Google actually said last year we don't care who writes the content anymore. If humans or AI write it, we just can't tell the difference. It just has to be accurate. Inevitably, it's gonna be so good that it is gonna replace writers, copywriters, content so good from ChatGPT, it's a little scary.

Welcome to the Agency Our Podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week we're joined by Brandon Lieberwitz, founder of STL Optimizers. Since 2007, Brandon's been helping small and medium-sized businesses drive business and get more traffic, which in turn converts into new leads, sales, and ultimately clients. In this episode, we talk about the future of digital marketing, breaking through the mental barriers that stop you from creating content, especially video, tips on consistently producing content even when it feels like no one's listening, why human connection is more essential than ever as AI takes the spotlight, the biggest mistakes you can make when using AI and a whole lot more. Now before we dive in, I want to take 30 seconds to talk to you about today's sponsor, Wix Studio. That's right, you heard me, Wix Studio. Digital marketers, here are just a few things that you can do when you manage projects on Wix Studio. Create a client kit for seamless handovers. Reuse templates, widgets, and sections across all sites, work in sync with your team on one canvas, leverage best in class SEO defaults across all of your Wix sites. Time's up, but the list keeps going. So step into Wix Studio to see more. Alright, I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Without further ado, please welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast, Brandon Liebewitz, all the way from Venice, California. Hey Brandon, how are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me on. Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you for joining us here on the Agency Hour Podcast. Now, for those that don't know, just tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you found your way onto the Agency Hour Podcast.

Yeah, I help people get more traffic to the website. So making sure that when people search on Google, that you pop up at the top of Google and start capturing that free traffic. And just fell into it after I graduated from school, got my degree in business marketing. And one of the first jobs I got was doing SEO, which I didn't really know much about it back in 2007. And they didn't really teach you that in school. But I told the company that and they said, Don't worry, we're gonna learn with you and take you to different classes and workshops and seminars. And after going to a few of those seminars, just kind of realized websites are probably not gonna go anywhere anytime soon. All this digital marketing stuff probably is gonna stick around, and SEO is just one way to get free traffic. And who doesn't want free traffic? And that just kept me going on that SEO journey over the years, working at different advertising agencies and as a director of SEO and before work and after work and on lunch breaks, I would work on my own company and eventually quit that job to be able to focus solely on this and been doing that ever since. And we reached out to you because with SEO, which we can talk about later, a lot of it is building backlinks and getting on other people's podcasts is great for content and social media, but also it helps out for SEO backlinks.

Yeah, 100%. It's a great strategy. 2007, man, it was like no one knew about no one like you said that you know you didn't really know much about SEO because they weren't teaching it, because no one knew anything about SEO back in 2007 is pretty much when I started it. Who were you following back then? Who were you learning from online?

Back then it was a lot of like forums or Moz, like Ran Fiskin, and just Mac cuts would be posting, and you're just like, all right, just take in anything that you say with a grain of salt because this was a rep from Google that would kind of tell you what they're looking for. But as you probably read, and with the Google leaks that happened over the years, you can see a lot of the stuff that they did say was actually not true because Google's ultimate goal is really to make more money. They know they have to do SEO because nobody wants to just go on Google with 10 ads. So having that balance of SEO and ads, but they'd rather you just spend that money.

Yeah, the pay-to-play model. Rand Fishkin, I think, uh, will go down in history as one of the great influencers and educators of all time. I've had him on the show a couple of times. Uh we've we've hung out in uh our virtual events online. And I I used to watch Whiteboard Fridays with Rand and learn about SEO. And then they published the beginner's guide to SEO, which was this epic, I think it's still online, this epic kind of multi-page, multi-faceted guide to learn SEO. It was like one of the most valuable pieces of content, which I'm sure also did wonders for their SEO as well. And they really raised the game, uh, really raised the bar with with content production back in the early days. Um, and so at what point, where were you? I'm curious about where you were with your own business when you decided, okay, there's enough going on here that I can quit the day job and go full-time in my own company.

It was probably after like eight or nine years, or probably like seven, eight years of working at these agencies that I was just happy to have a job and I was always happy to just get a couple of clients here or there and make some extra money. But after a while working at these agencies, I just realized that it was only so much of a cab that you could go and so high that you could get, and always had the entrepreneurial spirit in high school. Made a skateboarding clothing company, always wanted to get out there and do something, love skateboarding, still a skateboarding. So I was just trying to see how I could just tie it all back together with one of my passions, but just always wanted to just get the name out there or get something under that I would have my own business and realize that let me just go all in with this SEO. I probably get enough clients if I just focus on it and really push it versus just kind of just letting it be and getting clients here or there through referrals. So I start teaching classes and really putting myself out there, making like the YouTube and social media about myself versus my company, SEO optimizers, which is great, but people really want branded, not SEO optimizers, so just trying to build that up. And after doing that for a few years, I was able to quit my job. So kind of took the safer route, didn't just jump ship right away, which a lot of people do, and it's you can do it, but just want to take it a little bit safer, especially because you never know what's gonna happen.

Got it. Yeah, look, there's something I want to unpack here because you know, most people just won't make videos and talk about themselves and put themselves online and put themselves out there because for a whole bunch of reasons, fear of rejection, they don't want to be in Australia. It's actually we have this thing called the tall poppy syndrome in Australia, where if you kind of talk about yourself too much, people, everyone else, it's a colloquialism here in Australia, but everyone calls you a wanker, right? It's like, oh you wanker, you're just bragging about yourself, right? And so for in it's it's a massive thing in Australia. Most people in Australia just won't put themselves out there because they don't, you know, everyone thinks you're a tall poppy and they just try and cut you down, right? I I was in the States a few years ago in Philadelphia, and there was this tiny little dive bar late at night, and there was this guy behind the bar, and there was another couple over in the corner of the room with a monopod camera and a girl with the clipboard or an iPad, and they were shooting the guy, the the barman. I walked over and what are you doing? Like, oh, he's a YouTuber, and so we're filming him at work. And I'm like, huh. That's interesting. Like in Australia, if the barman was a YouTuber and the bar and everyone in the bar found out, you'd just go, Oh, you're a wanker, mate. Like, no one would be helping you film yourself working. And their mentality was like, oh no, we want him to succeed, like we want him to do really well, which I thought was really interesting. Did you have to kind of overcome any psychological kind of barriers to start making videos and put yourself out there?

It was not the easiest, but yeah, it took me a while to do it. I mean, I did a little bit over the years before like when I first started doing SEO. Well, YouTube actually came up to me and said, Hey, we'll film a video for you, and we'll you create a YouTube ad through it, which was pretty nice. I was like, all right, that sounds great. They came out, they filmed a video for me. It's probably like in 2010 or 11, and I put that video up, but it wasn't really the best video. It was good, and it was great that they filmed it for me. But that kind of got me on camera for the first time and realizing it's not that hard. And especially nowadays with the cell phones, almost anyone has a great cell phone in their pocket with a great camera that you could just film yourself and just put yourself out there. But it is tough to just you gotta do it. I talked to a lot of business owners all the time and tell them the same thing, like you just have to do it. It takes a lot of time to just get over it. But once I did it, like on my own and really filmed a video that I put on YouTube as an ad. That first day somebody called me and like, I saw your video on your commercial on YouTube. And I was like, I just filmed my cell phone, like it wasn't that nice, but just got me thinking, like, it's not that hard. And I just tell everyone just yeah, get over it and just do it, and just stop overthinking it. And just once you do it the first time, it's so much easier. Same with like being on podcasts. Like at first, it's like, all right, I don't want to be a guest of a podcast, and it's gonna be tough, and you'd rather do audio versus video, but after a while, you're like, wait, why am I not doing it? I want everyone to do video because some people that don't do video, I'm like, can we get the video recording? Because I get those up on YouTube and all these other places.

And totally. Yeah. And also, video is the fast, like the fastest way to connect with another human being is to be in the same room, right? And look them in the eyes and tell them that you have empathy for what they're going through and you understand their problems and you can help them with the solution. The second fastest way to do that is through video, right? And and video then, I mean, we do it on Zoom. Everyone's on Zoom, right? There's no difference. Like just be on Zoom, but just like download the recording afterwards, and then you've got some content, right? We use Zoom recordings of client calls all the time as content here. So we're kind of doing video anyway because we're all working from home and we're all on Zoom because of the pandemic. And the reality is video is such a great and it's such a great competitive advantage because, as you said, most people won't do it. I learned this from Andy Jenkins way back in the day. Like Andy Jenkins was part of this kind of internet marketer movement of Frank Kern and Ryan Dice and Ed Dale and Andy Jenkins all had those kind of these big internet marketers, and and Andy was the video guy, and he had this course called Video Boss, which was amazing. And he was like, look, 99.9% of people on the planet are just never going to do video because they're too self-conscious. So if you do video, you just got a competitive advantage because most people, your competitors aren't going to do it. And the other thing about YouTube is like, you don't need a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube with the plaque in the background to use it as a successful marketing channel, right? Like, talk talk to talk a little bit about if you're encouraging people to make video and they're like, well, we only get 500 views on our on our videos. A lot of people would be discouraged by that, right? How do you kind of keep just keep producing content even when it feels like no one's listening?

Unfortunately, I mean that's with social too. You just gotta start off with no audience, or even if you do have an audience on one platform to get them to come to another one, not the easiest. So have to understand that you're just gonna have to build it up, just like with SEO. It's that slow growth. I mean, social, you can get those big spikes and just go viral. But in general, you have to keep building it up. And everyone's probably heard it before, just be consistent, you gotta stick with it. If you just stop it after a while, that might have been that next week that it just all of a sudden explodes because it's that one person that finds you, or just getting hit with that right algorithm, or you just show up in the feed of somebody or in the explore pages. So it's just really just trying to stick with it and just know that you're in for the long run and you can repurpose that content. And if it doesn't work on YouTube, I could throw it up on Facebook video, on TikTok, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Twitter, and just see where it works. And one platform might work better than another, but repurposing that video, maybe you have to cut it, edit it a little bit more, help them in the beginning, and just keep testing to see what really resonates with your audience.

Yeah, 100%. Uh cool. I want to pivot the conversation a little bit. Thank you for sort of helping, helping unpack that. I've had a lot of interviews recently on the podcast, and people are talking about um, you know, uh Adam, Adam Robinson at retention.com's been talking about the founder-led startup. Uh, we had uh Tom Fennelli from Convincio recently talk about the founder-led uh company in the in the world of AI, in a generation of AI, that the founder-led business is what people are these guests that I've had are predicting is what people are going to respond to because it's a human connection. I'm all in on the founder-led thing, like that's why I do what I do, it's why I make podcasts and produce content and put YouTube videos out and go and talk at events and all that kind of stuff, because I believe that people want a personality. They want to follow someone who knows what they're talking about, they want to connect with another human. And in a world of AI where everything's becoming pretty bland and pretty kind of, you know, chat GPT-ish, uh, which is a new word. Um, the the founder-led thing, I think is is going to resonate, but it does require you to get out of your own way and just serve your audience and bring your A game to your audience. So I appreciate you helping us unpack that a little bit. So let's just pivot a little bit. I we'll talk about AI in a moment, but before we do that, I just want to talk about SEO in general. Like a lot of people, including people who are kind of well known in the SEO space, are kind of saying that SEO is done, right? And that, you know, with the advent of and I we'll talk about AI in terms of producing content and workflows and stuff, but you know, with things like perplexity and Chat GPT and, you know, is where where do you see this going? Like in three years' time, are we still going to be asking search engines for answers? Or is perplexity and the and the agents, the AI agents, are they going to be indexing the internet the same way search engines are so that it's I've heard this new thing called, you know, AO, I think it was, which was agent optimization, like optimizing your content for agents, right? I have a whole theory about web design and graphic user interfaces, I think, are gonna die because we just need to give the machine content faster without the fancy stuff getting in the way. What's your take on this? Do you think SEO is gonna be around for the long haul, or is it is it gonna, are we gonna see a tsunami wave of companies having to pivot because of new technology?

It is tough to really know, but I mean, as long as there's a way to search, there's ways to optimize. It doesn't matter if it's on Google or YouTube or even Amazon and or Yelp is big in the United States, TripAdvisor, stuff like that. So as long as you can search, I feel like there's ways to optimize. But ever since I started doing SEO back in 2007, people have always been saying SEO is dying, SEO is dead, and it's just changing and adapting. And now it's just gonna we'll have to see if what happens with ChatGPT, search GPT, and all this new stuff that's gonna come out. Are people gonna use it more? Or is it just a trend, which I'll feel like it's a fad, it's gonna probably be around for the long term. But it's really tough to predict, and Google still really runs the show, but I'm sure a lot of traffic, and I could see in analytics that some websites have dropped in traffic because you're just asking questions, and if it's just like a question-answer, those websites are probably gonna lose a lot of traffic. E-commerce, transactional, we'll have to see how that all plays out if people still want to go to Google or Amazon, but it's still optimized for those platforms.

What do you think um websites look like in three years' time if they're not just providing answers? Because in the States, you have this thing in in search. I was out in California last month and I noticed it again is that if I search in Google, kind of the top section of Google now is this kind of summary of the search results that AI is bringing together. And what I realize is that Google's business model is they don't want me clicking on the organic listings, they want me hanging around on the SERP page as long as possible. So I click an ad. Um, so what does that mean for websites that are just providing answers to questions? Do they need to pivot and become more of like a content or or an entertainment hub in order to get traffic from Google and keep it? How do we, as website owners, how do we get that traffic from Google now if just providing answers is not going to be enough? That part is tough because Google's been doing that for a while.

Well, not the AI section, but they put featured snippets at the top. Where if you're asking, let's say, like the age of someone famous or the birthday or the score of a sports game right now, it gives you the answer right there in the search results, and that's all pulled by using schema. So I'd recommend that everyone does incorporate schema, but Google's been doing that, and I mean that hit Wikipedia really hard because anyone that's searching for birthdays, like you said, Google doesn't want you to click on ads. I mean, Google doesn't want you to click on organic websites and leave Google because once you left Google, you're off Google and to get you back on Google, not the easiest. So Google wants you to click on ads, and they just know that if you're just searching for those keywords, you're probably not gonna be searching for an ad, and hopefully keep searching or learn something more about that person, something invent they invented, and then search for that product. But it is tough, and it's always just trying to figure out what Google's or trying to guess at what's gonna happen with Google, what are you gonna do, and how can I just prepare myself for that loss in traffic, but with that feature snippet, they also usually list out the website. So you sometimes might get that traffic, but it does significantly diminish your traffic on a website, unfortunately.

And so what do you think the types of websites are that are that are kind of future-proof that are gonna keep getting traffic regardless of what happens?

Most likely probably e-commerce websites, and then I feel like the informational websites will still be there, but it's just gonna change, or probably just more social media, just video content. People just want to keep scrolling and looking, and that's that endless stream of content and finding and discovering new things. I feel like social is gonna just keep having a stronghold and getting people sucked into their algorithms and holding on to people and not letting you go.

Yeah. YouTube have said recently that they think that YouTube is the future of television, and that the future of television is YouTube. YouTube's the number one streaming platform on large screen devices now uh around the world. So it's overtaking Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime. YouTube's the number one stream platform. YouTube don't create any content, right? YouTube don't they don't pay artists, they don't pay actors, they don't pay studios, they don't pay. I mean, sure, they produce a little bit of content, but it's not like you know, Apple or Amazon or Netflix are investing millions of dollars in producing content. Um and and YouTube aren't. So they're they're they stand to be potentially more profitable, and it's free. You can watch YouTube for free, you don't have to subscribe. I do because I don't want the ads. What does that mean for I mean, my concern is that you know, a local business one, and YouTube have said what they want is they want binge-worthy content on YouTube, right? So how does I mean, doesn't this just make it harder for a local business? I'm thinking about, you know, like a local restaurant, right? I mean, think about Gary V back in the day. He had wine TV or whatever it was, right? Where he would just sit there and review the wines that were in, you know, he rescued his family's wine shop basically by just kind of vlogging about wine. I don't think you could do that these days because the level of content, the production quality of content on YouTube is so good, is so competitive, you know. I mean, I spent $100,000 on a content studio here to try and, which is ridiculous. I didn't need to do that, but I I'm trying to up the game and raise the bar and kind of look better and sound better and produce high quality content. Max and I are always talking about what we can do in terms of our video content and make it more interesting so that it's not just someone looking down the barrel of a camera. And we're we're a small business, but we're not a tiny business, right? I just think it how does a small business compete in this space from not just from a video point of view, but just from a producing content that attracts people to their website? Let's just pretend they've got all the technical stuff around SEO, right? How do they compete to make their content compelling enough to get that traffic from Google and and keep it?

Yeah, no, it is tough. It is very saturated, a lot of the industries, the markets, and just more competition means it's tougher to do and lower barrier to entry with building a website on Wix or WordPress or Squarespace. It's pretty easy nowadays. Anyone could get one up there, or with social media, putting content or video content, just filming yourself with your phone. Of course, you want to try to make it a little bit better. It's I'm always trying to improve on my back and my space as well because I've realized over the years you want to try to have a nice studio, good microphone, good quality content, because it does help make a difference and make it look much more better and sound better. So it's but having that medium or just that balance. Like if you can't get all that stuff, just start off with your phone and just start off with a little gimbal and just record yourself and just get it out there. But just try to look at what other people are doing and try to look at what got or what gets people more views, more success, more higher rankings, more trust from whatever platform you're looking on, kind of just pulling stuff away from what other people are doing, what type of content, like if it's written articles, like how much are they writing, if it's video, how long are these videos? What are the thumbnails? Like, how do they try to hook people and get people interested? Because you gotta really hook people on your website, on your content, your social media, everything needs to hook people really fast because attention spans are just so short nowadays. 100%.

And is is video, I mean, I want to let's spend the whole episode here, but uh video for me is such a great form of content because if you create a video, even if it's a super short video about like, you know, the top questions that someone asks, like it was a guy here in Melbourne. And he did a really good job. He's a swimming pool company, right? He says, Look, the number one question I get asked is how much is a swimming pool? And the really sucky answer is it depends. And here's the reason it depends. And he just went through like all the different variables as to why I can't give you a quote until I come out to your property, or you at least send me some photos of what you want. Tell me if you want in-ground, above ground, you know, what sort of materials, you know, what do we do? Like, is it a deck? Is it like fiberglass around the out? Like, you know, I want to, I need to understand all the variables so I can give you an accurate price. Because I don't, you know, and he made this great video. And it he kind of owned that search term for a long time. And then he would go out to people's houses and he would open the door, and the and the couples and the families would be like, oh my God, it's Paul from whatever the spa company was or the pool company. It's like, oh man, we feel like you're a celebrity because we've been watching all your videos, right? And if you make a video, you've then got the transcript, especially with AI these days. You've got the transcript, you've got a bunch of shorts that you can make, you've got a blog post, you've got a whole bunch of social media posts that you can use from that one video, you've got an audio that you can publish as an audiogram, right? You it's one video that gives you a lot of different pieces of content. And then embedding that video on the blog post also then brings you up in the the video results in Google. So for me, it feels like the the home run. Like if you're gonna make content, make video to start with, because it just gives you all of the other pieces of content that you need. How much time, this is a this is where I'm going with the question. How much time do you think you should spend researching search terms on YouTube versus search on Google? Because they're different beasts, right? Like we've used a couple of the tools, TubeBuddy and VideoQ and stuff, to kind of figure out what to do on YouTube. Do you like my I guess my question is, do you figure out what people are searching for on Google, or do you figure out what people are searching for on YouTube to kind of drive your content strategy?

I would do both because Google owns YouTube and Google will show video in the search results. And when Google shows search results or videos in the Google search, they really want to push YouTube because Google doesn't want to promote Facebook or Vimeo or TikTok. They'll show it occasionally, but again, really Google wants to make money. If you're searching on Google and you don't click on an ad, but there's a video and you click on that video and it's a YouTube video, the first thing that appears anytime you watch a video on YouTube, always an advertisement. So YouTube is making money, which is really Google making money, and they are just going to keep pushing that as much as they can. But I would just try to allocate your time with the making videos and content creation, and or I mean allocate your time researching those keywords equally and just trying to see does Google from the keyword I want to write for, does Google show a video in the search results? If so, then I would try to look at those keywords, do keyword research on Google, try to see which keywords trigger videos, but also like where is the video? If it's at the very bottom of the Google search results, maybe not the best. And Google like moves it around, and so it's tough to really know how they're gonna do it. But with YouTube, you definitely want to do a little different keyword research. It's gonna be similar, but it's a little different. This intent behind searches or the way people search on YouTube is slightly different. And there are tools like you mentioned, Rid IQ and TubeBuddy and other tools that will help you do keyword research to figure out which keywords are the best, because that is one of the most important things that a lot of people do skip over, and it doesn't take that long to do keyword research. It only takes a few minutes if you're just quickly just want to check like a singular or plural or synonym. I mean, it does take a little bit longer if you're really diving deep into it, but it is well worth time and effort because you can get significantly more traffic just by spending that little bit of time researching keywords, your competitors' keywords, and just trying to figure out what the best is for your content.

I've got to ask because I know that the audience are gonna be listening to this and they're gonna be screaming at the in their headphones asking the question what is your favorite tool for doing keyword research? There are so many tools and I've used them all. What's your favorite for doing keyword research for clients and kind of managing SEO?

Yeah, there are two main tools. I like the Google Keyword Planner from Google. It's a free one. And that one's from Google, because I mean you just gotta take everything with a grain of salt. Always, there's those numbers don't always look good. Even on like hrefs, I like that one as a paid tool, but it's really just kind of picking one paid tool and just sticking with it unless you want to buy a bunch, and but you're always gonna get different numbers, and it just gets confusing. And sometimes it's best not to even think about it because there are a lot of zero, zero search keywords, just because there are new searches that no one's ever searched or Google hasn't really seen yet because the way people search, especially with mobile and voice to search, it's really changing everything. People are just speaking these weird phrases and long phrases, and it's just changing the way that yeah, everything is really optimized more towards that human language. So it's long, really long sentences, questions people out would be asking.

Yeah. So I think I heard AHRFs there might be your kind of preferred paid tool, but also the Google keyword planner, uh, which is a free tool that comes from Google. Talk to me about backlinks, because you know, Matt Cutz was kind of big on this back in the day, right? It's like, well, you can't buy backlinks, right? We will penalize you if you buy backlinks. Listen, everybody buys backlinks, right? Everybody knows it, everybody does it. You can't avoid it because your competitors are doing it. What tell for those the uninitiated listening to this? What is a backlink? Why aren't you allowed to buy them? Why should you buy them? When should you not buy them? How valuable are backlinks? And are they really such an important part of an SEO strategy?

Yeah, no, backlinks are clickable links from another website that points to yours. So let's say you're reading an article on entrepreneur.com. And there it says Brandon Leebood, so you click on it, it goes to my website. I'd be getting a backlink from entrepreneur.com. The more websites that have clickable links that point to your website, the more popular Google thinks you are, the more trust they're going to give to you, and ultimately the higher they're going to rank you. Because back in the early 90s, Google said came around and said, we're not just ranking websites based off keywords. Because I could build a website and I could put keywords all over it. And that doesn't necessarily mean I am who I say I am, because people lie and manipulate the search results all the time. So Google said, we don't trust your keywords, but rather we want to see other websites talking about you. And the more websites that talk about you, the higher they're they would rank you. That's how it used to be. But then people started spamming and buying low-quality backlinks or building low-quality backlinks. And Google said, it's not the number of backlinks anymore, it's actually the number of quality backlinks. And to Google, the quality backlink means it needs to come from a site that's related to what you're doing and has some trust and authority. Those are the two really main things that when you build backlinks, don't just build backlinks to build them, but like, is this a website that's related to what I'm doing and is going to offer value? Because if you build the wrong type of backlinks, it'll actually do more harm. And instead of breaking you higher, you're going to drop down, which we don't allow that to happen to anybody.

And so this, you know, back in the in the day in the days of the Wild West, and I know this still happens, is there are these things called blog farms, which you can set up a WordPress multi-site and you can spin up, you know, a thousand blogs that are completely irrelevant and, you know, use AI to write these articles that don't actually mean anything, and you just they're optimized for keywords, and then you just have a word in that article that points back to your website with the right keyword, and that's building a backlink. Um I know a lot of people that still use these and and and and still claim that they I mean, I just can't imagine. I mean, I think I my uh guess, man, maybe Google doesn't care. Maybe Google only cares about paid advertisers, but my guess is that Google's smart enough to go, that website is is kind of useless. And so that backlink doesn't count. Um if we are buying backlinks, and I'm not here saying that we should buy backlinks because it's against Google's terms, even though everyone does it, how do you I mean, because because earning backlinks is freaking hard work and takes a long time, right? So do you what's your what's your take on the whole buying backlinks thing?

Yeah, no, backlinks are tough, and almost every backlink you are paying in some way, because, well, in America, I don't know, the chamber of commerce is really big for local businesses. So you join a chamber of commerce and you'll get a backlink in your local area, your city. It's a great backlink, but you have to pay for it. And a lot of backlinks, you're can't really just ask someone for a backlink. They're just gonna be like, why am I gonna give you this backlink? So you have to offer something of value, your time, content, being a guest on podcasts, or just trying to figure out like looking at your competitor's backlinks using tools like Hrefs or Moz or Sumrush to try to figure out who who's linking out to my competitor and reaching out to those sites to see if they would potentially link out to you. A lot of them will get back to you and say, pay me. In the past, they would usually just write about you if you gave them a good enough reason, but now a lot of them know that you're doing it for SEO and the value of a website is really arbitrary. Nobody really knows. Like people just could say, hey, pay me this amount. And who knows really what that website's about or is worth. I get messages all the time for people saying, like, I wrote for Forbes and Entrepreneur and all these websites, pay me $2,000 and I'll get to you on these websites. And I mean, it does work. You get on these big websites, but is it worth the money you're really paying, like writers that just write for these websites? These websites don't know that people are paying for them. I mean, they kind of know that happens, but they try to stop it. But in general, yeah, if Google catches you doing that, though, they're not gonna be happy about it. But how can Google really catch you unless your competitors tell on you? Or if you just buy a bunch of backlinks all at once and you just have this huge spike in backlinks.

Yeah. And also, uh Forbes, I mean, this is you know, just to debunk this for people, right? You can pay, like, well, I don't know what it is these days, two or three thousand dollars a year or whatever to be on the Forbes Council, right? Like, and I I I was like full transparency. I was approached by Forbes to be on their agency council. To uh, they have different councils. They have like a coach's council, they have an entrepreneur's council, a business owner's council, agency council. I was approached to be on their council for whatever it was, hang out with all these other council members in a private Slack channel throughout the year and network. But really, the value is you get to write, you get to post on Forbes. So you basically get to publish articles on Forbes. So you can then put on your website, as seen in Forbes, right? And you can then just write whatever you want and build your own backlinks on Forbes, and it costs you whatever it is, three grand a year or whatever the price. I can't remember how much it is these days, right? But it's a pay-to-play model. And so whenever I go to someone's website and I say, as seen on, you know, Forbes and Entrepreneur magazine and all that. So like I just see straight through it now. It's just like it's it's I actually think it's quite funny and that that's people still think that that's you know, that legitimately I must be successful because I was featured on Forbes. It's like, well, whatever, dude. You just paid a couple of grand to be on the council or whatever. Um I I I'm not sure if that's I I hope that's not on your website. I don't mean to offend anyone here, but um, you know, it I'm just saying it's a pay-to-play model. It is what it is, right? Like it's you have to pay to be on these platforms, and you know, no one's gonna do it for free because they've got the eyeballs and and you want the eyeballs, and so you've got to pay-to-play, right?

Unfortunately, yeah, no. But yeah, anytime I see all that stuff on a website, I just same thing. Ever since I've been doing ICO, I just realized a lot of that stuff is just manipulated and peer-to-play. And just because it ranks on that first page of Google doesn't mean it's the best product or service or whatever it is that's ranking. It's just they did better marketing, and a lot of it is just game in the system and just trying to Yeah. Just gotta take everything with a grain of salt, whatever you see online.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, one thing you do really well on your website that I always I think this trumps everything uh in terms of uh content. One thing you do really well is social proof. I'm looking at your services page right now, and uh, you know, you talk about SEO, and then you've got uh, you know, a little bit about what it is, and you've got uh calendar booking, and then you've just got all these reviews. And some of these reviews are from a recent uh webinar that you ran or an intro class or something, and you've just got like a lot of five-star reviews uh from people with their picture and their name, and it's like it goes back to, you know, like seven years ago, right up to four days ago, right? Or 16 days ago, right? Now, social proof for me is a I mean, does Google pay attention to this? Because for me, it's a social cue. It's like all these people have said that. So there's this great video, by the way, that I think everyone should watch. If you haven't watched it, go just search for um Derek Sivers uh from CD Baby. He's the guy that started CD Baby and sold it for $22 million, and then famously put all that money into a trust fund for music education programs after he dies, and then he moved to Singapore, I think, and gave away everything he owns and kind of lived out of a backpack. Fascinating dude. I've had him on the podcast a long, long, long, long, long, long time ago, another podcast. But anyway, he um he made this video called uh, and it was a it was actually a TED talk, and um it's called How to Start a Movement. Go and watch the video where Derek Severs explains how to start a movement, and it's fantastic because essentially what happens is this guy gets up at a festival, this guy gets up on the hill, everyone's laying down on the hill chilling out, this guy gets up with no shirt on and starts dancing to the band, and he's the only guy to do it, right? In fact, I'm gonna put a link under the show notes for this video. But what happens is the second guy gets up and starts dancing with him. And then before you know it, and it takes a while for the second guy to get up, and then before you know it, the whole like eventually everyone gets up and starts dancing. And then the people who aren't dancing are the ones that look silly, they look like they're left out, not the guy who started, right? And so the point is, how to start a movement, it takes two, right? It's a fantastic observation. And for me, testimonials and social proof are this. It's like, well, I said this, but here's someone who's also saying it, which means I must be like, I mean, I can't pay people to I mean, I could, but do you know how much work is involved in paying people to write testimonials? Like, who's got time and money to do that? So, first of all, does Google take reviews like this into account? And when did you proactively start collecting testimonials and reviews and putting them on your site?