Interview with Brandon Leibowitz from SEO Optimizers

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season where we are doing a series of interviews again. We call this Interviews 2.0. And we are wrapping up in this episode. This is part four of our interview with Irina Podobnaya of Trackmage. And we get into the weeds a little bit this time around. We are going to continue sort of where we left off talking about effectively right sizing a product and finding the best solution for your customers, whether it is a very simple thing. There's a simple problem that's easy for them to solve that can be done maybe very effectively and cheaply. Or sometimes there's a lot of complexities that are part of their problem that they may not understand. And helping them understand and navigate the various options that are out there, whether that is to select your product or maybe sometimes your product is not the best fit and there is something that they are going to be better suited to. And then maybe come back later and purchase your product when it is a better fit for the problems they are facing at the time. And again, a little bit of spoiler as we get into this. So rather than me go and digress a bit, let's get back to our conversation with Irina. So today I'm here with Brandon from SEO Optimizers. Bring in a new guest here. And if you would want to look into the name a little bit, SEO Optimizers. Obviously, we're going to talk a little bit about SEO, search engine optimization, and get into what it really is because I think developers in particular can have problems underestimating it and say, yeah, it's just some tags, some codes, things like that. It seems to be with all the books that are out there, something that it's just like you just check off a list and you're done. And we're going to talk to Brandon who would be somebody in the know about how correct or incorrect that may not be. So I guess starting off, if you want to tell me a little bit about yourself, how you got into this and how you got to where you're at today a little bit. My name is Brandon Leibowitz and kind of just fell into digital marketing. Got my degree in business marketing. And after I graduated from school, the first job I got out of school was helping the company out with their digital marketing and kind of doing it all for them, helping out with like social media, doing email marketing, running paid ads, taking pictures of products, writing product descriptions, just helping them out with everything. And this is back in 2007. And after working there for a few months, just realized everyone's probably going to have a website in the future. And all the things I mentioned work to get traffic. But SEO is just a way to get free traffic. So I was like, why spend money on ads when you get that free traffic and just focused on that over the years, working at different companies, advertising agencies and always while I was working would be working on my company, building it up, working on on lunch breaks before work, after work, and eventually built it up where I was able to quit my job and just focus solely on this and been doing that ever since. For SEO optimizers in general, since it's by its name, obviously, that's part of what you do is consulting around that area. What are maybe what's sort of like your your focus? What do you do for your customers? I mean, what are your ideal customers? The ideal customers, anyone with a viable product or service, because that's the main thing is people have to be searching for you. And if you're creating something new that doesn't have a search volume, then social media might be a better way to go about it, because SEO is ranking you on Google. And if people aren't searching on Google, then there's not much I could do for you. But yeah, usually help out small, medium sized businesses, help out Fortune 500 companies and everything in between. So that really just comes down to having a good product or service that we can market to people. You mentioned the key to SEO is free traffic. Do you as part of your offerings, do you have like either a mix or do you have discussions around like pay, you know, actually putting advertising in as well as trying to get that organic SEO traffic? Yep, no, we definitely talk about helping out with different strategies, prefer SEO for the long run. But SEO takes time. It's not immediate. So if you're looking for that immediate traction, then run some paid ads and you'll get that visibility right away. And the ads do work. It's just once you stop doing them, you disappear. And the main thing is just making sure you have a positive return, making sure whatever you're putting in, you're getting back out and making sure that's really as long as you're making more than you're putting in, getting a positive return on ad spend, then keep pushing those ads. But it's not then cut them out. Actually, because that's you know, that's one of the things I've run into a lot. And I think that's sometimes that is, like you said, it SEO takes time. So sometimes that's sort of the shortcut is say, hey, well, we'll just throw some money at ads. But like you said, there's a certain point where it's like, hey, that's cutting into your revenue because you're now having to spend that on each of those customers. If you can get them for, you know, for free essentially, then you don't get those that organic kind of stuff or that search traffic, then you're going to be ahead of the game. So starting with like the small midsize companies and particularly those that are I want to start with, particularly those like content creating content creation sites like blogs or YouTube channels or things like, you know, like all the cool kids are doing, you know, they're they're various, you know, little content producing things. And in a lot of these, it's obviously you want to drive traffic to your site, but also there's this use of social sites and other places as part of this. Do you have a is there and maybe it is something that's unique to each customer, but is there sort of like some rule of thumb things out there that people that are generating this kind of content could say, hey, if you're writing a blog once a month, you should also hit all your sites once a day or once a week or or is there, you know, it's sort of like how much is too much and maybe how little is too little or is that even a smart question to ask? No, you want to put out as much content as you can because the more content better. All the websites love content. So whether you're on social media, I got to put out videos. That's what they really like. You're doing Google. They can't really read images or videos. They rely heavily on text. The more text you have put out there, the better off it will be. The easier it is for them to read, understand and rank it for the correct keywords. But content is one of the most important things for every platform, especially for Google. So I've seen and I've seen some people that recommend taking content like, for example, let's say they do a let's take like a podcast, for example, and say they do a 30 minute podcast and then I've seen recommendations, hey, take that and split it into six different parts and then make sure that you've got some text related to that. You know, you've got some sort of transcript and then post that out to different places. Is that does that make sense? Do you get some, you know, some advantage out of that or is it one of those where there's sort of like just a decreasing amount of return on it? So sometimes it's better to have a go to guide. Like if you're going to write a blog post and you're right, five blog posts out of 400 words or you write one blog post, that's five thousand words or twenty five hundred words. I would say write one blog post that's 2500 words because as long as it's all encompassing, like the go to guide for how to shop for cars, something like that, make it really long and informative. But if it's something really short where it's like, here's how to change the windshield wipers on your car. I don't need 2000 words about that. So just come down to what type of content you're putting out there, who your audience is and really what's going to resonate best with them and not overloading them with too much, but not breaking it down and making them have to keep going and searching to find those other ones because they're probably not going to find that stuff, unfortunately. So making it easy because people got really give them everything right away. So you're making them search around, click different buttons. It's going to be really tough, but you should just throw each episode up. If you're creating a podcast or video, throw it up on your website, transcribe it or timestamp it. If it's really long, it might be tough to transcribe an hour, two hour long podcast or content like that, but timestamping it because they feed off text, the more text, the better. And it's best to put it on your website because you own that instead of sharing it to other places. Oh, and that sort of leads into, um, I guess somewhere there's two things that, that I've seen used a lot. And I'd like to get a little deeper into those. One is the idea of backlinks where you get a lot of these places that are, um, really that's what they, that's what they trade in. You'll get stuff like, Hey, I wrote, you wrote a, an article about windshield wiper replacement and I've got a, an auto blog. And I saw that you wrote this article. What do you think about pointing to my auto blog? What, and then I'll point to your site. So I guess in general, how, how useful or valuable are those? Are there, and particularly cause I've seen some things where there's a, like in your, you've got a, which we'll have a link to this later, um, tools that you use and one of them that I was interesting is there's a disavow tool for Google that you can disavow certain links. So a little bit of this, what are there some gotchas or some caveats as well in dealing with backlinks? Yeah, backlinks are what Google's algorithm started with. And that's what made Google popular because they ranked websites based off backlinks versus whatever the search engines back then were doing. And still to this day, Google uses backlinks to rank websites and backlinks are clickable links from other websites that point to yours. So if you're reading an article, let's say on Forbes.com and in there it says Brandon Leibowitz, and if you click on that and it goes to my website, I'd be getting a backlink from Forbes.com. So the more websites that talk about you with a clickable link that points back to your website, the more trust Google is going to give to you and the higher than then they're going to look at the keywords on your website to figure out what to rank you for, but it doesn't work the other way around without backlinks. You're not going to have any rankings on Google because Google's not going to trust you Google doesn't trust anyone. And you have to build that trust up. And the way to build trust is by getting backlinks. There's a lot of different ways to get backlinks and you have to be very careful because in 2011, Google changed their algorithm and said, all right, it's not the number of backlinks, it's the number of quality backlinks. So in the past, if I had a hundred backlinks and you had 101 backlinks, you would rank higher than me. Now it's not the number of backlinks, it's the number of quality sites that link to you and what's a quality site to Google? A quality site is a website that's related to you and authoritative. So like if you're going back to like mechanic, you're getting a backlink from a SEO company, it's going to look a little strange. Like why is mechanic getting a backlink from an SEO company? But if you're getting a backlink from another auto body shop or mechanic or anything related to automobiles or cars, that would make sense. Another door to end this is how popular is that website? You got a backlink from my website. It's good, but it's not the same as like New York times or LA times or entrepreneur Forbes or any big, big site. So the bigger the website, the more SEO value that's passed on. So you have to be very careful because you build the wrong type of backlinks. Instead of ranking higher, you're actually going to drop down in rankings. And that's why Google has that disavow tool. In case you built low quality backlinks in the past, tell Google, don't count these, ignore these backlinks. That makes sense. And that's, yeah, that was one of the things that we'll talk about that a little bit more, because I know Google has, you know, regularly now in the last few years, several years, I guess they make changes, they, they do updates, they do tweaks, sometimes they let you know, sometimes they don't let you know what's going on or how they change things. So related to backlinks, there are a lot of sites out there where you can go, like if you've got a blog or podcast or a product site, whatever it is, you can go take your website and you go register with this site and they are sort of like a smorgasbord of sites. Usually they're, they're sort of like a search engine. It's stuff like if you go to findacoolsite.com, then if you're registered there, then if they're looking for an auto part, you know, site, then you'll show up there because it's sort of like search engine registry, but not quite, um, is it, and I've seen some, there's dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of those out there and even seeing sites that they're, they're key as they say, here's all these sites that you can go register for, you know, some are free, some are paid to those, is there, especially in modern days without the search and, and I guess, you know, Google is the, the, you know, 500 pound, 500,000 pound griller or whatever in the room. So especially with them, is there really a value in that kind of thing? And that kind of an approach? No. So it's backlinks. It all comes down to relevancy. If you're going to have a site that's about everything, Google's not going to know what you're about. They're going to get confused. So those sites used to work 10 years ago, but now it's all about really relevancy is the most important thing. If you're getting websites from, if you're getting backlinks from social media websites, Google's going to think you're a social media site. You're all you're getting is podcasts, backlinks. Google's going to think you're a podcast. All you're getting is whatever type of backlinks that's what Google's going to think you are, so you need to get websites that are related to you. That's so very important. If you're getting random sites to link out to you, if they're authoritative, even if they're really popular, it's not as valuable as a relevant website. If that website was only about, let's say you're like a plumber and that site, there's a directory only about plumbers. That would be good. But if it's about everything, it doesn't really help out too much. Just like, yo, stuff like that where they're about everything, but they're really, really big sites. It's a good backlink, but there's no real relevancy. And most of these sites put a tag saying no follow. So Google put out a tag a while ago. I'm like websites know that, Hey, we know that a lot of websites get spammed just to get backlinks, so we're going to put the, give you this no follow tag and you can put it on your website. And none of the backlinks count for SEO. It's like Wikipedia put that tag up a while ago because too many people are spamming Wikipedia just to get backlinks. Social media is no follow pretty much anywhere where it just says, add your website, like those directories. They're probably going to be no follow unless you pay them. Then they'll remove that tag. But most websites are no follow where the backlink doesn't count for SEO. Unfortunately, just because just did so much spam. Oh, that's good to know. Um, and something like this, their dovetails, so how do you, how do you, and then how would, is there ways that maybe you recommend people that are, where it's not their full-time job, keeping up with, uh, the changes and the, the evolutions of search engines and how they do their rankings and things like that, because like I said, I mean, you could be, you could have been number one in 2010 and always on the first page and now are, you know, way, way down at the bottom, you know, page two or something that like that, that nobody ever gets to, um, how do you, you know, how do you keep up with this? What are maybe some sources or some ways that, you know, if, whether it's somebody that wants to do it full-time essentially, or if it's somebody that just has a little bit of time to keep up with that. I mean, Google changes every single day. So Google's always keeping you on your toes. And the best way is just reading blogs, forums, joining, maybe Facebook groups, joining or watching videos on YouTube, listening to podcasts, or like masterminds, paid classes. But you got to keep testing. The main thing is trying things out. Don't just read and listen to what other people say, but try it out. See if it works. Great. If not, try something else out because you never know what's going to work. What's not going to work because what people put out on the internet is going to be sometimes outdated. Even if they say, here's a strategy that works today, tomorrow it might not work because Google is constantly changing. So you got to stay on top of it all the time, but that's also what keeps it interesting, but usually Google's really changing to prevent spam. So if you're doing anything deceptive or that you're tricking Google, that you know you should be doing, then you got to be worried that eventually Google's going to find out, catch you and drop you down. But as long as you're doing everything, what, according to what Google wants you to do, if you read Google webmaster guidelines, they'll tell you what they want you to do, then you don't really have to worry about these updates. But sometimes I'll tell you like, Hey, we're doing an update on speed or doing an update on mobile. If your website's not mobile friendly, we're not going to show you on mobile devices and right now they're doing a new one about AI content. So any content that's AI or fake content, they're going to try to penalize that and drop that down, which they've been doing that since 2013. Ever since article spinners came out where it's pretty much the same thing as these are similar to what these AI bots are doing, where you could throw an article in there and then it'll replace words with synonyms and make it look original, but didn't really read properly. Nowadays, the AI is pretty good where it reads really, really well. So it'd be interesting to see how Google is going to stop or figure out what's AI content and what's human-rearing content. And that will wrap this one up. It is a bit of a cliffhanger, so we will come back up next episode and we will pick up right where we left off. We're going to continue this talk about essentially ways to game the system. Some of the things that are out there and how Google makes some adjustments them and other search engines to take those things into account, to try to get the people that are, for lack of a better term, trying to generate fake interest and buzz about their site and their content, and instead focus on those that actually have true valuable content that is something that their users, they being the search companies, that their users really want. Because they, of course, want to be able to say that, hey, if you use our search engine, we will give you content that is what you were looking for. We're not going to, you know, you may be sold to, but we are not going to give you just a bunch of sales and ads. Instead, we're going to do our best to point you to what it is you're looking for. So without any more dragging this one out, we'll go ahead and wrap this one up and come back next time to see how this continues as we continue our interview with Brandon Lebowitz, but as always go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts, we are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Develop-a-Noor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Develop-a-Noor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Brodhead or Source Code of Happiness, you can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time we talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at develop-a-noor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.