[00:00:00] Speaker A: Google actually said last year, we don't care who writes the content anymore. If humans or AI write it, we just can't tell the difference. It just has to be accurate. Inevitably, it's going to be so good that it is going to replace writers, copywriters. Content's gotten so good from ChatGPT, it's a little scary.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Welcome to the Agency Hour podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams and their communities. This week we're joined by Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers. Since 2007, Brandon's been helping small and medium sized business drive business and get more traffic, which in turn converts into new leads, sales, and ultimately clients. In this episode, we talk about the future of digital marketing, breaking through the mental barriers that stop you from creating content. Especially video tips on consistently producing content, even when it feels like no one's listening. Why human connection is more essential than ever as AI takes the spotlight. The biggest mistakes you can make when using AI and a whole lot more. Now, before we dive in, I want to take 30 seconds to talk to you about today's sponsor, WIX Studio. That's right, you heard me, WIX Studio. Digital marketers, here are just a few things that you can do when you manage projects on WIX Studio. Create a client kit for seamless handovers. Reuse templates, widgets, and sections across all sites. Work in sync with your team on one canvas. Leverage best in class SEO defaults across all of your WIX sites. Time's up, but the list keeps going, so step into Wick's studio to see more. All right, I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome to the Agency Hour podcast. Brandon Liebowitz, all the way from Venice, California. Hey, Brandon, how you doing?
[00:01:48] Speaker A: I'm doing well. Thank you for having me on.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you for joining us here on the Agency Hour podcast. Now, for those that don't know, just tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you found your way onto the Agency Hour podcast.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: I help people get more traffic to their website, so making sure that when people search on Google that you pop up at the top of Google and start capturing that free traffic and just fell into it. After I graduated from school, got my degree in business marketing and one of the first jobs I got was doing SEO, which I didn't really know much about it back in 2007 and they didn't really teach you that in school. But I told the company that, and they said, don't worry, we're going to learn with you and take you to different classes and workshops and seminars. And after going to a few of those seminars, just kind of realized websites are probably not going to go anywhere anytime soon. All this digital marketing stuff probably is going to stick around. And SEO is just one way to get free traffic, and who doesn't want free traffic? And that just kept me going on that SEO journey over the years, working at different advertising agencies and as a director of SEO. And before work and after work and on lunch breaks, I would work on my own company and eventually quit that job to be able to focus solely on this and been doing that ever since. And what reached out to you? Because with SEO, which we can talk about later, a lot of it is building backlinks and getting on other people's podcasts is great for content, social media, but also it helps out for SEO backlinks.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Yeah, a hundred percent. It's a great strategy. 2007, man, it was like no one knew about. No one, like you said that, you know, you didn't really know much about SEO because they weren't teaching it because no one knew anything about SEO. Back in 2007, pretty much when I started out. Who were you following back then? Who were you learning from online?
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Back then? It was a lot of like forums or moz, like Rand Fiskin and just Matt Cuts would be posting and you're just like, all right, just taking anything that you say with a grain of salt. Because this is a rep from Google that would kind of tell you what they're looking for. But as you probably read, and with the Google leaks that happened over the years, you can see a lot of stuff that they did say was actually not true because Google's ultimate goal is really to make more money. They know they have to do SEO because nobody wants to just go on Google with 10 ads. So having that balance of SEO and ads, but they'd rather you just spend that money.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Yeah. The Pay to Play model Rand Fishkin, I think will go down in history as one of the great influencers and educators of all time. I've had him on the show a couple of times. We've, we've hung out in our virtual events online and I used to watch Whiteboard Fridays with Rand and learn about SEO. And then they published the Beginner's Guide to SEO, which was this epic. I think it's still online. This epic kind of multi page, multi faceted guide to learn SEO. It was like one of the most valuable pieces of content, which I'm sure also did wonders for their SEO as well. And they really raised the game, really raised the bar with content production back in the early days.
And so at what point, where were you, I'm curious about where you were with your own business when you decided, okay, there's enough going on here that I can quit the day job and go full time in my own company.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: It was probably after about eight or nine years or seven, eight years of working at these agencies at I was just happy to have a job and I was always happy to just get a couple of clients here or there and make some extra money. But after a while working at these agencies, I just realized that it was only so much of a cap that you could go and so high that you could get. And I always had the entrepreneurial spirit in high school. Made a skateboarding clothing company. Always wanted to get out there and do something. Love skateboarding. Still love skateboarding. So I was just trying to see how I could just tie it all back together was one of my passions, but just always wanted to just get the name out there or get something under that. I would have my own business and realize that let me just go all in with this SEO. I could probably get enough clients if I just focus on it and really push it versus just kind of just letting it be and getting clients here or there through referrals. So I started teaching classes and really putting myself out there making like YouTube and social media about myself versus my company, SEO Optimizers, which is great, but realize people really want branded, not SEO optimizers. So just trying to build that up. And after doing that for a few years, was able to quit my job. So kind of took the safer route. Didn't just jump ship right away, which a lot of people do. And you can do it, but just want to take it a little bit safer, especially because you never know what's going to happen. Got it.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Now, look, there's something I want to unpack here because, you know, most people just won't make videos and talk about themselves and put themselves online and put themselves out there because for a whole bunch of reasons, fear of rejection, they don't want to be in Australia. It's actually we have this thing called the tall poppy syndrome in Australia where if you kind of talk about yourself too much, people, everyone else, it's a colloquialism here in Australia, but everyone calls you a wanker, right? It's like how you wanker you're just bragging about yourself, right? And so it's a massive thing in Australia. Most people in Australia just won't put themselves out there because they don't. You know, everyone thinks you're a tall poppy, and they just try and cut you down, right? I was in the States a few years ago in Philadelphia, and there was this tiny little dive bar late at night, and there was this guy behind the bar, and there was another couple over in the corner of the room with a monopod camera and a girl with a clipboard or an iPad, and they were shooting the guy, the barman. I walked over and what are you doing? Like, oh, he's a YouTuber. And so we're filming him at work. And I'm like, huh, that's interesting. Like, in Australia, if the barman was a YouTuber and the. And everyone in the bar found out, you'd just go, you're a wanker, mate. Like, no one would be helping you film yourself working. And their mentality was like, oh, no, we want him to succeed. Like, we want him to do really well. Which I thought was really interesting. Did you have to kind of overcome any psychological kind of barriers to start making videos and put yourself out there?
[00:07:52] Speaker A: It was not the easiest, but, yeah, it took me a while to do it. I mean, I did a little bit over the years before, like, when I first started doing SEO, well, YouTube actually came up to me and said, hey, we'll film a video for you and we'll you create a YouTube ad through it. Which was pretty nice. I was like, all right, that sounds great. They came out, they filmed a video for me. It's probably like in 2010 or 11, and I put that video up, but it wasn't really the best video. It was good, and it was great that they filmed it for me. But that kind of got me on camera for the first time and realizing it's not that hard. And especially nowadays with the cell phones, almost anyone has a great cell phone in their pocket with a great camera that you could just film yourself and just put yourself out there. But it is tough to just. You gotta do it. I talked to a lot of business owners all the time and tell them the same thing. Like, you just have to do it. It takes a lot of time to just get over it. But once I did it, like, on my own and really filmed a video and I put it on YouTube as an ad, that first day, somebody called me and like, I saw your video on your commercial on YouTube and I was like, I Just filmed my cell phone. Like it wasn't that nice, but just got me thinking, like, it's not that hard. And I just tell everyone, just got get over it and just do it and just stop overthinking it. And just once you do it the first time, it's so much easier. Same with like being on podcasts. Like at first it was like, all right, I don't want to be a guest on a podcast and it's going to be tough. And you rather do audio versus video. But after a while you're like, wait, why am I not doing. I want everyone to do video. Because some people that don't do video, I'm like, can we get the video recording? Because I get throws up on YouTube and all these other places and.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Totally, yeah. And also video is the fast, like the fastest way to connect with another human being is to be in the same room, right? And look him in the eyes and tell them that you have empathy for what they're going through and you understand their problems and you can help them with the solution. The second fastest way to do that is through video, right? And video then, I mean, we do it on zoom. Everyone's on zoom, right? There's no difference. Like just be on zoom, but just like download the recording afterwards and then you've got some content, right? We use zoom recordings of client calls all the time as content here. So we're kind of doing video anyway because we're all working from home and we're all on zoom because of the pandemic.
And the reality is video is such a great, such a great competitive advantage because as you said, most people won't do it. I learned this from Andy Jenkins way back in the day. Like Andy Jenkins was part of this kind of Internet marketer movement of Frank Kern and Ryan Dice and Ed Dale and Andy Jenkins all had, there was always kind of these big Internet marketers and Andy was the video guy and he had this course called Video Boss, which was amazing. And he was like, look, 99.9% of people on the planet are just never going to do video because they're too self conscious. So if you do video, you just got a competitive advantage because most people, your competitors, aren't going to do it. The other thing about YouTube is like, you don't need a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube with the plaque in the background to use it as a successful marketing channel, right? Like talk a little bit about if you were encouraging people to make video and they're like, well, we only get 500 views on our videos. A lot of people would be discouraged by that. Right. How do you kind of keep. Just keep producing content even when it feels like no one's listening?
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Unfortunately. I mean, that's with social team. You just got to start off with no audience or even if you do have an audience on one platform to get them to come to another one. Not the easiest. So I have to understand that you're just going to have to build it up. Just like with SEO, it's that slow growth. I mean, social, you can get those big spikes and just go viral, but in general, if you keep building it up and everyone's probably heard it before, just be consistent, you got to stick with it. If you just stop it after a while, that might have been that next week that it just all of a sudden explodes because it's that one person that finds you or just getting hit with that right algorithm where you just show up in the feed of somebody or in the explore pages. So it's just really just trying to stick with it and just know that you're in for the long run and you can repurpose that content. And if it doesn't work on YouTube, I could throw it up on Facebook, video, on TikTok, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Twitter and just see where it works. And one platform might work better than another. But repurposing that video, maybe you have to cut it, edit it a little bit more, help them in the beginning and just keep testing to see what really resonates with your audience.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Yeah, a hundred percent.
Cool. I want to pivot the conversation a little bit. Thank you for sort of helping, helping unpack that. I've had a lot of interviews recently on the podcast and people are talking about, you know, Adam, Adam
[email protected] has been talking about the founder led startup. We had Tom Finelli from Convicio recently talk about the founder led company. In the, in the world of AI, in a generation of AI, that the founder led business is what people are. These guests that I've had are predicting is what people are going to respond to because it's a human connection. I'm all in on the founder lead thing. Like that's why I do what I do. It's why I make podcasts and produce content and put YouTube videos out and go and talk at events and all that kind of stuff. Because I believe that people want a personality, they want to follow someone who knows what they're talking about. They want to connect with another human. And in a world of AI, where everything's becoming pretty bland and pretty kind of, you know, chatgpt, ish, which is a new word that the founder led thing I think is. Is going to resonate, but it does require you to get out of your own way and just serve your audience and bring your A game to your audience. So I appreciate you helping us unpack that a little bit. So let's just pivot a little bit. We will talk about AI in a moment, but before we do that, I just want to talk about SEO in general. Like, a lot of people, including people who are kind of well known in the SEO space, are kind of saying that SEO is done right and that, you know, with the advent of. And I will talk about AI in terms of producing content and workflows and stuff, but, you know, with things like perplexity and chatgpt and, you know, is where do you see this going? Like in three years time, are we still going to be asking search engines for answers or is perplexity and the agents, the AI agents, are they going to be indexing the Internet the same way search engines are? So that it's. I've heard this new thing called, you know, ao, I think it was, which was agent optimization, like optimizing your content for agents. Right. I have a whole theory about web design and graphic user interfaces, I think are going to die because we just need to give the machine content faster without the fancy stuff getting in the way. What's your take on this? Do you think SEO is going to be around for the long haul or are we going to see a tsunami wave of companies having to pivot because of new technology?
[00:14:28] Speaker A: It's tough to really know, but I mean, as long as there's a way to search, there's ways to optimize. It doesn't matter if it's on Google or YouTube or even Amazon and. Or Yelp is big in the United States, TripAdvisor, stuff like that. So as long as you could search, I feel like there's ways to optimize. But ever since I started doing SEO back in 2007, people have always been saying SEO is dying. SEO is dead. And it's just changing and adapting and now it's just gonna. We'll have to see if what happens with chat, GPT, search, GPT and all this new stuff that's gonna come out, are people going to use it more or is it just a trend, which I feel like it's a fad. It's going to probably be around for the long term, but it's really tough to predict and Google still really runs the show, but I'm sure a lot of traffic and I could see in analytics that some websites have dropped in traffic because you're just asking questions. And if it's just like a question answer, those websites are probably going to lose a lot of traffic. E commerce, transactional. We'll have to see how that all plays out. If people still want to go to Google or Amazon, but you can still optimize for those platforms.
[00:15:31] Speaker B: What do you think websites look like in three years time if they're not just providing answers? Because in the States you have this thing in search. I was out in California last month and I noticed it again is that if I search in Google, the top section of Google now is this summary of the search results that AI is bringing together. And what I realize is that Google's business model is they don't want me clicking on the organic listings, they want me hanging around on the SERP page as long as possible. So I click an ad.
So what does that mean for websites that are just providing answers to questions? Do they need to pivot and become more of like a content or an entertainment hub in order to get traffic from Google and keep it? How do we as website owners, how do we get that traffic from Google now if just providing answers is not going to be enough?
[00:16:23] Speaker A: That part is tough because Google's been doing that for a while. Well, not the AI section, but they put featured snippets at the top where if you're asking, let's say like the age of someone famous or the birthday or the score of a sports game, right now it gives you the answer right there in the search results. And that's all pulled by using schema. So I'd recommend that everyone does incorporate schema. But Google's been doing that and I mean that hit Wikipedia really hard because anyone searching for birthdays, like you said, Google doesn't want you to click on ad. I mean, Google doesn't want you to click on organic websites and leave Google because once you left Google, you're off Google. And to get you back on Google, not the easiest. So Google wants you to click on ads and they just know that if you're just searching for those keywords, you're probably not going to be searching for an ad and hopefully keep searching or learn something more about that person, something invent they invented and then search for that product. But it is tough and it's always just trying to figure out what Google's or trying to guess at what's going to happen with Google, what are they going to do and how can I just prepare myself for that awesome traffic? But with that feature snippet they also usually list out the website, so you sometimes might get that traffic. But it does significantly diminish your traffic on a website, unfortunately.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: And so what do you think the types of websites are that are, that are kind of future proof that are going to keep getting traffic regardless of what happens?
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Most likely probably E commerce websites and then feel like the informational websites will still be there, but it's just going to change. Or probably just more social media, just video content. People just want to keep scrolling and looking and that's that endless stream of content and finding and discovering new things. I feel like social is going to just keep having a stronghold and getting people sucked into their algorithms and holding on to people and not letting you go.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: Yeah. YouTube have said recently that they think that YouTube is the future of television and that the future of television is YouTube. YouTube's the number one streaming platform on large screen devices now around the world. So it's overTaken Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime. YouTube's the number one streaming platform. YouTube don't create any content, right? YouTube, they don't pay artists, they don't pay actors, they don't pay studios, they don't pay. I mean sure they produce a little bit of content, but it's not like, you know, Apple or Amazon or Netflix are investing millions of dollars in producing content and YouTube aren't. So they're, they stand to be potentially more profitable. And it's free. You can watch YouTube for free. You don't have to subscribe. I do because I don't want the ads. What does that mean for, I mean my concern is that, you know, a local Business1 and YouTube have said what they want is they want binge worthy content on YouTube. Right. So how does, I mean, doesn't this just make it harder for a local business? I'm thinking about, you know, like a local restaurant, right. I mean think about Gary Vee back in the day. He had wine TV or whatever it was, right? Where we just sit there and review the wines that were in, you know, he rescued his family's wine shop basically by just kind of vlogging about wine. I don't think you could do that these days because the level of content, the production quality of content on YouTube is so good, it's so competitive, you know, I mean I spent a hundred thousand dollars on a content studio here to try and which is ridiculous. I didn't need to do that. But I'm trying to up the game and raise the bar and kind of look better and sound better and produce high quality content. Max and I are always talking about what we can do in terms of our video content and make it more interesting so that it's not just someone looking down the barrel of a camera. And we. We're a small business, but we're not a tiny business. Right. I just think it. How does a small business compete in this space from not just from a video point of view, but just from a producing content that attracts people to their website. Let's just pretend they've got all the technical stuff around SEO, right? How do they compete to make their content compelling enough to get that traffic from Google and keep it.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it is tough. It is very saturated a lot of the industries and markets and just more competition means it's tougher to do and lower barrier to entry. With building a website on Wix or WordPress or Squarespace it's pretty easy nowadays anyone could get one up there. Or with social media putting content or video content just filming yourself with your phone. Of course you want to try to make it a little bit better. It's. I'm always trying to improve on my back and my space as well because realized over the years you want to try to have a nice studio, good microphone, good quality content because does help make a difference and make it look much more better and sound better. So it's. But having that medium or just that balance. Like if you can't get all that stuff just start off with your phone and just start off with a little gimbal and just record yourself and just get it out there. But just try to look at what other people are doing and try to look at what got or what gets people more views, more success, more higher rankings, more trust from whatever platform you're looking on kind of just pulling stuff away from what other people are doing. What type of content? Like if it's written articles, like how much are they writing? If it's video, how long are these videos? Where are the thumbnails? Like how do they try to hook people and get people interested? Because you gotta really hook people on your website, on your content, your social media, everything needs to hook people really fast because attention spans are just so short nowadays.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: A hundred percent. And is video. I mean I wanna spend the whole episode here. But video for me is such a great form of content because if you create a video, even if it's a Super short video about, like, you know, the top questions that someone asked. Like, it was a guy here in Melbourne, he did a really good job. He's a swimming pool company, right? He says, look, the number one question I get asked is, how much is a swimming pool? And the really sucky answer is, it depends. And here's the reason it depends. And he just went through like all the different variables as to why I can't give you a quote until I come out to your property or you at least send me some photos of what you want. Tell me if you want in ground, above ground, you know, what sort of materials, you know, what do we do? Like, is it a deck? Is it like fiberglass around the end? Like, you know, I want to, I need to understand all the variables so I can give you an accurate price because I don't, you know, and he made this great video and it. He kind of owned that search term for a long time. And then he would go out to people's houses and he would open the door and the, and the couples and the families. He'd be like, oh my God, it's Paul from whatever the spa company was or the pool company. Oh, man. We feel like you're a celebrity because we've been watching all your videos, right? And if you make a video, you've then got the transcript, especially with AI these days, you've got the transcript, you've got a bunch of shorts that you can make, you've got a blog post, you've got a whole bunch of social media posts that you can use from that one video. You've got an audio that you can publish as an audiogram, right? It's one video gives you a lot of different pieces of content. And then embedding that video on the blog post also then brings you up in the video results in Google. So for me, it feels like the home run. Like if you're going to make content, make video to start with, because it just gives you all of the other pieces of content that you need. How much time, lam. This is a, this is where I'm going with the question. How much time do you think you should spend researching search terms on YouTube versus search on Google? Because they're different beasts, right? Like, we've used a couple of the tools, Tubebuddy and Vidiq and stuff to kind of figure out what to do on YouTube? Do you like. I guess my question is, do you figure out what people are searching for on Google or do you figure out what people are searching for on YouTube? To kind of drive your content strategy.
[00:23:48] Speaker A: I would do both because Google owns YouTube and Google will show video in the search results. And when Google shows search result or videos in the Google search, they really want to push YouTube because Google doesn't want to promote Facebook or Vimeo or TikTok. They'll show it occasionally. But again really Google wants to make money. If you're searching on Google and you don't click on an ad, but there's a video and you click on that video and it's a YouTube video, the first thing that appears anytime you watch a video on YouTube, always an advertisement. So YouTube is making money, which is really Google making money. And they're just going to keep pushing that as much as they can. But I would just try to allocate your time with making videos and content creation and or I mean allocate your time researching those keywords equally and just trying to see does Google for the keyword I want to rank for, does Google show a video in the search results? If so, then I would try to look at those keywords, do keyword research on Google, try to see which keywords trigger videos. But also like where is the video? If it's at the very bottom of the Google search results, maybe not the best. And Google like moves it around and so it's tough to really know how they're going to do it. But with YouTube you definitely want to do a little different keyword research. It's going to be similar, but it's a little different. The intent behind searches or the way people search on YouTube is slightly different. And there are tools like you mentioned, bit IQ and TubeBuddy and other tools that will help you do keyword research to figure out which keywords are the best. Because that is one of the most important things that a lot of people do skip over. And it doesn't take that long to do keyword research. It only takes a few minutes. If you're just quickly just want to check like a singular or plural or synonymous. I mean it does take a little bit longer if you're really diving deep into it. But it is well worth the time and effort because you can get significantly more traffic just by spending that little bit of time researching keywords, your competitors keywords and just trying to figure out what the best is for your content.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: I got to ask because I know that the audience are going to be listening to this and they're going to be screaming at the in their headphones asking the question what is your favorite tool for doing keyword Research. There are so many tools and I've used them all. What's your favorite for doing keyword research for clients and kind of managing SEO?
[00:26:00] Speaker A: Yeah, there are too many tools. I like Google Keyword Planner from Google. It's a free one and that one's from Google because, I mean, you just gotta take everything with a grain of salt always. There's those numbers don't always look good even on like ahrefs. I like that one as a paid tool, but it's really just kind of picking one paid tool and just sticking with it unless you want to buy a bunch and. But you're always going to get different numbers and it just gets confusing and sometimes it's best not to even think about it because there are a lot of 00 search keywords. Just because there are new searches that no one's ever searched or Google hasn't really seen yet. Because the way people search, especially with mobile and voice to search, it's really changing everything. People are just speaking these weird phrases and long phrases and it's just changing the way that, yeah, everything is really optimized more towards that human language. It's long, really long sentences, questions people would be asking.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think I heard Ahrefs there might be your kind of preferred paid tool, but also the Google Keyword Planner, which is a free tool that comes from Google. Talk to me about backlinks because, you know, Matt Cutts was kind of big on this back in the day, right? It's like, well, you can't buy backlinks, right?
We will penalize you if you buy backlinks. Listen, everybody buys backlinks, right? Everybody knows it. Everybody does it. You can't avoid it because your competitors are doing it. What for those, the uninitiated listening to this, what is a backlink? Why aren't you allowed to buy them? Why should you buy them? When should you not buy them? How valuable are backlinks? And are they really such an important part of an SEO strategy?
[00:27:34] Speaker A: Backlinks are clickable links from another website that points to yours. So let's say you're reading an article on entrepreneur.com in there. It says Brandon Leavewood. So you click on it. It goes to my website. I'd be getting a backlink from entrepreneur.com. the more websites that have clickable links that point to your website, the more popular Google thinks you are, the more trust they're going to give to you and ultimately the higher they're going to rank you. Because back in the early 90s Google came around and said we're not just ranking websites based off keywords because I could build a website and I could put keywords all over it. And that doesn't necessarily mean I am who I say I am, because people lie and manipulate the search results all the time. So Google said, we don't trust your keywords, but rather we want to see other websites talking about you. And the more websites that talk about you, the higher there they would rank you. That's how it used to be. But then people started spamming and buying low quality backlinks or building low quality backlinks. And Google said it's not the number of backlinks anymore, it's actually the number of quality backlinks. And to Google, the quality backlink means it needs to come from a site that's related to what you're doing and has some trust and authority. Those are the two really main things that when you build backlinks, don't just build backlinks to build them. But like, is this a website that's related to what I'm doing and is going to offer value? Because if you build the wrong type of backlinks, it'll actually do more harm and instead of raking you higher, you're going to drop down, which we don't want that to happen to anybody.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: And so this, you know, back in the, in the days of the Wild west, and I know this still happens, is there are these things called blog farms, which you can set up a WordPress multisite and you can spin up, you know, a thousand blogs that are completely irrelevant and you know, use AI to write these articles that don't actually mean anything and you just, they're optimized for keywords and then you just have a word in that article that points back to your website with the right keyword and that's building a backlink.
I know a lot of people that still use these and still claim that they. I mean, I just can't imagine. I mean, I think my guess, man, maybe Google doesn't care. Maybe Google only cares about paid advertisers. But my guess is that Google's smart enough to go, that website is kind of useless. And so that backlink doesn't count if we are buying backlinks. And I'm not here saying that we should buy backlinks because it's against Google's terms, even though everyone does it. I mean, because earning backlinks is freaking hard work and takes a long time. Right? So do you, what's your what's your take on the whole buying backlinks thing?
[00:30:12] Speaker A: Man, backlinks are tough. And almost every backlink you are paying in some way because, well, in America, I don't know, the chamber of commerce is really big for local businesses. So you join a chamber of commerce and you'll get a backlink in your local area, your city. It's a great backlink, but you have to pay for it. And a lot of backlinks, you can't really just ask someone for a backlink. They're just going to be like, why am I going to give you this backlink? So you have to offer something of value, your time, content, being a guest on podcast, or just trying to figure out like, like looking at your competitors backlinks, using tools like Ahrefs or Moz or Semrush to try to figure out who, who's linking out to my competitor and reaching out to those sites to see if they would potentially link out to you. A lot of them will get back to you and say, pay me. In the past, they would usually just write about you if you gave them a good enough reason. But now a lot of them know that you're doing it for SEO. And the value of a website is really arbitrary. Nobody really knows that. People just could say, hey, pay me this amount. And who knows really what that website's about or is worth? I get messages all the time for people saying like, I write for Forbes and Entrepreneur and all these websites. Pay me $2,000 and I'll get you on these websites. And I mean, it does work. You get on these big websites, but is it worth the money? You're really paying like other writers that just write for these websites? These websites don't know that people are paying for them. I mean, they kind of know that happens, but they try to stop it. But in general, yeah, if Google catches you doing that though, they're not going to be happy about it. But how can Google really catch you unless your competitors tell on you? Or if you just buy a bunch of backlinks all at once and you just have this huge spike in backlinks.
[00:31:52] Speaker B: Yeah, and also Forbes, I mean, this is, you know, just to debunk this for people. Right? You can pay like what, I don't know what it is these days, two or three thousand dollars a year or whatever to be on the Forbes council. Right. Like, and so I was like, full transparency. I was approached by Forbes to be on their agency council to. They have different councils. They have like a coaches council. They have an entrepreneur's council, a business owner's council, agency council. I was approached to be on their council for whatever it was. Hang out with all these other council members in a private Slack channel throughout the year and network. But really the value is you get to write, you get to post on Forbes. So you basically get to publish articles on Forbes. So you can then put on your website as seen in Forbes. Right. And you can then just write whatever you want and build your own backlinks on Forbes. And it cost you, whatever it is, three grand a year or whatever. The pro. I can't remember how much it is these days.
[00:32:46] Speaker A: Right.
[00:32:46] Speaker B: It's a pay to play model. And so whenever I go to someone's website and I say, as seen on, you know, Forbes and Entrepreneur magazine and all that, I just see straight through it now. It's just like, it's. I actually think it's quite funny and that people still think that that's, you know, that legitimately I must be successful because I was featured on Forbes. It's like, well, whatever, dude. You just paid a couple of grand to be on the council or whatever.
I'm not sure if that's. I hope that's not on your website. I don't mean to offend anyone here, but, you know, I'm just saying it's a pay to play model. It is what it is, right? Like it's. You have to pay to be on these platforms and you know, no one's going to do it for free because they've got the eyeballs and you want the eyeballs and so you got to pay to play. Right.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Unfortunately, yeah. No, but yeah, anytime I see all that stuff on a website, I just. Same thing. Ever since I've been doing SEO, I just realized a lot of that stuff is just manipulated and pay to Play. And just because it ranks on that first page of Google doesn't mean it's the best product or service or whatever it is. That's ranking. It's just they did better marketing and a lot of it is just game in the system and just trying to. Yeah. Just gotta take everything with a grain of salt. Whatever you see online.
[00:33:56] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Now, one thing you do really well on your website, that I always. I think this trumps everything in terms of content. One thing you do really well is social proof. I'm looking at your services page right now and you know, you talk about SEO and then you've got, you know, a little bit about what it is and you've got a calendar booking and then You've just got all these reviews and some of these reviews are from a recent webinar that you ran or an intro class or something. And you've just got like a lot of five star reviews from people with their picture and their name. And it's like it goes back to, you know, like seven years ago, right up to four days ago. Right. Or 16 days ago, right now, social proof for me is a. I mean, does Google pay attention to this? Because for me, it's a social cue. It's like all these people have said that. So there's this great video, by the way, that I think everyone should watch. If you haven't watched it, go just search for Derek Sivers from CD Baby. He's the guy that started CD Baby and sold it for $22 million and then famously put all that money into a trust fund for music education programs after he dies. And then he moved to Singapore, I think, and gave away everything he owns and kind of lived out in a backpack. Fascinating, dude. I've had him on the podcast a long, long, long, long, long, long time ago. Another podcast. But anyway, he. He made this video called. And it was, it was actually a TED Talk and it's called how to Start a Movement. Go and watch the video where Derek Sivers explains how to start a movement. And it's fantastic because essentially what happens is this guy gets up at a festival. This guy gets up on the hill. Everyone's laying down on the hill, chilling out. This guy gets up with no shirt on and starts dancing to the band. And he's the only guy to do it right. In fact, I'm going to put a link under the show notes for this video. What happens is the second guy gets up and starts dancing with him. And then before you know it, and it takes a while for the second guy to get up. And then before you know it, the whole, like, eventually everyone gets up and starts dancing. And then the people who aren't dancing are the ones that look silly. They look like they're left out. Not the guy who started, right? And so the point is how to start a movement. It takes two, right? It's a fantastic observation. And for me, testimonials and social proof are this. It's like, well, I said this, but here's someone who's also saying it, which means I must be like, I mean, I can't pay people to. I mean, I could, but do you know how much work is involved in paying people to write testimonials? Like, who's got time and money to do that. So first of all, does Google take reviews like this into account? And when did you proactively start collecting testimonials and reviews and putting them on your site?
[00:36:42] Speaker A: No, these are all reviews that I get people to write on Yelp and Google Maps. So Yelp is really big in the States and then Google Maps. Because I know those two areas are going to get me more business. So anytime. Well, in the past, I'd reach out to like people when I taught classes and just follow up with old clients to see if they would write a review because the reviews are more for people, like you said, social proof. Because people want to make sure are you real trustworthy? And they could see I have reviews. I think going Back to like 2010 is when I think of my first start getting reviews or realizing that they're probably important. I always thought it was a number of reviews is going to rank you higher, which it's not really necessarily the case because you could search any keyword near. Like you could search dentist near me in Melbourne. And you'll see number one could have five reviews. Number two could have 20 reviews. Number three could have 200 reviews. It's not really the number of reviews. There's a lot of other variables that go in it. But one really important thing is keywords in the reviews will push you up to the top. So somebody just said, like, group brand was great, super knowledgeable, very friendly, loved working with them, that's good. But if someone says like, I live in Los Angeles. I was looking for an SEO company. I found Brandon and he helped me rank my business. So you're putting all these, like, keywords in there. That moves you up much, much faster. And. But you want to have both. You want to get real reviews that show that people have, that people trust you. And then you also, if you know someone's going to write a review, like, if someone's like, oh, I love working with you, I'm going to write a review. Like, can you just make sure you list like, the service I provided or the product I sold you or whatever it is. But that in there is going to help a lot.
[00:38:25] Speaker B: That's super interesting. I didn't know that.
And so we're definitely going to do something about that.
So that's very helpful indeed.
And so it's not necessarily the number of reviews. It's that the number of reviews is helpful, but it's also the keywords in the reviews.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: Yeah, that's one part of it. With Google Business Profile getting ranked on Google Maps. There's lots of other variables, but reviews with keywords are much more helpful than just a general five star review. But also you have to get your, like it's called Map name, address and phone number listed on all these other third party sites. Kind of like you're building backlinks to your Google business profile and getting you up on like Apple Maps and Bing Maps and Yellow Pages and Map Quest and all these other maps Chamber of Commerce. The more websites that you're listed on with your name, address and phone number, the more trust Google's gonna give to that map listing and hopefully move you up little by little.
[00:39:24] Speaker B: Huh? Super interesting. There you go. There's a, There's a great big tip that I wasn't even aware of. Hope that's helpful for the audience. Now let's just pivot a little bit and talk about AI. Two questions here, really. One is, what are you using AI wise to help your workflow? And the second question is, what's the one thing that people just shouldn't do? Because I know everyone's out there trying to use AI. I was talking to a parent at the whose kids go to our school the other day and she said, oh, you know, she's a writer. She goes, oh, well, my career is over because of AI. And I was like, oh no please. Like that's not the case. You just have to pivot and you have to upskill. So how are you using AI and what should people not do with AI that you think is the biggest mistake people are making?
[00:40:06] Speaker A: I mean, the biggest mistake is just copying AI verbatim and just saying like, write me a blog post about jackets or about whatever it is that you're promoting or trying to write about. And if you do that, it AI does those AI hallucinations where if it doesn't know the answer, it makes it up. And if you just copy verbatim, that's not going to be good. But Google actually said last year, we don't care who writes the content anymore. If humans or AI write it, we just can't tell the difference. It just has to be accurate. So that means if you just copy it verbatim, that's not good. But if you go in and double, triple check it and make sure it's proper, that's okay. But see, I was AI, I try not to use it for content. But almost all the writers, because I have a team of writers that I just pull as I need content. With SEO, it's a lot of content marketing. Over half of them are Using AI, There's a few that aren't but it's so tough and anytime I try to find new writers, everyone's just using AI and it just and but Google said they don't care anymore. So now it's like using AI to come up like blog post topics or an outline is great but I try not to have it write all the content. Trying to hold off as much as I can but inevitably it's going to be so good that it is going to replace writers, copywriters. Content is, I mean we'll have to see but it's just, it's getting so good, it's learning so fast. It's just not a hundred percent accurate.
[00:41:30] Speaker B: Wow, I didn't realize that Google had said that it doesn't matter whether AI write it, they just want it to be accurate. I was not aware of that. That's super interesting.
So how are you using AI in your workflow?
[00:41:44] Speaker A: So yeah, using it with content. So trying to just help out with like writing content or coming up blog post topics, writing content, writing or outlines. Trying to have it. Well sometimes like a lot of my clients like we need to write content for your website. So if you're a dentist and you do 10 different things like you're a dentist and you do teeth cleaning and root canals, we need to create all these pages about all the different services and we need to add more text to every single page, a couple hundred words if not more. And a lot of times there's like I don't want to write this content and I have to use my writers, pay my writers but able to find a really create a really good chat GPT prompt. It's like probably two pages of just a really, really long prompt. But it puts out pretty good service content for services based businesses. I still give it to them and make sure they read it. The owner of the business or whoever's going to put up just to double check because it's not always accurate. And almost every single time I do show them the content, they love it but they have to go in and make some tweaks and changes. But once we put it up there then Google seems to like it as well. You know, it's all about making sure it's beneficial to the reader. It is crazy. But Google said, I mean these AI checkers as well say we can't tell the difference between AI and human content. I think the AI checkers from ChatGPT made one and it was saying the bible is written by AI and it was saying that Everything else, like, can't tell the difference anymore. So it's just content's gone so good from ChatGPT, it's a little scary.
[00:43:14] Speaker B: Wow.
Are you using custom GPTs at all?
[00:43:19] Speaker A: I'm doing that for also to try to help build backlinks and just like as another way to get your name out there. But I just write really long prompts and just try to look at what Google's looking at or wants. But also Google has AI, which is Bard or Gemini. They changed names recently, but that one is pretty nice. If you try having it do stuff for you, it gives you a lot of insights to like what they're looking for. If you say like, write me an SEO title tag, which I do that. But it comes out so bad on Chat GPT, even on Google it was Gemini. It doesn't really work that well to have it write like the coding and doing keyword research. But it's just interesting because Google and Google's AI tell you like, this is what we're looking for. Here's like five different variations, here's some with like different intents. And it's gonna give you some insights into their algorithm. So try to like piece together whatever you can that Google's also the leaks that happened last year or pretty clear this year with Google's algorithm trying to like figure out what they're looking for with content and just trying to make sure the content reads as natural as possible, but hits on all the variations of synonyms and plurals and long tail variations of those keywords to just keep it as natural as possible. Google says we're fine with it, which is pretty nice. Back in the early days when I first started doing SEO, there was tools that would do this content spinners and writers that would write content that were really low quality. Google hated that stuff. Now it's actually the opposite. And Google's like, we don't really care anymore. Just make it beneficial.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: Wow.
And pay us money and we'll rank it higher.
So I'm. We have this. In fact, it's on the bookcase here behind me. I have a Siri speaker Apple home that I bought a long time ago and my son is kind of obsessed with talking to Siri. And you know, although Siri is still pretty useless as far as I'm concerned. I haven't got Apple AI yet, but I was even got some friends that have got Apple AI and they're like, yep, it's still useless. It just can't even like, you know, you know, there's A message the other day someone said, text my wife and tell her I love her. And Siri wrote a message saying something like, I'm telling you that he loves you or something. And that's clearly not what I wanted. Anyway, there's a great episode of what's the Larry David show? What's it, what's the Larry David show?
[00:45:44] Speaker A: Enthusiasm.
[00:45:45] Speaker B: Yes. It's a great episode of curb your enthusiasm where he gets in the car and starts talking to Siri and he ends up just abusing the heck out of Siri because she's so useless. Anyway, the reason I don't have a Google speaker or an Amazon Alexa is because. And the reason I'm not going to go down the road of the Ray Ban meta glasses, which I think are super interesting, the Ray Ban smart glasses is because I do not want to talk to Zuckerberg or Google or Amazon because I don't want them to sell my conversations to advertisers. So Apple is my choice at the moment because at the moment they're not selling your data to advertisers, or at least if they are, we don't know about it. Whereas clearly Google and Meta and Amazon are. So I'm waiting for the more smart wearables to come out of Apple and I think that's going to be super interesting. One thing I'm also really curious about from an SEO point of view, and this is something I've been pondering a lot lately, is spatial computing is something that excites me a lot, is the ability to wear some smart glasses and talk to the computer or use a tiny little keyboard but have no screen in front of me and just have a hologram of the screen in front of my glasses. I know Apple glasses. There are some, there's, in fact there's over a million apps that are already optimized and built for Apple glasses, whatever they're called.
This is, this is interesting to me because how do we, from a, just from a, like a display ads point of view, right? How does the Google Ads and the Facebook ads game change over the next three to five years as we break away from looking at screens and we get into spatial computing? Like what, how are we going to navigate that?
[00:47:20] Speaker A: Yeah, they are by thinking hard and long about what can we do to get little activations or get brand, little dropping brands in there, here and there and just, just like the movies do. But yeah, it's gonna be interesting with display because yeah, I mean, people don't wanna see banner ads, people don't wanna see ads at all, but they are there everywhere you look. We just kind of get immune to them and just skip them over. You see them on like Facebook on the right hand, if you're on desktop and those right hand sidebar ads, nobody looks at them, but they're just there. And potentially we'll just have to see what's, how they're going to manipulate them, but they're going to figure out a way to at least as hard as they can to hold onto those ads somehow to get people to keep watching them or YouTube ads or.
[00:48:07] Speaker B: You know, I really, I really think, I really think the fu. I really think there's a big place in the future of digital marketing for the kind of the influencer brand attachment thing where, you know, YouTube are going all in on television. They're saying upload your videos in 4K, upload your thumbnails, high res, you know, 1920 by 1080. We're making that pivot now. We're uploading higher quality content because we're optimizing our YouTube channel for the big screen television. They're saying upload binge worthy content while we're still trying to figure out how to do that as a small business without millions of dollars in partnership and sponsorship dollars.
But I think because their approach is, you know, the more that AI does things for us and frees up our time, the more we want to kick back. It's their word, it's the more we want to kick back on the couch and, and watch television. And people are watching YouTube more than any other television. So the kind of influencer like you think about Joe Rogan, right? Like people are going to sit down. I mean, I'll sit down and watch a two and a half hour episode of the Joe Rogan show. If he's interviewing an interesting guest is because like it's interesting, right? It's, it's entertainment. And he's funded by Spotify, but if he wasn't, if he wasn't funded by Spotify, he would be funded by brands who sponsor him. And the sponsorship is part of the show, right?
I think there's a big part of that because in the future I think people are going to follow more people online as the world becomes more isolated and more disconnected and we start wearing smart glasses and that's the thing between us and the person in front of us. It's not a smartphone anymore. I mean these things are done as far as I'm concerned. It's not a smartphone, it's not a big screen, it's actually smart glasses with a hologram between us and the person on the train. Right. And so you'll be following your influencer in your hologram and your influencer will be saying hey, go buy these new watches because they're endorsing me and here's why. Or go use this new software. I mean the Rand fishkins of the world, that's the founder led startup or the influencer that's sponsored by brand.
I think this is a big part of anyway, I hope so because that's where I'm going. So I think display ads and kind of banner ads and I mean you know, even, even in, even pre roll ads in YouTube videos I think are thing of the, I mean imagine having your smart glasses on and watching YouTube video, have to sit there for 30 seconds. I mean you're gonna very quickly you're gonna find a button to get rid of that or pay five bucks a month to get rid of to get rid of those ads. So this is one of the problems with advertising is it's so bad people will pay money to get rid of it. Right. And I think advertisers, whether whether you're optimizing your content for SEO or whether you're running Google Ads, you're still advertising your product or your service to your audience. And I think advertisers need to get smarter and they need to produce ads that people will want to pay to watch, not pay to get rid of. And that's a challenge for all of us, particularly in the world of AI where most content is just going to get blander and more beige because we're using AI to generate it. So I think we're safe in our jobs because you know, we're helping clients navigate this world and coming up with strategies and helping them figure out what to do next. What's the number one thing you do for a new client that walks in the door? What's the quick win that you help get them in the sort of the first 30 to 60 days of working with them?
[00:51:26] Speaker A: I mean every website's a little different. So some are brand new websites that I get that don't have any SEO. Brand new website, no backlinks, no trust. So we start building that trust right away. But I've also had some clients that were, had one client that has a 25 year old website with the word Amazon in it. I didn't even know how they could get Amazon, but they existed before Amazon.com existed and they had a really old website, really a lot of backlinks. A lot of good domain authority, trust, age. But the website was just built in such a poor way, Google could not read it. And we realized we just need to go in and change the coding and make it easier for Google to read it. And doing that, they just shot up the rankings pretty much instantaneously in like the first month. Just shot to the top three positions for almost every keyword because they just had such an old website. But that's kind of the rarity. Usually it's the opposite where we get a more newer or newish website and we all look at it. Forgot how the website structured the hierarchy. I forgot how we want to, what new pages we want to build out, what content we want to put on these pages. And then also that backlinks in conjunction because we know just putting content on the website is great, but without those backlinks, it's, it's really, really tough to rank on Google. I don't think I've really ever seen a website without backlinks ranking on Google for competitive keywords. And so it's just trying to build that trust up as soon as possible because SEO really is the long term play and the sooner we build some trust, the faster you're going to get Google to move you up a little bit and get you higher and higher up there in the search results.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: Yep. Love it. Love it. Hey, Brandon Liebowitz. I'm conscious of everyone's time. This is called the Agency Hour and we are almost at the hour. Thank you so much for joining us on the Agency Hour podcast. How can people reach out and say thank you for this and get in touch and follow more about what you're doing.
[00:53:20] Speaker A: Well, anyone that wants to learn more, I create a special gift if they go to my website at seooptimizers.com forward/gift. That's S E O O P T I M I z e r s.com forward/gift. And they can find my contact information there as well and other classes I've done over the years. They could see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about and it's all up there for free.
[00:53:46] Speaker B: Love it. Love it. And this is a, this is a landing page you've put together, especially for people who listen to a podcast or a webinar that you're a guest on. So love the strategy here.
This is optimized content for people who are in a particular journey. So well done. Love the attention to detail there. Thank you so much for joining us on the Agency Hour podcast. And I look forward to continuing the conversation and seeing how AI completely disrupts everything we know over the next three to five years. It's a great time to be alive.
[00:54:15] Speaker A: No? Thank you for having me on. It's an interesting time. We'll see what happens.
[00:54:19] Speaker B: Thanks, Brandon. Bye for now.
[00:54:20] Speaker A: Thanks.
[00:54:22] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour podcast, and a massive thanks to Brandon for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Brandon and get more sales and leads using SEO, check out the links in the description of this episode. All right, folks, remember to subscribe, and please share this with anyone you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dean, and remember, sloths can hold their breath for longer than dolphins.
