Gina Gardiner & Friends with Brandon Leibowitz

0:00It's time now for Gina Gardner and friends. The show that shares stories from inspiring people from a wide range of expert guests all focused on helping you live a happier, more successful and fulfilling life. Gina Gardner is a multiple number one international best selling author, motivational speaker, business coach and trainer. She's the founder of Genuinely You. It has over 30 years experience of helping people step into their genuine, authentic power personally and professionally. Matthew. Oh, sorry. It's okay. I just need you to listen to me. I know that a lot of times mom, it might not seem like I'm listening to you, but I am. I hear you. And what you say really does matter to me. I mean, let's be honest. No kid likes rules, but I get why we have them. I hear you, and I know it's because you care. For more information about talking with your kids about underage use of alcohol and other drugs, visit underagedrinking.samsa.gov.

1:02And now here's your host, Gina Gardner. Hello there and a huge welcome to this week's episode of Gina Gardner and Friends. Today I'm joined by Brandon Lieberwitz. Now he's operated and run his company, SEO optimizers since 2007. It's a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium sized businesses get more online traffic, which can then turn into converts into client sales and so on. I think today is being seen both in business and in life. Brandon is an expert on getting you seen in business, and I'm going to share my expertise with you in terms of being seen and heard in life. So Brandon, a huge welcome. Thank you very much for joining me. Thank you for having me on today. So search engine optimization, it's a mouthful and you get your teeth all twisted up in the title. What does it actually mean?

2:04Yeah, it is a long one, but search engine optimization, which is also called SEO is ranking websites in search engines. So when you search mainly it's on Google. So when you search on Google, there's ads at the top. Those are all paid ads. Right below the ads are the organic, the free listings, which is what SEO is all about is getting your website ranked on the free listings on Google. There's 10 spots on that first page of Google so trying to get you up there. So you just capture that free traffic. So you get free visitors instead of paying for those ads, which the ads work, but there can be quite expensive. When you click on those ads, every time you click on those ads, those websites are paying Google. Per click, it could be a couple cents per click, could be a couple dollars per click, could be a couple hundred dollars per click just for one click. So it's quite expensive. That's why you try to help people get the free traffic instead of paying those Google ad money. You know, I had assumed that they paid for the position

3:05and paid a standard fee. I had no idea that every time somebody clicked onto them that it cost and that it could cost so much. It's crazy, isn't it? Google makes a ton of money. I realized how much money they make until I started working at advertising agencies where I'd see some of the budgets where you had clients spending $20 million a month on Google ads and they were a medium-sized advertiser to Google, which kind of blew my mind. I was like, what's a large one where I think eBay spends a million a day, Amazon spends over a million a day. So Google makes a ton of money off their ads. Way too much money, it's kind of insane. It blows my mind, I have to say, when you think of how that money could be spent in other ways, but that's a completely different topic than today's show. It just strikes me then that if you can organically a find a way of rising to that first page to be seen by people is so important. Because ultimately, if you're on page 322,

4:06the chances are that people aren't going to scroll through until they find you and being seen, making your mark within all of the white noise that there is on the internet is going to be important for any business if they're going to attract business and sales through the internet, isn't it? Yeah, I get yourself out there and have people find you because you could spend all this money building a nice website, but if you're not doing anything to attract people to the website, people aren't going to find it unfortunately. So I do some marketing and get the word out there whether it's SEO, social media, email marketing, running paid ads, doing TV radio, whatever it is, but you got to drive traffic somehow, referrals were to mouth, but got to get the awareness out there and that's where SEO and other marketing strategies come into play. So how do you do it? How do you make sure that a website is going to be seen more? I mean, how do you optimize things?

5:08So it's not really one size fits all. Every website is going to be different, but there's a few things that every website should have. Well, so first of all, Google, what we see about Google sees is different. Google looks in the coding of your website. So Google can't read a website. They just look at the coding, which luckily nowadays you don't need no coding to do SEO, but you got to be aware that everything is stripped down to text. Google can't read images, they can't read videos, can't understand audio. I mean, they're getting closer and better at it, but they really rely on text. So the more text you have on your website, the easier it is for the search engines to read, understand and know what keywords to rank you for. But this, the more they get is you need to put text on every single page on your website. So if you just put text on the homepage, that's good, but every page on your website is an opportunity to rank for different keywords. So you want to put content on every single page so Google could understand what those pages about. And the more pages you have, the more keywords you could target,

6:09because each page could only really target about three to five words. After that, it kind of loses relevancy. So if you want to target more keywords, you got to create more pages. The more pages, the better offer you to be, and make sure you have good, visual content on every single page will help ensure that the search engines know what your website's about and want keywords to focus on. So what do you mean by a keyword? So a keyword would be what someone's searching in Google. So whatever someone searches in Google is a keyword. So if someone's searching for women's necklaces, that would be a keyword. But that's a really broad keyword, because someone's searching for that. There's no real intent behind that. Where are they looking for it? There could be tons of different necklaces, styles, colors. So anything that's one or two words that's a keyword is really kind of a generic. It's a lot of people searching for it, but there's no buyer intent behind it. Someone's searching for, let's say, women's gold necklace with diamonds does. That's a long keyword. Not many people are going to be using it, but the people searching for it,

7:10they know they want this specific style with these features. So there's a little bit more intent behind that search. And so a keyword could be one word, it could be ten words, it could be whatever you're searching in Google, that's essentially a keyword. So how do you get in the mind of somebody who's searching? So ultimately, you've got your experience and your vocabulary and what you would look for. How do you go about finding out what people generally look for? You could, luckily, just kind of research your competitors. And you could see, so with SEO, everything is transparent. I could see what you're doing. You could see what I'm doing if you look in the right places. And the easy way to do it is just search on Google for your keywords. So go into Google, search for your keywords, and see who ranks on that first page of Google, skip over the ads, but look at the organic, the free listings. And the blue clickable link is called an SEO title tag. And that's where everyone puts their keywords. So you could quickly spy on your competitors and see what everyone is using.

8:12So you could put, like, women's necklaces into Google. And then you might see that everyone is putting women's jewelry necklaces or something like that. So you're like, oh, maybe I should put the word jewelry in there, or you'll see patterns and you'll get ideas from your competitors. And then what I do is I'll take those keywords, and then I'll throw them into a tool. There's a lot of different tools out there that will show you how many people actually search for that keyword every single month. But Google is either free one. So I would use what's called the Google keyword planner. It's a free tool from Google. And you could throw that keyword into Google, the Google keyword planner, and it will show you how many Google search for that keyword every single month. But it'll also give you hundreds, sometimes thousands, of variations of that keyword, singular, plural, synonyms, industry slang term stuff that you were saying, like, you might not know all the variations, but Google and your competitors will kind of let you and show you all that stuff. Especially the Google keyword planner because the Google keyword planner is really for Google ads. So if you want to run paid ads on Google,

9:14Google's like, OK, you want to bid on this keyword. But here's a thousand keywords that are almost the same. So they want you to spend more money on paid ads. But it also works for SEO where you could see how many people actually search for this keyword every single month, maybe five people search for that keyword, five people search for it every single month. But if you use a plural or singular, you might get 5,000 people searching for it every single month. Little changes like that have a big impact on search volume. So you want to find your competitors by searching on Google, seeing what they're using in that blue clickable link, and then throwing those keywords into the Google keyword planner to make sure that they actually get search volume. You know, I often work with people who are looking for work and helping them, particularly leaders who are wanting to get promotion. And one of the things that I talk to them about is doing their research, is knowing what they, the firm that they're applying for, knowing about them, and looking at what's important to that company, but also doing research about the job that they're applying for,

10:17but also what the company that they're applying to does. And it seems to me that the same principles of knowing your market, of getting prepared so that you can present yourself in a way that's meaningful, is very similar to somebody who is applying for a job and wants to make a good impression. Now, of course, it's important to be authentic. I think both in your website and in how you present yourself personally, but I think it's interesting, isn't it? How similar principles are true for both your personal life and for your business and for your website? I mean, you always gotta do the research for pretty much everything in life. The more you research and be prepared, the better offering to be, but definitely for work, job interviews, my dad, my parents would always say, research the company ahead of time, have a couple questions that you wanna ask about the company, that I really specific, learn from the position,

11:20if you get, like, talk to old, people or old employees that work there, that maybe have that position to get ideas about it, but yeah, you gotta do your homework, gotta do the research, can be prepared for pretty much everything in life, because if not, you're just kinda winging it, and if you're prepared, it's gonna make things a lot easier, a lot smoother, less hiccups and road bumps that you're gonna go over that year. In general, no matter what, it's inevitable. You're always gonna have those road bumps and hiccups that you have to push through, but being prepared will help you avoid a lot of those in the foot SEO, in life, in general, and just whatever you're doing. You know, when you're talking about SEO, you can save yourself a huge amount of money, but also you give yourself the best opportunity to actually be successful financially in your business if you do that sort of research. We're just about to go to a short break, and as Brandon has said, it's really important that you prepare, prepare to fail or prepare to succeed. So just in the same way that being really clear

12:23about the language that you use on your website will make a difference. Being prepared in terms of how you present yourself to an interview is going to make a huge difference. Now, don't go away, we'll be back in just a minute. I'll be here to hear what's on your mind. Kids want to share what's going on in their lives with the adults around them. Parents, grandparents, teachers, coaches, and more. They want to know your listening, and they want to listen to you. They want your input and guidance early and often on all kinds of topics. When it comes to a serious subject like underage drinking, they want to know your expectations, as well as how and why as a young person they should avoid alcohol. How you talk about it will change as your child grows, but the important thing is to talk about it, not just once for an hour when you think the time is right, but in 61-minute conversations and more that are part of your everyday talks. For more information about talking with your kids

13:24about underage use of alcohol and other drugs, visit underagedrinking.samsa.gov. When you meet me, I'll be by your side. Welcome back. I'm joined by Brandon Lieberwitch on this show. We're talking about being seen, Brandon's expertise as an SEO expert for your website. We're also talking about how you show up in life and how you get seen for the right reasons, rather than being showy and getting in the way of being more authentic. I think it's just as important on your website that however you're using your language with keywords and so on, that the message is authentic. Brandon, I'm interested in, I've sometimes gone onto websites and it's pretty evident that they're dropping keywords in

14:25like confetti at a wedding, because in the end, it almost doesn't make sense because it's keyword after keyword. How would you suggest people are able to create text that is meaningful, but still has plenty of keywords in order to give themselves the best opportunity to be seen? I would try to write for people, not write for search engines, which seems like that's what people are doing. If they're just putting the keyword over and over again, they're trying to optimize for search engines, which used to work a while ago, but nowadays, and Google changes are out with them all the time. So now, Google's looking for quality content, meaning you're writing for the reader, not writing for search engines, so. Yeah. Essentially, when you're writing this content, your keywords should emerge in the content, and if they don't emerge, then maybe you're not writing the right content and you should rethink what you're writing and try to write in a way that has those keywords in there. So instead of trying to force the keywords in there, try to naturally have them come in there, and if they're not naturally coming in there,

15:25try to figure out how you could get them to naturally emerge and make sense in that content, because. And the path to it is just throw keywords in there. The more keywords you had, the more times it repeats itself, the more likely Google's gonna rank you for that keyword, which doesn't work anymore, and now it's really just writing for people. And essentially, I've seen websites that go rank for keywords that they're gonna have in the content, in the content, just because Google's able to pick up singular or the variations or synonyms, or it's called the hummingbird update that they had a while ago where machine learning and Google just are able to pick that up. Doesn't happen all the time. You still should put the keywords in the content, but I've seen results where it's not even in that content, just because Google knows intent behind that search where you're located and what you're looking for. So just write for people and that's gonna be the best. Don't write for search engines anymore. I think that's great advice. And I'm talking about when people go to turn up for a job, for example, or want to get known within a new social group.

16:25I think it's so easy to try and be something that you're not, to try and think about what will please other people rather than being confident enough to stand in your own power and be yourself, but do that in a way that be your best self and allow other people to see who you are authentically. And it sounds to me as if you're, and when you're describing what to do around the text, that actually the parallels are very close. Oh, yeah. Authenticity is so very important for SEO, just in general in life, but for SEO as well, gotta be authentic and not just throw stuff out there, just to throw it out there. You gotta really be let people know what they're gonna get and focus on people, not search engines. You wanna have a little bit of balance where you wanna do a little bit for the search engines, but really everything should be focused on people for human experience. That's really number one. And people could see through nowadays if it could not writing for them. If it's not authentic, or obvious nowadays on website, so gotta be true and be authentic with everything.

17:28So let me ask you, do you do a service for people where you optimize their websites or is your work around training or a mixture of both? Well, a little bit of both, usually I'll do it for business owners since they usually don't have time for it, but some of them wanna learn how to do it themselves or have a team in the house where I'll go in and train them and I do classes where I teach people that are wanna get into this field or just have a business that they wanna learn how to optimize it, but usually people want me to do it for them because there's a lot of work because what happens is you can put all these keywords on your website, Google doesn't care what you put on the website. They don't believe you are who you say you are without what are called backlinks. You have to build up the trust from Google. So you can put keywords all over your website, Google's not gonna rank you. You have to get other websites to talk about you. The more websites that talk about you, the more trust Google gives to you. And then they look at those keywords on your website but it doesn't work the other way around. You need to build backlinks. So what is a backlink?

18:28A backlink is a clickable link from another website that points to yours. So let's say you're reading an article on like the LAtimes.com and in there it says Brandon Leibouge and you click on it and he goes to my website, I'd be getting a backlink from the LAtimes.com. So the more websites that talk about you, the more trust Google is gonna give to you and then they're gonna make you hire the search results. And building backlinks is what takes a lot of time. That's probably what I spend like 80% of my time doing is trying to build backlinks, looking at my competitors' backlinks, trying to build relationships with other websites and just trying to get as many quality backlinks as possible because the more backlinks you have from relevant authoritative websites, the more trust Google is gonna give to you and the higher you're gonna be able to rank in the search engines. So here's a question. I've got a YouTube channel which I'm building up at the moment. If you're listening to this, please go to genuinely you with Gina Gardner and subscribe. If every one of the listeners each month subscribed, I'd have a couple of million subscribers

19:28which would be amazing. So please do that. But if I put my website in the description of my YouTube video, is that count as a backlink? That would be a backlink as long as the clickable link from another website that points to yours. So the thing is it comes down to relevancy is very important to Google. So who's linking to you should be related to you. So if you're getting backlinks from YouTube, Google is just gonna think that you're a video website or a social media website. So if you're websites about social media, great. Then you want backlinks from other websites related to social media, but let's say you're a restaurant. Then you want other websites that relate to food, to restaurants, to dining, to entertainment, and then it's somewhat related to what you're doing. That's what you want to link out to you. So the more relevant it is, the better off that backlink is gonna be for you. Okay, so we've got key words in backlinks. What else do we need to be thinking about for SEO? Yeah, I mean, there's so many ranking factors, but I was told people that it feels like a puzzle.

20:29There's a lot of pieces to the puzzle, but content is so very important. Having good original content on every page and then having building those backlinks. backlinks are probably one of the more important aspects of SEO and there's a lot of different ways to build backlinks. The thing is if you build the wrong type of backlinks, instead of ranking higher, Google is actually gonna drop you in rankings. So you have to be careful and go for quality backlinks. And what is the quality backlink? Quality backlink is just a backlink that comes from a site that's related to you. So figuring a restaurant and you're getting a backlink from a doctor, that's not gonna look good to Google. So I get other sites that relate to you. That's very, very important. If you do the wrong ones, unfortunately, you're just gonna drop you in ranking. So the best safest way to build backlinks is find your competitors. So there's tools. You have to pay for these tools. Unfortunately, they're not free, but you pay for these tools. You can throw any website into these tools and they'll show you all of their backlinks. And then one by one, you can look at all of your competitors' backlinks, find the ones that are relevant and authoritative and try to acquire those backlinks.

21:31So maybe one of your competitors got an article written on, you know, let's say like Forbes. And in there, it's like a quote from your competitor. Maybe you could reach out to the writer that wrote that article and ask them if they could potentially have you as a, in the article is providing a quote or something, but you gotta get creative. You can't just ask them for a background. You gotta provide some value. And the tools that I was talking about, you have to pay for the, there's three main ones. You just kind of pick one to buy all three of them, but pick one and use that. The either Atrefs is one really popular one. Moz is another popular one. Sam Rush is also kind of another popular one. So pick one of those tools. Buy it and then search on Google for your keywords. Do you already found that first page of Google and throw their website into those tools and look at all their backlinks? And that's really gonna move the needle and get you rank quicker. So that sounds like great advice. What strikes me in terms of the parallel in life is that those backlinks act as relationships and they've got to be relationships that are meaningful,

22:32that where there is a connection, a true connection. And I think that, you know, that again, if you're looking at the parallels in life, being seen within a relationship, for me, it comes back to being authentic. If you're trying to be something that you're not, you talked about, you know, having a link between a restaurant and a doctor, well, that gives you very different connotations, whereas if you are talking to a food critic or it's about the suppliers that the restaurant is using, I can see that that's a symbiotic relationship that is, which is truly meaningful. We're gonna go for a short break. Please don't go away. I want you to think about the websites that you have seen and the websites that you stay on because I don't think the average stay on a website is very long at all. And we're gonna spend a few minutes towards the end of the show looking at, you know, how do you keep people interested in your website

23:34and at the same time satisfy Google and the search engine? So don't go away. One hour pick up order? Got it. Thanks. We're out of ink and I have a big meeting today. And two boxes of twizzlers. Yeah. For the team. The team. Yeah. Team. Go team. Go team. Know what's better than overnight shipping? Free one hour pickup when you order online or on our app. Add Office Depot Office Mac. Welcome back to Brandon. How do you think that you keep people's interests and keep them on your website? Because my understanding and I'm prepared to be completely wrong about this is that, that how long people stay on your website also has some bearing on how successful and how far up the search engines that you go. Is that true or is that something that I have made up?

24:36No Google looks at what's called user experience. So once you imagine Google ranks you at the top position for a keyword. And then Google sees that a time someone goes to your website, they hit that back button. That's Google. Maybe you're not the most relevant and maybe you should be ranked number one. So Google might drop you down to position two and see how people behave and keep dropping you down. If people keep going to your website and hit that back button, that's a negative signals Google. So you want to try to avoid that, which is inevitable. I mean, most websites are almost half your traffic, no matter what is going to hit that back button and call that bounce rate. But there's ways to kind of reduce it and try to keep people on your website longer, which making sure your website loads quickly is one easy one that especially for mobile. If people don't want to wait for a website to load forever, especially on mobile people's attention span is a really short but essentially, whatever you see on the screen is called above the fold. Once you start scrolling or swiping, that's below the fold. And most people won't scroll either. So when they get to the website,

25:37whatever they see above the fold needs to resonate with them. Because if you have all this nice stuff below the fold, you'll lose majority of the people because they're not going to see that. So you have to have a value proposition on the top of your website on each page. Many people know what's in it for me. Like, when am I going to get out of using your product or service? Ultimately, people are selfish and they want to know, when am I going to get out of this website? They don't care how long you've been in business, all these accreditation and certifications that you've got. That's not really important to people at the moment. They just want to know, when am I going to get out of using your product or service? That maybe a couple bullet points or a video above the fold and a call to action. It needs to be above the fold. So the call to action means what do you want people to do? Do you want people to call you? Put your phone number up there. Feel on them to fill out a form. Make sure the forms right there. So they don't have to scroll down or if you want them to buy a product, have that add to cart, but right at the top of the website. So you can add to cart like Amazon. You don't have to scroll down to add to cart

26:38because Amazon is testing all the time. So they're A, B testing their website. So what that means is if I go to Amazon and you go to Amazon, it's going to look almost the same, but something's going to be slightly different where maybe the add to cart button might be up pixel or it might be changed a little bit. The color to see does this increase conversions or decrease conversions because there is no perfect website. You always want to be testing and Amazon is always testing to try to maximize that value of every single visitor, which that's what you could do to your website as well is test and try to optimize your website to get as many people to convert because there is no perfect website. It's all about just trial and error and testing, seeing what works. Great, if this works to get more conversions, use this new version of the add to cart button maybe move it up a little bit. Now that that works, now test that against something else and keep testing and never stop testing because that's really how you can optimize and maximize that value of every visitor. So if there are business owners or people

27:39who are thinking about starting a business who want to make sure that their website is up there and being seen, how do people get hold of you? So I actually create a special gift for everyone if they go to my website at secooptimizers.com. That's secooptimizers.com forward slash gift. Like to find that there along with my contact information and I've done up a bunch of classes I've done over the years so they could see step by step. How to do a lot of the stuff that we talked about and also if they want to book some time on my calendar I'm happy to check out their website from an SEO point of view for free. They can book some time on my calendar there and happy to check it out and give them some feedback. Well that's fabulous, thank you very much indeed. We would like to invite you to choose one of four projects that are supported by B1, G1, by one gift one. They're an amazing organisation that works globally and to support people who are in need.

28:41We have four projects at the moment and you can choose one of those and we'll donate on your behalf. And so the four projects at the moment are cleaning water, health, education and reforisting the planet, which of those four would you like to choose? I would say clean water is probably, I mean they're all imported but water is life and unfortunately most people don't have access to clean water and don't have water then you can't survive, water is important. So I would say if you could help out anyway possible with water that's such a big thing that feels really important that I try to help out as well after going or see the few years ago I saw like how different it is and how lucky we are to have clean water and most people don't have access to clean water and you need water to live. That's brilliant, thank you very much. And B1, G1 is an amazing organisation that is actually set up to help businesses give, create giving as part of their marketing as part of what they do.

29:43And every penny that you donate or every cent that you donate goes towards well-getted and well-managed projects. So that will be going on your behalf. I'm just to remember that we donate meals based on the number of listeners that we have. So please encourage other people to listen to. I'd love to hear from you. My email address is Gina G-I-N-A at Gina Gardiner G-A-R-D-I-N-E-R and friends and the word and is in full.com. That's Gina Gardiner and friends.com. Love to hear from you and if you've got a great story and you'd like to be on the show, then please do contact me. And also, as I said right at the beginning of the show, I'm building up my YouTube channel. So please do go to YouTube to genuinely you with Gina Gardiner and subscribe to the channel. There's lots and lots of videos there to help a whole range of different themes. So it just remains for me to say a huge thank you, Brandon,

30:46for your great contribution. And if you have got a website, then do go and check out his website and the amazing gift that he's offered. Thanks so much for joining me. See you on the next show, bye bye now. Thanks for listening to Gina Gardiner and friends. The show that helps you live a happier, more successful and fulfilling life. To learn more about Gina Gardiner, go to genuinely-u.com. If you would like to work with Gina or book her as a speaker, email her at gita at genuinely-u.com.