SEO Expert Brandon Leibowitz of SEOOptimizers

In this the 13th episode of the QuotersCast your host Renee (writer/VO performer/coach) talks to SEO Expert For Advisors & Small Businesses Brandon Leibowitz of https://www.SEOoptimizers.com

The SEO Optimizers help their clients amplify their online digital footprint by increasing targeted traffic to their website, leading to higher conversion rates for sales and leads.

Their core goals are:

Quality work that is easily sustained.
Professionalism from all employees.
Compliant with Google Webmaster Tools.
Quick, easy communication with clients.
Increase online sales for all businesses.

Find Brandon here: https://www.SEOoptimizers.com

TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW WITH SEO Expert For Creatives, Advisors & Small Businesses – Brandon Leibowitz of SEOOptimizers

HOST:

Welcome to the QuotersCast. My guest today is the owner of SEO Optimizers, and you can find him at SEOoptimizers.com. He’s been in business since 2007 and has worked at a variety of companies. He now has his own business, and he’s an expert in digital marketing, and he specializes in helping small and medium-sized businesses. He’s got a degree in business marketing, and so I’m happy to welcome Brandon Liebowitz. Hey, Brandon.

  SEO Optimizers:

  Thanks for having me on today.Host:Sure. So let’s jump right into this because, you know, I’m a new insurance agent and budding financial advisor, although I’m clearly not new to life, and I’m also not new to digital marketing. And I think a lot of people think that digital marketing is putting up a few social media posts and kind of calling it a day. So I’m wondering if you can summarize for us, for people, exactly what is digital marketing? What does that involve?

SEO Optimizers:

Well, it’s just getting you in front of your target audience when they’re online. So making sure that if you’re, whatever your product or services that you’re offering, that when people are searching for it, that you hop up and get their attention, whether it’s through email, social media, paid ads, doing SEO, just having a good website that looks clean and optimized, or just anything online with digital is or on the internet is going to be digital versus offline would be like traditional radio, TV, advertising, magazines, and things like tha

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Host:

 All right. Okay, well, I started, I built my first website in 2015. And, you know, unlike you, I haven’t been part of companies, but it’s a lot of work. I’ve kind of taught myself off the internet. So, if somebody’s like me, who’s an individual who wants to actually get clients from the internet, what would be sort of the bare bones that they can start with without having to go through all these hours of learning?

SEO optimizer:

I just gotta figure out who your audience is and where are they trying to figure out are they on social media? Are they on Google or on Yelp? Are they on Facebook? Where are they? Amazon? Where are they? And then you build a strategy around that because it’s all about know who your audience is and how to be in front of them. Because if you try to be everywhere, you spread yourself too thin and it’s not going to work. You just need to figure out where exactly your audience is and how to engage with them in that platform. 

Host:

Okay. That’s an excellent point. So how does somebody go about finding out that information?

SEO Optimizer 

Well, you just got to take a step back. Think if you’re looking for your product or service, where would you go? If you’re looking for a dentist, are you going to go on Instagram? Probably not. You’re probably going to go on Google or Yelp, find them there and then check out their social media for social proof, but probably going to find them first on Google or Yelp or some other directory.

So that’s where you just got to think if you’re looking for your product or service, where would you go talk to other people, friends, family, try to get ideas from other people, where they would go, look at your competition, see where they’re active. 

Are they active on social? Are they active on email? What about a website? Do they stay active on their website? Are they posting daily on their blog, weekly on their blog? Are they never posting on their blog? So it kind of gives you ideas of how and what’s working for your competition because whether you want to look at your competitors, see what they’re doing, incorporate what’s working into your own strategy and that’s going to hopefully get you to the level that they’re at. 

Host:

Okay. Now I know when you started, you had a friend who was an insurance agent and you sort of swapped services. He built a website for you and you helped him with SEO services and you actually were able to rank him for insurance keywords above some government agencies. So can you tell us how that went? Because that’s remarkable.

SEO Optimizer

Yeah. So that was back in 2007 and less competition means it’s easier to rank on Google. The more competition, the more people you’re competing with, the more time it’s going to take to rank up there. So nowadays it’s much more competitive because anyone can build a website. There’s not really a barrier of entry. Like back in 2007, you needed to know coding and you know, like Dreamweaver, like HTML and all this stuff, which I didn’t know that. And someone helped me build a website and I did their SEO. And by going in and doing all the things that Google’s looking for, which is like putting keywords in different areas, building backlinks that got Google to trust them and rank them for those keywords and still similar strategies to this day.

It’s changed a lot how they look at keywords and backlinks, but for the most part, it’s pretty much the same thing that works in 2007 for today. I mean, it’s changed a lot of little nuances and like mobile and site speed and usability and all these other things, but for the most part, the basic fundamentals are still kind of good quality content and good quality backlinks are going to get Google to trust you and rank you for your target keywords and SEO. Okay.

Host:

Yeah. You mentioned, you know, 2007, how things are, you know, have changed a lot, but they’re also kind of the same. And I’ve noticed that as well, because content is still king. So if somebody’s an independent insurance agent or financial advisor and they want to do this, I mean, already I can see how it might be overwhelming to them, our conversation. So it’s like, where would you even start? Like would they build, get somebody to build a website? Could they use medium.com, wordpress.com? What’s the best way  for them to disseminate content?

SEO Optimizer

Yeah, they need a website because no one’s going to go on social looking for insurance. Some people might, but most people are not going to go on social. So got to build a website and you have to build a website, not use a third party platform.

Like medium is not a website, it’s just a place where you can post an article. You have to build a website on like WordPress or Wix or Squarespace or Shopify. And these platforms, but you need to buy your domain. com, build a website. Can’t be medium. com slash your name or 21st century. com slash your name.

You want your own website because otherwise you’re just renting space off somebody. You don’t own all that. They could take you down at any time. And none of that’s yours for free. Ownership, so you got full control and that’s where having website and then I start collecting email addresses and building that email newsletter up because those two things are going to be the most effective for an agent.

Social, it’s going to be good for like trust building trust up. Once someone’s been to your website, I want to check you out for social proof, but if you’re trying to get new clients, website, email, that’s going to be the most effective.

Host:

All right. So can you explain to people what is schema and how do you get it going on your website?

SEO Optimizer

Schema is a coding language that Google, Bing, Yahoo, and all these platform search engines made like 10, 15 years ago, and it’s just a way to enhance your website. So sometimes if you search on Google, if you search for like a recipe, You’ll see the recipes shown in the search results. You don’t have to click to the website.

That’s Alter Schema. If you’re searching for like a concert and you see like the concert dates right there, that’s Alter Schema. If you’re watching a sporting event and you search for the score, you see the score right there. That’s from Schema. So it’s like pulling in. Data from your website and showing it in the search results so people don’t have to go to your website, which is actually bad, but Google like schema.

So it enhances your website. It’s something good that you should put on there, but also takes traffic away from your website. So it’s good and bad, but. It helps you rank higher. So if you go to schema. org, you could see how to do it. It’s a whole coding language. You have to code it yourself. I don’t know how to code it.

There’s websites that will show you how to code it, but it gets pretty tricky.

Host:

Yeah, I know. I’ve tried it and it didn’t work for me. So I’ll have to dig into it more. So, um, so I’m curious, uh, with all your experience, you must have had some really good experience with clients. And perhaps some really bad ones. So can you tell us like the difference, like what are some of your best experience and what are some of your worst with the client?

SEO Optimizer

Well, the worst would be people that expect SEO to happen overnight or within a month or two, because SEO takes time to rank a website. It takes months, sometimes could take a year or so to build trust up with Google.

So that’s the biggest thing is just setting client expectations ahead of time and letting them know if they want immediate results. Paid ads or social media or something like that. It’s going to get them traction much faster, but SEO just takes time. Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut around it. You’ve got to build trust up and building trust with Google.

It’s not something that I could do really quickly. It’s the backlinks that build trust up and backlinks take time to build, but. That’s, yeah, that would be the tough one, dealing with clients that just don’t realize that SEO is not just a short term play, it’s more long term and you gotta work to get Google to trust you.

Host:

Okay, so if you work with individuals like us, uh, can you give us like a price range or how you would, uh, start with an individual who’s looking to get clients from the internet and they have no idea how to go about it?

SEO Optimizer

It really varies. It’s not really a one size fits all. It depends on how competitive your keywords are versus your competitors like. So if you’re like an insurance agent in Los Angeles, a lot more competition than some small obscure city where there’s maybe five insurance agents. So the more competition, the more time it’s going to take. Which means it’s going to cost more money to do it, but it’s very tricky. So I always offer a free website analysis to anyone.

So that’s always the first starting point. If you want me to check out your website, I can check it out, give you some feedback, look at your competition, look at your website, and then I can really give you a better idea of how much time and how much it will cost because it’s tough to just say on average, it might take about six months, but it could be much longer, it could be much shorter.

It really comes down to those back links. The more backlinks that you have. The faster you’re going to rank and what is the backlink backlink is a clickable link from another website that points to yours. So if you’re reading an article in the latimes. com And there it says brandon lebowitz and you click on that and it goes to my website I’d be getting a backlink from the latimes.com.

So the more backlinks you have The more quickly you’re going to rank, but it all comes down to your brand new website and your competitors have a thousand backlinks. It’s going to take me a long time to get up there versus if you’ve been around and you have, let’s say 800 backlinks and your competitors have a thousand, it’s going to be a little bit quicker, still take time, but it can be much quicker to get those rankings. There’ll be less money because you’ve already done a lot of established work to get you up there.

Host:

Right. Okay. So two of the best ways to sort of pump up a website would be press releases and backlinks, which by paid ads, right, that, that helps to get it going faster.

SEO Optimizer:

For SEO paid ads aren’t going to help you out. So, for SEO to rank, you need keywords and you need backlinks and backlinks need to come from sites related to what you’re doing. Press release is just a news website has nothing to do with what you’re doing. So you need to find sites related to insurance or whatever type of insurance would do in health insurance.

Each site’s related to health, medicine, medical, anything like that. That’s the type of websites. If you’re doing like home insurance and need websites about like homes, mortgages, real estate to link out to you. It’s all about relevancy. If the websites that link out to you are not related to what you’re doing it’s going to throw Google’s algorithm off, so the backlinks need to be related to what you’re doing, the content, the keywords on your website need to be related to what you’re doing, and that just shows Google that you’re relevant if someone’s searching those keywords. Google sees that you have backlinks that are relevant, your content is relevant, and it just helps build that trust up.

Host:

Okay, so I would guess that writers become quite important, especially if you don’t do a lot of writing yourself. So, uh, do you use writers, and if so, how do you vet them?

SEO Optimizer:

Yeah, no, you definitely need a lot of writers, unfortunately, nowadays with chat GPT, who knows who’s writing it or not, but Google said they don’t care if it’s written by AI, but I still want people to write it, but we’ll have to see in a few years, I feel like everyone’s just going to be using chat GPT and you don’t really need a vet writers, but now it’s tough to vet writers because who knows if it’s real or not.

So you try to ask them to write about future events because chat GPT can’t write about the future and that’s the way to kind of vet people. But it gets really, really tough.

Host:

That’s a really good point because I’ve used chat GPT a few times. And if there’s a lot like for insurance. There’s a lot of common information out there that’s been around for decades. So it’s easy for AI to collect that kind of data. Uh, it’s not so great with opinion. So, do you think that it’s kind of dangerous for something like, um, AI? Like, I don’t know, I kind of feel like a lot of websites that you land on are kind of homogenized. And they don’t have, Nothing seems very interesting in a lot of ways.

So have you noticed that? And, and how do you think we can make, you know, spice things up? Cause the internet really isn’t as interesting as it was in the early 2000s. I feel like everyone’s just going to social for entertainment. That’s why. So they’re looking for your payment. There’s going on social media and getting sucked into those feeds and getting lost in those algorithms.

SEO Optimizer:

But websites nowadays need to be simple because everything is shifted towards mobile. And if you have a bunch of stuff going on, on device, on your mobile, I mean, your screen is much smaller, so that also makes it tougher where they have to kind of strip down everything. So that’s probably why it’s not as engaging, There used to be all that flash and other stuff, music and intros, but people don’t really like that stuff.

Host:

Huh, that’s a good point. So if you’re on mobile, what’s a, what would you consider a good front page? Like maybe a headline with a video and that’s it, or a simply written article with headlines? Which, which is, does better?

SEO Optimizer:

Well, you need to put like a value proposition at the top, letting people know what’s in it for me, what are the benefits I’m going to get from using your product or service, and then have a couple bullet points, or a video, or something where it’s easy to digest really quickly and not read a 5, 000 word article and having a call to action right there above the fold.

So all that stuff should be at the top before they scroll down is by proposition, a call to action, like a phone number or contact form, or if you’re selling products, a buy now button or add to cart, then just some details.

Host:

Okay, did you say a 5, 000 word article? Is that what I heard you say?

SEO Optimizer:

Well, sometimes people put 5, 000, 10, 000 word articles on their website because the more text you have, usually the more Google’s going to reward you and rank you higher. Well, used to be the case in the past, so people just write really, really long articles.

Wow. Well, that almost sounds like an e book, like, uh, giveaway, that length, actually. So, maybe that’s something that they’d want to do as well. Is that, I guess, an option? Does that still work, PDF giveaways?

SEO Optimizer:

Yeah, but it’s also, you got to think like, depending on what they’re searching for, if you’re searching for like what’s two plus two, probably could get away with just writing 100 words.

But if you’re like writing an article about how to change your car engine out, then you can probably write 5, 000 words about it because it’s just so detailed. So it’s all about just knowing the intent behind that search and that keyword and how much text needs to be there to fulfill that user’s pretty much that question.

If it’s really in depth, then like how was the universe started, then you could just go on and on and on for thousands of thousands of words, but if it’s something really basic, like what are the latest styles for 10 issues in 2023 or something like that, it could be a couple hundred words or something like that, you know.

Host:

I noticed that you have a subdomain on buzzsprout, which I think is very interesting. SEO optimizers. buzzsprout.com. Number one, how did you get that? And yeah, how, and what’s the benefit behind it?

SEO Oopti

Buzz Sprout is just a podcast platform that distributes your podcast. So you just sign up. They give you that, and that’s just where your podcast is hosted. So if you’re doing podcasts and you want distribution or like Buzz Sprout or Pod Bean, I forget the other ones, but there’s a few of them.

Right. That gets your podcast out to everywhere. Like PodBean, I think is another one. Yeah. They give you that subdomain, but that’s just their way of giving you a little website, but that’s not really a website. That’s not a web. You need your domain.com like Brandon Leibowitz.com.SEO optimizers.com. It’s SEO optimizers. medium. com. That’s not mine as the optimizers. facebook. com or no, that’s mine. That’s. Facebook or these other platforms.

Host:

Right. Yeah. No, um, I use Podbean as well, but I thought Buzzsprout was connected to Buzzfeed. I guess I’m wrong about that.

SEO Optimizer:

Oh yeah. No, they’re separate.

Host:

All right. That’s fine. Okay. So, I know SEO, you must, you know, you geek out on it every day and SEO when you’re in it and doing it, it seems like, is it a bit of a grind? And so what do you do for like real fun? How do you disengage?

SEO Optimizer:

Well, definitely get that work life balance and disconnect, get away from the computer, go out.

I live in LA near the beach, so go down to the beach or hiking, snowboarding, skateboarding, traveling, just, yeah, definitely enjoy going to the beach since it’s so close. And that’s a nice way to disconnect and get away from everything and not be stuck on your computer all day long. That’s the biggest.

Host:

So you mentioned travel. So do you get to work when you, when you go away? Is that something that you still keep up or do you want to unplug when you go on vacation?

SEO Optimizer:

I want to unplug, but it doesn’t really happen. So when you have your own company, it never really ends, but it would be nice one day to hopefully unplug, but hasn’t happened yet.

Host:

All right. Wow. Okay. So you’ve been on your own doing SEO optimizers. com for a little while. Before that you, you worked for other companies. So, How long have you been grinding away with SEO optimizers and what’s the, what’s the future look like for you?

SEO Optimizer:

Started in 2007. So been doing that, but worked full time and then would just get one or two freelance clients here or there, and then built that up and really pushed it maybe like five or six years ago to really go all in.

But for that, I was just happy to work full time. I have a couple extra clients here or there to make some extra money, but now I’m just going to keep building it up and building it and growing it as much as possible and really putting all my efforts into it.

Host:

Good for you. Excellent. So how big is your team?

SEO Optimizer:

I don’t know. Probably about like 10 ish people.

Host:

Okay. And do they work directly with you or are they freelancers? Are they around the world?

SEO Optimizer:

A little bit of both. Writers, kind of are freelancers. The writers just let them write when they want to. So I’ll give them, here’s 20 articles, right? At your own pace, the more you could do, the more work I could give you.

Cause it’s just so much content writing. So, but yeah, I’ll make sure everyone’s, especially the writers have to be in the United States, not going to have some other countries writing context, tried that in the past and does not work. Got to have good quality content. Content is one of the most important things for Google and you have to have good, high quality content.

So got to make sure everyone’s a native English speakers. They know what they’re talking about. They know the nuances of English and all the little technicalities that come along with it.

Host:

Okay. So what is a day in the life of an SEO digital marketer like yourself? What does that look like? Do you spend mostly your time on the phone with clients? Or are you doing like, uh, I don’t know. You tell us.

SEO Optimizer:

I’m not sure. It’s probably all over the place. So being a client, then doing work, learning, researching, testing things out, seeing if there’s new things that pop up, new strategies or new tools that could help make things more streamlined. But yeah, it’s a lot of trial and error, testing things out and then client meetings and reporting, things like that.

Host:

Okay. All right. So what are some of your favorite SEO tools?

SEO Optimizer:

Google search console, it’s free tool from Google and it shows you what keywords you rank for. It’s like Google analytics is a free tool for analytics and they have search console, which is for SEO. That just shows you a ton of data about SEO from Google, but that one’s free. But the paid ones would be like Ahrefs or Moz, or SEMrush, one of those backlink checkers.

Gotta have something that checks backlinks, doesn’t matter which one you use. Either of those are really good, you just gotta pick one of them. And they do so many features now, it’s like they’ll do backlinks, they’ll check, they’ll do keyword research, they’ll track what your position is.

They can see what position you’re in for your keywords week over week, month over month. So they kind of become like a Swiss army knife where you buy one of those tools and they’ll do a lot of things for you. But there’s so many other tools that help speed things up and automate them. But really the backlink checker, you need something to check backlinks.

That’s the most important thing for SEO is building backlinks and looking at your competitors backlinks and making sure you have more quality backlinks in your competition.

Host:

Okay. That’s a great point. That’s great. So who are some of your digital marketing heroes? Like somebody like Neil Patel or Gary Vaynerchuk, are they people that you follow and try and emulate?

SEO Optimizer:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, those are more digital marketing, but for SEO, there’s like Matt Diggity or like Matt Cutts is like the head of web spam from Google. So hearing what they have to say, or John Mayer and some other people that are, are lunar about, um, SEO kind of hearing what they say and reading their perspectives.

But for digital marketing, the ones that I mentioned are good for more general. But depends what you’re looking for if you’re trying to find like some for paid ads and I’d find something that really knows paid ads or some of that knows SEO, I’d go for more like the SEO specialist because it’s tough to really know everything.

They just give you more higher level kind of strategies, but they don’t know, like, in depth in the weeds for those specific like SEO or social media, they know more of the higher basic level kind of strategies.

Host:

Okay, so do you do you attend masterminds or conventions to get some of the latest SEO techniques?

SEO Optimizer:

Yeah, any way possible. The more you learn, the better. So you can’t just be stuck in your bubble. You gotta be talking to other people, bouncing ideas off them and get ideas from other people that you probably never really thought would work or would not work. And they’re going to give you those insights.

Host:

So a lot of people in your position at this stage in your career would be writing a book or offering courses. Is that something that’s on the table for you?

SEO Optimizer:

Yep, that is. Courses, been teaching courses since 2013. So, and doing that and just, yeah, offering more courses and just trying to figure out, yeah, what people are looking for nowadays, but definitely going to keep putting courses out.

Okay, excellent. Where can people find them? On my website at https://seoptimizers.com, or they can go to YouTube and see classes I put up for free, and they can see step by step a lot of stuff that we talked about by just searching my name, Brandon Lebowitz.

Host:

Excellent. So, um, we’re coming to the end here. Um, do you have any specific tips for new insurance agents and financial advisors who want to get online and get some clients?

SEO Optimizer:

I just be patient with it and really just think about who your audience is. Are they going to be on Facebook? Probably not. I’m sure it works for some agents, but you really got to think like, who is my audience and where are they? Google people are searching. They’re showing intent. They’re actively looking social.

You’re just kind of browsing people. You’re interrupting people based off interest and demographics that they might want to use your services in the future. They might’ve used in the past, but it doesn’t mean they want it now. So social is still good. I’m not saying don’t do it, but. If you have to pick and choose. I really think, all right, where are my clients and where are they going to be searching and how do I get in front of them?

And that’s probably going to be Google having your own website and just be patient with it. It takes time. It’s not immediate, but as long as you keep doing the right things over time, you’re going to start seeing that traffic come in, but don’t expect immediate results.

Unfortunately, if you want the immediate traction run paid ads and you’ll start getting that traction right away. And if you’re running paid ads, I would still probably go on Google because people are searching on Google, whereas on social media, you’re just kind of interrupting them. And social is cheaper for a reason.

You’re not getting that same quality as Google, where they’re looking like someone’s searching on Google for life insurance agent, they’re looking, or near me, they’re probably looking for a life insurance agent right now versus someone that you have all these demographics, or age, their interests, or income level, and you run some ads to them on social media, they might want to use your, or use your services, but it’s not necessarily true.

Host:

That’s a good point. That’s a really good point. I was thinking, we’ve been talking about Google a lot, but there’s lots of other search engines, and I’ve heard that some people have had success with Bing. Is, do you switch up the search engines? Do you suggest that other people do that?

SEO Optimizer:

I mean, over the years, I’ve looked at analytics, probably 20 to 80 percent of the traffic comes from Google.Bing might bring 1%. Yahoo might bring 1%.

Host:

Oh, is that all?

SEO Optimizer:

DuckDuckGo might bring half a percent. Brave might bring half a percent. Then the rest comes from social media, email. People just typing your website in directly paid ads, but I’ve never seen a website get more traffic or Google bring in more traffic to a website than any other search engine.

Google just kind of runs the show. But if you know your audience is on a different platform or different search engine, you can try to optimize for that. But if you optimize for Google, you should be good for the most part for the other search engines. They all have different algorithms. They’re slightly different, but for the most part, they’re still looking at the main things like content, backlinks, the same signals.

It’s just a little bit different how they put weight to each one. Like Google might say, all right, backlinks count for more. Bing might say, all right, backlinks count for almost the same amount, but we’re not going to give the same weight to backlinks as we do social signals or whatever else are looking at site speed, things like that.

Okay. All right. Well, that’s great. Thank you very much for being here, Brandon. And if somebody wants to contact you, um, what’s the best way to do that? So anyone that wants to learn more, I created a special gift for them. If they go to my website at SEO optimizers. com, that’s S E O. O P T I M I Z E R S dot com forward slash gift.

They can find that there along with my contact information and a bunch of classes that I’ve done over the years I’ve thrown up for free. So they can see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about and also if they want a free website analysis. From an SEO point of view, they could book some time on my calendar that airs well for free.