How a $5,000 Website Led to an SEO Career

Jason got into SEO like most people who stumble upon digital marketing. It started as a need. Back then, SEO wasn't really a main topic that a lot of people spoke about. "It was kind of like black magic. If you knew how to do SEO, you were like a ninja."

At the time Jason had just gotten out of the Air Force. He served his country for about four years. He was going to college, studying for the LSAT, planning to go to law school. He had a side hustle DJing weddings and parties.

He paid a developer $5,000 to develop a website called Vegas Wedding Mall because the thought process was if people were Googling wedding venues or wedding DJs, he wanted to be able to rank on Yahoo and Google at the time.

The developer spent about two months developing it. Then once he was done, there was nobody coming to the website. Jason called him up. "I think this site is broken because nobody's coming to it."

The developer said, "No, that's this thing called SEO. I don't know how to do it."

At that point Jason thought, okay, I'm going to have to teach myself this stuff. That was the genesis of how he got into it.

One Presentation Changed Everything

After building that wedding directory, it went from Vegas Wedding Mall to Seattle Wedding Mall to Los Angeles Wedding Mall. He eventually built all these directories and ended up selling that.

In 2008, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia and partnered with Brad Fallon who had a company called StomperNet, one of the first platforms that taught SEO to business owners.

While Jason was in Atlanta, Brad got asked to speak at a DUI lawyer mastermind. It was 50 DUI lawyers that got together once a year. They brought in expert speakers.

Brad said, "Hey Jason, you know way more about this SEO stuff than I do. Why don't I come introduce you and then you could talk a little bit about SEO?"

Jason had 24 hours to put together a deck. He knew nothing about legal marketing at the time. He got up on stage, gave a presentation, was very transparent.

Out of the 50 lawyers, seven approached him and said that was awesome. "I'm paying my SEO guy $6,000 per month and he's not doing any of this stuff. Do you do this from a consulting basis?"

Jason said not really, but give me your card. He ended up leaving there with seven business cards that turned into about $30,000 per month in recurring revenue.

"Just one 45 minute presentation that I got asked to do one night before was the genesis of my first agency."

The Lamborghini vs Walmart Agency Model

Jason's first agency was called EverSpark Interactive. He had three other business partners at the time. They eventually bought one out, then it was just him and one other business partner. They built it up to about $3.5 million in top line revenue.

Then it got to the point where they had two different owners that wanted to take the agency in different directions. His partner ended up buying out Jason's interest after about eight years.

Fast forward to 2015. They moved out west to California. Jason's young son was pursuing an acting career in Hollywood. He had just exited his first agency to his partner. That business continued and is still around today run by another friend of his.

He got bored. Played tennis every single day. Then his wife was like, "Are you ever going to get back to work again?"

So he started Hennessy Digital, which has been around for about 10 years now. Similar approach, focused on working with lawyers, niched down. He got his first client for that agency.

"I'm like, screw it. If I want to really get good results, I'm just going to ask for the right budget."

The proposal he sent to the first lawyer he started working with was for $15,000 per month. The attorney agreed to it. Jason spent every waking second working on that to make it an amazing case study because he now had the firepower to do it. $15,000 per month is a great budget.

He was able to make that a great case study, then leveraged that case study to get his second client at $15,000, then his third client. Eventually built that up to a nice lifestyle business. Then from there, the journey continued.

He delegated, brought in a coach, brought in a good executive C-suite team to work with him. Now they'll probably do about $23 million top line, $7 million in profit.

I asked Jason to explain the justification for charging $15K a month when there are so many SEO agencies that are scams or don't do a good job.

"It's what's necessary in the field that I work in."

He works primarily with personal injury lawyers. Personal injury law is a vertical where there is high competition. Very probably one of the most competitive spaces in the world of SEO. But there's also very high margin and profit for the attorneys as well.

If he could generate a lead for a client that turns into a case, that case has a minimum value of $12,000 to $13,000. That's their fees for just one case. Those fees can go as high as $100 million depending on the case and the injuries.

"When I first got into it, everybody just thought like SEO in the personal injury space, you just pay $5,000 per month and you kind of get SEO. And I'm just like, that's not really how it works."

If they really want to be able to dominate the search engine result pages, they got to study the competition, get the links that they have, write the content that's necessary, put together a good strategy. Jason's time is valuable too and he knew he was pretty good at this stuff. He wanted to make sure he valued his time.

"There's two ways to go in the agency world. You can build the Walmart model or you can build the Lamborghini approach."

There's a lot of agencies that work in legal that just want to get clients that'll pay $2,500 per month and get 500 clients. That's not a bad model. But Jason thinks there's problems. Having a cookie cutter approach to $2,500 bucks per month might not be the right budget in certain markets. You have trouble scaling. You might have high churn because maybe you're mismanaging expectations.

The Lamborghini approach: "Rather than go out and get six clients that pay $2,500 bucks per month, why don't I just get one client that will pay the combination of all what the six clients would pay and then really have the firepower to make that perfect car?"

When people see it, it's sexy, it's on the road. Now you've become the Lamborghini dealership of your industry.

At the time Jason wasn't doing it for cash. He had just exited his first company. He was pretty okay. It was just a matter of if I'm going to do this, I want to build that Lamborghini dealership in my space.

What $15K Per Month Actually Pays For

I asked Jason what goes into that $15K budget. What is that money getting used for?

Backlinks is part of it. But believe it or not, even with that $15,000 per month budget, they're not doing all of the work. In most cases, they're reverse engineering competition and giving their clients homework.

They might see that six of their largest competitors all have a link from the Better Business Bureau. Three of their largest competitors have a link from PR Newswire because they did a press release.

What they're doing is going back to clients and saying, "Hey, we really need you to reach out to the Better Business Bureau, sign up for it. Even if you don't get any business from being on the Better Business Bureau, we need that link."

The client does their homework. In the background, they're also doing citations, guest blog posts, all the reverse engineering of the links they could build.

"I'm an agency that's known to give out homework to our clients. SEO definitely is a two way street. There's only so much I can do as your SEO vendor or partner. But there's other things that I'm going to tell you that you need to do as well. And the clients that actually get engaged and do their homework are the clients that really do very well."

Link building and content creation was also a large part of it. This is back before the world of AI where you'd have to pay writers to write good content, edit the content, publish the content, develop the content strategies.

In the world of legal, you can't write a bunch of BS content because you can get your client to lose their law license if you start saying the wrong things. They had to hire more sophisticated writers to write the content and get them trained.

And then really the biggest expense is their labor. Their payroll for their team.

Schema Markup for Local SEO Dominance

I asked Jason what's moving the needle with Google Business Profiles.

"Making sure schema, I think is something that we see as being important in the world of local rankings."

For those that don't know what schema is, on a website you have your HTML. That's the stuff that the user sees. The images and the content that's on your website that people can see and click. But in the background, there's this other language that's specifically written for the search engines, for AI, to basically give them more clues into who you are and what you do.

Schema markup is something you can go in to tell the search engines like Google that this is the name of our business, this is our verified address, this is our verified phone number.

There's something called same as schema where you can tell the search engines that we're the same as company that is referenced in this New York Times article. We're the same as a company that also has this specific Facebook profile, this specific LinkedIn profile. You can tell them this is the latitude and longitude of our office. You can tell them that these are some of the verified reviews. You can tell them this is what you're known for.

"In the world of legal, you have to have the edge because my competitors are working with very sophisticated agencies. And so I have to be more sophisticated than some of the most sophisticated agencies in the country."

He mentioned Chris Dreyer who has an agency called Rankings, also a very reputable agency that focuses on legal. "A lot of times Chris has his crew and my crew kind of going neck and neck just to try to get that little edge."

The Location Page Strategy That Builds Authority

I asked Jason what they're putting on location pages and what really moves the needle.

In most cases, a lot of their clients might have one headquarters, their main office, and they might have a couple of satellite offices as well. In order to be able to dominate an entire region or entire state, it's either you open up offices in every single city, which is not really plausible, or they develop a content strategy.

They make sure they have a personal injury lawyer page, a car accident lawyer page, a slip and fall lawyer page for every small city in the state.

They obviously start with the city in which their headquarters is. If it's in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, they have a Fort Lauderdale personal injury lawyer page, a Fort Lauderdale slip and fall page, medical malpractice, all of those. But then they continue to expand.

They might have 20 practice area pages and write those practice area pages for every city throughout the state. Then there's a way in which they internally link those pages so that slip and fall pages link back to other cities. "It gets really sophisticated in the way in which we internally link the pages so that we can pass relevancy and page rank."

They also build out something called topical authority. If you have a car accident lawyer page, that could be like a parent page for what would be like a head on collision accident lawyer or fatal car accident lawyer or a left turn car accident lawyer.

"You can get really sophisticated. And all of those sub practice areas of car accident all link to the car accident lawyer referencing the anchor text as the first link on the page."

A lot of times they're building out these sub practice area pages, not so much that they're ever going to get people that will type in left turn car accident lawyer. Those will generate cases, but they're zero search volume, zero competition.

"But what's happening is those pages are basically serving as building out the topical authority for some of those other more important pages."

They might have 50 pages that are just boosting up that Fort Lauderdale personal injury page. It gets really sophisticated.

The Marketing Director Who Almost Destroyed Years of Work

Jason shared a story that's one of his pet peeves. They've been working with a law firm for seven years. It all started with them working directly with the personal injury lawyer. Eventually the personal injury lawyer does so well because of all the cases they've helped generate that they now have a budget to bring in a marketing director.

The new marketing director comes in. A lot of times the marketing director needs to justify their new role. The first thing they say is, "Holy shit, we're spending $40,000 a month on SEO. That's crazy. At my old place, I was only spending $5,000."

They're immediately trying to slash budget. Sometimes they're successful.

Jason was on a call recently with a marketing director that was new to a firm. The marketing director came in and said, "I see that we have all of these pages that don't get any traffic. You know, this fatal car accident lawyer in Fort Lauderdale. There's a bunch of these pages and I want to get your agency to remove all those pages."

Jason said, "Absolutely not. I'll call my client who I have the relationship with and I'll terminate the relationship before I do that to my friend because that would have just killed his whole website."

"Sometimes you have to do the right thing. And in this case, I was ready to fire the client just to make sure that they didn't lose the investment that they've been making for all these years just because of an incompetent marketing director."

What Has Always Remained the Same in SEO

Jason's been in the space almost 25 years now. I asked him what principles have stayed intact.

"Three things. Making sure that the website has a good solid technical structure and makeup. Making it very easy for search engines and chatbots to basically crawl the site and index the site."

Second, writing or publishing content that satisfies the intent of what people are searching for. "I don't think that will ever change, whether it's in the written format or if it's in a video format."

And the third, which has always been the case, is building authority through links. Now that has certainly been, there's been a lot of iterations of link building.

When Jason first got into SEO, there was a whole world of spamming link building. You found that Coca-Cola had some kind of forum and you could leave a comment on a Coca-Cola forum and put your name as personal injury lawyer Miami. That Coca-Cola forum would link back to you using that exact match anchor text.

Even though it wasn't relevant to personal injury, you still have a link from Coca-Cola. That would really drive results. Nowadays that doesn't work. It can be seen as spammy and malicious and you can get your site penalized if you did too much of that.

At the end of the day, it comes down to getting strong links, good links.

Authority vs Relevance in Link Building

I asked Jason where he leans, authority or relevance or both.

"You have to try to find a mix of both."

A guest blog post on a site that has a lot of different guest blog posts on all kinds of different topics. You might have one article talking about pest control and then two articles later they're talking about car crashes in Seattle. Obviously the topical authority of that website isn't necessarily all about car accidents.

Should you build the link on that? Yes, depending on the domain authority of the website and where you're linking to. Is that website going to really push the needle? Maybe not. But at least it's checking the box that you've got the same link that your competitor got.

However, if you're doing real things, let's say you're a personal injury lawyer and you represented a celebrity and that celebrity ends up in the news and you were representing them. Now you've got a link from TMZ, you've got a link from CNN, you've got a link from Fox News, all because you were the personal injury lawyer that represented the celebrity.

Those are good links. Is CNN all about personal injury law? No. But it's a DR 96 website that is probably one of the most trusted websites on the internet. The fact that they have an article that's relevant to your client and what you do, that's some of the best links you can get.

"Trying to figure out a way that you can kind of maneuver to get all types of links like that."

It's almost like investing in stocks. You have to diversify. Don't just try to get a CNN link or don't just sign up for the lawyer directory. Get a good healthy mix of both.

Social Media for Local Businesses

Jason has over 1.7 million followers on Instagram and a huge following on LinkedIn and Facebook. I asked if he recommends social media for his clients and other local businesses.

"I do. It just depends on who your audience is."

For Jason, he talks about SEO, agency life, and business lessons. He's trying to capture multiple audiences with his personal brand.

Does he think it's important? Yeah, everybody should have an active social media campaign. But he also takes into consideration that the topic of law is a very boring topic.

"Should you be creating videos every day about here's the six things you need to do before you hire a personal injury lawyer? I mean, sure."

But maybe instead, talk about giving away backpacks for underprivileged kids. Talk about things you're doing in the community. Highlight a teacher, give away an award. Get very localized.

Here's something powerful. Anybody that follows him sees his life. On Facebook, he'll post photos of his kids, their trips.

"A lot of times, I get clients that have just been following me on Facebook just because they see me as like a family guy. I'm a business guy. I seem like a trustworthy person. And that's who people like to do business with."

When he sees somebody, they're like, Jason, that trip you took to Italy with your family was amazing. "They're not talking about that video I did six months ago about rel canonical tags. Who gives a shit about that?"

He uses humor a lot too. His last LinkedIn post said, "Okay, I'll admit I cheated in high school, but I did it the hard way. I didn't use AI."

Jason's Message: Take Action

I asked Jason for his message to local business owners and local marketers.

"If you've gotten to this point of the podcast, I applaud you because most people don't take action or they get bored. And so the fact that you've listened for 45 minutes and you've gotten to the end, you're a different kind of person. You're like the 1%. And so congratulations. You're a go-getter. And usually the 1% are the people that win in life just because they're always trying to get better."

Whether they're listening to a podcast or they are reading books or they're taking action. "I always like to say that you can create the future that wasn't going to exist in life by taking action."

Jason wakes up every single day and asks what action can he take today that is going to make his life better tomorrow.

There's a lot of things we talked about on this podcast that you've been taking copious notes. Don't just leave the notes aside. A lot of people do. They go to conferences, they're inspired, they write so much stuff down, they get home and they just get back to their everyday life. They don't take action.

"You have to go take action."

My Main Takeaway

This conversation with Jason completely changed how I think about agency pricing and positioning. The Lamborghini vs Walmart model is brilliant. Most agencies race to the bottom, trying to get as many clients as possible at low prices. Jason went the opposite direction and built something sustainable and profitable.

The biggest insight is that charging more actually gets better results. When you have $15K per month to work with, you can actually do the work that moves the needle. You can build the case studies that attract more premium clients. It's a virtuous cycle.

And the schema markup strategy is something most local businesses are completely missing. It's the behind-the-scenes work that gives you the edge in competitive markets.

But what resonated most was Jason's message about taking action. You can create a future that wasn't going to exist by taking action. That's exactly what he did when he asked for $15K from his first client. That's what I did when I reached out to him for this podcast.

Thanks for reading, and if you found this valuable, make sure to check out the full podcast episode. Jason drops even more tactical SEO advice that I couldn't fit into this recap.

You can find Jason on Instagram at Jason Hennessey, LinkedIn and Facebook under Jason Hennessey. Make sure to grab his book Honest SEO on Amazon where he spent 18 months giving as much value as he could in the four hours it takes to read.