SEO Secrets, Health Transformations, and Massive Exits with Jason Hennessey

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Are you looking for some tech tips as a law firm owner? In this engaging episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, SEO expert and entrepreneur Jason Hennessey shares his journey from mobile DJ to founder of Hennessey Digital, detailing how necessity led him to discover SEO. He discusses the evolution of SEO, the impact of AI, and practical strategies for law firms.

Jason speaks about the future of AI in SEO. In the early days of Jason’s career, AI was being used to reverse engineer websites to figure out what was working, which was very time consuming. In this day and age, AI is a lot more accessible and is being used by different people for different things. For companies like Jason’s, AI has opened the door to allow for more traffic because his service can reach different people due to AI’s diverse usage.

Jason and Tyson discuss the errors law firms make with their websites. One thing is people do not take action when they have the steps in order to do so. This is seen with many people who attend law conferences. Another error is trying to implement a solution right away and thinking it is going to solve the problem. Jason gives an example of a company hiring someone to design or maintain a website, but not having any oversight whatsoever. This can cause a lot of issues for a business owner who can lose control of what they are creating.

Listen in to learn more!

• 6:20 How SEO has changed
• 10:01 Early adoption of AI and the future of AI in SEO
• 17:41 Lifestyle businesses versus growth-focused businesses
• 20:09 Frequent errors law firms make with their websites
• 38:35 How social media now impacts SEO 
  
  

Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here. 


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Creators and Guests

Host

Tyson Mutrux

Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.

What is Maximum Lawyer?

Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.

Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.

If you're ready to grow your firm with less stress and more support, this is your next must listen. Subscribe today.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:50 So for the people that don't know your backstory, I mean, you're great on social media. So I think a lot of people probably know who you are. But thank you. Talk about how you got into SEO. I think it's an interesting thing.

Jason Hennessey 00:02:01 So SEO. I think like most people that get into SEO, you don't choose. SEO. SEO chooses you. so it started way back 25 years ago. Maybe, 2001. and I was a mobile DJ. I just got out of the United States Air Force. Served my country for four years. I was going to college in Vegas. That's where I was living at the time. I was studying for the Lsat. I was contemplating going to law school. I had a side hustle, which was a mobile DJ. I would dj weddings and parties and stuff on the weekends. And so, as a entrepreneur, I guess, in the making. I had an idea to build a website where brides that were coming to Vegas would plan their wedding.

Jason Hennessey 00:02:51 And so I built a website where I paid somebody to build a website. It was called Vegas Wedding. Com. After about three months of nobody coming to the site, I called the developer. I'm like, hey, I think something's broken. Do you have to turn something on? What's going on here? And he's like, no, that's like called like SEO or something, and I don't know how to do that. Like, not too many people know how to do that. And again, this was 2001. And so that is where the journey started. It starts out as an interest or actually it starts out as a need I guess. In that case then it became an interest. Then it became a passion then now it's more of an obsession I guess.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:30 So I'd say that, I mean, do you even have the shirt? That's why I'm wearing the shirt. Yeah, I love that. Oh my God. My well, well worn shirt is explicit. I wear it all the time.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:39 You'd send it, you send me a couple of them. I love them, they're fantastic. Yeah. The name so I love SEO was great. It reminds me of. I love marketing that podcast. Yes. Joe Polish and Dean Jackson. I don't know if you ever listened to that, but. Yeah, was I wonder, Was that the inspiration or did you have some other idea?

Jason Hennessey 00:03:55 You know what I'm like. I followed Joe. I've met Joe a couple of times. Genesis. I mean, what's his company that he has? it's not.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:05 Just out of the another.

Jason Hennessey 00:04:07 He's the.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:07 Genius. Genius? Yes. That's right.

Jason Hennessey 00:04:09 Right. but no, it wasn't about that at all. It's actually like, I, I think I had just, I'm like, you know what I say? I love SEO so often, I'm like, let me just see if the.com was available. And so it wasn't available, but I was able to convince the person that owned it previously to sell it to me at the time.

Jason Hennessey 00:04:26 And so now I just haven't.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:28 I like it, it is interesting. So I've been in a few of those conversations where you buy the domain. Yeah. And it's so funny. I don't know how your negotiation went, but they started really, really high. And I ended up offering like 25 bucks more than, like, it almost, almost always goes this way. Yeah. I gave them a really lowball offer. They give a really high offer. I keep saying no and they're like, okay, sure, I'll let it go for whatever. A little bit more than what you what you originally offered. Totally. Is that how it went or different?

Jason Hennessey 00:04:53 Well, this one wasn't too bad. you know, I think I ended up paying a couple thousand dollars for that one. others like my last name, Hennessy. Com. That one. The opening bid was, like, $500,000.

Tyson Mutrux 00:05:07 Oh my gosh.

Jason Hennessey 00:05:08 Because this was years ago. because they thought that Hennessy the cognac would buy it because it spelled almost the same, but it has an E at the end.

Jason Hennessey 00:05:19 versus not having the E. and so they thought they were sitting on gold, and they were just going to come and offer them millions of dollars for the domain. And so eventually, after years, I'm just like, let me just reach out to them. and so they came in with a price that was like, six figures. I think I negotiated down to like $50,000, and I was able to get Hennessy. Com.

Tyson Mutrux 00:05:42 Nice. That's not a that's not an easy one to get. That's really awesome. No I can't get matrix. Com because my it's like my great, great. Something. Or he's like, he's he. He's an artist. And he's so he's a I wouldn't call him a famous artist, but he's a pretty well-known artist. And so he won't let go of me. Scott drives me nuts. I thought for sure I'd be [e-mail]. Yeah, such. It's such a rare name. It is? Yeah. It's not like Hennessy, but, so you've been it's interesting because you've been with essentially SEO called general SEO, but now I think maybe more digital marketing, which is with AI, is expanded even more.

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:20 It's wild how what you've seen the transition from where you started to now. Yeah. I mean, have you ever thought about how different it is now compared to back then?

Jason Hennessey 00:06:31 Yeah. I mean, the core principles are for the most part, you know, the same. Right? You're, you know, you're trying to write content that satisfies the intent of what people are searching for, right? Whether it's on Google or YouTube or wherever you're releasing your content. Right. But the one thing that I will say is, back when I first got started, it was so much easier, right? Because there wasn't so much competition. And the Google algorithm at the time was not as complicated as it is now. Right. It's gotten way harder, and I think that's a good thing. and so just over the years, you know, as more competition came in and more, you know, as I started to kind of build my agency and I guess master my craft, I guess, then, you know, I think that created a bigger demand for people like me in the market, too.

Jason Hennessey 00:07:29 Right. So I looked at it as like it was it was a good thing that it got more competitive and harder over the years. Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:35 Does Google give you the playbook or do you have to figure it out?

Jason Hennessey 00:07:39 I mean, Google, they will try to steer you in the right direction or sometimes the wrong direction, I guess. but for the most part, it really comes down to practicing. And because I work with so many law firms, I have access to so much data, and we do a lot of experiments. I even have sites that are just truly sites that I just use for testing. And I take some of those sites I leverage, you know, some of the strategies that I want to prove a hypothesis and I do. And then we will incorporate some of the lessons that we've learned into some of our clients strategies as well.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:22 I never thought about doing something like that. That's a really cool idea. Would you recommend that law firms. No they don't. They're not going to have access to as much data as you.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:30 Sure. Would you recommend that they have a separate site that they can play around with like that?

Jason Hennessey 00:08:35 It's not a bad thing. you know, because if it does work right, you can have a second site that might serve as, like a lead generation site for your firm. so, you know, it's certainly not a bad thing. like some of the sites that I've built over the years. one is birth injury lawyer. Com. Right. That's a powerful site that I do a lot of experimentation on as well. And a couple other lead gen sites in Dallas that were like personal injury sites. And then I basically there's a term called rank and rent. Right? So you get it to rank and then you rent it out to a law firm. And so they basically become virtual assets. So there are certain things that you can do to monetize those sites if it's not just for your firm, but, you know, maybe to rent it out to somebody else too.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:22 Is that is that the same concept as the people that will sell, like the one 800 numbers that are really popular?

Jason Hennessey 00:09:27 Similar.

Jason Hennessey 00:09:28 Yeah, I guess because they own the asset and then you're just kind of like renting or leasing that number. So very similar. Right. So if I own a website that's ranking very well on Google and it's driving traffic and driving leads and cases. you, as the owner of the website, can never get fired, right? You know, if anything, like, you just find another tenant, right? That would take over the lease of that site.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:54 So how has the the development of AI changed the way you all have been approaching SEO or digital marketing?

Jason Hennessey 00:10:01 Yeah. So I mean, we've been using like, AI long before it became, like a, a popular trend or term. you know, we were using AI to reverse engineer top three ranking websites, you know, so that we can figure out what was working, what wasn't. But nowadays, now that tools are a lot more accessible. We're using AI in all kinds of different ways. we've got, engineers that are just AI like that actually will go out and create tickets and fix things on websites.

Jason Hennessey 00:10:38 so we've got, you know, that we're also taking websites and translating them into multiple languages using AI. It's a lot different than just using like Google Translate. This is where we actually preserve the entire SEO strategy on on a website, and we translate it. So all of the strategy, all of the links and everything kind of get indexed. And so you have a website that was not getting any Spanish traffic. And all of a sudden there's 4000 pages that we get indexed into Google. And now all of a sudden they've got to go out and hire like intake people. Like to kind of keep up with some of that demand. Right. So there's all kinds of things. And it's just this is the worst that AI will ever be, right? It's only going to continue to get better from here. You know.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:22 You know, someone had told me that their thought is, is that eventually it's just going to be agents going out, searching websites and finding the right. Like, let's say you're looking for an injury attorney, so, you know, hey, find me the best injury attorney for my case and boom, go and find it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:37 So how do you prepare for things like that.

Jason Hennessey 00:11:40 You know, I think, what we're doing is we are just, reverse engineering ChatGPT now or perplexity. Right. Google, AI overviews. So we're just spending a lot of time trying to understand what is feeding, you know, those algorithms so that when people are doing searches or just talking into their phone and asking ChatGPT, who's the best personal injury lawyer in Miami or whatever, that our clients have a better chance of, of ranking, in those algorithms as well. You know.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:14 It's because I feel like Google has such had such a massive lead just because of search and even perplexity. They've got the new comet browser, and I find it really interesting. One of the downsides of that browser. I can go to Google Chrome and I can just type in what I'm looking for and it's I can just type in some keywords, right? I don't have to type in a full sentence, but if I go into comet, I it tries to give me something it thinks I'm, like, actually prompting it in a certain way.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:40 Below that, it might give me some search results, but it doesn't really do the same thing. So it's wild how Google is really trained us to search in a certain way.

Jason Hennessey 00:12:50 Yeah, yeah it is. And believe it or not, like, you know, a lot of people don't like to change, right? You know, so you will continue to have people that just are using Google. Right. And don't even download ChatGPT. Right. You know, but you certainly want to be ahead of the curve and, and be at the forefront of technology for sure.

Tyson Mutrux 00:13:11 Do you feel like I mean, you just. That's a good segue because I wanted to ask you about this because do you feel like you're at the forefront of technology, or do you think that you will? I feel like we're just like even we're even trying to stay ahead of it, but we're like, I feel like we're still behind. So do you feel like you all are staying ahead of the curve as things are changing?

Jason Hennessey 00:13:30 You know, I'm at a point in my career where I try to keep up with with change in technology.

Jason Hennessey 00:13:37 I went out to Stanford. I didn't have to do that. I got an executive MBA recently because that's where a lot of this AI technology is coming from. And so I just went out there and I studied it and I learned about it. So I'm I'm proactively trying to keep up with this. But I'm also I like to call this outsourcing genius, right, where I'll bring in subject matter experts to come in and to teach us things or to, maybe build us technology or build as tools that we can leverage. And the lessons that we glean from these subject matter experts that we bring in, you know, if successful again, will basically leverage it across the board for all of our clients.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:24 I want to I want to change gears a little bit because I want to talk to you about Hennessey Digital because you I mean, you recently fairly recently sold it.

Jason Hennessey 00:14:30 I did.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:31 Yeah. And now you're on the board I am. Yep. Yeah. And so, what's it like selling your baby? Because you you.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:38 That's something you were growing and developing. And you, you put a bunch of time and effort and blood, sweat and tears and all that. Yeah. And a lot of sacrifice. What was it like? I don't know if letting go is the right word, but I mean, since you're letting go.

Jason Hennessey 00:14:51 Yeah. So I guess when you sell a business, it's it's a strategy, right? It just doesn't. In most cases, it doesn't just happen by chance. Right. And so for us, like we were going to take a three year journey to could you run the business a little bit differently when you're prepping to sell. And so we were about eight months into our three year journey when a private equity group came knocking at our door. and it wasn't it didn't seem like it was the right time. but the private equity group, checked what I like to say. Three boxes. And so the three boxes were. where is it going to be a right fit for my clients? Because we've met with other private equity groups where if we were to sold to them, it just wouldn't have been a good solution for our clients.

Jason Hennessey 00:15:43 so that checked that box, is it going to be a right fit for my staff? and so it seemed like it was going to be, you know, a perfect fit for them. And then third box was is it going to be a good solution for what I want in my life where I'm at? And so the beauty about this deal is it not only check the two boxes for my staff and my clients, but for me, like I feel like I've got so much more to give. so when you say, like, you know, just letting go of your baby, like, I'm still the CEO of of Hennessy Digital. so I'm still in control. I am on the board. my my company was always bootstrapped, and so I only had so much budget to bring to life some of the ideas that I've had. Right? And, my COO is like my no person, right? So like, because a lot of times entrepreneurs, they get sidetracked, right? It's like, I love SEO, right? That was a sidetrack, right? Let's build this.

Jason Hennessey 00:16:46 Right. But those become distractions. and so my COO kind of keeps me on track. And so he'll say like, that's a great idea, Jason, but just not right now. Right? Because maybe we don't have the budget to develop this new technology or bring this new idea to life. And so by bringing in private equity, it gave me access to so much more capital and resources. And so I'm excited for where the next five, seven years looks like having financial backing of the private equity group. And so it's just so much fun. It's just a different world that I'm living in right now.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:23 It's awesome because you have you've brought on a lot of genius. I think that's great. A lot of intelligence. That's. Yeah. Is it? Has it changed the way you thought about business in general, where if you had if you were to start up another company today, or if you had the same knowledge that you have today that you were going to and you started again back in oh one.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:41 Yeah. I guess. How would you have designed it differently? How would you have designed the company differently?

Jason Hennessey 00:17:47 so, you know, in the world of, of building a business, like when and if you go to sell, it's all about this thing called EBITDA, right? Yeah. Right. Basically, it's just your profitability. so I think I would have probably just, you know, there comes a point where when you're building a business, you know, it just it's it's just like a lifestyle. Right. In fact, there's probably a lot of people that are watching this podcast or listening to this podcast right now where you're at that stage of business where it is just a lifestyle and that's perfectly acceptable. you know, having a lifestyle business is amazing, right? You could go out and and take vacations with your family. You don't really want to delegate too much or more of kind of in control, right? and so for the first 3 or 4 years of my agency, it was just a lifestyle business.

Jason Hennessey 00:18:33 Right. But then I'm like, you know what? If I really want to take this to the next level, I really need to kind of focus more on growth. And so for the next five years, I'd say I was on growth mode. And so when you're on growth mode, you're not really focused on profitability, right? You're going out and you're hiring people. You're making money. You're you're finding out what is your zone of genius, and how could I focus on that and delegate everything else to other people? and so when I was in growth mode, that's when we really started to kind of scale. You know, I got a coach who helped me go from 5 million to 10 million. He's still my coach now, and he helped us get to now over 20 million. so knowing what your limitations are, right? I thought I was really good at SEO, but I wasn't a good CEO. At least that's what I thought. And it turns out to be true because I had a lot of things to learn there.

Jason Hennessey 00:19:22 and so, you know, but, you know, answer your question. Would I have done anything differently? Probably not. I probably would have not made some of the mistakes that I've made earlier on, which every business person makes mistakes and you learn from them. That's just kind of what gets you to the next level. but I think life is about the journey, right? It's not always the destination. and so you build scars and you learn from your failures, and you just get back up. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it right, you know?

Tyson Mutrux 00:19:58 So as long as you do learn from them, that's that's really that's the key. Yeah. You mentioned mistakes. It's a good transition into something I want to ask you about. What are some mistakes that you see law firm owners making with their websites?

Jason Hennessey 00:20:09 Yeah. well, I think a lot of times people will go to a conference, right? You know, and they get really inspired. well, two things. A lot of people go to conferences and they get really inspired to take a lot of notes.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:23 And Lots and lots of.

Jason Hennessey 00:20:23 Notes. And then they don't go home and take any action. Right. So I think that's one of the biggest mistakes is like go home and just circle 2 or 3 things that you're going to go do, and then just go home and take action, right. I don't think too many people take enough action. the second thing is sometimes you you learn something from a conference and you go home and you just try to implement it, and you might be implementing things wrong. Like, for instance, back in the day, people heard, oh, content is king. You got to be blogging. You got to be right. And so I've seen so many people make mistakes where they just go out and hire somebody to write content on their website, and they're not really managing the process. They're just paying the bill every month. And the person that's writing the content is like totally making the topical authority of the website irrelevant to what they do. Or, they're just linking in properly to certain pages like, I'm not going to bore you with the technical complexity.

Tyson Mutrux 00:21:25 I'm okay with that. That's fine.

Jason Hennessey 00:21:27 Yeah. You know, like, there's so much that you can do wrong. Like if you have too many pages that are optimized for Dallas car accident lawyer. Right. You're cannibalizing things and so like, so if anything, like, it's okay to go out and hire people to do things, but again, outsource this genius and, and bring somebody else in to audit the work of the people. Right. Just to hold somebody else accountable, I'd say.

Tyson Mutrux 00:21:52 Do you have any strong opinions one way or the other on AI generated content? Yeah.

Jason Hennessey 00:21:57 So I think there's a place for AI generated content. When it first came out, I was like, no, nobody should be doing this right. but then Google kind of changed the rules. They went in and they actually changed like some of their terms of service and stuff, because they knew that people were going to be using AI. Right. and so nowadays, like we do use a lot of AI content at Hennessey Digital.

Jason Hennessey 00:22:24 Now, I wouldn't necessarily use AI content for like my most important page on a website, like my car accident lawyer page or my personal injury lawyer page. But where you could use AI content is where we go after keywords that have like zero search volume and zero competition. And so those that are listening are probably like tell more. What do you mean about that? And so what I mean by that is there's a lot of opportunity where people are doing searches on Google, where Google has never really seen those searches before. I can give you an example. I was working with a personal injury lawyer based in Florida. This personal injury lawyer didn't have the budget to compete with the likes of Morgan and Morgan. Right. But they still needed to generate cases, and they needed to make the phone ring. And so we just made him a subject matter expert on all things slip and fall. And so if we published a page on Google optimized for Fort Lauderdale slip and fall lawyer, it's not going to be competitive, right? Just because there's Morgan and Morgan who have invested millions of dollars into the SEO of their website.

Jason Hennessey 00:23:32 So what we did was we're like, okay, what do all the grocery stores, what are all the big box retail stores, right. And we started writing content for did you get injured at Home Depot in Plantation, Florida? Did you slip and fall at Trader Joe's in Coral Gables, Florida? Right. And so by publishing enough of that content, we were able to actually not only make the phone ring, but now they're actually ranking very well in a lot of the ChatGPT searches and things like that. And so he gets multiple cases every month as a result of that strategy. You know.

Tyson Mutrux 00:24:09 Nice. I mean.

Jason Hennessey 00:24:10 It's all.

Tyson Mutrux 00:24:10 AI. I like being outside the box too. I think that's that's pretty cool. Yeah. So, At one point, there was sort of a trend that seemed like where long form content was doing really, really well. Yeah, and I haven't heard a lot about that recently. Is that still the case or is that not the case? Or is there like a limit is like is there amount that's too much.

Jason Hennessey 00:24:30 Yeah. You know that's a that's interesting. So there was a term that was coined and it was called the skyscraper technique. Right. And so the skyscraper technique in the world of SEO is, you know, it's like if you're in New York City and you look up, right, you're like, what is the tallest building in New York City? It's like, oh, the Empire State Building, right? Oh, the World Trade Center. Right. and so that was the thought process with content, right? So if you see somebody ranking on Google for a term and they had 6000 words of content, well, if you want to rank higher, then you just go and write 8000 words of content. Right. And then the next person is like, all right, I'm going to write 10,000, 12,000, right. And so that became this trend. And Google was rewarding that behavior for a while just because you're giving them more food to index and spider. but then it got to the point where, like, if you did a search for, like, blueberry pancake recipe, right, you've got the whole history.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:25 Of.

Jason Hennessey 00:25:26 Blueberries and this and that, right? Just because that was what was working at the time. And then eventually, you know, Google tweaked the algorithm and then they started to penalize websites. That was too long. But I think the the thing is, is like, look at like the top three results for any search term that you want to rank for, study them and just kind of see what's working. Right.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:48 So, it makes me think of, whenever I look for a recipe, it drives me nuts. And I go on there, I click on the website, the link, and then luckily the good ones had like the jump to recipe button. Yes, but otherwise it does have like all of. I wonder if it's from those days. It is just so much content. Yes. So I don't want to know about the history of blueberry pancakes. I want to know about the recipe that you promised me. The search result. That's what I want. That is. That's so funny.

Jason Hennessey 00:26:15 And you got to click through, like, seven ads just to kind of get to the recipe. I agree.

Tyson Mutrux 00:26:19 Oh, the worst websites are the ones where you're scrolling through and it keeps jumping because the video is loading. And it's like when you get the ad, it's just, oh, it just drives me crazy that that's nuts. So true. All right. So I don't know if this question is a good question or bad question, but I've always wondered this. Is there a difference between a blog page content and a page content? Where you got a blog is one more valuable than the other one?

Jason Hennessey 00:26:43 Not necessarily. I mean, it's just kind of interchangeable. It depends on on what you're doing. I like to say that if you have a blog, that should really be your voice. so, like, you know, here's my thoughts about this case or here's, you know, whatever it is, like, here's the things that we're doing in the community, right? I think you know that.

Jason Hennessey 00:27:08 That's good. I think everything else should be off of the route itself. so, like your practice or your pages, right? Should be off your route. That shouldn't be in a blog subfolder. FAQs. Right. Sometimes people will like Nestle FAQs under their blog, which it's a fine strategy. I like to Nestle those under, like, something called FAQs. Right. Just so that it's a little bit more specific. So it's really a preference, I guess, but once you kind of set it up from the beginning, you kind of have to go with what you chose. Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:27:42 is there a structure that works better than others in what you've found?

Jason Hennessey 00:27:45 Not necessarily. I mean, you might have, like, if you have a blog. sometimes when you write content and it's about Dallas car accident. Like, you know, like sometimes because you have in a blog. So subfolder Google won't penalize you for, having a cannibalization, right? Because they know that that's not as important as what you have.

Jason Hennessey 00:28:15 Closer to the root of the domain. so I wouldn't say that, you know. One's better than the other. I think where people sometimes will make mistakes as if they just use the general settings within WordPress when you get it, and it has like numbers in the URL, or, you know, the URLs are all choppy and there's, you know, different parameters that shouldn't be in there. I just think the URL should be short and clean.

Tyson Mutrux 00:28:40 Yeah. So in the URL, just make sure I make sure you understand this. Yeah. So let's say it starts with the numbers. So it creates you know Hennessey Digital. You know.com/and then a bunch of numbers. Yeah. Would you change that to let's say the articles about should you use AI to create content. Yeah. So would you, you would change that URL to match whatever the title is.

Jason Hennessey 00:29:01 Yeah. So in that case, if that's like a question. Right. That would be basically nestled under, I'd have a link at the top of the website that says FAQs, right? You click on FAQs and it would be Hennessy.

Jason Hennessey 00:29:15 X forward slash. Hyphen AI hyphen B hyphen. Right. You know, using all of the words and then ending it with a trailing slash. Yes.

Tyson Mutrux 00:29:26 All right. So if you were to look at just your average site, someone that's not using a company to help with your SEO. Yeah. You're just looking at it. How often? So it's let's say it's a DIY or someone that's just, you know, whenever they can, they do something with their site on average. If you just go to that site and you start tweaking little things. How much how much improvement could you actually make. Just right off the bat because they've made so many mistakes with it.

Jason Hennessey 00:29:54 So it just depends. Right. So if the site is relatively new and hasn't been around for a while and nobody has ever really linked to it, I can go in and make all the best practice optimizations to the website itself, and it's probably not going to, you know, make the site perform that much better. Right.

Jason Hennessey 00:30:16 if a website has been around for years and somebody has just neglected the technical components of a website, I can come in and I could do a lot of damage and really make the site perform a lot better. Right. By going in and just implementing best practices. Right. So what really matters is, you know, the, the, the power or the engine of the site. And that comes through years and years of people linking back to it. So, that's basically I guess, the best way to kind of phrase that.

Tyson Mutrux 00:30:49 Are there any quick wins that people get when it comes to the backlinks that they're not thinking of?

Jason Hennessey 00:30:55 yeah. there's a lot of things. Like, for one, sometimes people change their URL. and they either they don't know that they've changed it incorrectly, or the previous agency just made a change. So like, for example, like there is a difference between a WW domain versus somebody that chooses to not use the W, right? There's a difference between somebody that has Https in their URL versus people that don't have Https.

Jason Hennessey 00:31:27 Right. And so what happens is because it's been changed so many times over the years, sometimes like the domain will go from like HTTP without the s right WW w. And then it gets redirected to the to the non WW which then like so what happens is it's creating all of these redirect chains. And it's so easy to fix that. And what happens is when a domain gets redirected like that you lose about 10% of the link equity each time it gets redirected, right? Yeah. So sometimes when I come in, I audit a website, I'm like, oh my God. We call them hops, right? There's like four hops happening. So like you're already diluting like 40% of the link equity that's coming into the website. So let's go in and let's fix this right. And then you know, a lot of times you'll see like a nice lift as a result of that.

Tyson Mutrux 00:32:19 Is that fixed done. How does that I wonder. Like where is the fix done. Is it done at the site, your site, or is it done at their site?

Jason Hennessey 00:32:28 No, it's it's done.

Jason Hennessey 00:32:29 it's done at your site. Right. So these are these are links. This is what we would call as the canonical version of your URL. So you're basically it's like when people go to let's just say Hennessey. Com if they type in W.W. Hennessey. Com I don't use the w WW right. So it gets redirected to the WW w you see what I'm saying.

Tyson Mutrux 00:32:51 Yeah it's interesting now. Yep.

Jason Hennessey 00:32:52 And then but I might have links coming into the website from my Yahoo or whatever. Right. A lot of times like I see stuff like happen where like for whatever reason. Like for years and years and years, they've used the WWE. And then they pay somebody to redesign their website and they just elect to use the non WWE. And now they just diluted like 10% of all of their equity. And so they've got to go to like all of their profiles like their Facebook their LinkedIn their AVO. Right. And actually change the links so that you get rid of that hub. It'll still get there anyway.

Jason Hennessey 00:33:23 And if you're okay with the the loss of link equity, that's fine. But as an SEO, I like to preserve all of that. and so it might be easier just to revert it and then just go back to the version that it used to be.

Tyson Mutrux 00:33:36 Well, I think that part alone is probably worth the value of listening to this, because it's probably people, a lot of people probably missing that part.

Jason Hennessey 00:33:43 Of course they do. Like they don't study this stuff. Right? This is like I'm speaking of foreign language, but, you know, sometimes it's it's the language that Google speaks, you know.

Tyson Mutrux 00:33:53 Yeah. That's that's incredible. is there a way of getting backlinks faster than just requesting it from directly from the site owner.

Jason Hennessey 00:34:06 yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of strategies to, to get backlinks. you know, if you're first getting started, you know, I like to say you want to get all of the foundational links. what do I mean by foundational links? You know, your Better Business Bureau link, your Chamber of Commerce link, you know, setting up a LinkedIn profile, setting up a base rate, all the foundation stuff.

Jason Hennessey 00:34:30 In fact, I wrote a book called Law Firm SEO. where if anybody's listening to this podcast and you've gotten this far, right, I think we're about 40 minutes into it now. I'd be happy to send you a free copy, so just send me an email. Jason at Hennessy Comm, and I'll get you a free copy. and the reason why I say that is because in the book, I spent so much time reverse engineering link strategies for law firms that I've got a whole chapter dedicated to the foundational links that every law firm should have. And so I would start there.

Tyson Mutrux 00:35:00 Do you have a landing page for that? Because we can put it in the show notes, too.

Jason Hennessey 00:35:03 I think so. Yeah. So, I, I don't know it off the time.

Tyson Mutrux 00:35:09 We can get it afterwards.

Jason Hennessey 00:35:10 But we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah. Okay.

Tyson Mutrux 00:35:13 Yeah. That's that's good. Because yeah, that's one of those things where I think, you know, I mean, is everyone going to get something out of it? No.

Tyson Mutrux 00:35:18 Yeah. I think most people should probably hire a company like you. And I think you have. And but there's, there's plenty of people that try to do that stuff on their own.

Jason Hennessey 00:35:25 That's right.

Tyson Mutrux 00:35:26 have you seen something I was looking for? Whenever I was was really catching steam. I was like, okay, is there a site that will help me get backlinks like an AI? I think it'd be amazing. I've seen a few that have, like, bad links.

Jason Hennessey 00:35:39 You said.

Tyson Mutrux 00:35:40 A backlink. Oh, yeah. No, no, no, I may have said bad sites like that.

Jason Hennessey 00:35:44 That's called negative.

Tyson Mutrux 00:35:44 Yeah. No. Yeah, yeah. Backlinks, backlinks. Okay. have you seen any AI, websites that help get good backlinks? Thanks.

Jason Hennessey 00:35:54 you know, I think a lot of people are leveraging AI now. just to do quicker outreach. Right. To have better engagement with site owners and to negotiate better rates. To try to, you know, because they say that, you know, in Google, you're not supposed to pay for links, right? But I think every link that you get is kind of somewhat of a form of payment.

Jason Hennessey 00:36:15 Right. When you advertise on avo, you're paying avo, right? You're paying for the link. Right? so there's a whole strategy around, of, of reaching out and building relationships with different bloggers and maybe mommy bloggers, or just setting up legal directories and stuff like that. But I haven't really seen anything that will just automatically like using AI get you like good links. You know, usually the good links that are hard to get are earned, you know, mostly through PR, right? Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:36:49 For a short time at least. I don't know if it's still a thing. posting on Reddit was was something that was actually pretty decent. Sure. And is that still a good strategy or is that something that old news?

Jason Hennessey 00:37:00 It is. So like I always like to say this. Like if you are doing a search for some of the keywords that you think your clients are searching for. So in my case, you know, maybe it's, law firm, SEO agency, right? You know, that would be a term that would be important to me.

Jason Hennessey 00:37:19 I look at, like the top 20 results. and so if there's a Reddit section that's in the SERPs and it talks about like, who's the best agency for law firms, I might go and comment in there and leave a link back to me. Right. I will also study the top 2030 results. And if there's like a directory that's nestled in there, I'll make sure that I'm advertising on that directory. If there is a list of the top 20 SEO companies for lawyers, I might reach out to the person that owns that blog to see what can I do to maybe also get added to that. Right. So success leaves clues. And so if you're listening to this, go do a search for what is important to you. Look at the first 2 or 3 pages of Google and anywhere especially more important for the first page of Google, right? Or the top three results, because you're probably will get business as a result of and it changes. But if, let's just say fine law is ranking number two for your term, right? There's probably a good reason to basically advertise with fine law, because, you know, not only will you get the link, but you might also get some business and phone calls as a result of it in that case, right? But it's different for every different keyword in every industry.

Jason Hennessey 00:38:34 You know.

Tyson Mutrux 00:38:35 Something that is frustrated me for years is understanding the interplay between social media and SEO and the overall strategy. So how how does how does social media affect SEO if it does at all?

Jason Hennessey 00:38:47 It used to be like it really didn't have much impact. it was kind of like church and state, I guess, if you will. But nowadays, you know, Google is indexing a lot of, search results for social media, too. so it just comes down to, you know, you want to kind of be active on as many of the platforms as you can. There's different audiences. And in each of the platforms, if you're just going to set it up to be setting it up, you know, probably doesn't make too much sense. But, it might make sense to maybe bring in, like, an intern that, you know, is going to run your social media for you, and you're going to schedule a day like today, right, where you record a bunch of content and you're going to kind of leverage that same content, all the different social platforms, right? Hopefully you're doing it to kind of build a personal brand over time, and you're not just doing it just to leverage it for SEO, you know,

Tyson Mutrux 00:39:47 With that when it comes to videos, is it better to upload natively to the site or use something like YouTube and use the link embed it.

Jason Hennessey 00:39:57 So I think that's, something that I, I'm not a fan of is when people take a video they uploaded to YouTube and then they embed the YouTube video embed to their website. a lot of people do that, and I can see why it's because. Okay, great. I've got the video here and it's easy. Just take it. But what happens is, is like you're working so hard to get people to your website. and so you might have spent $250 for somebody to come to your website just with like a paid ad or something. Right. And so now they're on your website, they go to click your video, they accidentally click it, you know, twice. And now they're over on YouTube land. And next thing you know, they're watching the new Taylor Swift music videos. Right. and so you've worked so hard to get them there. So I don't like to use YouTube embeds on websites. I certainly want to post the video on YouTube too. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying don't post it there, but use a service like Wistia or Vimeo.

Jason Hennessey 00:40:56 There's other places that you can upload your content where when they come to the website, it'll stay native to it and there's no way to exit off of the website if you make the video bigger or smaller.

Tyson Mutrux 00:41:08 Oh, that's that's I didn't realize that was one of the benefits of using Vimeo. That's or Wistia. That's nice. Yeah. Is there a certain structure of a post or a page that you should follow? and because I've seen where, some people have talked about, okay, you should, you know, have this as the, as, like, basic question as the title or whatever the title should be and then have it structured a certain way, and then maybe you have certain sources underneath that. Is there a certain way of structuring it nowadays that makes the most sense? That might get you the best results?

Jason Hennessey 00:41:41 Yeah. So, the answer is yes. you know, usually you want to find a term that is going to be the main topic for this particular page. so I don't know.

Jason Hennessey 00:41:58 Let's just use an example. Seattle criminal defense lawyer. Right. so that's going to be your Seattle criminal defense lawyer page. So that's the page that you want to nominate for this keyword. You don't want to have any other content on your website that is optimized for Seattle criminal defense lawyer because then it cannibalize it. So then from there, you know, a lot of times like the first I don't know, like I guess let's just call it above the fold. That's where you really want to kind of capture people's attention, right? A lot of times people will just like hire somebody to write content and they talk about the statistics of, you know, DUIs or criminal defense, right? Nobody wants to read about that, right? I mean, somebody came to your website, right, because they're in trouble. It might be like one of the hardest parts of their life right now. So like, start with like, some empathy, right? Like, if you're on this page, there's probably a good chance that you are, you know, looking for somebody to get you out of, you know, an unfortunate situation.

Jason Hennessey 00:42:58 Right. Then I would even, maybe just put a video there above the fold, too, because what people don't realize is that when people are googling things like Google is measuring the time in which people click over from Google onto a website, and so they call this pogo sticking. Right. So if they're on your website and they're only there for like six seconds and they go back, that's sending a signal to Google that your site didn't satisfy the intent of that search. So if you have a video there, that's one way to kind of keep people sticky. Right. It keeps them on the page a little bit longer. But the other side is it's also like opening up the people to your personality too. Right. Like, people like to do business with those that they like and trust. Right. And so that's a good way for you to kind of capture their attention and spend 40s with them. Not longer. They're not going to watch an eight minute video, but maybe like a minute long video.

Jason Hennessey 00:43:50 And then from there then you want to, you know, structure the content so that you would like a newspaper, right? You've got your, your heading tags. Right. So you have your H1 tag. Then you have your heading tag two heading tag three. and then from there you know there is a science to it. Again, go look at the sites that are ranking already and then, you know, then in this case you could use ChatGPT, right? You can say, hey, how could I make my site similar to this, but different. Like what do you recommend that would give me the greatest chance of actually ranking, right? So leverage tools. If you don't have someone like me that's been studying it for so long.

Tyson Mutrux 00:44:29 All right. So I'm sure there's probably a lot of people listening or watching. They're like, oh no, I've got all this content. It's, you know, Scranton personal injury attorney. It's a bunch of pages and thinking, oh, I need to go delete all this content.

Tyson Mutrux 00:44:42 Yeah. What is. If they do have a bunch of those pages, is it does it make sense to leave the most the, well, the best performing page and delete the rest? Or is there a how like because that seems risky.

Jason Hennessey 00:44:54 Yeah. You're going into surgery, right? You're actually bringing your website into like the operating room, right. and, you know, you can kill the patient if you do it incorrectly. So if you don't have the core competency or competency or expertise to do that yourself, if it's not a language that you speak, go out and find somebody to kind of walk you through that. Because if you do kill your website, it's very hard. Like Google is not as forgiving. Like it would take months to kind of recover in some cases. just because like, that's just the way it works, right? you accidentally delete, I don't know, 60 pages. Right? Because you think it's the best thing to do. But for whatever reason, like Google was favoring this other page instead.

Jason Hennessey 00:45:42 And so anyway. So I would definitely consult with somebody that can maybe help you with that process for sure.

Tyson Mutrux 00:45:48 You know, what I find interesting about you is that I want to get into your mindset a little bit, because I've talked to a lot of SEOs over the years, and they a lot of them are are hesitant to give a lot of the information you just gave you. They're really resistant to it. or sometimes they're in the same position as you were. They run the company, but they don't have the expertise. So they're not they're not able to really.

Jason Hennessey 00:46:14 Talk.

Tyson Mutrux 00:46:14 Like that and talk like that. And I, I'm like, where does that mindset come from? Why are you so willing to talk about it?

Jason Hennessey 00:46:19 I live in a world of abundance, I guess. Right. and that was the reason why I wrote my book, Law Firm SEO was because I got so sick and tired of people getting taken advantage of. Right? I mean, it's it's the truth. Like, we'll just tell it as it is.

Jason Hennessey 00:46:35 You know, there's so many people that will reach out to an attorney, and they'll get them to agree to give them 3000 or $5000 a month. Right. and, you know, either they're taking advantage of them, right, because the lawyer doesn't speak that language or they're just incompetent, and they don't even realize that, that they don't have the skills to be able to get that website ranking right. So it's kind of like experimental together, I guess, and they're just not being truthful about it. So I get so tired of kind of getting lumped into those buckets because I could I mean, I could have like a client that loves me, that introduces me to like somebody and they'll still be suspicious, you know, just because it's the industry that I'm in. and so I get so tired of that. I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to, like, spend the next two years and I'm just going to write a book that educates and empowers lawyers to make the best decision for their firm.

Jason Hennessey 00:47:31 And I want to write it in such a way that they don't need me. Like if you read the book. Like, you can go out and you can do this on your own. Right. And so I did it, just because, like, I get, I get, I don't know, pride or I get benefit by seeing others succeed regardless of if it's hiring my agency or not. so in fact, I would run Facebook campaigns like I just mentioned on this show. Like, if you're watching this video, you know, I'll send you a book for free, right? You know, there's probably a lot of people in listening to this that probably won't hire me, and that's perfectly fine, right? But, you know, if I give the book away and and they read it and they can help feed their family and put their kids through college as a result of just the tips that I give. Hey, like, that's the world I want to live in. That's awesome. Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:48:25 Where does that mindset come from? Like where? Like the abundance mindset that you that you that you're talking talked about. You have. Because I think that's a great philosophy that we do the same thing with Maxwell. That's why we just like, listen, we'll show you everything. Let's. I think it's we it's kind of like the rising tides. But I wonder where where your mindset comes from.

Jason Hennessey 00:48:43 I guess, it probably just comes from upbringing, you know? I mean, like being raised, right? humble beginnings. Right. So, knowing how hard it is to kind of work to get something, you know, a world of gratitude. So I think when you kind of, when you walk around with that type of energy, it just becomes part of your DNA, I guess. Yeah. You know.

Tyson Mutrux 00:49:13 Help me understand something. I'm gonna change gears a little bit. Something is. I mean, I get because we talked we talked about a lot of companies in the. I mean, we've been doing this since 2016.

Tyson Mutrux 00:49:22 So like a lot of SEO companies, a lot of digital marketing companies. And I'll get this scenario. I can't tell you how many times someone will come to me, let's say, you know Jim. It's not Jim Hacking. I'm just saying, Jim, you know Jim. Just random random name of my picks. So let's say a Jim comes to me and says, hey, I just went with SEO company A, been with them a year or two and get I'm not getting any results. Yeah. And then they'll go over to SEO company B and they'll get results almost instantly. And to me that makes no sense because I feel like there are certain principles that most of you probably apply. And I there's people like you that you get create really creative and you do beta testing and things where. But I can't imagine it's that, you know, that that's making all the difference. So help me understand how that works, because to me, I'm like, wow, that's weird. How you could go to SEO company and get nothing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:50:10 SEO B almost gets instant results, so help me understand that.

Jason Hennessey 00:50:15 So, you know, a lot a lot of variables there. but I will say that, you know, sometimes it comes down to just mismanaging expectations from the start, right? So maybe company A, you know, says, hey, we can get your ranking and it's $2,000 per month, when realistically that's not the proper budget, right? So it could be a lot of mismanagement of expectations. The other thing, it could be that they're just not tracking things properly too. Right. Which is easy to do. the other thing is that, you know, maybe, they are just not competent enough to kind of get the results right. so company B comes in, and if it's a good company, a good agency, maybe they make some of those tweaks that I talked about with just the redirects of. Right. There's a lot of things that you can do if a site's been active for ten years. Like I said, a lot of times you can just come in and you just audit the website and you fix like you spend 30 days, 45 days just fixing the the best practice principles of SEO for the website.

Jason Hennessey 00:51:21 And you might see like a nice left. Right. Other times it just might be making some tweaks to like their Google local listing, right where you kind of go in and it's like, oh, you've got the wrong category, or you're not leveraging this, or you need to go and upload a couple more photos here. Or, you know, sometimes it just might be something that could push the needle a little bit faster where the other company might have been blinded by that. so I think, you know, that that could be circumstances, you know, there.

Tyson Mutrux 00:51:53 What's the topic that divides SEOs the most? Like what is the thing where you all disagree? There's like so much disagreement, amongst all the SEO companies.

Jason Hennessey 00:52:06 I would say, disagreement. You know, SEO is like an art form, right? So, like, if you give me a paint brush and a blank canvas, like, my art is going to be a lot different than some of my competitors, right? I think we'll probably all paint a nice picture and maybe sell our picture for $5,000 each.

Jason Hennessey 00:52:27 Right. so I think, you know, sometimes, you know, the way in which you kind of structure a website might be, different, right? Because it's just a different art form of doing things. but I think, you know, the one thing that I think we all agree upon is that links are the currency on the web. Right. And so, like, you know, I want to try to get my clients good links and my competitors reverse engineering the links that I get, and they're going out and getting their clients those links. and so at the end of the day, it's just like a battle of, of links, you know? Really.

Tyson Mutrux 00:53:02 So how do you win that battle? Because that we're gonna get it back into the backlinks because that is something that it does. It's maybe it's just time and maybe it just takes more time because you do have some websites where they've got so many tens of thousands of links. And so you're trying to compete with those. And is it just a matter of time? Is that what it is?

Jason Hennessey 00:53:21 It's a matter of time and strategy.

Jason Hennessey 00:53:24 so, like, it's not a matter of, like, getting the most links. You know, sometimes if you get a link from the proper website, that's relevant to what you do. That link could be way better than 300 links, right? so, like when I'm reverse engineering link strategies for some of my clients, you know, I'm always looking at like, what? What are the top ranking websites in some of the, the toughest markets. Like what links do they have? Right. So I spent a lot of time reverse engineering like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. And I do that not just because, like I've got clients in those markets. I do it just because I'm looking for the insights. and so I recently discovered that some people were getting links from like Google and Apple and I'm like, how the heck did a law firm get a link from Google and Apple and its their top two links, right? And I'm like, man, this is gold. So I reverse engineered it, figured it out that the way in which they got a link from Google and Apple was they had an app.

Jason Hennessey 00:54:31 Right. And so once you have an app, right, that's part of the process. Okay, great. So you have an app, you got to submit the app to Google and, and and Apple. but then you have to try to get that app indexed. And so how do you get that app indexed. And so the secret that I learned, I'm giving some.

Tyson Mutrux 00:54:49 Of this gold right here.

Jason Hennessey 00:54:51 Is to do a couple of things. Right. So in the footer of your website say download our app. Right. And who cares if anybody ever uses the app. This is just a link building strategy here. Right. And so now you have links from your home page which you know is going to get crawled and indexed. And so those links are going to follow over, which creates a better chance of your two links getting indexed. also from the app itself. Right. So when they go to your app page on Android or on Apple, you know you want to link to the privacy policy of your website, right? Because that's the link that they see.

Jason Hennessey 00:55:27 This is like a secret here. So they link right from the privacy policy. And then from there write a press release on like a site like PR Newswire, and then link both to your website and the app pages Android and Apple. And then maybe post about it on LinkedIn too. Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:55:43 Jason just made you a lot of money.

Jason Hennessey 00:55:45 Those are.

Tyson Mutrux 00:55:46 Great links. Send the check. or or higher. Hennessey digital. There you go. That is. That's awesome. Hennessy. Com, That Hennessy digital. What are all the services that you all offer? I mean, you obviously have the SEO, but it's it's Hennessy Digital, maybe for a reason. So what is everything that you do?

Jason Hennessey 00:56:04 So I'd say like our core competency is, has been and will always be SEO. Right. I think that's really what, where world class at? but we've gotten really good at PPC over the years. just when you have clients and you're spending millions of dollars per month, you know, you're learning very valuable lessons, you know? so because we work with so many lawyers, it's trial and error, right? The client number one, we had to, like, do test and learn from those mistakes, right.

Jason Hennessey 00:56:37 So that client, four years later doesn't have to make the same mistakes that we made with client number one, right? So it's kind of like an instant head start. Yeah. Whether it's putting in negative keywords or different strategies that work better. so PPC is also something that we do. We build websites, we design websites and we do a little bit of paid social. but that's about it. You know, we don't really do too much more than that.

Tyson Mutrux 00:57:07 Is there a mix, a successful mix of SEO, PPC, and maybe Facebook ads or social media ads. Is there like a mix that makes sense?

Jason Hennessey 00:57:17 There is, you know. There are different channels. You know, SEO is going to be the one that, that you own, right? so, like it's built upon your website that's an asset to you year after year as you're making investments, it'll continue to pay dividends for you. PPC, there's a law firm, that was trying to sell to one of my clients. And so this law firm was built just on a PPC campaign.

Jason Hennessey 00:57:49 And so they spent probably like $250,000 per month on PPC. And that was kind of like the whole law firm, right? It was just that was it. There wasn't an SEO strategy, there wasn't a nice website. And so when this law firm asked me, like, my opinion, should I buy this firm? I'm like, all you're buying is their PPC strategy.

Tyson Mutrux 00:58:11 Their PPC strategy.

Jason Hennessey 00:58:12 You know, I mean, why are you going to pay like a multiple of EBITDA for like just a PPC strategy, right. So like but don't get me wrong. Like if the PPC channel is working like continue to invest in that channel, right. And same thing with Facebook and Meta. Right. If if you're running campaigns and you're having success with it, can you continue to invest in that? But the one asset that you own right, which will be is your SEO strategy.

Tyson Mutrux 00:58:38 I don't know if you have an answer to this or not, but I am wondering what is the way forward when it comes to you.

Tyson Mutrux 00:58:44 You have all the LMS popped up and let's just let's focus on Gemini because I, I'm really wondering, I know that they've added the new AI tab where you can get an AI overview or whatever they call it, but it makes me wonder, okay, what's the future of reviews? What's the future of the maps? Like who? The three pack? What's the future of ads? Do? I mean, do you know the way forward yet? Is have they given you any sort of.

Jason Hennessey 00:59:09 You know, I think, you know, at the end of the day, right? You know, Google makes most of its money by serving up ads. Right. So, so I'd imagine that, you know, we'll get accustomed to using Google the same way that we've always used Google. I think the real estate will change a little bit. they might start to blend in, some of the local listings within some of the AI overviews which will have ads in there. so I think Google will continue to make sure that they're monetizing the traffic.

Jason Hennessey 00:59:46 but, you know, nobody knows or can foresee the future of like what's going to happen with Google. I think you just have to kind of keep up with it, adapt to the change. and be the first to reverse engineer. You know what? What's working? What is the new Google? Right.

Tyson Mutrux 01:00:05 It definitely makes me wonder though, because the about like the origins of Google where they had they had hit that the decision point. Okay. Do we charge for this service or do we do we do ads? And it does make me wonder if they're going to start to shift away from ads and more. You pay for the service. How would you do with like ChatGPT? It definitely makes me wonder that if if that's what's coming.

Jason Hennessey 01:00:29 Could be. I mean, that seems to be the model for ChatGPT right now. Like how many people are spending $20 or $200 per month? Right. And I think that's probably the best investment that I make all month long.

Tyson Mutrux 01:00:41 Absolutely. Right.

Jason Hennessey 01:00:42 You know, like I think I posted, like, how much would you be willing to pay, right, for ChatGPT if they increase the price, you know, and.

Tyson Mutrux 01:00:51 They haven't hit the limit.

Jason Hennessey 01:00:51 Yet. That's what I'm saying. You know, like $20 is is a joke, right? I might pay $1,000 a month. Don't let them hear that. Right. But that's how powerful it is.

Tyson Mutrux 01:01:01 I believe that's part of the decision. Yeah.

Jason Hennessey 01:01:03 So, no, I don't I don't know. I don't know if Google is going to change their business model. But maybe, you know, you never know.

Tyson Mutrux 01:01:14 All right. So I'm going to ask you something. I wouldn't ask most SEO people, but I'm going to ask you because I feel like you you have fun with it. Yeah. Do you practice what you preach when it comes to your site? I do wonder who does your SEO.

Jason Hennessey 01:01:28 Yeah, so I neglected my own SEO for years, as most people do, right? You know, because you're so busy, like working on client sites, right? At least that's the excuse that most people use. And it was partially true. but then I'm like, you know what? Like, I got to take my own SEO seriously.

Jason Hennessey 01:01:45 So about maybe, like two and a half years ago, I got laser focused. And so I developed the actual SEO strategy on our website. and so I did just what I would do with our clients. Right. We built out a content strategy, I recorded videos, we built links to the website. I probably spend seven, $8,000 a month just on links to Hennessy. Wow. just so that, you know, when you're doing searches, that you you find us, whether you're searching for law firm SEO or law firm PPC keywords like that, because my competitors are, you know, paying for a lot of that traffic, you know, with PPC. And the reason why I wrote my book and I called it Law firm SEO, was just because, like, I wanted to have a knowledge panel there. So if you were to Google law firm SEO right now, like there's actually like a big red photo of my book, right, with people that are actually leaving reviews. And meanwhile my competitors are paying like $67 a click.

Jason Hennessey 01:02:47 Also, I not only I built links to the Amazon page. Oh, nice. Right. So like now I have the Amazon page ranking. I've got Hennessy comm ranking. I also have Jason Hennessy ranking. I write for National Law Review, and I'll optimize an article there so that I have a chance of ranking for that, right? So I try to like leverage every piece of real estate that I can. you know, when people do that search, it might rank on Target.com or Barnes and Noble to you know what I mean? So like, it's it's just it was just a strategy and it worked.

Tyson Mutrux 01:03:21 All right. So before we wrap up, I do want to hear about your your health journey because you look. You look great. You look fantastic. You said you you actually said it's you know, it's part of the journey. And I want to hear about the the health part of it.

Jason Hennessey 01:03:31 Yeah. So for years and years and years I was chasing wealth, neglecting my health.

Jason Hennessey 01:03:39 and so, you know, I got to the point where, like, I didn't even recognize myself in the, in the mirror. And so, and so I'm like, you know what? I got to change this, right? And, and actually, I think it wasn't just that I got to change this. I went to the doctor. and so the doctors, like, I've got, I got good news and bad news for you. He goes, you know, the bad news is that you're pre-diabetic, right? Your A1, C is really high. And it's either you're going to have to take medication your whole life, or you're just going to have to, like, lose £50. Right. Easier said than done. Sure. Right. And so but when I go in on something, I'm all in. And so I'm like, all right. You know, I was always an athlete in high school. I kind of didn't feel like myself anyway. I kind of just let myself go.

Jason Hennessey 01:04:30 And so I'm like, you know what? I'm all in. I'm going to just kind of focus on my health. And so, you know, change my diet, change my extra exercise. And so it just kind of went on a journey and, you know, and then it becomes motivational. Right. You like lose £3. You're like yes. Right. You lose £5. You're like yes right. And eventually you look at yourself in the mirror and you see somebody completely different again. Right. Somebody that you're proud of. And so yeah, I think I've lost like, I don't know, like £70 over the past like three years. Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 01:04:59 So what's cool is that you've got some kiddos and they get to see it too. And to see like, oh, like dad. Look what dad did. I think that that's awesome.

Jason Hennessey 01:05:07 Yeah. So now it's balance between health and wealth, right. You know. So.

Tyson Mutrux 01:05:12 All right, so last question and I could talk to you a long time because it's just I enjoy it.

Tyson Mutrux 01:05:17 But the all good things must come to an end. Yeah. And I do want to feel like the earth is like moving under our feet so much with technology and digital marketing in general. So I wonder if you have any, any words of wisdom for all of us law firm owners going forward as things continue to change and they will continue to change even more. So I wouldn't have any words of wisdom for us.

Jason Hennessey 01:05:40 I think, you know, just continuously be a student, right? a student of life, right? and so change is going to happen, right? You're going to either embrace it or you're going to kind of, like, neglect it. and so a lot of people just they don't they don't keep up with with change. And so, you know, learn a little bit about everything, right. Just become a novice. You don't want to become an expert in anything like become an expert in the law. Right. That's kind of what where you feed your family. Right.

Jason Hennessey 01:06:14 But gain enough insights that you can actually make good decisions on behalf of, of your, your firms, whether it's hiring the right people, engaging the right agency, paying for the right tools, knowing when, you know, people or, you know, are being a little dubious, you know, in the world because there's a lot of that to.

Tyson Mutrux 01:06:38 A lot of experts these days.

Jason Hennessey 01:06:39 so many. Right. and so just kind of educate and empower yourself. and, and I think you might find other passions. Right? You, you might get really good at, at, at leveraging AI. Right. but, you know, just I would just embrace the change. And the most important thing is just to take action. Like like we talked about earlier. You know, you can create a future that wasn't going to exist if you take action. Yeah. In fact, this podcast wouldn't have existed. Right? Because I think I registered as just a person that was coming to the conference.

Jason Hennessey 01:07:17 Somebody seen that I registered you took action, reached out to me. Hey, would you like to be on the podcast? I said yes, right. And so you created a future that wouldn't have existed if you didn't take action, right?

Tyson Mutrux 01:07:27 So, sure. Yeah, we thought we saw it as, like, instantly. Okay, let's let's interview. I love it I'd love to have them on. So it's something we we wanted to have you on for a while, so I'm honored.

Jason Hennessey 01:07:35 Yeah. I appreciate it so much.

Tyson Mutrux 01:07:37 Jason Hennessy, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate.

Jason Hennessey 01:07:39 It. Thank you. Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 01:07:41 Nice.

Jason Hennessey 01:07:42 Dude, that was good. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Tyson Mutrux 01:07:45 The fun. I really do mean it's one of those things where, like, you, you are so open, like your posts or. I love your Facebook post too, because there some of them are so long, I'm like, okay, I'm.