Ep 224: The Simple SEO Fixes That Most Entrepreneurs Ignore with SEO Expert Brandon Leibowitz

“I tell people: Google’s a machine, not a person. You have to feed it the right signals.” – SEO Expert, Brandon Leibowitz 

In this episode of the Online Business Launchpad podcast, Trudy sits down with SEO expert Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers, who’s spent the last 15+ years helping small and medium businesses turn clicks into conversions. With his no-fluff approach to SEO, Brandon demystifies what it really takes to get your website found online, and why most entrepreneurs are spinning their wheels with outdated tactics.

Brandon’s journey started with a job board internship, evolved into a side hustle, and eventually became a thriving agency. He shares practical, real-world strategies that don’t require a PhD in Google wizardry, just a little consistency, common sense, and a willingness to test and tweak.

We Also Talked About:

• Why SEO isn’t about “tricking” Google—it’s about talking its language
  
• The biggest mistakes small businesses make with their websites
  
• How backlinks really work—and how not to get burned
  
• Why posting on social media is not a substitute for good SEO
  
• The long game of content marketing (and why most people give up too soon)
  
• What to look for (and avoid) when hiring an SEO consultant
  
• How Brandon scaled his business without going the agency route

   

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• SEO Optimizers – Brandon’s website
• Ubersuggest – for keyword research
  
• Google Search Console – for tracking how Google sees your site
• MozBar – for checking on-site SEO and backlinks

👉  Want regular access to tips, techniques, and advice from experts about growing your business?  My newsletter is for business owners who miss having weekends … and sanity.  If that’s you, sign up here.

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 224:The Simple SEO Fixes That Most Entrepreneurs Ignore with Brandon Leibowitz

In this episode, we dig into the nitty gritty of SEO search engine optimization and how even small tweaks can make a huge difference in traffic and sales. Because if you think SEO doesn’t matter in this day of ai, it actually still does. So Brandon breaks down the biggest mistakes that small business owners make with SEO shares, insider tips on getting ranked and reveals which strategies actually move the needle in 2025’s ever changing digital landscape. Now, Brandon isn’t just an SEO [00:01:00] expert, he’s the founder of SEO Optimizers, a digital marketing agency that’s been helping clients dominate search rankings since 2007. And since 2007, he’s seen it all and he brings a down to earth approach to a topic that often feels overwhelming, and he has a gift for making complex strategies, easy to understand, and more importantly, easy to apply.

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m your host, Trudy Rankin, and this podcast is for business owners like you who want to hear stories, tips, and advice from online entrepreneurs who have overcome problems and challenges to get to success, because if they’ve done it, so can you.

My mission is simple. I want to help you solve the challenges that you face as an online business owner so that you can have more time and money for yourself and your family. And more choices in how you live your life. 

[00:02:00] 

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. Today I have got with me Brandon Leibowitz. And he’s going to be talking about something that I personally have an interest in because if you’ve been listening for a while, you know that I’ve got a few content sites and Google’s sort of helpful content update tipped everything on its head a little bit.

It didn’t affect my sites so much. Really, but I’ve seen what it’s done to other people’s sites, and since then, there’s been a lot of discussion about that, and AI, and what’s happening with SEO, and there’s a lot of people going, hang on, wait a minute, our old model doesn’t look like it’s going to work in the future, what should we be doing?

And when I spotted Brandon. So I met him on Podmatch, which I’ve talked about before. He actually has a digital agency that focuses on SEO and he’s been doing it since 2007. They’ve been doing it for a while and he knows what he’s talking about. So [00:03:00] I asked him if he’d come on the podcast and he said yes.

And so I’m really glad to have him here today. So Brandon, thank you so much for being on the podcast. 

Brandon Leibowitz: Yeah, thank you for having me on today. 

Trudy Rankin: Okay let’s go ahead and start by, maybe we can start back in 2007 or maybe just a little bit before. Tell us a little bit about yourself. And how you got into the whole world of SEO.

Brandon Leibowitz: I just fell into this world of SEO and digital marketing, wasn’t planning on it, didn’t really know much about it. I got my degree in business marketing. And after I graduated from school, I, one of the first jobs I got offered was helping a company out with their digital marketing. I told them I wasn’t too familiar with it.

They said, don’t worry, we’re new to this as well. And we’ll take you to workshops and classes and learn alongside with you. And after going to a few of those workshops. Everyone just kept talking about how they have all these websites and they do drop shipping and affiliate marketing and all these things and it got me thinking I could work full time at this company and I could also do my own [00:04:00] thing as long as I’m not doing or competing against them.

So I started doing that and just built that up over the years to eventually where I was able to quit my job and been doing this ever since. 

Trudy Rankin: So do you work with big organizations or small businesses or solopreneurs, coaches, who do you work with? 

Brandon Leibowitz: Usually kind of everything in between, but usually it’s like small, medium sized businesses or fortune 100 companies in the past, but usually it’s more like local and e commerce type of websites that I’m helping.

Trudy Rankin: Okay, no, that’s interesting. It’s worth clarifying because obviously I’m in Australia, you are in the US, I’m assuming, is that correct? 

Brandon Leibowitz: Yeah. 

Trudy Rankin: Yes. And we define size a little bit differently between the two countries. So when you say small businesses give us a little bit of a range about what that might look like in terms of numbers of people maybe working for them.

Brandon Leibowitz: Oh yeah. I’d say like small be like one to five or one to 10. 

Trudy Rankin: Okay. So it’s almost the same as here. 

Brandon Leibowitz: But I guess, yeah, everyone just has [00:05:00] different perspectives, but yeah, I usually think small is nothing too crazy, medium would be like 10 to maybe 50 or 100, and then up from there. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, okay, no, that’s fine.

That’s good, because for a lot of small businesses, there’s always wearing of many hats. I’ve heard people say SEO is easy, and on the face of it, some of it’s easy, and there’s a lot of it that’s not. So if you’re somebody who’s played with SEO for the listeners, if you’ve played with SEO in the past, you’ll know that it’s not always as straightforward as it seems.

So you’ve been working with clients for a long time, but how long has it been since you were able to go, yep, got there, I can actually run this myself?

Brandon Leibowitz: When I first graduated and got my first job, I was happy to have that full time job and just picking up a couple clients here or there, so just making some extra money on the side. Did that for a while. I wasn’t too focused on doing my own thing until probably maybe seven or eight years into it. I realized maybe I should just try to push this a little bit more.

When I was working at like an [00:06:00] advertising agency as a director of SEO, I just saw the, how high you can move up these agencies and corporate life and just thought. Maybe I should just try it, go all in and see what happens. And after probably a year and a half of doing that, I was able to build it up to where I was able to quit my job and did that about six, seven years ago ish.

Trudy Rankin: Okay. So one quick question before we get into the subject of SEO itself. What’s the biggest challenge that you faced moving from a sort of a corporate employee into running your own business, your own digital agency? Biggest challenge. 

Brandon Leibowitz: Just having your own business and hiring and finding good people is always tough, but just doing everything is always tough at first.

And then just realizing, yeah, delegate. And that’s always tough too. Just letting go of things that we can focus on the more important things. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s for sure. Delegating, especially if you feel like you need to. Manage all the quality control and stuff that can be really tricky.[00:07:00] 

Okay, so let’s get into just the topics that I think our listeners will be interested in. And I’ll just turn the floor over to you. Let’s just start by talking, if you could talk a little bit please about some of the digital marketing trends that you are seeing. Over the last few months, year or so, and what you might be happening in the future.

Brandon Leibowitz: I would say AI is probably the one that everyone’s talking about and can’t escape that one. And that one is going to change a lot of what’s going on in the future. I’m not really sure how it’s going to impact people or the way people search, if they’re going to start using ChatGPT or search GPTs coming out to compete with Google. We’re going to have to just see what happens if people do use it more or if people just use it for a while and just say it’s almost the same as Google, maybe I’ll just stick with Google. Google’s already putting AI in the search results, but yeah, that one is just that big mystery of what’s going to happen with AI and how’s it going to impact search, but also people’s jobs, writers, [00:08:00] content creators, website.

Coders, Builders, Programmers. It’s going to change a lot of things in the future.

Trudy Rankin: This is assuming that you’ve sat down and thought about it, and possibly you haven’t, because life is busy. But have you thought about how AI might impact on your agency and what you might do to basically get on top of the wave instead of drowning under it?

Brandon Leibowitz: I’m trying to figure out maybe like making a tool to have AI help write content for blogs, but AI is not really accurate right now. So a lot of stuff that AI puts out isn’t really the best. It’s a good tool, but it’s not there yet. So in a few years, that’s when I’d be a little bit more worried for it.

But right now. Like for content, for articles, for anything that you ask it to do, it doesn’t really always get the answer right. And it will make the answer up if it doesn’t know it. And it won’t tell you that. It’s called like AI hallucinations. It’s really [00:09:00] strange, but if you ask it to do something and it doesn’t know what to do, it’ll just make something up and it will give it to you.

And then if somebody just copies and pastes it and puts it on their website and has incorrect information, that is not going to look good. And like a lawyer, I think when ChatGPT first came out, used it to help write their opening statements, I believe, or I forgot what it was, but it was just full of all these fake cases and stuff that never really happened and they got in a lot of trouble.

And that’s where you just got to be careful and just take everything with a grain of salt. With AI, it’s not perfect yet, and I’m not too worried about, maybe be more worried about the content, stuff like that, on page optimizations, but in terms of building what are called backlinks. AI can’t really do that, but it could definitely help with the on page optimizations for your website.

Trudy Rankin: Can you just talk a little bit about backlinks and what they are and what people should be thinking about because they used to play a specific role with SEO. What was that? [00:10:00] And what should people be thinking about as the future comes when we’re talking about AI and things.

Brandon Leibowitz: Backlinks are clickable links from another website pointing to your website. If you’re, for example, reading an article, let’s say on business. com, in there it says Brandon and you click on it and it goes to my website, I’d be getting a backlink from business. com. But the more websites that have clickable links that point to your website, The more popular Google kind of thinks you are, the higher, and the more trust they’re going to give to you, and the higher they’re going to rank you.

That’s really how Google’s algorithm first started, is, they said, we’re just not going to look at keywords, because, can’t trust what people put on websites. Because too many people put incorrect keywords that have nothing to do with them, because they’re just trying to rank for that keyword. And Google said, we don’t want that to happen.

So we want to look at third party sites to use those as trust signals to build trust in. Then we’re going to look at those keywords after you get some trust built up. [00:11:00] And over the years, a lot of people spam these backlinks. And Google said, it’s not really the number of backlinks, but the number of quality backlinks.

And a quality backlink just means it comes from a site that’s related to what you’re doing and has some trust and authority. Those are the key keywords. Two main important things. So if you’re like a restaurant, you should get other websites about food, about entertainment, about dining, about cooking, anything somewhat related to what you’re doing.

That’s what Google wants to see when it comes to those backlinks. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. So I’ve had, I don’t know how many offers I’ve had from people saying, pay me X amount of dollars and I’ll help you get hundreds of backlinks. And obviously you could pay the money, you could get the backlinks, but what does Google do with that kind of backlink?

Brandon Leibowitz: That’s where you got to figure out what type of backlink are they building? Usually it’s low quality backlinks and they’re going to do more harm than good. You have to get backlinks from sites that are related to what you’re doing and also you have to build it up over time. Every, like a normal [00:12:00] website should only get a couple backlinks every single month.

You don’t want to just build a hundred backlinks all at once and then never build backlinks again. That looks really suspicious to Google. And they’ll probably penalize you. Anyway, that seems too good to be true. Probably is. And Google is happy to penalize the website. And instead of ranking you higher, you just drop down and then you have to spend money on Google Ads, which Google is happy to make you spend money on ads.

Trudy Rankin: So I had an experience once where I was looking at backlinks for my site, one of my sites, and I decided I was going to go and see what kind of, what was actually there in terms of that backlink. And I discovered that somebody had taken my blog posts, turned them into garbled English, put them on some other website, and then put a link back to my site, and that was a backlink, and I was horrified to realize that, because they’re garbage, backlinks they’re not, they’re worth nothing, but I’m just [00:13:00] curious, is there a way to get rid of those kinds of rubbish backlinks?

Brandon Leibowitz: You can try to reach out to the website. They’re probably not going to get back to you or and Google realized that. So Google made a tool a while back ago called the Disavow tool. And you could upload or make a list of websites that you don’t want Google to count because anyone could build backlinks.

Like I could go on Fiverr and buy a gig for 5 dollars and buy a hundred backlinks, send them all to your website. And that’s really going to do a lot of harm to your website. Google knows that and said, all right. We’ll give you this tool. If something like that does happen, it’s called negative SEO, and then you could just upload that list and we’ll block it.

You have to upload the list to Google search console, which is a free tool from Google. There’s Google analytics, which is great for All data about your traffic, it’s free, that’s from Google, and then there’s Search Console, which is all about your SEO data, and it’s also [00:14:00] free, and I recommend everyone get both of those tools, because the more data you have, the better off you’re going to be, and better you’ll understand your website, your audience, your traffic, your keywords, and just so much more information in there.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. So I want to go ahead and ask another question, because, Obviously, we’ve had people will have seen Google’s helpful content update smash a lot of content based websites that were dependent on SEO, as well as, depending on which website it was, as well as good content to rank and using search to bring people to their website.

With the Helpful Content Update that basically destroyed a lot of the traffic to some of these websites. And a lot of people who had been thinking about maybe buying websites that already existed and then building them up and improving them and fixing the SEO and all of that sort of stuff, have gone, I’m not so sure that’s such a good idea right [00:15:00] now.

Is SEO dead? I’ll ask that question first. 

Brandon Leibowitz: When I started doing SEO in 2007, I would read blogs that would say SEO is dying and SEO was fading away. I was like, I don’t even know what this is. It’s so new to me, but people are saying it’s dying and got me a little worried at the beginning, but After a while, I just realized it doesn’t matter where you search.

If you’re searching on Google or you’re searching on Amazon, there’s ways to optimize to rank higher on Amazon or anywhere where there’s YouTube, anywhere where you could search. So essentially, as long as we’re searching think That SEO is going to go away anytime soon. But if we stop searching, then we’ll have to see if it just gives us an answer, which seems like everything is going to like, just we’ll have to see what’s going to happen.

But the future seems like it might be a little different, but for now, I feel like SEO is not in, I’m not going to die off right away. Again, I’ve been hearing this since 2007 and probably even earlier than that. People have been saying it. [00:16:00] So as long as you could search, I wouldn’t worry too much. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s interesting because Obviously there’s wars going, when I say wars, I, with, quote marks, going on between the different big organizations.

You’ve got Google, you’ve got Microsoft, you’ve got the ones that do search, and you also got the ones who do AI. And the ones who are, for example, OpenAI, who are the creators of ChatGPT, that they’re looking to create, and they have created a, like a search GPT. which is a specialized tool that you use to do your searching and stuff.

And it’s interesting that it’s competing with some of these other search engines. And I’m just a little bit curious because you talked about hallucinations earlier on. I’ve done some work with ChatGPT, where I’ve been able to get it to provide me with sources that weren’t hallucinations.

I was able to go back and track them and find them and validate that they were real. And so I [00:17:00] think quality of the content that’s coming back out of these tools is starting to increase a lot more quickly than what I think people realized. What’s been your experience with trying to marry up where search is going with those AI tools that are there?

Brandon Leibowitz: The more people use AI, the more accurate it will become, but, ChatGPT is just, is owned by Microsoft. Which is Bing, or it’s Open, OpenAI, and OpenAI is part of Microsoft, which is all Bing. ChatGPD is really just Bing search results, just put in a AI format. Love to see, Google is really scrambling to try to figure out how they can beat it against it, because people don’t really realize that.

It’s just really Bing. And but as long as you optimize for Google and Bing is pretty similar in an algorithm, they’re slightly different, but they’re always going to look at similarities. We’re going to have to see how they rank websites, but chat TPD, if it’s different, but they still probably have to look at the backlinks because just reading [00:18:00] content, especially with AI and making those AI hallucinations, if people just, Post AI Hallucinations on their blog.

It’s like that never ending spiral. So it’s just going to keep learning from itself and learning inconsistency or hallucinations. But the more people that use it, the more it’s going to become more accurate. It’s going to see how people search, how people respond, or how people ask questions or whatever they’re using with it, using it for.

For eCommerce, I feel like that’s where Google and it’s still pretty safe for transactional or local businesses, things like that, where you can, might find them on AI Chat GPT, Yelp is really big, maybe TripAdvisor, make sure they’re real legitimate and trustworthy businesses. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, no, that, that’s a good point.

Let’s narrow down then, in terms of local and e commerce type businesses, if somebody had one of those, and they’re looking to see how they could improve the SEO on their website, given that it still seems to be [00:19:00] working for these types of businesses, what would be three key things that you would tell them to do in order to be able to improve the search results, make it more likely that people will find their businesses when they search. 

Brandon Leibowitz: We see what Google sees are different when Google looks at a website, they are only looking at the code and they want you to put keywords in the, in different areas in the coding, which you get a little complicated, but one place that doesn’t require coding Adding more text to every page on your website, not just the homepage, but any page that you want to rank needs to have text.

Google feeds off text. The more text you put on every single page, the easier it will be for the search engines to read and, Understand and know what that page is about and then hopefully rank you for the correct keywords. But that’s where you have to do keyword research and make sure you are putting the right keywords in there because you can just guess and throw keywords in there and write content.

That’s fine. But there’s tools that will actually show you [00:20:00] should you use a singular or plural or a synonym or some other variation of that word and it might get significantly more traffic. The Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that will help show you search volume for keywords. One of my clients, they’re a personal injury law firm and they’re moderating for personal injury lawyers.

Plural, which gets 20,000 searches in Los Angeles, California, which is great per month, but Personal Injury Lawyer Singular got 200,000 searches per month in Los Angeles just by removing that one letter. And that’s where tools like the Google Keyword Planner are really invaluable and it doesn’t take that long to do keyword research, but a lot of people just skip it over thinking it’s too complicated.

And yeah, I mean that, those two things are really important and I would just use those tools to write the content and to do keyword research. I’ve tried using ChatGPT to do keyword research and the numbers are way off from the Google Keyword Planner. So good, [00:21:00] just take everything with a grain of salt that AI puts out there.

You can have it give you like outlines to help you write content for these pages, but. I wouldn’t just say write the page for you, but have it help you just like a starting point, give me some topics, themes, keywords that you think are good. And then from there you fill in the blanks and make it in your own tone and voice and resonate with your audience.

Trudy Rankin: That is a really good point. I’m curious and you may or may not have an answer to this. So it’s fine if you don’t, but it’s just a curiosity based question. So you’ve got the SEO approach to content based websites. And you were saying, add content to any kind of website, make sure that there’s good content.

So I take that point that’s an interesting point, local e commerce as well. But when the Google Helpful Content Update came through, all of a sudden there were all these gurus out there saying, Hey, you should use a social media first approach to your content. Can you just comment on that and what that potentially means and whether that’s [00:22:00] valid as opposed to using a straight SEO approach. 

Brandon Leibowitz: I haven’t really heard that one, but I guess they’re just probably just saying post content on social media because. Social media, you post it up there and people are going to see it hopefully right away, but the reach is just so low on social media, unless you’re spending money on ads.

They’re really low. Facebook is a 5 percent reach. So five out of every hundred people that like your page will ever see what you post. Instagram is maybe like 30 percent ish. I’m not sure how TikTok and all, but they’re not a hundred percent reach, but it is a great way to just get your website or get your name out there, get your business out there, putting videos and all that stuff up there.

But I would also repurpose it and throw it up on YouTube, throw it up on your website and just try to, if you’re making a video, put it on there, put it everywhere and then see where your audience or who reacts positively. And then that tells you where your audience is and what platforms you should probably be more active on.

But I would always still put content on your website. Google can’t really read [00:23:00] images or videos or audio. They’re getting much, much better at it. But they still rely heavily on text, the more text. So if you have a video and you upload it to YouTube, you should have text that describes what that video is about in the description, or if you could Upload subtitles or transcript, that really helps a lot because then you’re giving them the text and that text is really what they use to for the rankings.

Trudy Rankin: Okay. So that’s interesting in terms of the images and the videos and things, and I’m sure that it probably applies to podcasts as well. So in terms of a podcast. Do you have an opinion one way or the other of whether it’s better from an SEO perspective to have a link to a transcript from a podcast page or embed the whole transcript in the podcast page?

Brandon Leibowitz: On the page, whatever it’s at, if it’s on your website. Put it on your website with the podcast, or if it’s on YouTube or Spotify or wherever it’s at, the more text you’re able to help or [00:24:00] put in there, the more you’re helping them, giving them a little bit of information, insights to what this episode’s all about.

Even the file name, they look at that to see what the podcast file name is or image file names. All those need to be named with descriptive words, little things like that will help them just read. And better understand what that is, hopefully. But the more signals you’re able to send to them, the more likely they are going to hopefully rank you for those correct keywords.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, okay. That’s an interesting point. Obviously, I have a vested interest because I have a podcast. And at the moment, I just have a link to the transcript, but I have seen other podcast hosts who have included the transcript or a version of the transcript on the page I assume for SEO purposes, and maybe also for accessibility purposes as well, for people who need to use screen readers and things like that.

One other quick question about, an important component of SEO, which is things like more the technical side of [00:25:00] SEO for things like Page speed and how much, how quickly things load and all, like all the more technical details about a website. Can you just comment a little bit about some of the things that people might do to help improve that side of things for either a local or an e commerce type website?

Brandon Leibowitz: Technical SEO would be really just coding. So just going in the website and making changes to the coding and putting all the keywords in the correct places, making sure your website, Looks good on mobile and desktop and making sure it loads quickly and just making sure that it doesn’t really have any of those like little issues like in the coding but depends on what platform you’re on if you’re on like WordPress or Shopify or Wix or Squarespace there’s only so much you could do or if it’s custom coded so every platform is gonna have Pros and cons, WordPress is probably the best because you could really customize everything with plugins, which is really nice.

But some of the other platforms, there’s not really much you can do about speed. If you’re on Shopify or [00:26:00] Wix, other than images, the more images you have on a website, especially if you upload a 5,000 by 5,000 pixel image. And on your website, you’re only showing like a 100 by 100 pixel image. Don’t upload that huge image because it’s just going to slow down your website.

So smaller images or images that are only the size that needs to be there. Also deleting old images, old logos, all that takes up space on your website and will cause it to slow down a little bit, but speed isn’t really the most important for SEO. It’s definitely important for people, but Google said that speed is one of the lower ranking factors that if there’s two websites that have the exact same SEO value to Google, then we’ll look at speed.

But, and that’s only, they’re exactly the same with like content, keywords, and everything else that Google looks at. Speed will be down there as something, but it’s definitely important for humans. We want fast loading websites. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. And we want to be able to do it on our phones as well. Which is always interesting.

So it can help to have a team [00:27:00] who can do that. Terms of, I’m thinking e commerce now, e commerce websites for things like we’ll just say Shopify, or maybe Etsy, or maybe some of the other platforms that are e commerce based. Do you have any tips for how people might improve their SEO for those kinds of sites that are on somebody else’s platform, like Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, whatever the platform is.

Brandon Leibowitz: I would just worry about going into each page and updating all the SEO settings, adding more text, more content, and just looking at how you structure the website, the hierarchy, the content. Categories, subcategories, sub subcategories of how you structure it are really important. So those would be the main things because each platform nowadays are all pretty good.

I’m not worried too much about them. Maybe five or 10 years ago, some are much better than others, but now they’re all really awesome. Equally good is just what you do with those platforms is what matters, not just having a good platform that’s [00:28:00] SEO friendly, you got to go in and make those changes to the keyword research and make those changes to the website.

Trudy Rankin: So you’re talking about categories, can you just expand on that just a little bit? give us an example possibly. 

Brandon Leibowitz: A category would be if you’re selling like men’s tennis shoes, the category would be shoes, and then a subcategory could be men’s shoes, and then a sub subcategory could be men’s tennis shoes.

So you’re just breaking it down by different ways that people would search for e commerce usually. Do it for services, but usually it’s for e commerce type businesses. 

Trudy Rankin: So it’s more about thinking about how people would organize the search string in their mind. When they’re on there, they’re, are they going to, they’re not, they might search for red men’s shoes or red men’s tennis shoes or, is that what you mean?

Brandon Leibowitz: Yeah. So someone searching for men’s tennis shoes, they might want to just see men’s shoes. So you have that men’s category page or subcategory page. So they could see all the men’s shoes, or they might [00:29:00] want to just see all your shoes. So you have that shoes as a category, or you have the men’s tennis shoes as a subcategory, where they could just see all the men’s tennis shoes.

So you’re just organizing them by ways that you think people would be searching. And best way to do that is just look at your competition and see how they structure their websites. Get ideas from them. 

Trudy Rankin: Okay, now that, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so I just just thinking out loud here, in terms of coming back to the whole digital marketing trends, do you see SEO for local and e commerce type sites changing a whole lot in the future with what’s happening currently for other sites with AI, Google Helpful Content Updates, and those sorts of things.

Brandon Leibowitz: AI is definitely changing it. We’ll have to see what’s going to happen where people are searching and how those search results look. But that one, nobody really knows what’s going to happen with that one. That one is just a waiting game, but for [00:30:00] now it’s still the same. Google really just dominates and runs the show and hasn’t, yeah, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to go anywhere anytime soon.

They might lose some traffic market share to other platforms, search engines, but I don’t think Google’s any going to just disappear, at least not for a long time or a while. 

Trudy Rankin: Okay. Cause that’ll be really interesting if it does it all bets are off.

Brandon Leibowitz: Yeah, but Yahoo is still around and their old AOL is still around.

So Google might still be around, just not as big, but I don’t think it’s going to disappear. It’s not going to lose that giant market share. Not yet, at least. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s a really good point. Brandon, it’s been interesting talking with you. It’s always interesting talking to someone who’s really got their fingers in on the nitty gritty and working, at ground level on things like SEO when there is so much change happening and in the industry, in the marketplace and things like that.

And so it’s interesting to see what’s working and where you think things might go. If people were interested in either learning more about you or what you [00:31:00] do, or they might want some help with their SEO, where’s the best place for them to go? 

Brandon Leibowitz: I actually created a special gift for everybody.

If they go to my website at seoptimizers. com forward slash gift, that’s S E O P T I M I Z E R S. com forward slash gift. And they can find that gift there along with my contact information and classes I’ve done over the years. I’ve thrown it up for free so they could see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about.

And also if they have a website, I’m happy to check their website out from an SEO point of view and they can book some time for website analysis there for free as well. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s fantastic. I know there’s a few people who would be interested in actually finding out that information and looking at your gift and maybe even booking an audit or having you look at the SEO on their site.

Brandon, thank you so much for being here. It’s been a pleasure. 

Brandon Leibowitz: Thank you for having me on today.

Trudy Rankin (2): And there you have it. SEO Demystified, courtesy of Brandon [00:32:00] Leibowitz. 

Whether you’re just getting started with optimizing your site, or you’ve been at it for a while, but haven’t seen the results that you want yet, I hope today’s episode gave you a clear roadmap to follow. And if you found Brandon’s tips helpful, and I’m betting you did make sure to check out the resources he mentioned.

And don’t be afraid to start small. Even one change can help get Google’s attention. If you enjoyed this episode, please hit that subscribe button so that you never miss an update. And if you’ve got a minute, I’d love it if you left a review. It helps more people find the podcast and learn how to grow their business the smart way.

And I’ll catch you next time on the Online Business Launchpad podcast.