How to Build Smarter SEO with AI and DEO with Jason Ciment

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10x ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne. Today, I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Jason Sement. Now I'm going to read some highlights from Jason's bio. So Jason is a former CPA and lawyer, and he's the co-founder of Get Visible, which is a digital marketing and technology development agency that he's been running since 2005. And we're going to talk about some of the recent innovations that they've been working on that I'm really excited to learn more about. He's a serial entrepreneur, including in the early days of the internet, Uh, founding MagazineSubscription.com. He's the creator of the Invincible Income online market penetration strategy, author of the Amazon bestselling book I Need More Clients, and the book I Need More Patients, which was just published last year, which is digital marketing for doctors who would rather be doctoring. So Jason, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Glad to be here. Good to talk to you. Yeah.

So you obviously have a really interesting background. You know, you were A lawyer as well as a CPA. Tell us your story of how you got from that into doing what you're doing today.

Well, I, I'm good at taking tests, so—

Okay.

Not great, but I'm good. I could get a B+ in probably anything.

Okay.

Unless it requires a strong memory of detail. But I started out as a CPA. I got very lucky to get the job that I got. It was the first time they hired from my college. And the interview was so out of left field because I had taken off the first 2 weeks of college, that of my last year of college, and I went to Thailand and Hong Kong on a business trip in a family business. And back then, this is like before cell phones and stuff like that. And I had bought these Montblanc pens for a dollar on the street. They were fake Montblancs.

Sure.

And the interview was like, Right after school started. So our whole interview, we were talking about my trip over to Asia. And the guy just liked it and he very much liked those fake Montblanc pens. All of a sudden, I get an offer to come work for one of the, basically the top firm in the country.

Wow.

It was focused on real estate. Everybody who was a successful real estate-oriented company used this firm because they were the, they called them, they were called the Gilded Sweatshop.

Okay.

So you worked very hard. I even back— not even back then, I grew up Sabbath observant, so I never worked Friday night or Saturday, and I still had more overtime than almost everybody in my cohort, right? So I worked there for a couple of years. I'd already passed the CPA, and then I— my plan ultimately, I think, was to become an estate attorney.

Okay.

I went to— I went to Fordham Law. I quit to go to Fordham Law School. And I clerked in a— in the probate court in Brooklyn. And but in that second summer, instead of working at a law firm, I actually took a job with the biggest clothing manufacturer in Asia. And I— my first day on the job was on a plane to Hong Kong.

Oh, wow.

With, with the owner of the business. And then we went to Sri Lanka for 2 weeks.

Wow.

And then I went back home and then I went back by myself to Sri Lanka. I was like, I was 26 at the point.

Wow.

Right. So I went to Sri Lanka for a couple of weeks and my job for my last year of law school was to work in between the guy's factory in Manila and in Sri Lanka, his buyers in New York and his fabric and parts people in Italy. So, and my job was to coordinate all this stuff and—

Racking up those flyer miles.

I didn't have to fly, thankfully, but it was, I built a system to track everything and the lady who was managing it in New York, she used to have reams and reams of paper.

Okay.

And she used a thing called an AS/400, which was like a very old database system. And she used to send me birthday cards for 10 years because I moved her into a system called FileMaker. So it turns out I was, I have a good head for flow and logistics. I can program a little bit. So I use the FileMaker 2.0. That's how far back now. It's in the '20s, I think.

Okay.

To build this system. And then when I graduated law school and took the bar, and again, I could pass tests. So I passed the bar. Well, I'll tell you one funny thing in the accounting world. If you got a 300 score on your CPA exam, It meant you studied perfectly because it's 4 parts, 75 each would be 300. And I met a 300 guy, so I was a 308. I still had 8 points too much.

Wow.

It's just one of those funny things. So, uh, when I, uh, passed the bar, I stood in the courtroom and I— to get sworn in, and I was thinking, I don't know that I want to do this right now. I just got married. And we said, well, we're gonna move to LA anyway. Why don't I try starting a business before we move? So I started the business in the, like, '97. It was the year in between, uh, internet. Like, the internet really took off in '88.

Okay.

Right? '99 was the big dot-com boom stuff. So I ended up starting it in '97. I got funded in '99 for my business by an angel investor. They gave me a chunk of cash. Which paid for a deposit on the house I'm sitting in.

Okay.

And I never went back to law. I just kept plodding along on the internet. My first business was an e-commerce business in 2003. I ended up buying out the software company that was powering my website. So now I owned an e-commerce platform and I inherited clients along the way. And now I had to service them, right? So I had to, and I wasn't a programmer as much as I could put things together and put resources together. I'd already had employees in the business that was funded. So we started learning how to do the marketing we were doing for ourselves to do it for other people. 2005 rolls around and one of my older old employees who put himself through college working with me. He called me up, he says, why don't we start a consulting business and do marketing for other people, not in your e-commerce thing, just regular people who have businesses, lawyers, whatever. And let's, let's see if we could do it. We'll work it out.

Yeah.

He had a job. I was still running my e-commerce business and we said, let's try it. Within a week, we had 2 clients. And we wouldn't talk in the daytime. We'd only talk at night. He'd do the work at night after work. And it took about a year until we had enough clients that he could quit the day job. And now it's almost 20 years later, up to over 20 employees. And it started with just search engine rankings because we— Google was our client, actually. They bought every catalog in the '90s. Before the world knew who Google was. I just didn't understand how big Google would be. I should have gotten paid in stock. It just grew. So we started with SEO, then we said, okay, we're gonna build WordPress websites because I already had a developer on staff. So he just started building WordPress and then we, I joined an organization called Provisors, which is how we met.

Yeah.

I'm in it for like 16, 17 years. And there your Rolodex just explodes if you really work the network.

Yeah.

Meeting a lot of people and you don't sell to people, you sell through the people. But some of the people say, oh, I want your business, I want you to do stuff for me too. And so I started meeting a lot of attorneys and attorneys are great sources for referrals. And then I met PR people and accountants, just a lot of service providers and they would be, well, I have a website. What can you do to get me traffic? Well, I don't really care about search engines because my relate— it's more relationship based or people are not searching for me, but they need to learn about me. So then we started doing what I call interruption advertising. That's where you're not looking, but you're, you're capable of being interrupted with an ad. And like, if it's good, we can grab your attention.

Yeah.

Call to action, we can get you to click. And if we have something good to give away, I mean, I wrote this whole book here, right, that you mentioned, not to sell it, but more as a good follow-up to grab attention from somebody and say, hey, there's a lot of stuff in this book. You're not gonna wanna do it, but at least you'll understand what you're paying someone to do for you.

Sure, sure.

Right? And so just one thing leads to another and every couple of years we add something and we don't necessarily pivot. We just Adapt considering that we're in the internet marketing, everything moves fast.

That's right.

Now is the next pivot. So, or the next adaptation and there's never a dull day. So you can't sit back.

Well, it sounds like you make an adventure out of whatever you do. So I'm not surprised that you don't have many dull days.

No, I mean, I've been lucky. My partner is extremely smart. And he was doing funky stuff with advertising 20 years ago where he was buying like Greek characters, like the gamma or different letters so that he could bid on advertising using the spelling of a word like Gucci. Oh, you can't do that stuff anymore. But that's more of renegade stuff.

Yeah.

The fact of the matter is his favorite way of thinking is to come to our employees and say, okay, what do you have out of the box?

Yeah.

Right. It's almost like going to ChatGPT and we actually have a prompt that someone gave us which is called be critical. It almost always agrees with you and we don't want that. Clients don't want us to do the obvious things. They want us to go outside and say, here's something that you wouldn't have thought about.

Yeah, I've incorporated some of those prompts into my standing instructions for ChatGPT around assume I'm missing something, assume I have a blind spot, point out the things that I could be thinking of that I'm not. So I love that.

Correct. So a lot of what we hear, you'll laugh, you know, I have a flamingo behind me. So one of my friends sent me this, be flama-zing. Right. So I think the flammazing is, it's not just doing a good job. It's a bit about the process of how you get there. Yeah.

Well, I know one of those innovations that you're working on, and you and I have chatted about this a little bit, but I wanna learn more, is around kind of redefining SEO. And, you know, in the, you know, for our audience that may not be as deep into this, search engine optimization has been a perennial, you know, source of good leads. 'Cause if you create good content, then people are out there finding it and then And they, you know, sort of, it builds your authority on a particular, you know, subject matter. But now people aren't going to search engines and looking for content. They're going to the, the AI platforms, whether, whatever your preferred platform is, even if it's just the summer, the, you know, sort of summary results that you get in Google that are, you know, is using an AI to pull from different websites. Tell me a little bit about how you're sort of redefining search engine optimization through this new lens. of, you know, sort of AI agents?

Well, when you think about SEO, it's always been one channel. It's either Google or Bing, right? There's been third and fourth stringers, but ultimately it's Google and then Bing. And Bing has had a resurgence because rankings on ChatGPT often depend on the rankings inside Bing.

Oh, I've heard. Yeah.

All of a sudden, if you rank on Bing, you can get into ChatGPT. Fine. But when you think about that, it's still one highway when there's many highways. So interruption ads are not a search engine because this is proactive. Search engine is, is preparing to be reactive. They do a search so you can show up. If the search doesn't happen, you got nothing showing up. And that includes ads on Google too. So all of a sudden now, AI is is creating a fork in the road because AI is still someone looking. So if they're looking, it means you're waiting to be discovered. So therefore, instead of thinking about a search happening, I'm thinking, or we're thinking about a discovery that needs to be triggered.

Okay.

Right now, once you start talking in the language of discovery, you don't actually have to wait to be discovered. So it's not just search engines anymore. It's not just chat. It's the entire enterprise of brand presence. How do you get discovered? Right? How do you get awareness to your brand?

Wow.

So that first letter of D for discovery becomes part of a new concept that we are evolving. So discovery is the first word. The second thing is, okay, once you've been discovered, People have to visit your brand online. That could be a website, it could be social media, it could be like a tweet, a Twitter channel or X channel. It could be LinkedIn. And within those channels, the experience is not uniform.

Right.

What you do on LinkedIn is not gonna be the same as Twitter, won't be the same as Pinterest, it won't be the same as your website. So you have to create an experience that is tailored to the channel and tailored to the use case that the people are expecting when they get to that channel. So right now you have a second thing. It's not only like a landing page. Like right now you could actually see in LinkedIn there's a whole new concept, a cadence, like a flow of steps. Traditionally, you get people to click, go to a landing page, Try to collect their email from the landing page and then follow up with them and put them in a sales funnel. Now with LinkedIn, what you'll see, you just have to notice that it's happening, is they don't even go to the landing page. They use the LinkedIn post, they put the call to action right in the post, and they say leave a comment in order to get something. And then if you leave the comment, there's a way to send a message to you and often to get your email and send a message there. And it's funny, now I realize the, uh, lawnmower is going to be in the background.

You know, I don't hear it. The audio is great.

So what happens is the second stage is now the experience. That's— so that's one word beginning with an E. But at the corollary, the other side of the coin of the experience is the engagement and the re-engagement, because you don't want to hit them just one time to connect with them. You got to hit them multiple times.

Yeah.

You need the email, you need the LinkedIn outreach, you need all that stuff happening. So you're, you're, once you've been discovered, the 2nd stage of the process of, of, of the, of working your brand awareness is making the experience strong enough that they want more. Or they understand, they either want to reach out or they want to come back to learn more because people usually need anywhere from 7 to 25 times Before they will transact. And you need an engagement strategy. So you have discovery, you have experience and engagement, and then you have the third thing, which I think doesn't change, which is optimization. Optimization ultimately is just making things better. It means you start from point A and you say, okay, let me test, let me adapt, let me modify, let me take technology, let me take know-how experience. All of that stuff's really ultimately optimization. It's just making things better. So we're coining the term DEO, which is Discovery Experience Optimization or Decision Optimization. It depends who we're talking to. And that in itself is explaining the multichannel approach. For some people, DEO with experience is gonna work, and for others it's gonna be engagement. Just depends on the audience.

Yeah.

Or I just can't make a decision, which is definitely a millennial thing. So, uh, DEO is really a way of reframing the digital marketing conversation in a way that anybody could understand regardless of their technology or marketing expertise. Everybody understands I want to be discovered. So that's why our tagline has become from invisible to inevitable.

Yeah.

Right. So either first we get you visible and second is we gotta sell you. To make it as if our brand, and I'm saying on behalf of our clients, to make our clients' brands in demand and inevitable, the obvious choice. But that is the marketing strategy that we're exhibiting right now.

Interesting. Interesting. And to sort of take a little bit of a left turn, although I think it's closely aligned, I know there's another innovation that you've been working on related to this sort of Network 10,000 that's specific to leveraging LinkedIn, a platform that you talked about before. Talk to us a little bit about that. Uh, when you and I were chatting about it before, it sounded really interesting.

Okay, so part of the discovery paradigm is recognizing that you have 2— uh, they're not competing, they're 2 levels of discovery. It's either what you do on your own Or what someone helps you to discover along the way, right? You have a Sherpa or a guide or someone you trust who says, hey, look over here, and you're doing your own searches on Google or chat or whatever, and you're— the authority you get from that introduction is worth a lot more.

That's right.

Than, than someone gaming the search engine or the chat.

That's right.

To show up first, your trust level is not at the same. It's even like if you go to Google, people tend to skip over the ads because they know people paid for them.

That's right.

You know, the ads are good, right? Most of the time they're gonna be the right ads. It's just you have an inherent distrust of the man, right? I wonder what the new term of that— you can't say the man anymore in 2025. Can't say the person either. Anyway, the machine, the machine does it. Right. So we're creating a concept where we have combined software applications from 3 different entities that are ultimately around getting introductions and referrals.

Okay.

So the notion is if I can use AI and technology to facilitate more introductions from trusted intermediaries, I can increase business. So we're creating a new concept. It's called Network 10,000.

Okay.

Foundation is something called 100 by 100.

Okay.

And the notion is, is if I know 100 people and you know 100 people, and I don't mean just I know them, I mean, if I call them at 3 in the morning, they're gonna answer the phone, right? They might not be happy, but they're gonna answer the phone. If I send them an email or if I send them a message, and say, hey, I want to introduce Mark to Jennifer, they're not gonna ask me for an explanation why. They're just gonna say, give me the paragraph, I'll send out the introduction. As long as I make it easy for them, they're willing to do it. They know that if they're doing it for me, they're gonna get a reciprocal thing from me to them.

Yeah.

So if I put 100 people into a network and you put 100 people into a network and we have software go analyze our connections and we have an ideal client persona, ICP, which I'm calling an IRP, an ideal referral persona.

Okay.

Type of person that I want to meet to make an introduction. The software can get you a certain amount of understanding and say, you know what, out of these 100, 5 of these are really good to ask Marc for an introduction. Either because they can be a direct client or because they can be a good intermediary.

Yeah.

So the Network 10,000 concept is going to be a combination of the software in addition to a virtual assistant, because like I said, the software can only get you that far, but the virtual assistant right now can do more and can facilitate all of this stuff. So there's going to be, uh, ultimately 100 people Each putting in 100 of their best connections into this network. There'll be 10,000 people and the goal is to create introductions both bilaterally. So you'll get requests to make and requests to receive.

Interesting. Very interesting. Well, and I love that you're bringing together sort of multiple different capabilities into sort of a complete product for that.

Right.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

And then again, to take a right turn, because this is very different, but also something I think the audience will be really interested in. You talked about a tax credit opportunity for small businesses that seems like a no-brainer that everyone would want to take advantage of. Talk to me about that.

Right. So this is— it's You call it a lead magnet, sort of.

Okay.

So what's a way that's a magnet that pulls a lead in? So for my business, considering that we do websites also, and that's a door opener for us, you know, it's a majority of our income is not building websites. And being an agency that just builds websites is a horrible business plan.

Right.

There's no recurring revenue. So it's not good. So the government does have a program that if you build a website or rehabilitate a website and you make it compliant to ADA, American Disabilities Act, then which now enables the website to be accessed by someone with impairment of vision, then they will give you a tax credit. So literally, if we're building a website, the first $250 that the person spends, that doesn't count in the calculation. But the next $10,000 they spend, 50% becomes a tax credit.

Oh, wow.

So it's free money. I mean, yeah, you get, you get 25-30% as a tax write-off. But this is not a write-off. This is a credit. So this is Dollar for dollar, like you get 50 cents back on your tax return. So if you spent $10,250 and you have an ADA-compliant website, you— as far as I understand, I'm not a tax expert, but my understanding is if you have under $1 million in revenue or you have under a certain number of employees, I think it's 25 employees, then you get this tax credit. You just take it on your tax return. It's one form. One page. You don't have to do anything. You fill it out, you take it. That's it.

Seems like a, seems like a great way to open the door to doing some website projects for sure. Yeah.

I mean, it's our definitely, it helped increase our web business, but technically we're doing a good thing. It's, it's like a ramp in a building. It's necessary. Even if, if you're 99% of your client base is not vision impaired, it doesn't mean that that 1% doesn't need it. And on top of it, it doesn't mean that they can't facilitate a referral for a company.

That's right. Well, and also, you know, more equity in the world is a good thing. So, yeah, that's awesome. So, you're obviously a wealth of knowledge about a wide range of really interesting topics. So, we could talk all day, but I got to be mindful of your time and let you get back to doing some of these exciting things. But before I let you go, why don't you tell us about something that's on the horizon for you that that you're excited about in addition to these other sort of new innovations?

So I am going to release next week a— the website will be managerlinks.com.

managerlinks.com.

Right now there's nothing there. It'll be up next week. I'm 2 days behind because we had a Jewish holiday Monday, Tuesday, so I didn't work and I had a family wedding a week ago. So everything I've been planning to has just been shoved Just delayed. But in any event, we built a piece of software that will enable you to more easily manage your custom GPTs in ChatGPT. If you're like me, I have a lot of them. So it's very hard to easily manage them in the ChatGPT environment. So we built a way to do it that categorizes them, gives you descriptions, Tells you when you loaded the GPT, who the author was. It just makes it really easy to remember because it's hard to remember all of them. So anytime you bookmark a GPT, or even if you bookmark like a page that has a prompt that you really like, you can store all this inside this bookmarking vault. And you can bookmark anything. It doesn't have to be AI, but we're Positioning it for AI and I'm gonna launch a lifetime license next week on this thing. And right now I'm just trying to come up with the name. So if anybody has a good name for it, right now the working name is Milty, but we'll see.

Milty?

Like Uncle Milty.

Okay.

That's an old reference to a TV show from years ago.

Milton Berle, right?

Yeah, Uncle Milty. So I won't use that, but I'm coming up with something. Awesome.

Well, Jason, thank you so much for taking the time to connect today. For our audience that's, you know, been listening and loves this, you know, sort of creative energy and all these ideas you have for innovation and wants to learn more about Get Visible, how do they get in touch with you? What's the best way to connect?

You want to laugh? I could show you something. I was about 30 years ago. I was in LA and I met a guy who invented the de-icer.

Okay.

For planes.

Okay.

He was a very, very successful, wealthy man. He'd already been through World War II, all that kind of stuff. And he had a business card and his business card had his name and it said United States of America. No phone number, no email. So this is my new business card. Jason Cement, United States of America.

There you go.

And it has a QR code on the back.

And I'm guessing that might be the same QR code that's on the side.

No, it's different than the one on the other thing. I'm gonna change that. That one goes to Get Visible. But if you need to reach me, you can find me at Get Visible. I'm very, very— there's only one Jason Cement in the world as far as I know. So I'm very findable. But Get Visible is the best place to get me.

Awesome. Well, Jason, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.

A lot of fun.

All right, talk to you soon.

Thank you.

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