Digital Marketing Strategies To Increase Your Website Sales — Brandon Leibowitz | How Important Is SEO In 2024, How To Get Started With SEO For A New Shopify Store, What Is A Quality Backlink, Would Google Accept AI-generated Content

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Claus Lauter [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the e commerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we revisit an episode with Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers.com. And we talk about digital marketing and SEO strategies to help you boost your website sales. So let's dive right into it.

Voice over [00:00:15]:
This is the ecommerce Coffee Break, a top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to Shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world with your host, Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google. Welcome, welcome.

Claus Lauter [00:00:40]:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to talk about something that is as old as the interwebs. It's SEO search engine optimization. Search engine optimization has always been there. I working on and off with that for a very long time in all businesses that I involved, and it shows you how important it is. So with e commerce, with Shopify, with everything that helps you to turn clients or traffic into clients, into sales, SEO is a crucial factor to make it work. Want to talk about this today? And Brandon Leibowitz, he's the founder and owner of SEO Optimizers at seooptimizers.com. Brandon runs and operates this business since 2007, so he's around for a long time when it comes to SEO.

Claus Lauter [00:01:23]:
They're a digital marketing company that focus on helping small and medium sized business to get more traffic, which turns and converts into client sales and leads. So let's dive right into it. Hi, Brendan. How are you today?

Brandon Leibowitz [00:01:34]:
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on.

Claus Lauter [00:01:36]:
You're welcome, Brendan, you're doing SEO and everything that comes with it for a very long time, and a lot of things have changed over the years. So what's your perspective? How important is SEO nowadays?

Brandon Leibowitz [00:01:49]:
As long as people are searching, then SEO is still going to be around. But if search engines or people don't search in the future, then we'll go away. But for now, people are still using Google. Still searching doesn't have to be Google. You could search on Amazon, on Yelp, pretty much anywhere. Anywhere. There was a search feature. There's ways to optimize for that.

Claus Lauter [00:02:08]:
Okay. Now, for a lot of business owners versions, shopify versions, SEO is a bit of an afterthought. They want to have traffic very quick. SEO usually takes a little bit of time. What are the biggest challenges that you see when it comes to implementing SEO strategies?

Brandon Leibowitz [00:02:26]:
It's building trust up with Google because you can put keywords all over your website. Google doesn't really care or trust you. So you have to get Google to trust you. And that's the part that takes time. It's not that hard to build a website and throw some keywords in there, but to get Google to actually believe that you are who you say you are, that's where it takes time. And it just depends on how compact those keywords are. So if there are a lot of competition for your keywords, then it's going to take a lot longer for SEO versus if you're selling or promoting something very unique and niche and there's not much competition, then it's going to be a lot quicker and easier. It still takes some time, but it'll be much faster.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:03:03]:
SEO is more of a long term play, so you have to build up this trust. And once Google starts trusting you, then they're going to start ranking for your keywords. And the way to build trust is by getting what are called backlinks, getting other websites to talk about you, more websites that talk about you, the more trust Google is going to give to you and then they look at those keywords on your website, but it doesn't work the other way around. Without those backlinks, Google's just not going to believe that you are who you say you are.

Claus Lauter [00:03:27]:
Now just assume I'm a new merchant. My Shopify store has just started. What are the steps that I need to implement to get started with SEO?

Brandon Leibowitz [00:03:36]:
Well, before you even set the store up, I would think of a structure and hierarchy that makes sense for your website because it's very important how you categorize and set up the categories or collections. They call it subcategories. Sub subcategories. And I would look at your competitors, see what they're doing. Because you're an ecommerce website selling 500 or 1000 products, it's going to be tough to optimize every single product. But the categories are where people are more likely to search. Like for example, if you're selling tennis shoes and then you have all these different styles of shoes. Someone searching on Google for tennis shoes, you don't want just one pair to show up.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:04:11]:
You want the whole collection. Or like men's tennis shoes, you want the whole men's collection so they could select from it. Or if they put like white men's tennis shoes, then you have the whole white selection of white colored men's tennis shoes. But people aren't going to look for individual products. Sometimes they will, but majority of the time focus on the categorization. So making sure you really set your site up in a way that maximizes as many different collections or categories as possible. Looking at your competitors, seeing what they have for their categories, I always tell people just go to for example, target. It's a good website because they sell pretty much almost everything and you can look at how they categorize their categories.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:04:46]:
Subcategories. Sub subcategories. And you look at these big corporate sites, they're going to help you out because, yeah, I think they have whole teams of people building this stuff out. They're not just guessing, they're doing the research and trying to fine tune it. Or Amazon, another great one to look at and see how they structure it. Once you structure your website, then another big part of it for e commerce is content. Google can't really read images or videos. So if you just have a bunch of product images on these collection pages, that doesn't do much.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:05:15]:
You have to add some text. So adding a couple hundred words of text for each collection page or category is going to really help out. And I know a lot of people don't want to add a bunch of text on their page. Now I'd say just sort the very bottom of the products. So have the products at the top, maybe have like a paragraph at the top or a couple sentences at the top, but then at the bottom have all this text there. That's really for SEO or Google to help them read and understand what that page is mean. This is stuff that's more straightforward. But then we can kind of get technical where you go into SEO settings and you have the title tag and by the description, making sure your images before you upload them to your website are descriptive file names.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:05:55]:
So the file name of images, videos, audio, pretty much anything that's not text needs to have some descriptive words in there that's going to really help out. And there's a lot of other typical things, but those are the more important things, like having good content on every single page or the collection pages and the home page and having a good site structure is really going to help move the needle without getting too technical and in the weeds and then building those backlinks, getting other websites to talk about you because you can make all these changes to your website, you can make a perfectly optimized website, but without those backlinks, Google's just, they're not going to trust you.

Claus Lauter [00:06:30]:
It already shows that SEO is a very complex topic. So I think what you just mentioned, these are sort of the basic, that emergence in a day to day business. A product manager or whoever maintains the product detail pages can do and should do as part of their normal day. And as you said, then it becomes quite technical. Tell me the other side of the site that you help with backlinks and everything that comes with this. What makes it so special and what is sort of the structure or the process that you help the merchants with to get the traffic at the end.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:06:59]:
Of a day, I take care of it all for them. So, setting up the website, the structure, the hierarchy, helping with the keyword research, figuring out what keywords to put on the website, going in, optimizing all the technical stuff, and then building those backlinks by. There's a lot of different ways to build backlinks. So there's tools that will show me anyone's website. So I could see your backlinks, you could see mine. So what I like to do is go into Google, search for your keywords, see who's on that first page of Google for your keywords, and throw them into these different tools. You have to pay for them, but they'll show you all their backlinks. The big ones are like Ahrefs or Maz or Semrush on the more popular sites.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:07:35]:
And you just buy one of those tools. You don't need to buy all them, but just pick one and use that to just find your competitors and look at what keywords they're used or what backlinks they're incorporating into their website. And then one by one, you could see which ones seem good because it's not a numbers game. In the past, if I have 100 backlinks and you have 200, you rank higher than me. But now it's not the number of backlinks, it's the number of quality backlinks. And when we're looking at your competitors, we only want to get the quality backlinks. So what is a quality backlink to Google? Quality backlink is a website that's related to you, that's really important. And authoritativeness.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:08:08]:
How big is this website? So, relevancy. If you're like, let's say, selling clothing, and then you're getting a backlink from a flower shop, that's a little strange. Like, why is a flower shop linking to a clothing store? But if you're a clothing store and you're getting another website related to fashion or anything somewhat related to what you're doing, that's what Google sees. And then authoritativeness. How big is this website? A backlink from my website to yours would be good, but it's not the same as a forbes or Wall Street Journal or Huffington Post. So the bigger the website, the more SEO value and the more related to you, the better off it's going to be. So when looking at your competitors, look for the sites that are related to what you're doing and have some authority. And those are the ones that you want to go after and target and figure out what does your competitors do? Were they interviewed on this website? Did they give out a free product to somebody and they wrote a review about it? Did they have a coupon code that they gave to somebody? Did they join, like the BBB or chamber of commerce? Or what did they do? Because you could reverse engineer their entire strategy by looking at those backlinks.

Claus Lauter [00:09:05]:
Okay, now, a lot of shops have a high turnover on products. Some of them are commodities, some of them are fashion products that are just in there for a season or so. So optimizing for a short lived product detail page is probably not a good idea. Or does that make sense?

Brandon Leibowitz [00:09:23]:
Yeah. So if you're doing that, then that page, you could either leave it up and say, coming soon, or try to serve people in a different direction. Or if you take that page down, you get to what's called the 301 redirect, so it preserves some of that value. So it tells Google, all right, this page is gone, but here's the category page. So it says, here's like the category or the home page. So takes people to a page that's similar. It's called a 301 redirect, and that's a way to preserve that value. But if you have seasonal ones, like if you're selling something for a few months, might be tough for SEO because it's going to take a few months for Google to rank you.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:09:59]:
Unless you've already built up backlinks in your big corporate website like Target, they could throw a product up on there and they'll rank pretty much immediately because they have so much authoritativeness built up in their backlinks that Google trusts them. So you get yourself to a level that Google trusts you, then those rankings will come in quicker, probably won't come immediately, but you probably get ranked in like a month or two. So it just depends how big your website is, how much trust Google's given to you, and then you can try to target some of those more seasonal, short lived products, but they do disappear. You could try to offer them something similar or maybe have them on a waitlist or whatever you could do to hopefully get that person to continue to want to purchase from you.

Claus Lauter [00:10:38]:
Hey, Klaus here just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, subscribe to the weekly newsletter at newsletter ecommercecoffeebreak.com. I score and create 50 news sources so you don't have to, saving your hours of research. Grow your revenue with ecommerce news, marketing strategies, tools, podcast, interviews and more, all in a quick three minute read. So head over to newsletter ecommercecoffeebreak.com to subscribe as at 100% free. Also, you will find the link in the show notes. And now back to the show. Okay, these are great tips you're talking about Google.

Claus Lauter [00:11:07]:
I think Google has still, most of the traffic is coming from Google. Are there any other kind of search engines or niche search engines that you would recommend to optimize for?

Brandon Leibowitz [00:11:16]:
I would just optimize for where your traffic's coming from. And I would use tools like Google Analytics to track where your traffic comes from. And then you could see, where's my traffic coming from? Is it coming from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, or social media or email or people just typing your website directly in? But these tools, Google Analytics mainly, it's a free one. It'll show you too much data. It's like data overload, but it shows you everything you want to need. Then you can see, all right, I'm getting a majority of my customers are coming from by you or this search engine by you. Maybe I should optimize for this, but I've never really seen that since doing this from 2007 to now, like almost 15 years, never seen Google or another search engine bringing more traffic than Google. But every website is different.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:12:01]:
So I would check your analytics, but for the most part, Google where it's at. But you got to take a step back and think, if you're looking for your product or service, where would you go? And that's all that matters. You don't need to be everywhere. You just need to be in front of your audience. And sometimes it might be some small, obscure site or Etsy Pinterest. Things like that could bring in a lot more traffic if done properly.

Claus Lauter [00:12:21]:
Okay, now, a lot of stores, they have, as I said, their home page, a collection page, their product detail page, and I might have an about us page or some policy pages, but not much more of content. What kind of strategy would you recommend to build up more content? And on that, what kind of content should people build up so that they get indexed?

Brandon Leibowitz [00:12:42]:
Well, to Google, a normal website would have an about us contact us page privacy policy. Terms of service like these need to be there if they're not there, Google just looks at you as like, all right, you're not that trustworthy. Or on your contact page, h should have a phone number or an email address or some way for people to get a hold of you, especially if you're e commerce, because if not, Google's just not going to trust those sites. I know a lot of people don't want to put that contact information there, but take a step back. If you were going to buy off a website that had no contact information, would you ever buy off that? Probably not. That's why people would be like, all right, let me just go on Amazon because I know if it's fake or I get ripped off or something happens, I'll get my money back. So you got to build trust up to get people to trust you. But content wise, you got to have more text on every single page and more categories.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:13:26]:
So build out as many categories as possible or collections as possible. But once you built them all out, then it's blogging, where that's a way to add more content to your website because there's only so many pages, products, categories that you could build. Then it's like, all right, what do I do? And that's where the blogs come into play, where you offer value. Don't promote yourself, but offer value. And write informational blog posts that are supposed to rank in Google to get people that are looking for a question or have an issue, they'll find your blog post, read it, and then hopefully want to buy your product or service or whatever it is that you're promoting in there. But blogging is a great way to keep adding more content to your website. Now, I'd blog once a month if you can. More is better, but once a month is really sufficient just to keep it updated.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:14:09]:
Because Google also looks at your website to see how frequently it changes. If your website hasn't changed in four years, Google thinks that you might have gone out of business. So a blog is a way to keep your website updated with new content, fresh content, and just a new way to draw new eyeballs onto your website.

Claus Lauter [00:14:27]:
I think there's a lot of truth in there. I see a lot of online stores who do not have a phone number and do sort of hide. And I always tell them that's not building trust with your customer. I never thought about that. This is part of SEO, so I learned something here. But one reason why to do it, I want to touch on something that's relatively in the news for the last couple of months is creating content with artificial intelligence generators, open AI, Chat GPT. There's a bit of a discussion going on if Google will accept this kind of content generated there or not. What's your take on that?

Brandon Leibowitz [00:14:58]:
Well, Google said a couple months ago that it's fine if it's ran by AI, that they're not going to penalize you like they would have in the past. They said as long as the content offers value. Actually, they just said it a couple days ago too, as well. Whether they had guys that does SEO or by master at Google that lets you know, but take everything with a grain of salt. Google's not really going to tell you the truth, but Buzfeed fired half their staff a couple months ago because there's like, we don't need you. We could just have Chat GPT or GPT four and other tools like that just break the content for us. But Google says as long as it offers value, it's okay. But Chat GPT or GPT four, it's a lot better now, but still, it's not perfect.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:15:39]:
So take everything with a grain of salt. Probably got to go in there, tweak it, rewrite it. I would use it as generating outlines is a great tool for that, for writers to generate outlines. But copying it verbatim might not be the best idea nowadays. But in the future, once it's much more sophisticated and better, you probably just could, unfortunately, just copy it and wouldn't have any issues. And Google says it's perfectly fine. Just make sure content offers value. That's really what Google wants to make sure is that it offers value.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:16:06]:
That you're providing an answer to someone's question or just giving value. That's what you should be doing anyways. Your blogs, social media, anything you're putting out there should be offering value. You don't want to promote yourself, really spammy, and people don't want to hear you or see you promoting yourself. But if you offer value, people start to trust you more.

Claus Lauter [00:16:24]:
You said earlier on that SEO is a bit of a long term strategy. Give me an idea on how long it will take from scratch or somebody who has a website for a year or so before they can really see results, if they follow every step in the process.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:16:38]:
That really varies depending on the competition and the keywords that you're trying to rank for. Because what matters is who are you like, how old is your website, how many backlinks do you have versus your competitors? That's really what comes down to you. So if it's very competitive, these keywords and these competitors might have thousands of backlinks and you only have like five backlinks. It's going to take a long time to get you up to that level. But if you're in a more unique kind of niche area with less competition, and let's say your competitors have 100 backlinks and you have five backlinks, then probably get up there in six months or so a year, possibly depending on how competitive it is. But in general, if you don't have any backlinks, it's going to take much longer. If you've already built up some trust and credibility and have been around for years and years, that's going to help speed it up. Like maybe let's say you don't have any backlinks, but you've had your website for 15 years, which I've had clients like that.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:17:26]:
Me building a few backlinks and doing some quick changes will get them to pretty much just shoot up right away. Because Google is like, thank you for finally giving us some backlinks, showing us that you're trustworthy, because we've seen that you've been around for years, but we just don't know who you are and we don't trust you. But these backlinks help solidify and build that trust. It's like a vote. It's like these websites are voting for each other. So it's tough. It's not really a one size fits all. I always offer free website consultations with my clients.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:17:52]:
That way I could let them know, all right, where are you versus your competitors and how do we get them to the level that you want to be at? Because I just tell you, it's six months. It might be six months, but it might be a year or it might be three months, or who knows? It's tough. It's not one size fits all.

Claus Lauter [00:18:07]:
Okay, you already answered a little bit of the question. My following up question here is like, if somebody is approaching you at SEO optimizers, what's sort of the process of onboarding and what kind of homework needs immersion to do before they can get started working with you?

Brandon Leibowitz [00:18:22]:
No, it's just sign up for a website analysis. That way I can look at your website versus your competitors and make sure it is feasible because I can't work for every website. Like if you're just selling t shirts, it can be tough for me to rank you on Google because it all comes down to who's on that first page of Google for your keywords. And if you're selling just t shirts. You got Amazon, like Target, Walmart, Costco, all these big, big corporations. And if you're just a small mom and pop shop, it's going to be really tough. So that's why I have to look and figure out, all right, maybe SEO is not the best we could do. Social media, it's a little bit easier to break into that market or run some paid ads.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:18:57]:
So that's why I just try to make sure that I look at their website and give them the best options available because sometimes SEO isn't going to work and I don't want to spend or waste your dime and money on something that isn't going to be relevant for where your audience is at.

Claus Lauter [00:19:11]:
Okay, give me an idea about pricing. How much does it cost to have you working on my SEO, that's where.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:19:17]:
It also varies depending on how big your website is. So let's say you're an ecommerce website and you're selling five products. That's five pages that I have to optimize. But say you're selling 5000 products. I have to go on each page essentially. Well, eventually get through each page, I'd work my way down from the home page, categories, subcategories, then go after the top selling products. But that's going to take a lot more time. So that's where it's tricky as well.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:19:43]:
Each website is going to be different and that's where that website analysis is the best way. That way I could really figure it out and see what's going to be the best fit for you.

Claus Lauter [00:19:51]:
Okay, before we come to the end of our coffee break today, one question that I have is AI. How will it change the search landscape? So there's other tools coming up, more and more. Will Google catch up? Will be our search behavior as a user? Will it change or what's your prediction there?

Brandon Leibowitz [00:20:10]:
Yeah, Google is definitely working on it and building out bard and they're going to compete. They're not going to just let take over. So they're working hard to keep it up there. But we'll have to see what happens in the future if people stop using Google. But I know people are using Chat GPT a lot, but it can't really do the same things that you do on Google. Like if you're trying to buy a product for e commerce doesn't really work on GPT, so we'll have to see. Maybe it'll enable you to e commerce shopping. But for now, Google still kind of runs things.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:20:40]:
But about to see because with SEO or digital marketing in general, there is no constant. It's always changing. So it's just trying to see what's going on and what are the latest trends and is this going to stick or is this going to be another fad that's going to just disappear? Which I don't think it is. It's going to definitely stay, but who knows what's going to happen in the future?

Claus Lauter [00:20:58]:
Triggy yeah, but I think that's the fun part. You're doing this for 15 years and more. Things are always changing. Brendan, where can people find out more about you and SEO optimizers?

Brandon Leibowitz [00:21:08]:
So anyone that wants to learn more, I create a special gift for them if they go to my website at SEO optimizers.com. That's seooptimizers.com forward slash gift. And they can find that there. Along with my contact information and a bunch of classes I've done over the years. I've thrown up there for free so they could watch that anytime. And also, if they want to book some time on my calendar for free website analysis, I'm happy to check out their website and give them some feedback about what's working, what's not working, and how to get them to that level that they want to be at. And they could book some time on my calendar there for free as well.

Claus Lauter [00:21:44]:
Excellent. I will put the links in the show notes as always, and you just one click away. And I would recommend every merchant to look in their SEO strategy because it's an important one. Thanks so much for your time today.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:21:54]:
Thanks for having me on.

Claus Lauter [00:21:56]:
Hey, Klaus here. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the e commerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast simply like comment and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast. And even better, if you could leave a rating. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.

Brandon Leibowitz [00:22:19]:
Bye.