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SNM240: Brandon Leibowitz

• Jonathan Green : Bestselling Author, Tropical Island Entrepreneur, 7-Figure Blogger

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Jonathan Green: The power of search engine optimization. Is it still work in 2022 with special guest Brandon Leibowitz. I'm so excited to have him here today on today's very special episode. 

Today's episode is brought to you by Surfer SEO. If you want your content to rank in the search engine needs to optimize for over 200 ranking factors. That's way too much to remember. So surfer does it all for you and directly integrate with Google Docs and WordPress to make ranking your content a breeze. Get started at servenomaster.com/surfer. 

Announcer: Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now.

Then you've come to the right place. Welcome to Serve No Master Podcast, where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a Tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now, here's your host. 

Jonathan Green: So Brandon's an expert, built his own SEO agency and kind of helps other people grow their businesses.

He's gonna teach us all about that today and really, of course, also kind of starting your own business. So I'd love to hear Brandon, how your journey started. Where did it all begin? 

Brandon Leibowitz: Well, it all started after I graduated from college, got my degree in business marketing, and the first job I got outta school was helping a company out with their digital marketing, which I really know much about it.

Back then. They said, don't worry, we don't know too much about it either. We're gonna learn alongside with you and take it to classes and workshops and seminars. And after doing that for a couple of months, just realized everyone's gonna have a website, and this is back in 2007. I thought everyone was gonna have a website in the future.

There was a lot of different ways to get traffic. I was helping out with like their SEO, doing Social Media Marketing, helping out with paid ads, doing email marketing, and just really focused on SEO because that's the way to get free traffic. And I thought, why spend money on paid ads when you gave it up there for free?

So over the years, worked at different advertising agencies, and while I was working full time, I'd always pick up freelance clients here and there and build it up to where I was able to quit my job and focus solely on my company. 

Jonathan Green: That's one of my favorite moments is the from zero to one client. That's really the critical moment where you kind of go, oh, I can do this.

I can actually get paid to do this stuff completely on my own. How did you get that first client? Where did they come from? What was that moment like? 

Brandon Leibowitz: Uh, I think that one probably came from posting on Craigslist, possibly because I didn't really know how to build websites, so I posted on Craigslist and I think one of the first clients was we bartered, where they built me a website and I did their SEO. So they built me a website, showed me how to build one using Dream Weaver, like custom coding it. I didn't really understand coding, so I learned like basic html, but that was a good feeling, especially getting a website. Then it made me feel more official, and then I was able to start doing SEO on the website, which still takes about six months to take effect.

So in the meantime, I was calling up companies, going door to door and just trying to, anyway, get the word out there that I offer SEO. 

Jonathan Green: It's really cool. I got my first clients from Craigslist as well. I think a lot of people really underestimate sites like that. When I looked, when I thought about Craigslist, I go, everyone here is looking to buy something.

It's not a research platform. No one goes to Craigslist to learn about SEO or to learn about stuff. They go there to hire someone or to post a job. So that's really cool to kind of, you had that grind mentality. Do whatever it takes. A lot of people really struggle with that moment of they want it to just happen.

You know, people talk to me now, I do mostly ghost writing with my main service and they say, John, how do you get clients? I tell everyone, I just tell everyone I meet that I'm a really good ghost writer and it's so many people, they say, oh well I haven't told anyone yet cuz there's this fear. I think like that fear that like, oh, what if I don't succeed.

So they don't tell anyone. And I think it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, isn't it? Where if you don't tell anyone that you're doing SEO, how's anyone gonna find out and hire you? 

Brandon Leibowitz: Yep. Yep. Pretty much. You gotta spread the words. Just like building a website. You build a website and you can spend millions of dollars on it, but if you don't do any marketing, no one's really gonna find it. So you gotta be able to do both sides of things. 

Jonathan Green: Yeah, when I first started out, I had this 1, 1, 1 friend of my dad's, right? You always get like a friend of a friend who hears what you do, and they had the most beautiful website I'd ever seen. It's the beautiful website for the musical store entirely built in flash, which means Google couldn't read it.

And I was like, wow, this is such a tragic. Cuz they spent a huge amount of money so beautifully designed, all these really cool musical elements would happen and things would integrate, but they weren't getting any traffic and they never would because Google couldn't read Flash. Cuz remember those days everything was like encoded in like a secret language.

So no one know how your website was built and it is that where you, some people make these really big mistakes, um, especially small businesses. They invest a lot of money to website or technology, they don't quite understand and they don't realize there's a second component to it. Like building website isn't enough, people have to find it.

What's that kind of like when you're kind of dealing with clients and they've maybe overinvested in the wrong direction? You know, my very first client, she spent thousands of dollars that she couldn't afford on a website, wasn't getting any phone calls. And when she hired me, I go, yeah, your website doesn't have your phone number on it. That's why. 

And she was one of those where you drive around with your phone number on your car and it's these tiny mistakes that can devastate a small business. So what are some of the kind of the ways when you approach a business that you can just help 'em ride out the gate? 

Brandon Leibowitz: Yeah, there's so many little things like I see e-commerce websites that aren't getting sales, but like what's going on?

And then we check their shopping cart. You're not able to check out, so gotta test that website, make sure everything works, because unfortunately you never know or like contact forums, stuff like that, email addresses. But for SEO, something that usually most people are lacking or an easy quick fix is just adding more text to every page on your website.

Google really feeds off content. Images and videos are tricky for them to read, just like flash. Not the easiest for them to understand. So the more text that you have on every single page, the easier it is for search engines to read, understand, and know what keywords that, or know what this page is about.

So I always tell people, just try to add about 400 words is like the average, but just depends on the page, the product, the service that you're offering, how much text used to be there. But the more content you could put it there, the better off surgeons are gonna be at reading and understanding that.

Jonathan Green: A lot of people don't know how to edit content on their website, which I find like they had someone, usually a relative or a nephew or a niece or someone young build a website and sometimes they don't even know the login or the password.

Um, how can people kind of bridge that gap? I think people are really afraid of breaking their website. Now I've done that. Um, maybe you have this experience too where I'm like, I'm gonna figure out how to do HD access. I'm gonna figure out how to do php.in a, like these really core files and I've made my entire website crash.

So I've had that moment where you get that red screen of this website is super broken forever for eternity. And then I've fixed it cause I had a backup of the original file before I messed with it. But I think people are afraid that's gonna happen if they dive in cuz a lot of people, especially 40 plus, you know I'm 41 so it's my generation is like, oh gosh, what if I, I don't understand technology, I don't understand the young kids.

What if I break it? How can people kind of start to think about it's okay if you break it and you, cuz then you'll learn how to fix it. And that little bit more control means you can grow your business a little bit faster. 

Brandon Leibowitz: Unfortunately with websites, you gotta be ready for them to break and crash and get hacked or whatever happens to them because it's inevitable.

So having the backups is always the best, easiest way to not be so worried and letting people know, or business owners know, just call up your hosting company or, whoever's managing your site, web developer, your programmer, has them to make sure daily backups are enamored. So if anything does happen, you just revert back to the day before anything, anything negative happened on the website.

But yeah, unfortunately a lot of people are a little scared. Like with WordPress, we update the plugins or do any updates. You can break the website. So gotta be careful with all that stuff. You don't wanna break your site but you do have to keep it updated. So you have to have that balance and just not be scary to do it.

Even though a lot of people don't wanna make those changes cuz they're nervous. But as long as you have the daily backups, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. 

Jonathan Green: Yeah, when I started out, nobody was backing up their website. Like you'd back up your website maybe once a month and there's nothing like losing an entire month's worth of work and you know.

Now, most, like most good hosts, at least either doing the daily backups, which is so important cuz something's gonna happen. You don't wanna lose more than a day of work. Um, when you were kind of going through that process of, I'm gonna switch from working in house to having my own agency and kind of having larger number of clients, what was that moment of transition like when you realized, you know what, I'm gonna step out of the security of having like a full-time income and instead have multiple clients and have like more freedom but also more risk.

Brandon Leibowitz: No, it took a while and I didn't just jump right into it. Built it up over the years where I made sure that I was making the same amount, if not more than I'm making at the advertising agency for a couple of years. So I did just all of a sudden just take that leap and just jump off cause I wasn't really sure of what I wanted to do.

I was happy to work full time and pick up a few freelance clients here and there. But after I started really building it up and getting more business and I was making, at my current job, I was debating, right, should I leave? But I was like, let just make sure to, I have that stability because I want you to leave.

And then something happens and then I lose a bunch of clients, which unfortunately did happen when I left a few years after Pandemic hit, lost a bunch of clients, cause I had a lot of local businesses that were doing SEO that had to shut down completely so, that made me realize don't focus on one specific type of industry or type of business.

Try to diversify because you never know what's gonna happen, but luckily, I was able to manage through and survive and had enough clients to back it up. But if I only had a few clients, that would've been a lot tougher. So making sure that you have that stability is really helpful. Otherwise, you are taking that big kind of leap of faith, hoping that's gonna work, which you never know what's gonna happen.

But I took more of the safer, slower route. It just depends on how risk of risk you are. 

Jonathan Green: Yeah, that's really interesting. A lot of the people that I interview and talk to on the show are much more risk. They're like, let's dive in. They take a really risky decision with like just a little bit of proof. They go, oh, I got my first client, I'm quitting my job. I'm going all in. 

The one advantage, and I think you kind of mentioned is that when you have multiple clients, you're not gonna lose 'em all at once. You might lose a fewer a bunch, but at least you don't. Your income doesn't go to zero. Like all these people who lost their jobs when something happens and there is this belief in job security.

But I'm a big believer in income diversity instead. Whereas like if I have 10 clients each pay me a hundred dollars a month, it's better than one client, pay me a thousand cause if I lose that one client, that is rough. And it is having like that little bit of a spread out. When I started out, the whole idea was you started an SEO agency.

You'd only specialize in one type of client. And I had a friend who only did, um, like, what's it called? Uh, flooding repair. He only worked in the flood repair niche. And another friend who only worked in SEO for tombstone companies. And the danger, which is interesting, no one thinks of it now is that, well, what if that particular industry has a problem?

So I think that it is interesting to see how mindsets develop and having lots of clients in different regions who have different types of, uh, needs means that if one industry gets hurt, you're still, your own business can keep thriving. Cause it is interesting to see how a lot of business have had to change over the last two years.

So kind of going forward, what's your plan for like growing your business and what do you kind of see as the future of how SEO grows as every single company is now doing SEO. Everyone's doing on-page SEO. Everyone's doing AI writing SEO, and I know there's a big Google update coming out, which is all about trying to push down the AI writing so it's more natural human writing.

But how do you think the future's kind of gonna pan out? 

Brandon Leibowitz: Yeah, it's gonna be definitely interesting to see what happens in the future. But I mean, there's always been these article spinners, which are kind of similar to the AI where they would you put an article in there and they'll find synonyms and try to replace words.

So it looks original. It's hard to read, it doesn't read properly. That was back in like 2007, eight. They had these tools. So AI has just gotten a lot more advanced where now you read these articles, you can't tell the difference. Back in 2007, you could see it was just gibberish. It didn't make sense, but it would pass the test where it looked like original content cuz to Google, when you write content, it needs to be original. 

If it's been copied from another page or another, website becomes stupid content and Google doesn't like that. So AI content is an interesting one. I'm not sure how they're gonna be able to differentiate what's real, what's not, because some of that content you can't really tell the difference, but it will be interesting to see what happens with the future. 

Everything does seem to be shifting towards mobile since everyone has mobile devices, making sure your website looks good on mobile loads quickly. Maybe you trim down your website so it's not the full desktop version, but more just of what needs to be there because on mobile, your screen is much smaller.

Also, video seems to be really, really popular lately. Everything seems to be shifting towards. Visual content tension span are really short nowadays. So video is an easy way to keep people engaged and keep people wanting to watch, and instead of reading your content, just watching it. So like those two things are gonna really take off, but it's kind of tough to predict what's gonna happen in the future because everything is so dynamic and changes so quickly.

But for the most part, I think those trends are probably gonna be what's going on. 

Jonathan Green: Yeah. I think that you're right about mobile, and you're right about kind of people being able to move around. A lot of people last year, you know, with the advent of clubhouse, with all the virtual reality stuff, those things only work if you can't leave your house.

Like I think that you're more, right. Maybe augmented reality will happen where people can do stuff outdoors, but a lot of people are thinking, oh, I need to build real estate in the metaphors. I need to build a virtual reality website, or I need to have like presences on these platforms that don't seem to be working right, like my entire life like they've been trying to make virtual reality work when I was 14 or 15 outside of the laser tag arena, they had like a virtual reality thing you could play and they keep trying to make it work. Remember there were three, everyone had a 3D TV for like one year. Now you can't, nothing comes out in 3D anymore.

If you have one of those TVs, you can't watch anything. So sometimes we go down these technology paths that turn out to be cul-de-sac. And I think that's what, maybe that's why a lot of companies are gun shy. Um, they, that's why so many companies waited in like three years to build a website and they build their mobile presence too late.

And they join TikTok like five years too late because they're wondering, oh, I don't wanna invest in technology. That's a dead end. So as someone who's delivering services and kind of maybe starting out, what if you were starting out now, what would you focus on if you were gonna build now, would you go straight to SEO or would you kind of look at some of the other things that have kind of grown or come around in the last 15 years?

Brandon Leibowitz: I would still maybe do or lean more towards the SEO just cause it's a way to get free traffic. Social media is good, but most social media is now paid to play platforms where you're not getting much reach or engagement or visibility without spending money on ads on these social media sites. So, that one. I mean, it works.

It's just you have to pay to get that visibility. And the ads paid, ads on, like Google, they all work. It's just once you stop spending money on ads, you disappear. So the long term strategy for SEO is get ranking and continuously get that traffic. So I'd still probably stick with SEO, but I mean, ever since I started doing SEO, people told me SEO is dead.

This is back in 2007. So people still think SEO is dying off, which. It might, but as long as there's search engines, there's gonna be SEO. So it might change in the future, like we're all plugged into the metaverse or something. It might not be Google, but you're gonna still be searching probably something.

So there's ways to tweak and get you ranked, just like on Amazon. There's all algorithms for that. Rank you higher on Amazon. To rank you higher on Yelp. Doesn't necessarily need to be Google. So whatever pops up in the future. There should be an algorithm behind it for the time being. Who knows what's gonna happen in the future, if there's some other way to do it.

But as long as there are algorithms, there's ways to kind of get yourself more visibility and optimize yourself to rank a little bit higher on them. 

Jonathan Green: Yeah. I remember searching on Alta Vista or the AOL search engine or the Yahoo search engine, or the Excite search engines. Even though, yeah, now Google's the dominant player.

There are other platforms and search engines coming out. They're doing different things that are very interesting. So you're right, it may be a shift, but I guess the idea of creating good content, optimizing your content is here to stay. So how can people find you online, spend more time with you and see some of the other cool things you're doing in the world of search engine optimization?

Brandon Leibowitz: So for anyone that wants to learn more, I create a special gift on my website. They go to seooptimizers.com. That's seooptimizers.com/gift. They can find that there, along with all my contact information and classes I've done over the years about SEO and digital marketing. I've thrown them all up there for free.

Also, if they have a website, they want me to check it out, give some feedback from an SEO point of view, they can book a time on my calendar and I'm happy to analyze their website and see what's working, what's not working, and how to pull that disconnect. 

Jonathan Green: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Again, that's Brandon Leibowitz from seooptimizers.com.

We'll put the links, load the video into the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. 

Brandon Leibowitz: Yeah, thanks for having me out today. 

Jonathan Green: Thank you for listening to today's episode. Starting your blog is an amazing step. Now it's time to get your first 100 raving fans as quickly as possible. Let me show you the shortcut to this milestone with my free guide at servemaster.com/100. That's forward slash one zero zero. 

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