Interview with Brandon Liebowitz of SEO Optimizers

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we are doing interviews. We're calling this Interviews 2.0. And this episode we are wrapping up our interview with Brandon Liebowitz of SEO Optimizers. We are going to sort of pick up where we left off and talk about keywords, the value of keywords, how those figure into things like ads and search engine optimization, and some of the ways that you can not only game the system, but ensure that you are utilizing words properly so that you get categorized and cataloged properly by the search engines, the primary one being Google, of course. So I'm going to go right into this. We'll pick up where we left off. And here we go with part three with Brandon Liebowitz. That's good. And I guess I hadn't realized that that was one of the things I've seen before. I've seen before where you get an ad quality credit or something like that. I can't remember how Google referred to it, but I guess that's what it is. They sort of say, oh, OK, you're following the rules properly, so we're going to give you a discount. And that's, yeah, I can see where if you're spending $10 a month, it's not going to matter much. But if you're spending $10,000, that can add up fairly quickly. Yeah, it makes a big difference. Yeah, it's that quality score. Google looks at the quality of the landing page, the click through rate, and I believe the keywords. So making sure that all those three are checked off will help you save a couple cents per click, which is going to help out in the long run. Keywords is another interesting thing because there are that's another thing. There's a lot of tool. Actually, even Google has tools to help generate keywords. And there's all kinds of sites that are, you know, give them a word and they'll get you all these different keywords and suggested phrases. Is that. Are those things or is that useful? Is it something where it's great to have tons and tons of keywords that are all these different ways people can reach you? Or should it? Are you better off? Is your time better spent like refining that down to something that's more specific and avoid, you know, I guess, cast a smaller net versus a bigger net? So nowadays, half the searches on Google, Google's never seen that search before. So it's a brand new search to Google, which seems kind of weird, but you got like smartphones, you just speak into it. So instead of just searching like like auto body shop or mechanic near me, you could say, where can I find a mechanic near me? So it's a whole new phrase. It's a sentence is Google understand the human language, the AI, the semantic web. So if you're just focusing on that one keyword, you're missing out because people search differently, singular, plural synonyms or reorder the words around. So you got to do keyword research, focus on the high search on keywords as your main keywords. But then you want to have all these supporting keywords that are long tail variations, synonyms, plurals, singular industry jargon sprinkled all over the content. But initially, you really want to focus on the main keyword because you can't focus on every single keyword. But as long as you sprinkle them in the content on your pages, then Google will see that there and that will hopefully get them to rank for that keyword or phrase or sentence, whatever it is that someone searching nowadays. That's good to know. And it's sort of related to that. Google, I think it's for everybody and it may be it may have to. It's just sort of my experience that maybe that there's certain target areas that they have, but they do. They've got automated recommendations that come out of like if you're doing Google ads or any of that or search console ads, you'll get these recommendations that are coming in and then they also have consultants that will periodically call and say, Hey, we're we know that you're spending money with us. There's some things that we can do to help you out. Do you know how it how useful is that I guess is some of those recommendations. Is that something where it's like, hey, if Google recommends it, you should go ahead and and make your adjustments or is it something where it's taken with a grain of salt? Well, that's only for paid ads. Google's never going to tell you anything for SEO. Google will never call you for SEO, but if you're running paid ads, they're going to call you and try to get you to spend more money. So that's all they really do is trying to get you to spend more money and open up your keywords to a wider net of keywords that are probably really irrelevant, not targeted, doing like a broad match instead of doing phrase match or exact match searches, which is a little tactical. Don't want to dive too deep into that because it's confusing. But ultimately, Google is just trying to get you to spend more money. Google says, OK, don't just advertise on Google. We partnered up and we bought out all these search engines. Let's show you ads on all our partner sites. But these are low quality sites, low quality traffic. And by default, Google's going to check that off and show your ads to everyone, searching whether it's on Google or any other search engine, which usually you want to focus on Google first. Once you've exhausted that and spent all the money that you can on Google, then you can start doing other search engines. But don't just open it up to everything. And they're really tell you like, yeah, just to broaden your search out where you really want to narrow it down and hyper focus on a segment that's working like maybe males 30 to 35 are clicking, but they're not converting. Cut them out. Don't spend money on them. Maybe females 40 to 45 are clicking and actually converting push more money to that. But Google's going to usually tell you the opposite, like just open it up to everyone, which is good initially. But you want to hone in and eventually spend less because you figured out here is 100 million people, but only one million of these people actually are my audience. Let me just focus on this one million instead of these hundred million people where I'm just be wasting money. So from a search engine. So from the SEO point of view, do you want, do you want to broaden your, your keywords like that to get as many people thinking about your site or do you do is it come back to relevancy Do you really want to get relevant keywords to what you are. Yeah, like, for example, just like I could say, let's say I'm a national company that sells batteries, and I could go in and have tag word keywords somewhere on my site that is batteries in, you know, in New York and Alabama and Florida and California and I could have, you know, batteries and all of these state names, I could have all of these keywords that are showing up that are basically just trying to cover locations and all of those variations of, hey, I need to find batteries near me. Does that make sense as an approach or is this something where you really you're better off sort of ignoring some of those things that broaden the scope and instead focus on things that are relevant to your, your topic. Relevancy is number one so make sure that whatever you're putting out there is related and when you're doing keywords you want to try to go for high search running keywords but if they're really really competitive, and you're just a startup, it might be tough. So you understand who you are in the business cycle if you're a startup, and you're trying to write for the word batteries, you're going to be competing at big corporate websites that have been around for decades and built up tens of thousands of backlinks, whereas you're just going to start off, you gotta find something more niche and more unique about so going for maybe like environmentally friendly rechargeable double A batteries is your keyword, less people are using it but people looking for it, looking for that keyword actually want to use your product or service so it's just trying to figure out who your audience is and how big and how authoritative are you can you go after these more general broad keywords which ultimately want to do in the long run but those usually don't have much intent behind them either for people to want to buy. In all the stuff we discussed one things that comes to mind is as an SEO company as a consulting type company or these, you know you or anybody your competition is if somebody's going out and says I need some help with my SEO. Is this is it typically something that it makes sense as a call like a one and done where you would like as an SEO company you would come in, you'd spend x amount of time you know three months and hey we're going to go help you with your SEO, or is it something that people should look at it more as like a long term partner kind of relationship where they'll come in and either regularly or you know maybe periodically do checkups or how should that. How would you recommend somebody like that wants to start out and build their company how should they view SEO if they're going to go outsource that and find somebody to help them with it. So it depends on the competitiveness of those keywords that they don't have any competition. Then they don't really have to worry about maintaining SEO because once you get to the first page of Google, it's only 10 spots, you're pushing someone off. So, if you're a restaurant in some really really small town and there's only five restaurants and once you get to that first page or get to the top. You don't really have to do too much to maintain it except for just keeping the top position, but fear in Los Angeles, near restaurant there's a lot of restaurants out there you gotta do a lot to keep those rankings, and it really comes down to backlinks because once you get to that first page. I'm going to hear backlinks and see what backlinks you built and replicate them, because if that's what got you to the first page, I want to get back to that first page I don't want to be on page two or being pushed down. So, it's kind of back and forth competition or back and forth with each other trying to keep those rankings and not drop down. Excellent. Yeah, good point. I guess once you're there if you're on top it's just a matter of staying on top and whatever it takes to do that. Well I think that wraps up that site. This has been, it's been really fun and interesting because it's one of those things that I think anybody that's built a website has bumped up again because you always do you register with Google you go through you check out Google Search Console Lighthouse and some of the tools that are out there has become you know they've sort of become common for so many people to go check out what's my, my web speed or what's my, you know my ranking. What's, how do I comply with all of the various Google stuff, generating site maps all those kinds of fun things that are part of it. So, it's interesting to see what is that beyond just like, you know, checking the boxes say yes I've done a little bit of stuff what are some of those next steps that you take in the, in the SEO world. And so I guess with that wrapping up what is somebody is now interested in, in you as interested in your company what is maybe the best way to get a hold of you or how would you recommend like their what would their next step be to, to, to advance in the SEO world. So I created a special gift for everyone that soliciting or watching if they want to go to my website SEO optimizers.com that's SEO opt im iz er s.com forward slash gift. They could find that gift there along the contact information and there's a calendar there if they want to book a time for free website analysis. And I give them some feedback from an SEO point of view of what's working and what's not working and they could put some time on the calendar for free there and also have a lot of classes I've done over the years. I put those up all for free as well so if they want to learn more about SEO or any topics about paid ads social media Google Analytics Search Console I've thrown those all up there as well. Excellent, excellent. That's great. So, those, I'll make sure I get those links in the show notes as well, because sometimes it's a little hard to type if somebody's driving while they're going along and listen to this. So I have all those and then I do want to say I checked out your site. And it is it's chock full of information there's the like I mentioned earlier you've got the, I guess like the 65 or 60 free tools that are out there that are that are useful and poke through and there are there are a lot of those tools that looked at over the years that are there. It can be daunting to deal with SEO but there's also an amazing wealth of tools that are out there to at least help you get started and see what's going on and start to like you know sort of stumble your way through some of these things and figure out how your, your site ranks. Having said I think that this is a good time to wrap it up I want to, I do want to thank you for your, for your time for these been great answers for me, you know, walking, sort of meandering around the topic a little bit and going over SEO and how that can help people out how they can help themselves out. And hopefully, you know all this stuff continues to be something that moves forward. And we do get to the point where we can get less and less. And also, unless of those were some spam type of sites and all the things where you click on it you're like, this isn't all what I want and instead, you know drive to the point where these search engines gives us, oh yeah that's exactly the side I wanted or that's exactly the content I needed. Yeah, they're getting there. They are very good at it so they know what we like. Awesome. All right, thanks a lot Brandon you have a good day we'll talk to you again sometime. Thanks have a good one. Bye. And there you have it. If you haven't noticed that wraps up our interview with Brandon Lebowitz. We are not done yet. We are just getting started in our season. And we will come back in next episode, have yet another interview. But this time around. I just want to make sure that you took some notes, checked out some of the things maybe that Brandon mentioned in the show notes I will have links ways to contact them in case you are interested in discussing this further with him or maybe you have a customer or your boss or somebody where it would be useful for them to know a little bit more about how to do SEO, how to adjust some of their content, or even yourself, it may be something that you're trying to build out a site or a product or service. And you're trying to figure out how to get that free organic traffic. You know it's sort of like location location location is key to a physical bricks and mortar business. But keywords keywords keywords is really key for don't pun intended is really critical for a web location. If you have a website, you want to be seen by people that are searching for your types of products, keywords are the way to do it. And we will now wrap this one up. We'll get you get back to your day. So 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 developer podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcast, 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. Hi, this is Rob from Building Better Developers, the developer podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa. Now, you can enable us by simply saying Alexa enable building better developers, and we will be there ready for you every time you want to listen to your now favorite podcast. 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