Is SEO Dead? What Still Works in the AI Era | Brandon Leibowitz

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People have called SEO dead since 2007. As long as people search, it still pays.

I've been blogging since 2010. Sixteen hundred pages and posts. A lot of them about software that doesn't even exist anymore.

So I asked Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers, what to do with all of it—and whether SEO still matters now that everybody's asking AI.

He's been doing SEO since 2007, he's been a guest on over 300 podcasts, and he wrote The Power of Guest Podcasting.

His take on old content stuck with me: "Even if you just add a couple sentences, that refreshes it."

What you'll learn in this episode

• Whether SEO is dead—and what hasn't changed since 2007
• How to earn backlinks without begging (hint: be a podcast guest)
• What to do with old blog posts: refresh, redirect or delete
• Whether AI-written content hurts you with Google
• How to start retargeting for as little as $5 a day

The best lines from Brandon

"As long as people are searching, then there's gonna be SEO."

—Brandon Leibowitz

"AI could actually write all your content and Google won't care...It just has to be accurate."

—Brandon Leibowitz, on AI-written content

"Retargeting is the cheapest ads, warm traffic, and that gets the best conversion."

—Brandon Leibowitz

Like this one? You'll also like Jon Ostenson on where the smart money in franchising is going and Jeffrey Gitomer on making first calls, not cold calls.

Full transcript (lightly cleaned)

Skim the chapter headings and jump to what you care about.

1:47—Is SEO dead?

Wes: Brandon Leibowitz, SEO expert since oh seven. Two thousand dude, that's like almost twenty years. Welcome to The Sales Podcast. How the heck are you?

Brandon: Thanks for having me on.

Wes: Isn't SEO dead? It's all AI now, right?

Brandon: SEO's been dead. Even when I first started doing SEO in two thousand seven, people were saying SEO was dead. So I was like, is this a good career?

Should I stick with it? And then like every year, but it's just changing a lot. But as long as people are searching, then there's gonna be SEO.

But if people stop searching and they just give you the results and they know what you're looking for, then things are gonna change.

Wes: SEO was dead. Oh my gosh. How did you get into SEO? Like where did that come from? What was your background?

2:32—How Brandon fell into SEO

Brandon: I just fell into that after I graduated from college, got my degree in business marketing and one of the first jobs I was offered was do an SEO, which I didn't really know much about it. I told the company that they didn't really teach me that in school. And they said, don't worry, we're new to this as well, and we're willing to learn with you and take you to different workshops and classes and seminars.

And after doing that for a few months, I just realized back in 2007 that everyone's probably gonna have a website in the future, and there's lots of ways to get traffic. Back then I was doing SEO, social media, email marketing, paid ads, and it all works to get traffic, but I thought to myself, who doesn't want free traffic and that got me sticking with the SEO over the years, working at different advertising agencies as a director of SEO and before work, after working on my lunch breaks, I'd work on my own company and eventually built that up to be able to quit my job and been doing this ever since.

Wes: So you were hired just as an employee to do the SEO?

Brandon: It was a e commerce website. They maybe had like four competitors that had a really niche product which made it nice as well. I mean it was still complicated.

They had thousands of products, which that made it pretty tricky, but that made me realize too that when I work at this company, they don't really have many competitors. So I could go to like a local business, like a pizza shop or a doctor's office and see if they wanted help with that SEO. So that got me thinking like I could work full time but I could also maybe make this into my own freelance to agency, which I started off doing freelance and then just built it up.

Wes: Well you did that pretty quickly. I'm looking at your LinkedIn. I mean, did you know right away like you wanted to have your own thing?

Brandon: Pretty much well, I've always had the entrepreneurial spirit in high school. Started a skateboard clothing company. Once I went to college I kinda Stopped focusing on it, which I should have kept it going because it was getting a little bigger, it was getting into a bunch of shops and stuff, but focused on school.

And then after school or after I graduated, then I got that first job and realized that I could also make this kind of into entrepreneurship where I could work full-time and as long as I'm not finding another competitor and helping out with their SEO. There's no conflict of interest, and it's just gonna help me learn more because now after work, before work, all my lunch breaks, I'm learning about SEO, doing SEO, so it just helped me get even better at.

But I took the slower route. I didn't jump ship right away. I was happy to have a full-time job and have one or two extra freelance clients here or there to make some extra money, but didn't really push it too hard until about ten years ago.

And that's really when I kind of went all in. Also cause I skateboard and skateboarding had lots of injuries and I broke my wrist almost every other year. I'd break my wrist or my hand and I had to have surgery and then I had to yeah it was a little frustrating so I had to jump around because a lot of times these jobs are like we can't wait for you to come back for a year so let us know once you're healed, you're done physical therapy but yeah that was a little rough in my thirties and or twenties but

Wes: Dude, wear a brace.

Brandon: I did wear a brace, but I don't know. That concrete is unforgiving. Even some guy I live in Venice Beach and I was at the Venice Skate Park, which is very busy, and some guy and I collided and I try to like protect one of my hands and I think he shattered three of my fingers that way.

So it's always been weird little things or a little rock on the ground that you're not paying attention to. Anytime I do real tricks, never really got hurt, but it's just when you're not paying attention, not expecting it and not prepared to fall.

A little rough. Especially having to bounce around all these different companies throughout the twenties. It always looked weird, like, why are you leaving your company?

It's like, oh and I show them the scars and then they kind of understand.

6:36—The fundamentals that haven't changed

Wes: So I wanna talk about like the basics and the fundamentals, but then I also want to get into the new stuff. Especially leveraging AI. But from a foundational standpoint, are there some things that just have never changed in twenty years and people have to get right before they start doing the fancy stuff?

Brandon: Say content is king. That's what I heard back in 2007 and still to this day content is one of the most important things, meaning text. Audio and video, I mean with AI they're getting much better at it, but before AI they couldn't understand audio and video and images and graphics.

They struggled with it, so they really rely heavily on text. And still to this day, the more text you put on your website, the easier you make it for the search engines, LLMs, all these different crawlers to understand who you are, what your website's about, what keywords you're targeting. But that one I feel like if everyone just adds more text, good quality text.

Making sure it's helpful for the user and it's gonna be beneficial and then that's gonna help them get more visibility. But a lot of the fundamentals really haven't changed too much over the years. It's just people find loopholes of ways to like build low quality content using like article spinners were really big.

Back when I first started doing SEO, where you would write an article, and then you could find synonyms and it would rewrite the article to make it 100% unique, which is what Google wants, unique content, but it didn't really read. Properly to people. It just was like a bunch of jumbled words thrown together.

So Google started penalizing that or backlinks. One of the most important things still to this day is getting other websites to talk about you, but quality over quantity, because people spammed a lot of backlinks over the years. So fundamentals haven't changed too much.

It's just making sure that you're not doing anything that's gonna that's like gaming the system because Google's been around for decades and seen all the tricks and if they catch you doing this, instead of ranking you higher, they drop you down and penalize you. We don't want that to happen.

8:50—Do you have to promote as much as you create?

Wes: So could someone that's a good writer, a prolific writer, just put content out there and be found, you know, or do they have to get in and make sure the H one is right and the H two and the alt text and have an image and have captions and have a good meta description and you know, share it, you know, plug it into buffer or whatever and share it and then, you know, 'cause like, you know, if you build it they will come, right? Is that is that not really a thing?

I mean, do you have to get out there and spend as much time promoting your stuff as creating your stuff?

Brandon: Unfortunately a little bit. I mean, Google wants you to create content that people naturally link to, that you're not doing any of these tactics or strategies where you just write really good content and people just naturally are drawn to it, which happens, but it is tough to break through because it is a crowded space nowadays and that's where you gotta make sure that you're doing more than your competition.

If everyone's writing really good content nowadays, then you gotta figure out all right, what are they lacking? Are they lacking those titles or meta descriptions or FAQs or schema or whatever, other technical things, but the backlinks are the big part that you have to work on that to try to get other websites to mention you. But naturally the search engines want that to happen.

They don't want you to build them, but we have to build them because if not, we're not gonna be found and they're just gonna show big brands.

10:27—How to get backlinks

Wes: So how does someone build backlinks?

Brandon: Links are clickable links from another website that points to yours and

Wes: No, I know. How do you get 'em? I mean, d you know, are you building networks?

You know, 'cause it's like somebody could call me and say, I got a nice shoe repair company, will you link to me? I'm like, No, don't ever call me again. I got no reason to link to a shoe company. You know, so how do we get 'em?

Brandon: That's weird. no, you gotta think outside the box and figure out what can I do to get another website to say yes. Like if I just asked you, like that shoe company asked you for a backlink, you're gonna be like, What? You want me to add your website to my website?

Like what's in it for me? But if you offer something of value that makes it a little bit more enticing. So a popular way was blogging on other people's websites, finding other niche relay websites and seeing if you could write for them or get interviews.

But I've kinda gone all in guest podcasting over the past couple of years where I had my own podcast for in 2020 for a few months. And then somebody asked me to be a guest on their show, and that made me think to myself, like, if I'm a guest, I'm gonna get all the benefits of podcasting, but I'm also gonna get published on their website if they have a website. Not all podcasts have a website, but the ones that do, they're gonna give me a backlink.

And I've been on over 300 shows as a guest in the past and actually just finished writing a book about it. It's called The Power of Guest Podcasting. It's that

Blue book right there. Published that like six months ago. Been working on that for four years, but it kind of lets people know the different the benefits of guest podcasting, but how to find podcasts that have SEO value that's gonna be passed on to you.

But you have to always offer something. Like if you just ask without giving something back, it's tough to get those backlinks.

Wes: Ha. What? So yeah, I got your email.

I mean, you don't use a service, right? You just do it yourself, the outreach.

Brandon: No, I just do it myself and have a team that helps with outreach. Trying to get people booked if they're open to being booked or being on podcasts, which not everybody wants to be on a podcast. So if they're not open to that, then doing the guest blogging, looking at competitors' backlinks, seeing where the competition has been published, using tools like Ahrefs or Moz or SEMrush.

These are all paid tools that will show you backlinks. But Those are also really good ones to find like hidden gems of where your competitors might be listed. And you're like, hmm, maybe I should reach out to this site.

It's not always gonna work because maybe they got a backlink from the LA Times in 2013 and you're like, all right, if I pitch that right, or are they still there? Probably not, maybe, but or are they even open to guest spots anymore? But interviews are a really good way. Digital PR is the best.

Wes: I mean I appreciate it how you do it. I mean, you're using your own URL. I get pitched fifteen to fifty times a week.

I made a template just to reply to people. I get so many. And they're usually crap.

You know, it's a PR firm. This one guy, I have outed him multiple times. I've now saved fifteen different email addresses he has pitched me from.

And I know the guy and we've had I called him out, he's like, take that down and he's all you gotta do is message me, man. I'm like, dude, stop emailing me. I got another email from him last week.

I DM'd him on LinkedIn. He's like, Oh, what's your email address? And I'm like, Really?

Like you go do some work, dude. So and then I got another one yesterday from this dude. And they're terrible.

But people pay hundreds, even thousands of dollars to get on podcasts. And it's unbelievable.

Brandon: Thanks.

14:15—Growing across every social platform

Wes: But so you know, I appreciate how you're doing it and you've got a good social media presence. Sixteen follow six sixteen thousand followers on LinkedIn, thirty-nine thousand on Twitter, sixteen thousand on Instagram, even fourteen thousand on Pinterest. How are you growing across all of 'em?

'Cause people usually say like pick one channel and run with it, you know, but you seem to have a good fit footprint again across all of them.

Brandon: No, the Pinterest one surprises me 'cause my Pinterest is SEO and digital marketing and a little bit of skateboarding, but you never know where your audience is. And I always tell people with social just cross promote everything. So I had a have a big page about on skateboarding, has a couple hundred thousand followers. And

Wes: Ha. okay.

Brandon: On Instagram and then I would automatically make every time I post on Instagram make it post to Facebook, make it post to Twitter, make it post to YouTube, make it post to all these different platforms. And by doing that, cross promoting my Facebook grew to fifty thousand for the skateboarding, my s Twitter grew to fifty thousand for skateboarding, my YouTube grew to twenty thousand subscribers.

All without me I were manually posting. So I always try to tell people like pick one. Like Instagram is probably a good one for most businesses to oh make that your main focus and then from there make it auto post to all the different platforms to TikTok to your website to YouTube and cross promoting it.

I use Zapier now with AI, there's n8n or these other websites I get help with the cross promotion or you mentioned buffer to help share blog posts. But I try to automate as much as I can and now it's become clear that everything should be automated as much as you can. It doesn't always work out perfectly like posting from Instagram to Twitter, having an auto-post the usernames don't always work, so you could go in and edit them, but it's but it's a lot of work.

Like if you try to post once a day on all the platforms, it takes a lot of time. People don't realize how much time goes into social media and anything to help just speed it up and then go all in on the main platforms and let the other one just kind of populate.

16:23—Quality vs. quantity

Wes: So what's the right formula or best formula today? You know, 'cause years ago it was frequent content, right? Three to five hundred word blog posts every day.

And then they're like, Well, deep post, twelve hundred words, two thousand words, three thousand words, you know, like write one good deep post a week, and then promote it, right? So like what's the blend now?

Brandon: It's always quality over quantity, so if you're trying to put out blog post every day and it's decent but if you could put out one a week that's really good it'd be better to put out the one a week versus trying to put out a bunch because now Google is gonna well they've always looked at this like crawl limits so they can only find so many pages on your website. So if you're putting out tons of content like I have one client he has like five thousand blogs on a new website.

I'm just like this does not seem natural like this is gonna get you in trouble and Google's not gonna know what to rent And there's gonna be like there's too many pages here that are mediocre content.

Wes: Well, and I see some guys in this space, in the AI space, publishing fifteen to eighteen posts a day, but they are getting indexed. They are coming up in AEO results. So 'cause I know what you mean, you don't overdo it, you'll get in trouble, but then I see guys getting and this is this guy is former Google guy, former CTO of MySpace.

I mean It's working at least for now. So like where's the where's the cutoff? You know, where do we draw the line?

Brandon: That's the part where AI is might be showing it, but Google's like, hmm, we don't really want to show it, but AI's constantly changing. And that's where I feel like it right now it's like the Wild West, where it's like when I first started doing SEO, it was a lot easier. It was much easier to rank.

And I think it's the same with AI, where they're just trying to figure things out, trying to figure out how to rank everything, because they're constantly changing what they're looking at, what they're referencing. Reddit used to be really big, now it's not.

Wes: For sure.

Brandon: Not as important, still important, but it's constantly changing. So now if you're trying to chase those short those quick wins, it might work in the short run, but in the long run, is it gonna be sustainable? And that's where you gotta trade that balance.

Cause it I mean, I see people doing it too, and it does work for some times, but then other times I see that their traffic just starts to drop off or it gets indexed and it gets shown for a couple weeks and then it just disappears.

18:55—Publish on your blog first, then cross-post

Wes: I and I've seen people get the Google slap and it's not pretty. So the formula would be write something longer, right? Twelve hundred, two thousand words at least.

And then how do you share it? 'Cause I see things get ranked I tell people all the time, like if you don't have blog, and some people like th they're not really allowed to, they be in financial services or insurance or something, healthcare. I'm like, go write an article on LinkedIn, you know.

Talk about your industry and 'cause I see the big brands, Substack, Medium, LinkedIn. I mean, those things seem to dominate search nowadays. You know, would you say just go publish there for now to start see if you can jump the gun, you know, jump ahead of things a little bit?

Brandon: No, it's good to distribute your content everywhere, but I would put it on your blog first, if you have a blog. Like I know some industries, like you said, are sensitive or they can't have it, but Publishing on your own blog gives you that credibility of you publish it first and then I would cross promote it. So that's kind of what I do is I post it on my blog and then I'll share it on LinkedIn and Substack and all these other places.

But Google kind of looks at who published it first as the original source of it. And then everyone else get seen as duplicate content. But AI's change it where I'm I see LinkedIn getting indexed really quickly, but

We'll to see if they patch that and stop that from happening, because once people find a way to game the system, they're like, wait, do we want people just spamming LinkedIn now all the time to just get that traffic? So it's kind of a back and forth battle trying to figure out that sweet spot, that happy medium.

Wes: So is it okay to have duplicate content, like publish it on my blog, then publish the exact article on Substack or LinkedIn? Or do I need to change it or do I just share on LinkedIn? 'Cause then I hear, you know, like LinkedIn'll and Facebook will deprecate it if, you know, if th put the link in the comments, you know, all that stuff. Like, what's the right way?

Brandon: I do it all though, so I'll post on my blog and then I'll share the link on LinkedIn. I'll make it a LinkedIn newsletter as well. Trying to tap into both different ways, but rewriting it is always best.

If you can rewrite it, you don't have to rewrite the whole thing, but just change it up a little bit for the different platforms. That way it's not exactly the same. But We're not really worried about duplicate content because if Substack doesn't rank for that topic, then it's not gonna rank.

But if your blog ranks, that's gonna bring you traffic because once people read or are on your website, you have full control. When they're on other websites, especially like LinkedIn, there's a lot of noise and distractions and messages and friend requests that could get people reading your LinkedIn newsletter, but then sucked into the algorithm and then they forget about you. Whereas on your blog you control all that messaging and you

Wes: So what are the numbers? Because I notice like my reading habits have drastically changed. I'm reading more long form content on a Twitter post, you know, than a blog.

And I used to read blogs a lot. So it am I abnormal? Is that are you seeing that trend? You know what's happening there.

Brandon: I feel like social is opened it up, especially now you could put longer than two hundred eighty characters on Twitter, which makes it much easier 'cause back then it was like a hundred forty, and then it went to two eighty. Now it's really long form content that you could put on there and but yeah, no, I mean there's a lot of good people that are posting on Twitter only and just sharing that content on social and it s just doesn't have that same SEO value as publishing on your own website.

But for visibility, for exposure, that's a little different where it's like this is just general marketing, but for SEO, I'm always trying to get those SEO wins on top of it. But it works if you're just posting on Twitter and you have a big following, then maybe you don't really need a blog. But if you're not trying to rank organically with your website.

Wes: So same question though, like should I write a long article, put it on my site as a blog, and then I don't know what. Should I have, you know, my AI tool rewrite it and then publish it as a long Twitter post and just link back to myself?

Brandon: That's kind of like the LinkedIn newsletter strategy where you post on your blog and then you make a LinkedIn newsletter. You could do the same thing is post on your blog, rewrite it a little bit, and then share it on Twitter or all these platforms. I try to cross promote it everywhere, but yeah, no, could be.

I haven't done the Twitter one. I've done all the other platforms that you mentioned, but I haven't really done Twitter, which maybe I should start doing that as well, because if I'm already posting it on all these other third party sites, posting on one other platform

Not gonna take that much time and Twitter is a huge site with a big audience.

24:07—Link in the post or in the comments?

Wes: So but when you say share though, just to be clear, are you spinning or tweaking the article and posting it in its entirety or are you like having a preview share image from your blog and linking back to your to the thing and is that even recommended, you know, or d again like should I put the link in comments because the socials, you know, don't want you clicking away? Like how do you share?

Brandon: I do both ways, sharing my link and then also sharing the content separately because

Wes: Do you put the link in the post or in the comments?

Brandon: In the post that way it gets the featured image and that way that image is clickable because if not, then the image if you just click on it gets bigger and guts but yeah, it's tricky 'cause yeah, social doesn't want you to leave social media. They want you to stay on those platforms. They don't want you to put clickable links so they kind of devalue some of those posts.

So people put the comment for pin like a first comment and little tricks like that.

Wes: So but you do that or do you just say screw it, p throw the link in the main post and m and just run with it?

Brandon: Throw the link in the main post and then if you're doing like a LinkedIn newsletter then you could put in the first comment. Here's a link to the full article or the full blog post if you want to read it. So you could hit it both ways because it does look good visually having that c that featured image in the social media.

Wes: But if it gets suppressed, I mean, you know, is it better to have whatever, you know, a hundred people see the post and have to go to the first comment for the link versus ten people, you know, see it and the link takes them right away. I mean, and I'm just making up numbers, but there's some there's some punishment, right? I mean, Facebook will suppress outbound links and I assume LinkedIn does as well, maybe even Twitter.

You know, have you studied those numbers or you know, are there articles out there that have researched it?

Brandon: I'm not sure the exact numbers 'cause social's not my main focus, but I know that they definitely do suppress it and on all the platforms. Every single platform. Because what's in it for them?

Like if you look at Instagram, the only clickable link is your bio link or like the a little swipe up stories, but they don't want you to leave Instagram. They want you to stay on Instagram, Facebook, all these platforms are pretty much the same. Like you put a link in your Instagram, it's not gonna be clickable in the captions because they don't want you leaving those platforms.

They the more time you stay on these sites, the more ad revenue they make and They're just fighting for your engagement. They don't want you to leave and go on to your blog because getting somebody back to Twitter from a blog like going from Twitter to your blog and then going back to Twitter doesn't always happen. And Twitter's like, we don't want to lose that person because that means we're losing money. They're just trying to maximize their profits.

27:12—Refresh old posts or write new ones?

Wes: So if someone has not really paid attention to SEO, but let's say they've got some decent content maybe even over the years, should they go back and try to optimize, maybe refresh some old posts and get 'em back, get them out into the world, or just start doing new and just follow best practices. You know, where would you know c assuming that you they got limited time, limited money.

You know, they're gonna try to do it themselves for a minute and try to start popping.

Brandon: Going in all your Old blog posts is always good checking. Well, I started my blog in 2007. So I have a blog post that are really old.

But if I go in and update them and make them fresh, then Google's gonna look at it and say, all right, maybe let's rank this again. But if it's just like a keyword research strategies in 2010 blog that's never been updated, they're not gonna want to show up. But if I say, hey, I've updated this every year with the best practices, and they look at that stuff too when your content was last updated, not only when it was published but when it was updated.

So going into all your old content is always a good idea just to refresh it maybe once a year or however whenever it needs to be. But even if you just add a couple sentences, that refreshes it and gets them to come back and re analyze it and recrawl it and hopefully then index it 'cause a lot of the old blog posts might not be indexed as well. So you can go in and update them and kinda like pruning where you can look at Google Search Console, see which ones are getting impressions but no clicks, maybe fixing those are the ones that are getting no impressions and no clicks. Maybe cut those off or rewrite them if necessary.

28:56—Delete, redirect or update old content

Wes: So is it okay? Let's say it is old, you know, yeah, I'm going through this right now. I've got, you know, I've been blogging about Infusionsoft since like two thousand ten.

Well, they became Keap and then they got bought by Thryv and I'm not really selling it anymore. So is it Does it show, does it validate me that I've been in the game a long time? If I've got some sixteen year old blog post about con you know, about a tech platform, should I just delete 'em?

Should I three oh one, you know, redirect them? Should I update, say, well, Infusionsoft and Keap and Thryv, well, you know, but hey, here's how the game has changed. And like so I kind of leave it for historical, but then you know, just refresh it and then do I republish it, you know, with today's date or do I leave a two thousand eleven date?

Brandon: I would leave the original date that it was published, but then a lot of people will also put like right underneath it last updated and then they'll fill in the date of whatever it's been updated. So then you could see that, hey, you've been around, you have that credibility. I wouldn't just delete them unless they're not getting any traffic.

That's right, I would look at Search Console and see if they are ranking and if they're ranking then I would keep them up. I wouldn't take them down. I would just kind of refresh them and make them more current for 2026.

Wes: Well, I mean th they're indexed, but you know, you look at the last year, you know, no visits, no clicks. So I'm like, Yeah, 'cause nobody wants to read a post from two thousand eleven about technology, it doesn't exist anymore. You know, and so how do you know what to do with that?

You know, does Google frown like if I go I have sixteen hundred pages and posts, you know, and I was just looking this morning and you know, some of them haven't been crawled. So

Is there a harm if I just go and like mass delete, you know, five hundred posts with no clicks? Like, is that a no-no?

Brandon: Look at impressions versus clicks because nowadays with AI overview well featured snippets back in 2013 have dropped clicks and they're just dropping all the time. So if it's getting shown, it might be shown in the AI overviews, which don't always get those clicks and then if you cut it out You're gonna lose that and the AI overviews give like that branding where they could see your name, your company name.

But I would really look at if they're not getting any impressions, then they're probably just dead weight. That's just those I would one hundred percent trim. The ones that are getting impressions, maybe no clicks, that's where you gotta pick and choose.

Should I keep this or what are people finding it for? Are people just looking at the history of this tool? Is that really my audience? Maybe not. So maybe that could be cut out, but

Wes: So if so they're getting so if like no impressions, let's say for a year, and then obviously no clicks, is there any harm in just outright deleting it or should you three oh one, you know, redirect them? Or three oh two, whatever? Okay.

Brandon: I would try to redirect them to an appropriate page. That way it doesn't just become a four oh four error page. But if it hasn't been have any impressions or clicks, is anyone finding it?

But it still is good just to try to avoid four oh fours if you can.

32:06—Can AI rewrite your content?

Wes: For sure. Is it beneficial or harmful to have AI go read these older posts and refresh 'em? You know, since they are they were original ten, twelve, fifteen years ago, you know, and then if AI s you know, spruces it up a bit, i would Google ding that Or it'd be like, Okay, that you know, this is not AI content, it you know, it was updated a bit, but is that okay?

Brandon: AI could actually write all your content and Google won't care. Google said we don't care who writes the content anymore because they can't tell the difference between AI and human content. It just has to be accurate, which AI is not accurate.

Wes: I thought there was some kind of watermark issue like a month ago with Claude and people were losing their minds and it's like well, whatever.

Brandon: They probably watermarket, but Google look if you read the Google's best practices for content and They specifically say we don't care really who writes it, AI or human. Like maybe ten years ago I would have been like, no, robots should not be writing your content. These article spinners are all getting penalized.

But Google said that as long as the content offers value and is helpful for the reader, so the helpful content update is a big one that they're looking at. It's making sure that the content is gonna help the reader. Like going back to the text on like how much text should a blog post have, Google says It should be enough to fill that answer.

Like if somebody's searching for something that's really basic, like how to tie my shoes, then you can only probably write a couple hundred words. But if you're trying to write an article about like how to change your car engine, you could then you need to write thousands of words. So it's just trying to figure out like what's gonna be beneficial without overdoing it and just throwing fluff in to just throw it in there, but making sure it's all gonna be good, useful content for the end user that

That's really what they're looking at now nowadays.

Wes: So if someone so th if they have a lot of content it wasn't optimized, you'd say spend more time updating, optimizing and sharing versus trying to make a bunch of new stuff.

34:33—Old date or last-updated date?

Brandon: If you have lot, if you're sitting on like you or like myself, I have hundreds of blog posts, so me going in and cleaning them up is gonna be a quicker win than writing hundreds of new ones because it takes time to write blogs and takes a lot of research and I mean AI has made it much easier where literally you can just have AI write the content, but it still needs a human to double, triple, quadruple check it, fact check it, make sure it's real beneficial content.

Wes: So, you know, blogs will usually have like they'll show the most recent. So it's interesting when you say like leave the old date but then show and update it. You know update blob or we know blurb at the top.

So how if I truly like if I did a big update on a post, And I want people to see it, you know, that just naturally hit my site. Is it bad to make it a current published date? You know, is it too big of a hit?

I get or is it just is it so beneficial to have like a fifteen year old post that's updated versus showing

Brandon: No, but I would put the modern date as the last updated and still have the original publishing date 'cause I wouldn't republish it unless you're

Wes: Well, but like you know, like I'm saying most blogs I get are there features on a blog like to show updated? 'Cause I usually it's shows most recent. And so let's say I haven't written new content in a gear, but I'm updating sixteen hundred posts. So my site is updated.

You see what I'm getting at? Because like I haven't written a lot of new stuff. I've been redoing all c like there's nothing new under the sun.

I mean, over twenty years I've kind of written what's out there. And of course, I'm throwing in AI. I'm throwing how to leverage AI in HubSpot, leverage AI in your CRM and by Fix Your Follow-Up Failure, right?

Fix Your Follow-Up Failure has been a subject and Infusionsoft gave it to us, you know, eighteen years ago. So, if I'm write a good update on it but my blog sorts by date, like you'll never see that thing 'cause it's way in the back, you know, as far as pages, you know, or sorting it. So do I just rely on my sharing and it getting indexed versus just regular traffic finding my page and clicking through like they're browsing a you know, a catalogue?

Brandon: Pretty much that you hope that Google's index that page, that old blog post, and shows in the search results when people are searching for keywords related to that topic. But Pushing it back to the top of the blog post after a month, it's gonna be buried again. So it's always that issue of like, depending on how frequently you publish content gets buried and it's deep and it's hard to find it, especially if you have hundreds, thousands, like Forbes or Huffington Post or Wall Street Journal, which has so much content, they're gonna go in and edit it, but they're not gonna change the published date.

They're just gonna say this is last updated. So Google will still index it and still find it that way. And that's really the main goal is get.

That page to show more in the search results. That way it gets more traffic. People come to your blog, they might not necessarily see it.

You could pin it at the top of your blog or make it like a featured blog post, but there's only so much space and then how do you pick which ones to pin or which ones to feature because it's tough to but then I'd look at Search Console and see which ones maybe get the most traffic, which topics get the most traffic, look at Google Analytics, and then you could

38:13—Does Bing matter?

Brandon: Kind of keep those ones at the top or make it more visually appealing somehow with like a carousel or sliders.

Wes: How does Bing play into this? You know, how much everybody mentions Google of course. Should we be paying attention to Bing and their keyword planner?

Brandon: Google is kind of just the front of the show, but Bing is gotten a little bit more important because open or ChatGPT is open AI, which is heavily funded by Microsoft, which is Bing. So then Google wait said, wait, hold on. ChatGPT is gonna be in Bing.

We need to put our they made it Bard at first and they changed it to Gemini recently, but they made their AI and 'cause they didn't want to lose that market share to Bing because if Bing had AI and Google doesn't, everyone's probably gonna go to Bing. So Bing is still pretty important or a little bit more important nowadays where I would look at Google Search Console, look at Bing Webmaster Tools, make sure that you're trying to get shown everywhere because those two are the bigger ones.

Yahoo, I'd say chopped down a lot. It's not really even relevant that much. It's still there, but I think Yahoo is actually powered by Bing.

39:21—Using AI for real estate content

Wes: So if somebody is not great at content, like my son's in real estate, he hates writing, he hates making videos, should he just use AI and I could do it for him, you know. Could I write could I have AI write, you know, a couple of blog posts a day about maybe different neighborhoods in the city, different counties, you know, and just publish two a day, you know, and based on your advice, or let's say we make it twelve hundred words, and I go grab some images from around the area, like would that hurt him? Would that help him?

Brandon: As long as you someone is editing it that knows real estate. So if you know the markets and know real estate, then That should be okay. But if it's something that you don't have any experience in, or just something that you're not comfortable with, then you're just gonna rely on the AI to be accurate, which it's probably not.

And also depends on how you prompt it. Because if you just say, write me an article about the real estate market in San Diego, it's gonna be very generic and lots of real estate agents are probably gonna be doing that. But if you personalize it, give it a feed it more information about who you are, about what specific areas in San Diego you're targeting or whatever you're trying to put in there, but personalizing it, giving first hand experiences and helping out with that EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authority and trust, are really big to show.

But AI's not really gonna do that unless you give it that content. Otherwise it will do it, but it's just gonna make it up and it then people might be calling you out, like, Why did you say this? Did you really do this? Or did your son do that? And it could backfire.

41:15—Writing The Power of Guest Podcasting

Wes: So tell me about your book. Why did it take you four years, man? That's a long time.

Brandon: Writing is never my strong suit in high school I did not like writing and never really wanted write a book. People told me for years I should write a book. But I was just like I don't really know what to write about.

Everybody's written about SEO. It's but then after being a guest on couple hundred podcasts, I thought to myself that not many people talk about guest

Wes: Ha. How did that start? I mean, did you seek it out or was it kind of accidental? Did somebody invite you and then and you ran with it?

Brandon: Well and my home pod well, back in 2020, the world shut down. And I couldn't teach classes in person anymore. So I started teaching classes on Zoom.

Zoom took the audio and video separately. So then I thought to myself, let me just take this audio and make it like a little makeshift podcast. So I'd teach classes online and did that for a few months.

And then somebody reached out to me and said, Hey, we saw your podcasts, but we would like to have you on as a guest on our podcast. So they reached out to me and then that got me realizing that's gonna have all the benefits of podcasting but also get me that backlink from another person's website because the main reason I even started my podcast is to get published on Spotify to get published on the on iTunes on Google Podcasts on all these different players if you don't have a podcast you're not gonna be getting those backlinks so I did that to get those backlinks but once you got a backlink from Spotify a hundred more backlinks from Spotify are not as good as a hundred unique websites that are linking to you And that just got me going on the guest podcasting where I would do guest blogging for my clients where I'd reach out to blogs to get them published.

So then I just started doing guest podcasting for myself as a kind of like a little test to see if it works and got myself booked on a bunch of different podcasts and just kept going with it 'cause Being a guest is a lot easier than having your own podcast. You don't have to edit, which is the toughest part, or think of topics, or you just show up and answer questions, which is also not that difficult if you know what you're talking about, but if you don't know what you're talking about, it's gonna show really quickly.

43:31—Tracking podcast traffic with one landing page

Wes: What's what has been the benefit of doing this? You know, you're an SEO guy, so I gotta assume you've tracked you know, attribution and growth, you know, can you track this to new business?

Brandon: No, people hear me on podcasts, they say they've listened to the podcast episode. It's tough to say that being a guest on all these podcasts has gotten me more traffic from Google because correlation isn't causation and my backlinks have like doubled since doing this. So from 2007 to 2020, I think I have maybe like five hundred backlinks. From 2020 to 2026,

I doubled that. I have A thousand backlinks, so I've grown exponentially and my traffic has grown, but you can't specifically say this backlink is because is getting me ranked higher. It's kind of tough to do that.

But I see traffic coming from these podcasts. I track everything in analytics. So I and then I make like a landing page for every episode that I'm a guest on to direct traffic to.

Then I could track how much traffic that page has gone, which that page is now one of my top pages for traffic. So instead of at the end when people are hey, how can Yeah. Instead of listing out Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, because my username on Facebook is different than Instagram because I couldn't get Brandon Leibowitz, so I had to get LeibowitzBrandon, or Twitter won't let me put Brandon Leibowitz.

I have to shorten it to BrandonLeibs. So I had like think of an acronym. And if I tell people that at the end of a podcast, they're gonna be like, What?

Where do I go? So I just make a landing page and then I can track how many people go to that landing page. And that page has gone lots of traffic over the years. So I can

I could see it and I could track conversions, see how many people went from that podcast page and filled out a book to time on my calendar or whatever conversion action I'm trying to reach out or accomplish.

45:29—Why every business should retarget

Wes: Are you retargeting?

Brandon: I tell people retarget always. That's the I don't really like paid ads because they're expensive. It's tough to convert cold traffic.

But Low-hanging fruit is every website is gonna have that bounce rate, or now they change it to engagement rate. Like how many people stay on your website? And usually about 40 to 60 percent of people will stay on your website, and then the rest of them leave immediately because of infinite reasons.

Your website could load slow. Maybe somebody was looking it on mobile and they're about to buy your product, and then somebody called them and they forgot about you. But retargeting is the cheapest ads, warm traffic, and that gets the best.

Conversion. So I always tell every business, almost every business, unless it's something really like impulse by where you're just like buying a t-shirt. Maybe don't retarget.

But in general, like I retarget for over a year because people come to me and like taking one of my classes 10 years ago. And they're like, Oh, I wasn't ready, I was in startup mode, now I'm ready to use your services. So I realize for me it's a really long buying cycle where It doesn't hurt to retarget for the most, which I could do 540 days, I think, on Google.

And I retarget on Google, on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Meta, pretty much everywhere. I try to follow people around. That way they see me and it builds that trust.

Like now they see my banner ads or my video ads everywhere. And like, oh I remember I went to that SEO Optimizers website. Maybe they didn't fill out a form or they didn't watch one of my classes.

I'm gonna hit them with ads. Tell them like depending where they are in the buying cycle. If you haven't watched my masterclass, check out this free class.

If you have checked it out, but you didn't book a time on my calendar, then I'm gonna show you ads that say book a time on my calendar. If you booked a time on my calendar but didn't convert, then I'm gonna show you testimonials and reviews. So not just sending everybody the same page, which a lot of people when they re-market, retarget, they just send them the same page or but if you could really understand that people are in different buying cycles, they might be top of the funnel middle bottom like where are they it's a little tougher for services e-commerce it's pretty straightforward like they look at that product show them that product but for service-based businesses you gotta get a little bit more creative with those custom audiences

47:49—Retargeting on $5 a day

Wes: What like what's a minimum budget someone should spend if they're starting out with retargeting? I mean, can they spend as little as ten dollars a day or does it need to be, you know, thousands a month?

Brandon: You could do like five dollars a day. It really depends on the traffic. So if you're only getting like how

Wes: If it's small. a small business. I mean I always I use like my son in real estate, I always use like a chiropractor example. So I mean somebody that's you know, not some super famous, not Amazon, you know, small local business, you know, trying to just grow.

Brandon: And as long as you have enough people to populate the custom audience, I think you have to have like at least a thousand visitors in the past ninety days. Every platform's different, but as long as you have that, but that

Wes: Can you do visitors or can you do like lookalike audiences? 'Cause I've got I mean thousands and tens of thousands in my database, you know, from years and years. So, could I upload that list and say create lookalikes or is that's not really retargeting, is it?

Brandon: No, that's not retargeting, but that is good to do because if you have a list of converters, so which is even better, like if you have a list of all the like I have my big database of all these email subscribers I've had over the years, but then if I could figure out which one's actually converted and then make a look like audience for that's gonna be even better. And but yeah I would do that too before I would start doing cold outreach.

I mean that is cold outreach, but at least it's a similar audience. Whereas in general when I just run just regular ads, it's tough to get those conversions. It's expensive depending on what platform you're on.

Like LinkedIn is like 10 times more expensive than Google and Google's already expensive. Of enough. Meta's way cheaper than kind of just throwing everything against the wall and seeing what works.

Push more money to that, pull money away from what's not working. But yeah, no, look-alikes and retargeting are the two that I would remark spend as much as you can on retargeting until you don't get shown. Like if you have a hundred dollar a day budget, but you only have a thousand people in that retargeting list, you're not gonna spend that full hundred dollar budget.

You're maybe gonna spend like five dollars, or depending on how many people are searching that day and how.

Wes: So can you trust the tools? Like if I put in a hundred dollars, I mean it's not gonna go just spend it and waste it, right? It would say, Hey, there's not that many people, so we only spent five today.

Is it mean can you trust 'em? Or should you limit it to five? okay.

Brandon: Nope, that happens all the time. no, that happens all the time where I'm like, why is it not spending my budget? And it's because some days are less popular than other days. Like some days more people are online, so there's more of an audience to show my ads to, and some days there's less people online or less people searching.

So Google always says we're gonna spend up to fifty percent more of your budget per day, which seems a little crazy. And when I worked at agencies, when We had clients that were spending a million dollars a day. They're like, wait, we can't have an extra five hundred thousand dollars spent.

So but Google does that because some days you might spend ten percent of your budget. So they're trying to

Wes: Less. Okay.

Brandon: Trying to capitalize as much as I can. So you might see days where you're like, why did it spend more than my budgets? Because it's offsetting the days that showed less of your budget.

But in general, if you say it's a hundred dollars a day, in the if you look at it from like a month to month standpoint, it's really not gonna spend much more than that. It might spend a little bit more, but it's not gonna be too crazy.

Wes: But I would think if somebody, you know, let's say you're getting a hundred visitors a day, and then for whatever reason, f summer vacation, holidays, you know, you only get fifty a day for a week. But over time, you know, over the course of that year, you know, a hundred a day, now you've got thousands and you say, you know, you can show up for five hundred and forty days, it would seem like your budget would always be going up 'cause you're Those people are gonna see your ads every day for five hundred and forty days, right?

Brandon: As long as they're still online. So maybe they're not offline or they disconnect. But I also set parameters too, saying like don't show it to everybody, show it to different age groups or different depending on what platform you're on, you could put different settings into the ads to kind of cut it out.

That way it's not just growing and growing when you're like, All right, do I really want to show it to people that are eighteen to twenty five? They're maybe might be biotech.

Wes: But Right, but assuming well in even in those numbers, let's say you know, a hundred a day or are within the right segment. And I mean most people stay online. And so you know, every day then it would seem like your budget or your spend would go up.

At least until you get to that five hundred and fortieth day, then it would it wouldn't even go down, it would just cap out, right? And then you it would seem like you would stay at that number. Forever, right? As long as your site's up and traffic keeps coming.

Brandon: That's where I try to cap it to saying like show ads once a day to people. Don't sh like I'm sure everyone's seen this where they look at a product and they don't buy it and they see ads all day long everywhere they go and it's too much. And that's where you gotta put those parameters and

52:39—Frequency caps and ad fatigue

Wes: All the time. All the time. Why did yeah, like how much are they spending?

Like I see Instagram ads, all Instagram and Facebook, you know. Come join my AI masterclass. I'm like, dude, I'm seeing your ad literally twenty times a day. It's in my feed, it's everywhere.

Brandon: Meta doesn't let you control that, unfortunately. Google does. So I put caps on Google, on YouTube, on display, on performance max, demand gen, all those different campaigns, but Meta doesn't give you frequency capping, which sometimes can be annoying because I feel that issue where I'm like, sometimes I'll see my own ads.

Wes: 'Cause they pay, right? Every time I see that ad, they're paying.

Brandon: Depending on how you set up, but usually yeah, it's like impressions or mhm.

Wes: I mean it's usually it's impressions versus clicks, but yeah. So if somebody is new to this, again, my son, local chiropractor, should they start with Google retargeting and then kinda ease into it?

53:42—Google or Meta first?

Brandon: I would try to think where who is your audience and where are they. But nowadays people are everywhere. So if you're only on Google then you're not gonna

Wes: Well and the and these are obviously these are local, right? A chiropractor's gonna be super local. My son, semi local.

I mean real somebody in Miami could call him say I wanna I'm moving there, I'm buying a house, a second house. So theoretically he could be national, but you know, I'm saying target Southern California at most, you know, maybe a twenty mile radius of our location. You know, so local, and th and then the segmented of course by age.

Mm you know, my son more maybe than the chiropractor could, 'cause anybody of any age could benefit from a chiropractor, but, you know, eighteen year olds probably aren't buying a house, you know, so

Brandon: No. Especially nowadays. Depending well, depending on where you live and if you're in Los Angeles, definitely not.

But yeah, I know Google usually is the better one to start because there's more buyer intent and Google has the display network, which I see my ads on Yahoo. Like how'd that happen? It's because of Google is Yahoo is pulling the ads from Google. So if you s look on any website, but

Social media is huge nowadays, whereas in the past, I'd say is your audience on social media, but nowadays everybody's kind of on social media. So it doesn't hurt to be on meta as well. Meta's gonna be cheaper, but Google has that buyer intent where I would try to exhaust your budget on Google first over Meta.

But you never know until you test. Every business is different, every website, every audience is different. So

Wes: Nearby is. But the average person, if they're gonna try to do it on their own, they can't really test that much. You know, I'm like m both of my sons when they were I mean, they're twenty nine and twenty eight now, but this was they were in high school, so easily fourteen years ago roughly, they asked had all these questions for me about Bitcoin.

And I you know, I used to be a financial guy years ago and I was looking into it and I was buying some and I said, Look, there's too much there's too much going on. There's too much for me to really tell you and they were both smart and you know, I said, put some skin in the game. Go buy a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin.

You'll pay attention if you got a hundred dollars in the game, you know, and they did, and they've done well, you know, and both have done well overall in life. But so like with this, I would I just want people to start. You know, most people aren't doing this.

My son's not doing it, my chiropractor friend's not doing it, my friend with marketing items, promotional items, she's not doing it. You know, so I'm like, I just want people to start. And it's like, okay, go to Google, set a ten dollar a day budget and start paying attention, get some skin in the game, right? And then kind of iterate from there.

Brandon: No, I would agree with that one. Just start off on Google and literally you can even put like a couple of dollars a day. Doesn't even have to be ten dollars a day.

You could put whatever. Sometimes I have a threshold saying like it has to be more than three dollars a day, but think that's like the minimum where you could just test the waters, get a feel for it.

Wes: Regardless, people spend ten dollars a day on fast food, you know, so I'm like, You can spend ten dollars. I mean, give me five dollars. They spend five bucks at Starbucks without thinking about it, you know. So spend five bucks on yourself.

Brandon: Invest in your business. 'Cause it's gonna be a lot better return in the long run than just throwing it out there.

57:10—Where to find Brandon

Wes: Well man, we've we're over an hour. Thanks for letting me pick your brain. What do you want people to do?

Where do you want them to go? Do you wanna buy your book? Do you have a PDF?

Do you have a report? A newsletter? What do you want folks to do?

Brandon: So I created a special gift for everybody if you go to my website at SEOOptimizers.com forward slash gift. That's S-E-O-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S dot com forward slash gift. And they could find that gift there along with my contact information and classes over the years I've done for free.

They could watch that or I put the book there. So kind of like what I was saying earlier, where direct people to just one landing page. That's what I do is create one landing page because now I could track.

How much traffic comes to that page and I could see how it performs and now I could put everything there. I could put all my I could put my Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, but if I start reading it off right now, people are gonna be like, what? Where do I go?

Wes: It's crazy. No. I tell people all the time, have one good URL.

You know, I say assume they're on a treadmill, they're on a mountain bike, they're you know, they're on a plane with no internet, like it's gotta be memorable, it's gotta be clear, you know, 'cause we're just gonna forget. Too much.

Brandon: Unfortunately, there's too much going on nowadays and it's too easy to just forget about it and having one central landing page is always the best. So that's where I do. It's just direct everybody and glad that you're telling people to do that too, because I do hear people at the end of some podcast episodes listing out all these different places.

I'm like, I don't even remember any of them now 'cause I tried to remember one, but now it just jumbled all together and then you might never find them and that's the worst.

Wes: Hell no. No. and I'll be linking I'll link to it from the show notes and on the blog so 'cause I embed this on my website as well. So you'll get a few backlinks.

Brandon: I appreciate that. And I usually reciprocate the favor and I take all the guest spots now and make that my makeshift podcast. So instead of recording new episodes, I just take all my guest spots and if the host is open to it, then I'll throw it up on my platforms and share it.

That way we're all winning and cross-promoting and tapping into new audiences and getting backlinks and getting all those SEO wins.

Wes: Cool. Sounds good. Well, all right.

Brandon Leibowitz, SEOOptimizers.com. Man, thanks for coming on the show.

Brandon: Thank you for having me.

Wes: Good to see ya. Have a good day.

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