Seth & Alex Valencia, and Jason Hennessey: Three Middle Aged Guys Talking SEO

In this encore presentation of the webinar presented on October 1st, Seth is joined by Alex Valencia and Jason Hennessey to discuss how the digital marketing landscape has evolved over the years. The trio also dives into content marketing, link building, and overall best practices for modern SEO.

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BluShark Digital

Welcome to the SEO insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of BluShark taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.

Alex Valencia

Alright, so we'll go ahead and start getting going. We're two minutes in, man, I am so excited I got to my good friends here. I want to keep this super professional. But I don't know if you guys ever seen the kings of comedy. And Steve Harvey had to be the best intro person on the planet and the way he introduced every single comedian. I've always wanted to do it. So I'm gonna say screw it. And I'm gonna go Steve Harvey. And if you don't like the language, then you probably don't belong on this web. I'd like to first introduce my mother fucking friend, Jason Hennessy, who I've known for over a decade, one of the baddest SEOs in the industry. This guy's an entrepreneur, a dad, a good friend, and amazing business person, someone that I look up to. So proud to have a partnership with we've grown together substantially, we're gonna go into that story and how that happened. Ladies and gentlemen, give via virtual hand to my mother. And next, we have another friend that I've known for, I don't know probably around the same time as Jason if not a little bit longer. It says, My mother fucking friend, attorney, SEO, dad, awesome all around person, Seth price, the owner of Price Benowitz, not only one of the biggest law firms in the North East and probably eventually going national, but also a huge and awesome SEO agency. Some of the people on this panel I'm sure are using him or us or one of the other SEOs. But another welcoming handed my motherfucking friend said I didn't give Steve Harvey any justice. But I've always wanted to do it. So there we go.

Jason Hennessey

That was a little different than your introduction at UPenn.

Seth Price

When you we actually had Joe Biden as our commencement speaker for the college, his son, Beau was a classmate. So I got Alex and Joe.

Alex Valencia

You got to put that on. Alright, folks, so today we have Jason and Seth. And we're gonna be opening it up to some questions. But first of all, I kind of want to go into how we met how everybody gets in the industry. Jason and Seth both have an amazing story. So I'm gonna let it go to Jason and Jason, tell the audience on how you got started, where you were when SEO started for you and why it happened. And let's go from there.

Jason Hennessey

I'll keep it kind of short. Yeah, so I've been in the game SEO particularly since 2001. I got started just as a need for myself. I was going to college, contemplating going to law school, studying for the LSAT shadowing a district attorney for about 30 days. And I had a DJ company, I would DJ weddings and stuff. I was going to college and and so I built a website called Vegas wedding mom and and I didn't know what the heck I was doing to promote the site to get myself leads for the wedding industry for people that had destination weddings. So I found a guy named Aaron wall and he had a book called the SEO book and read it from front to back. It's a thick book, I still have it. You know, I read it front to back twice, started practicing some of the techniques. And you know, eight years later, I built a business I ended up selling that business I got introduced to speak at a conference in Atlanta, Georgia. A guy by the name of Bubba had a mutual friend Braden Pollack had put that on and Seth was in the audience back then that's when I kind of tapped into this whole legal space. I gave a presentation of how to a group of lawyers about how I was able to rank on Google for the word wedding favors and I gave away all my secrets and stuff and and now fast forward another whatever. 13 years or so, and I'm still in the game and doing this and Alex, you and I have known each other for over a decade now. We met at a conference. I think it was a coma conference at the time at eversport. We couldn't work together because we had her own content team and stuff. After I sold my business ever spark I packed up headed out west to California so my son could be an actor. You ping me I was playing tennis four Days a Week living the good life. And now I don't play tennis anymore. Thanks to you. And here we are. So that's my story.

Alex Valencia

We are how many employees later?

Jason Hennessey

We're about at about 100 and over 100. Now, let's just say.

Alex Valencia

Yeah, somebody said. Hopefully you can hear me now. Hopefully, that's better. But someone said they couldn't hear me. Awesome story, man love, always love hearing that story. Seth, what about you?

Seth Price

Well, you know, I was a lawyer when I went to law school, and in the late 90s, left big law to make my millions in the first .com bubble. So I went to New York, and, you know, was helped to launch founding in place called us law.com, which was a precursor to find law on avo and Legal Zoom. And we had, you know, we had all those features, but ahead of its time, we'd raise 10 million, there was 30 million on the table, the bubble burst in April of 2000. So by January 2001, everything's gone. So, my longtime buddy, I went to college and law school with this guy, Dave Bennewitz, he really wanted to practice law, and I had the entrepreneurial bug. And so we decided to divide and conquer, where he would be, like, run everything, like chief legal officer, and I wouldn't be the chief marketing and operations person. That was pretty, you know, tall goals sitting in his basement, just the two of us chatting. So, you know, built a website, it did well hire another lawyer built another website. And along along the way, met Mr. Hennessy. I was in an audience of maybe nine people in bobbleheads house. Yeah, it was like it was Zune, you know, we were doing well with SEO, but it was we were doing well, sort of, because there weren't a lot of other people fighting that fight. But as you wanted to move into more competitive markets and moved from criminal to PII, and things like that, worked with Jason, early on, May have been the first paying customer, you've worked with Jason and you know, geeked out so much on this that eventually took my in house department from the law firm and, and spun that into what is today BluShark. Digital, and it's been a fun ride. And, you know, one of the things people said to me before, before I started was how are you gonna differentiate yourself from all the snake oil that's out there, because Lord knows, there's plenty of it in our space. And one of the things I've loved about working alongside YouTube guys is like, you know, whether it's the love of content, the love of links, you know, the idea that it's, you know, there's its execution of what we're talking about today, we could talk about this forever, you talk about both you guys always talk about a lot of the stuff that's sort of the secret sauce, so to speak, but it doesn't matter. It's like, how do you take that and execute it. So it's what I've always respected about you guys is that if you put, you know, when you speak to somebody, and we've been at conferences, and somebody has, you know, 110 clients, and 10 employees, you know, how much effort is being put into each client? Sure, the fact that, you know, people are scaling and putting butts in seats to actually execute on what needs to be done. It's why I like hanging out with you guys so much.

Alex Valencia

So little info about me, if everyone on the panel doesn't know, me, I'm Alex Valencia, I'm co founder and owner of we do web content with my wife, Yvette, who's got all the brains and looks and started this after I got laid off from the financial industry and early 2000s. And, you know, this business turned into something as a passion project, just something to get through. And here we are, today, I started with just content content alone for years worked, I think we all started right around the same time where we were just writing tons of content for law firms across the country and, and blown it up for them. And then, you know, 2009 2011, around that time 2011 2012 said, became really saturated online. And, you know, we really need really needed to partner with an SEO firm to really give the clients the results that they needed, you know, concrete was still performing, and we were partnering with other firms. But to get to the next level, you know, it's either gonna be somebody like Seth or Jason that we were going to partner with, and, and really go 100% And maybe even 1,000% Now to see the growth we have where, you know, Jason posted a case study yesterday where we're, we're writing what is it 400,000 words a month for...

Jason Hennessey

one 400,000 words of content from

Alex Valencia

one client, that's one client out of what like 60 that we might have other you know, others are getting 100,000 So we've had some growth, but we've seen the benefit of of content, and obviously, all the backend technical SEO and work that Jason's team that he's built because obviously he couldn't have done it alone. But it all comes out from that little brain and his up there. Little very little. Yeah, you know, Seth price you do the company you've built with with your staff and all the speaking engagements. It's just impressive. So I'm happy Good to be here with you guys. That's our intro. I'm gonna hop into some questions unless you guys got some questions up front.

Jason Hennessey

Yeah, I mean, I think this is this is really it's, you know, there's, you know, we're all it's interesting because like Seth is one of the few people that I would probably trust with my SEO became such a student. And he knows, you know, there's, there's, there's maybe like I can count on like one hand five people that I would trust with my SEO in the industry, you know, and so it's awesome.

Alex Valencia

Yeah, I mean, for sure. Alright. So, Seth, did you want to jump on some questions?

Seth Price

No, I have some, my questions are more granular. So I'll jump in after you after you geek out too much too early.

Jason Hennessey

I got well, why don't we start with this, Alex. So you know, Seth and I were doing this back in, let's just call it 2008. Right. And now we're doing it still. I think I've got more gray hair, don't let the light fool you then set this.

Seth Price

I have the.

Jason Hennessey

But here we are still added right in 2020. And Google has really made our life a living nightmare over those past whatever, 12 1314 years. You know, so what's your thoughts on kind of what radically changed from 2008? To now like, you know, with in terms of weather content or full strategy, what's your thoughts?

Seth Price

You're talking about with respect to organic

Jason Hennessey

ranking, organic ranking on organic? Like, what was the big change? Like, what what were some of the things that we used to do that work that no longer work? Like, you know, look, the...

Seth Price

The things that are most evident when I first met you was, you know, exact match, anchor text, spam in volume, move the needle? Yeah. And it was sort of sad, it still does. But they clearly made it, if you abuse it, they're going to slap you down. And there was a whole period where that went, where that sort of became persona non grata. I think that what we've seen since has been Google looking to determine, you know, what is what is an authoritative answer to a question? And then if you looked through that prism, and whether it's content, whether it's links, whether it's your coding, and we've talked about local separately, that Google each thing they're doing, besides trying to make money for themselves, you know, with local service ads, and everything else pushing the organic down, but everything they're doing is trying to decipher who's the kid in their basement practicing law? And what's the legitimate firm, that's going to give you a real opportunity to get a great legal answer to your case or great representation. So that I think what's happened is, each, you know, the ability to game the system has gone down. And instead, you're basically, and you did this back in the you were one of the first people to do this, it was we are almost like digital PR agencies trying to say to Google, hey, this is the this is the guy you should put on TV. And that if you continue to put great content out and great links out, that's the one two punch that moves the needle, and that it's just gotten the games that can be played had been suppressed. And while there still are some, the majority of the hard work is blocking and tackling, which is why you have over 100 employees because in order to move the needle, you can't just have a team in Singapore or in the Philippines, you know, spamming like crazy, it takes technical blocking and tackling to get that work done.

Jason Hennessey

Yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree. You know, and we went through those some of those war stories where all of the links that we built, we had to disavow just to kind of get back in the good graces of Google, you know, one of the things that I've seen, so like, if I if we even go back further, like to 2001 When I first get started, when I told you, I was reading that book, and I'm like, Oh, I implement this and wow, look at this, you know, like, back then I was just going in and like spamming the meta keyword tags, and it was working right, you know

Seth Price

Titled Ted little you change the title tag, and you could get traffic.

Jason Hennessey

Yeah, it was like, but there was not a lot of competition. Like I was one of maybe like, I don't know, 200 people in one vertical that were kind of doing these little techniques, right. Nobody was really being super competitive. You know, so that's, you know, and then Google came along the way then it wasn't a matter of I'm just talking like on page. I ignored technical SEO for many years. Like I paid no attention to technical SEO, all I was doing was the link building aggressive link building. But then the other aspect of it was the way in which you write your content back then you were really like optimizing your content for the bot first.

Seth Price

Like I was guilty of this more than anybody, you know, you saw the site Remember, a criminal lawyer in Washington DC if a criminal defense cases needed a criminal lawyers who should

Jason Hennessey

In the first sentence and embolden in the third paragraph, right? Yeah.

Seth Price

The density was density was like 80% held up by my law partners like this is nonsense. I'm like it's working. Now to Google's credit. They don't want that. It's not a good user experience. And they've sort of forced people you know, and Alex's team is as good Is anybody at this at you write real content, you want to make sure your term is there once paragraph, but it's like, keep it natural, Google's smart enough to know what is going on. You don't want to, like, ignore it. But in time, if you go too heavy, it counts against you. Yeah.

Jason Hennessey

And then said, I fast forward now. So it's a complete opposite, right? You know, like, with RankBrain, and everything else that they've done, they've got a lot smarter, they have a lot more resources, you know, now, it's really, truly, it's about some of the indirect signals that they're looking at, right? You know, like, you know, who, you know, who is satisfying the intent of that particular query, right? Like, somebody has a problem, or somebody has a solution. Somebody has a question, somebody has an answer, right? Yes, the authority has given you a shot at even being on the first page, right with links and stuff. But now, it's really a matter of like, hey, somebody clicked does a Google search, they click on the first result, they're there for seven seconds, they click back, well, guess why that person, if enough, people are only on that first result for seven seconds, that's going to be position nine, and a couple of days, you know, I mean, like, but you know, that, you know, and that's why I'm a true believer, that video is keeping people on the page a little bit longer. So if you can create a video and keep it a pie above the fold, that's going to keep people on the page a little bit. But anyway, it's more about like, a lot of those indirect user experiences now that is really kind of keeping people in the top three positions.

Seth Price

Well, I'm gonna throw into Alex and Jason, feel free to chime in because this debate we have internally, you know, assuming finite resources, right, you know, everything you could, you could the answer could be both. But when you if you have X number of words for a client, or for a money landing page, do you like to 22,020 500 Mega page 50, whatever it is, versus saying, here's one solid 500 Word page, and then for supporting pages back up, and I get that it's both the Where do you how do you sort of allocate time between mega pages versus a library of information to support that page?

Alex Valencia

That's an awesome question. So like you said, I would say both, we've been going more towards a lot of what we call skyscraper pages. Hennessey's team does a great job with, you know, itemizing the content strategy for client, depending on, you know, audits. So it depends on where they are, when they come in, right, if we take somebody on initially, and they already have content that's not far from ranking, then we'll supplement and use, we've actually built a proprietary system that, you know, pulls all the information from Google on the top 510 landing pages. And it helps us not only human opt to optimize the page, but technically optimize the page. So we'll know where to take it and get it to rank from there. So that actually gives us the guide on what the best word count for that would be an In addition, we still do the 350 to 500 to 800, word supporting pages with the internal linking. And Jason, I'll jump in on the internal linking because this has been huge within the last two years for us is building content for the internal linking purpose of the site. But again, to the answer, the question is we do both, I think the long form, and the short form with supporting is a great strategy. But so many people are going long form now that you'll you'll be ranking one day, and then two months later, somebody's ranking above you, because they built a better page. So you just got to always be on top of it.

Seth Price

And Jason, I'm gonna throw the sort of a sort of a tweak on that, which is, you see the studies nationally, they talk about hey, of the people who rank for this type of term, the majority have these these skyscraper pages or mega pages? How much of that is the fact that those are people that are doing 1000? Other things good? Do you think the length of that page is definitive? Or is that just part of an overall strategy?

Jason Hennessey

It depends on the competition of the particular query. Right? So right, for an FAQ, you can rank without a whole lot of authority. Right. But when you're trying to rank for, you know, Washington, DC, personal injury lawyer, right, that's a whole different story. Right? You know, and so, in my opinion, it kind of really, it depends on on the particular query, and, you know, and it's longer other Long gone are the days where you just write a page of content. And that page of content is just going to always rank on the first page of Google, right? Because, or even the top three positions of Google because once you get there, right now, you if you expose what works to the people below you, right? And so the people below you are just kind of like, oh, well, let's just look at the top three, we do this right. If you know, whenever there's a shake up in the Google algorithm, there's winners and there's losers and if I used to be a winner, and now I'm a loser, well guess what? I'm reverse engineering the strategies of the new winners, right? And I'm seeing Oh, Wow, interesting. They have a video on the page. Oh, interesting. Look at their internal links. Oh, interesting. They have You know, a 7000 page skyscraper when we have a 1200 word order in I mean, so like. So it really all depends on on the particular query in the question and then just reverse engineering the top three results. And it changes, right.

Seth Price

And left and right. And as we saw, like, you know, there was a day, a couple weeks, months back where Google made a mistake, and everything Gods really

Jason Hennessey

texted me you're like, are you saying? Like, yeah, I'm working at Home Depot now. Like, I'm out.

Seth Price

I saw guys who had literally not touched the website in five years where like, top of the research ranks changes, like, I got some guy, your mark, it was

Jason Hennessey

definitely show. Yeah. Yeah.

Seth Price

With that said, something that we are seeing, I'm curious to see your your thoughts on this is that, you know, whether you see it for good or for evil, depending on how you perceive Google's intentions, the US, we both have people in different markets for both my firm and our respective agencies that have been sort of perennial, three pack people for lack of a better term. And that what I what I have seen, has been that, although organically, I guess there's been less of this, but definitely within the local, that we are, we are seeing the desire of Google not to show a perennial number one, you know, there are guys, nationally, big mega players TV that have done crazy things with their SEO, and that it's almost like they're trying to be egalitarian to give, you know, four or five and six a shot. And that that seems to be a trend that we're seeing over the last few months, where they're not really wanting to see, like, it's not like if you did your work and you built a we talked about this, over the years JSON of building a moat where nobody could get to you than the moats are less effective today, not that you're going to stop doing it. You know, great, there's so much traffic during COVID, that if you're if you're there, 50% of the time, you're fine. But the ability to own and be number one, you know, forever seems to be something that is much harder to attain of late.

Jason Hennessey

Yeah, yeah, I agree. You know, I mean, like, I've, I've had certain clients where I was number one for three years for certain terms, you know, and you see a shake up, and then all sudden, you're down to position number five, and you're like, What the heck nothing change. It's like, if anything should be stronger. Right? You know, because the strategy certainly hasn't changed. But there are different variables that Google is, you know, is looking at, you know, and so, you know, one of the things is, you know, when you mentioned, like these big guys that are on TV, and has been a lot of times they're, you know, they're always on the first page of Google, if they're, if they're doing it, I've seen people on TV that just completely clean SEO game for me. Yeah, the people that are actually playing the SEO game? Well, you know, if you think about that, right, if somebody if somebody does a lot of TV advertising in a particular market, what happens is they get higher click through ratio, right? And so, you know, because people when they're doing a Google search for, you know, Dallas Car Accident Lawyer, and they see, you know, my Dallas Car Accident Lawyer did blah, blah, blah. And then they see a brand that they recognize from billboards and TV, right. Right. I clicked the ratio, and so that higher click through ratio is a signal that Google's look, it's debatable, but in my opinion, it's a signal that Google's

Seth Price

I'm sure I'm sure it is plus, plus they have the direct traffic, because people aren't like calling anymore. They're sitting on their phone and Googling it.

Jason Hennessey

And they're Googling the brand too. And that's traffic.

Seth Price

So just like social signals coming through, or traffic coming through, we all love traffic. I, you know, for us, like in Virginia, we can't make money off of, you know, issues with babies. Sure, right, that there's, there's a there's a fun so that it's not a it's not a monetizable thing, but I don't mind it, because we crush it. And there's traffic. So I try to make sure that like there's some times that you want traffic to your site. And I feel like those TV players that bombed and what, for people like yourself, and myself and Jason, when you're doing stuff, right? More often than not, like 95% of the time there's an algorithm change. It only helps you and your clients when the dust settles, I agree.

Jason Hennessey

The only thing is we're not taking shortcuts, the algorithm. Yeah, it really affects the people that have leveraged those secrets that expose Google right. And so if you know, as long as you're not upgrading, now, don't get me wrong. I have testing websites that I do try to do those secrets just to kind of see what absolutely right, you know, and, and heck, you know, sometimes it doesn't hurt, you know, if you have a throw away site that you can test out, right, who cares? You know, I mean, like.

Seth Price

that's what we're up to exactly what I was gonna say but two things. The one thing that I have noticed has been that with those changes, the only thing that has tweaked out of the best practices we're talking about, which is out of our control, is that I've seen a disproportionate bump for some TV advertisers in these recent algorithm updates because of the brand value, and then coming in. But I'll throw you a SEO key question, which is, you know, back in the day, we, you know, it was all about anchor text, there was no percentage of anchor text, it was like 80 90%, you know, Philly, DUI lawyer or Denver Personal Injury Lawyer, we just, that was the text of the link coming back to your site, something that I have struggled with want to get your thoughts, you know, when you do it cleanly, it works. But I am now seeing that people that are filtering in some percentage of spammy anchor text, it's like anything History is written by the victor who are not getting dinged that that Google is still using it as a search signal. It's too dangerous to go overboard with it. What's your feeling, as far as balance of exact match mot called Dirty? So anchor text might be the name of the firm, Philadelphia Injury Lawyer, whatever that is, what's your feeling of balancing between hyper clean versus anchor text to sort of help just put yourself in a competitive market?

Jason Hennessey

Yeah, so you don't want to

Alex Valencia

Before you answer why don't you? A lot of the people may not know what anchor Texas. So just real quick, basically just go. Yeah, so..

Jason Hennessey

anchor text is anchor text is like, if you look at Wikipedia, there's a lot of like text, and then there's a lot of blue links, right? And so whatever, you know, if you look at Wikipedia, that's a perfect example of using exact match anchor text, right? But it's internal anchor text, which you don't really like lose a whole lot of credit with internal, you can actually mess up a website if you link to the wrong page using exact match anchor text, right, because it miss cannibalizes the page, but when you're getting links from a outside sites, right, and some of these links, you know, they look alike paid guest blog post and you know, what might be deemed a domain authority 17 link that has an exact match anchor text, right? And an exact match anchor text sets credit, as is when somebody actually uses Denver Personal Injury Lawyer as the blue underline link linking back into the page. Right? So that's the exact match anchor text. And so his question is, you know, he's still seeing sites that are actually getting rewarded from this. Whereas pre penguin days, like, you know, that was like a thing is like a no, no, stop doing it. You don't want to kind of like kill your website, because you can over optimize the exact match anchor text, you know, so my thought processes, it really comes down to your link profile, right? And so how much you know how much branded anchor text you have, where you can actually start to make some those slight tweaks? Because if you're ranking in position three for Denver, personal injury lawyer and you want to move to position one? Well, I don't think it would hurt if you diversify some links coming in and saying Denver, personal injury law firm Denver, personal injury lawyer, Denver, personal injury, personal injury lawyer, right. But if you you know, there is a threshold that once you meet that threshold, you you're not moving from position three to position two, you're moving from position three to page five with the negative 50 penalty, right?

Seth Price

So that's like, where is that line? And I feel a lot of what we're struggling with now. It's, it's like a continuum. Remember, if you go back, I don't know, number of years probably to get this rolling, say six years ago, guest blogs were all the rage, right? And basically, everybody who was in the SEO space was doing it. That's the widget that was being sold when people were selling SEO from spammy companies. And, you know, basically, they sort of tried to penalize it. But cuts came on one of his video podcasts or whatever they call it those days. And it was like, No, it's not that a guest blog is bad. It's a spammy guest blog is bad. Sure. Right. So it's like most of the stuff, you know, whether it was directory submission, you know, commenting on a blog, you know, any of the stuff that we do if to Unreal, going back to the beginning of our conversation, where it's done authoritatively, if you're looking like there's a badass lawyer, who's like, you know, Ajay leadership, and they go, and they make a comment on a blog in a thoughtful way with a link back to them or read it. Right. Yeah. God bless. If it's a thoughtful comment back, the problem is that it gets to do it volume that, you know, and that we're seeing, sort of, I think, I believe, you know, we're seeing a resurgence of this, because I just next to LinkedIn messages, wanting 15 minutes of my time for a consultation about something. The next most popular email are, you know, guest blogs, as that thing starts to spike. And it's like, oh, well, I can move stuff in a cost effective way. You could tell that at some point, there'll be that Google is going to be like, there'll be an article in The New York Times about the market for guest blogs, and it'll get slapped down again, and you're just it feels like, you know, you're good until you push beyond reasonable and the question is, where's reasonable?

Jason Hennessey

Yeah. You know, there always be, you know, uncertainty there. I don't think we'll have the exact answer. But I think just based on experience, we know kind of the threshold that we're not willing to kind of exceed. But what are the things that you raise a point because there's a lot of people Pull on on this call or webinar that's listening that, you know, get those same emails that you and I do about, hey, you know, get your guest blog posts, and you know, and then somebody, you know, your agency, right, or my agency, you know, like, we're not we're certainly not building 1000 links a month to a sub clients websites, right. You know, I mean, and so some people think that the more links the better, right, and so, right, you know.

Seth Price

I laugh because we literally had this conversation five, six years ago, where it was where there was a point where the more was the better. Yeah, like, right. And then they became when we started to get clued in on the exponential value of new sites, that it changed the game that you would fight for two or three good links was infinitely better than even 2000 from crappy sites, potentially.

Jason Hennessey

Absolutely. Yeah. I'll take I'll take like an entrepreneur link for 1500. Alex, way over, you know, 1000, like spammy guest blog posts from a PBN network or whatever. Yeah.

Alex Valencia

Awesome guy. Cool. So we have a question from Gary. Gary asked, is it better to build a website like drug watch.com to generate legal leads, or build multiple microsites to generate leads? Which one, in your opinion is a better way?

Jason Hennessey

I think we both have the same answer to this.

Seth Price

It like most things were to say, it depends. But it depends on what your resources are. I'm sure Jason and I both get people that come to us, quarterly, maybe every six months, I want to I want to, you know, rank nationally for you know, mass tort terms. And you know, drug watch is no joke, they put a lot of resources in for a lot of time. And that, you know, that is a huge threshold that most people 99.9% of people are going to run out of resources before they get to the point of realistically competing with a drug watch. So the question is, if you were, if you had private equity money behind you, and a team, and you were gonna go and hire a Jason and Alex, myself, and you said, Hey, we're funded, and we're going to do this. Sure. But for most people, that's not realistic. And that those microsites allow, you know, could allow you to potentially compete for something against somebody who's ready for everything. It's a bit I think that the question that I find more interesting, which is a slight nuance to this, and I'll let Alex go. Let Jason go back and answer the actual question is for most people, microsite versus authoritative branded site, and from an SEO point of view, and this is something that I know Jason, now sort of agree with, that the the macro site, if you have a firm site, adding a mass tort or new practice group to that site is a lot easier than starting from scratch with something with no authority coming out of the sandbox. That said, the flip side is that the conversion may not be as good if you have a site, it's only about something, you know, Google likes, that the URL is inline, the the pages are all about it. So I think it depends, but the odds of somebody having the resources to do drug watch are limited. In my experience, Jason...

Jason Hennessey

You nailed it. And it's the same thing, you know, like, I'm always in favor of just building one authoritative website, assuming that it's all kind of within, you know, the same vertical like, it's like, you know, if, if you decided to open like, part time plumbing business on the weekends, you know, I mean, I wouldn't say go on Price Benowitz, you know, like, build the silo there. Right, you know, but it's only John.

Seth Price

Morgan tells us, we're really plumbers. So.

Jason Hennessey

So, you know, so yeah, it's all about building a, you know, an authoritative website. But if you're, if you're like, to Seth's point, if you're gonna get into the game of, you know, drug watch, or you know, any of those type of mass torts and stuff. You're fighting a big battle, right? And you need a big army to fight that battle. And you know, the thing that they have, could you compete, you know, you know, what did they say, like, you know, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, or today, that's today's the second best time, right? You know, that's really it, you have to get started, right? You know, we have one client that I won't mention the name of the website, but it's in a very competitive space. It's an exact match domain, right? You know, the guy's had it for many years, you know, he came to me and said, You know, I want to compete in this space. I'm like, Oh, that's great. You've got this exact match domain, it's really awesome. If he didn't have the exact match domain. I might not have taken this client on, right if he just had some $8 GoDaddy domain, right? Because that there is a difference in that too. And so I managed his expectations. You know, I'm like, Alright, we're gonna need a budget of $30,000 per month. And we're competing with sites that have been in the game for like, you know, four or five years and I'm showing him the link authority of these different websites, and I'm showing how much content that they have on these websites. And like, you know, so it's gonna be about $30,000 a month and you're not going to get your first lead probably till about month 14. And he went forward, you know, And, and we've been at it, you know, and now here we are month 15. And it's now popping on the first page of Google for that exact match term. And it's starting to generate like very, let's just call it high ticket legal leads, right. But he made that investment and, and it worked out. But you have to manage the expectations and come up with a realistic budget.

Seth Price

You know, that's a great pivot, I want to go both you guys with this, because this is the bane of our existence. What you just talked about, you know, is is from an agency point of view, like, you know, I see it from both sides, the law firm and the agency. But to me, the hardest thing as an agency is to set those expectations a because we don't control everything, Google. And be because even if we do set the expectations that are always heard, I just want to get your thoughts on best practices of setting expectations. And what you do, because it's one thing to set a day one, everybody's happy. But month six on a project like that, and you start getting the phone calls. You know, we get phone calls very often the week after we launched a site saying, Hey, how come my phone's not ringing? I just want to just get your thoughts on, on best practices there. Yeah, you

Jason Hennessey

Have to like, you know, like, the only way you can set expectations and the benefit that you and I have Seth and Alex has is that, you know, we have case studies to back up what you know, what we're stating, right? You know, we're not just, this is not our first rodeo, and it's not we're going to be guessing, like we have case studies that we've done, like similar strategies in different markets and with similar budgets and similar starting points. And so if you're looking at this new client that has an $8,500 budget, and he's in a town of like, 25,000 people, or 50,000, you know, I mean, like, we know, like, what is it going to take? It's okay, well, it's not going to take as long as like trying to compete LA with Adel. So we can manage the expectations from that perspective. And that's all you can really do. At the end of the day, if we think about this, like the analogy that I like to use is, you know, Seth, if your wife goes outside one morning, and she sees that the grass, the grass is brown, right, she's going to come back in and probably yell at you, right? And say, What the heck's up, you got one responsibility, she doesn't care that you own, like, lose your ark, and then price benefits. And I grew

Seth Price

Up in New York, so I haven't touched it.

Jason Hennessey

But you know, the grass is, you know, brown, it needs to be green, right? And so, you know, at the end of the day, right, there's, there's, there's really three inputs that you can control to get the grass to turn green, there's probably more but in this reference, right, so you could wire the grass, you can mow the grass, or you can fertilize the grass, right? And if you do that, enough, given the uncertainty of the sun coming out, like if the sun doesn't ever come out again, well, you don't have a shot in hell on getting that grass green. So that's the uncertainty that you can't control

Seth Price

The outcome, you may not rain you

Jason Hennessey

Yet, but the outcome is very likely well, the outcome is very likely that if you do that, it will work kernel term, correct, right. And so in the in the terms of Google and what we do, and I tell my clients this, it's the same thing, I use this analogy, because it's the same thing, right? You know, like, our goal, like the client's mission is to get more leads in cases, right and, and I get it like, that's their output, but the only output that we can control is to drive targeted traffic, which will hopefully turn into more leads in cases, in order to get that targeted traffic, there's three variables that we can control, right, that's more obviously, but in this terms, and the three variables that we control is keeping the technical SEO of the website like sound, right, and making sure that we're checking Search Console, and there's no issues, writing content on a regular basis that's targeting the links, and then building the popularity of the website through link building, right. And so those are the three variables that we can control that we know history has showed that if we do that, eventually our grass will turn green with more traffic, assuming that the unknown variable, the sunlight, in our case, is Google. Right, you know, so that's kind of how I like to explain.

Seth Price

That's a great way to do it. You know, it sort of dovetails into sort of a different analogy, but similar type of situation, which is those fundamentals. I agree. That's what I tell people, like, you know, our experiences, this is going to be four or five, six months, let's see fives the overunder, you know, if we do these things, we'll have our green grass. But one of the things that you alluded to before is you have your fun stuff you do at night, right? Where you build your sights that stuff, you wouldn't you're testing and you wouldn't actually test on somebody's firm's site, that 15 year URL. So this is the analogy that I often struggle with, with love your inputs on it. So if you've ever had you guys ever renovated a house or an apartment for a rental where you take something and most likely when you start out, you may if it's a gut renovation, you know, you have some guy comes in and frames it. And inevitably that person breaks, stops returning your calls and leaves to get a new guy to come in. Now, the new guy doesn't come in and say, Oh, this is this is great. I'm going to use this. That's the first piece the first is like getting those fundamentals. But what as you're completing that, that renovation, there are things that you do if this is for yourself, and you're going to own the rental, and you go and you don't pull a permit for something, if it breaks, you're going to fix it, right. But if you're selling something, and you're, you're, it's not going to be in your control anymore. And if you don't pull a permit, something happens, you may end up getting sued, you could get sued if a renter has something bad happens to them. But what goes on behind the walls, you know, you can take shortcuts that will make you more money short term, but are so one of the things that SEO that's really hard is that when we're as agencies, we're competing against guys who are cold calling, who are have two employees for 100 clients, that they are doing things behind those walls of that renovation, that, you know, work, and we'll get the place renovated faster, and might get you in position faster, but it's gonna cause a lot of pain later. And I...

Jason Hennessey

Just you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to break down the laws and rewiring the place again, at some point, right? Yeah.

Seth Price

And I feel like, on a daily basis, because it's that balance between aggressiveness and moving the needle, but understanding that you almost, you know, there's, uh, you know, making sure that you're not violating the permitting process, because if you go too far, while you may get that short term gain, it's gonna come back to bite you later.

Jason Hennessey

Yeah, a good example of that, you know, because like you, you know, like, a lot of times, you know, when we're working with a client, somebody will like, hop on a call and pitch them and you know, it, you know, you need to be smart, you need to see what else is out there. So you should be hearing these pitches occasionally, right, because maybe there's like something that they're sharing that you might not know, or this is how people get out of contracts with those type of practitioners that you're talking about is because of that. But one example was somebody, you know, got access to one of our clients, you know, analytics, you know, they gave them access, they're kind of getting bedded, you know, and one of the things that this person said was, I'm concerned man, like, you know, it's really good. You're, you know, it seems like the SEO is working, but man, your bounce rate is really high, you know? Yeah, right. It's later turnarounds, right, yeah, your bounce rate is really high. You know, it's, and then this kind of, like, tipped off the attorney attorney, and I need to get him a call with you. What the heck, you know, like, why is that bounce rate? 70%. And like, you knew me, like, no one, you know, and so like, I get on the call, I'm like, I can fix this man. I'm like, you know, like, first of all, let me explain how bounce rate. That's, that's the most important piece, right? So, so let me explain how Bounce Rate works, right. So in Google, you know, when somebody does a Google search for, you know, DC, personal injury lawyer, and they find Price Benowitz, right, and they read the content, they watch their awesome videos, and they look at their reviews, and everything else, they're gonna call them, right, because they landed on that page, they might not click through to the about us page or the Contact page, because there is a good job, Seth gets a good job of putting the phone number right at the top, and they click on it, right. And so now they're on the page with sets intake department for 15 minutes. And that becomes a case, right? to Google. If you go back later, that shows as a bounce, right? It shows us a bounce, because they didn't go through to another page on the website, right? So if you're doing a good job, from a legal perspective, you don't want people going to other websites, you're that you're getting into the entrance points, and you're getting them to take action, right. And so I told this attorney, I'm like, Hey, listen, you know, I could fix this, it's a really quick fix. This is what I'm going to do. Right? I want to remove the phone number from the top right. And so to get them to call you, we're going to make them click on your Contact Us page where they can get your phone number, and then we'll basically get this bounce rate down to like, 30%. Are you cool with that? Absolutely not. Yeah, yeah. You know, so that's, that was my answer to that one? Well, no.

Seth Price

That's a great example. Because, you know, Google doesn't give us all the data that over the years, when we started, we got a lot more, we get a lot less you want the data you pay, you don't even get that much for paying anymore. So the the idea that there is Google knows the difference between a two second or a one second bounce rate or bots coming in, or whatever it is where there's a problem. And they also know what's nonsense, right? If they're bots coming through that they're they're raising it, who cares? And if there's an if it's, you know, put if it's legitimate traffic, they know the difference between a two second bounce and a four minute bounce. And they talked about that publicly for years it that there. And the worst part is, we can't see it. Our clients can't see it. But I think that's why you don't check common sense door. You know, when you're looking at like, search traffic for a given term. You get such bad information from Google, that, you know, as long as you know that there's money out there with people who would be interested in those words, even though it may be a nominal amount per month. Those micro numbers I just, I just ignore them. And pretty much you have there's a certain amount you have to go with. This is our money, keyword. And if people are not searching, it's so be it. But I'm gonna build the pages to get there that if somebody is searching that I want that traffic.

Jason Hennessey

And one thing is that, you know, I wouldn't say this right? You know, if I had an e commerce website and my bounce rate was high, I'd be very concerned about that, right? Because people are getting to a product page, and they're not getting to the right to like in that example, like I take bounce rate very seriously. Right? That's a whole different example. But in law with, you know, our direct response stuff. Yeah, don't pay attention to that.

Alex Valencia

We got a few questions that came in. All right, so first one, you can both answer, Mr. President, you only have 30 seconds. So it just said, Seth, looks like a sports announcer he totally does. One of the best free and paid for forms that articles can be posted to this free, I would say LinkedIn Pulse is a great one. Any of the, yeah.

Jason Hennessey

Medium, medium. game.com is good. You know, if here's the thing, man, if if you, you know, pass the bar and gotten into law school and have tried some big cases or whatever, you know, you have some notoriety in your space, leverage that notoriety, you know, and, you know, become a contributor on you know, some of the legal sites become a contributor on you know, I know, Alex, you're part of the Forbes Council, right. You know, I mean, like, you know, that's not a free one, but it gives you kind of the bragging rights to then use that to kind of, yeah, right, you know, so like, there's, it just takes effort, like everything else.

Seth Price

I'm gonna I'm gonna ask one back at you, Jason. Because there are, there's no shortage of places to go or feeling because some of the better ones, you know, historically better ones are, you know, in the medium term, what dofollow? what's your what's your feeling of getting stuff posted to more authoritative places with nofollow versus, you know, places that might be less with follow?

Jason Hennessey

I pay absolutely no attention to follow versus nofollow. That's just my personal.

Seth Price

You want to know what the Wikipedia like, here's the thing

Jason Hennessey

I'm not I'm not gonna pay somebody $500 for a guest blog post than a nofollow link. Don't get me wrong.

Seth Price

But that's that's the point. Because the really great places that charge not 500. But 3000.

Jason Hennessey

Yeah, exactly. So like, even if it's a Forbes agency Council, that's a nofollow. You know, well, there's trust signals, in my opinion.

Seth Price

They agree. That's part of that mosaic. And that, look, if Google had its way, they would eliminate backlinks because it's the one thing that we can manipulate. Right? You Alex need to you can't really fake, you know, domestic written content. That's right. Right. Yeah. The days of way back when with the overseas content gone, you know, gone for years. So you know, to me, it's, if you are looking at it, they still work, right links, work, anchor text, words, all these things are still in there. But you got to think that everything that Google is doing is trying to find some alternative to links, if the idea that just like we mentioned before that how like, you know, guest blogs were all the rage, and then they got shut down. It's like, you know, while you know, some of these big business publications that you could post these pages to like the question was, put post your your articles to that the idea that they were getting spammed now that they put the nofollow, it reduces the spam. So the question is, is Google like saying, hey, let's make sure that these mega authoritative places, they put the nofollow to make sure they're not spam, but they're still trust signals?

Jason Hennessey

Absolutely. aren't that algorithm? 100%? Yeah. And you know, and it's one of the things like, if you ever reverse engineer the link strategies of like stuff, like the Morgan Morgan's of the world, right, you know, you know, we spent a lot of time looking at, you know, in fact, I think he got hacked or somebody like, did some malicious negative SEO on his website recently, he went from like, 2000 referring domains to like 10,000 referring domains in like the matter of like days, like something happened, right, which is a whole nother topic that we're talking about, because you should be monitoring that for that stuff, too. And so his link profile is strong enough that it probably is going to impact him too much, unless it gets really egregious. But when you look at his profile, there is, you know, the top like you look at his links, it's like Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, like all of that stuff. And a lot of those are nofollow. Right. But that's what they've been.

Seth Price

But look the other thing, and that's what I can't tell, but he's naturally create what we do, actually, yes, not fabricated. There's he's a PR machine, right? Just living and breathing. And so you get that. And again, that's what it comes down to for SEO. I mean, again, I remember years ago, you reached out and started doing work with PR agencies way ahead of your time. But I feel like that when you look at each of these things, it's like, Hey, how can I signal Google that I'm the real deal and somebody else, you know that I should be above somebody else? And that's what it comes down to?

Alex Valencia

That's exactly. Next question. Do you believe there are ways that content both on site or off site I can improve your local math position, Seth.

Seth Price

Yeah, I mean, we focus a lot on local content, you know, that, you know, again, SEO is great, but we're now playing if the new normal is local service ads paid map, and then organic, you know, we have to pay that much more attention, not that we weren't already to to the local, and that local content is important. And, you know, we were talking before about Super authoritative places to play to get content and links back, we're playing the local game, you know, hardball. And if, you know, just like we might, you know, just like we want to see it in, you know, Link, we're trying to, you know, sculpt links and content in the local community, because we want to get every possible signal to Google that for a local search, given that that's what a client's goal is that we're able to show through content through links or anything else that we can do that that is that local search result is the best to get that three pack placement.

Jason Hennessey

Yeah, no teacher, I agree completely with that. And, you know, just add that, you know, whenever you do Google searches, even in the GMB, it's like, you know, this is ranking. It doesn't say this is ranking, but it says this page, you know, or this website, references motorcycle accident, right. And so it's in bold. So it's obviously like scanning the website for relevancy for particular queries and popping into a GMB if there is a GMB for that query. So we know and you know, then there's things that you can do with schema and markup and, you know, to also kind of help Google kind of understand the semantics of and relevancy of a page from an on page perspective. So yes, yes, yes, yes, definitely focus on that. And then from an operator's perspective, yeah, there's all kinds of tricks, you know, like, you know, posting, you know, sponsoring Little League teams in your local community and getting local links back to the website, doing a press release that you can write and embedding Google, you know, embedding maps within the press release, like, you know, don't get me wrong, there's still some like, secrets, if you will, like, that's probably something that most lawyers wouldn't just do is take a map in bed and put it on a press release. And, you know, because it's not common, but you know, some of those things like improving to kind of work and how

Seth Price

Look, it's, it's, I think that for all of us, I have my knowledge, those throwing spaghetti at the wall, embedding those maps the golden goose No, and that's why I the the sorts of videos that you see online, where hey, you do this one thing, it's gonna solve all your problems. It's not you have no we have no idea. We were not sophisticated know, the Google algorithm. But I can tell you, if you took 10 ideas, like embedding that map, like sponsored, if you do, if you, you know, if you hit all of those different checkboxes, you know, we don't know which, which is like marketing, we know which five are going to work, five are worthless, they're laughing at us, like, why are you why are you wasting your time? I mean, we're being smart about it, you're not, you know, it's stuff that intuitively should work we've seen potentially, you've isolated and done an experiment with one of your test sites. But generally, we're dealing with low domain authority sites, we just want the ecosystem to be, hey, this guy is relevant in this area, so that when they're looking for a local answer that it makes sense for you to be associated with that location.

Jason Hennessey

And one thing where they went, you just mentioned something that I want to kind of talk about. So like, so like, when you're when we go through, and we're going like, because when we take on a client, the first thing that we do is we go through their links, and we create a disavow file, because we weren't associated with any of the bad links, you know, and, you know, if I didn't think about this in one way, like I would go through, and I would just sort it by domain authority, and I would just disavow anything that has like a domain authority of like, 20, or less, or 15 or less, right, you know, but the thing about it is like, you know, when you go out and sponsor your daughter's softball team, and like her little town, right, there's no way her softball team is going to have a domain authority of 70. You know, I mean, three, but yeah, but but that link is very valuable from a local perspective, right.

Seth Price

And so the link itself is not, but if you can get a story being told, yeah, that's.

Jason Hennessey

Exactly. Yeah. So that's what I'm saying is like, you know, be careful with your disavows. Because you might just if you're just doing it holistically, and just kind of following the formula of everything below this, get rid of it can hurt you. Yeah.

Seth Price

Let me ask them because you just said something that, you know, most of the stuff of shaking my head in unison, I'm just a little a little confused. So how much disavowing are you doing because we've gotten a lot of signals from Google, you know, not to worry about. So again, it gets it also depends if you have a client that has a couple bad links, not the end of the world, if you're inheriting somebody who has been spamming for years, it may be different. I want to get your thoughts on when and when and how to just

Jason Hennessey

Do it within the first 30 days that we get a client and then we do it every three months. Yes, yeah. We and we see impact from doing it. So you're.

Seth Price

finding that the sculpting of the links from that. So this is a great example, Google tells you a lot of things. And many, like it's crazy. It sounds like you know, almost like my mother in law, where you sort of like it may or may not actually be what they want you to do. But they're sort of what they want you to do. Again, that could be good for you or not another story. So this is a, you know, great examples of where Google has signaled, hey, we you shouldn't do this. And then, but you know, if you do, it will actually help you. And we you know, who's doing that? Again, I think they were saying, Don't do guest blogging, he came out and said, It's okay to do it. But they're, they're trying to change behaviors, that if you ignored them, would actually do better than if you listened to them, which is kind of a quick, no, yeah, want to take the advice and when not to..

Jason Hennessey

I've gotten a site that, you know, we have actually a mutual client. And you know, Alex and I that, you know, had was getting hacked spammed, right, and so they're doing a lot of negative SEO, and it had an impact. It really had a radical impact, like they were successful at it. And it happened in a short period of time. And, and so we went in and we failed the disavow, and we recovered from it. We didn't have to do like

Seth Price

you're saying, even if you get a site that's doing fine, you're still playing the disavow game? Yes. Interesting, because it's like, there's so many different, you know, we have seen people that have had massive spam attacks. And that, what if it gets the good news is if they're so crazy, used to be people would say, Hey, I'm being attacked, because we both know a bunch of people who were sort of very influential during the google plus days, oh, oh, I'm being attacked and being attacked. It was just devastating building the links. And Google was on to that. He basically said, there was one point where he said, there's no negative SEO. What I have seen now is that when there's negative SEO, it's so laughable that I almost feel in certain instances Google is ignoring, and I had one case study where the negative SEO was so extreme, that it didn't end up hurting them. But whatever was left after that was over and again, History is written by the victor, if you make it through it, most of that was some of that negative SEO turned out to be okay, meaning your text coming in and ended up stuck in certain positions nationally, there's no way they could have had they not had that negative SEO attack.

Jason Hennessey

Sure. Yeah, I completely agree with that.

Alex Valencia

Another question.com, still better than dot law dot lawyer dot attorney.

Jason Hennessey

It's, you know, to me, in fact, somebody did a case study, Bill Hartzer actually did a case study stating that, you know, I'm not sure if all things are equal, but he said that nets are actually treated more favorable than comps and, and so, you know, I guess you'd have to kind of like, really, like, look into that case, study and see, like, all the variables, in my opinion, it's a matter of like, domain age to me, right. And age is so freakin important. And so you know, if you're going to put a dot lawyer against the.com, that was registered in 1996, right? You know, I'm going to take that.com, all day long, you know, and a lot of times, what we do is we see things like we see these dot lawyer websites that are all set that start ranking, right. It's like, I remember every Ledger had that dot pro website that was ranking, you remember that? And I, I call them like, holy shit, man, how the hell do you pull this off random, like, this is impressive, right? Come to find out, he just redirected his.com to the doc Pro, and he passed all that authority. And so it's kind of like there's, there's stuff behind it, the magic is behind the scenes that the ordinary guy doesn't know. And so with the dot lawyer in dot legal, you know, a lot of people were gonna take their old.com and redirect it. Right, you know. And so that's kind of like the facade that most people don't see.

Seth Price

Well, it's funny because you get to that story. Because there there was a point where the filtering of that 301 didn't seem to pass bad juice. So that was one way to do it very, in the old days, at least, you could clean things up very quickly with a 301. But that actually brings me to something that we see a lot. How do you address clients who have a domain, it's a good crusty old domain, you know, 15 years old. And they're like, Oh, we want to use a different name, like, we're going a different direction. And you're like, you're coming to you. So you're starting, you're starting new, we talked about setting expectations. You know, there are times when you 301 stuff, and it's like, there'll be guilt. And there are times when Google's not loving it for whatever reason, how do you set expectations where it's a risk, because history again, history being written by the victor, if it goes straight through, they love you, and they're sending you a box of cigars? And if it turns out that it's one of those ones that doesn't quite mesh immediately, it will eventually you'll get your grass green, but it might take a season. You know, how do you how do you set expectations when there is no certainty as to how it's going to be affected?

Alex Valencia

We had one client sorry, that came in with a had an exact match domain and wanted only because they wanted to go statewide, so their exact match was localized. And they we were building some authority to it for a while but then, you know, Jason's like, alright, well if you want to switch to the law firm name And we're gonna take a hit and we did we took a hit for what was it like three to six months to gain all the links and all the authority and indexing the content all over again? Yeah, it's it's kicking ass again, but it talks about he was cool with it.

Seth Price

I would say just you know, that is one of those things that I find very hard you setting expectations, because A, it's some days it just pops immediately, which is great. But when it's of course, the pain in the ass is where it is where it doesn't matter. And it's one of those uncertainties where you know, and again, we I feel like we should have like, you know, somebody has to sign like when you're going on, you're gonna go bungee jumping, you sign away your life. You change your URL for strategic reasons that no, here please sign and initial these seven places like it like basically make a poster and send it to them. Because to me, that's one of those ones that is one of the most frustrating non certainties that you have. That's true.

Jason Hennessey

And it could be done. And it can be done in so many wrong ways. I mean, the scary part is when they're like, oh, you know, I'm getting you know, I'm having another person that says, nope, the website and they're gonna, like, well, you know how like messed up that could be if you're not mapping URLs correctly.

Seth Price

Or who built the framing out and then you come in and you say, This frame is all screwed up. It's not gonna we had

Jason Hennessey

nightmares, man, I have seen nightmares. We had one client that was convinced that WordPress was the devil, and that, you know, has too many vulnerabilities and malware and, and this was like a, you know, a guy that was really about security. And so he convinced this client who was doing it wasn't even before we working with them, convinced them to move over to some platform called orchard, right, I'd never heard of it. But it's a dot ASP. dotnet. And every time you see those kinds of things, you cringe, like every SEO, and immediately, bam, and the client didn't know until we kind of like, open up their eyes to the tools to see what happened. But yeah, it's it's it's bad.

Seth Price

But that's that's one of the things I would say that, you know, I think we've both identified early was working on WordPress, working with partners like WP Engine and things like that, that getting away from these proprietary systems were good for a business model. Those shops made tons of money and still do, but that from a from an optimization point of view. You know, it's the people that have not that people that stayed with proprietary systems generally have not fared as well as those that have moved to WordPress. Great. Yep.

Alex Valencia

So we're past the time a little bit, we can keep going and have some fun. Or we can schedule another one because I still had a whole bunch of questions that people were asking, but

Seth Price

Let people get back to their day and make him wait for more.

Jason Hennessey

Ah, let's do one more question. Let's take one more, and then we'll wrap it up. How's

Alex Valencia

That sound? All right, one more. Let's pick one.

Jason Hennessey

This is fine, man. Like, it's just like.

Alex Valencia

what's the worst part of SEO? If you were to do something in SEO that, that if you could eliminate it from all the work that you do for SEO? What would it be? What's the hardest part?

Jason Hennessey

The hardest part? I think if if I asked you you're gonna say content, right? If

Seth Price

I was at worst part, but one of the things I will go to Alex is love to get Alex's perspective, because this is real topic, which is, you know, when you're doing content, it has to be unique, right? Obviously, you can't just copy a page and just change the location. And you'd be done. Like everybody ever wants to do that. Ask me why you can't do it can't do it. So one of the things I think that's really hard is to write good localized content, when the facts are law are the same. And you could do different courthouses, you can do from roads, you try to localize. But doing that at scale. I think that I'd love to hear Alex's thoughts on best practices for localizing when you really are creating a fiction because there's not that much to differentiate one page for another other than the key word you're going for a variety of writers and editors

Alex Valencia

That's that's the answer. I mean, we've got so many writers and editors on staff that no clients ever getting the same people only by request rate because we're at a place now where we have client profiles and clients have preference depending on what tier they are in. But it's really comes to variety. We go through like a 90 day training with these writers. So if you remember the boiler room where Vin Diesel or Ben Affleck come into the room and says whoever has their series seven Get the fuck out. Well, it's kind of the same with a lot of the writers they have to unlearn what they've learned before from writing to learn the style and format that we're doing things and, and there's a structure and a format for it all, but it really comes down to variety to have the differentiation it's No, I mean, no matter who writes it, there's always a redundancy. It's going to happen with the volume that we're creating. But, you know, fortunately, all of it, you know, comes out originally, just some, you know, depending on the lawyer or the firm, they like to have their hand in it. And sometimes, you know, Jason, I have to hop on and say, Dude, you just got to let us do our work, high quality New York Times content, then you got to pay a little extra for that.

Seth Price

You know, I, you know, yes. And that would be my answer. I think that the localized content is one of the hardest things to do at scale. But that, I get it, I'll leave you with this final story. My law partner, David, he hates everything that we write, you know, you hated it, when it was all the anchor text, and he hates it, no words repeated. And you know, but also those lawyers, if you handed something they wrote, and they didn't realize they wrote it, they'd rewrite it themselves. Exactly. And I just pound the 8020 rule. You know, as a lawyer, I gotta take off the lawyer and put on the businessman hat. Do you want to make money? Or do you want perfection in content, and I think unless if you're not willing to, you know, let some control go. We've, you know, We've parted ways with clients where they're just like, you know, or like you want this give us content, because nobody is going to be able to satisfy you at at, you know, what's inside your head, and that the key is ROI. And if you again, you want to hurt your brand, I'm not saying you want to put something that's crappy out there. But assuming that you get stuff that passes the laugh test, that's its high quality editors have gone through, it's grammatically right spellings, right. You know, and the law is not wrong, that it's never gonna be said perfectly, especially at scale, you have all those different writers with different styles. So if you'd like one of them, you may not love the other one, but you need to keep them different. So it's like, it's part of that sausage making that nobody likes to see. But they like it. When the phone's ringing. They're making money. Yeah.

Alex Valencia

Amen. Amen. That's gonna be a soundbite to all of our new clients, whether by attorneys mouth.

Jason Hennessey

I think one of the hardest parts for me is, you know, is when you're hired to do a job, but there's somebody that has a job that is in a position like this, you're gonna be working, or something's introduced after the fact that say, Hey, we brought in this person, and they're gonna be our new SEO manager, or whatever, and you're gonna work with them. And like, you know, and this person doesn't have the same breadth of experience that you have. And so like, they just want to be helpful. And they're going in and like changing title tags, and like, Oh, we don't, we don't play. We don't play that. I'm just saying, well, we don't live there. No more. But we had somebody that was introduced. And it's like, what, and it's like, there's a new sheriff in town. I don't know if I believe with this. Um, and he just started like, and boy, man, and now that's, that's

Seth Price

That's the most guys you're not clients anymore. So the client, they fired?

Alex Valencia

Let's say it goes either way. Yeah. We were afraid it was gonna look that way. That is it.

Seth Price

Look, you also get the people come in and say, Why are you paying these guys all this money, I can do it. You know, look, Jason knows this, because he knew back in the day, and I'll conclude sort of, with why I even started the agency, I'd have a guy. And he, he'd be my right hand person, it was one year was a girl, and they'd stay two years. And then they'd go off and do something else. It wasn't like they were competing with me. But I know they they went they made more money, and they learn the stuff. And then I have to start all over again. And what I realized was the reason that we started built the agency the way we did, which sounds very similar to what you guys do things is people do things in their given thing, you have people to do paid search, they're not doing content, people doing content aren't doing links. And so when you get one person that comes in, they may have an expertise in one area, but it is rare that they are that well rounded, so that you know what they you know, while they may have really great insight into one area, the other areas could be their blind spots, and that it's just incredibly painful. We've We've kept some we've lost some and it's just no magic answer there. What I would like to think is that when we set out for I'm sure you do too, is look at people as a partner, and if the person is coming to table with ideas, and you can have a really good exchange of ideas and accept some and challenge others and meet the middle on some stuff that you can great, but if it's if it comes from an authoritative place, it rarely works.

Jason Hennessey

I agree. Yep. And it's almost one one last thing. So like it's taken off, because for us, even when we're hiring, like SEO, like analyst and stuff, like, you know, the going rate is going to be between 70,000 You know, whatever, it's not, it's not cheap to hire, like somebody actually knows what they're doing. Right? You know, and so for somebody to bring in one person, like you said that that is a generalist, you know, if you think you're gonna save money by kind of hiring one person, well, they're not gonna write the conch. So you have to write the content, right? You're gonna still have to have links, you're still gonna have to do technical SEO is one person that you think is going to do all of this stuff is not you know, and so when you think about paying an agency $7,500 or plus, right, you're getting everything right, you're getting the collective resources of the payrolls that we have right with experts in their particular fields. So it's not always a win. The proposition to kind of bring it in house because you think you're getting in a little bit cheaper.

Seth Price

Well, and that's just my point is that the people kept leaving, and then the person leaves and you're starting from scratch. Exactly. And frankly, don't know what do they know? That's right. Because they're they're so interpersonally you want to believe people. And that's, I think that's the what I've seen very often whether they we went into person leaves, or that person stays, you find out three months later, the person that was causing all the trouble is now gone.

Jason Hennessey

That's right. It happens time after again. So when are we doing part two? Man, this is awesome. I have to schedule it. I had a lot of fun. And thank you for that.

Alex Valencia

Let's do part two, because we still had a lot of questions. I want to talk about how to go into content and SEO for 2021 how we managed COVID for our clients, so there's a lot to talk about still. So let's get number two schedule. There's still over 30 people on online that wanted to continue here and you.

Jason Hennessey

Guys that right? Thank you. We appreciate you. Yeah.

Alex Valencia

You know, we had a packed virtual house. We could barely fit him in.

Jason Hennessey

I love that. You tried that scarcity trick with your coffee man. Oh my god, I called you out

Alex Valencia

Should I do it? Should I not? That's awesome. But thank you guys all for joining. We always do we have some chats.

Jason Hennessey

Yeah, this is good. Again.

Seth Price

Thank you guys. This was awesome

Alex Valencia

Yep. Thank you guys for joining. So look out for an email or Facebook or something for another invite. Maybe next month or in a couple of weeks. Guys. Seth, man awesome having you Jason. Always a pleasure loving these guys.

Jason Hennessey

Thank you.

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