Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera with Unscripted SEO Podcast. I'm here with Brandon Leibovitz. Why don't you give yourself a quick introduction and then we'll get going.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: My name is Brandon Leibovitz and I've been involved with digital marketing since 2007, just helping people try to tap into that free traffic from Google using search engine optimization strategies.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: Nice. That's about the time when I started too.
Where did you start? Did you start with an agency? Did you start setting up your own sites or start in house at a existing brand?
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Started in house at a brand that was looking for help with marketing SEO. And I just graduated with my business marketing degree and they thought that it might be a good fit and I told them I didn't really know much about SEO and they said, it's fine, we're going to learn with you, take you into the classes and seminars and workshops and did that for a few months and just realized, this is the future. Everyone's going to have a website.
And who doesn't want free traffic? SEO is free traffic. So why don't I just focus on SEO versus paid ads or social media or any of those other ones that all work to get traffic, But SEO is just a free traffic source.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Awesome.
Which channel or niche have you ended up specializing in over the years? Or do you kind of see yourself as a generalist? I usually see people fall into one of three buckets. Either they get focused on technical SEO, which is where my love went to, you know, doing SEO audits and finding all of the insane ways that people have broken their sites on from a technical crawl type perspective, or the content marketer niche looking and trying to generate traffic by focusing on building, you know, different types of quality content and quantity content strategies or link building and outreach specialist. Is there particular niche in SEO? You find yourself falling in out of those three or all three of them, or you don't touch one of them.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: I work on all aspects of SEO because most of my clients come to me and they just need help getting more traffic and they don't care if it's on page, technical link building, whatever it is, they just want more traffic. So I have to go in and analyze each website from a.
Which you always have to do from a unique point of view. Each one's different and figure out, all right, are they, do they have really bad backlinks? We have to fix that and clean up these low quality backlinks and offset them with better ones, or is their site structure just a mess? That Google can crawl it and it's having issues reading the code and reading what keywords they're targeting. Or maybe the content is really thin on their website. Maybe they're E commerce and all they have is product pictures and they never wrote a blog post or never wrote any content to supporting it or just copied the manufacturer's descriptions over to their website.
So trying to seen or just. Yeah, trying to take everything one by one and trying to be more of a generalist and trying to focus overall the higher level. But each one does require specialization in terms of being able to dive into technical versus link building and it gets a little tricky trying to do all of it. But having a team helping me helps manage everything and helps me focus on the more important things and then dive into saying hey, let's try to fix these 404s or let's see why there's all these redirect loops.
[00:03:27] Speaker A: Got it. So right now what's the name of the. Are you with. You have your own agency or team that you're working with? Is that. That's SEO Optimizers, right?
[00:03:38] Speaker B: Yep, that's my company.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Awesome. So about how many people are on your team? How many people are you working with?
[00:03:48] Speaker B: 8 people on the team.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: Okay, cool. Do you tend to for the clients that are coming in, uh, do you find yourself falling into a particular industry or type of site?
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Not to. I mean type of site would be like. I mean I guess more of local e commerce type of businesses but not really any niche specific in types of sites. I mean most of them are WordPress but Shopify some Wix, some Squarespace, some GoDaddy website builder and just keep going down and down from there. But most of them are on WordPress luckily.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: Okay, so you also found yourself gravitating towards WordPress as a platform
[00:04:33] Speaker B: in preference. But I get people with GoDaddy website builder and just tell them the limitations. Can't do a lot of things. You can't do canonical tags. You can't do just like a lot of the basic SEO 101 on there and try to get them off of it to any platform other than GoDaddy website builder.
Pay for that when you get WordPress for free or if you want to do wix or Squarespace. But I'd still prefer WordPress it's just a better platform in general, customization wise, SEO friendly and it's really easy to use. But WIX has been getting a little bit better. Squarespace is getting a little bit better but still don't let you do the customizations that WordPress does.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: That's true. I have stopped saying that WIX is outright bad for SEO because I think Morty Oberstein, who I interviewed a couple times, he actually has done a lot of work to try to add in SEO features. But I do personally have a lot more experience with the WordPress platform. I know some people, like my wife, like, she hates WordPress. She's like, it's super clunky on the back. And I'm like, this is the most intuitive thing ever. I think it's just because once I was off of Dreamweaver in 2008, went right into WordPress and most of my work has been there as well. So I absolutely agree. As a platform, you know, you've got all the plugin functionalities you need.
I'm liking Astra recently as a theme. Do you usually find yourself recommending like Divi, Elementor, Astra or a particular theme that you find to be more SEO capable in WordPress or is basically just depend on what the client's already set up?
[00:06:17] Speaker B: What the client's already set up. They already usually have in house developer or they have someone that manages building, programming, coding their website and I'll just work on the marketing side of things. So however they want to design it aesthetically, yeah, for the most part, it's kind of up to the web developer.
[00:06:36] Speaker A: Makes sense.
What's your usual approach to like your strategy for the client?
Is it like audit first, technical SEO, Clear those hurdles, start doing link building. Do you do link building in house or do you have like some additional process that you, what process or approach do you use generally for your clients for link building and how does that tie into what you propose for a content strategy?
[00:07:07] Speaker B: It's all different. So it just depends on each client and we'll start with the audit and then we can figure out what we need to do next. Some of them just, I mean most of them need backlinks because a lot of them don't know what they're doing, built the wrong type of backlinks or don't have any backlinks. Some of them have good backlink profiles and then we could work on the technical and the content, but most of them need the backlinks in conjunction with content on their website. Got to start blogging, putting out their, interlinking their pages together, doing all the basic one on one SEO stuff that Google wants to see is just trying to make sure they have good content on their homepage, on their product pages or category pages or service pages just anywhere that they want to rank. Make sure they have good original content that is ran for people first Google secondary sprinkled in those keywords. But really try to write for people to to get them to convert from just being a visitor to that sale or lead or phone call or whatever that conversion goal is. But lower down the page then we'll work on more Google content for Google because most people are not going to scroll down and read all that content. But Google hopefully Google sees that content lower down and reads it and better understands what that page is about. But on the link building do it all in house and just judge you depending on well first of all get the competition, see what backlinks they have, try to replicate their strategies and then from there it's usually guest blogging or doing guest podcasts if they're open to it to try to get them backlinks as other strategies and just trying to think outside the box looking at the competition. Usually it's the best way to get new ideas of sponsoring trade shows or events or joining a local chamber of commerce or whatever it is. But trying to reverse engineer the competition helps out a lot usually.
[00:08:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I like mentioning doing the real world stuff and trying to get the business to think about SEO as how it attaches to other marketing channels too of like how you can get the site to support customer support for one thing like if they are like a SaaS or if they have like a fulfillment process making sure hey you know if I had documentation on how to process returns for these then I wouldn't have support tickets that I have to have support reps filling out and responding to and have less chances for people to get unhappy and do negative reviews.
Speaking of reviews, what's your experience on the local SEO side? I think you said that you did to provide SEO for the local and mapped type business. What's your experience there and what are you seeing as far as trends or focus areas that are important to include in your SEO plans?
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely help out with or local because a lot of my clients are local businesses and prefer local because you move the needle much faster than E commerce or national just takes longer and most people don't want to wait around for results. So having local unless they're a restaurant in Los Angeles, then it's a little too competitive because I'm based out of la, so I have a lot of clients in LA that want to rank in LA and that's where I just got to set expectations and let them know hey, let's try to target the city that you're actually in and then we can eventually target LA county and build it out from there. But it's really just making sure that they have a good good business profile listing. Everything's filled out, make sure you tag images with keywords, make sure that you have all the profile is properly set up in place. Answer do the Q and A respond to reviews but really just try and build those nap citations on third party sites to build those third party trust signals and then work on getting good keyword rich reviews. Making sure embed the map on their website and try to send signals because that's a big thing is just doing all that doesn't really move the needle as much as it used to without having actual signals of people searching on Google Maps, searching for your keywords related to you, clicking on it, calling you up, getting directions, going to your location. So trying to send those positive signals as well seems to be pretty important nowadays with Google.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: So when it comes to changing dynamic of AI based search, is there anything in particular you're adding to your workflow or process? Because we got you know Siri Interacting now with ChatGPT, we've got copilot from Microsoft getting added to newer laptops, Chat GPT is getting used more regularly. There's perplexity.
Gemini is obviously powering AI SERP snippets. Is there anything in particular you're doing in addition to try to focus on that side of services for the clients as things continue to evolve?
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Just trying to write for AI which is more question answer making sure you have schema on your website because schema is really important for AI to pull that content in and just making sure but kind of same thing I've always been doing, always been adding schema to every website but just making sure that it's done even more nowadays and just making sure to focus on more Q and A type of question answered. But it's more informational stuff that happens on AI, it's not really transactional which doesn't really affect the bottom line of most my clients unfortunately. So it's okay. But I mean AI kind of traps you on there, you can't buy from there yet. I mean we'll have to see but right now it's not the top top priority. But it is good to have a presence there because the more touch points that you have, the more places people find you, the more likely they are going to want to use your product or service in the future.
In general, just trying to stick with the best practices that have already been in place because the AI overview I feel like is featured snippet just kind of just a new way to rebrand it for Google and it's just schema being pulled in. So it's just trying to do the old tactics, old strategies already worked. Just making sure that you just do it on a bigger, more scaled level. Nowadays for AI,
[00:13:29] Speaker A: is there any particular vein or approach that you use on your schema? Is it mostly about just finding in those same as entities and trying to connect those dots or are you going deeper to the knowledge panel, knowledge graph view, you know, trying to do more custom schema breakdowns for each, you know, different service or product that you have. What's your approach on that side as far as more technical on the schema piece?
[00:14:06] Speaker B: Every page should have different schema for the different products. For E commerce you don't want to just, you want to have some general ones for your organization and things like that. But each page has their own unique CM entities. But usually I'll have somebody code them. I'm not the best at coding. I did Dreamweaver back in the day with HTML but coding is not my area of expertise so I let somebody else handle all that and then just we use the verifiers to make sure it's validates and it reads properly and Google is able to read it and see what those, what those entities are that we're trying to push.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: Makes sense.
So it's kind of wrapping up here. Like if somebody listens to this, what's the takeaway action item that you would recommend they do after this? After they listen to this, what should they open up their website and do immediately?
[00:15:04] Speaker B: If they're trying to rank on AI, I would make sure they have schema on every single page on their website and they have the right schema in place and they could check the schema validators. I forgot get the exact URL. But if you just type into Google schema validators there's a few big ones that are out there that you can put your URL in there and it'll show you if it's valid or what's missing. And you could put your competitors URL's in there so you'd see what schema items they're utilizing. And if you see that you don't have some that your competitors are using then you might want to add them if it makes sense. Just because your competition has on their website it might be incorrectly set up. So don't always copy verbatim. But if you see that they have some new piece of tag that you might have overlooked or not thought that was important. But if they're using it and you see other competition they're all using it, then it might be a good idea to rethink that and maybe add that into your into your schema. But that's more targeting schema holistically for SEO. I would just say make sure you look at your competition and try to look holistically at everything that we talked about. Because just doing technical doesn't really move the needle if you don't have good content and good backlinks and you have to put all those pieces together. But sometimes there's a bigger piece that's missing that really needs a lot more emphasis. This and another and that's where you could just try to use search console or a tool like Ahrefs or something to help you audit and see any just low hanging fruit that will just move the needle quicker.
[00:16:33] Speaker A: That definitely makes sense. Where can people find you online to hang out on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Twitter and where's your company site? How can people get a hold of you if they want to use your services?
[00:16:49] Speaker B: So anyone that wants to learn more, I created a special gift if you go to my website at s e o optimizers.com forward slash gift that's s e o o p t I m I z E-R-S.com gift and they can find that gift there. From all my contact information and venture classes I've done over the years I've thrown up for free. So you can see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about. And also if you have a website and want a free website analysis, I'm happy to check out your website from an SEO point of view and you can book some time on my calendar there as well for free.
[00:17:28] Speaker A: Fantastic. So much.
Thank you so much for your time. Brandon.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: Thanks for having me on.
