Podcast With Jason Hennessey

8-Figure SEO Agency Secrets: Jason Hennessey Blueprint for Success

Show Notes

Discover the blueprint behind building an 8-figure digital marketing agency with Jason Hennessey, founder of Hennessey Digital. In this revealing interview, Jason shares the critical strategies and insights that transformed his agency from startup to an industry leader.

Learn how Jason scaled his SEO agency through strategic hiring, innovative technology development, and maintaining a strong company culture - even with a remote team of 130+ employees. He breaks down the exact systems and processes that enabled consistent growth, including:

• Building and leveraging powerful case studies
• Creating efficient operational workflows
• Developing proprietary tools and technology
• Managing rapid scaling while maintaining quality
• Cultivating strong client relationships and retention

Perfect for SEO agency owners looking to break through revenue plateaus, this interview provides actionable insights on everything from hiring your first executive assistant to building multi-million dollar client relationships.

Whether you're starting your first digital marketing agency or looking to scale past 7 figures, Jason's practical advice and proven strategies will help you avoid common pitfalls and accelerate your growth. Learn from someone who's successfully navigated the journey from startup to 8-figure success.

Join us for this value-packed conversation about agency growth, leadership, and building a sustainable business in today's competitive digital landscape.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction

00:39 - Jason's journey

01:36 - Client acquisition and retention lessons

05:21 - Creating systems and processes

08:15 - Positive company culture

10:11 - Building a leadership team

12:02 - Staying grounded

13:18 - Fostering team creativity

14:56 - Technology's role in scaling

18:44 - Leveraging case studies for growth

20:55 - Scaling your agency to 8-figures

24:13 - Tough challenges in agency scaling

26:32 - Learning from failures

28:25 - Balancing personal and professional growth

29:50 - Evolution of SEO in 2 decades

33:18 - AI's impact on SEO strategies

37:05 - Solving challenging SEO problems

38:47 - Advice for new agency founders

40:15 - Scaling beyond $1M for agency owners

42:34 - Starting an agency: what to do differently

45:45 - Staying ahead in a fast-paced environment

46:40 - Rapid Fire Round

47:55 - SEO is not dead

48:09 - Future of Jason Hennessey Digital

48:46 - Connecting with Jason

Transcript

Introduction

0:00 welcome to the agency Insider show I'm your host navnit kosel today we have a very special guest Jason Hennessy an

0:08 international recognized Su expert the founder of NC digital and a successful entrepreneur who has scaled his agency

0:15 to a remarkable [Applause]

0:24 [Music] height Json it's an absolute pleasure to

0:30 have you on the show how are you doing today I'm excellent thank you so much for having me I appreciate it before

0:37 diving into the core of our conversation let's briefly discuss your journey you have been a Pioneer in Su and digital

Jason's journey

0:43 marketing for decades for our listeners who might not be familiar could you share your stories and how you get

0:49 started in this field yeah sure uh so uh yeah I got started doing SEO back in 2001 so over

0:57 two decades now um my journey started in the world of SEO just as a pure need I

1:04 built a website for a small business that I had learned that I quickly needed to get it to rank if I wanted to bring

1:11 traffic to it and so was just more of a need it turned into a curiosity then it

1:16 turned into a passion and then Obsession I guess after that and then you know built an agency I sold my first agency

1:24 and started this agency about 10 years ago and have just been uh growing and

1:30 scaling it over the years that's good so let's talk more

Client acquisition and retention lessons

1:36 about talking uh about the foundational steps you took when building your first agency what were some of the most

1:42 critical early lessons you learned about uh client acquisition and retention yeah sure so I think uh when I

1:49 first started my first agency I think um you know the easy part for me was getting our first couple clients usually

1:55 that's the hard part uh when somebody's starting an agency is the sales side my my agency was born out of a a

2:02 presentation that I gave um uh to a group of lawyers in the United States I

2:08 had no intention of starting an agency I basically uh got on stage for about 45

2:14 minutes explained to them what they need to do if they wanted to you know rank higher on Google and get more traffic

2:20 and as a result of that 45 minute presentation I had about seven lawyers

2:26 approach me to see if if I could help them uh with their and so that was the Genesis of my first

2:32 agency you know I left that presentation with like about five or six clients and

2:37 so um you know from there then it really uh started the process of like learning

2:43 how to skill and and you know and how to build a case study and how to get

2:48 results and how to do reporting and you know all of the other stuff how to hire the right people and so you know built

2:54 that agency up for about I think probably about six or seven years and then I sold my interest in that agency

3:00 to my partner took a leave of absence a little sabatical and then I started my second agency but you I think you know

3:07 you're going to make a lot of mistakes and you just have to accept that when you're building an agency you know you just have to accept all your failures

3:13 and know that that is the stepping stone to kind of getting to the next step right so that's one thing if if there's

3:19 anybody listening to the podcast that wants some words of wisdom is to embrace your failures I would say right yeah I

3:27 absolutely agree running my Agency for more than 20 year I would I would agree with that right yeah so how did you

3:34 navigate challenges like resources limitations managing growth while maintaining quality and building brand

3:41 recognition yeah you just have to um you have to work within your means I guess right you know so like when you're first

3:46 starting out you don't have you know big budgets to hire the best people in the world right so you know during those

3:53 times you're you're spending a lot more of your time you know doing a lot of the

3:59 tasks that you would maybe later on kind of Outsource to people that are a little bit more competent than you are at those

4:05 tasks so uh so that's just it you know you kind of have to work within your means um you know and and as you

4:12 continue to get more clients that gives you more budget I guess to to hire and

4:19 recruit uh you know uh people that are more capable I guess at the task than you are you know early on you know

4:27 you're you're you're having to you know bring on people people that might not necessarily be the the perfect person

4:34 for the role and so you're having to train those people right so you might you might only be able to afford an

4:39 intern or you know somebody that's fresh out of college right and so they don't bring like real wisdom of you know of

4:47 fulfilling the needs of that particular role right with years and years of experience so instead you're training

4:53 them to be uh you know better at that specific role right and so sometimes you

4:58 find some diamonds the rough um you know by bringing in you know interns and and

5:04 you know uh entrylevel people who will grow with you and then later on you know as you're you know you get more clients

5:11 that's when you start to really kind of bring in you know I guess you know people that have more experience that can help you grow a little bit faster

5:18 than you could right right now in your recent presentation at Chiang SEO you emphasize

Creating systems and processes

5:25 creating systems and processes so can you share a specific system system or

5:30 process that was a GameChanger for your business yeah I think for one not having

5:35 me do the systems in process right that you know like usually most CEOs you know

5:42 we have ADHD right you know there's all kinds of like I call them superpowers right you know some people will classify

5:48 them as as negative characteristics right but you know it's just it's just who you are right and so replacing me

5:55 with somebody that actually is better at putting systems and processes in place is is extremely valuable the other thing

6:03 I would say is you know when I was first started out like I didn't I didn't operate with goals right you know like

6:09 it was just every day it was a New Journey and wherever we ended up is where we ended up right and so when I

6:15 brought in a strong leadership team that's when they helped me see that Hey listen we need a vision right not only

6:23 do we need a vision we need to make sure that the whole company is aligned to your vision right and so we need to

6:29 build goals you know that that you know uh make sure that we're actually hitting

6:34 you know the the points of the vision along the way and so you know I brought in a good leadership team you know I

6:39 developed the legion the vision and they helped me kind of execute it and setting up goals and so over the past 10 years

6:46 we've been kind of really growing and hitting all of these goals and uh and it's been a a great journey right but

6:52 it's been a testament to the whole team and not just me and so I'd say that was one and the other one was you know

6:59 putting Learning and Development in place you know there comes a point where you know you're growing so fast that

7:04 you're recruiting people and so you have to make sure that that everybody that you bring into the organization has the

7:11 proper training um and the proper support to be successful in their individual roles right so H how large is

7:19 your team now I think we're about 130 full-time employees I'd say across

7:25 the whole company yeah so are they remote or they they work in the office or how does it yeah so so my agency was

7:33 set up by Design as a remote agency even well before covid I know a lot of

7:38 companies had to Pivot during covid and you know and have people start working remotely we we set it up that way from

7:45 the beginning just because like I didn't want to have to recruit worldclass Talent from a five mile radius of one

7:53 office building in some city right in the United States right so so you know we set it up it was always good going to

7:59 be remote we were using Skype I think initially then we transitioned over to zoom and slack and but we have a a great

8:06 setup now and we've got people everywhere literally all over the world and domestically within the United

8:13 States okay that's good to know now you also I mean I've seen lot of your talks

Positive company culture

8:20 and where you emphasize the importance of taking care of your employees how do you cultivate a positive company culture

8:26 especially in a remote working envir yeah I think it comes from the top right

8:32 so you know I think my attitude is everything you know we try to operate in an environment where there's you know no

8:39 no no blame right so like people are going to make mistakes you know you don't have to be worried about getting

8:44 fired because you made one mistake right sometimes when people make a mistake they're just kind of bringing a problem

8:51 to the surface that should have been fixed regardless right people don't fail systems fail right um and so right you

8:58 know when you when when you have that type of mentality um you know people feel encouraged to to do their best

9:06 right knowing that they're not always going to be successful but the lessons that we learn uh we then grow from it

9:14 and so from there and we do a lot of other things too you know to kind of make sure that we've got culture um we

9:20 got core values that we set and it's not one of those core values that you know it's just a bunch of words and nobody

9:26 ever looks at it again you know I mean like our core values we live and die by our core values in fact I fired a client

9:32 recently because the client did not live up to our core values you know and this was a big client and so I think I shared

9:39 that from stage at changai as well you know our our big thing is like you know don't have fun don't be a jerk right and

9:45 so we had a client that was not you know it wasn't fun to work with and he was not really being nice to our staff and

9:51 so I had to step up and and do something about it so that you know I live the core values right and my staff sees that

9:58 and so anyway that's just it you know setting core values building a culture and then taking care of your employees

10:05 um you know the best that you can take care of them okay now of course leadership play a crucial role in

Building a leadership team

10:12 scaling you also mentioned hiring a leadership team and business coach as a pivotal moves how did you determine the

10:19 right people to Brak on bring on board and what impact these have on your operations yeah so in this um in this

10:28 particular part of the company as I was growing I got really lucky to be honest with you um because it's not easy to

10:35 find the right executive leadership team and so I got introduced to uh a guy by

10:41 the name of Scott Trum who's our coo and president of the organization through a mutual friend the timing was perfect he

10:49 was uh you know looking for his next opportunity he was working at his

10:54 organization um for about 12 years I think before this um and he helped grow

11:00 that company and brought them to an exit and so he didn't want to stick around with a new uh owner and so he was just

11:08 looking for his new role I got connected we had lunch we hit it off and then he ended up coming over and joining my

11:15 company as our Co and and president um and then from there a couple months later he then recruited his old CFO that

11:23 he worked with so she also came over and so they had worked together for about 10

11:28 or 11 years together at that organization um and then a couple months later we then recruited their CTO as

11:36 well and I got like a three for one package you know and and they all had the experience and camaraderie of

11:42 working together for like over a decade and so that was great and then from there you know they helped me establish

11:48 just the foundation of how to really you know turn what I would say would be more of like a lifestyle business into more

11:55 of a um uh an Enterprise operation I guess yeah so I also asked one of our group

Staying grounded

12:04 for the Indian Su who were in Chiang that because your talk in changai went little long and we couldn't ask any

12:11 question so I said this is a time I'll ask on your behalf so here's one coming on their behalf so how do you stay so

12:18 grounded even after tremendous growth in I think you know always remember

12:24 where you come from you know for me like I didn't come from wealth you know everything that I've built you know

12:31 always came from a lot of hard work um and just you know tireless passion I

12:38 guess um and so you know I I wake up every day with a sense of gratitude

12:43 optimistic by Nature usually a positive person and so you I think those those

12:49 are some of the characteristics that I guess I just have naturally um I've always had those my entire life

12:56 regardless of how much money was in my bank account right and so I don't think that'll ever change and so you know I I

13:02 remain just a positive humble person and that's that's just who I am by Nature I guess that's very rare quality because

13:10 sometime people when I mean get too much of a wealth you know it goes in their head so yeah yeah yeah I see it for sure

Fostering team creativity

13:18 right okay let's talk a little bit about Innovation and creativity you have spoken previously about the importance

13:24 of balancing productivity and creativity in other talks in the digital marketing world we where data often Drive

13:30 decisions how do you Foster creativity within your team and processing yeah well there's a couple

13:36 things that we we do you know for me first importantly you know like I try to block off at least one day per week

13:44 sometimes two where I don't put anything on my schedule and and that allows me just to kind of have a free day where I

13:50 can just show up and not be at the mercy of Zoom calls and internal meetings and

13:55 stuff you know because it's really hard to kind of be creative of when you are you know on a zoom call on this call

14:02 that call right so like sometimes you just need to free your mind right and so I think you know that that's for me like

14:08 that's where I get most of my creativity as for the team we we do things so like for instance we have what we call like a

14:15 hackathon once a year and that's where we let our whole engineering team spend

14:21 like a full week just being creative right so like looking at like what are some of the inefficiencies what are some

14:28 of the problems within the organization how can we solve those right and so we give our engineering team like a full

14:34 week to kind of develop you know whatever it is technology that they want to develop and then they pitch it to us

14:41 right and then from there based on the MVPs that they create in the short period of time will then put Financial

14:48 Resources behind that those ideas right so we let their creativity kind of help

14:54 booster and grow the organization as well all right now uh what role does

Technology's role in scaling

15:00 technology play in driving innovation in your agency and can you highlight any tool or strategies you have implemented

15:06 recently that that have had a significant impact sure yeah so based on

15:12 that hackathon that I was just talking about a couple of our Engineers thought that it would be a great way to innovate

15:20 by leveraging AI to take a website that is uh you know indexed in English and

15:28 basically build automation to convert the website to multiple languages using

15:34 AI right so you know so that that is something that came by way of innovation and creativity through our team right it

15:40 wasn't my idea and so you know next thing you know they they developed like a prototype they pitched it to us we put

15:47 resources behind it and now we have a great product where you know we can take a website that's in English maybe

15:53 there's a thousand Pages that's indexed in English on Google you know use AI so that you know all of the internal links

16:01 kind of get changed from English to let's just say Spanish um all of the URL

16:07 structure the HF Lang tags right you know so like basically creates like a picture perfect um uh you know

16:15 translation of a website and so and the cool thing about it is when we go and we update a English page it'll

16:22 automatically convert that update to Spanish right so um so anyway I thought that was kind of a cool idea and there's

16:27 so many different other things that can it come as way of uh leveraging technology for sure now uh of course H

16:34 digital has developed several propriety tools and how important do you so think

16:40 in today's word technological innovation is for an SEO agency oh I think in the only way for us to be able to scale we

16:47 had to incorporate technology because it's it's too much to manage you know when there's so many different people

16:53 touching multiple websites and writing content and editing content and getting

16:59 it to the client for approval and getting it back right I mean there's there's a lot of places where you can

17:04 make mistakes and so we basically started to develop our own technology

17:10 using software you know which I think is a big part of the reason on why we can scale if we didn't do that we we might

17:18 not have a good retention right because like there's be too many mistakes or there'd be too many people touching

17:24 websites where you know one person's fixing it another person's breaking some something else right so so we we invest

17:31 heavily in in technology um I want to say we we probably have uh you know

17:36 maybe like 10 or 12 people just in our systems team um with a product manager right and so uh you know they're they're

17:44 just working on on you know building better infrastructure to allow us to be

17:49 more efficient and effective leveraging you know softwares okay I I I also know

17:54 you have a WordPress speed uh speed uh tool which increases the word

17:59 yeah we that's called that's called Power uh pwa and we built that um you

18:05 know just as as a need a lot of the third party tools that we were using um

18:11 for whatever reason uh you know it would work perfectly this way but on this

18:16 website it wouldn't and it would break this website and we're like you know what like we can continue to like try to

18:23 patch this or we could try to like invest time in building our own speed tool and so yeah we made that in

18:28 investment and you know spent a lot of money developing it but now we've got a great tool that we can use you know

18:34 internally for our own clients that help with caching and indexing and Page speed you know and passing core web vitals as

18:41 well yeah okay now you have often talked about turning clients into case studies

Leveraging case studies for growth

18:48 can you walk us through how you effectively leverage these case studies to build

18:53 momentum yeah um yeah I think you know as you as you get a client right the

19:00 goal is is to retain that client right and you know I think the best way to retain that client is to a manage

19:07 expectations upfront so that you know both the agency and the client are on the same page in terms of like what does

19:14 success look like and then doing everything that you can to try to meet or exceed the expectations of the client

19:21 right and so you know early on right you don't have the answers right you're doing a lot of experimentation right

19:28 like is this content strategy going to work is this internal linking strategy going to work

19:33 is this you know inbound linking strategy going to work right and so through the experimentations that you do

19:39 you start to see results and then from there you hopefully you document the the the strategy so that you can kind of get

19:46 those same results for another client and you you start to build a case study and you start to build a strategy right

19:52 and then that that case study and that strategy becomes your calling card to get new clients right so sometimes if

20:00 you do some marketing or somebody recommends you you get on a call with them and you just basically are showing

20:06 them what you've done for these other clients and this is the strategy that used and this is why it's effective and

20:13 then from there that just becomes uh you know part of your sales process and so

20:19 it helps you to you know sell new clients while keeping the clients that you have happy because it's that case

20:25 study and then it just becomes a balancing act of like like managing you

20:30 know the retention and making sure that all of your clients continue to be happy while also bringing in new business and

20:37 then and that becomes the game of of running an agency really right you're you're trying to keep current clients

20:42 happy and you're trying to get new clients trying to keep current clients happy trying to get new clients and doesn't always work that way you might

20:47 lose a client right or you might have a month where you can't get a new client right and it's like you know now you're

20:53 just kind of managing that process right okay now Jason one of you your key

Scaling your agency to 8-figures

20:58 achievement is scaling hencey digital to an eight figure business for many agency

21:04 owners the leap from six or seven figures to eight seems daunting could

21:09 you break down the core strategies that help you scale so significantly yeah so you know back to

21:16 earlier on in the in the conversation you know a having a vision right so first all you know have having a a very

21:23 clear Vision like you can go to hennessy.com and then click on about out

21:29 and then there's a section that says where we're going and then you can see my vision like we posted on our website

21:35 right so so that's the vision you know I created that Vision three years ago um I'll be creating my new vision here uh

21:42 soon um that will take us to 2027 and then once you have a vision then having

21:48 a good leadership team to help you build out that Vision right um and putting

21:54 kpis in place and putting goals in place um um you know uh bringing on uh you

22:01 know a sales team to help sell bringing on a a good midlevel management team

22:07 right to to make sure that everything is all well organized and properly managed

22:12 and then from there it's just you know everything comes down to building the reputation like we have a really good reputation in the marketplace because a

22:20 you know we have a strategy that works we get results and we don't mismanage expectations like you know we'll we'll

22:26 tell a client that's not that doesn't have the right budget to work with us that you know unfortunately it won't

22:32 work right so like we'll we'll say no to prospects you know just because we'd rather preserve our reputation right I'd

22:38 rather say no to somebody than say yes and then four months down the road the road they're they're not happy with us

22:44 they're firing us and then they're spreading that word online with bad reviews and stuff like that right so you

22:51 know I take our reputation uh very seriously and when you have a good reputation that spreads right people

22:58 start talking about you and then you start to grow as a result of that right so I think you know I wouldn't say it

23:04 like it was by Design I just think that we made a lot of the right decisions early on and we just built a a a good

23:11 agency that gets good results with a good reputation okay so so when you created your vision three years back was scaling

23:18 to eight figure was one of the part of the vision then it was yeah I mean like

23:23 it was very exact you know I said that you know in three years I wanted to have

23:29 five million in in iida right like that was like it's spelled out in the financial part of our vision I think I

23:36 think our at the time I said that our Topline Revenue was going to be like $32 million right and so and I said we were

23:43 going to have a lot more people working for us right and so we were a lot more efficient and effective right we still

23:49 hit like the five million we just missed it we'll come in at like $4.8 million this year in profit in iida but we only

23:57 needed to do like 20 million in Revenue right so so we were a lot more efficient and we didn't need as many people to hit

24:04 that but yeah I was very clear on on where we were going to be financially within that bvid vision for

24:11 sure all right now uh every entrepreneur Journey has its ups and downs uh looking

Tough challenges in agency scaling

24:17 back what were some of the toughest challenges you faced while scaling your agency and how did you overcome them

24:24 yeah so I think part of our our growth is there was a time I think I think it was like three years ago maybe um where

24:31 we had like a very large client that was paying us north of $100,000 per month so

24:37 very very large client and so we were working with that client for probably about seven years and we really kind of

24:44 helped them grow it was a law firm you know helped grow their Law Firm to the point where um they they got acquired

24:52 right and so somebody bought their firm and and we were very instrumental in in helping that happen and so so uh when

24:59 the new owners came in um they didn't want to spend $100,000 a month on SEO

25:05 anymore and so they had a plan in place where they're going to kind of get rid of us and and um and maybe either bring

25:12 that in house or hire another Agency for cheaper and so um you know it was like

25:18 November I think and and you know we got notice and so you know that hurt us

25:24 right because we that was $100,000 in revenue and at the time I want to say it

25:29 made up um you know maybe like 15% of our total revenue something like that it was

25:35 like um and so um I don't think it that high but it was some like some high number like that and so it was really

25:42 unfortunate right and so we had to make like Cuts like in November you know like right before holidays right because we

25:48 weren't expecting that you know and so I think that was one of the the big lessons that we faced is you know now

25:54 we're very strategic about taking on clients um that are going to be too big

26:00 that could be a risk factor right in the future because it's never fun to have to make like Cuts around holidays or

26:08 whatever you know when it's outside of your control like that so I think right um just kind of growing growing at the

26:14 right pace and not making sure that there's you know there's any one client that could really put you out of

26:20 business you know yeah I think having one or two clients is always I mean it will give me a Sleepless nice touch

26:27 would I never had situation but yeah absolutely now you also highlight the

Learning from failures

26:32 importance of learning from failures of course one of the example you Shar so can you share some other specific

26:38 instance where a failure turned into a valuable learning experience yeah um so let's see here so

26:47 many so many so many I think you know just for one just in in which the way we were set up as an agency you know I look

26:55 at it like this right like if you're running an SEO agency there's usually three buckets right there's the first

27:00 bucket of like somebody's going to make a mistake on a website whether it's you

27:05 know they misspell a word or they publish the page using the wrong URL or

27:11 they send a broken link somewhere right there somebody making a mistake right you know and that just happens right

27:17 then you have somebody else that comes in that like audits the work and they diagnose the mistake right so again you

27:24 know there was a failure somebody's diagnosing it and then there's somebody else that comes in and they're an

27:29 engineer and they fix the mistake right you create a ticket to get it fixed and so there's this cycle of like make a

27:35 mistake diagnose a mistake fix the mistake make a mistake diagnose the mistake fix a mistake right and so

27:41 that's that's the whole world of of SEO really I mean that's like that's our whole world of what we do and so so that

27:49 that is something that we looked at like what can we do how can we create systems and processes so that we can avoid that

27:56 in the future and so now we have a crawler that we built that basically audits the work that we do it puts

28:04 preventative measures in place so that people don't make mistakes and then and it automates the creation of tickets to

28:10 fix things right so we've kind of automated that process now and so that that has big been a big lesson that

28:17 we've learned from a failure all right and I'm sure it saves a lot of time as well it does yes now now managing time

Balancing personal and professional growth

28:25 is another area where many agency owners struggle what advice would you give on balancing personal time with uh

28:32 professional growth yeah that that takes time I think you know like you really won't have a balanced life when you're

28:39 just getting started it's unfortunate but you're going to be working late hours and long hours and you just have

28:45 to make a lot of sacrifices just because you don't have if if you're bootstrapping a business you're not

28:51 going to have um you know the team or resources to have people do stuff for

28:56 you right so but over time you know once you make the right decisions and you start to grow your revenue and you

29:03 reinvest some of that profit into more people then you're finding you know uh

29:08 the time you're finding the resources to buy back more of your time right that was a big part of my presentation in

29:14 changai was you know a lot of time you're you're spending your your time

29:20 right to make money right and then later on you're spending your money to buy back your time right it's just a

29:25 balancing act so like I said like first three years of building a business maybe

29:31 longer you're going to be working really hard and you're going to be working late hours and that's just part for the

29:36 course but if you make some of the right decisions later on you know then you

29:42 you'll have more time and you'll have people in place that are more capable at these tasks than you are

29:49 so right now let's talk I mean a bit about advising the uh aspiring agency

Evolution of SEO in 2 decades

29:56 owners you've been reverse engineering the Google algorithm since 2001 how has

30:01 SEO evolved over the past two decades and especially now good question you

30:06 know I think um a lot of the foundational stuff is kind of Remains the Same right you know writing content

30:12 that satisfies the intent of what people are searching for right building the popularity of the website you know by

30:19 way of links and then you know having a good foundation with you know technical SEO right and don't get me wrong like

30:26 along the way like you know earlier on like way back like let's just call it like 15 20 years ago um it was a lot

30:34 less competitive right so like you do things that move the needle faster right

30:39 you know there used to be a time where you know keyword density mattered right

30:44 you know where you know if you really wanted to rank for keyword you made sure that that keyword was in there and that

30:50 the density was 14 15% and that you bolded things right you I mean like

30:56 nowadays you don't really have to kind of that you know in fact that probably would have an opposite effect on it

31:01 right back in the day you could drive a lot of spammy links to pages and and

31:07 push the needle right you know whereas now nowadays that that will tend to hurt you instead of help you you know so like

31:14 um you know it's just been this evolution of different strategies and tactics but at the core I would say you

31:21 know the foundation has always remained the same right published content that that people really you know want want to

31:28 see that addresses their their questions um you know boost the popularity of the

31:33 website and the domain and just have a good technical infrastructure now lot of

31:38 these days we hear that the backlinks are dead although I'm against it and I mean you have quite often recently

31:45 showcast how you are winning the Surfs with the good content especially I think

31:51 link is the very uh major part to those uh getting you rankings for this Law

31:56 related keyword so what is your take on yeah no um anybody that says backlinks

32:02 is dead or it doesn't work anymore I think you're like on a different planet um I don't know where that comes from um

32:10 you know like that's it you know Google is their whole algorithm is built upon

32:15 page rank right and so you know gaining popularity to your website is such a a

32:20 strong signal and so you know we're targeting the keyword law from SEO right now um You' been putting a big push

32:27 towards that we've got uh a good internal link strategy we built out our silos properly on our website and you

32:34 know now we're just trying to get the strongest links to come back to it and some of those strong Links come by way

32:40 of me you know publishing articles on sites like entrepreneur.com or

32:45 rollingstone magazine or Forbes or Newsweek right you know like I contribute to a lot of those websites

32:51 because I know that you know my page has a link back to my website right and then we're doing a lot of digital PR right

32:58 now so we're using data so there's just a combination of different strategies that we use me going on podcast like

33:05 this right you know where you know it might get published on a website and then it links back to us right it's all

33:11 by Design right it's it's to boost the uh the relevancy of the links and the popularity of the domain right so so in

AI's impact on SEO strategies

33:20 last two years when we got hit by all these AI has your approach changed in terms of delivering SEO or doing you or

33:28 it's more or less same no we uh we're definitely um you know leveraging AI

33:34 more it's it's helped our uh especially our our content team um be a lot more

33:41 efficient uh and effective so like they're leveraging you know both you

33:47 know CET gbt they're leveraging tools like phase and Surfer um you know they

33:53 are optimizing pages with a better chance of ranking you know leveraging of

33:58 this Ai and then we're just looking at the results and measuring things and and

34:03 then from there building new systems and processes to make sure that um that you know every new piece of content follows

34:10 the same kind of guidance I guess okay now recent Trend which we see especially in our agency some of our clients start

34:17 using chat GPT putting all our all Su into it and getting advice from it and say why are you not doing this or why

34:24 are you not doing this so have you reached that point or no where where clients are coming with chat

34:31 GPT as your suggestion and pushing it to you yeah um I say a little bit um a lot

34:36 of times like the clients that we work with um you know they're they just want us to kind of be their strategic partner

34:43 and we've built the confidence in working with them over the years that you know a lot of times they don't

34:48 necessarily question the strategies or tactics um you know we will get you know clients that you know will come to us

34:53 and have a question and stuff like that and you know a lot of times we we handle the question and you know and we're open

35:00 don't get us wrong you know I mean it's not like we just closed environment and anything that say we're say no no no we're not going to do that you know some

35:05 if a client comes to us with like an idea like we're certainly open to that and you know and heck we can learn from

35:12 from them just as much as they can learn from us so you know but it's not like we're just closed off and we get

35:18 offended as a result of it but we don't we don't necessarily see that much you know requests like that okay now since

35:25 of course a lot of people now start talking that is not something a sustainable business model diversify

35:31 diversify diversify so over the last two years has hansy digital started

35:36 diversifying into more than Su or do you have a road map for that yeah um no I

35:42 think we've always kind of had a plan for that you know there's different multi-channels that you should be leveraging to to bring in new business

35:50 to your your for us we work with law firms right so some of those channels

35:55 include SEO right you know that's one Channel you know there's there's paperclick there's page social there's

36:01 organic social TV advertising there's radio there's Billboards right there's so many different ways to kind of Market

36:08 themselves right and so you know we're we're you know i' would say we're really good at the SEO we do payperclick as

36:15 well we do some organ I'm I'm sorry we do some paid social we do website development design right so you know but

36:22 when it comes to like some of the traditional offline like TV radio we've got good part partners that we refer out

36:29 um that get good results there but yeah it's definitely you you have to spread your budget um to to really grow if if

36:37 you want to you know take on more market share it's just it's just a a proper way of doing it so are you doing something

36:44 related to AI agents or not yet uh we're doing some experimentation right now for sure um brought in a product manager

36:52 that's going to be kind of spearheading that and working with our systems team to to build out some different AI agents

36:59 and such so but it's still I would say the first inning I guess if you will on

37:04 on that for us okay back to SEO can you share an example of a particularly

Solving challenging SEO problems

37:10 challenging SEO problem you have solved and how you approached it I know when one you said with the ticketing system

37:17 but is there any other example um I think uh like for example internal links I think that's that could

37:24 be a huge advantage or a huge dis advantage if executed correctly or

37:29 incorrectly you know for years and years and years we really didn't have systems and processes in place so like you have

37:37 just somebody that's writing content and they're just naturally just linking to Pages using anchor text that they feel

37:44 is relevant and so sometimes you really start to mess up a strategy right so

37:50 like if you're linking to a blog post right using the word car accident lawyer

37:56 whereas you a car accident lawyer page right you're basically sending the wrong signals to Google right saying hey

38:04 here's the page that I want to nominate for car accident lawyer and you're linking to a blog post whereas the real page is your transactional page right

38:12 and so just over the years you have just so many different writers and bloggers that are randomly linking to things

38:18 using the wrong words and such and so that creates a challenge but it also creates an opportunity right so when you

38:25 come in and you fix that stuff boy do you see like nice lifts so we put systems and processes in place using Ai

38:33 and Technology to catch those mistakes and automate and fix a lot of that so

38:39 that we don't have a big mess with internal links that's been a big push for us over the past

38:45 year okay now many of our listeners our agency owners or Aspire aspiring

Advice for new agency founders

38:52 entrepreneurs what advice would you give to someone starting an agency today in a competitive digital

38:58 landscape yeah um I would say you know just kind of you know a grow um within

39:05 reason right don't don't look at trying to scale and grow so fast you know because I think you you really sacrifice

39:13 the quality right you know you know trying to get quantity right so you know

39:18 just kind of grow within reason you know get one client like I said turn that one client into the best case study that you

39:24 can turn it into um you know then create systems and processes on what you did to

39:30 get that case study to where it is and then from there then use that case study

39:35 to get a second client and then make sure you do the same thing for that second client because it's really easy

39:40 to get 10 clients quickly and then the quality suffers because you're not

39:46 Building Systems and processes you're too busy selling and you don't have the right resources and support to kind of

39:52 like execute the strategy and so then your reputation gets tarnished the

39:57 quality not is not good and you start losing clients just as fast as you're gaining them and so I think that's a big

40:04 problem that most agencies have is is they can't retain the clients you know

40:10 just because the quality or the expectations are are just misaligned so

Scaling beyond $1M for agency owners

40:16 okay now now what advice would you give to agency owners who are struggling to scale beyond 1 million revenue mark will

40:23 this be a similar advice or slightly different yeah usually if if you're trying to scale past 1 million I'd say

40:30 that you're probably the constraint you're probably the reason why you're not able to scale and it's probably

40:36 because you're a control freak I was you know I mean nobody can do it better than you can right at least that's the

40:42 mentality um but in order to kind of get past 1 million you're going to have to um reinvest some of your profit into

40:50 hiring people it might be a salesperson it might be an operations person

40:56 depending on what your better at right if so if you're better at operations and building out the strategy and systems to

41:02 then put your time and intention on that and then hire a salesperson to go sell right or if you're better at sales then

41:09 you do the selling you hire an operations person to build out the systems and processes I would say that's

41:14 probably H you're at a at a point in your agency where you need to kind of make that decision do I focus on

41:20 operations or do I focus on sales and then replace yourself in that other role so when you when you you also

41:27 mentioned previously that you built a strong sales team so what what what core skills or primary value look when you

41:34 are hiring a SES yeah I think it's somebody that's very likable I think

41:40 that that communicates effectively in my case like the person you know the the two people that were hired to to be in

41:48 sales roles at my organization you know they they weren't like like 20 year

41:53 veterans that knew SEO you know and they were just very likable people that

41:59 communicated well that I was able to teach my way of selling leveraging case

42:05 studies using the tools like using the exact formula um and so I think that's

42:11 it people like to do business with those that they that they like trust right and so that are likable and so that would be

42:18 most important would be finding somebody that you know if you were on the other end of that call and they were trying to

42:23 sell you would you feel good about this decision you trust this person on the other end right and then from there just

42:30 teach them the SEO side okay okay that's a good advice now if you were to rebuild

Starting an agency: what to do differently

42:36 your agency from a scratch today what would you do differently based on what you know now yeah so a I probably would

42:44 have gotten a coach sooner just because I think that would have prevented me from making some of the mistakes that I

42:50 was making earlier on so so that'd be the first thing the second thing would be uh I would have gotten an EXA itive

42:57 assistant a lot sooner as well just because uh I was probably doing a lot of

43:03 tasks that I should have been doing earlyer on I was kind of spending a lot of my time in my email you know like

43:09 might have been like six hours a day just in the email right when you're doing that how do you really kind of grow right um and so that would have

43:17 been the second thing and then the third thing would have been from there if I had an executive assistant they would

43:22 have been able to see that I could replace myself in different roles and I would have prob probably hired people a

43:28 lot sooner to replace myself in specific roles that I wasn't even the best to be

43:33 doing in the first place all right now now aren't the

43:38 business coaches expensive to high yeah business coaches are expensive right so but you you you know you can

43:45 probably find a business coach that is you know more within your means right

43:50 you know like you don't necessarily need to find the best business coach right away you can just find a coach that you

43:57 know is able to kind of you know take you to the next level and then as you continue to grow as you continue to grow

44:03 you know then you might have to replace your business coach right you know you know the business coach that you have

44:09 now might have experience growing an agency to a million dollars right but

44:14 then you get to five million right you might have surpassed your business coach right now you need a business coach that

44:20 has successfully taking an agency from five million to 20 million right so and those coaches are probably going to more

44:27 experienced because they're more expensive because their time is more valuable right I know you earlier talked

44:34 about you know which specific coach you wanted to have so you went after it but

44:39 but how do other people find coach do you have any advice yeah you know I

44:44 think um you know you you follow people on social media you interact you know uh

44:51 you know I would just say you know find somebody that you think could help solve your problem somebody that that's

44:57 already done it before maybe they're not a coach right but maybe you've seen what

45:02 they've done and you aspire to be like them and and maybe you can reach out to

45:08 them and say hey I know I know this is an off-the-wall question you know but I've been following you for five years

45:14 and I really look look up to what you've done and what you've built you know would you be open to maybe spending an

45:21 hour a month with me if I paid you to help coach me so I could ask you questions right so um so I would say

45:27 just kind of you know manifest who it is that you want to be a coach and then just um reach out to that okay that's a

45:37 good advice because a lot of people get stuck they don't know who to ask where to ask so of course yeah all right now

45:43 Su and digital marketing continues to evolve how can agency stay ahead of the curve in such a fastpac

Staying ahead in a fast-paced environment

45:52 environment um you know a you need to keep up with it yourself so like you

45:57 know at night time I'm reading you know different articles about you know Google updates or you know things that are

46:03 taking place within our industry looking on LinkedIn I'm looking at different case studies I'm looking at new tools

46:10 we're experimenting with new tools I think it really comes down to just keeping up with the industry and that

46:17 comes from still having a Passion about it right you know I think if this is your passion right you're GNA like read

46:23 this stuff you're going to be interested in it you're going to go to changma you're gonna network with people you're

46:29 gonna right you know if you're just doing this strictly for the business side of of it um you're going to get

46:35 passed with people that are more passionate about the subject right right right right with this we come to the

Rapid Fire Round

46:41 last segment of our show which is rapid fire round so I'm going to ask you

46:47 question and you're just going to answer what comes in the top of your mind so ready yeah yeah so what's the best piece

46:53 of business advice you have ever received get an executive assistant it literally divides your time in half and

47:00 you could be a lot more effective what's your go-to productivity hack a go-to productivity hack is finding a day of

47:07 the week just to kind of be um uh you know just to be creative you know I

47:12 think a lot of my productivity comes from me being creative that blocking one day which you mentioned right all right

47:18 all right if you could have dinner with anyo historical figure who would it be and why probably Walt Disney um just

47:26 because he was big dreamer and he was able to build something that just kind of grew into something bigger than he

47:32 was right right what's a book that has significantly influence your business approach there's a book called rework

47:39 it's from the founders of base camp yeah I'm not sure if you read it but it's very and it's concise and I think it was

47:46 really very small concise nicely placed book right I love the right no fluff all

47:51 all real thing right exactly right yeah and what's one you would like to debunk

SEO is not dead

47:58 right now that SEO is dead I'd say that's been resurfacing every year since

48:04 I've been in C yeah okay uh Jason this has been an insightful conversation

Future of Jason Hennessey Digital

48:09 before we wrap up can you share what's next for you and heny digital and are there any exciting projects or

48:15 initiatives in the pipeline so I think uh you know what's next for us is you know just you know it's a New Journey

48:23 for us like we're trying to grow from like 20 million to 50 million you know in revenue and so that's a journey that

48:30 I have never been on and so I expect that we'll make a lot of mistakes and we will learn and we will grow but I'm

48:36 really excited for it and I know that Ai and automation is going to be a big part of that and you know we'll be continuing

48:43 to to innovate with new technology for sure where can our listeners connect

Connecting with Jason

48:48 with you and learn more about your work sure so I think I'm most active on

48:54 LinkedIn and Instagram I publish videos every single day on Instagram I share

49:00 some of my business lessons and wisdom on on LinkedIn and then personally you

49:05 know if you want to learn more about like more personal Journey with family and stuff Facebook is probably the best

49:11 place for that right all right thank you so much for joining us Jason it's been a pleasure having you on the agency

49:17 Insider show thank you so much appreciate it and for our audience if you find Value in today's discussion

49:23 make sure to like share and subscribe stay tuned for more indust insights in our upcoming episodes until next time

49:30 thank you