Table of Contents
SEO Strategies for Business Growth Podcast
Last Update September 10, 2026
The SEO Strategy Brandon Leibowitz Has Used Since 2007 to Outrank Bigger Competitors
An honest SEO strategy is the difference between a business that quietly outranks its competitors and one that keeps wondering why a worse company sits above it on Google. That was the theme when Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers, sat down with Jenny White on the Business Growth Show.
Brandon has been in digital marketing since 2007. He did not plan on it. He got a business marketing degree, took a job helping a company with digital marketing, and the company admitted they did not know much either. Their pitch was simple: we will learn together, and we will send you to classes, workshops, and seminars.
A few months in, something clicked. Everyone was going to have a website. Email marketing, paid ads, and social media all worked, but organic search was the channel with free, compounding traffic.
So he worked his day job at advertising agencies and built his own company before work, on lunch breaks, and after work. Eventually the side project paid the bills, and he quit.
What AI Actually Does Well in an SEO Strategy (And Where It Lies)
Jenny asked the question every business owner is asking right now: what is AI going to do to search engine optimization?
Brandon’s answer was refreshingly unhyped. AI is useful. AI is also confidently wrong.
Ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI for keyword research on Italian food near me, complete with search volume and competition data, and it will hand you a tidy list. Cross reference that list against a real keyword tool and the numbers are often way off.
That is an AI hallucination, and in marketing it has a price tag. Bad search volume data sends budget toward keywords nobody searches.
The Prompting Habit That Separates Usable Output From Generic Filler
Brandon’s fix is not to abandon the tools. It is to stop giving lazy prompts.
Here is the workflow he described, in order:
- Give the AI your actual target keyword, not a vague topic.
- Ask for a list of topically related keywords and semantic variations.
- Pick the keyword you want to own, then request 10 blog post topics around it.
- Choose the topic that fits your audience and ask for an outline.
- Edit at every stage, checking the facts against your business.
- Validate any data point with a real SEO tool before you act on it.
“Write me an article about Italian food” produces what everyone else is publishing. Granular and specific prompting is where the ranking benefit lives.
He also had a preference worth noting. Since ChatGPT’s search side leans on Bing and almost nobody uses Bing, he pays closer attention to Google’s own AI output when the task is SEO. It will do keyword research, draft title tags, write meta descriptions, even output code. Still take it with a grain of salt, but information coming straight from the search engine you are trying to rank in carries more weight.
A Real Ranking Case Study: Music Festival Fashion
Brandon works with local businesses and e-commerce brands and stays niche agnostic. The one thing he avoids is generic products. Plain T-shirts put you in a hyper competitive pool where results take forever.
One client sold festival clothing. Not fashion in general, festival fashion. That specificity was the entire opening.
Step One, Build Pages That Match Buyer Intent
Google reads text. It is getting better with images, video, and audio, but text is still what it understands best.
Sending someone searching “Coachella fashion” to a homepage ignores user intent. So the team built a dedicated page for essentially every music festival.
That way Google has an obvious answer. Someone types a festival name plus fashion, and there is a hyper relevant landing page waiting.
The work never fully ends, because festivals launch, rebrand, and disappear every year.
Step Two, Earn Trust With Backlinks
Content alone is not enough. As Brandon put it, Google does not automatically believe anything you say about yourself on your own website.
Trust comes from other websites talking about you. The more relevant sites that reference you, the more authority Google assigns, and the more weight your on-page keywords carry.
For the festival client, outreach targeted the ecosystem around the niche:
- Music festivals themselves
- Event promoters
- Venues
- Music blogs and media
- Anything topically adjacent to live music
Step Three, Reverse Engineer the Competition
Tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush expose any website’s backlink profile. That includes your competitors.
If a site already links to a competitor, it is a realistic prospect for you. The job is figuring out how that link happened.
| Link source they used | How you reverse engineer it |
|---|---|
| Guest article or blog contribution | Pitch the same publication with a better angle |
| Press release | Find a genuine news hook in your business |
| Podcast interview | Get booked on shows in the same niche |
| Sponsorship | Sponsor the event, team, or organization |
| Trade show or conference | Get listed as an exhibitor or speaker |
The results with that approach: first page of Google within roughly six months, top three positions within a year, and the site now bounces between positions one and two.
Why the Timeline Is the Hardest Part of Any SEO Strategy
Jenny asked the question every agency owner has wrestled with. How do you get a client to keep biting the apple for a full year?
Brandon does not oversell speed. He sets a real expectation instead.
Movement shows up within the first few months. Full trust from Google takes longer, because backlinks are a waiting game. You can build a link today and Google might find it in days, in weeks, in months, or never.
Tracking the Small Wins Before the Big Ones
The answer is visible, incremental proof. Google Analytics and rank tracking make progress legible even before the phone rings.
A typical trajectory looks like this:
- Week one: position 97
- Week two: position 90
- Month six: position 40
Nobody shops on page four. But watching a keyword climb steadily is evidence the strategy is working, and it buys the patience the process requires.
Rankings Are Only Half the Job
This was the most important shift in Brandon’s approach over the years. Getting traffic is not what clients actually want.
They want sales, leads, and phone calls. Roughly half of the visitors you earn will bounce, so ranking alone does not pay the bills.
That realization pushed him past pure organic search into a fuller funnel:
- Remarketing that follows shoppers who added to cart and left, since those are warm leads
- Paid ads working alongside organic listings for coverage on the same query
- A lead magnet that captures email addresses instead of losing the visitor forever
- Email follow up that keeps the brand top of mind
- Conversion rate optimization, because sending traffic to a weak page wastes it
More touch points build more trust. More trust drives more purchases.
As Jenny framed it, when someone says “I just want ads,” the site itself often tells you that ads are not the problem to solve first.
SEO as Brand Building, Not a Rented Channel
Here is the contrast that makes the long game worth it.
Turn off paid ads and you disappear the same day. Build organic visibility and the traffic keeps arriving, as long as you maintain it.
That maintenance clause matters, because the first page of Google has 10 spots. The business sitting on page two is studying your keywords, your backlink profile, your site structure, and your technical setup so it can take your position.
Brandon and Jenny landed on the same metaphor: it is Tom and Jerry. The chase never ends.
The barrier to entry keeps dropping too. Fifteen years ago, building a website was a project. Now WordPress, Shopify, and Squarespace templates spin up a new competitor in an afternoon.
What This Means for Your Next 12 Months
Compare the two paths honestly.
| Factor | Paid ads | Organic search |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first results | Immediate | Weeks to months |
| What happens when you stop | Traffic ends that day | Traffic continues with upkeep |
| Cost curve over time | Rises with competition | Falls per visitor as authority grows |
| Brand impact | Limited | Compounding authority and recognition |
| Best use | Testing offers, remarketing, fast cash | Long term visibility and lead flow |
The takeaway from the interview is not complicated. Publish content that matches what buyers actually type, earn relevant links from your niche, track incremental movement instead of demanding overnight wins, and fix what happens after the click.
Do that consistently and the question stops being why competitors outrank you. It becomes how long you plan to stay ahead of them.
If you want help mapping this out for your own site, Brandon Leibowitz and the team at SEO Optimizers have been running this playbook since 2007.
