the show today. We are going to be talking about SEO and how do you optimize it, especially if you've got a website for your business or yourself, if you're a personal brand, how do you get more reach out of it without paying to, to run ads to it? So thank you so much. And I'm excited to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be on.

So, Brendan, kind of give our listeners an understanding, you know, what exactly is SEO? What do we need to know about it?

SEO is search engine optimization, which means optimizing your website for the different search engines. So when you search on Google, there's going to be ads at the top of Google, but right below the ads are the organic results. That's what SEO is all about. So when you search on Google at the top, there's always going to be some paid ads, but right below it is the SEO, the free listings. And there are 10 websites listed on that first page of Google., but also there's images that appear there, videos appear there nowadays, there's a map if you're a local business. So SEO is really trying to take as much free real estate as possible up on that first page of Google without spending money on ads.

Absolutely. Now, over the years, I mean, the, the amount of reach that, that people get, you know, natively just by launching a site has decreased unless you're doing some special things to your site. Um, I'm assuming a lot of the, the ads and people that are, they're running ads are kind of telling you that, you know, SEO is, is something that's dead. It's not something that you should really focus on. You need to run ads, the only way to do it, which is not true. Absolutely not true. What should a business look at doing to their website just to, to kind of be set up for good SEO?

Yeah, so the ads, they do work, but just temporarily because SEO does take about 6 months to take full effect. So in the meantime, You might want to run some paid ads, but they are pretty expensive. And once you stop running ads, you just disappear. That's the one thing that I don't like about the ads is they're expensive and you stop running them, you disappear. Whereas with SEO, stop doing SEO, you're not just going to disappear. Over time, your competitors are going to do more SEO than you've done, but you're not just going to disappear. With SEO though, it's not really a one-size-fits-all. Every website is different. Every website's unique in terms of what they're doing. Are they a local business versus a national? Have they done SEO already versus someone that's just starting out? So it's not really a one-size-fits-all, but the most important thing, or one of the most important things that anyone could pretty much do on their own, is adding content, adding text to their website. The more content you have, the better off Google is going to be at understanding what that page is about and then ranking you for the correct keywords. But content is so very important because Google struggles to read images and videos. They're getting better at it, but they really rely heavily on text. The more text you have, the easier it is for them to read and understand that text and then rank you for the appropriate keywords. So everyone should put about 400 words of content on every single page that they want to rank, which, you know, seems like a lot. It's going to make the website look very ugly, but there's always this balance between SEO and web designers like you. You want to make the website look nice aesthetically, but Google needs some content for them to understand what that page is about. So I always tell people, throw the content at the very bottom of your page. Because most people don't scroll down to the very bottom, but Google will read from top to bottom and they'll see that content. But that's one thing that everyone could do pretty much on their own is just adding more content to all the pages and creating more pages. The more pages you have, the more keywords you could target, the more opportunities you have to rank for different keywords because each page can only target about 3 to 5 keywords. After that, it kind of loses that relevancy. So you're trying to target more pages or more keywords and you don't have many pages, start creating more pages. That's kind of why blogging became popular a few years ago, because— or like 10, 15 years ago— because blogs are an easy way for people to add more content to their website. It really comes down to content.

Now, most people are running like a WordPress, uh, website. At least most of my clients have been using that. Is there, is there a benefit between creating your content as pages versus posts, uh, in that platform? Does it have any relevance to the SEO power?

Pages are more for like anything in the top navigation. So anything on like on your website where it's like the dropdowns on your navigation, like the homepage, about us, contact us page, privacy policy, terms of service, all those pages, all those would be pages, like anything that's gonna live there forever. Services that you offer, all the different services. So I do SEO, I don't just have a page that says SEO, I have a page that says I do SEO. I have another page for keyword research. Another page for backlinks, another page for content. So just building them all out, those would be all pages. Or if you're an e-commerce website, the products would be pages, the categories would be pages, and then the posts would be essentially blogs. So just anything that's extra that you're like, I want to throw in 7 tips on how to optimize your website, that's not necessarily going to be a page because it's a blog post. It's more newsworthy kind of informative stuff. So post would just be for the post blog posts, and pages would be for like the actual pages that are going to live there on your navigation and things like that.

Okay. Now when you're saying, you know, you need more pages, or you can have, you know, the more pages, the better it is for you, do they necessarily always have to be in the navigation? Could you create a page that just lives there? It's live, but it's not part of your menu system. Does that hurt you by not having it in the menu?

No, it doesn't hurt you, but you have to make sure those pages are interlinked. Because if you just create a page and you don't have it linked anywhere, it becomes what's called an orphan page, and Google might not find that page. So you want to link, because Google follows the links on your website. So if you link to another page on your website, Google's going to follow that link. So that's why the navigation helps out, because Google follows the navigation and that links out to all the pages, or whatever pages you want to push on your website. But if it's not linked in that navigation, then You gotta make sure it's linked somewhere in the content on your website. That way Google finds it and it's not an orphan page. But other than that, it's perfectly fine to— you don't have to put all the pages in the navigation. You don't want to put all the pages because it's going to clutter it up. You don't want to put like the privacy policy, terms of service at the top. That's gonna— that's not necessary. You want to only put what's important at the top because the more choices you give to people, the less likely they're going to know what to do. It's kind of like too many options. So less is kind of better. Minimal is going to be better with the navigation and things like that.

Absolutely.

Now let's talk about blogging. Um, you know, a lot of people when they think of content, blogging is probably the natural one that just comes top of mind. Um, you mentioned about linking to other pages in the site. Um, it's important in a blog to link to other content that you have, correct? That helps.

Yeah. So Google looks at how you interlink your website together. Plus, the main thing is if you're reading a blog post, like, if you get to the very end of the blog post and there's nothing to click on or nothing to do, you're just like, all right, I read this blog post, what do I do now? Do I leave a comment? And then I hit that back button and leave that page. But if you have clickable links that point to other pages on your website that are related, it's going to keep people on your website. But also Google follows those links as well. So it's kind of like a roadmap for Google to find or to see what you're linking out to. But if you're reading like any big publication nowadays, you'll see that they're doing this. New York Times or any big website, you'll see that in the blog post there's gonna be clickable links that point to other blog posts because they want you to stay on that website longer. And also Google's going to follow those backlinks for those links and help rank that page a little bit higher. So it has twofold— helps for people and it helps for Google, right?

Now you threw out the term a couple times, backlinks.

Uh, they're important.

What are they?

So backlinks are clickable links from other websites that point to yours. So if you're reading— let's go back to New York Times— if you're reading an article in the New York Times and in there is a clickable link and it says Brandon Lee Woods. And if you click on it, it takes you to my website. Then my website would be getting a backlink from the New York Times. So the more websites, third-party websites, that mention me, the more essentially trust Google's going to give me, because Google does not trust any website. If you look at every website, there's like, we don't trust you, we're not going to rank you because there's too many people have tricked us over the years that We don't want to just put someone up there and find out that they're scamming people and there's these other 10 websites or 100 businesses that have been around that we trust them versus you. And the way to build trust is by getting other websites to talk about you. That's the biggest part of SEO is getting other websites to talk about you. And you have to be careful when you build these backlinks because if you build the wrong type of backlinks, instead of ranking higher, you're actually going to drop down in rankings. So you have to be very, very careful when you're building these backlinks. That's the one tricky part of SEO. Everything else is pretty straightforward. Like adding content, blogs and things like that. But the backlinks, it's where you have to be very, very careful.

Now what do you mean by that? Like, like it can, can hurt you? Like what would be like a bad backlink? What would cause that?

So Google looks at— so to Google, in the past it was a numbers game. If I had 100 backlinks and you had 200 backlinks, you would rank higher than me. But 2011, Google had an algorithm update for the Penguin update, and they said we're not looking at the number of backlinks, we're looking at the quality. So Now it's quality over quantity. And what's a quality backlink to Google? Quality backlink is a website that's related to you, related to you and authoritative in this. So making sure it's a related website is really the biggest thing. Like if you're, let's say you're a doctor and you're getting a backlink from a mechanic or an auto body shop, that's going to look a little strange to Google. They're going to be like, why is this mechanic linking out to a doctor? Whereas if the doctor was getting a backlink from a WebMD or a website related to health or medicine, that would make more sense. So relevancy is really the most important. The more relevant, the better. So relevancy, like if you're getting a bunch of backlinks from random websites, Google's gonna get confused and think that you're some other website and they're gonna drop you down in ranking. So you gotta be very, very careful making sure you build good quality backlinks. And good quality really just means it's a website that's related to you and authoritative, like Getting a backlink from my website would be great. Like, SEO Optimizers is a good website, but it's not the same quality as like the Huffington Post or Forbes or Wall Street Journal or Entrepreneur. So the bigger the website, the more SEO value that's passed on. But also, those big sites don't have any relevancy. They're just general sites usually. So you still need to get on these smaller niche-related websites. That's really important to Google.

So, so essentially, the, the website domains have, have an authority rank, right? Like, they get quality score based off of, you know, the reputation.

Yep. Google has— it's called PageRank. They don't show it anymore. They used to show what the PageRank is, showing like you're on a scale of 0 to 10. 10 is the best, 0 is the worst. And they used to show that. They took that away. But there's all these third-party tools that show you their guesstimate, which is just a guess. It's not 100% accurate. So I just take everything with a grain of salt because it's easy— not easy, but there's ways to manipulate these third-party tools like Moz has domain authority, page authority. There's Alexa Rank, there's Majestic Citation Flow, Trust Flow. There's Ahrefs has their own. There's all these tools that have their own kind of algorithm that they're trying to figure out what Google's doing. But people kind of game the system on some of these. So what I like to do is I like to look at all of them and just take everything with a grain of salt. And if I see all the numbers are really high but one of them, like maybe Ahrefs has really low numbers, but Moz and all these other ones are really high, then maybe I might say that's not the best site because maybe they manipulate it. But if all of them are really high numbers, then it's probably a reliable, trustworthy website. Or if all the numbers are really low, maybe you want to avoid that site because, you know, if you build the wrong type of backlinks, it's going to do more harm than good. So you have to be kind of careful, or not, you have to be very careful with the backlinks.

Yeah, good, good words of, of, uh, caution there. Now, Brendan, how important is your, your, your social presence online if, especially if you got your website linked on your social pro profiles, you know, can that hurt you or could that help you?

Well, social media doesn't really impact SEO too much. So Google's kind of blocked from all the social media channels except for YouTube. They own YouTube, and Google's partnered with Twitter like 5 or 8 years ago. But other than that, social media is really like— Google and Facebook are direct competitors. They're not helping one another out because Google owns YouTube and Facebook has a big video presence, so they're just kind of blocked from one another. But it does help out a little bit because, well, for people, like, people want to see, like, when they go to your website, they want to maybe, they're like, all right, who are you? We see this website, but I don't trust you fully because I don't know who you are. But if you have a presence on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or Pinterest, or whatever platform your audience is on, then they could see, okay, maybe you really are a company. It puts a face behind the company. Social media is really to build trust for people, and people know, okay, You can buy off our website, but there's also a team here. You can message us here. You can read reviews. You can see status updates. You can make sure that we are really reliable and trustworthy. But social, in terms of ranking higher on Google, it's not going to help out with the backlinks or anything like that, because anywhere where it's too good or too easy, it's usually going to be blocked from Google. So like, you put your website URL on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, it's just too easy. You're just putting your URL there. And also the relevancy. If you're getting a bunch of backlinks from social media sites, Google might think that you're a social media site. If you are a social media site, then that's good. But if you're not, that's not really what you want. You really want relevant websites, sites that are related to you.

Now, I had heard one time that, that if you, you know, want to help your SEO ranking and you have a YouTube channel, embedding your YouTube videos into your site helps. Is that, uh, is that truthful?

Yep. So that would definitely help out because Google owns YouTube. So Google is going to give a little bit more preferential presence to YouTube. Well, to rank higher on YouTube, that helps you rank higher on YouTube. In terms of SEO, I'm sure there's a little bit more benefit of putting a YouTube video versus like a Vimeo or some third-party custom player, but videos do help out a little bit for SEO because Google just wants to see that you're putting text on there, that you're putting images, you're putting videos. Makes it a good user experience. I don't know if Google's necessarily going to I'm sure they might put a little bit more emphasis if you're putting a YouTube video versus a third-party competitor, but that part's top secret. But to rank higher on YouTube though, a big part of YouTube's algorithm is the more websites that have your embedded video on it, the higher you're going to rank on YouTube. It's kind of like building backlinks to your YouTube video. The more websites that embed it, the better. Plus, if you got embedded on a website and that website got you 10,000 views, all 10,000 views get attributed to your video. So That's also the benefit of embedding it. But it's kind of tough, like how do you get people to embed your video? It's really tricky. But if you could get people to embed it on their website, it helps out a lot, especially your own. Like when you record video content, you should 100% put it on your own website, embed it, transcribe the video, or if it's a long-form video, maybe timestamp it because Google can't really understand audio yet. Like when you upload a video to YouTube, they'll try to get the closed captions and subtitles for you, but it's not perfect. You still have to go in there and edit it. Google still, or YouTube still relies heavily on text. Like, text is so very important.

This all is very much like making sense to me because I had done a blog post on mine, um, a little over a year ago, and it was like 6 ways to edit your podcast using a software. And I did YouTube videos for every 6 of the steps and embedded it in there. And that today is still the top organic blog post that I have, um, with it. And I think that probably is attributed to the fact that those YouTube videos are on there as well. So, um, that's probably making sense. Now, you seem to know a lot about SEO. You've specialized in that, and you created your company back in 2007, SEO Optimizers. Why SEO? What, what's the passion for you with this level of digital marketing?

I just kind of fell into SEO back in 2007. That was the first job I got out of school or out of college, is helping out a company doing their digital marketing, where I was actually helping out with like everything. I was doing social media, doing email marketing, running paid ads. I was taking pictures of their products, writing product descriptions, doing SEO. And back in 2007, I kind of realized like everyone's gonna have a website in the future and I should probably stick with this digital marketing. And also with SEO, it's a way to get free traffic versus paying for Google Ads or these other things, which they all work. I'm not saying don't do them, but SEO is just a way to get that free traffic. And why spend money? Why make Google richer when they already have way too much money and power. So let's try to help you out and get you that free traffic. So that's really kind of what I focused on, is just trying to get that free traffic and stop making these big corporations richer because they're getting plenty of money already.

That's right. So you have small and medium-sized businesses, the website SEOoptimizers.com. I guess what's, what's the process if somebody is listening to this and they say, you know what, I think my website could be improved for SEO, uh, Brandon seems to know his stuff, what would be the next step? Like, what's the process of working with you?

Well, so I would have to analyze, do a website analysis. So analyzing the website and diving in and seeing what's working, what's not working, and trying to find the disconnect between you and your competitors. Because it's not really a one-size-fits-all. It's not like, okay, you want to do SEO, here's what we're going to do. It's let's look at your website, look at your backlinks, and look at some of your competitors and see where— what's missing. Where— how are they— what sites are they on that you're not on? What are they doing differently that you're not doing? And how can we implement that on your own website. So it's really kind of diving in and doing analysis and then trying to figure out what the disconnect is and how we could get you to that level. But it really is not, it's a customized package. It's not a one size fits all for everybody.

Right, right. And then would you provide back to, to the, the client, here's a list of things that, or recommendations you should do, especially if that person is really good at making content and, and, you know, you know, you know, building pages and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, the more you could do, or the business owner could do, to help me out, the faster those rankings come in. If they could blog alongside, because I'll be blogging for them, but if they could blog alongside with me, I mean, the more content the better. The more they do, the better. But it doesn't necessarily mean they need to do anything. Usually I take care of it all for the business owner so they can focus on the business. But if they do have some extra time and they want to write a blog post or send over some content, that's great. But that's not necessary. But does help out. A lot of SEO is getting content out there on other websites, and means of writing a lot of articles, press releases, blogs, whatever it may be, videos, podcasts, whatever content you're putting out there. It's just getting a lot of content out there on the web.

All right, and your website has a free SEO masterclass on it. It's at seooptimizers.com/gift. So if you're listening, you want to go there, you can get it. Then the link will be in the show notes as well. Um, before we wrap up, is there there any little nuggets of, of wisdom you can give to people that kind of help them through their, their website journey for this year?

I would say just be persistent with it and keep at it. With SEO, it is the long-term play. And a lot of people— I know everyone wants instant gratification, want to see those results immediately, but just take the time and understand that it does take time. And over time, you'll be moving up and getting that traffic. But don't just get discouraged. A lot of people kind of just give up after a few months. They're not seeing any traction, and it takes time because your competitors might have been around for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years. And if you're a new website, it's gonna be tough to build that trust, but it's all feasible and doable. It just takes time. You just have to be patient and just keep working and don't get discouraged if you don't see those rankings immediately. And don't give up. You have like running paid ads, like a lot of people run paid ads and get discouraged saying it's not working. Well, maybe you need tweak the ad, tweak the ad text, maybe do a video ad, make sure the landing page is optimized, make sure— I mean, there's a lot of variables that go into it. It's not just, oh, this isn't working. It's not working because you need to test and tweak something. And that's a big thing, is just testing and testing and testing and never stop testing, because that's how you're going to learn and see what works, what doesn't work, and it's going to help you make more informed decisions.

Excellent, wise words.

Thank you, Brendan. Thanks for having me on.

As I mentioned at the top of the show, this episode is sponsored by eWebinar.com.

You know what?

I've used a lot of webinar platforms over the years, not only for myself but for my clients. And when I found eWebinar, The experience that the attendee to the webinar has in an automated webinar platform is far superior with eWebinar.com than any other platform that I've ever seen. So I urge you, if you're in the space of doing webinars and you haven't thought about doing an automated one, or maybe you already have automated webinars and you want to up your game to a platform that's going to convert more, keep the attendees active even longer, check out ewebinar.com. You can get a 14-day free trial. Again, ewebinar.com.