Getting to the Bottom Line: Conversations to help business owners maximize revenue, profit, and cash flow
Whether you're looking to boost your profits or simply gain a clearer understanding what drives business success, "Getting to the Bottom Line" is your ultimate guide to unlocking the strategies and secrets behind sustainable growth and the financial freedom you deserve. Tune in and discover how to turn your business goals into tangible results, one insightful conversation at a time.
Getting to the Bottom Line: Conversations to help business owners maximize revenue, profit, and cash flow
Mastering SEO for Long-Term Business Growth with Brandon Leibowitz
Unlock the secrets of digital success with Brandon Leibowitz, the mastermind behind SEO Optimizers. Ever wondered how SEO can change the game for your business without the hefty price tag of ads? Brandon shares his journey from the corporate realm to his own agency and offers invaluable insights into the power of SEO in today's shifting digital landscape. We'll explore how staying ahead of trends like mobile-first optimizations and AI's growing role can provide a competitive edge. Brandon simplifies SEO for newcomers, explaining how it boosts visibility and conversion rates by positioning businesses in Google's organic search results.
For those aiming to carve out a niche in e-commerce or any online business, we dive into strategies to harness SEO for growth and stability. Discover how a mobile-first design and streamlined website forms can enhance user experience and lead generation. Learn about the harmonious relationship between SEO and paid advertising, focusing on remarketing techniques that build trust and convert casual visitors into loyal customers. Emphasizing the enduring value of SEO over fleeting social media trends, this episode is a treasure trove of practical tools and strategies to establish a lasting online presence. Get ready to embrace a long-term SEO strategy that requires patience but promises significant returns.
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My name is Stephanie Smith, owner of New Light Financial Solutions, and we help business owners walk the one clear path to generating more cash in their business. To learn more, visit us online at https://newlightfs.com/
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Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Getting to the Bottom Line, where I'm your host, stephanie Smith, owner of New Light Financial Solutions, where we help business owners walk the one clear path to generating more cash in their business, and we do this by looking at 16 financial drivers that impact your revenue, profit and cashflow. However, we know that the things that we look at aren't the only things that impact your bottom line. So that is the goal of getting to the bottom line is to see what other things to put into perspective, the various things in business that impact your bottom line. So I'm excited to have with me here today Brandon Leibowitz. Brandon runs and operates SEO Optimizers, and he's done that since 2007. They're a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium-sized businesses get more online traffic that converts into clients, sales, leads or whatever it is you want. So thanks so much for joining me today, brandon.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me on today.
Speaker 1:I'm excited to have this conversation because we were chatting right beforehand and I was saying I don't, we're going to focus on SEO. I don't do SEO in my business and I know I should or shouldn't focus on it. I should focus on it more. So I'm glad to have you here so we can talk more about it. But first, why don't you tell us how you got into what you're doing?
Speaker 2:I. We can talk more about it, but first, why don't you tell us how you got into what you're doing? I kind of fell into it. I graduated from college in 2007. And after I graduated well, got my degree in business marketing and one of the first jobs I was offered was helping a company out with their digital marketing, which I didn't really know much about it back then. They didn't really teach that in school and the company knew that and said it's okay, we're going to take you to classes and workshops and learn with you.
Speaker 2:And after going to a few workshops, just realized back in 2007 that everyone's probably going to have a website. Digital marketing is not going anywhere anytime soon and SEO is just a way to get free traffic and who doesn't want free traffic? So I really focused more on the SEO side of things. But in general with digital marketing Google ads or ads, social media, email marketing it all works to get traffic and I'd recommend doing all that. I just really focused more on the SEO side of things just to help people avoid spending money on those ads 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 to where I was able to quit my job and focus solely on this, and been doing that ever since.
Speaker 1:That is so awesome. It's such a story I think a lot of people recognize and are familiar with transitioning from corporate or other jobs to their own business. But starting in 2007,. That was a long time ago. At this point, I'm sure you've seen a lot of changes over the years. Is there any significant thing you've noticed over the past year, since you've gotten into everything?
Speaker 2:I mean it's always changing. The biggest change right now, I feel like AI is such a big change compared to all the other changes. We're big changes Like mobile has taken over everything Mobile first for building websites and just most of your traffic, majority of your traffic, will come from mobile. That happened around like 2013-ish. Google started switching over from desktop to mobile focused optimizations, but AI is just something that's so new and we'll have to see what's going to happen. Where is it going to go? Are people going to use AI or search on AI versus Google, or it's just that kind of that mystery box, right?
Speaker 1:now I do have chat GPT so I use it, and it did ask me if I wanted to use like chat GPT as my search. I did it one time I was like this feels weird and I went back to just regular google. But, um, I completely get it. The landscape is changing um, so keeping up with that, we need someone like you so you can keep up with the landscape changes and tell us how it impacts um what we're doing. But tell me, tell me more about what it is your business does and how you help people specifically in this world.
Speaker 2:So we make sure that when people search on Google for keywords related to your business, your product, your service, whatever it is that you show up on Google underneath the ad so the ads you have to pay for each click.
Speaker 2:Anytime somebody searches on Google and if you click on an ad, that company has to pay for each click. It could be a couple cents per click, it could be a couple dollars for one click, it could be $100. Just for one click it gets pretty expensive. I mean, as long as you're making more than you're putting in, you don't have to worry about it. You could keep running ads, but you don't want to always run them. That's why the SEO is right below the ads, organic, the free listings and that's what I focus on is helping your website appear in those free listings so you can just capture that traffic when people are searching, because people searching on Google they usually have some intent behind those searches to make or learn more about a specific question, need help with something, and then eventually it might lead to them buying a product or using your services. And that's really what the goal is is getting people from Google to your website and then ultimately having them reach out to you or whatever that conversion goal is.
Speaker 1:Right, we want people to find us and buy from us as business owners. Right, that's the ultimate goal. So tell me I'll say someone who isn't as familiar with SEO like what exactly does that mean that you're optimizing? Like, how do you do it? What's been? And dumb it down for me to to real easy, easy understand language what? What is it that you're doing on my website with SEO?
Speaker 2:Doing a few different things depending on what type of website you have, but there's some commonalities with all websites where Google feeds off text. Google loves content really text, images, videos, audio. They are getting much, much better at it, but they still rather have text. The more text you put into your website on every single page, the easier it is for the search engines to really read and understand and know what that page is about. Because search engines are just robots and the more you give to them, the more you spoon feed to them, the easier it is for them to understand that page and rank you for the correct keywords. But Keywords really mean nothing to the search engines because they just don't trust anything anybody puts on a website.
Speaker 2:I can build a website and I can say, like brandonsdentistcom and Google's like all right, are you really a dentist? Because we don't believe you and we don't want to just rank you and then have people go to your dental office and find out you don't exist. It's a bad user experience. People are probably going to get frustrated and say Google, why are you showing me this dental office that doesn't exist? And they're probably going to switch over to Bing or ChatGPT or some other search engine and Google doesn't want that to happen.
Speaker 2:So Google wants to see that other websites are talking about you and that's a trust signal to tell Google that you are trustworthy. It's called building what are called backlinks getting other websites to link out to you. So if you're a dentist, you'd probably want other websites related to health and wellness, so other maybe dentists in other states, or you get on like WebMD or Yelp or Wikipedia, or you join your chamber of commerce in your area. But the more websites that talk about you, the more popular, the more trust Google gives to you, and then they look at those keywords to figure out what keywords to thank you for.
Speaker 1:So when you work with someone, you work with them to figure out how they can get these backlinks in other places to help their SEO.
Speaker 2:Yep, or sometimes I have clients that have been around for 20 years, have a lot of backlinks built up, a lot of trust built up, but their website is just built in a way that Google can't read it and going in and cleaning it up because Google looks at code, they can't see the website.
Speaker 2:What we see is not what Google sees. Search engines just look at the code and the code is all text. That's why it gets all stripped down to text and if you have the code in a weird format or you sometimes like, block the search engines, they. And if you have the code in a weird format or you sometimes block the search engines, they're not able to read that and they're not going to be able to know what keywords to rank you for. And that's really important. That feels like a puzzle. You got to put all those pieces together. You can't just do one thing or do another thing. You have to really do it all to make sure that you maximize that trust and then make sure that you get the correct keyword ranking on the search engines.
Speaker 1:Hmm, that you get the correct keyword ranking on the search engines. So, doing what you've done for so long, what are the biggest mistakes that you see that impact people's SEO?
Speaker 2:The backlinks are the trickiest part, because either people don't know about backlinks and have never heard about them, or they know what backlinks are and they're going on sites like Fiverr and buying a thousand backlinks for $5.
Speaker 2:And, unfortunately, if you build the wrong type of backlinks instead and they're going on sites like Fiverr and buying a thousand backlinks for five dollars and, unfortunately, if you build the wrong type of backlinks, instead of ranking you higher, it's going to drop you down and Google knows there's all these ways to like, trick and game the system and going on Fiverr, you're getting all these low quality backlinks and what you want to do is get quality backlinks and to Google, a quality backlink just means it comes from a site that's related to what you're doing. So if, depending on whatever you're doing like if you're selling shoes you want websites about like shoes or about fitness or about style if it's stylish anything's somewhat related, it doesn't have to be other shoe companies. Like I do seo probably not going to get other seo companies to link out to me, because we're all pretty much competitors, but I can find SEO blogs or find podcasts about marketing or about advertising or just anything that's somewhat related to what I'm doing. That's what I want to be on.
Speaker 1:That makes sense, and I didn't know. You can buy backlinks on Fiverr. So that's news news to me, but okay, so note to self, don't do that. Where are they putting those links, you wonder?
Speaker 2:It's commenting on blogs. So that's why most blogs don't allow comments, because back when I first started doing SEO, there was a tool and still out there and with the click of a button you'll comment on whatever amount of blogs 5,000, 10,000 blogs and Google knows that blog comments anytime you have a comment. And well, in the old way, you always used to say name, website and email address, so you put that in there. You're always getting a backlink. So a lot of people will just go in there, put their name as a keyword and put their website URL in there, and that became a clickable link. And you're able to do that on some really, really big websites. And that's why Google always updates their algorithm, like in 2011,.
Speaker 2:They changed it saying, hey, these backlinks it's not the number of backlinks anymore, because it's too easy to spam and get a bunch of low quality backlinks. We want good quality backlinks. We want good quality backlinks. So now really, what you need to do is build a couple or more backlinks in your competitors, but usually that's around like a hundred or so backlinks. So if you're buying a thousand backlinks from Fiverr, that looks really suspicious to Google. A normal website would only be getting a couple backlinks every single month, depending on how big you are. If you're a big corporation, then of course you're probably getting that more, but small medium-sized businesses get a couple backlinks every single month. So naturally you just want to get a few and build it up and build it up and over time that's going to see Google getting you more trust. But that's why SEO takes so much time because Google just doesn't trust you and to build trust is not easy.
Speaker 1:So you're in the long game when it comes to SEO. Speaking of that, so how long do you usually see that it takes for people to get results from focusing on this?
Speaker 2:It really depends on the competition of those keywords. The more competitive those keywords are, the more time it's going to take. But also how old your website is Like. If I go back to that old example where I had a client that had a website that's 20, over 20 years old, it has the word Amazon in it. I'm like, how'd you get the word Amazon in it? He's like I had this website before Amazon existed, so his website's really really old. It was just built in a way that was really hard for Google to read it.
Speaker 2:But we went in and changed a bunch of coding things or changed a lot of the code and pretty much in a month they shot up to like the first three positions for almost every single keyword they wanted to rank for. But that's really rare. Usually it's the opposite, where I get someone that doesn't have any backlinks and it has a brand new website and we have to build that trust up and that's where it just depends on that competition. So if you can niche down and find something more unique that helps differentiate yourself, that really helps out, because the more competition, the longer it's going to take. If you're just selling t-shirts, a lot of competition. If you can find something more niche, like maybe sell organic cotton t-shirts for toddlers still very competitive, but a little bit more niche. So the more niche you get, the faster you're going to see results with SEO.
Speaker 1:That makes sense and have you seen anyone? Because we're talking about things that impact your bottom line, right. So I'm going to ask have you seen anyone really get like a lot more sales or increase their revenue from doing this and focusing on SEO specifically?
Speaker 2:revenue from doing this and focusing on SEO specifically Yep. So usually once they start getting more traffic, that's where also the website has to convert. And that's why I try to work with the owner of the business and the web developers and just making sure that your website is optimized for conversions, because a lot of people will spend money on paid ads and they're like I'm not getting conversions or they'll do SEO and they're getting all this traffic. But traffic doesn't really mean anything unless you get that traffic to convert. And that's where you have to build trust for people when they get to your website. So for SEO, I have to build trust for Google to get Google to rank you. And once we get Google to rank you, then how do we get people to convert? And that's where try to figure out.
Speaker 2:Let's make your website look really easy to find everything. Don't clutter it up. Make sure it looks good on mobile. It's easy to purchase. If you're e-commerce, make sure it's easy to buy. Make sure that add to cart button is on the top of the screen, because whatever you see on a screen is called above the fold and most people don't scroll down. Majority of people never even scroll down on the website. So if you don't have all your important information at the top, like a value proposition of what's in it for me maybe a video or a couple of bullet points and then your call to action, a form, if you want people to fill out a form, all needs to be on the top of the screen. And that's where a lot of times where I'll get people traffic and then they're just like hey, leads aren't coming in and I'm like we need to move this around and we need to tweak this.
Speaker 2:And doing little changes has had big impacts. Like one of my clients they were a lead generation website and they had a really long form on the website, for the contact page asked a lot of questions, like it had first name, last name, separate. It was asking for their address, their city, state, zip code, all these things where you could kind of merge some of them together. So you just ask for a name instead of having two fields, instead of asking for the address, like the street, the city, the state, you just say zip code, because from zip code you could get the city and state from there. Because the less fields you have, the more conversions you're going to get.
Speaker 2:Especially on mobile have, the more conversions you're going to get, especially on mobile. And by cleaning up their form, we pretty much doubled their leads that they were getting, because, especially on long form, like you got to think about, do you really want to fill out all this information on your cell phone, and nobody has time for that. Even on desktop, at least, it kind of auto fills it for you, which is great, but on mobile and you really have to understand or think. Anytime you're building your website or looking at your website, look at from a mobile first perspective, because that's where you're going to get. 60 percent of traffic nowadays comes from mobile and it keeps increasing. And you can check google analytics. It's a free tool from google that will show where your traffic's coming from and you can see how much is really coming from mobile or desktop or tablet and give you a wealth of information in there no-transcript, you might just abandon ship.
Speaker 1:So that's really great advice and so you help people beyond just the SEO to help improve their website, to get those conversions, sounds like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I realized over the years SEO just gets you traffic but traffic isn't a means to an end. And even I help out a little bit with paid ads because a lot of people that come to your website, no matter what, are going to leave immediately. I feel like half the traffic that comes to any website leaves immediately. That bounce rate from Google Analytics and if you could just follow people around using remarketing that keeps you top of mind and gets people that were warm leads back into your funnel, hopefully. So those ads are very, very cheap where, if you look at a product on Amazon and you see those ads that follow you around doing the same thing and I do it for my website People come to my website and don't watch one of my free classes, I'm going to follow them around with ads for my free class.
Speaker 2:If you've gone to my class but you haven't booked a free consultation, I'm going to follow you around and say like, hey, book a free consultation. And if you have booked a consultation but haven't signed up as a client, then I'll follow you around with, like, testimonials and reviews so you could sell all these different custom audiences and the more trust points you have, the more, the more trust you're going to build, especially for things that aren't the cheapest Like if you're just on socks or something really cheap, then you probably don't want to spend money on those ads. But SEO I've had people come to me five years later, taking one of my classes, saying, hey, I was in startup mode, I'm now ready to start the SEO, which just took me a little while, but it's a long buying cycle. That's where you have to understand your audience and just how to really resonate and connect with them at the right moments.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. So you help with SEO and you'll help with these other things and you have classes. Is there anything else that you do to help business owners in this area?
Speaker 2:Those are really the main things. I mean I'll guide them on social media, email marketing, but emails usually we have to have a really good lead magnet to get people to sign up or give their email address up. But after that I usually just tell the business owners you should probably write the emails because if you have somebody else it loses that authenticity and you know your business best and how to speak with the, with your audience, and keep that tone and everything like that on point. So I usually help guide them with that stuff. But in general I just try to figure out where their audience is and how to get them in front of their audience at the right moment. Whether it might be social, like sometimes seo doesn't work. If you have a new product and nobody's searching for it, there's not much you could really do. So social media would be a little bit better and it's just trying to figure out where your audience is and how to get you in front of them.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Which of those things do you like doing the most? Is it the SEO?
Speaker 2:The SEO is the better long-term strategy. I feel Google's not going anywhere anytime soon, except for AI has kind of mixed that up with social and everything. I'm like you can put all your eggs in one basket and focus on Facebook, but now Facebook is kind of the foresight. Instagram took over and then now it's TikTok, so you have to keep jumping platforms and to get your audience from one platform to another is not the easiest, even if you have a really big audience. To get them from Instagram to TikTok doesn't always work. It sometimes does, but it's tricky. So that's why I like the SEO is one of my better strategies, but email is always the best as well, because email.
Speaker 1:Sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just you get the full reach. So if you have 10,000 people on your email list and you email all of them, all of them are going to get that email. With social media, you post on social media and reach is so low that you don't really get that full engagement.
Speaker 1:I mean that makes sense. I feel like you can post something and you don't know how many people actually see it. It's usually a small number. I know I don't see half the people I follow on Facebook anyway when they post stuff. So all good focus areas. So if I'm a business owner and I want to get started with SEO, where would you recommend people begin?
Speaker 2:Let's first start off with building backlinks and working on their website, their structure of their website, Because the sooner you build backlinks, the sooner you're going to get rankings Backlinks. I mean. It takes about six months to get Google to trust a website. So if you're thinking about building a new website or starting a business, I would buy your domain name right away and then try to start building some hype about it. Maybe do a press release Sound like this website's launching soon. That's a way to get some backlinks Not the best backlinks, because they're just kind of general news sites, but it doesn't hurt just to try to get some hype around it. Get Google to see that other websites are talking about you and hopefully speed up that process, Cause it is a more of a patience game with SEO. You got to stick with it.
Speaker 1:How do I know where I rank?
Speaker 2:I'd use Google analytics. It's a free tool that everyone should be using to track their traffic. Wordpress and Shopify and Wix and all these platforms will give you analytics, but it's not the same as Google Analytics. It just shows so much information. It's like data overload. A lot of people look at it, just don't know where to go and I just say click on everything. You're not going to break anything and you're just going to learn so much information about your traffic, where they come from. There's also Google Search Console. That's another free tool from Google. Search Console is really for SEO and it'll show you what keywords you rank for, what position you're in, how much traffic you're getting. Google Analytics is just for all traffic, just general information. And then Google search console is for SEO specifically. We'll show you if you've been penalized for doing some things that Google doesn't want you to do. It'll tell you. It'll show you how fast your website loads. It shows you a ton of information on there.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So, knowing that all there's all these tools that we should know about and be using, I assume you have some courses to help people you know learn how to all these tools that we should know about and be using. I assume you have some courses to help people learn how to use these tools and do things better.
Speaker 2:Is that true? Yep, I do a lot of classes to help educate people and do them Well, nowadays, mainly online, doing one in person and watching like three days for the first time in a long, long time in los angeles. So if you are around los angeles, come out. But yeah, usually they're on person, so or online, which is nice because now I can watch them anytime. It connects everybody and it makes it so if you're in another country, you can just log in and it's all good. You don't have to drive, find parking in los angeles. It's not the easiest and usually they're like after work or on lunch break, so it can be tricky, but I like that. Zoom has connected everyone and made things a little bit nicer, even though it's still nice to do them in person. I'm excited to do it in person, but online it just makes it so much easier for everybody.
Speaker 1:Sometimes it feels like COVID is still happening. We all went online and never came back, so maybe some of my listeners might come see you in person or come see one of your classes. So I would love to know if there was one thing you would want someone to take away about SEO and the conversation that we had. What would it be?
Speaker 2:You have to work up SEO and it takes time. A lot of people I mean everyone wants that instant results just to shoot up those rankings, but with SEO it is a long-term play. You have to build it up and build up, and building trust with Google takes time. So just be aware that the sooner you start building backlinks, the sooner you start getting Google and other search engines to trust you and that's going to get your traffic to slowly move up. Sometimes it just jumps really fast, but in general with SEO we just got to keep building it up and building it up and over time you're going to see that traffic just slowly but surely increasing.
Speaker 1:I love that. It's the long game. It is the long game. Let's see. One of my takeaways is thinking about the mobile first experience. So when you're building your website, mobile first and remember that people don't like to scroll too far, so starting with something that gets the interest and the action that you're looking for. But this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming. I want to know if people did want to find out more about you or take some of your classes, where is the best place for them to find you?
Speaker 2:I create a special gift for everybody If they go to my website at seooptimizerscom. Forward slash gift that's S-E-O-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S dot com. Forward slash gift and they could find that gift there, along with my contact information and some classes I've done over the years. I've thrown up for free there so they could watch classes to see how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about. And also, if they do have a website and they want a free website analysis, I'm happy to check their website out from an SEO point of view and they can book some time on my calendar there as well.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I will put the links to that to your website and where they find your free gift in the show notes so everyone can find that, because who doesn't like a free gift, right? And if you're looking to find out more about me and what we do at New Light Financial Solutions, you can find us online at newlightfscom. But that is all that we have today for this conversation of getting to the bottom line. Thank you again, brandon, for coming on the show. I hope you all have a wonderful day and we will see you next time. Bye, everyone.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me on.
