Join Brett Deister and digital marketing expert Brandon Leibowitz as they delve into the ever-evolving landscape of SEO and digital marketing. Brandon emphasizes the critical role of AI in shaping marketing strategies for 2024, including how it can enhance content creation and engagement. The conversation explores the challenges of email marketing and the importance of offering value to build strong customer relationships. Additionally, they discuss the necessity of leveraging data and analytics to maximize return on investment and maintain a competitive edge. Tune in for practical insights and strategies that can help businesses thrive in the digital realm.

Takeaways:

• Embrace AI tools in digital marketing but use them as a supplement, not a crutch.
• Understanding your audience is crucial; focus on platforms where they engage most.
• Create valuable content that answers user queries to boost shareability and SEO rankings.
• Backlinks remain essential—prioritize quality over quantity to enhance your site's authority.
• Engaging video content is increasingly important; it dominates social media and user preferences.
• Utilize data analytics from tools like Google Analytics to refine your marketing strategies.

Links referenced in this episode:

• seooptimizers.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• SEO Optimizer
• Starbucks
• Google
• Bard
• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• Moz

💬 Want to get involved? Leave us a comment, give us a 'like,' and follow us for more insights. Join our Locals for lively discussions, and if you've got questions, email us at bdeister@digitalcafe.media!

👕 Check out our merch

🌟 Review the Podcast if you loved this episode and share it with fellow marketers who could benefit from a treasure trove of podcasting wisdom. Tune in to "Digital Coffee: Marketing Brew" and let's brew up some success together!

That's good.

And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

And I'm your host, Brad Dicer.

And this week we're going to be talking about SEO, digital marketing, social media, all the things you need to know about to actually help your business run successfully through the digital landscape.

Because there's a lot and everybody needs to know how to do that well.

But I have Brandon with me and he has run and he runs and operates SEO Optimizer with which is a digital marketing company focused on small to medium sized businesses to get more online traffic and convert and converts clients and into sales and leads as well.

But welcome to the show, Brandon.

Thank you for having me on today.

You're welcome.

And the first question I saw my guest is are you a coffee or tea drinker?

I like my mocha coffees.

Some chocolate in there always helps out.

Like the Starbucks mocha.

Are you like, do you just not caring?

Just like whatever.

Anything with chocolate is good, so can't go wrong with coffee and chocolate.

No.

It's almost the holiday season so you're probably going to get some of that peppermint mocha too.

Mm, yep.

Anything with chocolate in there?

Any type of chocolate, White chocolate?

It's cacao.

It's all good.

No worries.

But I gave a brief summary of your expertise but can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you do?

My name is Brandon Leibutz and I help people get more traffic to the website, specifically using search engine optimization and helping out with paid ads.

Just trying to make sure that people find you when you're searching online.

And got my degree in business marketing and when I first started out, got my or when I graduated got my first job helping a company out with their digital marketing, which I don't really know much about it.

They said don't worry, we're going to learn with you.

Taking your like classes and workshops, seminars and after working there for a few months just realized this is probably the future.

Everyone's going to have a website and there's lots of different ways to get traffic such as SEO, social media, email marketing, paid ads, it all works to get traffic.

But I just thought who want, who doesn't want free traffic?

So over the years I focused on search engine optimization, just 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 work on my own company and built that up to where I was able to eventually quit my job and focus solely on this and really been doing that ever since, just helping people tap into that free traffic to get more sales and leads to the website.

All right, and so the landscape for digital marketing has evolved in the past few years.

Marketing just in general.

So doesn't matter if it's SEO or just in general life, but AI is really taking over and how to use AI to help with your SEO or is Google gonna be taken over with AI and just have AI search results or what's gon Just trying to figure out what's in store because it changes so quickly.

There is no constant with digital marketing.

It's always changing and evolving.

So just trying to see what's going to happen next or is this a fad that's going to disappear?

Probably not, but who knows what's going to happen and just trying to stay up to date with all the latest changes with AI and the tools, the companies that are putting it out there.

Google has Bard, which is their version of AI.

So just trying to see what's what the future has.

Just store with that.

And so should you recommend a lot of marketers actually at least dip their toes into AI because it's everywhere.

I mean we have chat GPT, we have Bard, we have perplexity.

I think I figured that one out as well a little bit.

So should.

Should they start to dip their toes into it and figure this all out?

Definitely sooner than later.

Otherwise you're going to be far behind.

But you can't just copy and paste and rely on AI.

Just use it as a tool to help you out.

But if you're just relying on it to do all the work for you, it's probably gonna do more harm than good giving you incorrect information.

But if you use it as a tool to help start and supplement what you're doing, that's where you should use it, utilize it.

Got you.

And then since we're still in the era of social media dominance, what platforms should like businesses be looking at?

I know it's gonna depend between industry and industry, but should they look at X slash Twitter, should they look at Facebook for the future?

Should they be heavily focused on TikTok because Gen Z and everybody else is just scrolling through short form videos.

What do you think about all that?

Yeah, with social kind of like what you just said, it just depends on who your audience is and where they are.

Because you don't need to be everywhere.

It's good to have your presence everywhere or like claim your username everywhere.

But in terms of being active, you don't need to be everywhere.

You just need to figure out who my audience is, where are they, and how can I get in front of, in front of them at the right moments when they're actively looking for my product or service.

And I'd say test them all out and see which ones work, which ones get engagement, which one gets more leads, more sales, whatever that conversion goal is, but you never know until you try.

Also, you can look at your competition, see what platforms your competitors are active on, but then see which ones they actually get engagement.

Just because they're posting five times a day on Twitter or X and they're not getting any engagement, is that really the best place to be?

Maybe not.

Or maybe they're just doing Twitter wrong and they're just not posting correctly.

But gives you some insights and some competitive analysis is always going to help kind of speed things up a little bit.

Gotcha.

And then, I mean, even going on with that, should they focus on like specific content?

Because not everybody can just write, do pictures and videos.

Should they also just like figure out what content they want to be good at and then focus on those platforms instead?

Because each one of them have different strengths and weaknesses depending on the content too?

Yeah, I feel like most content is video nowadays and people want visual content.

Video content is really taken over.

If you look at Instagram, it's primarily video.

TikTok, it's all video.

Everything's really shifted towards video.

So I tell people, just grab your phone and just put a face behind your company and get behind it and start building that, building that audience, building that trust up with people.

Because people want to see who you are and builds that authenticity, that credibility.

And it's tough at first, but once you do it, it's not that hard, but just gotta do it that one dime.

And most platforms do take video.

Nowadays, even Pinterest will take video.

So if your target audience is females and it's all about like crafting, which is Pinterest audience, create some videos.

I mean, images work really well too, but you never know until you try it out and test and see what works, what resonates with your audience and keep pushing that towards them.

And how did pros build backlinks safely?

I mean, still, the old school SEO is still important, but how do they build that to their maximum effect and not Build bad backlinks because there are the difference between good and bad.

Bad backlinks, Yep.

So backlinks are clickable links from other websites that point to your website.

And you gotta get websites that are related to what you're doing and authoritative websites.

If you're just getting random websites, it's gonna do more harm than good.

Quality backlink is a site that's relevant to what you're doing and authoritative.

But relevancy should be number one.

The more related to you, the better off it's going to be.

So finding.

So if you're a doctor, like a dentist, it's going to be tough maybe to get other dentists to link out to you.

But you find anything related to healthcare, to hygiene, to.

If you're doing children's dentistry, you find anything related, like children and stuff like that.

So it doesn't have to be exactly what you're doing.

But some are related.

The more related the better, of course.

But as long as it's somewhat related, that's what Google wants to see.

If you got a restaurant to link out to, that might look a little strange.

I mean, maybe you helped out with the restaurant's employees and gave them a good deal for some teeth cleanings, but other than that, the majority of them came from restaurants.

That's gonna throw Google's ad with them off.

Gotcha.

And then in the age of ad blockers, since they become more and more private because people are tired of, let's just say, bad ads, like really bad ads.

How can business create ads to capture the attention?

I mean, you have iPhone that limits that even as well, with no tracking through the app.

So how can you create compelling content in the age of prevalent ad blockers?

Well, you could just.

I mean, the blockers are going to block people from seeing the ads, but there's other people that don't have it and they're going to still see those ads.

And there's lots of different ads you could run.

Just like with social media, you could do like text ads on Google, you could do images, you could do videos, you could do Gmail, you could do discovery.

Then there's social media ads.

And it's just offering value.

If you're just promoting yourself, nobody really cares about that.

But if you offer value and insights and Maybe have like a case study as a video or give some tips out.

Because if you're just promoting yourself, nobody wants to see that.

But if you're giving out something that's going to be a little bit more receptive to people wanting to actually learn about your product and service.

But just take a step back and think, if you're looking for your product or service and you saw ads, what type of ads would you want to see?

Probably no ads, but if you had to be forced to see ads, what type of ads would at least keep you a little bit engaged and use as a starting point?

And look at your competitors, go to their website so you can get hit with the remarketing ads and you can see what type of ads are utilizing or use tools to look at their ads and just get ideas based off the competition as well.

And should digital marketers start to look more heavily into podcast ads because of the evergreen side of the content?

Because I mean we talked about social media, but there's always other aspects of it.

But should they also start to look at, maybe even craft out a small budget for podcast ads as well?

It's worth trying out, testing out, you never know.

But I would look at the podcast analytics, see how much traffic they're getting, how many downloads, how many views, how long do people stay engaged with the videos or the audio.

Do they just listen for 10 second or 10 minutes and then your ads going to be 30 minutes into the show, then it's probably not going to do much good.

But if they mention it on their website and give you a banner ad so long with that, that also incentivizes you a little bit more.

But I really just look at your audience and see is your audience listening to the podcasts.

And you can test it out because you really never know until you try it out with all these different ads, it's really throwing everything against the wall, seeing what sticks, what resonates, what gets conversions, pushing more money into that, pulling money away from what's not converting and then just optimizing, testing, scaling, optimizing and really just never stop optimizing those ads.

Because there's no perfect ad, there's no perfect campaign.

There's always room to improve, test landing pages, creative ad text audiences, demographics, things like that, where it's really never ending business.

Gotcha.

And then what are the benefits of the SEO and what are some of the best practices improving your search engine ranking?

The main benefit of SEO is getting more traffic from Google.

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

Those are all paid ads.

Those companies are paying anytime anybody clicks on their website.

Could be a couple cents, could be a couple dollars per click, could be a couple hundred dollars for one click.

Gets pretty expensive.

Right below the ads are the organic free listings.

And SEO is getting your website in those free listings so you don't have to spend money on those paid ads.

Ads work as long as you're making more than you're putting in.

But you can't really scale up because once you stop running ads, you just disappear with the SEO.

You'll still be there if you stop doing SEO because Google still trusts you.

As long as your competitors don't do more SEO than you've done, then you'll remain on that first page of Google.

But there's only 10 spots on that first page of Google.

So once you get to that first page, you're pushing someone off.

They're not going to be happy about it.

And they're trying to outrank you.

Looking at your keywords on your website, how you structure your website, the content on your website, how you hide the hierarchy of your website, the categories, subcategory, subcategories.

And then they also look at the backlinks saying who's linking out to you.

If you're a local business looking to see if you're on Google Maps and what strategies you're incorporating to get ranked higher on the maps.

Or just kind of reverse engineering their entire strategy by using tools like Ahrefs or Semrush or Moz, which are all pay tools, but they'll look at, they'll let you see any website's backlinks so you can reverse engineer their entire strategy and see how did they get to that first page of Google, what can you do to emulate them?

And focus on quality, not quantity, like we talked about earlier with the backlinks.

But that's going to give you insights to how you can potentially get your website up there.

But SQL is like a puzzle.

There's a lot of pieces to that puzzle.

Some pieces are much bigger than others, like content on your website.

Very, very important.

Google feeds itself off text, meaning they can't really read images or videos yet.

They're getting much, much better at it.

But text is really what they rely on.

And then backlinks to build trust up.

And so should marketers and PR pros just like continually look at their SEO to continually make sure that if they are on the top 10 pages, stay on the top 10 page.

Because like you said, it always changes and you always have to be aware of it.

So how, how do they make sure it's all optimized?

Should they look at the backlinks and make sure if they can't take it off or like unlink it to bad ones, should they make sure that their s their keywords are up to date or at least change them if they're not working?

Is that some of the strategy behind just keeping it on the top 10.

Me up and really looking at Google Analytics and Google Search Console, both free tools, and they will show you how much traffic you're getting day over day, week over week, month over month.

So you can see, did I get a big drop off?

All right, where is the drop off?

Is it coming from social media, is it coming from paid ads, is it coming from email, or is it coming from SEO?

If it's coming from SEO, then you use Google Search Console to see what keywords are dropping off, what pages are dropping off, and try to figure out what might have happened if you've been penalized.

They'll sometimes tell you there, usually not, but they might tell you there.

So you figure out what penalty you got hit with and then try to figure out what is Google looking for to so I can get out of this penalty.

Is it the backlinks?

Then you got disavow backlinks, visit the content.

Then I start taking content off your pages or rewriting the content and fixing it so it offers more value to the reader.

So I mean talking about the content, is it how to create compelling and shareable content?

Because I feel like the the sharing wise could actually help the SEO as well.

As long as the content offers value, then people will want to share it.

If it's just full of fluff and fuller content, then that's not really offering value.

So take a step back and think, if you're reading this article, is it fulfilling what you're looking for?

Which is you're probably asking a question and you want an answer and is it telling you that answer?

Or do you have to read through a bunch of filler content at the beginning and it just draws on and on and on and on.

Like sometimes if you're searching for recipes, you just want that recipe.

But when you get to the websites to rank on Google, they need text.

So they fill it up with a bunch of text and a recipe to make something really simple, like cranberry sauce.

Could be 5,000 words, where you're like, I just need the recipe.

Just tell me the ingredients, tell me what needs to be done and 200 words.

But they're adding all this filler content in there for SEO purposes.

So that's where you gotta figure out, all right, let me put all my important content at the top and then the filler content lower down.

So when people get there, they get what they're looking for.

But I'm also appeasing Google by having all this extra text that explains really in depth all the variations of how you could cook it, the different methods and techniques and ingredients that you could possibly use.

But keep it really more optimized for people first.

Google secondary.

Got it.

So you almost want to consider like a press release or maybe even say, here's the link to the bottom of the page for the recipe, something like that, to help people find it easier.

Is that the best way of doing it?

Yeah, that'd be good.

Put a video up there, something more digestible.

You're not going to.

Because especially with mobile, people don't want to read through a long page on their cell phone and keep swiping and swiping.

When they just want that answer, that instant gratification right there, they hit that back button.

There's 10 more websites on that first page of Google + ads, + videos, + images, + all.

But other things that they're doing to try to keep you on Google longer.

Yeah, they don't load well because I've seen some websites where like the text jumps up and down.

I'm like, ah, I don't like this.

I don't want I lost my reading or where I was supposed to be.

So should they be cognizant of that?

Of just annoying ads?

Yep, always just people first.

That's what Google's been emphasizing recently is focus on people.

But you still gotta have that balance where you're optimizing for search engines, but people as well, because people.

Google looks at time on site user engagement.

So someone just comes to your website from Google, hits that back button.

Five seconds later that sends a negative signal to Google, which you don't want to do that either.

The worst challenges do some businesses commonly face when implementing the email marketing.

And what are some best practices for overcoming these challenges?

Probably getting email addresses.

Getting people to give you their email address is not easy.

And buying a list is the last thing you want to do.

You want to get people to sign up.

And the way to do that is offer something for free.

If you're e commerce, just give them a discount.

10% off your first order.

Give me your email.

Simple.

But if you're not An E commerce business, then it's a lot more work.

You gotta offer something for free, whether it's like an ebook or a class or something, but you gotta offer something.

If you're not offering something, you're just saying give me your email.

It's probably not gonna work.

So if you're a dentist, again, going back to that example, what can you give away for free?

It's probably not much, but maybe you give away ebook, about seven tips to whiten your teeth in under a month.

But using natural ingredients or whatever it is.

But something to, to differentiate yourself versus just saying sign up to my email list to stay up to date with my dental practice, which nobody wants to do that.

And then once you send out or email, people just offer value.

Don't promote yourself, just offer value.

So once people sign up for that email list, you could have another email that goes out about the importance of cleaning your teeth and why it's important.

But not saying come visit me for your teeth cleaning, but just talking about it because then it's gonna be like, okay, maybe I should see this dentist.

Because there's so many benefits to cleaning your teeth.

So just offering value is really number one.

And then giving something free to, to get those email addresses.

Gotcha.

And how do you think business can leverage basically their, their data to actually rank higher?

Like how, how can they, how can they have success stories with you said like backlinks and everything, but how can they actually leverage it for the return on investment side?

Because the return on investment is what we're all looking for is like no, am I getting the revenue back from how much I'm spending either time or money?

So how can they leverage the data and analytics to actually get them better return on investment?

You could look at analytics and see which pages get the most traffic.

You can see, here's my.

Or this page gets the most traffic.

I'm an E commerce business, but nobody's buying this product or it has a bounce rate.

Meaning how many people came to this website and left immediately?

Let's say 90%.

So 90% of the people that came to this website or that page left immediately.

What's going on?

Let's try to fix this.

Because they're not getting what they're looking for.

Or maybe it doesn't look good on a different or platform that they're on, like Chrome or Firefox or mobile, doesn't show up properly or whatever it may be.

You could get insights to what's working, what's not working, but you gotta look at the data.

The data's all there.

You just gotta utilize it and incorporate it and make sense of it all.

Looking at Google Analytics, Google Search console and other tools that give you that.

Free data and should PR and marketing pros like test it out on whatever platforms they can actually do it.

So like is it Firefox or Apple or Android?

They test it out and make sure that it's optimized either through their own eyes.

Because sometimes you can look at the data but like experiencing yourself can also give you really good insight.

Yep, you gotta test, test everything until you break it and then once you figure out what's broken, fix it.

But like Internet Explorer probably gonna break every website for some strange reason.

So looking at your website on all the different platforms, browsers, tablets, mobile, desktop, and just seeing how it looks, widescreen, computers, things like that, and then looking.

Ahead, what, what types of emerging technologies or data or any type of thing including AI, what, where do you think that's going to change the game on?

Is it going to be getting better insights into your website?

Is it going to be making better content?

Probably with the AI just pushing out more content.

But is the content good?

Not really.

So you gotta edit it.

But it does make things a lot easier when you are creating content, but you just gotta go in and edit it.

So a lot more content is gonna be out there.

And now Google has to differentiate but is real versus what's not accurate and how you know what's real and what's not real.

It's kind of tough, like fake news, real news, it's all blends in and it's really tough to differentiate.

So just trying to figure out how they could understand what's accurate and what's inaccurate.

But let's see what happens with all that.

Gotcha.

And then where can people find you online?

Yeah, anyone that wants to learn more, I actually created special gift for them.

If they go to my website@seooptimizers.com that's S E O O P T I M I z e r s.com gift.

They can find my contact information there along with classes I've done over the years.

I've done up for free.

So they can see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about.

And if they want to book some time on my calendar for a free website analysis, they could book some time there as well for free.

And any final thoughts for listeners with digital?

Just be patient.

It all takes time.

A lot of people like that instant gratification which sometimes it happens with with paid ads or social media you can go viral but usually you have to build it and build it and especially with SEO it takes time.

So keep working at it and over time you'll see that traffic move up.

But just don't get discouraged if you don't see it right away because it does take time.

All right, thank you Brandon for joining Digital Coffee Marketing bringing sharing knowledge on SEO and digital marketing.

Thank you for having me on today.

And thank you for listening.

As always, please subscribe to Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and all your favorite podcasting apps and a five star review really does help.

And join us us next month as we talk to a great spot leader in the PR marketing.

All right guys, stay safe understanding your SEO and content marketing and see you next week later.