Table of Contents
Small Business SEO Strategies Podcast
Last Update September 10, 2026
Small Business SEO After Google’s AI Shift: What Still Moves the Needle
Small business SEO is not dead in the age of AI Overviews, but the playbook that worked in 2019 will quietly bleed your budget in 2026. That was the argument Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers, laid out on a recent episode of the Afluencer podcast.
The host opened with the question every owner is thinking. The top half of the search results page is ads. The rest is an AI answer box. So what exactly are the rest of us supposed to do?
Brandon’s response was not panic. It was a strategy with four moving parts: understand what Google actually wants, use paid ads to buy time, research keywords with real data, and build the kind of backlinks that still count.
Google Has Been Eating the Click for a Decade
The featured snippet, that little answer box at the top of the search results, showed up roughly ten years ago. AI Overviews do the same job with better language.
Ask how old someone is and Google pulls it from Wikipedia. Check an NBA score and you get it live without ever touching the league’s website.
“Google is just trying to essentially keep you on Google longer,” Brandon said.
There is a revenue logic underneath it. A score check shows no ads. But the fan who checks the score, then searches “Lakers jerseys,” is suddenly a paying query.
Here is the line worth pinning above your desk:
Google knows they have to have that organic, because if it’s just ads, nobody would go to Google. Their ultimate goal is not to get you to click on the organic.
Organic listings exist so users do not defect to Bing or DuckDuckGo. Once you accept that framing, you stop chasing the wrong searches.
Which Queries Still Send You Traffic
- Pure fact lookups are gone. Google answers them on the page.
- Comparison and buying queries still get clicks, because people want options.
- Local service searches still produce phone calls and form fills.
- Long-tail questions with real nuance still reward pages that go deeper than a snippet ever will.
Paid Ads Buy You Time While Rankings Build
If your site launched in the last year, organic traction is months away, sometimes longer, depending on how competitive your keywords are. Brandon’s advice is to bridge that gap with paid search rather than sit on your hands.
His rule is refreshingly simple. As long as your return on ad spend is positive, there is no reason to ever switch the ads off.
The caution is the other side of that coin. Ads vanish the second the card stops charging, so building your entire lead flow on them is expensive and fragile.
On the SEO question, Google’s official position is that ads do not influence rankings, and Brandon does not fight that. He does point out that a visitor who clicks an ad and then actually stays on your site is not a bad signal.
Remarketing Is the Channel Most Owners Ignore
This stretch of the interview was the most immediately useful. Remarketing targets people who already visited your site, which makes it warm traffic instead of cold.
His example is one every ecommerce owner has lived. Someone is looking at a product on their phone, a call comes in, and the sale evaporates. A remarketing ad puts that exact product back in front of them the next day.
The mistake is blasting one generic banner at everybody. Segment by where the visitor actually stopped.
| Where they dropped off | What to serve them |
|---|---|
| Browsed products, never hit the cart | General brand or category ad |
| Added to cart, never checked out | Discount offer, for example 10 percent off |
| Downloaded the ebook, never called | Testimonials, reviews, case studies |
| Visited the site, never took the free class | Free class or lead magnet ad |
| Took the class, never booked a call | Free consultation offer |
Brandon runs this exact ladder for his own business. Free class first, free consultation second, each one aimed at a different rung of the buying funnel.
Where you can run it:
- Google Display Network, which reaches nearly every site that shows banner ads
- YouTube, since Google owns it, though video raises the production barrier
- Facebook and Instagram
- LinkedIn, X, and effectively any platform selling ad inventory
Each platform drops a tracking pixel on your site, or accepts an uploaded email list, to identify the audience. More touchpoints means more trust, and that compounds fastest when your ticket price is high.
Keyword Research Where One Letter Cost 180,000 Searches
Brandon still starts with Google Keyword Planner. Semrush and Ahrefs are excellent, but Keyword Planner is free and the data comes straight from Google.
His client story lands hard. A personal injury law firm was deciding between two nearly identical phrases.
- “personal injury lawyers” pulled roughly 20,000 monthly searches
- “personal injury lawyer” pulled roughly 200,000
One letter. Ten times the search volume.
His process runs in this order:
- Brainstorm your own keyword list before opening any tool
- Feed the entire list into Keyword Planner, not just one seed term
- Harvest the hundreds of related terms and long-tail variations it hands back
- Cross-check volume and keyword difficulty in the paid tools if you have them
“The data is there,” he said. Guessing at search intent when the numbers are free is a self-inflicted wound.
Small Business SEO Still Runs on Backlinks
Ask how long results take and the honest answer is six months on average, with wide variance in both directions. What decides where you land in that range is your backlink profile compared to your competitors’.
A backlink is a clickable link from another site pointing to yours. If the New York Times mentions Brandon Leibowitz and links out, that is one backlink from a high-authority domain.
Google treats those links like votes in a popularity contest. More relevant sites talking about you means more trust and higher rankings.
What Actually Earns Links, and What Cancels Out
Reciprocal swaps are largely wasted motion. If I link to you and you link back to me, Google sees the trade and neutralizes both.
One-way inbound links are the target, and earning them means giving something first.
- Write a guest post for a site your audience already reads
- Sit for an interview or a podcast that publishes with a link
- Send product samples to bloggers and influencers who review in your category
- Sponsor local organizations, chambers of commerce, or community events
- Get listed everywhere your competitors are already listed
That last one is the shortcut. Pull a competitor’s referring domains in Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush and you can see exactly which links carried them onto page one.
Two filters override everything else: relevancy and authority. Brandon was blunt that scraping up every available link backfires, because some do more harm than good.
Where AI Search Fits Into All of This
The host floated a theory. When Gemini or an AI search engine decides what deserves to be quoted, what else can it lean on besides the same authority signals SEO has always used?
Brandon has landed in the same place.
“If it’s not looking at backlinks, how does it know what’s real?”
That is the crux. AI writes fluent, confident text, and it hallucinates. Anyone can generate a hundred personal injury articles, interlink them, add clean title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags, and technically cover every topic in the niche.
Google has said it does not care whether a human or a machine wrote the content, largely because it cannot reliably tell. What matters is accuracy and value.
Links are how a machine verifies that. A backlink is another site vouching for the page, which is a signal no language model can generate on its own.
The Practical Takeaway
| The old assumption | What holds up now |
|---|---|
| Rank first, everything follows | Rank, get quoted, and get mentioned by name |
| Volume of content wins | Accuracy plus links that vouch for it wins |
| Ads and organic are separate silos | Ads fund traction while organic authority compounds |
| Reciprocal links build authority | One-way links from relevant, authoritative sites build authority |
Test, Because Nobody Is Handing You the Algorithm
Neither Google nor the AI platforms publish how their ranking systems work. Brandon’s closing point is that search engine optimization has always been an experimental discipline.
Practitioners move keywords around, adjust on-page elements, watch what lifts traffic, and watch what gets flagged as spammy. That loop has not changed, and it is the only reliable method available.
The businesses that lose ground are the ones waiting for a clean answer before acting. The ones that gain are running paid ads for cash flow, building relevant links for durability, and testing everything in between.
Brandon Leibowitz put together a free gift, a set of free classes, and a free website analysis at seooptimizers.com/gift. Worth grabbing if you want the step-by-step version of everything above.
