Table of Contents
How to Fix Your SEO Marketing Podcast
Last Update September 11, 2026
Why Your Competitors Outrank You: Brandon Leibowitz on Building an SEO Strategy That Compounds
A durable SEO strategy is usually the reason a competitor with a worse product sits above you in Google, and Brandon Leibowitz has watched that pattern repeat since 2007. The founder of SEO Optimizers broke it down on the Business Growth Show with host Jenny White.
The conversation covered AI hallucinations, a music festival client that climbed from invisible to position one, and why traffic alone never satisfies a business owner.
From Accidental Hire to Full-Time Search Engine Optimization
Brandon did not set out to build a search marketing agency. He earned a business marketing degree, and his first employer handed him digital marketing with a memorable disclaimer.
“Don’t worry, we don’t know much either.” The company promised to learn alongside him and pay for classes, workshops, and seminars.
A few months in, the picture got clear. Every business was going to have a website, and there were several ways to feed it traffic: email marketing, paid ads, social media, and organic search.
Paid channels worked. Organic search offered something better, which was free traffic that keeps arriving.
So he took jobs at advertising agencies and built his own book of business before work, during lunch breaks, and after hours. Eventually the side company replaced the paycheck.
Where AI Helps Your SEO Strategy and Where It Quietly Costs You Money
Jenny asked what AI will change next in search. Brandon’s answer was measured, because the tools move faster than anyone can forecast.
His main warning was accuracy. When a model does not know something, it does not say so. It invents an answer.
Ask for keyword research on an Italian restaurant near me query, including monthly search volume and competition scores, and you get a clean list back. Verify that list in a real keyword tool and the numbers are frequently wrong.
Jenny named the consequence directly. Bad data sends budget in a direction that never pays you back.
The Prompt Sequence That Produces Usable Content
Brandon does not avoid AI. He refuses to hand it a lazy prompt.
His process runs in stages, with human editing at every step:
- Start with the exact keyword you want to rank for, not a broad topic.
- Ask for topically related terms and semantic variations around it.
- Lock in the primary keyword, then request 10 blog post angles.
- Pick the angle that genuinely fits your customers.
- Have it build an outline before it writes a word of draft.
- Edit for accuracy, brand voice, and anything specific to your business.
- Cross reference every data claim against Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz.
“Write me an article about Italian food” gets you the same generic page everyone else generated that morning. Granular prompting is where the ranking benefit shows up.
He added a preference specific to search work. ChatGPT’s search side leans on Bing, and Bing carries a fraction of the market, while everything in organic search comes back to Google.
So when Google’s own AI drafts title tags, meta descriptions, keyword lists, or markup, he weighs it more heavily. Still verified, still edited, but coming from the search engine you are trying to rank in.
A Client Story: Owning Music Festival Fashion
Brandon is niche agnostic and works mostly with local businesses and e-commerce brands. The exception is generic products.
Sell plain T-shirts and you enter a hyper competitive category where results crawl. Sell something specific and you have an opening.
One apparel client focused on music festival fashion. Not clothing in general, festival clothing.
Content Built Around Buyer Intent, Not Convenience
Google reads text. It handles images, video, and audio better every year, but written content is still what it parses most reliably.
Dropping a visitor who searched “Coachella fashion” onto a homepage ignores user intent entirely. That mismatch is a ranking problem and a conversion problem at the same time.
The fix was a dedicated landing page for essentially every major festival. Now the relevance signal is obvious to the crawler and to the shopper.
The work is ongoing, because festivals launch, merge, and vanish every season.
Backlinks Are How Google Decides to Believe You
Publishing content is only the first half. Google does not take your word for anything you write about yourself.
Authority comes from other websites referencing you. The more relevant domains mention your brand, the more weight your on-page keywords carry.
For this client, outreach targeted the ecosystem around the niche:
- The festivals themselves
- Event promoters and organizers
- Venues and amphitheaters
- Music blogs, magazines, and culture sites
- Anything topically adjacent to live events
Reverse Engineer the Sites Already Linking to Your Competitors
Backlink tools expose any domain’s referring domains, including your rivals. If a site links to a competitor, it is a realistic prospect for you.
The job is identifying the mechanism behind each link, then reproducing it.
| How the link was earned | Your version of the same play |
|---|---|
| Guest article or contributed post | Pitch that publication a sharper angle |
| Press release | Find a real news hook in your business |
| Podcast interview | Book shows serving the same audience |
| Sponsorship | Sponsor the event, venue, or team |
| Trade show or expo | Get listed as exhibitor or speaker |
| Resource or roundup page | Ask to be added with a better resource |
The outcome for that client: first page of Google in roughly six months, top three within a year, and the site now trades between positions one and two.
Selling Patience: How to Keep a Client Through Month Six
Jenny asked the question every agency owner has faced. How do you get someone to keep biting the apple for a full year?
Brandon does not promise speed he cannot deliver. He sets a truthful expectation instead.
Movement appears within the first few months. Full trust takes longer, because link discovery is unpredictable.
He can build a link today and Google might crawl it in days, in weeks, in months, or never at all. That waiting period is not something an agency can shortcut.
Make Incremental Progress Visible
The retention tool is proof. Google Analytics tracks organic sessions month over month, and rank tracking shows keyword movement week over week.
A realistic climb looks like this:
- Starting point: position 97
- One week later: position 90
- Six months later: position 40
Nobody browses page four. But a client watching a keyword march from 97 to 40 can see the direction is right.
Rankings Are Half the Battle in Any SEO Strategy
This was the biggest evolution in how Brandon runs client work. Traffic is not what business owners actually want.
They want sales, leads, and phone calls. Nobody celebrates a position when the phone stays quiet.
Roughly half of arriving visitors leave without acting. So the work expanded past organic search into the rest of the funnel.
- Remarketing for shoppers who added to cart and abandoned, since those are warm leads
- A lead magnet that trades something free for an email address
- Email follow up that keeps the brand present during a long decision cycle
- Paid ads covering the same queries while organic authority builds
- Conversion rate optimization, because traffic to a weak page is wasted spend
Jenny made the same point from her side. When a prospect says “I just want ads,” a look at the website often shows ads are not the first problem to solve.
More touch points build more trust. Trust is what turns a visitor into a customer.
Organic Search Is Brand Building With Staying Power
Here is the contrast that justifies the timeline.
Shut off paid ads and you vanish that afternoon. Build organic visibility and traffic keeps arriving, provided you maintain the position.
| Factor | Paid advertising | Organic search |
|---|---|---|
| Speed to first results | Same day | Months |
| What happens when you stop | Traffic disappears | Traffic continues with upkeep |
| Cost per visitor over time | Climbs with competition | Drops as authority compounds |
| Brand effect | Limited | Cumulative recognition and trust |
| Best fit | Testing offers, remarketing | Long term lead flow and equity |
That maintenance clause is real. Page one of Google has 10 spots, and the business stuck on page two is studying your keywords, your backlink profile, your site structure, and your technical setup so it can take your place.
Both hosts landed on the same image. It is Tom and Jerry, and the chase does not end.
Competition also keeps getting cheaper to enter. Fifteen years ago a website was a project, and now a WordPress, Shopify, or Squarespace template puts a new competitor online in an afternoon.
The Practical Takeaway
Brandon summed up the division of labor cleanly. An agency can get you to where customers can find you, and running a profitable business once they arrive is on the owner.
The playbook itself has not changed much since 2007:
- Publish pages that match what buyers actually type.
- Earn links from sites inside your niche.
- Track incremental movement instead of demanding instant wins.
- Fix what happens after the click.
- Keep maintaining it, because someone below you is working to pass you.
Do that consistently and the question stops being why competitors outrank you. It becomes how long you intend to stay ahead of them.
To talk through your own site, Brandon Leibowitz and the SEO Optimizers team have been running this approach since 2007.
