Primary Topics Discussed:

• Local SEO
• Local SEO Tactics
• Developing internet marketing strategies for local businesses.

Links Mentioned in Episode

• Brandon Leibowitz’s LinkedIn
• SEO Optimizers Website

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kevin Dieny: Hello, and welcome to the Close The Loop podcast. I’m your host, Kevin Dieny. And today we’re gonna be jumping into local digital marketing strategies. We’re gonna be talking about all things, local, local marketing businesses, uh, marketing for local businesses, how that works. What’s the best way to do that. What are some things you should look out for?

[00:00:18] Kevin Dieny: We’re gonna be focusing mostly on the digital side, but you know, sometimes there’s jump into marketing, can go all all over the place. So to really help me dive into this topic is someone I’ve contacted and I’ve really sought out as, okay. This guy knows his stuff. This is a guy who really understands SEO, really understands local marketing, local businesses, and I thought would be a great person to have on.

[00:00:39] Kevin Dieny: So our guests is Brandon Leibowitz. Brandon is the owner of SEO Optimizers. His company helps businesses generate more traffic, but not only that traffic that converts into sales and leads using proven. I love that term SEO strategies. So Brandon has helped thousands of small and medium sized businesses grow their online presence.

[00:01:03] Kevin Dieny: He’s definitely been doing this a lot and has done this for a while. He is passionate about seeing others’ businesses succeed, which I think is really cool. And he’s, uh, he’s very passionate about skateboarding. So welcome, Brandon. Thanks for coming on.

[00:01:17] Brandon Leibowitz: Thanks for having me on I’m looking forward to sharing some tips about local SEO.

[00:01:21] Kevin Dieny: Let’s ground everyone with what we’re kind of talking about. When we say local marketing. What does that mean? And how would let’s say is that different than every other type of marketing that exists?

[00:01:32] Brandon Leibowitz: Well, so local will be more geotargeting, a specific area or radius or city or region that you wanna focus on versus just trying to just reach everybody.

[00:01:42] Brandon Leibowitz: Now. You’re like, I have a specific, maybe I have a physical location, a brick and mortar business that I want people to come to. Or I might be a service based business, like a plumber or. Dentist or something like that, where they serve a five or 10 mile radius. And the way Google usually works is they’ll show you for your keywords or for your, like, if someone’s searching for your keywords in the general area, they’ll show you for like a 10 or 15 mile radius.

[00:02:06] Brandon Leibowitz: But if you’re trying to build out more than that, then it’s about trying to get creative, maybe having virtual offices or creating local pages on your website, or just trying to figure out other strategies to, to get up in those areas. But local kind of adds a layer of extra work because now we’re trying to also optimize.

[00:02:22] Brandon Leibowitz: Just like, we’d optimize your website, but now you have a Google my business getting listed in Google maps or Yelp or all these other places that we wanna get you ranked hire as well. So it’s not just ranking your website now it’s ranking website, plus getting on all these local directories and trying to get you that visibility.

[00:02:38] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, yeah, that’s really great for a business to consider, like how much of my customers are, you know, local or geographic, even if they’re not necessarily, they don’t consider themselves maybe a local business, the local strategies of, okay, well you do. If you have physical location or if you have a business they’re still that locality to consider, you’re still part of that community.

[00:02:59] Kevin Dieny: You’re still in that area. So I think that’s, I think it could definitely help a lot of businesses. So here’s something I’ve heard a lot. From smaller local businesses. And I hear this oftentimes from like a restaurant is like, why do I need marketing? You know, like my location is my marketing. Why would I need more than that?

[00:03:18] Kevin Dieny: Why do I need a webpage? Why do I need SEO? Why do I need. Advertising, like sell me on why I need more marketing than just having my physical location. Be everything that I’m about.

[00:03:30] Brandon Leibowitz: Mm-hmm yeah, no, the physical location is just one aspect of it, but gotta draw attention to it and get eyeballs on it. Cuz you could create a, a page on or on Google, my business or Google maps, or even like you can create a listing on yellow pages, but then like the old directory, but you’re just gonna get lost in that seat.

[00:03:46] Brandon Leibowitz: So you gotta make yourself stand out. And sometimes just promote yourself a little bit more. Otherwise there’s just too many options out there, especially nowadays on Google. There’s endless supplies of websites, depending on if you’re a local business in like Los Angeles, like a restaurant, there’s a lot of competition out there.

[00:04:02] Brandon Leibowitz: So you gotta differentiate yourself somehow and get people to wanna check you out versus other. Competitors or the other restaurants or whatever it is that’s out there, but kinda differentiate yourself in marketing as a way to just get yourself out there in a different way that reaches a new audience and gets new people to potentially come and check you out.

[00:04:20] Kevin Dieny: Wow, yeah, what a great answer. Okay, so the next thing I’ve heard a lot is, okay, marketing sounds good, but from what I hear, you know, without having done it, I often hear marketing is just so expensive. Like it’s it is costly. Um, do I have to hire people? Do I have to spend a bunch of money on ads is local marketing, especially the digital side does it… always come with a big price tag?

[00:04:44] Brandon Leibowitz: It just depends on the competition and how competitive your industry is. It’s not really a one size fits all with SEO and digital. It really depends like how established are you? Are you a brand new business? It’s gonna take a lot longer versus someone that’s been around and established and has gained some trust from Google.

[00:05:01] Brandon Leibowitz: It’ll be a lot quicker and easier, but also it comes down to really how many websites are out there trying to compete for that first page of Google of, you know, like you’re a local business or a restaurant in Los Angeles. There are a lot of competition versus a restaurant, maybe in some smaller town.

[00:05:17] Brandon Leibowitz: It’d be a little bit quicker and easier, and that would cost less money and be less time intensive. And it really just comes to down to that really just who’s the competition and how much have they done versus you? And where’s the disconnect and how can we fill that up? What’s what’s missing that they’ve done that you haven’t done.

[00:05:33] Brandon Leibowitz: And how can we get you there? There’s a big competitor. They might have been around for 10 years building it up and it takes time. You wanna compete with them, you’ll be able to do it, but it just, you have to be realistic that it’s gonna take some time to just build that trust up of Google because Google sees a website that’s 10 years old versus a brand new one.

[00:05:50] Brandon Leibowitz: They’re gonna go with the older one just because they’ve been around for longer. And they trust that.

[00:05:54] Kevin Dieny: I mean, a business sometimes decides, you know what? I need to focus on my. getting my business going started. I need to focus on getting the right people here. I need to focus on making sure that the things, my business does, that what it serves, what it delivers, what it sells, what it provides is going.

[00:06:12] Kevin Dieny: So why is it that amidst all of this and everything, a local business is trying to do that. They will often just ignore marketing.

[00:06:20] Brandon Leibowitz: A lot of people just don’t realize that people aren’t gonna find them. If they don’t make themselves stand out. And people think that I create this really nice website. I spend all this money building a website that people are gonna come to me.

[00:06:31] Brandon Leibowitz: If you’re not marketing it, if you’re not promoting it, people are not gonna really find it. If you have the worst ugliest website, if you’re in marketing, people will find it and people will come to you. You might not get as many sales if, unless you optimize that website to look better, but you’ll still be getting people that come to you.

[00:06:46] Brandon Leibowitz: Versus if you’re not marketing it, it’s gonna be tough to get other people in friends and family and referrals to find you. So if we’re looking to get new people, The best way is by doing some marketing and just trying to get, get that awareness, get people to find you somehow, whether it’s writing content on articles, doing press releases, blogging, doing videos, doing podcasts, doing social media, but whatever it is just to get the word out there, email marketing, TV, radio, anything, but you gotta get people aware of you gotta get, let people know that you exist.

[00:07:17] Brandon Leibowitz: That’s the one thing. It’s tricky and there’s so much competition out there nowadays, especially online. There’s so many people have a website, so it’s tough to differentiate yourself, but you gotta get creative. Start doing it sooner than later that marketing.

[00:07:30] Kevin Dieny: That’s a really good idea. And, and it brings up another area as a priority, right.

[00:07:34] Kevin Dieny: For businesses like, okay, well, yeah, you’re gotta get your business going. Gotta get the foundations laid processes in place that are going to be able to deliver your products and services to your customers, which sort of brings me to the, you know, the next part I was kind of curious about, which was okay, so you decide, you know, maybe I will take a look at marketing and I was curious if a business let’s say.

[00:07:56] Kevin Dieny: Decides to do this and they do have some current customers. Maybe let’s start there first. So what channels, what kind of marketing can a local business employee to. Keep their current customers coming back. Right, tension. How can they, how can their marketing help them expand and keep, hold on tighter to the current customers they already have?

[00:08:19] Brandon Leibowitz: No, they should definitely be reaching out to the existing customers are the best, as long as it’s not something you just purchase one time. But. Keeping them yourself top of mind, by having an email list, somehow getting their emails. If they’re past clients, you probably got their contact information, but definitely running some email campaigns.

[00:08:37] Brandon Leibowitz: Email marketing is definitely the most effective. By far because you have full control, you can just send out that email to any time. And if you have 10,000 people on your list, all 10,000 people will be sent that email, but definitely gotta build that email list. I mean, that’s why I always tell everyone, number one, build an email list up.

[00:08:55] Brandon Leibowitz: You can do remarketing where you follow people around. If you’ve went to website and you don’t make a purchase, or you don’t do a specific action ads can follow year around, you could also do the same thing for people that have become a client or used your services in the past. You could say, all right, a year from now or six months from now, let’s run so many marketing ads, depending on if you’re like, if you’re a dentist, maybe you say, Hey, come in for a teeth cleaning.

[00:09:18] Brandon Leibowitz: Or if you’re a doctor, you say, Hey, it’s time for your annual physical or whatever it may be, but getting creative and just trying to have. Some banner ads I could follow ’em around, or you could create some YouTube ads or whatever platform you wanna advertise on, but just getting yourself out there, you could upload lists of email addresses that have been to your website, or people have been to specific page.

[00:09:37] Brandon Leibowitz: Maybe they went to the checkout page or the contact us page and filled out a form. So you knew they’ve. Potentially used your services. You could start remarking to them, and that’s gonna be a great way to keep yourself top of mind. And also like just setting up, follow up emails, asking them what they thought of your product or service.

[00:09:54] Brandon Leibowitz: If maybe they could leave your review. If you can do that, I know you can’t do it on all the platforms, but some places you could ask for review, but you gotta be careful. You can’t. Necessarily ask them to, but you could kind of comply it, things like that, but yeah, those are all great ways to keep yourself top of mind for people that have already used your services and find new people.

[00:10:13] Brandon Leibowitz: Definitely just try to put yourself in the user’s point of view, if you were looking through your product or service, where would you go or you didn’t go on. Google are you on Facebook? Are you on Instagram? Are you on Yelp? You know, go on Craigslist Angie’s list, whatever it may be, but you just gotta try to think of, if you were looking for your services, where would you go?

[00:10:30] Brandon Leibowitz: And that’s gonna be the main thing is you need to be in front of the audience. You don’t need to be everywhere. It’s gonna be in front of your audience and take a step back, which is tough as a business owner, but just try to think of like, you were looking for your product or service, where would you go?

[00:10:44] Brandon Leibowitz: And that’s gonna really help you out a lot.

[00:10:45] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, the, you brought up, you bring up something right there at the end there about like, understanding your audience. So how does a business. Figure out their audience and understand them and you know, the places they may go and the things they may be using to research, you know, let’s say you’re a business owner and going, okay, well, how are my customers coming to me?

[00:11:03] Kevin Dieny: You know, what channels are they using? How are they researching steps? Are they taking before they make the purchase? I think sometimes the local business might consider well local businesses, you know, maybe they have price tags, a varying degree, like a restaurant has. $15 lunch versus this other one is $30,000 new roof for my house.

[00:11:22] Kevin Dieny: So the price tag could vary quite a lot. There, it might mean like there’s meant much more research being done. It might mean there’s a certain type of demographic. It might mean a certain type of customer. They may have some idea of that, but how do they kind of validate that and really understand their customer better?

[00:11:40] Brandon Leibowitz: There’s free tools that Google gives you like Google analytics. It’s a free tool that will show you everything you wanna know about your website traffic. So if you’re getting traffic to your website, you could use that data to make statistically informed decisions about who your audience is, where they go on your website.

[00:11:56] Brandon Leibowitz: How long do they stay on each page on your website? How are they behaving? And all this stuff is really out there. It’s a free tool. There’s other tracking tools out there, but Google analytics will give you one from Google. So I would definitely take advantage of that and try to just learn as much as you can, because there’s a wealth of information.

[00:12:15] Brandon Leibowitz: It’s a little overwhelming at times, people just get lost in the sea of data, but just slowly or just click around. You’re not gonna break anything. I always tell people like, you’re not gonna break anything on Google analytics, you just click on everything. And you’re just gonna learn a bunch of information about who your audience is and learn.

[00:12:31] Brandon Leibowitz: Yeah. A ton of data, but also fewer, maybe like a service based business. And let’s say you. A dentist, you can reach out to other dentists in other states where you’re not direct competitors and ask, ’em like, Hey, can I maybe pay you a couple hundred bucks to pick your reign for an hour or two and try to find someone that’s established and maybe get them as like a mentor kind of thing, where they could give you advice?

[00:12:54] Brandon Leibowitz: Because if you’re not direct competitors, they’re more than likely willing to help out possibly if they have time, but if you compensate them with some money, they probably would help out. So think about that. If you can, that’s one great way. As long as they’re not direct competitors like myself, I’m an SEO company, never get another SEO company to help each other out because we’re all direct competitors.

[00:13:12] Brandon Leibowitz: But like with localized businesses, you kind of can do that as long as you’re not competing in the same state. Whatever it might be even same cities potentially. You could reach out to other people to get some advice and get some tips because if it’s working for them, you could definitely see what’s worked and what’s not worked and kind of skip that learning phase of what mistakes they’ve made in the past.

[00:13:33] Brandon Leibowitz: And just focus on what’s gonna work.

[00:13:35] Kevin Dieny: That is really helpful. I, I think sometimes too, a business owner may have some idea, but it’s more like, you know, let me just see what’s working for them. Let me ask, let me see what agencies or what experts are saying. Cuz marketing is a kind of a field where. Parts of it feel like they haven’t changed in forever.

[00:13:52] Kevin Dieny: you know, but other parts of it feel like they’re changing so quickly, so often and figuring out, okay, what is changing? What works now? What is an effective way to generate business for or to grow my business online using marketing is something that, you know, it does help to get a pulse on. So Brandon, let’s say an owner, a small business, a local business.

[00:14:13] Kevin Dieny: Wants to know, well, what’s the right channel mix, right? Like what channels are working right now at this point in time, uh, for businesses, what would you say about that? You know, as it stands today?

[00:14:24] Brandon Leibowitz: Well, it just depends on their business. And I would say like step back and put yourself from point of view.

[00:14:30] Brandon Leibowitz: And if you were looking for your services, where would you go? That’s gonna be the best way to go about it. But usually Google people are searching on Google. They’re searching, they’re looking, they have intent. That’s usually gonna be the best. Seems like YouTube. People are searching. They’re looking versus social media.

[00:14:47] Brandon Leibowitz: People are just browsing and you’re targeting them based off interest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want to use your services or product at that time just means they might have been interested in the past or in the future, but not necessarily now where. Google, they’re looking, they’re showing that direct intent.

[00:15:03] Brandon Leibowitz: So I usually tell, but Google’s probably gonna be the best, but every business is different. It’s not really, that’s not really one size fits all. Everyone’s different, but usually people start on Google search around. Then they’ll like vouch for you. Checking on like social media, making sure you’re real business.

[00:15:18] Brandon Leibowitz: We can reviews and things like that. But. Usually people will find you on Google first or Yelp. If you’re a localized business, Yelp is really big in the us, maybe not in worldwide, but in the United States, Yelp really dominate. So having presence on there and then just trying to see where else you could build it up.

[00:15:36] Brandon Leibowitz: But I always tell people, YouTube is great because people want visual content, people buy off people. So if you could start building a YouTube channel up, that will also be really great in the long run because Google owns YouTube. So Google’s gonna always give preferential like. Treatment to YouTube. So when you search on Google, sometimes you’ll see video ads or videos appear in the search results.

[00:15:55] Brandon Leibowitz: So in the organic, the free listings in Google, when you search, sometimes videos appear 90% of the time. It’s gonna be a YouTube video because Google owns YouTube and Google wants to make money on Google and you don’t click on an ad. Google’s not making money. And there’s like, all right, that didn’t really help us out.

[00:16:11] Brandon Leibowitz: But if you search on Google and there’s a video there, and it’s a YouTube video and you click on it, the first thing that appears, anytime you watch a video. Always an advertisement. So YouTube is making money, which is really Google making money. And I feel like Google is just gonna keep putting a bigger emphasis on that.

[00:16:26] Brandon Leibowitz: And also like, everything’s really going to like video. Instagram is primarily videos. Now there’s still images, but it’s a lot of video content. TikTok is all video. I mean, people want video, people don’t wanna sit there and read or people’s attention. Scams are just too short nowadays.

[00:16:41] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point.

[00:16:43] Kevin Dieny: And there’s implications for all that. Just like you mentioned, different businesses may want different demographics where they are comfortable reading others. You’re in the TikTok world. and you need like, you know, 15 seconds to get your point across on a quick video. Show me, don’t tell me, you know, so it definitely makes sense, like depending on what the business’ target is, we’ve talked about.

[00:17:01] Kevin Dieny: Yeah. You can figure that out. You can look at your current customers past customers. You can look at your Google analytics. Good setup like a good on paper. Here’s the kind of customers, here’s the kind of traffic you’re getting today and what you might expect in the future. If you keep doing what you’re doing.

[00:17:16] Kevin Dieny: So what I was curious about was, you know, sites like Yelp, like yellow pages, YouTube, more than that, I know, like for home service businesses, there’s a website called like Angie Angie’s list for doctors, or sometimes a website like health grades, or find a doctor or whatever. It’s there’s sometimes there’s these listing sites.

[00:17:36] Kevin Dieny: Now how important are listing sites to local businesses like being able to be listed in there or in the, the business directory of a, you know, local, small business, like a chapter or something. How important are the listing sites for local businesses?

[00:17:51] Brandon Leibowitz: Oh, the listing sites definitely help out a lot because they help you rank higher on Google.

[00:17:56] Brandon Leibowitz: So the more websites that talk about you or mention you, the more trust Google’s gonna give you, and the higher you’re gonna be able to rank on Google or especially Google maps, Google maps, they wanna see you listed on all these different directories. The more directories you’re on the higher you’re gonna rank on Google maps.

[00:18:11] Brandon Leibowitz: But the one thing with those directories, you have to have your consistency, your. Address and phone number it’s called nap citation, naps. Like the more places your business name, address, and phone number is listed, the more Truco Google’s gonna give you. And the higher they’re gonna rank you on Google map.

[00:18:26] Brandon Leibowitz: So a lot of Google maps, optimizations is just getting you on all those different directories, even though some of them might be really small and no one’s on them. Just having your name, address, and phone number. You don’t have to pay for like premium versions of these direct. Some of them will like say pay us $50 to enhance your listing.

[00:18:43] Brandon Leibowitz: Don’t necessarily need to do that. You just need to be listed on it. And the free listings are perfectly fine, just making sure that everything is consistent. So if you do move or change addresses, you’re gonna have to change all those listing addresses because Google’s gonna get confused. And the way it works is like I could create a listing or a Google my business saying, Hey, Google, here’s my address for a dentist.

[00:19:06] Brandon Leibowitz: And Google’s like, are you really a dentist? Like, we don’t wanna just send people to your dental office and find out you don’t exist. So Google, let me create my page on Google. Where I’d say, Hey, I’m a dentist in Los Angeles, but Google’s like, we’re not gonna just rank you yet because we wanna make sure you really are who you say you are.

[00:19:22] Brandon Leibowitz: And the way they do that is by looking at other websites, talking about you. Like, if I’m a dentist, it would make sense that I’m also not just only on Google maps, but I’m on Yelp and yellow page map quest and Bing maps and health grades and all these other sites. The more sites that you’re on. That list your business name.

[00:19:39] Brandon Leibowitz: Imagine the phone number, the more trust Google’s gonna give you, but also some of the bigger ones, like if there’s like a really, really big one in an industry, maybe then you might wanna spend some money to advertise just to get yourself to the top of it. But in general, if you’re just trying to get citations and just throwing your name out there, like on the yellow pages, no one goes to the yellow pages.com, but Google goes there, sees those back links or sees those citations and gets you to rank higher on Google maps.

[00:20:03] Brandon Leibowitz: So it’s kind of weird little strategy, but the more places that you’re on. That have accurate information about your business, the bit higher, you’re gonna be able to rank on Google maps. Yeah.

[00:20:12] Kevin Dieny: And all this, all these sites, right. I’ve often talked to some people on phone calls, doing demos. They’re like, man, there’s just a lot of stuff I have to do.

[00:20:18] Kevin Dieny: I have to work on SEO over here. My social media over here. I have to put ads over here. I have to run campaigns here. I have to remember all the sites. I have to answer my reviews. I have to run these email campaigns. There is a lot, it can be very overwhelming. So if a business is like, okay, well I’m doing all this.

[00:20:35] Kevin Dieny: How do I know what’s working where it’s working, what’s working really well. Maybe what’s working in tandem, you know, lifting other, other types of marketing. So how does a business, kind of get a pulse on and figure out what marketing is working for them?

[00:20:51] Brandon Leibowitz: If you’re doing digital, then I would check Google analytics because that’s gonna show you everything related to digital marketing.

[00:20:57] Brandon Leibowitz: So Google analytics is that free tool that you sign up for it. And you put a little tracking code on your website, and once you put that tracking code on your website, Then Google’s gonna start showing you data about your visitors, who they are, where they found you. If they’ve done a conversion action, like calling you up or emailing you or submitting a form or whatever that conversion goal is signing up for your email list, downloading an ebook, whatever it is.

[00:21:22] Brandon Leibowitz: But. All that stuff can be tracked through Google analytics. The sooner you’re install Google analytics, the better it’s free tool. You have to put a tracking code on. And if you put the tracking code on next month, you’re not gonna get into this past month’s data. It only starts tracking once you start adding that code, and it’s not that difficult to add that tracking code, it takes maybe like.

[00:21:39] Brandon Leibowitz: 30 minutes at most. And if you don’t know how to do it, if you have a web developer, they can help you or just search on Google, how to install Google analytics on, and then you fill in the book. Like if you’re on WordPress, how to install Google analytics on WordPress, if you’re on Squarespace, how to install Google analytics on Squarespace, and they’ll walk you through step by step, how to install that.

[00:21:58] Brandon Leibowitz: And that’s probably the best place to look at digital what’s working. What’s not working. And even some offline you could put like tracking codes on your URL saying, go to my website.com/. TV, and then you could track anyone that’s ran and then you run a TV and add on TV saying, go to this URL. And then you could attribute anyone that went to that URL from the TV ad.

[00:22:18] Brandon Leibowitz: So there’s ways to tie digital into traditional. Google analytics is probably the best. There’s tons of other tracking tools out there, but Google analytics is free. It’s from Google. So I’d definitely jump on that one sooner than later to get that data.

[00:22:31] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, that’s a really good point. We’ve been saying a lot actually here, like Google analytics, Google analytics.

[00:22:37] Kevin Dieny: and I love it because that’s, that is where you, a website is sort of a central place. So even a local business, who’s like, man, I gotta get a website. If I feel like, yeah, you kinda gotta get a website. There’s such a big benefit to it, to it coming in there. The analytics part of it is free. Like you said, it does take some time to set up, but the benefits of it coming off of that are huge.

[00:22:56] Kevin Dieny: And being able to have those insights, what would you do if you knew. You know, a certain channel is driving growth for you and certain one isn’t, you know, I think you’d be like, well, let’s, let’s put more gas on the one that’s working really well and see if we can get more out of it. You know, maybe $50 for a premium listing goes a long way from a site that we’re getting a lot of great quality traffic, cuz it’s it’s the end of the day.

[00:23:17] Kevin Dieny: I don’t necessarily say it’s all about traffic. It’s like in what you do. It’s a lot more about quality leads, sales, revenue, bringing success for the business that sometimes doesn’t always mean dialing up traffic, but dialing up the quality of traffic. And there’s just so much going on there. So there’s another thing I wanted to ask you about here, which was the Google local services ads, which are not for every industry.

[00:23:45] Kevin Dieny: I don’t know how. You know, you want to dive into this, but it is like a, a type of ad that Google allows for local businesses of a certain industry type. I think there’s a list of, I think it’s like 20 or something types of industries. It works for dentists and plumbers and electricians and stuff like that.

[00:24:04] Kevin Dieny: Could you explain like what Google local services ads are and what their purposes are for businesses and who who’ve never heard of it? Let’s say?

[00:24:12] Brandon Leibowitz: So there’s a bunch of different ads that Google lets you run. And if you’re not in that 10 list of 10 things that you mentioned, there’s ads that you can run on Google maps.

[00:24:20] Brandon Leibowitz: So when you search on Google maps, there’s sometimes ads that appear there. There’s always three organic listings, but sometimes Google’s adding a fourth one where it’s an advertisement, so you could pay to get in there and that one could be any local business. It doesn’t have to be a specific list and that’s just running Google local ads.

[00:24:37] Brandon Leibowitz: So you go into Google ads, create accounts, sign up. And then they’re gonna give you all these different types of ads. You can run, you can run like keyword ads on Google search. You can run banner ads, you can do Gmail ads, you can do YouTube ads. You can also do like maps. You can do shopping. You can do a ton of different ads, which I always recommend to people.

[00:24:54] Brandon Leibowitz: Like if you’re running ads, the keyword ads are gonna be very expensive. But if you’re running these other types of ads, banners, YouTube, Local maps. It’s gonna be a lot cheaper and you get more visibility exposure, cuz the way the ads work is the more people that bid on keyword or bid on whatever you’re advertising on, the more expensive we become.

[00:25:12] Brandon Leibowitz: So we’re both bidding on keyword saying, I want to rank for dentist Los Angeles, I’ll pay $5 per click. You might say I’ll pay $5 in 1 cent, a click, then I’ll be like, all right, I’ll pay $5 and 2 cents. We keep bidding each other up and it just keeps going and going. It’s really easy to bid on keywords.

[00:25:28] Brandon Leibowitz: Most people have a website where they’re just like, all right, let me drive traffic to that website by placing keywords, but not many people do banner ADSS, which are also really effective is running those banner ads. It takes a little bit more time where you have to create the banners. So less people are bidding on those.

[00:25:41] Brandon Leibowitz: It’s less expensive, but really like YouTube too. YouTube videos are gonna be very cheap because not many people bid on them or not many people create the videos. So there’s not as much competition. And again, like going back to like the visual content, like people buy off people like having something, a video out there is gonna be best.

[00:25:57] Brandon Leibowitz: But then there’s also, like you said, like the local expert guides where Google lets you kind of be at the top saying you’re an expert in. That one is, I think for, like you said, like 10 or there’s like a select amount of industries, like realtors could be in there and things like that, where they just there’s another revenue or place to try to get more visibility and more eyeballs on your content.

[00:26:17] Brandon Leibowitz: And I always tell people with the ads, you never know what’s gonna work. It’s all about testing and seeing what works, push more money to that. Pull money away from what’s not working. So kind of just throwing everything against the wall initially and seeing which ones are gonna get you the most leads at the lowest cost per click or the lowest cost per lead rep cost per acquisition, trying to figure out what’s gonna get you that best return on your investment, because it really comes down to just testing.

[00:26:39] Brandon Leibowitz: You never know what’s gonna work, or what’s not gonna work, or what’s gonna be expensive. Like sometimes those clicks could. $50 a click on Google or a hundred dollars a click where it’s like, this is gonna be really expensive. If I I’m selling a really high ticket item, I could make my money back. But if not, I’m gonna have to find something a little bit more cost effective because.

[00:26:56] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, wow, definitely put a punctuation on what you just said about testing. Yeah, there’s lots of agencies and marketers. Who’ve maybe worked in a company just like yours and they can come to you and say, this is the exact thing that’s gonna work really well. Sure. And it might work pretty well, but testing. Is so powerful and helps a business really narrow in because not every business is the same, not every business has the same legacy, the same experience, the same types of service, the way that deliver the service, something about your business is unique and you want it to be unique.

[00:27:26] Kevin Dieny: That kind of means your marketing may not work the same that everyone else’s marketing does. I think a lot of times it’s like marketing. That’s just a TV commercial. No. Like there’s so much more, there’s so much more you can do, and there’s so much more, your business should explore. That means testing.

[00:27:40] Kevin Dieny: And like you said, throwing all your eggs in one big basket and spending a ton of money to make one commercial. Sure. Maybe it’ll do great, but I think there’s also the avenue to try. Smaller bite size chunks, especially for a local, smaller business to, okay. Let’s throw it over here. Let’s see how it performs.

[00:27:58] Kevin Dieny: Let’s do this and that. Let’s see how those work together. Let’s try this. Let’s try that. Then let’s try. Let’s try. And even when we try, let’s see if we can improve it for a while and if we can’t okay. Let’s see what else works that sort of. Try get feedback, explore routine. That process is so critical to getting marketing that does eventually work.

[00:28:20] Kevin Dieny: That that is such a big deal. And this leads me right to another great question here when doing all of that, right. Okay. It’s one thing to get marketing, to figure out you need it to launch it. The other part is, is optimizing it, improving it, figuring out what’s working better than something else and allocating that budget more appropriately.

[00:28:36] Kevin Dieny: A lot of times. That ends up being the overwhelming part, a business, figures it out, gets an ad going and then sort of forgets about it. What does it look like if a business needs help? Right. If a business is like either I gotta hire someone or I gotta go elsewhere to an external agency, I gotta get help for this.

[00:28:52] Kevin Dieny: What does that look like? Typically for a business who who’s like, you know, I need some help and I don’t have the ton of resources to spend. So what does that look like for a business who does need a local business? Who locally, who needs help with its marketing?

[00:29:03] Brandon Leibowitz: You know, if they’ve just gotta figure out, do they wanna hire a company or hire people internally or learn it themselves, but it’s gonna be different if they’re overwhelmed and don’t wanna do it themselves, or don’t have the time, then they should probably look for company to help them out.

[00:29:17] Brandon Leibowitz: But if they wanna hire people internally and build up a team, they could do that as well. It just depends on what route they really wanna go. Just finding someone that’s appropriate and can really help them out and align with their goals and what they’re looking to do. So they’re trying to get more leads, more phone calls, more emails, but just trying to make sure that everything aligns properly with what they’re doing and who they’re gonna potentially bring on.

[00:29:40] Kevin Dieny: For the business that’s considering. Okay. I’d like to take a look at my SEO side. So this is your bread and butter here. Brandon was how much does local SEO, right? Trying to get organic search engine optimized website. How much does the local SEO defer from? You know, what I’d consider is typical SEO or normal SEO.

[00:30:00] Kevin Dieny: So is there something special or different about, uh, local, targeted SEO?

[00:30:06] Brandon Leibowitz: Yep, so for local, you need to have pages on your website for each city that you wanna target. If you’re a realtor and you’re targeting Los Angeles, you might wanna create a page for Los Angeles, for Santa Monica, for Venice beach, for all these different places.

[00:30:22] Brandon Leibowitz: Because if someone’s searching for real estate in Venice beach and you don’t have a page about it, Google’s not gonna think irrelevant. Versus if you have a page about it, then Google’s gonna say, okay, This page is about Venice beach real estate. This aligns with what you’re searching for. Let’s potentially show you, but you have to create local pages for all the different places that you wanna target.

[00:30:41] Brandon Leibowitz: That’s very, very important. Also gotta get listed on Google, my business to get you on Google maps. That’s really important as well. And then taking that listing. And I mean, a lot of people think they need reviews. Reviews don’t really matter too much on Google or Yelp or any of those. It’s not the number of reviews you could search for any of your keywords.

[00:31:01] Brandon Leibowitz: You could see the first person on Google maps might have five reviews. The second one could have 200 reviews. The third one gonna have 50 reviews. It’s not the reviews that matter. It’s really the keywords people use in the reviews. That is so very important. If someone. Leaves your review saying great company.

[00:31:18] Brandon Leibowitz: Brandon was so knowledgeable and helpful. He’s the best. I recommend him to everyone and they gimme a five stars. That’s good. But. It doesn’t help me out to rank higher. If I wanna rank higher, I need someone to say I live in Los Angeles. I was looking for an SEO company. I found Brandon. He helped my business in Santa Monica, rank higher for my keyword.

[00:31:36] Brandon Leibowitz: So hitting all these different keywords, Los Angeles, Santa Monica SEO. More keywords you put in those reviews, the, how you’re gonna be able to rank on Google and on Yelp or Amazon or any of these platforms like keywords in reviews are one of the biggest ranking signals that not many people focus on.

[00:31:54] Brandon Leibowitz: Also consistency with your name, address, and phone number. So maybe your everywhere, your business name, address, and phone number is listed is accurate. And the way to do that is just searching. Google, searching Google for your phone number and see all the places that pull your phone number up. These are all ranking on the first page of Google.

[00:32:10] Brandon Leibowitz: These are all pages that Google’s put a lot of emphasis on. Make sure all the information in your name, address, and phone number is a hundred percent consistent search for your address. See where you’re listed as well. Make sure that’s accurate search for your business name, search for your business name quotation marks present in search for as.

[00:32:27] Brandon Leibowitz: Your exact business name. So if you just put like, my company name is SEO optimizers. If I just put that to Google, it’s gonna pull up all this stuff. That’s related to SEO, not really related to my business, but if I put quotations around my company name, it’s gonna show me everything related to my business.

[00:32:43] Brandon Leibowitz: So quotations being, when you search in Google, that it has to be that exact, whatever you search in those quotation marks has to be there verbatim. Can’t change the order around can’t change, plurals or synonyms or singulars. It’s gonna show you exactly. What’s. And that’s a great way to just double check and make sure everything is consistent, but really a big thing is filling out all the information when you’re in Google, my business or Yelp or any of these profiles, it’s gonna say, write about us.

[00:33:10] Brandon Leibowitz: Like here’s 500 words to write about your business. If you only put 100 words, you’re missing out on a lot of wasted space because. All these algorithms are based off content. They can’t really read images or videos yet they’re getting better, but they need text. The more text you put in there, the better.

[00:33:25] Brandon Leibowitz: So fill out all that information till it’s a hundred percent complete. So you can’t put any more information in. Where it says about me services. Like whatever places that lets you put text, fill it out. Same with images. Fill out those images. I mean, upload images, but before you upload those images, name them with words like don’t just have file names, zero image, 0 0, 1 dot JPEG, Google and Yelp, and all these platforms.

[00:33:50] Brandon Leibowitz: Can’t read images. So name your images with keywords. This is where you could say like Los Angeles SEO company, that could be your image name, because Google really looks at the file name and puts a lot of emphasis on whatever that file name is. And don’t just upload images from your phone, save them to your web or your desktop rename them.

[00:34:10] Brandon Leibowitz: That’s really gonna help out a lot too, as well, to get you more, to more eyeballs on your image. And those are kind of just like some of the best practices, but there’s a lot of other stuff that goes into local SEO, but that’s kind of what differentiates it from regular SEO is regular SEO. You’re gonna do normal optimizations, plus you’re gonna do this.

[00:34:28] Brandon Leibowitz: So it adds an extra layer of work. So local seems easier, but it’s really, it’s more work, less competition because you’re not competing nationally, but it’s a lot more that needs to be done to get you up there.

[00:34:40] Kevin Dieny: Wow. I didn’t know a bunch of the stuff you just said. And that’s really interesting. I’ve heard about a lot of this, a lot of things too.

[00:34:46] Kevin Dieny: I think in the industry to be like, well, I’ve heard that, you know, if you do, it’s like a superstition. If you look up at the moon before you go to bed at night, then your marketing will do better. Or, you know, I heard some guy say that, Hey, you know, Yelp doesn’t work or it’s just a, you know, it’s terrible or there’s a lot of confusing misunderstanding, misinformation around marketing stuff for businesses out there.

[00:35:08] Kevin Dieny: So it’s tough. That’s why it’s great to kind of, okay. Let’s, let’s focus this episode. Let’s really talk about local marketing here and all the stuff that is working and really get this narrowed down. So at the end of the day, right? So I have two questions. The first one is how long should a business expect.

[00:35:24] Kevin Dieny: Okay. They’ve decided to do, let’s say they took you up Brandon on everything you’ve mentioned, they’ve done it all. How long would they expect it to take before the lag time, before the results start coming in for them? And second, in terms of what should a business do? Let’s say the business is like, okay, I’ll do, I’ll take your advice, Brandon, for the next 90 days.

[00:35:46] Kevin Dieny: So just tell me, gimme a list of stuff you’d want me to do that. I can get going on in the, in the next 90 days to have the best chance of success. So, first one first part of this is how long does this stuff usually take? And the second one is, okay, the first 90 days of getting going here, what would you give them as advice?

[00:36:00] Brandon Leibowitz: It takes about six months to take, to really kick in with SEO, just because google’t trust you. So that’s the biggest thing is getting that trust. Nu Google does not trust anyone. The way to build that trust up is getting back links, getting other websites to talk about you. That all takes time and there are shortcuts, but if Google sees that you’re doing a shortcut, they’re gonna penalize you and drop you down and kick you off Google permanently, which is the last thing we wanna happen.

[00:36:23] Brandon Leibowitz: So slow, steady growth, but over time, you’re just gonna build it up and build it up and keep getting more and more traction, more and more growth. But it all does take time. Unfortunately, with SEO, there’s no shortcut around that. And. 90 day period. I would just tell people, add more content to their website.

[00:36:37] Brandon Leibowitz: That’s gonna be the easiest, less technical aspect is just create more content on every page on the website, create pages for all the different locations that they wanna target. That’s gonna be huge and add about 400 words of content to each page without content. Google’s gonna have a tough time ranking you or understanding what that page is about.

[00:36:54] Brandon Leibowitz: So, I know a lot of people would be like, how do I write 400 words? If I’m a realtor, how do I write 400 words about real estate in Venice beach, in Santa Monica? And for most of all these different places, it’s gonna be tough, but I get creative and just try to think of content. Like most people are not gonna read this content it’s for Google.

[00:37:09] Brandon Leibowitz: So I always tell people, put the content at the very bottom of your page. Don’t have it at the very top. You don’t have to have 400 words. Of just content there. Nobody’s gonna wanna read that, but put at the very bottom of your page, Google will see that content and that’s gonna help them better understand what that page is about, and that’s gonna have a huge impact on your ranking.

[00:37:24] Brandon Leibowitz: So, I mean, that’s something that everyone can do without having to build back links or go on their coding and make technical changes, add more pages and add more content. And I can almost guarantee. They will see a Lyft in traffic and start seeing themselves rank for all these different locations that they’d otherwise were weren’t ranking for.

[00:37:40] Brandon Leibowitz: Cuz if you don’t have a page about it, it’s gonna be really, really tough to rank on Google for that service.

[00:37:45] Kevin Dieny: That is some great advice. Now, Brandon, we’ve talked a lot, a lot of things we haven’t gone super deep. Let’s say, I mean, you’ve touched a little bit more on the SEO side, cuz I think that was really relevant, but let’s say someone has questions for you.

[00:37:57] Kevin Dieny: They wanna follow up. They wanna know more about your company. Wanna know more about what you do, what you offer, how it maybe could help them. They wanna just learn more about local marketing. Uh, how could a company or person get in touch with you, find out more about you or learn more about your company?

[00:38:12] Brandon Leibowitz: So everyone that’s checking out this podcast. If I create a special gift for them, if they go to my website, which is seooptimizers.com/gift, they could find that there that’s seooptimizers.com/gift. And, they could find all my contact information there and also do free consultation. So you do have a website.

[00:38:36] Brandon Leibowitz: I could kind of dive into it and give you some feedback from an SEO point of view of what’s working. What’s not working and where that disconnect is with your competitors and how you can get you up there. So someone’s looking for that as well. I’m happy to dive in and give some feedback, an analysis of what’s working and how to get them to the level that they wanna be.

[00:38:53] Kevin Dieny: That’s great. I, I think it’s really helpful when a business is like, look, maybe there’s a part of this. I’m willing to do myself. Maybe none of this, I wanna do myself, but at least there’s the flexibility of options. Okay. Gimme a head, start. Tell me where I need to go. And then the business can say, okay, yeah, this is gonna take a lot of resources.

[00:39:11] Kevin Dieny: We may have everything down, pat, but this is gonna take maybe resources we don’t necessarily have, or it’s gonna, you know, maybe I’m gonna pull out my, my pen. it hit the 400 word articles and just see what I can do. See what I can come up with. And I think that flexibility allow. Businesses to really figure out themselves in a local in local market.

[00:39:30] Kevin Dieny: Cause I think it is difficult to. Really push when you have limited resources. So I think it means it kind of feels like man, every resource, dollar or hour I spend is really important and critical. So thank you, Brandon. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for talking about local marketing, digital marketing in the local space for local businesses.

[00:39:49] Kevin Dieny: Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this with our audience.

[00:39:52] Brandon Leibowitz: No, thanks for having me on.

[00:39:54] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, this, this is a great.

[00:39:55] Kevin Dieny: Anyway, thanks everyone for listening to this episode, and I hope that you are encouraged and you’ve got some great ideas or you’ve got some questions that you’re ready to, to take and help your business grow in the local, your local business, grow with local marketing or digital marketing or however it is.

[00:40:13] Kevin Dieny: So again, thank you and, uh, have a great day.