Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host Roberta.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating, and a review.

Now, when it comes to communication, one of the most important things is how you craft your message and communicate it to the rest of the world, so that they understand exactly what it is that you do and how you help them.

Today, my guest, Brandon Leibowitz, who is a digital marketing specialist, is here to help us with just that.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Brandon.

Hi, thank you for having me on today.

You are welcome.

And thank you for being here from sunny California, California, I'm guessing.

Yeah, from Los Angeles, California.

Oh, okay.

Say hi to Universal Studios.

So tell us a little bit about yourself.

My name is Brandon Leibowitz, and I've been involved with digital marketing since 2007, helping people get more traffic to their website using different strategies such as search engine optimization, social media marketing, helping out with paid ads, and just trying to help people get more visibility and exposure online.

I got my degree in business marketing and just kind of fell into this role back in 2007.

Wasn't planning on doing digital marketing, but first job I got out of school said, we want you to help out with digital.

And I said, I don't know much about it, but they said, don't worry, we don't know much about it either.

We're going to take you to classes, workshops, seminars, and learn alongside with you.

And after working there for a few months, just realized everyone's probably going to have a website in the future.

And there's a lot of different ways to get traffic.

But SEO is just a way to get free traffic.

So I really focused on that over the years, trying to tap into that free traffic from Google, working at different advertising agencies as a director of SEO and before work or after work on my lunch breaks, I would work on my own company and built it up to where I was able to eventually quit my job and focus solely on this and been doing that ever since.

Since 2007, that's before social media became as big as it is today.

How did you have the foresight to know that, hey, wait a minute, that there's going to come a time when this is all that everybody's looking for online?

I mean, they had Facebook around back then.

There's MySpace, there's Reddit, and all these social Web 2.0 type of sites that were around, that were gaining trajectory.

And I just thought that everyone's probably going to have a website in the future, and just stick with this digital marketing.

Wasn't planning on doing social or any of that stuff.

I just thought people are going to have a website and figure out how to market themselves online.

Now, when it comes to marketing yourselves online, there's a lot of ads that say, Oh, I'm going to help you with your Facebook ads.

I'm going to help you with the Instagram ads.

But you talk about Google ads and you say that they are better than those two.

Why is that?

Well, it just depends what you're doing.

So most of the time when people are on social media, they're not looking to make a purchase.

They're just looking to connect with friends and family.

And when they see those ads, you're just interrupting them.

And people don't want those ads there.

And you're just targeting people based off interests.

So you could say, Oh, someone like I'm a realtor.

I want to find people that just got married, that live in the city, but that doesn't mean they want to buy a house.

They might want to buy one in the future or in the past, but it doesn't mean they want to right now.

But on Google, someone searching homes for sale near me, they're looking right now.

They have that intent, that buyer intent, which is the biggest thing is intent.

Social media has no intent.

Google has intent where people are looking, and if you want sales, then you want to do Google.

If you're just trying to get your name out there and get brand awareness, then social media is great.

But if you're trying to actually get sales, leads, phone calls, whatever that converging goal is, then you probably want to stick with Google Ads or anywhere where people actually search, because when they're searching, they're looking, versus where they're browsing with friends and family, they're not looking to make a purchase.

I mean, sometimes they might, but most of the time, they're not really looking like, most of the people are not going to go on Facebook looking for a dentist.

They're probably going to go on Google looking for a dentist, or Yelp looking for a dentist, and then check them out on social media to make sure they're a real company, put a face behind the company, make sure they're real, legitimate, credible, have reviews, have status updates, connect with them, you can see what other people say about them, so it builds trust for people.

So social is really meant to put a face behind the company.

It's not really meant to get leads.

It's evolved over the years to pay to play platforms, to get leads, but really it's to put a face behind the company because you can buy off a website, and you're just like, who is this website?

Maybe you go looking for a new TV, and you're like, I want to buy a TV, and then you see Best Buy ranks there, Amazon ranks there, but maybe Bob's TV ranks there, and you're like, who's Bob's TV?

But Bob's TV might have been around for 50 years, 80 years, and it's like a physical store, and they're a real legitimate business, but you're just like, I don't know who they are.

Social media puts a face behind that company saying, oh, look, Bob's TV has a Facebook, you can ask us questions, you can read reviews, so you can see that we're legitimate, just like Amazon or Best Buy is legitimate, Bob's TV is legitimate, but you probably have never heard of them, so social really helps build that trust up.

So if Bob's TV places Google Ads, so people search for them, obviously, they would need to have a website, because you know how sometimes they say, oh, websites are dead, as long as you have a private Facebook group, you're going to attract people who are looking for your services.

What do you think of that?

I mean, Facebook is on decline, so less and less people are using it, and what if someone wants to make a purchase and they don't have a Facebook page, then you just lock them out.

Not everyone has Facebook, so you're kind of excluding a lot of people by just saying, oh, you can only buy on my Facebook page, and Facebook takes a big percentage of those sales if you sell online through Facebook Marketplace and things like that.

Plus, you're just renting space off Facebook.

They could take you down anytime, and you just lost your entire business, whereas your website, you own that.

No one could take your website down.

I mean, your hosting could go down, but you still own your website.

That's yours forever.

Facebook is not yours.

Facebook is Facebook's.

You're just helping Facebook get more traffic, helping Facebook make more money.

You're not really helping yourself out by having a Facebook group.

I mean, a Facebook group is good.

The Facebook group is to get people off of Facebook onto your website, not the other way around.

You don't want people going from your website to Facebook because you got to think what's on the Facebook page.

There's ads on the Facebook group.

There's all these distractions.

There's notifications.

There's friend requests.

So if they are on that Facebook group or page, they're probably going to get distracted and leave that page and forget about you pretty quickly because there's too many distractions on Facebook.

Is this similar to Instagram?

Because I know some people say, oh, I'll help you with your Instagram ads.

You know how you scroll on Instagram, you'll see about three of your friends' posts, and then the next one is an ad.

And usually it's something that probably you've searched before.

How effective are those?

Well, remarketing ads are very, very effective.

So if you go on Amazon, you look at a product, you don't buy it.

Those ads follow you around.

Those are really effective.

I mean, it's called like cart abandoners, people that don't make a conversion.

And I would 100% recommend to everyone run remarketing ads, because these are all warm leads.

People have been to your website, they know who you are, and you can run remarketing on Google.

You can run it on Gmail, on YouTube, on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest.

And that's what I do is I run remarketing ads everywhere, so you stay top of mind, because you need about five touch points before someone actually trusts you to make a purchase.

So if you're selling a high-ticket item, they go to your website, they don't make a purchase, but they see your ads, following them around all over the internet, keeps you top of mind.

And Google is going to be the best, because Google is partnered with every website on the internet that shows banner ads, except for social media.

Google is blocked from all social media.

But if you want your ads to show on Yahoo, on Fox, CNN, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, it doesn't matter what website that your visitors are going to, as long as there's ads there and they've been to your website, those ads will follow them around on any website they go to through Google Ads.

Or if they're on Facebook, then you can run Facebook, or Instagram, you can run Instagram.

But those are limited.

Like Google runs the internet and has partnered with almost every website on the internet.

Like if you want your ad to be on Yahoo, you can get your ad on Yahoo through Google for a couple cents.

So if I Google something, okay, and the search is up 6 billion, the 6 billion search, what did they do so wrong compared to the first search that appears that they are last on the list of suggestions?

If someone's not on that ranking on Google, then they're not doing SEO properly.

So you have to do search engine optimization to rank on Google.

So if they're not ranking, they're not doing SEO, or their competitors are doing a better job of SEO than they are.

A lot of us are not tech nerds, so would you like to explain that to us?

SEO is search engine optimization, and that means ranking websites on Google.

So when you search on Google, there's ads at the top.

Those are all paid ads, and right below the ads are the organic listings, and SEO is getting you in the organic free listings.

What are some key things that I should follow in order to appear at the top of the key listings?

There are over 200 ranking factors to rank on Google, but I would say one of the more important ones is adding more text to your website.

The more text you have on every single page on your website, the easier it is for Google to read and understand and know what keywords you're targeting, because they can't read images, they can't read videos, they can't understand audio yet.

They're getting better at it, but they need text.

The more text, the more they're going to understand and know what you're targeting and be able to rank you for the correct keywords.

But you have to have text on every single page on your website, not just the homepage, but every page.

If you want to rank on Google, needs to have content on it.

It's so very important.

Speaking of keywords, how will I know that these are the keywords I should use in my website descriptions?

Well, you want to do keyword research using tools like the Google Keyword Planner.

So you go make a list of keywords that you want to rank for or that you think you want to rank for, and then you go to the Google Keyword Planner, put them into that tool.

It's a free tool from Google, and it will show you how many people actually search for that keyword every single month.

Plus, it will give you a couple hundred other variations of that keyword, synonyms, plurals, variations of it, and it will show you how many people search for those.

So you could go through that list and find out which keywords seem relevant and then incorporate them into your website if they're relevant.

But don't take every keyword.

You have to focus on which ones have buyer intent and have a decent amount of search volume.

That's going to really help out.

You spoke earlier about competitors.

How would you know how your competitors use SEO?

Just search on Google for your keywords.

So go to Google, search for your keywords on Google, see who's on that first page of Google.

Make note of all those websites.

Skip the ads.

The ads are different, but make note of all those websites on that first page of Google.

And then using different tools like Ahrefs or Moz or SEMrush, you have to pay for these tools, but they'll show you all of their backlinks.

And backlinks are what brings websites.

Backlinks are clickable links from another website that points to yours.

So if you're reading an article on the latimes.com, and in there it says Brandon Leibowitz, and then you click on that and it 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 gives to you, and the higher they rank you, because they don't believe you are who you say you are.

They don't care what keywords you put on the website.

Anyone can build a website nowadays and say, like, I'm a dentist in Los Angeles.

Google's like, are you really a dentist?

We don't want to send people to your dentist office and find out that you're not there, that you don't exist, it's a bad user experience.

So they want to see that if I'm a dentist, I should be on WebMD, I should be on Wikipedia, I should be on Yelp, I should be on yellowpages.com, I should be on MapQuest, I should be on Google Maps, Bing Maps, Apple Maps, all these websites.

The more websites that you're on, the more trust Google is going to give to you.

And then they look at the keywords on your website.

That doesn't work the other way around.

Without backlinks, it's pretty much impossible to rank on Google.

A lot of people are not aware of the backlinks that you just mentioned.

So what can they do if I'm saying, okay, this is the first time I'm creating my website so that I tell people these are my services, where will I go in order to establish that, wait a minute, I need to list on MapQuest and all of the things that you mentioned?

Yeah, that's where you do the competitor research.

Search on Google for your competitor or for your keywords.

See who's on that first page of Google, make note of all those websites, and then throw them into those different tools like Ahrefs or Moz or SEMrush, and they'll show you all their backlinks.

And then one by one, you could start reaching out to those sites because if they're ranked on that first page of Google, they're doing something right, and it's more than likely because of those backlinks.

And if you start building those same or similar backlinks, Google's going to reward you with the same rankings that your competitors are getting.

But you have to look at your competitors and use those different tools.

Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, you just pick one.

They're all pretty much the same, but you have to pay for one.

So it doesn't matter which one you use, but you just got to pick one, use that, and that's going to let you see everything your competition is doing.

Nothing is hidden.

I could see everything you're doing.

You could see everything that I'm doing.

Nothing is hidden but digital marketing.

So if I want to drive traffic to my website, as you said, and I write all the keywords, I do all the stuff that you talk about today, let's use the dentist example.

So sort of like they show a map, and then they show a few businesses that are within your area, within Los Angeles.

They list about five or ten of those.

Just three on the maps.

Oh, three on the maps.

Yeah, and then ten organic websites, and they might have four ads at the top, or three, or two, or one, or zero.

The ads are kind of random.

They might have three ads at the bottom, or two, or one, or zero, but in between those are the ten organic results, the websites, they'll be maps, but there will only be three listings on the maps, maybe four if they show an ad.

Did those listings pay for that space to show up when you say near me, or is it all organic?

If it says ad, they're paying.

If it doesn't say ad, then it's organic.

It's not going to be all ads.

If Google is all ads, no one would go on Google.

Everyone would just be like, I'm going on Bing or Yahoo or DuckDuckGo because no one wants to see a page full of ads.

So there will be a couple of ads, and then there will be a lot of organic results because they can't just have a page full of ads.

That's a bad user experience, and nobody wants to go on a website that's just full of ads.

You're going to be like, nope, I'm going on another website.

That's unbiased because I don't want to see what people are paying for.

Yeah, we like buying, but we don't want to be sold to.

So those people who pay ads, like when it starts for something, and then they are the first two that appear, those are ads, and then it becomes the organic traffic.

That ad space, is it just the two companies?

Did they pay more money than other companies in that same industry?

That's why they appear as the top two ads, and then you find the organic pages.

Because usually it's about two, and then the organic, and then about two at the bottom as well, before you go to the next page.

It's actually zero to four ads.

It could be zero ads, one, two, three, or four at the top.

It's all random.

The bottom, it might be zero, one, two, or three ads.

So the top will have at most four, the bottom will have at most three, right now, but everything changes.

So who knows what's going to happen in the future, by the time being at most four at the top and most three at the bottom.

And then there might be one ad on the maps.

So does that mean if you are the top, before even the organic shopping, you have paid, how is the payment?

Is it you pay more, you're going to appear first?

Or is it universal fees?

It gets kind of complicated.

So it's whoever pays the most, but also they look at ad relevancy, click-through rate, user experience and landing page.

So if you say you'll pay $5, I'll pay $5.10.

Usually I'd rank higher, but if your website is more optimized, then Google is going to say, okay, you're paying $5, we're going to rank you because you're more optimized.

Even though I'm willing to pay more, Google wants to show who's more optimized.

So you have to have some optimization, making sure your keywords are in the ad, in the URL, in the text, on the landing page, make sure you have a good click-through rate, all that goes into it.

So they have their algorithm.

It's not just whoever spends the most.

It's a bunch of other variables that go into their algorithm for the paid ads.

Algorithm, a word that a lot of us non-tech people are so afraid of.

When it comes to YouTube, you know how you search for something.

And if I want to post a video, I've been advised that, okay, before you title your video, look at how for that topic, what is the most searched way of titling the YouTube video?

Instead of saying how to be a great public speaker, it could be how to be a good public speaker.

That could be at the top of the search.

So I must change my video and title it like that, like the first thing that appeared.

What do you think of that?

Oh yeah, definitely.

You want to do keyword research.

You have to always do keyword research.

You don't want to just throw keywords in there, thinking those are the best you need to do keyword research through like the Google Keyword Planner for SEO, or YouTube has a keyword research tool for YouTube.

So definitely, definitely spine your competitors, research your competitors, analyze them and then take those keywords, throw them into the different tools to see how many people actually search for that keyword every single month.

Because just because they're ranked up there doesn't necessarily mean it's the best keyword.

It probably is, but it doesn't mean it.

That's where you got to do your own research and due diligence to make sure it actually is a good keyword.

And you know on Instagram you have hashtags?

Here's the perception some of us have.

If I hashtag the word communication, it's going to show communication skills or communicate and all the suggestions and it will show how many people search for that word on Instagram.

Do I pick the one with the highest search numbers as a hashtag?

Because that's what we do.

Definitely not.

You have to go after intent.

A lot of people throw back Thursday, Motivational Monday, all that stuff, but that doesn't mean anything.

Or one word hashtags are really bad.

Communication, what does that mean?

It can mean a ton of different things, but communication skills, that means they're looking to improve the communication skills.

They actually want to use or learn more about what you're doing, but communication can mean so many things.

You have to think about intent behind those searches.

If it's just one word, those are the worst keywords.

You never want to use a one word or hashtag.

Don't want to use one word.

Two or more words, long tail keywords or long tail hashtags.

Less people are using it, but the people using it have intent.

I could use a hashtag, SEO.

It's good, but what does that mean?

It could mean like, what is SEO?

How do I do SEO?

It means so many different things, but if I'm doing SEO classes, I want to put like SEO class, SEO classes, SEO courses, SEO training.

Less people are going to be using them, but the people looking for that actually want to learn more and take my classes.

So it's all about intent.

You don't want to just rank for any keyword just to get traffic or just get followers because that's not going to do anything.

You want people to actually make a purchase.

That's the ultimate goal.

Getting followers is good, but that doesn't result in sales.

Getting traffic to your website is good, but if they're not buying, that doesn't do any good for you.

You have to have targeted people that have intent.

I have been doing this all wrong.

And if you think about the fact that even Facebook now has hashtags other than Instagram, you got Twitter hashtagging.

You've got even TikTok.

TikTok mostly works on hashtags.

So a lot of us always look for, okay, in this word, this is the highest number of hashtags for this word.

So let me pick that in relation to my post, obviously.

So that's what we've been doing all along thinking, oh, the more people search for it, then the more there's going to be traffic coming here.

But also the more competitive it becomes too.

So the more people, the more general broad keyword or hashtags, the more competitive it is.

So you're going to have a thousand people maybe posting pictures or videos with that hashtag every hour, whereas the long tail, the two or more words, might only have five or ten people posting with that hashtag.

So less competition means you're going to show and get more exposure to people that actually care about what you're offering.

You got to think about the user.

If you're looking for your product or service, what would you use?

If you're looking for yours, would you go to Instagram and type in communicate?

Probably not.

You're probably put something, two or three words.

Like when you search on Google, most people never just put one word in there, unless you're trying to figure out like, what does this word mean?

There's like a dictionary, but other than that, people don't really search one word, words or hashtags.

It's two, three, four, five words, 10 words.

The more words in it, the more targeted it is.

Like someone searching on Google for men's shoes.

What does that mean?

It means so many different things, but if someone searches for men's Nike tennis shoes, size 10, color white, I mean, that's a really specific search keyword.

Not many people are going to be searching for it, but the people searching for that, they know exactly what size shoe, what color, what brand.

They're ready to make a purchase.

Someone searching for men's shoes, they're at the upper funnel where they're just browsing around.

They don't know what type of shoe they want.

They just know they want something for men.

They don't know if they want tennis shoes, dress shoes, running shoes.

Who knows?

There's no intent.

And in that men's shoes example, so that means my website, if I'm selling men's shoes, I must have those keywords, men's shoes, and then have a picture maybe, and then say color black size 10.

So I'm more likely to show up in the search.

It's going to pick those up.

Yeah.

If you don't have it on your website, then Google's not going to know that you're trying to target it.

So you have to have that content on your page.

What other advice can you give us?

I've been doing this all wrong.

What other advice can you give someone who has a website?

If they're thinking, okay, I just started having a website.

I just created one.

Where do I go next in order to have this SEO?

Build backlinks.

Build backlinks sooner than later, because backlinks take a lot of time to build.

It takes a lot of time for Google to trust you.

And the sooner you start building backlinks, the sooner you start getting traffic.

But if you don't build backlinks until six months, a year later, you're going to have to, it's all a waiting game.

I tell people even before you build your website, when you just have your URL, start building backlinks.

Because SEO takes about six months or more to take effect because of the backlinks.

The backlinks are what ranks websites.

And then secondly, once I've done the backlinks, what do I do next?

The keywords.

Oh no, the backlinks are never done.

You're always going to be building new backlinks because to Google, a normal website would always be getting backlinks.

So if Google sees that you build a bunch of backlinks and it stops, Google thinks that you went out of business.

You have to always be building backlinks.

Backlinks are how Google's algorithm started.

That's how Google became popular.

Because they rank websites based on backlinks.

So it's really important to build backlinks and making sure that you have a good, strong backlink profile and keep building new backlinks.

And then you have to optimize your website because once you get Google to trust you, they're going to look at the keywords on your website to figure out what keywords to rank you for.

So that's where you got to have the keywords and all the technical kind of coding places on your website, which is a little technical.

I don't know how technical you want to get.

If you add content, just text to your website.

That's easy enough without having to go into the coding and change like a title tag or meta description or schema or alt tags or site maps.

And all those really technical things which help out.

But the content, the text on the page is so very important.

If you just have a bunch of images, Google is going to struggle.

They can't really read images.

They need you to supply them with text.

I know you wanted to talk a lot more about Google, but I can ask you a Twitter question.

I have been advised that if I post my tweet and I write something and then I pick the hashtag, one of the extra hashtags I should have, even though it's not related to my tweet, is one of the ones that are currently trending.

Is that true?

No, that is the worst idea ever because what if the president is trending all the time?

So you could put the president in there, and what's that going to get you?

A bunch of random people that are looking for the president.

But unless you're selling something that's trending, great.

But if you're not selling something that's trending, then putting hashtags that have no relevancy is going to get you followers that have no interest in your product or service.

Remember, you want to get sales.

Traffic and followers don't do anything.

You want sales and you need to find people that want to use your product or service.

Someone searching for a trending hashtag, they're just looking for viral stuff.

They're not looking for your product.

It's entertainment to them.

They just want to see what's going on.

Imagine you're selling tennis shoes and then you put in there Obama.

It's going to be like, why did you put Obama?

Today, the view was trending.

So you're looking for men's shoes.

You're a guy.

The next hashtag, the view, which is a woman's talk show, which has zero relevance to you.

Well, I've never met a man who watches the view.

So you put your stuff, your communication skills and all of that.

And then, oh, somebody advised me to write the trending hashtag.

So I write the view.

It didn't make sense to me, but I thought, hey, I'm not a techie.

Maybe this person knows what they're doing.

It sounds like they might unfortunately not know what they're doing.

You have to think about the user.

Ultimately, take a step back and pretend if you're looking for your proctor service, does this make sense?

If not, don't do it.

What last word of wisdom would you give to us when it comes to SEO?

Just to be patient.

It takes time with digital marketing and SEO and everything, especially SEO takes time.

So be patient.

Don't expect immediate results.

If you want immediate traction, run paid ads.

That will get you traffic right away.

But SEO is more of a long-term play where it's going to get you traffic indefinitely.

But it takes time to get up there.

So a lot of people get discouraged when they don't see those rankings coming in.

And I always tell people just be patient, keep working it.

And over time, you're going to slowly start seeing yourself moving up, getting more traffic and getting more traffic.

But it's not immediate.

It does take time.

Words of wisdom from Brandon Leibowitz, the digital marketing specialist.

Thank you so much, Brandon, for being here today.

Thank you for having me on.

And I did create a special gift for all your listeners.

If they want to check out special gifts, if they go to my website at seooptimizers.com, that's seooptimizers.com forward slash skip, they could find that there along with my contact information, a bunch of classes I've done over the years.

I've thrown up for free so they could see step by step how to do a lot of this stuff.

And they could watch those anytime all there for free.

Thank you very much.

We love free gifts and especially this one is very helpful because tons of us have websites, some of the stuff we've been doing it all wrong.

So this has been very helpful.

We're going to search those gifts for sure.

Thank you so much, Brandon.

Thank you for having me on today.

My pleasure.

Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review, and we'll be with you next time.

Bye.