Unpacking SEO Free Traffic AI and Future Trends with Brandon Leibowitz

🎙️ I had a blast being a guest on the Ignition Path Podcast with Kyle Goodnight! We went deep into all things SEO — from how I fell into digital marketing back in 2007 to why I don’t always trust what Google says (👀 yep, I said it).

We talked about:
 ✅ Why SEO isn’t one-size-fits-all
 ✅ How Google’s really making money (hint: it’s not from your organic content)
 ✅ The truth about AI content and what Google actually cares about
 ✅ Why video and file names matter
✅ SEO tips specifically for podcasters 🔥

I even dropped a few spicy nuggets on how to get free traffic without paying for ads, how to leverage file names for YouTube SEO, and the importance of blogging your podcast episodes (seriously, stop just sharing the YouTube link).

If you're a creator, entrepreneur, or podcast host trying to stand out online, this one's for you.

Catch the full episode and learn how to make search engines work for you, not against you 💻

👉 #SEO #EntrepreneurLife #PodcastTips #GoogleSEO #PodcastMarketing #DigitalMarketing #BrandonLeibowitz #IgnitionPath #GetRanked #FreeTraffic #SearchEngineOptimization #YouTubeSEO #PodcasterTips #SEOOptimizers

Transcript

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Probably not. So it's really what's best for the user experience. And sometimes more is better, more is needed, and sometimes less is needed. So when it comes to SEO, there really is no one size fits all. And what you read online isn't always going to be truthful. And even Google isn't going to. Even if Google tells you something, I wouldn't trust Google fully because they don't have your best interest in. In mind. They want you to spend money on paid ads, so anything they tell you, just take it with a grain of salt. Might be accurate. Ish. But it's not telling you the full story. Foreign welcome back to the Ignition Path podcast. My name is Kyle Goodnight. I'm your host. I'm glad you could come and be with us again today. Today I'm very excited. I had an introductory call with this gentleman and he taught me a couple of little nuggets in that entry call. And he's. He's even taught me a little bit more. At the beginning of the. Before I started recording. But this is Brandon Lebowitz. I. I think that's how you say your name, right, Lebowitz? Yeah. Awesome. All right. I got it right in the first try. He is the owner of SEO Optimizers, and he's here today to talk about his entrepreneurial path, about where he came from, to get to where he optimizes people's web pages and, and shares nuggets of information about how to optimize everything there is that comes with SEO, you know, and I'll let him explain it all. I've got a couple of questions because I'm still pretty new on the SEO concept. I mean, I understand it, but I'm not a. I don't understand it. So. So we'll get a little bit more as we get things going. So, Brandon, go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about you and then where you came from and, and, and how you became a entrepreneur of SEO Optimizers. Yeah. Thank you, Kyle, for having me on today. My name is Brandon Leibowitz, and I have been involved with digital marketing since 2007. Kind of fell into it after I graduated from college, got my degree in business marketing. And back then they didn't really teach you much about digital marketing. And one of the first jobs I got out of school was helping a company out with their digital marketing, which I didn't really know much about it back then. And they said, don't worry, we're kind of new to this as well. And we're going to learn with you, taking you to classes and workshops and seminars, which I thought was kind of interesting. Let me try this digital thing out and did that for a few months and just realized this is probably the future. Everyone is probably going to have a website and there's lots of different ways to market and get traffic to your website. I just focused more on SEO because search engine optimization is a way to get free traffic to your website. And I thought, who doesn't want free traffic? And over the years I worked at different advertising agencies as a director of SEO and before work and after work and on my lunch breaks, I'd work on my own company and eventually built that up where I was able to quit my job and focus solely on this. Just helping people or businesses tap into that free traffic so they don't have to spend money on paid ads. Right. And you know, one thing that I was speaking with a gentleman the other day that he's in the marketing space. Hes also, he's also a wedding photographer. And he said that there are some things that just changed recently that it like basically the, a year ago, the traffic, the way that Google and traffic came to web pages, people are starting to. His clients are starting to notice that they're not ranked as high on Google as they used to be. And was there a big change recently? And like one thing I do notice, I notice that I, whenever I type in, if there's a short out there in the world or a video out there in the world about what I just typed in that I'm searching for, I see that first before I see companies. So talk a little bit about that. Yeah, no, Google changes daily, so their algorithm is constantly changing. Every few months they'll have a big update. So I'm not sure what date you're referencing, but a lot of them nowadays are kind of like regarding content, because AI content is something that everyone's using and Google just trying to figure out is this okay to use? And just try and make sure that people, if they use AI content, Google said it's fine. A year ago they said we don't care who writes it if it's human or AI, as long as it's accurate. So if you just copy something from chat GPT, it's probably not going to be accurate. But if you use it as like a reference and like a guide, maybe it'll help you write an outline for a blog post and then you go in and edit it and tweak it and make sure it's accurate, then it's fine. But if you just copy verbatim, then potentially Google might penalize you, but they just really want to make sure your content offers value and is accurate. Especially for like anything with like financial advice or health or wellness and stuff like that. That's where they really scrutinize it every even more. And the video that you were saying, when you search on Google, there's website set up here. But Google also has changed a lot. So it's not just websites that appear. There's maps, there's images, there's videos, there's products for shopping. There's a lot of stuff going on. So for SEO, we want to try to take up as much free real estate as possible without spending money on paid ads. And with when it comes to video, Google owns YouTube and they're going to push YouTube as much as they can. So. Because shorts are important. Yeah, yeah. Google isn't. Google wants to make money. And if you search on Google and you don't click on an ad, Google doesn't make money. But if you search on Google and there's a YouTube video there and you click on it, the first thing that appears. Anytime you watch a YouTube video, there's always an advertisement, which is YouTube making money, which is really Google making money. And they're not going to push Facebook video or any of the other ones. You'll see them occasionally. Like you might see a video from Facebook and stuff like that, but really it's primarily going to be YouTube because Google owns YouTube and why would they want to promote a competitor? Right. So real quick, I want to splash back to something you said at the beginning of that explanation. And it kind of goes back to our conversation we had during that introductory call and a little bit of the beginning before we recorded. But you mentioned that don't copy and paste, like if you go in and create a blog in ChatGPT, but if that blog is created from a transcript of a web, of a podcast episode. So the way I create my blogs is when I create the blog for us for this episode, I will go and my software creates automatically the transcript at 99.7% accurate of what you said and what I said. And then I take that whole entire transcript, I drop it into ChatGPT and I tell it to create me a blog out of 100 or 1500 words. I looked up on Google, what's the ideal link for a a blog post. They said between 1500 and 2500 words. So I just went 1500 because I don't like to read a lot and. And I want to keep it as short and sweet as possible. So when it comes to grabbing words that we say that is captured at 99.7 accuracy. Is that being penalized? Should I edit that? When I create the blog and I get it and I see it and then I read through it like is but or because that's from our conversation. That's not from anything. That's, you know, that's so you know. You know you're an industry expert in SEO. It's your information coming out of your mouth. Are they? Do I have to make sure that I double check what you said to make sure I'm not in trouble with Google? If you're uploading a transcript and telling Google to summarize or AI to summarize it, that's a little different. But if someone's going to chat and saying write me an article about dog grooming tables, that's where you're just giving it like a one sentence prompt and asking it to do something. But if you're giving it a whole transcript and saying summarize it, then it should be better. Can I still read through it? Double check it, make sure it's accurate. Because you never know with AI how it's going to return the results. But usually you get the what are called AI hallucinations when you just ask it to do something without giving it a lot of in depth instructions. But the more in depth the instructions are, the more granular you get with your prompt, the better off it's going to be. If you just say summarize this and make it 1500 words, that's great. But you can make it even more. You could go even further with that prompt saying make break it down with different like headers and different sections and include this type of tonality. Make sure that it is SEO friendly. It follows Google's best practices. Make sure to check it for spelling and grammatical errors. You could tell more you prompt, the better it's going to be. But one other thing though, when you said 1500 words, there is no word count that is good for Google. In the past everyone would say write 400 words and that's kind of like the average. But people would always say the more text you put, the better. Google loves text. So if you write a thousand words or 2,000 words, that's even better. But that's not really what matters. It what matters is who's on that first page of Google for your keywords and how much text have your competitors wrote? You need to write a little bit more than your competition. So it's not a one size fits all. And what you need to do to figure out how much text you need to write is you need to go into Google, search for your keyword, and open up those 10 websites. Skip over the ads. Ads are completely different. But Open up the 10 websites that are in the organic, the free listings, and look at how much text they each have and average it out. If everyone's writing a thousand words, you should probably write 1100 words. Everyone's writing 50 words. You don't need to write a hundred words. So you need to just do a little bit better than your competition. Because the way Google says, like, it doesn't. There's no sweet spot. Because if someone's searching for, let's say, how to change my car engine, you could probably write 5,000 words about that. But if someone's saying, like, how do I pump tire for my bicycle tire? You can probably write 500 words, maybe thousand if you're pushing it. But do you really need to write a thousand words about how to pump some air in a bicycle tire? Probably not. So it's really what's best for the user experience. And sometimes more is better, more is needed, and sometimes less is needed. So when it comes to SEO, there really is no one size fits all. And what you read online isn't always going to be truthful. And even Google isn't going to. Even if Google tells you something, I wouldn't trust Google fully because they don't have your best interest in, in mind. They want you to spend money on paid ads. So anything they tell you, just take it with a grain of salt. Might be accurate. Ish. But it's not telling you the full gotcha. All right. That's great information. Yeah. And you know, that was, you know, I've been doing. Ever since we had our introductory call, I've been doing what you, you're like, hey, by the way, don't just send out the link to YouTube to your clients. Make sure you send out the link to your blog. And I'm like, well, I don't have a blog yet. And you're like, make a blog. So I went and started making blogs. And and I'm actually enjoying it now because, you know, I'm getting back some really good. I really actually like reading my blog and seeing how it breaks it down from the conversation because it's, it's even more concise of what than watching the episode, which really, which is really nice. And I'll definitely do what we talked about before and try to get that figured out how to embed that video in there. My next question is, when we first talked, you talked about how you follow people around like Amazon. Is that something you can share more about? Like when it comes to someone going to my webpage and then just like we speak out into the world about something and our phones show us stuff. That's all, that's all SEO, right? That's all captured from what we type in, what we speak out, that the, that our microphones hear us. You know, can you talk about how that's done? And is there, is there a one size fits all program that does that for us? Like, how do we implement that into our businesses? Those are all through ads. So that SEO is getting you organic free traffic. And then the, what you're talking about is all paid ads. So if you look at Amazon or if you look at a product on Amazon and you don't buy it, those ads will follow you around. That's all called remarketing. So you have to spend money on paid ads to follow people around. And you could set up ads on all the different platforms. And it's really great because it keeps you top of mind. And it has especially for like e commerce, like if someone looks at a product and doesn't buy it, but adds it to the shopping cart, they were that close to buying and maybe they for some reason got distracted, they were on their cell phone, somebody called them and they forgot about you. But you follow them around, keeps yourself top of mind. And it's another touch point to build trust up. And it works really, really well. You could do it on Google, you could do it on all the different websites that have banner ads. You could do it on social media. And I would just try to be everywhere that you think your audience is. That way you just build that trust and credibility. Gotcha. Now when it comes to SEO I know me, you mentioned that Google loves that. Google loves words and loves, you know, copy, if you per se. So with the, with the, the switch in the last few years going to, you know, I've also heard that, you know, video is king now. Like if you're not doing video for your content or for your website or what have you, you're, you're just shooting yourself in the foot. Does SEO also is it to the point now where SEO is, is listening as well as reading words on a page? Are they listening to content that we post or is that is that like another level of, of, of, you know, computing? No, Google is trying to do that, but they're not perfect. If you upload a video to YouTube and they'll give you the subtitles or closed caption, but it's not perfect. But it's getting close. So they are definitely trying to figure, understand what people are saying, trying to understand what the images are, what the video imagery is. But they're close. They're just not there yet. Yeah, probably. Probably in the next couple of years. Definitely. Very soon they'll get that. So, so, so you've been in digital marketing from pretty much from the beginning. So. So you didn't have any classic marketing other than in school, which. So talk a little about your schooling was where did you go to school for one in a second. And then also how up to speed work. Because I've had a couple of other guests on that. Like on my other podcast for mental health, I had a mental health graduate come on and she said that their training that they had in school was so antiquated that it's like she doesn't even know why they teach it in school anymore because it's changed so much. So when it comes to your education, before you became into the digital marketing world, how much were they talking about digital marketing, or was that only after you got into the field that people said, hey, things are changing? Like, you know, if you can speak on that, I mean, 2007, that's quite a many years ago. But I mean, I would think that education is caught up by then, but. But what? Speak a little bit about that. And I know you do some classes in general too, so. And talk about that. I mean, no, I went to Cal State Long beach and got my degree in business marketing. And back then it was more just traditional marketing. So once I, I mean, they touched a little bit about digital, but I can't really talk too much about it because social media email marketing, paid ads, SEO was really very, very, very new. Maybe email was pretty big back then, but even back then, social was kind of newish to the most part. But 2007, I think was when the cell phone came out or the iPhone came out. And that's, I think changed everything where everyone was able to stay connected, was able to go on the Internet with their cell phone. They don't have to buy a computer, a desktop computer or laptop. And I think that's what really shifted things. I'm Pretty sure after 2007 they would start to talk a little bit about Digital, but I'm not 100 sure of what they're teaching now because everything is so dynamic and what works today doesn't necessarily work tomorrow. Like all the stuff I'm telling you today could change tomorrow. And yeah, it's just so dynamic. There's no constant with digital. It's always evolving and changing. Well, and I saw on your website, you know, when I went and looked at, looked you up and researched you a little bit, that you actually do classes and offer up, you know, education. So is that something that you do on a, on a monthly basis, weekly basis. Do you do courses, like talk a little bit about that side of your business? I do courses free and paid, but they're just kind of sporadic. Do usually one or two free ones every single month. And then, yeah, sometimes I'll do a little bit more, sometimes I'll do less. But started doing that back in 2013. My friend and I decided that when we were working at a company, let's teach classes. He did Google Ads, I did SEO. And we teach classes and ran a meetup group and still do that because the meetup's grown to, I think like 5, 000 people in it. So just kept it going and just. Keep using physical meetups. Or is that like online meetups? Since COVID everything that changed in 2020 shifted to online. Before that it was in person. Did one in person recently, and that was nice. But yeah, most of them are online because people don't want to drive and especially in la. I live in Los Angeles. Nobody wants to drive after 5 o' clock. Downtown LA, fine parking and just take so much time versus just watching it on Zoom. You could be anywhere, anytime. And it's been bad, right? Exactly. It's so funny. I didn't, I should have put, I should have put out to everybody I knew because I got a voiceover gig that flew me out to LA last week. I was in LA Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday last week. Pasadena, Burbank. I did the recording in Burbank and I ended up driving down to Newport beach for a meeting down there too. The day before I left. And I've met now three people through my podcasting that I didn't know where they lived and I already 1 had them on a podcast or 2. The, a gal that I recorded yesterday who I just launched her podcast, she was, she was in Anaheim and I went to Downtown Disney that, that day before I left. And you, and you live in la. I'm like, I could have met with three of my podcaster people that were my guests. I could have like, like met them in person, you know, because, because I'm a big, I'm a bit of a social butterfly if, if anybody's watched a half of my, even one of my episodes, I'm an I, I call myself the Extra Extrovert. So it's one of those things where I love networking, I love meeting people that I, in real life, that I've met online. It's, it's, it's a joy of mine. And, and I wish I would have known that, that you live down there. I would have, I would have hit you up and be like, hey, let's go have a beer or coffee or something. But. But nonetheless, next time I'm in la, when they were doing, they told me during the recording that there will be a phase two of the video game. And and my, my character is one of the main characters. So maybe I'll be in la. I don't know, maybe they'll fly me to Tokyo. I don't know where they're going to tell me to record. So. But nonetheless, if I'm ever back in LA again, I'll make sure I've, I've keep a list of everybody to know in la because it's a big city and driving there. You're absolutely right. I mean it's still not as bad as Chicago. Have you ever driven to Chicago? I've not driven through. I've been there and I would take. I would take LA driving over Chicago any day. Yeah, even I mean, because at least it still moves. Chicago, you have to know like five miles ahead what lane to be in. And there's four different sections of six lanes. And LA is not like that. You know, I didn't think, I thought it was pretty easy to get around. Now your on ramps are really short. Like, what the hell is that about? Like no one can ramp up to get on the freeway. It's like, no, here's the road, here's the freeway and 80 miles an hour to zero. You know, so that was a little crazy. They just want you to go on and light that late. Exactly. It's a little nerve wracking at times, but. Oh yeah, I learned that. You know, so for sure, being out there. But all right, so when it comes to, when it comes to, you know, you know that I'm, I kind of I have two podcasts one on Mental health for the first responder. That was my first one that I did for. That was my own podcast. I've worked on many other podcasts prior to that as a producer and post production and co host. But now I'm doing these two podcasts myself. This is now the Ignition Path podcast. So, and I'm part of a podcast group where we're learning and doing more about podcasting. Some people are brand new to podcasting because our services actually provide a lot easier way to do post production. And we're, you know, one thing that I want to be able to share this video with those people because SEO is so important. We talk about SEO and, and a lot of people don't understand what SEO is. Just real quickly explain what SEO is and does. And then on a second note, what are maybe two of the most important things as podcasters? And I think we've already spoken this, but just like, let's go ahead and put them out there. What are two very important things that, that podcasters should do to optimize their SEO? Search engine optimization is ranking on search engines. So if you're on YouTube, ranking videos, if you're on Amazon, we'd rank your products. If you're on Google, we'd rank your website. If you're on Yelp, you'd rank your business. So wherever you could search, there's ways to get you ranked higher. And that is what SEO is all about, is getting you ranked higher so you don't have to spend money on ads and you tap into that free traffic because all those anywhere There's a search platform. There's a way to optimize and try to just capture more of that free traffic. So. So does that include, like, Apple Podcast search engine, and Spotify search engine and iHeartradio search engine? Because I know a lot of people think that that's where podcasts live, and they don't. They live on the RSS feed, wherever that may be. But the Apple and Spotify and iHeart and Amazon podcast, those are all search engines for specific audio podcasts. Are those still. Those are the. When we have words inside of our description, that's adding to the SEO, right? Yep. So it's anywhere where you could search. Doesn't matter if it's Google. People just think SEO is Google. But it's really anywhere where you could search, essentially. Cool. All right. That makes that. I wanted it dumbed down because I've tried to explain it to people before and they're like, I just don't get it. Well, I'm like, what? You don't get search engine optimization? I'm like, it's optimizing the search engine. And I'm like, what do you mean, Google? I'm like, sure. And. But I didn't realize it went as deep as. As I didn't even realize Yelp was a. Was I guess it is a search engine for. For businesses. I usually think of Yelp as a restaurant app, but I guess any business can be on it, right? Yep. Yep. A lot of businesses come to me and they want to rank. They spend money on Yelp ads, and I'm like, stop starting money in Yelp ads. Yelp is the biggest scam and ripoff ever. And if anyone has local business, they would 100 agree. But. And there's ways just to get up there for free. So optimizing it so you don't have to spend money on ads, because especially with Yelp, they are ruthless and they do not give up, and they are very, very annoying to deal with. Well, that's good to know. So won't go down that path. Now, what are a couple of things that you would suggest for podcasters specifically to optimize their SEO? I know you. I think one of the things you mentioned was having a blog on your website. But then what else? What else would it be to make sure that our SEO as podcasters are as tight as we can make it? You could name your files with descriptive words before you upload your. Your episode to YouTube or to Spotify or to wherever you put it, or even to your website. Name the file with descriptive words. Don't just name it Podcast episode five. Name it. Like, fits this one. I would say SEO Strategies with Brandon Lebowitz, something like that. Something descriptive. That's very, very, very important. And then just try to, if you can transcribe the audio, if it's very long, timestamp it by just having some text that summarizes what that episode is about is very, very beneficial as well. Okay, great. Yeah. The product, the. The software that we use does all that. You know, as we drop our video into the software, it creates chapters, it creates key points, it creates all the transcripts. And. And. And then it feeds it into. And it includes. The only thing it doesn't do is when you save the file of the. It only puts on numbers when you save the video file. So that'll be something I talk to the to the developers with, because we get a Thursday meeting with the developers every week that develop the product that we. Or the. The software that we use. And they're great. They're. They're amazing. There's three or four developers, and I think they just added a fourth person in their group. And. And they have literally created stuff that we have kind of just said, this would be neat to do this blank. And they're like, oh, that's easy. We can do that. You know, And I asked them about creating a blog directly from the transcript after it's done doing, and they're like, it's on the way. It's on the way. And I'm like, fantastic. So I'll eventually have. Be able to just push a blog, not only on my personal website, but also be able to. On, you know, my website that. That hosts my podcast as well. So that's really nice. But that follows. File name thing is a huge nugget. I talk about nuggets on my episodes all the time. Little sprinkles of nuggets that. That we. That no one had a clue about except for the experts. And that's huge because right now I'm just uploading. Like, when I go to YouTube and I upload the video, it just says like, 728-15-37581. But it's. That file is inside of the folder for you. So now I will name that file. I'll basically grab. I'll basically grab what my software creates as a title. I'll make that the folder, the file name before I upload to YouTube. That is a big one, because I didn't even think of that. That files are being Read when you upload them as well. So that's a great, great point. So thank you for that. Yeah. Anywhere where you could add keywords, it's always going to be beneficial. Or just descriptive words. Descriptive words, yeah. Fantastic. Now when it comes to your specific business, can you explain. Now this is where you can kind of promote yourself a little bit and tell people how to find you, how they work with you, what, what your, what your what you do for them and how you know how you work with them. I mean, go ahead and explain all that so people know that. Tell us what your website is, all that good stuff, and then we'll wrap things up. Yes, I create a special gift for everybody if you go to my website@SEOoptimizers.com, that's SEO O P T I I z e r s.com forward/gift. You can find that gift there along with my contact information and a bunch of classes 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 they want a free website analysis. I'm happy to check out their website from an SEO point of view and they can book some time on my calendar for free there as well. Okay, and then how do you turn now with. Then from there? They if they want to do more or have you do more, that's when they become actually clients of yours or, or you have other packages that are deeper than that. But sounds like there's a ton of value in the first in the free stuff, which is, which is great. And I, I have not taken advantage of that yet. And I will. But but when it comes to, if someone wants to really dive deeper in, that's when you offer like a, A secondary phase or what have you. Yeah. Because first I have to look at their website. Right. And because it's not a one size fits all, I have to look at their website and see what's working, what's not working, and what their competition is doing and how can we do a better job of it, essentially. Gotcha. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. That'll. That stuff will be in the, in the description below. I So tell me what's best. I was gonna put the link to the free gift in the description. Do you want me to just rather have them drop your. Drop your e or your, your website in there instead? Like what is. Like when it comes to adding descriptions that we all do in podcasts when there's a free gift. Is it better to put the free gift as a, as a. As a hot link right. Right there, or is it better to feed them into the website and then have them search for the free gift? No, no, the gift there. Because they'll never find the gift. It's hidden. So only for people that listen to the podcast. Okay. Or. Yeah, yeah. So you can't find that stuff. Okay, that makes sense. So. So putting that in. So that's. That's another like, like so many questions for someone who knows all the intricate, you know SEO tricks and stuff of the Internet. So, Brandon, thanks so much for coming on the Ignition Path podcast. It was a great conversation. I hope to get to know you better as the. As the months and years go by. You know, I meet new people on a daily basis that don't have a clue about this kind of stuff. And now I have someone that I could. I could at least kick over to you because I'm not going to try to regurgitate everything that you said, you know, so it's a matter of making sure that my, my guests are experts in what they do. And I feed people that that have interest in the things that. That you are expert in. I feed them to you, so. Or I get them to your share my share the podcast with them so then they can hear it for themselves. So I really appreciate you coming on. Don't forget to, like, share and subscribe, everybody. And Brandon, if there's anything else you want to say, go ahead. If not, we'll just wrap things up. I'd say just keep working on that SEO. Don't get discouraged if you don't see that traction right away. It does take time, but as long as you keep building it up and building it up, you'll get that traffic. Awesome. All right, thanks, Brandon, so much. I appreciate it. Thanks. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to Ignition Path, fueling the entrepreneurial fire.