How To Turn SEO Traffic Into Leads and Sales With Brandon Leibowitz of SEO Optimizers

So trying to just piece it together and figure out like if someone’s searching, if you sell men’s tennis shoes, if you rank for the word shoes, that’s going to get you a lot of traffic. But most of those people don’t want men’s tennis shoes. If you rank for the word like men’s shoes, that’s better. But they still don’t really know what type of men’s shoe they want. They want sandals or they want dress shoes. 

 So those keywords are good. But the more broad keywords versus the transactional ones would be like these long tail keywords, keywords that are two or more words like men’s tennis shoes, much more targeted. It’s more buyer intent. It’s for people that want men’s tennis shoes, but you can even take it one step further and say like men’s tennis shoes, size ten, color white. It’s a really long keyword, but that person knows exactly what they want the size, the color, the style. 

 So that’s going to be more transactional, going to get more conversions.

Chad Franzen: 16:55

How can a B2B business determine whether its website is is attracting? You know, maybe maybe you just explained it the right visitors rather than just a lot of people are going to come stay there for two seconds and then bounce.

Brandon Leibowitz: 17:07

That’s where you got to look at the analytics and look at the data points. There’s Google Analytics or there’s other analytical tools out there. Doesn’t matter which one you use, but just being able to track everything and seeing how your website, how people behave on your website. Do people stay? How long do they stay for and or what pages have the higher bounce rate where people leave immediately because some pages might be performing really well and others might not.

So it’s not your whole website as a whole. It’s usually individual pages or topics or things like that that need to be tweaked and revamped. And then you could also look in Google Search Console and see how many of your pages get how many. So Google Analytics is for all your traffic. Google Search Console is for SEO specifically, and Google Search Console will show you which keywords are triggering you showing up in the search results. 

 So you could see if you’re showing up thousands of times for a keyword, but nobody’s clicking something’s off or you need to change some of your content around. Or, I mean, it could be a ton of different reasons why, but that’s where you kind of become a detective and try to figure out like, what’s going on and how can I fix this?

Chad Franzen: 18:24

So if you have, let’s say you get 20 clicks, 17 are from paid ads and they last five seconds and three are organic. Would you maybe say that in those last a minute? Would you say that those are more valuable clicks than the the paid ads clicks?

Brandon Leibowitz: 18:40

Yeah, I would say if they’re staying longer and they’re engaging, but ultimately we all care about conversion.

Chad Franzen: 18:47

So the sales, right? So if they, let’s say they stay, but let’s say everybody’s attracted to one page, but it doesn’t result in a conversion. Does that mean maybe that page is attractive in theory, but there’s something about it that needs to be changed to direct people more toward buying.

Brandon Leibowitz: 19:02

Yeah. That conversion rate optimization where making sure that whatever page landing on has that value proposition, a call to action, some reviews, maybe some more benefits at the top of the page, and just making sure that you give them as much information without making them scroll. If someone scrolls, then they’re interested, they want to learn more. And then that’s where you could introduce yourself and be like, hi, my name is Brandon. I’ve been doing SEO for 19 years, but you don’t start off with that because that’s not what sells people.

And just trying to you could a B test it and have half your traffic go to one page and half your traffic, go to another page, and then you could start testing to see what converts better, because little changes to your pages could have big impacts on conversions. And like Amazon is constantly a B testing their website. If we, if everyone listening right now went to Amazon and we look at the same product, it’s going to look similar to us, but they’re a B testing little things like maybe moving the add to cart button up a millimeter to see if that helps with conversions or changing the color of the button and just changing its gradient or just changing it a very slight amount because little things that we wouldn’t know. There is no perfect website, so we don’t know until we test.

Chad Franzen: 20:21

You kind of mentioned AI is definitely playing a factor now in SEO. So you have to really keep keep on top of what’s going on. What what role do you see artificial intelligence playing both now and in the future of digital search marketing?

Brandon Leibowitz: 20:37

I feel like AI is not going to go anywhere anytime soon. It’s just getting more and more, well, adopted people are still new to it, even though it’s been out for almost four years. But Google or people are just trying to figure out where do I want to search? Like, is AI good? Is it accurate?

Is it going to give me these AI hallucinations and make things up, which it does a lot of times, but it seems to be getting better now with more user data and more more accurate information, but it still makes things up all the time. And so people don’t fully trust it. But over time, I feel like it’s just going to take over everything. And that’s where I just got to adapt your, your digital marketing strategy to figure out where your audience is, because there’s new platforms always emerging, like for B2B or in general, like there’s like Yelp, which is a great one for me to promote myself and share my content on there and get reviews and have other business owners see that. I’ve been around for a while and it helps build that trust. 

 So now I’m like, all right, I need to figure out how to rank on Yelp or how to figure out how to rank on fill in the blank TripAdvisor or Amazon or any of these platforms where you’re searching, there’s ways to optimize, and it’s just trying to figure out where your audience is and making sure that you’re really optimizing for those platforms.

Chad Franzen: 21:56

So if somebody is looking for a product or a service and they go to ChatGPT rather than Google to to figure out maybe what’s best for them or for to look for a recommendation. Is there something that B2B businesses need to do differently?

Brandon Leibowitz: 22:11

For the most part, it’s pretty similar in what they’re looking for. For SEO best practices, making sure you do all the the normal SEO tactics like keyword research and then changing the coding, doing all the technical SEO and then building the backlinks, building trust, getting mentioned on other people’s websites. The more third party sites that mention you, the more popular you seem, the more trustworthy you’re going to seem. And that’s going to get you to move up the rankings for search and AI platforms. But backlinks are really integral because nowadays with AI, anybody can just go on to ChatGPT and say, write me 50 blog posts about this topic.

So content never really was what ranks you. Content is important, but search engines just don’t believe your content. They don’t trust you. And these third party sites that mention you build that trust and get you to then start moving up the rankings along with schema and all these other technical things that need to be in there trying to answer people’s questions. But that’s all been around for over a decade, and that’s all just general SEO, best practices, FAQ style content. 

 All the stuff that now has become more popular has been around for a long time.

Chad Franzen: 23:27

What’s the best way to get backlinks if you’re not like a big, huge business?

Brandon Leibowitz: 23:32

Backlinks are where I spend probably most of my time for myself and my clients is building backlinks. And one way is by doing what I’m doing right now, being a guest on other people’s podcasts. So back in 2020, when the world shut down, I would teach classes in person. I couldn’t teach them in person anymore. So I had to teach them on Zoom and Zoom and record the audio and video separately.

And so I took the audio and made my own little makeshift podcast to me, teaching classes. But after doing that for a few months, somebody asked if I want to be a guest on their podcast. And that got me thinking in terms of SEO, like, if I’m a guest, they’re going to publish me on their website. Google’s going to see that another website is mentioning me and that’s going to build a backlink. So I’ve kind of went all in on that and been a guest on over 300 podcasts and just actually published a book a few months ago about being a guest and how it helps your SEO, because a lot of people don’t realize SEO value being a guest on podcasts, they look for the social media content or being a subject matter expert or tapping into someone else’s audience. 

 But the real benefit that I or one of the bigger benefits that I’ve seen is by getting these backlinks, and that’s helped grow my business exponentially. But backlinks are really tricky. There’s tons of ways to build backlinks, but you just got to get creative and figure out, how can I get someone to say yes to publishing my website on their website? If you just ask for backlinks, it doesn’t really work. But if you offer something of value, like your time to be a guest on your show, or if you sponsor like trade shows, or if there’s tons of different ways also looking at your competitors. 

 So there are tools that will show me backlinks. I could see your backlinks using these tools. You could see my backlinks. If you were my competitor, I would take your website, put it in a tool, look at your backlinks, and then one by one, reach out to the sites that are mentioning you if they make sense, if they’re relevant and authoritative, and see if I could get myself a backlink, like maybe you’re interviewed on a website or platform, I could pitch myself to that journalist or website to see if they want to interview me, or maybe sponsored an event or a trade show, or you speak at classes or like promote classes. I teach classes in person, and when I teach those classes, they’ll usually write up about write me up on their website. 

 So then I could see places my competitors maybe teach and try to try to kind of kind of like we were talking about earlier being a detective and reverse engineering your competition and seeing what they’ve done.

Chad Franzen: 26:12

Can having your I mean, obviously you’re, I’m, I work for Rise25 where we do podcasts. Can having your own podcast help with backlinks, or is it better to. Or is it just more efficient to go on somebody else’s.

Brandon Leibowitz: 26:24

I actually started my podcast just to get backlinks because if I create my own podcast, I’m going to get on Spotify, on iTunes, on all these different platform podcast directories, but those platforms, like they’re okay. They’re not the same as getting published on someone’s website. So when I do guest podcasting, at first I was happy to be on anyone’s podcast. If you just shared it on YouTube or Facebook, I was like, great, gives me some visibility. But then I realized I want to really focus on podcasts that have a website that publish each episode on their website.

Then another website is linking out to me because social media, it doesn’t really count the same as a website, because Google knows that you could just create a profile on YouTube or Facebook and add your link there. It’s not that difficult getting another website to add your link is extremely difficult.

Chad Franzen: 27:20

So hosting your own. So most likely your own podcast would not appear on somebody else’s website. So being a guest, being a guest is really valuable in that sense. That definitely makes sense. How should a founder decide which marketing activities to handle internally and which to outsource?

Brandon Leibowitz: 27:38

It just depends on how much time you have or how big of a team, because if you’re just a solo entrepreneur, then you should start delegating because, I mean, it took me a while to do that, but once I started letting go of things that I’m not a subject matter expert in, it’s helped me grow and become much more efficient and given me a lot of my time back to be a guest on people’s podcasts, because this takes time. And if you don’t have time, you’re like, why am I going to spend 30 minutes or an hour on someone’s podcast when I need to finish all this work? And it’s a lot better just to let go of the things that just take up a lot of your time. But that’s where you gotta look internally. If you want to start building your own team internally, you could do that, but that means you have to learn it and hire people that know what they’re doing, and then you have to monitor over them versus just going with an agency that specializes it.

You could kind of rest assured that you’re in good hands for the most part. I’m not saying all agencies are good. Some are hit or miss. I have some horror stories that I get from clients, but in general, you could pretty much trust them to be experts in what they’re doing.

Chad Franzen: 28:44

Are there marketing metrics? Maybe you’ve covered this marketing metrics that help founders avoid wasting money on activities that do not support growth.

Brandon Leibowitz: 28:53

I mean, the ultimate one is the conversions, just looking at traffic to conversions. But there’s so many other metrics in between that that are good indications of what’s working and what’s not working, but ultimately got set up that conversion tracking and Google Analytics where you’re tracking your sales and your leads and your phone calls. That way you can really see what is working and driving the bottom line, which is getting you more revenue. And there’s tons of other metrics, though, in Google Analytics and Google Search Console that I just recommend people just play around with them, play around with those tools, click on everything. You’re not really going to break anything.

You’re just going to learn about your traffic and how it behaves and how your audience behaves on your website, which is going to help you then make statistically informed decisions about how to better optimize that website to get more of that bottom line conversions.

Chad Franzen: 29:43

Okay. Sounds good. Hey Brandon, it was great to talk to you. Very informative and very interesting. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Brandon Leibowitz: 29:50

Thank you for having me on.

Chad Franzen: 29:51

So long everybody.

Outro: 29:52

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