Navigating the ever-changing world of SEO can be frustrating. Brandon Leibowitz from SEO Optimizers shares his expertise in Search Engine Optimization and answers questions on best practices for blogging, videos, and websites. Learn what SEO strategies work in 2022.
Brandon Leibowitz.
Brandon runs and operate SEO Optimizers since 2007. We are a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium-sized businesses get more online traffic, which in turn converts into clients, sales, leads, etc.
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What SEO Strategies Work in 2022
Note: Below you’ll find timecodes for specific sections of the podcast. To get the most value out of the podcast, I encourage you to listen to the complete episode. However, there are times when you want to skip ahead or repeat a particular section. By clicking on the timecode, you’ll be able to jump to that specific section of the podcast. Also, the transcript was completed with computer voice recognition software, please excuse the minor errors in punctuation and grammar. Here’s to getting a Competitive Advantage!
Transcript
Hi, I’m Brandon Leibowitz of SEO Optimizers. And we’re talking about what SEO strategies work in 2022. And you’re listening to The Brand Journalism Advantage.
Episode 441.
The Brand Journalism Advantage — the podcast that teaches the power of storytelling to increase business by attracting, engaging, and influencing consumers. Now it’s time to think like a journalist with your host brand journalist, Phoebe Chongchua,
Hello, Brand journalism Community I’m Phoebe Chongchua. Thanks for tuning in to The Brand Journalism Advantage podcast. Here we go with the inside scoop on today’s show, Brandon Leibowitz. Brandon operates SEO optimizers, and he has been doing that since 2007. They’re a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium size businesses get more online traffic, which in turn, you guessed it, converts into clients, sales leads, whatever right, whatever you wanna to sell online, it makes a difference. If you have that SEO traffic welcome, Brandon, how are you?
I’m doing well. Thanks for having me on today.
Yeah, I’m glad to have you on. So I’m really excited to talk to you because I had taken a bit of a hiatus with the brand journalism advantage podcast. I have about 400-plus episodes and really got, you know, during COVID and all the different things got swamped with believe it or not work because of the online presence that I had built myself. And so I had a lot of people who were asking for help during that time with COVID and how to keep their brand alive. And you know, what they were doing, they were, were writing content and they were using, you know, webinars and Zoom like we’re doing here. So back in the old days, I used to use Skype to record. I then switched over to Zoom and started teaching in that. So Brandon did, did you see a big shift? I mean, what did you see? Let, let’s roll back just a little bit, because, of course, there’s still COVID but things have changed a lot. So what did you see during that time?
Yeah, no, definitely saw a big change. So I mainly do SEO and unfortunately had to lose a lot of clients because a lot of ’em are local businesses that just had to completely shut down and some of them, unfortunately hasn’t yeah, unfortunately haven’t reopened, but it did change July. It just shifted. And then also made people realize that who relied on traditional like brick and mortar that it’s not the same anymore. And about like eight months into like 20, 20, maybe like August, September ish, people started realize, I didn’t forgot this online thing. Cuz if not, I don’t know when this pandemic’s gonna end if it’s gonna keep going or in general, if it doesn’t, I still need to have that present online because it’s changed how people shop and behave. And everything’s really shifted to being more comfortable buying online or doing whatever online, ordering groceries, like everything is all digitalized now. So making sure that they have that presence online has become even more important.
Yeah. Well, I mean clients like I have from, you know, psychotherapy to remodeling to the insurance agency, everybody’s found a way to navigate around it. You know? One of my favorite remodelers in San Diego, they’re doing, you know, webinars and really they were able to pack people in, in a very short period of time when COVID hit because they went from, you know, in person to online and everything shifted. And, and actually it was even better because, you know, maybe they were able to have 20 people in their physical,you know, center where they would do the seminars and then through online events they could have 50, 60, you know, they could have whatever they wanted. So, it was really a cool thing to see that happen, but I get how some people, obviously lots of, of brands struggled and um,pefully we’re turning the corner and that’s what this podcast of is all about.
Brand journalism community is we’re talking about SEO, what’s changed, you know, yes, we’re, we’re making it our way through 2022, but a lot of things have changed and I want to really dive into it with Brandon and explore what his top tips would be for the rest of the year and moving forward or especially with things like video and webinars and you know, all the different platforms, but you know, we kick it off with an icebreaker and I must admit that I went and Googled you a little bit. Not just your professional side, but his icebreaker is that he’s an avid skateboarder. Tell me about that. I saw, I saw quite a few pictures. I wasn’t sure if, if some or all of them were you, but tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, no love skateboarding and that is one of my passions and grew up skateboarding and like middle school found a skateboard of, one of my friends introduced me to it and kind of just fell in love with it. And still to this day, we’ll skateboard a little bit, not as much anymore, but I’ll go like up and down, like, cause I live kind of close to the beach. I’ll go up on the boardwalk and just, yeah, screws around. It’s a great way to just get out, but not there isn’t as many tricks anymore cause I’ve had a few injuries, but I did create a page on social media for skateboarding. You might have seen that where I post other people. So I find like up and coming young amateur skateboarders that aren’t getting the publicity, like the pros are and created that page and kind of took off. I grew up to like a couple hundred thousand followers on social media or all organically. Facebook has a few hun or like 50,000 Twitter, YouTube. It’s kind of funny. So cuz I love skateboard. I was like, how about I follow my passion and like create something I love cuz I’ve helped out all these companies over the years. And I’m like, I don’t mind doing SEO, but like skateboard a little bit more so gonna see if I can make that into a brand and actually start making the product.
Yeah, I, I get it. I know I used to be an avid rollerblader and then I had one pretty bad accident <laugh> and I was like, I think I’m done with this. I’m hanging up my rollerblades. You know, I got that road rash and had to like kinda limp all the way back to the car. It was, it was pretty bad, but yeah, not, not too much fun. All right. So in theme with our podcast and of course this episode about SEO here is the think like a journalist quote that I want you to weigh in on. Brandon goes like this, a good SEO professional, not only understands the searcher, but the competitive landscape as well. That’s Helen Pollitt lead SEO at Arrows Up. What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, no understanding the competition is probably the most important thing is cause with SEO, you’re not trying to be Google. We don’t care about Google it’s algorithm, algorithms change every single day. There’s no way to step up to date with Google’s algorithm. What we care about is who’s on that first page of Google, how much SEO have they done and how can we do more SEO than they are? We don’t care about the competition cuz sometimes Google might be showing people that are not competitors or might show up Wikipedia page. But if that’s who’s on that first page of Google, that is your competition for that keyword. I mean I forgot how to do better SEO than they’ve done. So definitely 100% degree, you gotta understand the who’s your competition online, online and offline is different. So when you’re thinking about competition, you guys figure out who’s on that first page of Google. That’s really all that matters.
Yeah. So what would be one success tip or quote that you wanna leave with our audience at this point?
Well, I would say study the competition by just going into Google and searching your keywords and see who shows up there and make note of who shows up consistently, cuz that’s your real competition just because they might have ranked once or twice, they might have not lucky, but search for dozens of keywords, like keeps searching over and over again and look for trends and see who’s up there. Like go through the first three pages and kind of just look for who’s up there and just make note of them. And then we could go into how to dive in and see what they’re doing. Cuz with SEO, everything’s transparent if you know where to look. So yeah, we could see everything they’re doing
Awesome. Well, we want you to teach us all that. Before we get there, the, tell us your career highlight what has been most meaningful to you?
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I would say being able to quit my job, my full-time job and focus on this and really grow my business and took me some time. It’s not immediate took about like 10 years of just working full-time and doing this on the side and building it up and building it up eventually was able to quit my job a few years ago and really go with this full time.
Awesome. Isn’t that a great feeling? Control your destiny and, and earn what you want.
It’s the best it takes some time, but it is definitely worthwhile and, and run. So definitely.
Yeah, sure. All right. Well we’re gonna flip that story now. I want you to, or that moment in time, not a story that is like, oh yeah, I had this failure and I learned this, but a real story, something that we can sink our teeth into, learn from and go, Ooh, that hurt. But you recovered what’s that moment in time when it didn’t work?
Well with SEO, yeah, it’s all about just trial and error cuz Google updates, her algorithm big time or makes major changes every few months. So every once in a while whole trial strategies and like with content or with back links, I’d say with back links back in like 20 yeah, 2011, like there was ways to build back links when Google wasn’t looking at the quality of them, it’s just the number of back links you have. So just trying to get as many back links as possible. And it worked until Google’s a changed, I think in 2011 they had their penguin update, which is still being updated to this day, which is all about back links because too many people have gained the system with back links. So saw the traffic drop down after that algorithm update and try to piece it back together and figure out what was going on and working through all these back links and just trying to remove the bad ones and focus on building good quality back links, which quality back links nowaday are just websites are related to you finding niche related sites. The more related it is to you, the better office can gonna be.
Yeah. So when that happened, I mean, let’s go back to before it wasn’t working. Were you like, wow, this is money. This is so easy. All I gotta do is link to all these different sites. It’s gonna feed traffic in and I’m gonna be number one all the time. Was that kind of like the attitude
Kind of be honest, it’s pretty easy back then or easy or yeah, still that easy, but yeah, it was definitely much easier and less competition. Now there’s so much competition that that’s really what makes it der to nowadays back then NAS many people were online. So it was a lot easier to get up to the top pretty quickly.
Yeah. So you had to really pivot when that changed. You had to go, oh wow. I gotta do things differently. Always figuring things out, which is the nature of, you know, an entrepreneur, but the nature of this in particular business as well,
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yep. It’s always adapt, adapting and adjusting to whatever Google or if there’s a new search engine in the future that takes over. But for now, Google just dominates the market, but you just have to adjust and adapt and look at what they’re looking for and try to just keep everyth to what their quality standards are. If you read Google web or guidelines, they kind of tell you what they’re looking for, but gotta take everything with grain salt. Google’s not really there to help you with SEO. They want you to spend money on ads. That’s all they care about is ads. They don’t
Care about. Exactly. Right. So right on that, let’s, let’s just jump right in and let’s talk about what’s new in 2020 and going forward, even though we’re, we’re approaching the halfway mark at the time of this recording what do we need to know? Just, just drill down, give us some top tips and then I’ll come back to you with some questions.
No, I would say video, like you said at the beginning, video is taking over and Google owns YouTube. So I would try to get some video content out there and start building a, up a presence on YouTube. Cuz you gotta think like people’s attention. Fans are so short nowadays with Instagram, everything is not all in videos, but primarily videos. Even though there are pictures, it’s not really pictures and TikTok, all visual content, like everything is really going to videos. So people’s attention span. They gotta capture people’s inform or capture their attention quickly. Even on your website. If you have a website with just a ton of content all over it, nobody’s gonna read it. But if you have a video that explains what your product or service does that really conveys a message a lot quicker or it resonates better with people. So I would try to build that up.
And also when you searching Google videos sometimes appear in Google, not all the time, but sometimes, and since Google owns YouTube, they’re not really gonna show any other video platform. They’re gonna show YouTube probably like 90% of the time. So that’s another way to get more traffic or more visibility. And because Google only cares about making money. So if you don’t, if you search on Google, you don’t click on an ad, Google’s gonna make money. But if there’s videos in there, it’s a YouTube video and you click on the YouTube video. The first thing that appears, there’s always an advertisement. So YouTube is making money, which is really Google making money. And yeah, I would really build that up as much as
Possible. So let me, I I’m gonna jump in right there because I, I have a question about that. So is there mom, right? Which is able to analyze the videos now and that that’s something different from in the past. How I, if you have a video and you put it on your website, do you also recommend having a supplemental blog and also transcribing the video? What are your thoughts there?
Yeah, definitely transcribe it 100% cuz I mean, Google’s getting better or YouTube’s getting better at it, but there’s still not a hundred percent. And like if you upload a video onto YouTube, they’ll be like, do you want closed caption or subtitles? And they’ll do it for you. They’ll autogenerate it. But you have to go in and fix it cause it’s not perfect. Right. So Google really realized on content like text images and videos are tough for the search engines to read for now they’re getting much better at it, but still definitely transcribe it. If you could write a blog post about it, that also helps out. Just make sure it’s original content. You can’t just copy and paste the content from one like Google feeds off original content. So if you just take that transcript and post it as a blog post, just knock outta the same effect as if you write something unique along with the transcript.
So definitely transcribe it, embed that video. That’s gonna really help out. Don’t just post it, like take the video on YouTube and embed it and then share the video. And all the platforms like upload to Facebook video to IGT, which is Instagram long form video because Facebook’s on the decline, but they don’t wanna lose that video market and Facebook codes, Instagram. So I GTV is a way to get better engagement too. Like if you’re using any of the features on Instagram, like stories, reels, all those ones are gonna get a little bit better and get engagement than just a normal feed post. So, but yeah, definitely cross promote every share to like LinkedIn, share it everywhere. The more you can, the better cuz you create that video, take some time, but it’s worth it to use it. Cuz that video content is gonna be the best.
So when we go back to SEO, what do we need to know about on page SEO? What do we need to do to our websites today?
There’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle with SEO, but some are a lot bigger than others. So like the more important, most important thing is content content on your website is so vital. Like text gotta have content on any paycheck you wanna rank. If you’re like the eCommerce website, you just have a bunch of product pictures. Google can’t really read those images yet. They’re getting better at it. But all they can really read is the file name and the alt tag, which doesn’t give ’em that much context. So they need content. If you write about 400 words per page that you want to rank, that really, really will help out. It has to be original content, but the more you put on the better Google really feeds off content, but you don’t have to do it on every page. You just need to do it on the pages that you wanna rank, like contact us page about us.
Doesn’t matter. It’s like your homepage. If you’re doing service, if your service-based businesses, then all your service pages. If you’re an e-commerce website and you have a thousand products, you’re gonna be like, I can’t write 400 words for each product, but categories that’s really what ranks I on Google. Like if you, you an eCommerce website, like if you’re searching for shoes, like you might search for running shoes. And if you get taken to a page with like one pair of running shoes, that’s not a good, easier experience. Cause you wanna get taken to like a category with options to choose from. So categories usually rank higher than like end of Google products. But adding content, title tag is very important for or SEO, but the content really is number one, like you have to have,
So talk a little bit more about title tagging. Explain for someone who maybe isn’t so familiar with that.
So title tag or page title tag, or is all these different names for is some, when you searching Google, you’ll see the blue clickable link in Google. That’s an SEO title tag. So you wanna make sure, sure that you put keywords in that SEO title tag. Every platform’s different. If you’re on like WordPress, Shopify or Wix or Squarespace, there’s all gonna be at different places you have to. I was just go to Google and search for where do I place SEO title tag for WordPress or for w and we’ll tell you where to put it, but essentially where you put all your keywords that you wanna rank for that page and you only get about 60 characters. So if you’re trying to rank for more, it’s about three to five words. So if you’re trying to rank for more keywords, you gotta create more pages because if it’s more than that, it really dilutes how relevancy in that page doesn’t become the most relevant. You wanna really focus on like one or couple steps of keywords per page. That way it’s really, really hyper focused and hyper target to, if someone’s searching for that, your page is only about what they’re looking for. It doesn’t have anything else in there because it’s gonna distract them and it’s gonna take away from what they’re actually looking for.
And again, the long tail keywords though, still really popular, really make a big difference.
Yep. So when you’re doing keywords, you wanna focus on keywords that are two or more words like anything, that’s like one word it’s just so broad. There’s no real intent you behind it. So you might rank for a keyword. That’s one word. Like I might rank for the word SEO, but what does that mean? They might be searching for like, what is SEO? What, how do I become an SEO person? Like where can I learn SEO? I wanna hire someone to do SEO. Does it mean they’re looking for your, what you’re doing? Whereas someone searches for like SEO company, Los Angeles, they’re looking for what I do. So it’s more intent. Less people are gonna be searching for it, but the people searching actually wanna use your product or service, which means the most, like you don’t just want traffic to get traffic. And also it’s a bad user experience. If Google sees that you’re rank number one for this keyword and then half the people that come to your website leave immediately that tells Google, maybe you aren’t the most relevant and maybe we shrink like you for this keyword and I’ll actually drop you down in ranking. So you wanna make sure you’re going after those targeted long tail buyer intent keywords.
So talk to me about when somebody has a website that is content rich, like with a blog and maybe they have an article or blog on their, on their website and they’re getting a lot of traffic. How frequently should they add? Like add to that, update that or write about something similar that might have another keyword, you know, long tail keyword that they’re trying to, to rank for. Would you add to the page that’s constantly performing or would you create another page
If the page is already ranking and then you create a new page targeting a similar keyword, as long as it’s different, but if it’s similar, you might actually cannibalize your results for now you become your own competitor or Google’s like, we don’t know which page to rank. Right? Right. It comes down to like the running shoes or like 50 pairs of running shoes on your website, Google doesn’t know which pair to rank. So they’re gonna wanna show you for like the category page or they’re gonna pick one at random. And when Google picks at random, it doesn’t always work out. So I would make sure if I would add to the page, that’s probably gonna be the better way or update it. Like if it’s like a blog post from four or five years ago, maybe just update it a little bit. Cuz Google also looks at like, if you it’s been updated that comes a little bit more relevant. Cuz sometimes when you’re searching on Google they’ll show the date that that article is published. And if it’s from like 2013, people might not think it’s the most accurate, even though it might be still accurate evergreen content, but 2013 versus 2022, someone’s gonna wanna click on the newer article. So just
So what do you, what do you do about that then? Do you change the date when you update it or what, what, what’s the best thing to do the articles a long time ago, but you’re still getting people commenting on it and finding it. What, what do you do at that point?
So you could put this little, you just put a snippet of text saying last updated, and then you put that date and Google actually pull that date instead of the original date. So you could say this article was published on 2013 and was updated in October of 2021. And Google actually said,
Is that in the snippet area? Or where do you put that? Or
Wherever the date is on it, it doesn’t really matter. Usually it’s at the top where the date is and you can just put last updated right there. And that’s a little trick to get Google, to reroll it and re index it. And we update the date and you could really just add a word or you, and that’s enough for it to be updated, but it’s better to really update it unless it’s evergreen content that doesn’t really need to be updated, but it’s fine. I make a little change. Just show Google that that page has been changed and to come back and reevaluate it.
Okay. What else have you got for us? Huh? What else do we need to know for 2022?
Well, back links are still the most important part of SEO building. Good quality back links, getting other websites to talk about you without backlinks. Unfortunately none of that stuff really matters. Like Google’s not gonna rank a website without backlink. So you have to get other websites to talk about you. And there are a ton of different ways to build backlink, but the safest way is probably just blogging on other people’s websites. So finding other websites that are similar to what you’re doing, like I’m an SEO company, I’m not gonna get other SEO companies to link out to me cuz we’re all direct competitors. So that’s gonna be tricky. So I could find other websites related to marketing or advertising or business and reach out to ’em and be like, Hey, I was wondering if I could give you a free blog post or somehow build a partnership with that website and in
Exchange, good guest on a podcast <laugh> mm-hmm
<Affirmative> that works as well. If, if you put the podcast on your website and then give a clickable link, but if you’re just posting it on YouTube and all that stuff, Google’s kind of plot. Well, Google owns YouTube, but most social media Google’s block form some yeah. The doesn’t really help out too much, but, but yeah, there’s a ton of different ways to get back links. It’s all about just kind of getting creative and trying to think outside the box, you could be an event sponsor like a lot of time when you go to trade shows, when they have them in the past, if they still do them, you could become a vendor. And usually they’ll list all the vendors on the website with the backlink to your website. So there’s tons of ways to kind of get creative best is really just looking and competitors back links, there’s tools like eight TRFs or Maz or some rush where you just throw web anyone’s website in there and you can see all their back links.
And one by one start trying to build them. Like, as I said at the very beginning, try to figure out who your competition is, figure out who your competition is and use those tools to look at their back links because that’s really what ranks websites is. Those back links backlink are number one. I mean, Google’s changed a lot how they look at the back links, but back links still play a big, big part in their album back links and content are like the two most important things. There’s a ton of other things that go into SEO. But those two alone are probably 70% of SEO. 80% of SEO is just content and good back links. Yeah.
So if there’s one mistake that you see repeatedly with your clients or even, you know, on just other people’s websites, what is it
I’d say? Well from SEO perspective, the back links usually could be lacking, fixed. Yeah. They’re not the best or they’re built low quality ones or they go on sites like five by back links, which Google’s gonna penalize you for low quality back links. Never you hire, you actually drop down your rankings, but also lot websites just need to test their websites out and make sure they work. Cuz I get a lot of clients saying like nobody’s buying off my website. Then we check out their shopping card and it doesn’t even work or their contact form doesn’t work and go really optimize. Cuz getting traffic is half the battle. Getting that traffic to convert is the other really, really tough part. Like how do you get people to go to buy off of you? It’s so tough. So you gotta build that trust up, make it easy for them to use your website, make sure everything works. There’s a lot of, lot of things that people overlook and don’t realize is affecting sales significantly.
Hmm. I hear you. All right. All great stuff. Thank you so much, Brandon. In the essence of time, I’ve got this scenario for you. You’ve been hired to help an aling company. It’s about to financially collapse. Now its reputation is shot. You have a month, a thousand dollars budget, a smartphone and a laptop. How do you begin to turn this company around?
That is trick reputation management is tricky because then you’re ranking 10 websites to push or nine much I to push down that negative content. So with that, a lot of it is just creating new content or yeah, creating new content, kind of throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks with Google. So when I ever, well it depends what keywords pulling the negative stuff out there, but I would just create everything like usually social media ranks at the top of Google. So I create a Facebook with Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn, a Pinterest, a YouTube dig, delicious stuff like all these social web 2.0 social networking sites, MySpace and see what ranks cuz you’re gonna get at least three of them that will rank at the top. The Google guarantee, social media usually ranks. You never know which one will, but you create all that.
And then you also build some websites. So go on whatever GoDaddy, buy some.info domains for like $2 a year and build a couple websites and usually a couple of those with the exact match URLs. So whatever the keyword is that you wanna rank for buy it, the.info. It doesn’t matter if you have info.net.com.org, they all rank equally. Well. So buy the cheaper one and just see which ones rank cuz a thousand dollars. It’s not that much money to really move the needle or get it going. But if you’re trying to deal with some reputation and trying to fix some clean up that stuff, it’s really NPR, press releases usually ranked really well. So doing a PR campaigns or like PR web or I news wire, which probably would take like half the budget, but press releases usually get to the top and like topical or newsworthy is usually good to get the word out there.
And how about I haven’t heard you mention Google my business.
Yeah. If you’re a local business then yeah, you definitely wanna get on Google maps. If you’re a local business on Google my business, get on Yelp, get on yellow pages, get on MapQuest, get on Bing maps, get on apple maps and more maps. You’re on the higher you ranking in Google maps because it’s like building back links. It’s like, you can create a page on Google maps and Google’s like, all right, like I can say I’m a dentist in LA, but Google’s like, all right, is Brandon really a dentist? We don’t wanna just send people to this dentist office and find out it doesn’t exist. So if I’m on Yelp, I’m on yellow page, I’m all in all these other local maps then Google’s like, okay, maybe you are a dentist. We still don’t believe you. But we believe you a little bit more like you gotta build that trust up. So local is a whole nother one, but it’s a lot of just getting other directories, getting in like a chamber of commerce or the BBB or any these websites to build that local trust.
And then is there one platform that, that you would recommend like a Yext or something like, you know, that manages and kind of sends out. So you’re not, I mean, otherwise it’s a massive job getting into all these directories and submitting and things like that.
It’s a lot of work dealing with that. But going downside with using something like Yext is if you stop using Yext, they own all those property. So you pay Yext and you’re actually renting them out. They’ll create a Yelp for you for your business and they’ll manage it. But once you stop paying Yext, they’re like, actually this is our Yelp. You’re like, well this is my company. They’re like, no, we’re gonna keep it. So I don’t really like Yext. I’d rather do like Moz or bright. Local is a lot better. Bright. Local is much better, but Moz is okay to do it through, but you just have to be careful with the XTX has a big network and they own a lot of these properties. So some of these properties that you wanna get in are owned by X, but you just have to really understand that you’re renting it off the XT. You don’t own it, which is not good for long term business be is you wanna own it all unless you don’t mind paying Yex indefinitely. But if you ever wanna stop paying Yex, it’s like you’re doing paid ads. You run ads on Google, you stop paying those ads. You disappear
Same. Right? It’s like building your, you know, your whole website, if you will, like on an Instagram or a Facebook and not having your own. Yeah, I get it. I get it. Yeah. Oh, that’s good. I, I didn’t know that about Y alright. We’ve got rapid fire questions for you. What is one piece of technology, video, multimedia equipment or app that you just can’t live without?
Definitely cell phone smart phones make life so much easier, especially now. Which one
Do you use
The iPhone. All
Right. I like it. <Laugh> one book document, a blog podcast or internet channel.
I would say for a book, I was been like the power of now just being present. Love it.
Yeah.
Yeah. That, one’s a pretty good one, but
Excellent book. Right. And you can go over to audible to get a copy of that book if you’d like, if you prefer to listen to it. All right. Expert predictions. So when I first started the podcast several years ago, we were much further out on this and now we are rapidly approaching. So if I continue this show, I’m gonna have to change the year. But for now the year is 20, 25. What will the world look like? And what is your best advice for business us is to thrive and have a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Yeah, I would say hopefully that search engines are still around, but with the metaverse and everything that’s taken over now, I’m sure that’s changed a lot. So I’ll have to see if we’re all stuck and plugged in and digitalized, cuz I’m not sure how that’s all gonna work out, but it seems like that is where we’re all going. But for the time being, I would say hopefully search engines still exist and you can mark yourself on Google, but if that’s all changing and it’s a whole new ballpark, I don’t even know how that one’s gonna work out. But definitely now just try to build that presence up online digitally and just take advantage as much as you can. And just don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Like you said, like don’t just focus on like big Facebook or MySpace or Instagram, like try to be as many places as possible. Cause you never know what’s gonna take off or what’s gonna disappear. And if you just focused all on my space, you’ll be like, oh, now I’m just kind of out of luck and have to restart rebuilding. But I feel like soulful is definitely gonna keep taking over. And
Yeah, I was listening to a podcast earlier today that was talking about, you know, the metaphor and all of this and brands coming in and you’re gonna order your pizza and your McDonald’s and whatever. I, I don’t know, you know, there was kind of mixed reviews about it. Like people all jumped in as kind of like second life. Right. Which is still around, but it didn’t quite do what we thought it was gonna do. And same too. Like the whole everybody’s gonna be using 3d printers. And if something breaks in your house, you’re gonna print, you know? I mean some of these things yeah. They’re, it’s sort of there and could be, but I’m not completely sold, you know, <laugh> know. I think some companies will jump in, but, and what did I hear about Coca-Cola having a, a new, did you hear about this? The new flavor that is supposed to taste like pixels or something? I, I don’t even it’s it’s like I don’t get it. You know, we’re going too far. <Laugh>
Yeah, I
Agree. Take my Coke just the way it is.
Yeah. No pixels in there. That’s weird. That is strange. I don’t know how it’s all gonna work out but
Up. I don’t know. It’s bizarre sometimes I think just the more bizarre it is, you know, the more attention it gets at least short term, whether it sticks, who knows, but
Yep. Builds that hype
Drinking, but
It builds up that hype. It gets people talking about them and it gets them SEO back links and it gets ranking iron on Google and
You’re you’re right. You’re right. <Laugh> all right. One place to wine, dine or play.
I like going down to the beach or relaxing down there playing by the beach. That’s usually my spot to go and just get away. Where
Are you? What area?
In Venice beach. So nice go down to like Santa Monica or Venice or
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. And where do we find you? People listening? People watching.
Yeah. So everyone that’s watching or listening that tuned in I’m created a gift for them. So if they go to my website, SEOOptimizers.com/gift, there’s a special gift for everyone. So that’s SEOOptimizers.com/gift.
All right. And we will also link to that from ThinkLikeAJournalist.com. So you’ll be able to read the show notes get a trans, I will do a transcript here. So we’ll have that too. And thanks for the, the gift for the community. That will be very helpful. I really appreciate you giving us this download on, you know, 2022 and SEO. And I know there’s so much more, so maybe we’ll do like some sort of tutorial training down the future where we actually dive in. I’d, I’d love to have been wanting to do that with somebody where we take a website and we kind of go through it and you know, pick out like this is good. That’s not good. I mean, it’s so interesting. There’s so much to learn, but Brandon, thanks so much. I really appreciate being on the brand journalism advantage.
Yeah. Thanks for having me on
Hey, Brand Journalism community. You know, that you can find all the valuable information in the show notes. All you have to do is have on over to think like a journalist.com and in the search box type in episode 4 41. And this interview and the resources mentioned in this episode will pop right up.
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Study competition, search keywords, who shows up consistently.
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