Latest / The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast / The New Rules of SEO: How to Rank Higher on Google and AI Search | Brandon Leibowitz

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The New Rules of SEO: How to Rank Higher on Google and AI Search | Brandon Leibowitz · The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast

0:00
People are looking at instead of SEO,
0:02
there's now called GEO and AEO.
0:05
But as long as people are searching,
0:07
doesn't matter where they're searching,
0:08
there's ways to optimize.
0:09
Mm-hmm.
0:10
If you're just going into ChatGPT and saying,
0:12
write me a blog post about this topic,
0:15
it's going to be very generic
0:16
If people come to your website and then leave immediately,
0:19
search engines are gonna think that you're not the best.
0:22
We're just trying to send all the right signals that show that you are real,
0:26
legitimate, trustworthy.
0:28
Everyone wants to go viral and just grow and explode in traffic,
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but that's kind of the rarity.
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The norm is that slow, steady growth of consistency.
0:53
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast.
0:57
My name is Rick Meekins. I'm gonna be your host as usual,
0:59
and in our studio we have Brandon Leibowitz.
1:02
How are you today, sir?
1:05
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on the podcast.
1:08
we are so glad you're here. And today we are going to be talking about SEO.
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And as we know, SEO is changing.
1:16
And so Brandon's going to be shedding some light on what these changes
1:19
are going to be. But
1:20
if you haven't done it already,
1:21
if you would like, subscribe, and hit the bell so you can get updates every time
1:24
we drop a new episode. And without further ado,
1:27
let's get into it. Mr. Brandon,
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give us give us an overview. Who are you?
1:31
What do you do? And why do you do what you do?
1:34
I help people get found online with what's called search engine optimization,
1:41
which gets you free traffic to your website.
1:44
So when people search on Google or there's ads at the top,
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those are all paid. But right below the ads are the organic,
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the free listings. And I get people ranked there on Google,
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on ChatGPT, on Gemini, on Yelp or Amazon,
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wherever people search.
2:03
Mm-hmm.
2:03
There's ways to optimize to get you to rank higher and kind of just fell into that
2:09
back in 2007 after I graduated from college.
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One of the first jobs I got out of school was doing SEO,
2:15
which I didn't really know much about it.
2:17
I told the company that.
2:19
probably gonna have a website.
2:21
SEO is free traffic. And I thought,
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who wouldn't want free traffic?
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And that got me going on my journey of working in the SEO field as
2:29
the director of SEO at different advertising agencies.
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But before work and after work and on my lunch breaks,
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I'd work on my own company and was able to build that up to quit my
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job and been doing this ever since.
2:42
Wow, amazing. Amazing. What what do you remember what year it was that
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you kinda said, Hey, you know what,
2:47
I'm I'm done working for other people?
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I think it was around 2018 range,
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somewhere 17, 2018. So I took the slower route,
2:56
took the safer route where I built up,
3:00
well, after graduating from college,
3:02
I was happy to get a job. And then I was like,
3:05
well, I could also make some extra income on the side by doing SEO.
3:09
So I'd pick up like one or two freelance clients here or there.
3:12
But after doing that for a while,
3:15
I was like, let me really just try to go all in on this SEO.
3:18
and my agency and see what happens.
3:20
And by doing that, within like two years,
3:22
I was able to quit my job at the advertising agency and just went on my own thing.
3:28
But playing it slow and safe was my choice because it also helped too
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a few years later, the world shut down.
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And when that happened, most my like half my clients were local businesses
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and most of them had
3:41
Mm-hmm.
3:41
a just completely shut down. So if I just jumped ship right away and
3:46
Didn't have my business built up,
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I might have been in trouble, but luckily I had enough like e commerce clients
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and other industries that weren't affected that I
3:55
Yeah.
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was still able to be sustainable.
3:58
Mm mm mm. You know, it's it's interesting.
4:00
I I remember I guess years ago,
4:03
you know, just a handful of years ago,
4:05
you know, SEO was a it was, you know,
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the hot conversation, you know,
4:08
lots and lots of marketers were were selling it.
4:10
And it was just I remember, you know,
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just going through like all the rig and roll with my different websites
4:15
and you know, trying to get them optimized and that sort of thing.
4:18
And it seems like that conversation is is is dying off a little bit.
4:22
Have you noticed that?
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N not really too much. I mean,
4:24
maybe People are looking at instead of SEO,
4:27
there's now called GEO and AEO.
4:31
and all these new acronyms that
4:33
Yeah.
4:33
have been released the past couple of years with the AI LLMs that
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are now platforms where we want to rank on those as well.
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But as long as people are searching,
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doesn't matter where they're searching,
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if it's on search engines or LLMs or
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Amazon, as long as people search,
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there's ways to optimize.
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Mm-hmm.
4:53
But once we stop searching, then it'll be a little different.
4:57
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I th I think I I feel like it it's it's well I guess what's what's
5:02
happened is is it's changed a little bit.
5:04
I remember when we were first doing it,
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you know, we were, you know, putting keywords in,
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you know, certain parts where we're building the website and well,
5:12
let me let me let me let you take it.
5:14
So how has search changed in the past five years?
5:17
I guess that's a better question.
5:18
The main thing is where people search the platform.
5:22
So instead of like five years ago,
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it was just Google. There was Bing,
5:25
Right.
5:26
there's Yahoo, there's DuckDuckGo,
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but not many people really use those platforms.
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Google just ran the show, and then ChatGPT came out,
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and that started to take some market share away from Google.
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And that's where Google made Gemini and their own AIs to compete with ChatGPT,
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which was taking away a lot of market share from.
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But the principles haven't really changed too much,
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like the strategies of good content on your website,
5:56
doing keyword research, figuring out which keywords have buyer intent
6:01
and are low competition, but have good search volume,
6:04
and then incorporating those keywords into the coding on your website.
6:08
But changes to your website don't really move the needle.
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What moves the needle is third party sites mentioning you.
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Building backlinks. Then Google and the LLMs,
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they're both looking at backlinks heavily as ranking factors,
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especially nowadays when most people unfortunately are just gonna go
6:29
to ChatGPT and say, Write me a blog post about and if they're selling tennis shoes,
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about men's tennis shoes. And all the websites are gonna have similar content.
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So now it's like, how do you differentiate what's gonna what's good,
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what's gonna move the needle, and these backlinks,
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these third party sites that
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mention you are the trust signals that are gonna get you to move up the rankings.
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So so how do you how do you develop that?
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I mean it's it's you know, I I I think about everything,
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you know, like you know, kind of like building a building.
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You know what I'm saying? So it's you've got your your architecture,
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you have your foundational pieces that you have to do.
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That might be your website content,
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design, et cetera, et cetera. But what you're you're talking about
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is having other businesses in say like the community referring people
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to your business. So I would assume that foundationally,
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you're talking about, you know,
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building the website and you were what when we l talk about building a website,
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when we talk about creating content in our website,
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what is gonna be foundational?
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What are the things that we need to be thinking about from an SEO perspective?
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You wanna create content that's that is better than your competition.
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It's not really a one size fits all where in the past people would
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say write four hundred words of text per page.
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But
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Right.
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that's kind of like the average.
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Some pages could use more, some pages could use less.
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And the way to figure that out is by going into Google and searching
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for your keywords and then opening up all the websites on that first page
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and seeing how much text are they using.
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If everyone's using a thousand words,
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you should probably use a thousand and one hundred words.
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If everyone's using fifty words,
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you should probably keep it around like fifty,
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seventy-five words. Like you just want to do a little bit more than your
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competition. But if everyone's writing fifty words,
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and then you come in and write five thousand words,
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search engines are like, what's going on?
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This doesn't really make sense.
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I mean, maybe you're going really in depth,
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but in general, you want to follow what they're already showing as a
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ranking factor and what they're looking for is good quality content.
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Content that's gonna help the reader.
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So if you're just throwing extra words in there just to make it longer,
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not ideal. You wanna make it value oriented,
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value first and help the reader solve their problem.
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Do do you have like a do you have like a framework for that or is it just
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you know just kinda kind of instinctual or how does that t typically work?
8:56
No, there's a framework involved with going in,
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looking at the competitors, looking at the competitors content to
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see like what keywords are mentioned over and over again and how many times
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are they saying that keyword? Are they using a singular,
9:10
a plural, a synonym, or what other variations are they hitting on?
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That way you kind of cover all the ways that people might be searching
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for your topic. And then just really building it out quality first.
9:23
So thinking for the reader first.
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I have writers that help write the content.
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AI can write the content. Google said we don't care who writes the content,
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as long as it's accurate, AI is not accurate.
9:35
It's a good starting point to maybe help come up with topics and outlines.
9:40
But If you're just going into ChatGPT and saying,
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write me a blog post about this topic,
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it's going to be very generic and we wanna make you stand out.
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And if you could put real life ex examples,
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experiences.
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Stuff to really personalize it,
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your own stories that shows that it's more unique because AI content will never
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do that unless you specifically ask it.
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But in general, it's not gonna put stories or real life examples.
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And that's where you could help stand out and differentiate yourself,
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put case studies, reviews, or anything else that just helps build trust
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for the reader.
10:17
Mm, mm. So talk talk to about navigation and design features.
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How d how does that fit into the overall SEO strategy?
10:25
The design, If people come to your website and then leave immediately,
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search engines are gonna think that you're not the best.
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If somebody's searching on Google for or ChatGPT and they find a website,
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they go to that website, but then they leave immediately,
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that tells these platforms that maybe you aren't finding what you're looking
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for on the website. And instead of keeping you at the top,
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let's drop you down. Which
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We don't want that to happen. We want you to stay at the top of the search results,
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but sometimes they're just testing it and just seeing how that user experience is.
11:01
That's where you gotta look at the website,
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make sure it loads quickly, it looks good on mobile,
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it doesn't break on Firefox or Internet Explorer or Chrome,
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because it's gonna look different on every browser.
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And if your website isn't functioning properly,
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then search engines are gonna slowly drop you down those rankings.
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The top navigation, the menu bar,
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I mean it's not the most important to put keywords or pages in there.
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Maybe like the footer links would be good.
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But top navigation, you wanna make it for the user,
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focusing on conversion rate optimization of how to make sure I could
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get that visitor to flow. Cause if you just list out all the pages
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on your top navigation and you have hundreds of pages,
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that's gonna be very cluttered,
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which
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I have clients that do that and I tell them,
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maybe don't do all this. Like this is too much on the top navigation.
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It's gonna it's kind of like analysis by paralysis.
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You don't know where to go. If you're given fifty different pages to go
12:00
to on a website in a drop down,
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you might be like, I don't know where to start.
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Whereas if you're just given a few options,
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they're gonna kind of follow that journey.
12:10
It's like in and out. In and out hamburgers is big in California and their menu
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is just
12:16
Hamburgers, French fries. That's kind of it.
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It's not like where you go to the Cheesecake Factory and it might be
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a twenty page menu where you're like,
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I don't even know where to start.
12:25
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.
12:28
I've seen where some websites I'm I'm thinking of I'm thinking
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of a mobile phone, you know, company in in general,
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where they'll put just their featured items,
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like in that top menu, and then they'll have like a a hamburger menu that slides
12:45
out that has like a lot more more detailed information like maybe about
12:48
the company or what kinds of things do people
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Like these days, what kinds of people what kinds of things do we need to
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put in that top menu bar? Is it is it like the actual services
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or products we provide or general categories or do you have an opinion on that?
13:03
Or do you know what works versus what doesn't work?
13:05
I would always be testing it, but whatever is at the top left is gonna
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get all the clicks because depending on what country,
13:13
if you're targeting Americans,
13:15
we read from left to right and we're gonna zigzag and a Z quickly looking
13:21
and scanning that page. Whatever's at the top left is gonna get almost
13:25
all the clicks. And that should be your services or if you're e-commerce,
13:28
your products. And then
13:30
Yeah.
13:31
if you list out your services in a drop-down,
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same thing, whatever's at the top.
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Is gonna get most of clicks. Whatever's at the bottom of the list is
13:38
get gonna get the least amount of clicks.
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So trying to order it in a way that you're most profitable or what you want
13:44
to focus on is always at the top left.
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So I'd put like services and then I would put reviews and testimonials because that
13:53
helps build trust. People
13:55
Mm-hmm.
13:55
don't trust anybody, and you have to really just like you have to
13:59
get the search engines to trust you with backlinks.
14:01
Once people get to your website,
14:02
you need to get.
14:03
people to trust you and testimonials are really helpful.
14:07
I would put an About Us and Contact Us pages because those
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are just standard basic pages that every website should have.
14:16
But I have clients that have e-commerce websites with no contact us.
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And I tell them like, would you buy off this website?
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Like if you had the choice, would you buy from here or Amazon?
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Because Amazon
14:27
Mm-hmm.
14:28
makes it too easy for e-commerce to check out.
14:31
To buy and to know that you're gonna get free returns or free shipping
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or whatever it is versus a website that you might not have never heard of.
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Why would you buy off that one?
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So trying to think like, how can I convey people to look at my services,
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learn about who I am, and then want to reach out to me?
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And I would try to avoid stuff that's not necessary,
14:51
like the blog. Not really necessary to be in the top navigation.
14:56
Blogging is very important, but
14:58
Mm-hmm.
14:58
blogs get people.
15:00
into your website. Once people get to your website,
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unless you are just a blog, but if you're a service or e-commerce website,
15:07
you don't want people reading more blogs.
15:09
You want them to go to your website and buy your product or reach out to you.
15:13
And that's
15:13
Right.
15:14
where you have to look at what's taking away from the ultimate goal of my website.
15:18
How how important are like like H1,
15:20
H2 tags, you know, that that type of what do you call that architecture?
15:24
having clean coding is important to having all the code properly built
15:30
out where there's these header tags and making sure you have the H1 tag at the top,
15:35
then H2, H3, H4,
15:38
and could go on and on. But H1 and H2 are the really the more important ones where
15:44
I'll see sometimes empty H1 tags or five H1 tags where you should only have
15:49
one per page.
15:51
H2 you could have as many as you want,
15:52
but also I see like H2 sometimes higher than H1s,
15:56
and you
15:57
Mm-hmm.
15:57
want to put the H1s, the header ones at the top,
16:00
and then lower down you can drop them down.
16:03
It's kind of like a newspaper.
16:04
If you had a copy of like the New York Times newspaper,
16:08
the physical copy, New York Times would be the header one,
16:12
the name of the newspaper. Then all the stories on the the front page.
16:18
would be H2, any of the sub sub stories would be like H3 and four
16:22
and just keeps going on like that.
16:24
Yeah, yeah, yeah. How how does that work with or how do images
16:28
how important are images and how do they play into the overall SEO architecture?
16:33
Images aren't too important for your landing pages.
16:36
I would recommend putting images to just break up the content and make
16:40
it more visually easy on the eyes.
16:42
But images on your page aren't really gonna have a big ranking factor,
16:47
but you can optimize your images so they show
16:49
Mm-hmm.
16:50
up at Google image search. Sometimes in Google search they'll show
16:54
the images directly there. So best practices you wanna make sure
16:58
you optimize all your images with good file names,
17:01
doing
17:02
Keyword research, adding alt tags,
17:04
adding content before and after the image that is related to the image
17:08
to just build that topical relevancy.
17:11
Mm, mm. That makes sense. That makes sense.
17:14
Are call to actions important?
17:16
Not really for SEO, but very important for a website.
17:19
Because if you don't have a call to action,
17:21
people aren't gonna know what to do.
17:22
If you go to my website and I just talk about SEO,
17:27
but I don't have a phone number or a co email address or a contact form,
17:34
people aren't gonna really know what to do.
17:36
So the call to
17:37
Yeah.
17:38
actions are part of that conversion rate optimization,
17:41
making sure
17:41
Mm-hmm.
17:42
that you get traffic to
17:44
not just visit your website but actually convert into a sale or lead
17:48
or phone call and you should put call to actions on every single page.
17:52
Like even at the top navigation actually I would add a call to action.
17:56
I do SEO, I offer free website analysis.
18:00
So I put that in my top navigation.
18:02
If you're a remodeling company,
18:04
you could say like we do free home estimates or whatever it is to
18:09
try to incentivize people because
18:11
Call to actions help you help differentiate you and make you stand
18:15
out by offering something of value for people.
18:19
Mm, mm. That makes sense. That makes sense.
18:21
That makes sense. I noticed one of the things I I guess a couple of things that
18:25
I noticed. one is accessibility.
18:27
I noticed that, you know, that was becoming a that is becoming a conversation.
18:32
And I'm thinking from the perspective of I guess people being able to use
18:36
so use the website. What is what are what are your thoughts on that?
18:39
What do we need to know about accessibility?
18:42
Your website needs to be accessible to visually impaired or
18:48
if it's audio hearing impaired people and making sure that you you make
18:53
it so anybody can visit your website.
18:56
Google was put a big emphasis on this with their images and their
19:00
alt tags saying not all images or not all websites are going to show images.
19:07
Mm-hmm.
19:07
Not all browsers or computers,
19:09
I mean, are powered to show images,
19:10
but also
19:11
People that are visually impaired,
19:13
they can't see images. So they have screen readers that read the text.
19:17
And if an image isn't there, or if an image is there,
19:21
the screen readers don't know what to read.
19:23
So they would look at the alt text and alternative text as a way
19:27
to help understand what that image is.
19:29
So it's accessible to people that are visually impaired.
19:32
And search engines want to make sure all websites are accessible.
19:36
And that's where you could look at there's ADA compliance and
19:41
Things like that that could go more into detail.
19:43
I've heard horror stories of people getting sued for not having
19:47
ADA compliant websites, which not really sure how that all works.
19:52
I feel like there are no there is no standard.
19:55
You just want to make sure it's accessible,
19:57
but there's no rule book that you have to follow to make sure your website
20:01
is ADA compliant. But I would make sure all your images have alt tags.
20:05
That's gonna help your SEO and help the
20:08
compliance side of things, accessibility.
20:11
Mm, mm, mm. I got it. I got it.
20:14
That makes sense. and you had mentioned like footer links.
20:18
What did you what were you referring to?
20:19
Well you could have links in the top navigation and also on the bottom footer and
20:24
I mean
20:25
what's what's the benefit of the of the footer links?
20:28
And then you can put in the footer links links to other pages with keywords.
20:33
So having keyword rich clickable links site wide tells search engines that these
20:39
are probably important pages on your website and to do a little bit more emphasis
20:44
on ranking them and gives more internal links to those pages as well.
20:48
Mm, that makes sense. That makes sense.
20:51
Are there things that we get wrong,
20:53
you know, when we're building our website,
20:55
things that you see. You mentioned a few a few things already,
20:58
like the H1 tags or not having all tags or having a different number
21:04
of words than say your competitors.
21:06
Or some other things that you see that we get wrong.
21:09
just not adding enough content on their pages,
21:12
or not building out pages that service all the different topics
21:17
and keywords that they want to rank for,
21:19
or just long one-page websites that are parallax that look good visually,
21:24
but search engines want multiple pages.
21:28
The more pages you have, the more keywords you can target,
21:31
the more robust your website becomes,
21:34
but it gets
21:35
Kind of technical with all the on-page SEO stuff where it's like internal linking,
21:40
adding schema, adding all the right tags,
21:44
the right code, Facebook, Open Graph,
21:46
Twitter cards, all these really technical things that nobody really sees unless
21:52
you're looking at the code. People don't
21:54
Yeah.
21:54
look at the code, but search engines are reading that code and looking
21:58
for keywords in different places to help show that you are relevant to.
22:03
to whatever that search that someone is performing,
22:06
then hopefully then you'll trigger Google to wanna show you in the search results.
22:11
Mm. Mm. What what kinds of things do we need to include in the website
22:15
to support like agentic search?
22:17
It's the same as just regular SEO.
22:20
I would just make sure you have good content,
22:22
Right.
22:23
schema, FAQs, but that's all been around for over a decade.
22:28
So people have just
22:29
Sure.
22:29
started recently saying schema is important,
22:31
but schema was important in twenty fourteen when Google Bing and Yahoo created it.
22:36
And it's
22:37
Right.
22:37
been very important to always put in there,
22:40
but a lot of people just don't do it,
22:42
neglect it and headers and all the same principles.
22:45
Nothing really new has emerged.
22:48
would in terms of agentic other than like maybe an llms.txt file that it could put,
22:54
kind of like a robots.txt, but that one has no impact on rankings,
22:59
but people say it will in the future.
23:01
But right now there's been lots of tests and having that versus not having
23:05
it is not gonna mean you're not gonna show up in the AI search results.
23:10
Amazing, amazing. I didn't know that.
23:12
I didn't know that. That's interesting.
23:14
so we talked about the site itself and you talked about backlinks
23:18
and and the importance of backlinks.
23:20
So the question becomes, you know,
23:23
is a
23:23
You know, as as a I guess as a content creator,
23:25
I mean what what backlinks matter?
23:28
You know, I mean if you're putting stuff on LinkedIn and YouTube and you know,
23:31
those other social platforms, does that matter?
23:34
Or is it or are there other places where your site,
23:38
your content needs to show up and link back to your website?
23:41
Or is or am I completely
23:42
Social doesn't really help.
23:43
off base?
23:45
No, backlinks are the most important thing.
23:47
And social is just too easy to get.
23:50
Anyone could go on Facebook, create a profile,
23:53
and put a link to their website or a podcast that they did.
23:57
And those backlinks, search engines know,
23:59
it's too easy to get. So those aren't as valued as much as getting
24:03
on another real website.
24:06
Getting on any site that just lets anybody submit URLs.
24:11
LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, those just get devalued.
24:15
What you want to find is other sites that are niche related to you.
24:18
The more related, the better. So I do SEO.
24:22
I'm not gonna get another SEO company to link out to me,
24:25
but I could find blogs about SEO or podcasts about SEO and be
24:31
a guest on their show and that will get me a backlink,
24:34
which is what I did kind of in
24:38
2020, when the world shut down,
24:40
I would teach classes in person.
24:43
I couldn't teach classes in person,
24:44
so I would teach them on Zoom.
24:46
And
24:47
Uh-huh.
24:47
Zoom would record the audio and video separate.
24:49
And that got me thinking, maybe I should just take this audio recording
24:54
and make it like a makeshift podcast.
24:56
And did that for a few months and then got asked to be a guest on someone's podcast.
25:02
No.
25:02
And then I said, Yeah, sure, I'll be a guest.
25:04
And that got me thinking from the SEO point of view that.
25:08
If I'm a guest on someone else's podcast,
25:10
and if they have a website and they share that each episode on their website,
25:15
I'm gonna get backlinks. And that got me to kind of go all in with
25:18
the guest podcasting and leave left my podcast alone and really just I've been
25:23
on over 300 shows as a guest because it's gotten me hundreds of backlinks
25:28
and it's helped grow my business significantly.
25:32
I also just wrote a book about it and p came out about
25:36
four months or six months ago,
25:37
about it's called The Power of Guest Podcasting.
25:40
And it talks about guest podcasting,
25:42
but from an SEO point of view.
25:44
Cause guest podcasting is great for content,
25:48
for building subject matter expert,
25:51
building trust and building authority,
25:53
tapping into new audiences, but it also can get you backlinks if done properly.
25:59
And that's
26:00
Mm.
26:00
where I go into depth about how to do that.
26:02
Cause I even had one of my clients recently
26:05
They were on like twenty shows as a guest.
26:08
I checked after once we started working together,
26:11
I checked
26:11
Mm-hmm.
26:12
all those shows and not less than half of them gave them backlinks.
26:15
So then we reached out to all those shows and not all of them will give
26:18
you a backlink, but majority of them did.
26:20
And that
26:21
Mm-hmm.
26:21
helps out so much. But it's all about just being creative and thinking outside
26:25
the box about how can I get another website that's related to me to mention me,
26:30
which is not easy.
26:31
Mm.
26:32
And that's why there's so much value in these backlinks.
26:36
Mm. Mm. Mm. Is it is the you talked briefly,
26:41
I guess, about the the authority of the of the website and you said that social
26:46
is just too too I don't understand.
26:48
I don't understand that. You know,
26:50
you you you think you produce,
26:51
you know, lots and lots of content like on these social networks and it's like
26:54
you get no credit for it. Just like,
26:56
I still did the work, you know,
26:58
what what's the deal? But anywho,
27:01
There was I r I remember Google used to have the was it ranking authority
27:06
or something like that. So it told you the quality of your site
27:11
and perhaps other sites that were linked.
27:13
Is that still a thing? Is that something that we still have access to?
27:17
We don't have access to it, but Google made PageRank,
27:20
which was like a zero to ten scale about how authoritative
27:25
how good your website was from an SEO point of view.
27:28
They took that away like fifteen years ago,
27:31
probably longer than that. It was only around for a few years when
27:34
I first started doing SEO, and then it Google took it away.
27:37
And then all these third party sites like Moz started making their
27:42
own arbitrary guesses, like making domain authority.
27:46
page authority and then there's all these other platforms,
27:50
majestic trust flow and citation flow and Ahrefs domain rating,
27:55
and all these are just guessing at what Google looks at,
27:58
but none of them are accurate.
28:00
I mean it's better than nothing,
28:01
but you can't hold it as a source of truth because there's literally gigs
28:07
on Fiverr that you could spend five dollars and get your domain rating to like
28:12
a 30 or 50
28:14
Which is pretty high rating. So those could be manipulated,
28:18
and you can't really trust those third-party sites.
28:20
Unfortunately, Google doesn't want to help with SEO,
28:23
so they don't want to show it.
28:24
Mm-hmm.
28:25
And going back to social media,
28:26
social media, it used to really not help out.
28:29
Now with AI,
28:30
Yeah.
28:31
it does help out a lot more for like the LLMs.
28:34
So for Google,
28:34
Mm-hmm.
28:35
it's not the biggest ranking factor because they're just like these
28:38
are easy backlinks, but the LLMs,
28:40
they were reading social.
28:43
And now Google is starting to pick up a little bit more on it,
28:46
but those are just easy backlinks that don't have the same emphasis as getting
28:52
on a a physical website.
28:55
Makes sense, makes sense, makes sense.
28:57
is there is there anything else we need to think of?
29:00
So we talked about building the site,
29:01
we talked about backlinks. Is there anything else we need to take into consideration
29:05
with SEO?
29:07
There are too many different variables that go into it.
29:09
A little technical nuances. There's hundreds of ranking factors that
29:14
go into Google and the LLMs even more ambiguous because they keep changing
29:19
on a pretty much daily basis. So We're just trying to send all the right trust
29:24
all the right signals that show that you are real,
29:27
legitimate, trustworthy. There's EEAT,
29:31
which was made maybe like 10 years ago from Google saying we want
29:37
content and your website to show that you're experienced,
29:40
you're an expert, you have authority and you have trust.
29:43
And those are really difficult to build.
29:46
Most of that comes from backlinks to show that you're trustworthy,
29:50
you're knowledgeable, getting other websites to kind of vouch for you.
29:53
But it's really just trying to do a better job than your competitors have done.
29:58
So looking at your competitors,
30:00
SEO, what pages they've built out,
30:03
what keywords, what content,
30:05
Looking at your competitors' backlinks.
30:07
Everything is transparent. If you know where to look and if you look
30:11
in the right places, you could kind of reverse engineer your competitors' strategies
30:15
and see what was working and then incorporate what's working and skip over what
30:20
seems a little sketchy or weird because there's always gonna be some weird stuff
30:23
that appears and you don't wanna just copy them for beta.
30:27
You wanna make sure it's good user experience.
30:29
You're not gonna put out any misinformation or
30:32
deceitful or hiding or tricking people.
30:36
okay, okay, that makes sense. That makes sense.
30:38
Cool, good stuff, good stuff. I have a question I asked all my guests.
30:41
I'm gonna ask you if that's okay.
30:44
so the name of the show is the relentless pursuit of winning podcasts.
30:48
And so what we always talk about winning,
30:50
winning is pretty easy to talk about.
30:52
You know, we talk about winning in search,
30:54
for example. But the hard part in running a company as an entrepreneur sometimes
30:58
is just maintaining that relentless pursuit.
31:00
How do we just
31:01
keep going despite everything else that happens.
31:04
So my question for you is, what would you recommend to our guests
31:07
to help them maintain or to maintain that relentless pursuit?
31:11
Yeah, you just gotta enjoy what you do and like what you're doing for the most part.
31:15
You don't have to love it, but if you do,
31:17
that's even better. But you just gotta kinda just be persistent and stick with
31:23
it with the ups and downs. It's kind of like ranking on search engines.
31:26
It goes up and down, up and down.
31:28
It's never just a straight path.
31:29
There's always gonna be these little dips and ups and downs,
31:32
and that's where you just gotta keep going and know that in the long
31:36
run it's gonna trend up.
31:37
You might have these
31:38
Mm.
31:38
ups and downs, you might get discouraged,
31:40
things might change. But
31:42
Mm-hmm.
31:42
in the long run, if you just stay persistent and continue on it,
31:46
you're gonna be going in the right direction.
31:49
And that's kind of like with SEO,
31:51
just being patient with it all.
31:52
Everyone wants to go viral and just grow and explode in traffic,
31:56
but that's kind of the rarity.
31:58
The norm is that slow, steady growth of consistency.
32:04
Mm. Mm. Mm. Okay. Cool. Cool. if someone wants to get in touch with you,
32:08
someone who wants to work with you or or you have a as a matter of fact,
32:11
you have a giveaway. you want to talk about that?
32:14
Yeah, I created a special gift for everybody.
32:17
If you go to my website
32:19
at seooptimizers.com forward slash gift.
32:24
They can find that gift there along with my contact information
32:28
and classes I've done over the years.
32:31
I've thrown open for free. So you could see step by step how to do a
32:34
lot of the stuff that we talked about and
32:36
Also, if you do have a website and want me to check it out from an
32:40
SEO point of view, you could book some time on my calendar for free there as well.
32:45
Brandon, thank you so much. That's that's a wonderful,
32:47
that's a generous gift. Thank you so much.
32:49
And thank you so much for being on the show.
32:51
I really enjoyed our conversation.
32:53
Thanks for having me on today.
32:55
Absolutely, absolutely. And
32:56
folks, thank you so much for watching or listening to another episode
33:00
of the Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast.
33:01
We'll catch you next time.