Outrank the Big Dogs: How Brandon Leibowitz Cracked Google’s Code

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Make sure to check out the show notes for access to our workshops and exclusive 12-person mastermind. All right, let's go ahead and jump into today's show. Welcome back to Grow Your Impact, Income, and Influence, the number one show helping you reach millions. If we're talking about millions of website visitors, you're going to want to tune into today's show. If you've been writing blogs, if you've been posting on social.

If you've been trying to drive traffic to your site and you can't figure out how to get more traffic, this show is for you. I'm joined by Brandon Lebowitz today. And Brandon built a website for one of his customers that actually outranked all of the government websites when it came to insurance. Pretty spectacular feat. He's going to tune us in, show us behind the curtain of how you get your site to rank. Brandon, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well. Thank you for having me on. Hey, it is my pleasure. So let's just jump right into it. How did you get into this? You've actually been in the SEO and kind of digital marketing game for a long time now. I just fell into it back in 2007. Wasn't planning on it, but graduated from college, got my degree in business marketing. And one of the first jobs I was offered was to do SEO, which I didn't really know much about it.

Company was new to it as well and said, we're just going to learn with you taking like classes and workshops and seminars and did that for a few months and just realized this is probably the future i should probably just stick with this digital marketing stuff i think everyone's going to have a website and back then i was helping out with like social media email paid ads seo and it all works to get traffic i just focused more on seo because seo is just a way to get free traffic and

who doesn't want free traffic so over the years, I just worked at different advertising agencies as a director of SEO. And before work, after work, on my lunch breaks, I work on my own company and eventually built it up to where I was able to quit my job and been doing that ever since, just helping people get that free traffic. I mean, that's pretty awesome. That is living the dream for yourself, first off, working for yourself.

But you're doing it through providing a service that most people cannot understand. Most people are like, I don't understand why I'm not ranking further up.

I don't understand why my blogs don't get any traffic. I don't understand. I'm putting my heart and soul into this. So let's jump into some of the strategies and tactics. Let's look at it from a 30,000-foot view. What should people be thinking of generally when it comes to SEO? There are lots of little things that matter, but the few big things that really have an impact, one is content on your website, the content meaning text. Google loves text.

They struggle with images and videos and audio. They're getting much better at it, but they still prefer text. And the more text you put on every single page of your website, not just the homepage, but any page that you want to rank, needs to have text on it. A couple hundred words.

The more, the better. that's one thing that doesn't require coding and doesn't require any technical knowledge but you want to put those put more content and research keywords so figure out what keywords do people actually search for that way you go for the high search volume keywords using tools like the google keyword planner which is a free tool from google and it'll show you actually how many people search for your keyword every single month that way you can figure out which

one is better like a singular or plural, we'll have a difference. Like one of my clients, their personal injury law firm, they want to rank for personal injury lawyers, which gets 20,000 searches a month in Los Angeles, but personal injury lawyer singular gets 200,000 searches every single month. Just by removing one letter, you get 10 times your traffic. So keyword research, and then put those keywords on the website.

Okay, so questions on keywords and ranking. If we have a site that is not ranking very well right now, should we go after the major keywords? Or I've heard like long tail keywords are definitely the better way to go to start. Do you have a preference on that? Yeah, you always want to go for long tail. Don't go for broad, which would be like a one or two word keywords, because those ones, they're very competitive and there's not much intent behind it.

The longer the keyword, the more words in that keyword, the more buyer intent, because then they're really searching for something very specific. And even though it might only get a few searches every single month, it still might not be a worse keyword. But going for the high search volume keywords, the keywords that get the most searches every single month from the Google Keyword Planner might be good, but I always check to search that keyword.

So anything that looks like a good keyword, I always take that keyword and search it in Google and see who ranks on that first page of Google. And if I see just a bunch of big corporations and I'm a startup, I'm going I'd be like, nope, too competitive. Yeah, so that's kind of, or if I see ads, if you see ads, that already tells you that people are spending money because they can't get up there organically.

And that tells me that it's going to probably be a competitive keyword that maybe I should skip it for now.

Eventually I want to target it, but first I want to go for that low hanging fruit, the one that's going to move up the fastest. And that's the long tail, really niche keywords. So do you have, if somebody's getting started, how, or if you're starting to work with the business, How do you determine what those keywords are? How do like, do you have a tool or a planner?

I know you said use Google, like Google keyword planner, you can type the words in, but it doesn't actually give you the long tail. Are there tools out there that would help us identify those? I like to really just search on Google for my keywords and then see who ranks on the first page of Google and skipping over the ads, looking at the organic results. And if you want to quickly just find them, you could look at that blue clickable link, which is the SEO title tag.

That's usually where the websites are going to put their main keywords. And if they're on that first page of Google, they probably did some keyword research, at least hopefully they did. Maybe they got lucky because they just rank sometimes, that happens. But what I look for is trends. Do I see everyone's using a singular or plural or what variations, like how are they ordering and structuring the words?

And I write them all down and then I use tools like the Google Keyword Planner, or you could buy a tool like Ahrefs or Moz or SEMrush to do keyword research. But you kind of Google Keyword Planner is from Google and it's pretty good for the most part and it's free. So you don't have to worry about it. But these other tools are more for backlinks to check on where other people are linking out to you.

Okay, so you just touched on the next big thing that I think a lot of people have heard of is backlinks. How, like backlinks seem like they were a thing from 2005.

What's going on with backlinks here in 2024 and going into 2025? No, it's all about quality versus quantity with the backlinks because backlinks are a way for other websites to kind of vote for you, saying we trust you. It's another website that links out to you and Google sees that as a trust signal, even though it's been spammed over the years. I haven't really seen websites rank without backlinks. Almost every website that I've ever seen that's ranking at least has one or a couple backlinks.

The more competitive the keywords are, the more backlinks you need to get, but it's all about quality, not quantity. And a quality backlink really just means it comes from a site that's related to what you're doing. So if you're just selling clothing and you're getting backlinks from a restaurant, that looks a little strange, but you're selling clothing and you're getting fashion websites and other websites that are somewhat related to what you're doing, that's what Google wants to see.

So how do you go about getting those? What is the best way to get quality backlinks over quantity? That is where it gets tricky. There's lots of strategies to build backlinks, but you got to go for the quality ones and you got to find real websites that are really niche related to what you're doing. And then authority, like how big, how popular is this website?

If I give you a backlink from my website, it's a good backlink, but it's not the same as like the Wall Street Journal or entrepreneur or business.com. So the bigger the website, the more SEO value. And there's tools that will let you look at any website's backlinks. You have to buy one of them. They're not free, but I pick either Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush. Those are the more popular ones.

And then I would go into Google, search your keywords, see who ranks on that first page of Google, and throw them into these tools to look at their backlinks. And then you could sort by the domain rating and which backlinks seem like they're the strongest, the best ones, and go for those first. and one by one, try to reach out to all the sites that make sense. Not all of them are going to be good backlinks. So don't go for the only ones that are relevant. Have some authority.

That's the two really main factors when you're building backlinks. Is this a pay to play style? Like if I reach out to, I know if I reach out to like Forbes, they're going to tell me like, hey, you got to spend some money. Is there a way to, if we're starting with our website, is there a way to get some of the quality backlinks? Because obviously I can't go after like a tier one, you know, triple A company. I'm going to need to go after something a little bit smaller.

What's the best way to do that? I mean, like if I'm a blogger, am I going to medium? Am I going to like some kind of aggregate site? How do I how do I start this?

We'll get back to the show in just a second. Now, we know that you become the sum of the people that you surround yourself with. Are you looking for a great group of people that will take you and your business to the next level? Make sure to check out the show notes for access to our exclusive 12-person mastermind and workshops. All right, let's go ahead and jump back into the show. Yep, so sites like Medium or posting your articles on LinkedIn,

Pulse, those aren't really... You want to go on niche-related websites. That's number one. So the best way to go about that is really just searching on Google for your keywords and then maybe adding the word like blog or adding the word podcast to your search and finding websites that are blogs or podcasts that you can reach out to them and be like, Hey, I've been involved with this industry for so long.

I wanted to see if I could write for you or get some time to be on your podcast to share some of my knowledge and.

You've got some of my time but basically you can't really just ask for it you just ask for a backlink no one's going to say yes for it they're going to say like you said like pay me pay me for this backlink unfortunately a lot of sites are kind of pay to play even if i did reach out to a blog a lot of nowadays will say pay me to post your blog so i'll write a blog for them and i have to pay to post it on their website but that's just unfortunately people know

you're doing it for seo and they just want you to spend money but google doesn't want you to pay for these backlinks but google wants backlinks to naturally happen which if you write really good content eventually hopefully that does happen but you kind of have to initiate it and get the ball rolling and there's lots of other ways to build backlinks if you're a local business you could join like a chamber of commerce in your area or join like the yelp or apple maps google maps

bing maps all these different places so it's all about just trying to think outside the box and how can i get other websites to give me a back like talk about me essentially got it okay what else when we're looking at seo what is a timeline like if i'm starting a site right now or i started a site in the last like three months what's a timeline to get decent organic traffic if you have a newer website like you said that's even six months old that's still a pretty new website even anything

that's like one-year-old is newish to Google because Google just does not trust anybody and you have to build that trust up and trust takes time to get.

Unfortunately, that's the one downside of SEO is it takes about six months to start kicking in. Depending on the competition, it could be longer or sometimes it's shorter if you have a more established older website. Like one of my clients, they had a really old website that's like 25 years old. They had the word Amazon in it before Amazon was even around, which I was like, I don't even know how we have the name Amazon in your URL, but it had this really old website.

Google couldn't read it. So we just changed some of the coding and made it so Google could read it. And they just shot up to the first page of Google for almost every single keyword. They ranked like number one or two, number three for almost every keyword within like a month.

But that was an old website. Most people that I work with have newer websites and that's where it's got to find that more long tail niche keywords that will move faster versus those more broad, hyper-competitive keywords are going to take a long time longer to rank. Got it. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about you're getting started, you're trying to rank. You just said like what you did for one of your clients was take an old website and recode it.

If they're just getting started, what like the site that you worked with, we talked about for insurance that you got them to rank quickly ahead of government sites.

What did you do outside of was it just backlinks and long tail keywords or were there other tricks up your sleeve? No, it was other little change lots of coding things. So putting keywords in the coding, but not trying to do any manipulative or try Google, but just put it in the places that they want to see it, which is like a title tag or meta description or your images. Making sure you have images with file names that match that keyword. That helps just build that relevancy.

If you could put a video up, making sure before you upload the video to YouTube or whatever platform, naming that file with keywords because all these little things come together when you're trying to really rank for more competitive keywords, you got to make sure you do everything. Having the content in there, having blogs that talk about that topic, that way you become topically relevant. So if you're trying to rank for a keyword or a service that you offer, that's great.

But Google just says, all right, this isn't really enough for us to rank you so if you're like a plumber and you have a page about plumbing on your website that's great but then if you have 20 blog posts about how to like fix a leaky sink or how to fix your toilet and all this other stuff that's all linked together you can become more topically relevant and that really helps out so all these little things plus those backlinks lots of good quality backlinks

to really push you up that's also very very important Got it. So it's like a three prong. You want to have, you want to have good quality, long tail keywords. You want to have backlinks and you want to be posting enough that you are relevant. What's, what's the ideal posting cadence?

It's really not a one-size-fits-all. It's more than your competition. So what you have to do is you've got to spy on your competition and look at their websites and see how much content are they putting out on their blog, how frequently are they posting on their blog. And a shortcut you could do that is if you just go to any website. So you just go to anywebsite.com forward slash sitemap.xml.

That's S-I-T-E-M-A-P.xml. And they'll pull up their sitemap, And then you could see all their blog posts quickly and you could see all the topics and you could do like a like a troll F and look for that keyword and see how many blogs do they write on that topic. And then you probably want to do a little bit more than them. So because with SEO, we're just trying to figure out who your competitors are and how much SEO have they done and how can we do a better job of it?

And whoever is ranked on that first page of Google, let's try to reverse engineer their strategy and look at their keywords. They'll get their pages. They'll get their site structure and look at their backlinks. And then go in and just do a little bit better. I like it. What do you see? I guess this is with, this is future because you obviously have a ton of knowledge around this. What do you see going on with chat GPT and all these large language models when it comes to SEO and search?

That one, we'll have to just see what happens. It's so new, but I feel like even if people like search GPT is going to be coming out where you could use chat tpt to search but i feel like well chat tpt is part of open ai which is part of microsoft which is really bing so it's just optimizing for bing search which like well bing is very similar to google and i feel like it's just another search engine just to optimize for but we'll have to see if it takes off or not because.

It's so new. People love Google. People Google everything to get people to not Google something. It's very tough, but AI is really catching on. People are seeing how powerful it is and how much you can do with it besides just searching for writing content and coding and doing so many different things. It's really interesting to see what will happen and what the future holds in store, but it just changes so much so quickly now that it's tough to really tell.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see. I would agree.

All right so let's talk a little bit we've talked through how people could do this for themselves if people want to work with you how do you work with how do you work with a website owner usually start off with the website analysis very consultations where i'll look at your website and try to figure out where you're at how many back things have you built how established is your website how much trust how many pages all this stuff i could look at it and get

a really quick overview and then kind of discuss the best strategy look at your competitors and just figure out where that disconnect is how many how much time is it going to take to get you ranked because really every website is unique and it's going to be different for a local business or e-commerce or someone that's selling five products or 5 000 products different strategies yeah absolutely the so we are going to link you have a gift that

we are giving away to everybody that listens on the podcast. This will be linked down in the show notes below. It's actually an SEO masterclass. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you cover in there? I show more step-by-step how to do a lot of the stuff that we talked about because it's okay to talk about it, but it's a little bit easier to visualize it and see how you make some of that stuff, find the keywords.

And I have lots of other classes I've done over the years too that I've put up about different topics, social media, YouTube optimization. Getting ranked higher on Yelp and Google business profile and all these different topics. And they could find those on at the gift and even just searching my name on YouTube. Awesome. So we are going to link both your YouTube channel and we will link your free gift. If you guys have enjoyed learning about SEO, I know it can be very.

Very like up in the cloud and you have no idea what you're doing and why it's not working. We're trying our best to give you a clear strategy, which I think Brandon has done really well. Long tail keywords, good quality backlinks and posting more than your competitor.

You got to do a little bit of research. All of this seems like it is. It's intensive work. If you want it done for you, you can reach out to Brandon. Brandon, what are some of the results that you have seen both the people that you've worked with and people that have built good, strong websites? Is it just organic traffic or are there other payoffs as well? No, well, traffic is just actually half the battle because once people get to your website, how do you actually get them to convert?

And that's where conversion rate optimization comes into play. And I try to help out more holistically with the marketing, not just doing the SEO, but try to do remarketing ads.

So if someone goes to your website but doesn't do a conversion action, let's follow them around trying to keep yourself top of mind let's work on trying to move things a b testing your website just to try to maximize the value every visitor to try to get those conversions because business owners don't really care about traffic they want leads sales phone calls and that's where i'm trying to help with that whole cycle not just the seo and say

here i got you all this traffic now let's work on those conversions awesome well we are putting all the links down in the show notes. If you guys have enjoyed this show, make sure that you click on definitely go get the free gift. If you've tried to take notes and you want visualizations, I'm sure Brandon breaks it all down very well for you there. Brandon, thanks so much for coming on today and sharing about SEO. Thank you for having me on. Hey, it is my pleasure to everybody else out there.

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