Honest SEO - Jason Hennessey

Foreign.

I love doing the show live because it kind of makes it real. Brings a little different energy, a little pressure to get it right. We're live once again.

Love it.

And we're talking about SEO stuff today. SEO, it's a topic, you know, it's familiar, it's old, except it needs revisiting. Probably always, but search engine optimization. Does anyone not know what SEO means? Probably not too many. But how do you get found organically? It's easy to spend a lot of money, but how do you make sure that you're found right and you show up in searches and like that? So we're going to share some stories with Honest God expert, somebody who's done a tremendous amount of great work in the world of SEO. So. And yet also some black cat. SEO can get you in trouble. It can hurt you. So we'll talk about all those things more. My name is Bill Gallagher. Scaling Coach, host of this Scaling Up Business podcast show comes to you every week and on recording days like today, you might hear three or four things if you're watching live with us. And we've had a couple great shows today. So we're continuing to talk about that and all these shows and more@scalingcoach.com there on the screen. Scalingcoach.com our website where you've got all the information back shows, but also our groovy new Growth Navigator program. Growth Navigator program makes Scaling up work affordable to people like never before for a fraction of the cost of what it's typically 1500amonth. We can do scaling up for companies between 2 and 20 million. It's ideally suited for those. As long as you've got a couple of people, you're building a business with people. It's a great program for you. So scanlan coach.com is where you find out a little bit more about our Growth Navigator or just send us a note, DM, etc. Comment here. Like it, like do something so we know that you want to know more and we'll tell you all about that program first. Next group starts in October for that program. So only 1500amonth. All right, Jason, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Bill. Appreciate it.

So talk to folks a little bit about your background and how you got started in this. Why? Why would anybody get in this line of business?

Yeah, good question, right? If you want to have black hair when you're 40 instead of gray, maybe stay out of this business. Let's say that I got into this business. Look at this.

I'm still doing okay.

You Know, I think, you know, as in with. With most businesses, like, if you're an entrepreneur, like, life just kind of like takes you places, and it's just your curiosity takes you from one thing to the next. And so I was just a young entrepreneur thinking about maybe going to law school. I had a DJ company where I was DJing weddings, and I wanted to create a website where brides can plan their wedding online. And so that kind of led me to kind of enter the world of SEO and digital marketing, because I didn't know anything about it. And from there, I paid a developer to develop a website. Nobody was coming to the website. I'm like, what the heck's going on? They're like, oh, that's this thing called SEO. I don't do that. You know, you need to do that yourself. So I'm like, oh. And so that was 20 years ago, 21 years ago, I'd say. And so ever since then, I, I became really passionate about it. And it's just a subject that I love. And I'll talk about some of my, the stories that I've got in terms of like, SEO. Yeah.

So let's get into it, right? Like, I think a lot of us have done it bad and then some of us have had great, like, good luck, right? When I, I started a website in the first round of the Internets. A lot of different website properties in those days, and one of them was for this book series called Guerrilla Marketing from Jake Conrad Levinson and and others, including one of the co authors was my dad, which is how I knew Jay and company And I lucked on something and that was I had guest articles on our blog page and then we let anybody, like, put our articles as long as they backlink to us. So in those people were hungry for content and there was just all kinds of content sharing. And we ended up ranking super high for marketing, right? Marketing. Like we, boom. We were, you know, first page for all four years. Right. And, but that was that, like sharing content and backlinking was enormously good for us.

Yeah, it hasn't changed much. You know, I mean, those are the core principles of getting good traffic to your website. It comes down to three, you know, making sure that the site is technically sound, that Google can crawl the website, and there's not a lot of errors and it loads fast. All the boring stuff that, you know, you probably aren't going to do yourself, but, you know, somebody that development will make sure you've got that in order. Content. Creating content that people actually want to watch and listen to or read. Right? And that's what you're doing with this podcast, right? This is good content, right. And it's satisfying the intent of. Of what people are looking for. And in your case, it's people that are looking to scale their businesses, right? They come here and they watch your content. Right? So it's good content that satisfies a problem. And a. And then the third thing is, hopefully if we talk about something that's really cool today, people will kind of link back to it and share it, right? And that helps boost the popularity of a website. And that's really it, because there's not much different from like a blueberry pancake recipe from one website to the next, right? If you're trying to rank for blueberry camp pancake recipes, the thing that's going to make the website really rank higher is like this chef went on Top Chef and he got nationally recognized, and everybody's linking to his blueberry pancake recipe. And now, you know, he's ranking number one in Google. It's a popularity contest, basically. That's how it works.

So the other one, I think, is like, choosing the right name, the right terms, things like that. And I, I have had. In 10 years of running a coaching business, I've operated under four names. One of them is still our legal name, a name that we spent some time working with that nobody knew, nobody cared about, nobody could spell. I'm like. And we went through all this process, then we came up with it, and we're like, okay. The minute we started using it, we're like, okay, that was a disaster. And. And then through some iteration, we ended up with scaling coach. And how did we find that? How do. It's so simple, it seems now. And yet that has been enormously helpful for us, for people finding us, being aware of the show, of. Of the coaching work, that kind of thing. Right? That's got to be at least one part of it.

Oh, it is, yeah. For sure. You know, making sure that, you know, like, that's why they call them EMD Exact match domains. They still carry a lot of value, right? I mean, if you own sex.com, you know, I mean, that's. That's a money website, right? You know, I mean, and there's a lot of people that just kind of. That's. Their whole business is buying and selling big domain names like that, and they never really develop it. But once you actually develop a domain name that's on an exact match domain like that, like, yeah, you've Got a competitive advantage for sure.

Yeah. Somebody that I was coaching years ago owned quirky quirky.com and sold that for well, like a quarter of a million dollars.

I believe it pretty good. Yep. I totally believe that. Yeah.

Not a bad, not a bad thing. I've sold some websites in the past just because of the name for, you know, enough to be, to be interesting. Right?

Yeah. And then on the opposite side, like sometimes me as an SEO, like I'll look at domains and I'll buy domains just based on their SEO value. Right. So I might find a domain that's going to expire or it has expired. And I can see that this website has like 10,000 links coming back to it from all these credible news sources. Right. You know, so that's a whole nother market. Right. So I do that. Yeah. As well.

Depending on the nature of that traffic, you could sell that to someone or you could use it yourself.

Exactly. Yep.

One of the things that's kind of surprising to me today is how given how smart we can be about the Internet and how we talk about some of these big companies, oh, Palantir, blah, blah, blah, how dumb some online advertising is, like, why are you showing me that there's no, I'm never going to be interested in that. My entire life. That's so far from me. Like, wow.

Yeah.

Remarkable. Sometimes.

Yeah. Sometimes the, you know, either somebody that's at the wheel that's not paying attention and their look alike audiences don't look alike or something. Right. Or sometimes it's the algorithm that, you know, gets things messed up too. Right? Yeah. I'm not sure.

So tell some stories. What did you do for yourself? What have you done for some others? What worked? We love as much to hear the ones that didn't work. Right.

Yeah, yeah. So I, I got my start. Like I said, I've always got online.

Poker about Black Friday, like.

Yeah, yeah, let's talk about that. Okay, great. So. So I, I got my start, you know, working, you know, as an entrepreneur. You know, I built up a couple of affiliate websites. I got really good at SEO. This is when SEO was kind of like black magic, right? Yeah. And then I got recruited to do SEO for two pretty big poker companies. Absolute Poker, Ultimate Bet were the two companies that I was working for. I was doing their SEO and their digital marketing. And then we were doing very well. And the difference between like ranking like number one and number two on Google for a keyword like online poker was a swing of about $250,000 per day. Right. So like that's how much money was involved in kind of getting the SEO. Right. And so we were doing very well, you know, and there was definitely some black hat strategies that you use in those type of industries. They call it the PPC industry. Porn, pills and casinos. Right. Is the acronym there not paper click. That's different, right? Yeah. And these were very competitive spaces. And then one day I just woke up and the whole first page of Google at the time when you go to any of the websites, it says seized by like the authorities, FBI, whoever it was. Yeah, you couldn't do anything. And so that was the day that was called Black Friday. And so that really kind of hurt everybody. I was kind of out two big clients at the time and then I kind of had to shift and I accidentally stumbled into this legal field of doing marketing for law firms all across the country. And I figured that's a competitive space, but the poker industry is way more competitive. And so I've built a name for myself in the legal industry since about 2008.

Yeah, yeah, it's really great because there's always a need for marketing and marketing for lawyers is a touchy, difficult subject.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we work with over a hundred law firms all over the country, you know, some pretty big names in the space. And you know, it was, it's really cool. It's rewarding, right? I mean, because like the stuff that we do, like. Yeah, like we help lawyers, you know, fly private jets and you know, and stuff like that. In fact, one of the leads that we generated from SEO turned into a 25 million dollar case. Right. Just from like an SEO strategy. Right. So you can kind of see the ROI and that kind of stuff. But the other thing too, and like why we do it is also we're like a connector. Like we're putting people that are actually in need of legal services with people that are qualified. And so, you know, that's really the more of the reward here is kind of making that human connection with people that have a need, with people that actually can service that need.

Yeah. So helping people find the right thing ultimately. But in a universe of many things that one could find, finding your client, finding your company is, is highly desirable.

Yeah, correct. You know, and Google has gotten a lot better. I mean, you used to be able to kind of just completely manipulate search. You know, there were people that were doing something called Google bombing, right. Where you kind of just like get, if you remember that, right, you like a president to rank for something that, like a keyword that they shouldn't rank for, you know, just because of your political views. Right. You can manipulate Google. Right. You know, you could make up a.

Word and attack a senator with it.

Exactly. Yeah. So you're familiar with some of these stories. Yeah, I could. Yep.

And so that one people can go find that on their own.

Yes. You know, but good luck trying to do that now. Right. It's not as easy. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Yeah. The stuffing in the past. Invisible words at the bottom of a page.

Right. Text on white page. Yeah, yeah. You know, this space for sure. Yeah. Those are the strategies that worked back in the day. Yep.

Yeah. But the danger in that kind of stuff is somebody figures out that's a little too clever and then you actually can get penalized for it and disappear.

That's the thing. Yeah.

So you don't end up on Santa. Google's bad list.

Google Jail, I call it. Yeah, you don't want to get go to Google jail. In fact, you know a book that I just recently wrote called Honest SEO here. Oh yeah, There's a whole chapter.

Hold up the COVID Honest SEO.

Yep. But there's a whole chapter about negative SEO. If I show it right here. Right. This whole chapter talks about all the things that people are probably not aware of that these bad practitioners can do to you to really kind of make your rankings go down. There's a whole chapter about it. So.

Yeah, really good.

So many different things to be aware of.

So. But one hot one these days that everybody's talking about is, oh, I want to use AI for everything. I want to use chat GPT for that. So what are you seeing? Can you give us an examples of what's good and what's bad?

Yeah.

Who's doing it? Right. Who's not doing it?

Yeah. So, you know, I think you can look at. At AI just like any new technology as an opportunity or a threat for us. You know, we totally see it as a. As an opportunity.

Yeah.

Some of the things that we're doing with it is like we're. I'm not sure if you know this, but you probably do, but maybe your listeners don't. If you have a website and you want to translate it before AI, you can use something called Google Translate, where basically it just uses JavaScript and it just changes the actual words. It doesn't get indexed in Spanish. You don't get traffic in Spanish. What we've done is we've actually used AI to take a full website and actually convert the whole website to multi language. So we can convert it to Spanish. We create Spanish URL. We create something called an href lang tag to tell Google that this is the Spanish version of the page. All the links get translated to Spanish and the next thing you know, now you have a duplicate site that's all in Spanish. Right. So now you're getting traffic to it. Right. So that's something that leveraging AI Well, I think things that you shouldn't do.

Before you move on from that one, let me just say if you go and create a website in Spanish or in any language, make sure you have somebody in your office who can answer phone and email in that language.

Yeah, yeah, that's a problem. Right? You don't want a bunch of negative reviews that you know because your site's in a different.

I ran a Vietnamese site and then I had nobody who spoke Vietnamese. Yeah, not a good idea.

So that's stuff we're doing. We're also doing things where like, you know, a lot of our clients, like, you know, we have services that will, you know, record the call and then, you know, here you got a 19 minute call and we're using AI to kind of like summarize the call and it's like, what are the main points? Like was this person injured? Yes or no, Were they at fault? Yes or no? Like did they take an ambulance? Right to the like all the questions that are important as far as pre qualifying it. We're using AI to kind of like, you know, summarize that kind of stuff.

Love that.

Right? Yeah. So there's a lot of other things that we're doing for more advanced SEO tactic that you can probably get in the book. Some of the things that I think you should avoid using AI for is just basically saying, hey, write me an article about this and then taking that and publishing it as.

I'm so glad you say that because we have seen so many people do that and talk about that and every time I've seen someone attempt it and every time we've tried to do it, we're like, okay, that's producing crap that I wouldn't want to be seen as associated with.

Correct. Yeah. And, and at the end of the day you got to realize that, you know, Google, like when you search Google, you're not really searching Google in real time. You're searching like an archive, it's like a photocopy of, of what Google has. It was, yeah, yeah, right. And granted, you know, sites that are updating content on a regular basis are getting recrawled every three minutes. Right. So don't get Me wrong. It seems pretty current. Right. But at the end of the day, like, if you're just putting a lot of like AI generated content, guess what? Google has this serve up this content, so it cost them money to kind of serve up all this AI content. So that's why they've got like AI detection tools to try to filter that stuff out. So. Right. It's too. If it's too good to be true. Right. It probably is. And. And you know, I probably would avoid that. Yeah. Don't get me wrong. Use AI to kind of help you articulate the article that you want to write. Right. But don't just kind of copy and paste it. Yeah, yeah.

Using it. Well, we're using it for client strategy these days, so maybe we survey some top customers and we get a whole bunch of input from them and we throw that in Chad gbt and we say, okay, what are the main points here against, you know, a hundred responses and in like two minutes we get a summary. Like, these are the three big themes.

Oh yeah.

Awesome.

Right?

Like now we have some insight. Or here's everything that we surveyed from our entire employee base.

Sure.

They think is good and not good about this company. Okay. Now we have a list, like, you know, great summaries and that kind of thing.

Yeah. The other thing that I think you should consider using AI for is, is doing things that are like comedy too. Like for example, at a wedding, somebody actually used AI to do the speech. Right. So they only gave him like three little things about the person and they said, come up with a speech about this, like a best man speech. And they actually used it as an AI. And then they read it and they just got so much laughter. It was great.

So that's a really good idea. I mean, if you think about it. What. Our son is the principal research scientist for a company called Mid Journey AI. And, and he's like, listen, here's what AI is like Mad Libs, Right. It's computer Mad Libs on steroids. It simply suggests what the best next word or two could be and like it's in it and it takes the average of whatever. And if you tell it to pick something funny or whatever, it's going to try to do something like that, but it's going to produce sort of middle of the road, predictable, obvious kinds of things.

Exactly. Right. Yep. So I thought that was pretty humorous. Yeah, for sure.

So getting started, I'm a company. We haven't done any, you know, thoughtful SEO work in any concerted way. What do I need to do? What do you see companies do? Can you share any examples of what they do to just get going?

Yeah. Right. So I guess, I guess first of all, you have to look at like, what are the assets that you have, right? Do you have time or do you have money? Right. If you've got money, right. There's probably a better chance that you want to go hire somebody that's an expertise in that field, and you might want them to kind of run your SEO or full digital marketing campaign. Right. And that's easy. Right. And so I wrote the book so that if you have money, you can read the book. Right. So that you are informed and you can hire the right person and know how to hold them accountable to getting the results that you're looking for. Right. So that's part of the reason that I wrote the book. The other reason why I wrote the book is because if you don't have money and you have more time and you want to learn how to do this stuff yourself, guess what? If you read the book, it'll teach you kind of how to do this stuff yourself too. Right? So that's kind of it. It's made for a CEO of a company that manages a team, or it's also made for somebody that is fresh out of college that wants to start an e commerce website and they want to learn how to drive traffic topic to it. Right. So. And it's really hard to kind of write a book like. Like that where you're trying to kind of like target multiple audiences. But, you know, what I did was I just basically took over 20 years of experience and I wanted to give the cliff notes of, like you like to say, like, all the mistakes that I've made. Right. Not all the success. But here, this is, don't do it this way, do it this way, don't do it this way. Right. And so there's a lot of those lessons in the book. And. And yeah, I think anybody that picks it up will hopefully get a lot of value from it.

That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. So you want to think about what the approach is. And I think that's a key problem today with people who just offer coaching, tutoring classes, like whatever. If you don't also have some service providers or contractors, most of us are already busy doing some kind of job, and we're not in a position just go out and like, do a whole new thing on top of our job. But you've got to be an informed buyer, right? You can't hire a vendor if you have no idea what you're getting into or you are. Well, you can. You'll just throw money in the toilet.

And that's the world of SEO, man. Like, that's it. And that's why I called the book Honest SEO. Like, to be honest with you. Yeah, exactly. Right. So many people have gotten burned. Yeah, yeah.

So how do I know what people are looking for and how do I reconcile with who I am and should be as a company? Right. Not as an individual. How do I reconcile who I am and should be with what people are looking for and who. Or should I just focus on being me no matter what?

Well, I think the key is obviously just to be. You know, there's nothing better about SEO than having a company that actually has a good culture and has a good team, that actually services their clients and has their clients, has a positive experience with them. Right. That's half the battle. Right. I mean, if you can do that, well, you know, things are going to naturally kind of happen. But then there's ways to kind of manipulate the success a little bit. Right. With. With digital marketing. And so that involves knowing who your competitors are. Right. Trying to reverse engineer their strategies and see how much share of voice that they have versus how much share of voice that you have. Right. And knowing the tools to use and then knowing how to build the strategy to start to take away some of their share of voice. And how do you do that in terms of content? Do you need text content? Do you need writers? Do you need video? Right. And then. And then, you know, then going and executing the actual strategy. And that involves like keyword research and competitive analysis. And again, it kind of goes into specific details in the book. But at the end of the day, you need a strategy. That's the key. And I think a lot of times people just operate without a strategy. Like, they know, like, oh, I need SEO, and they hire somebody like a web developer to go and they go change some title tags and make a couple changes to the website. And that's SEO. Like, that's not SEO. Like, SEO is building out, like the architecture of the site in terms of the content and the 2000 pages that you're going to need to write and how they all link to each other to build silos. Right. It's so much more sophisticated if you really want to operate on a high level in terms of an SEO strategy.

So one company that I know, they search for competitors against whatever it is. So they'll be like, oh, we want to be known for this service or this product or whatever. So they'll go and they'll search for that thing and then they'll get up a whole bunch of competitive content websites, product pages like whatever. And then they take the best of those and they essentially copy, re, spin them a little bit and put them back out onto their own with kind of their own version that are tracking well. So they're now trying to jump onto whatever content that was, but now them substituted in for the other. As close as it can be to what was ever tracking well. How well does that work? Is that a good idea? Should people do that as an approach?

To an extent like you know, the best way to reverse engineer, you know what to write in order to rank on Google for a term that's important to you is to study the top three websites that are already ranking. Right. Because you know there's a reason why Google has that content up there. It's obviously satisfying the intent of somebody that's doing that search. Google uses a lot of user signals to kind of determine what to put up there. What I mean by user signals is when somebody does a Google search for a keyword, right. And they click on a result, the first result, Google's measuring the time that somebody stays on that result before they go back to Google and they click on the second or third result, right. So if somebody's only on your page for six seconds and they go back, that's a signal to Google that it doesn't satisfy the intent. And so Google's going to shuffle things and you're going to end up maybe on page two or wherever else.

Right.

And they're going to experiment with other things. So again, that's the positive way of doing this is you want to kind of see like how do they structure their page and then think about like what could I do different to make it better? Maybe I can add a video. They don't have a video. Right. All this other stuff. But what you don't want to do is like you said, just kind of take a bunch of competitors content and try to use like a tool that spins it and kind of make it unique and then publish it. That's gonna, that's not really going to be a good long term. You might have some luck with it, but that's not a good long term.

It's not going to level you up.

Yeah, no, I don't think so.

So you study the others you replicate, but try to improve or create more value for them to get people to stick around a little bit longer is the better approach to Do.

Yeah, that. That's the better approach for sure. Try to just kind of humanize it, you know, not only just on your website, like, Google's also looking at as you as a subject matter expert. Right. Like, how do you know? Do they see that you write for other websites? Like, I personally write for Entrepreneur magazine, Rolling Stone magazine, Newsweek. I wrote for Inc. Magazine. Right. Search Engine Journal.

Yeah.

Because I do that. You know, Google knows that this is like, my whole life. I'm kind of like, in the world of digital marketing, and I write all over a place about it. Right. So they see the connections. Right. Because every time I publish an article, it's under my byline, which links to my website. Right. So that's something called expertise, authority, and trust. And so that's also a big part of why you can't really manipulate Google anymore is just because they've leveled up the algorithm.

So I've decided I need to do this. I've got a company that is between, say, 2 and 10 million. Small company, not huge company. 2 and 10 million dollars. How do I know how much to budget for this?

Good question. I would first try to reverse engineer. Like, what is a customer worth to you? Right. First of all, like, what are you selling? Are you selling T shirts or are you selling, like, jets? Right. You know, so that's. Yeah, that's part of the. The equation. And then I would probably would run a pay per click campaign first just to kind of get empirical data, just to see, like, okay, I. I'm gonna spend $10,000 on pay per click this month. I want to see what is the average cost per click, what is the average cost per lead, and what is the average cost per acquisition. Right. Client acquisition. And then from there now, you're getting a bunch of empirical data. You're seeing which keywords convert better than others. You're, you know, kind of the competition. And then from there, that will really kind of give you a better sense in, like, what you should be budgeting from an SEO perspective while you're also studying your competition. That's the key.

And as paperclip, starting there with a vendor and a $10,000 expenditure, correct?

Yes.

Yeah, that's an initial thing. That's not a lightweight thing to go down that road for a company that size. Your initial thing is in the ballpark of 20 grand.

That. That's just a number I threw out there. Right. If you have only a Budget 5000, you start there. But you have to start with something that's kind of experimental, and you just Know that that's experimental. Really? Yeah. This is an experimental budget before you just say, hey, I'm going to allocate 250,000 to it. Right. That's. That's not smart. Right. Okay. And then from there, from an SEO perspective, then it really comes down to you really have to study the competition. Right. You know, like, if you're competing with Amazon, Right. To sell T shirts. Right. Guess what? You know, like, that's not a viable business. You really kind of go into a little bit more niche than just that. Like, maybe you just focus on selling green T shirts and that's your thing. Right. You know, but you have to kind of study.

That's interesting. That's a good point. Like actually being unique and relevant versus me too.

Yes. Huh.

Is important.

It is. Yep. And you know, building a brand is important too. You know, like Google recognizes that too. You know, they're. They're looking at how many people are searching for your brand name on Google. And then the more people that are searching for your brand name kind of adds to the, to the credibility and the trust factor of who you are as a business. And so that also is weighted in the algorithm. So that's why a lot of the, in the world that I live in, in working with lawyers, a lot of the lawyers that, that do TV and radio, and they've built a brand they get a little benefit from from SEO because of that. Because they've got more of a brand presence. Yep.

All right, so what are your, like, three big piece of advice to give to our listeners on either leveling up? Well, why don't we take it first way? So I'm already doing SEO. What do I need to do to level up? What do you think is most important that most people are missing? I think it's a couple of things.

Yeah. I, I think a. If you're already doing it, you know, depending on if you're doing it yourself or you have somebody that's doing it for you, I would say just kind of arm yourself with the knowledge and insights into being able to determine if you or the agency that you're working with is doing a good job. Right. Unfortunately, like, people will just send you reports and they'll make the news seem like it's good news. It's like, hey, great news. Like, we're ranking higher for this keyword today. High five. High five. Right. But meanwhile, like, that doesn't mean anything. Right?

Yeah, that's a good thing. Are we getting traffic? Are we getting leads? Are we closing business? Is revenue Increasing, like, look past the.

Are you tracking it per channel? Right? So, like, is it your brand that's driving the business or is it truly the SEO budget that you've invested in? There's ways that you can kind of do that, right? So I think a, you know, arm yourself with information. Like, you know, familiarize yourself with it either by reading a book, watching YouTube videos, all that kind of stuff. So I'd say that's the first thing. The second thing is don't operate without a plan. I mean, if you just have a writer that is just, like, you're paying her, you know, $50 an article, and she's just randomly picking titles and blogging on your website just for the heck of it, just because somebody said that you should be writing content on your website, I would just stop that. That's not doing you any justice or it's not helping you. Like, you need to operate with a plan, so don't waste your money. And then the third thing is, you know, just think about, like, how you can continue to be remarkable as a business and what will get people to kind of want to talk about you and link back to you and, and, you know, like, for example, like, I remember Zappos back in the day, their big thing, like, they sold shoes online, but their big thing was customer service. Right? So that's really what made them legendary.

Yeah.

Oh, my God. Right? Yeah. Delivering, like, Tony was amazing. Right? And, and so, but that was why the media talked about them. They took tours there. They gave away, like, books at the end of each tour with some of Tony's favorite books. And, like, all the media just wanted to talk about it because it was awesome. Right? So find out what is your. Your differentiator and really kind of like, go big with that.

Now, I've never done SEO. That kind of person. They've never done SEO. How do they pick their vendor? They need a partner. They need a helper with it. How do they pick someone? And I. And I acknowledging you're someone, right?

Like, yeah, yeah. Hey, I would, you know, obviously do your. Your due diligence after you familiarize yourself with kind of how this world works so that you can kind of, like, grade whether or not somebody's going to do a good job or not. You know, I would basically do your due diligence. You know, speak with vendors that might work specifically in your niche and have a lot of experience and have a lot of case studies. Ask to reach out to some of those case studies and just to kind of get like a Reference and maybe talk to them. Another question I'd advise you to do is say, hey, listen, I know that you guys are an agency, and you've got all these amazing great things, case studies and stuff, and I appreciate that, but can give. Can you give me the name of, like, maybe, like, somebody that fired you recently? I'd be curious to speak with that person, too. Like, you know, what went wrong, you know, and. And just kind of see what they say, right? Because everybody. Everybody kind of just highlights, like, their success stories, and everybody has some of them. But not every agency is perfect, Right?

And I'm very happy to talk about our things that don't go well, and I recommend others do, but I'm not usually giving you the name of that person to go talk to. Let me tell you about something.

Yeah, but you know what? Like, hopefully, like, if you're an agency, like, if. If somebody fired, like, you parted ways and everything's amicable, and, hey, listen, we screwed up. We got it. Like, you're gonna move on, you know, I mean, like, at least that's how we try to operate.

Or. Or it just wasn't a fit, right? Like, you know, yeah. Hey, we wanted to work with them. They didn't want to do this kind of work.

That's it. Yeah. I mean, there's reasons, like, you know, in heck, you know, there's that quote, right? If you're not failing, you're not trying. Right. And so building a business is. Is so important to kind of recognize that you're gonna fail doing SEO, like, if you. If you know how to do SEO. Like, SEO is the easy part. Like, if you're really good at it. The hard part is scaling SEO as a business. Yes. And so. So, you know, we've made a lot of mistakes, and we've learned from the mistakes. And I often tell some of my prospects that are on the fence with hiring us, and they say, what's the biggest difference between you and somebody else? Like, well, we've been doing this for so long that we failed, like, 10 years before they even got started. And you get the benefit of that, you know, And I think that's the truth.

Yeah, really good. Well, we've covered a lot of territory. We shared some funny examples, some good things. It's remarkable how time and again, it's not some, like, clever little web hack. It's more like, well, know what your business is and be in a compelling business and offer some real value and connect with some real people and do something interesting. I'm reminded of How Zappos got all that traction for having great service and return policy. You don't have to pay to promote something like that when what you're doing is innovative. Tesla for years spent like nothing on their marketing except for the launches, the attention on their press events, but not like regular media buys and creative because they were doing cars that nobody else was doing. So they got plenty of attention for doing something that actually looked interesting and different. And I'm not a naive Tesla booster. There's things wrong with them as well, but worse, we could learn that piece of of what makes that special. Right. You're going to get a lot of press if instead of just being another rocket company, you launch rockets that land themselves and you can use them again. Right, Just again. Another unfortunate reference to Elon, and clearly not everything he does is brilliant because he's certainly got a bit of a mess over there at what was once Twitter.

Yeah. If he can send rockets to, you know, to space and come back and land and reuse them again, I think he'll figure Twitter out.

Maybe.

Maybe he's got a plan. Right? We'll see.

Maybe. We'll see. We'll see. But you know, you wouldn't want to bet against him.

No.

On that.

But.

But I think the thing that I'm a marvel at is actually taking on real problems and doing something innovative versus a lot of me too. Crap. Before we run out of time. Wanda, do you have a link for us? Honest SEO? Find it on Amazon or wherever you.

Yeah, I think you'll get some value out of it.

Honest SEO. It's worth a read. Get yourself started. If you're already doing it, level up if you're not already, then you'll know how to get started, how to choose the vendor and that kind of thing. If you want to know more about our Growth Navigator coaching program, only 1500amonth, like unprecedented. We've got a group starting in October. You could join, but we do weekly touches. Learning, accountability, coaching, quarterly planning, annual strategy work, you and your senior team. 1500amonth. It's unprecedented. It's the coolest thing that we've done in 10 years. Find out more@scalingcoach.com Send us a note, email, etc. Or info scalingcoach.com it's in the crawl there. It'll be in the show notes as well. Hopefully that's helpful for you. I want to thank Wanda Mitchell. Producing our show in the back time in the background, getting our guests ready, that kind of thing. My friend and mentor, the creator of the scaling up framework and the Rockefeller habits that preceded it. Vern Harnish I'll see Vern tomorrow and this weekend at Harvard for a thing about scaling the valuation of your company. We do events like this all the time. Get on our email list, follow us to find out about what you can do to grow your company. And to the folks at Podfly Productions who get our show ready and out the door, show notes, things like that every week. Thanks again everyone for watching, for listening. We'll talk to you again next time. Until then, keep scaling up.