Join Seth and Jay as they discuss E-Myth and prepping for EOY. Then, hear from Rand Fishkin about his journey in the SEO field and the impact of outside money on your business. Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, and a leader in the field of SEO. He has dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his book, Lost and Founder.
Hello Hello, and welcome to another edition of Maximum Growth Live. I’m your host Jay Ruane, CEO of firm flex social media marketing for lawyers as well as Ruane attorneys, a civil rights and criminal defense firm in Connecticut. And joining me as always, down there in the sun. See, I’m stuck here in the winter wonderland of the Northeast. My leaf blower problem has now turned into a snow blower problem. But that guy down there Seth is hanging out. You’re either in San Diego, Spokane, Syracuse, where you
think of me as like Henry Hill we just picked up filled up the minivan and don’t know any of our neighbors. Nobody knows we’re here, we’re just sort of zooming from warmth.
So let me ask you, Henry Hill’s main complaint at the end was egg noodles and ketchup was pasta and sauce for you and your tribe? It’s bagels. How are the bagels down there?
Yeah, ironically, I can’t speak to bagels as much but Deli. This is like the Mecca because New York has gotten crazy, as you know New York, good Deli in New York. Crazy expensive. South Florida is like this mecca of reasonably priced really good Deli. It just, it didn’t seem it’s gotten nothing. So you know that that is the one thing but yes, we don’t have New York pizza or bagels. In fact, I just got a gold belly delivery from St. Bagel, which I grew up across the street from in New York.
Very nice. Very nice. Yeah, I’m actually thinking about giving gold belly out as a Christmas present because everyone’s stuck at home. You can’t really do experiences with people. But it’d be a cool thing that I can give to my father is as here in order something cool that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get now and have a nice Have a nice meal out of it.
My two senses. Most of the gold belly experiences are such a premium. That is like if somebody knew what you paid for it, they’d be like, really? Oh, I feel like the direct delivery from CATS is much better bang for your buck.
Well, you can send a salami to your boy in the army. I gotta tell you, I can’t say you know, and I know our viewers, they’re probably don’t want to hear this. But I have spent many many, many drunken nights in Katz’s wolfing down pastrami. It’s really me because back then, you know, in my younger days, it was all the clubs around the Orleans groceries Mercury lounge, you know, I was going to see live bands down there in my 20s and 30s. And I love spending time at Katz’s. It is definitely the way to go. But okay, so it’s Thursday, we got another show, let’s talk a few things. But I want to prep us for next Tuesday. Because, you know, our Tuesday shows are really getting interesting as we really sort of get down and deep into certain topics. And one of the topics I want to talk to you about next Tuesday. And so I want to tease it now and get people interested in listening to that Tuesday show. It’s the end of the year, right? It’s gonna be, you know, December 20, or 19th. When we do that show, or 21st, I don’t know the dates, I’m not gonna calendar. And anyway, so on Tuesday, I want to talk a little bit about how do you wrap up your year, you know, it’s, it’s so much easier for some companies to wrap up the year and for us, you know, we have cases we opened in December that will last till March or even longer, you know, so it’s, there’s no hard and fast, we stopped selling at a certain point. And so you’re always sort of in this flow. But you but you have to sort of memorialize it somehow. So I want to talk a little bit about ending the year and setting concrete goals that you can achieve. In the next year, we’re already talking about our websites that we want to improve and that type of thing. So be ready for that. But you have any tips that you can give or any ideas when it comes to wrapping up a year? Well, you know,
I some things a little outside the box, I mean, their fundamentals, and we will talk about that more in depth on Tuesday. But one of the things that I it’s from a sort of bigger picture point of view, and you alluded to it a little bit, is there are certain things that are always coming, particularly the contingency fee space, you know, if somebody is trusted estates, and you have like probate matters, and haven’t quite paid yet, but you’re done. And there all these different things, and how you look at things to get an accurate snapshot of where you are in health affirm, I think it’s one of those things that you unless you’re looking at it from multiple different angles, you can make things seem better or worse, depending on which of those angles you’re looking at. And that, you know, it’s been a humbling year with COVID. There’s stuff that I thought would be better that wasn’t better, stuff that I thought would be worse than it was it was better than you know. So there’s been a tale of multiple cities. And I feel that unless you have, you know, these different perspectives of how much cash is going into escrow, for example, in your world, versus how much are you pulling out? And because at the end of the day, it’s what do you what do you what have you taken out of escrow that you have earned is what you care about. But at the same time, the health of your firm is determined based on the stuff going in assuming that you’re not giving tons of refunds. So there’s that balancing act of how do you slice the information to get a clear and accurate picture of the health of the firm?
Yeah, absolutely. And by next Tuesday, we really will know where we stand with maybe another round of PPP, what you know what the final bills looking like coming out. And I think that’s going to be important, because, you know, the interesting thing for some firms, you know, and if you have an LLC or pastoral organization, a lot of people sort of spend down in December, you know, to get money off the books, they’ll pre pay things and that type of thing. We do that every year, you know, well, this year, a lot of people don’t have money to spend down, but then that’s true, right?
I mean, if you’re the one who spend down theoretically, that means that you’re, you know, you’re again, and I think that this is the elephant in the room, which is not getting as much press, as I would imagine, is the tax ability of the PPP money, because that’s going to be a big, big swing for people that they may not be counting on, you know, talked a lot a little bit back, you know, in April, but, but frankly, the idea that the intent of the law was that you would, this would not be a taxable event. But as of right now it is, and that’s a big, big swing for some people.
Yeah, I actually, you know, in my, in my quarter lease, I actually paid more this year, thinking that I’m either going to get a refund, or I’m not going to get hit as hard. Because of the way that the tax stuff was set out there, I just, you know, it’s something to be concerned about. Because, you know, I guess theoretically you get on a payment plan with the IRS and deal with it, then. But nobody wants to be in that situation.
Obviously you want to be there. But, I think that it is one of those things that conceptually, you spent the money on payroll, which is normally a deductible expense. And all of a sudden, again, it’s the fifth, thankfully, you’ll have profit, let’s say you would have broken even but for PPP, but that then becomes that delta that you receive becomes taxable income with the way the law is right now. And I think that I am waiting for the the Small Business outcry to come usually that’s what pushes Congress, but at some point, maybe it’s going to be closer to April, and people are like, “Oh, my God, I have a massive bill that I don’t have cash to pay”, I think this is going to be like, the easy thing for Congress to always do is, you know, wave it, you know, or, or changing. There’s some people fighting, even as it is saying that this was the intent of the law, and that the IRS should should see it that way. But right now, it is, I think, on the wrong side of the bubble, and that people are going to be pretty, you know, it’s gonna be a big thing for a lot of people.
Yeah, I definitely agree with some of that, as you enter the last part of the year, it’s just something you got to be aware of, right. And that’s important thing, because if you get hamstrung halfway through or a quarter way through a year, you know, 2021, this could really impact your growth potential. If all of a sudden, you’re hemorrhaging money going out to pay this debt that doesn’t get you know, taken care of, it’s going to impact your ability to grow your firm. And that’s really something that we just want to keep people into looking out for making sure that you know, your your plans for the next year. And you know, we’ve been sitting around in the office talking to my marketing team, really get an eye on things that we can do to sort of grow next year. You know, the license stuff that we talked that we talked about back in August, and September is really starting to take off here and state, getting a lot of leads coming in from that. So we’re happy about adding that, you know, product line, so to speak. So we’re I think we’re in a good shape. And I think if you make it through this winter, you’re going to be able to really sort of explode into the next five years and really do well, because, you know, I’ve talked to some lawyers up here, and they are not doing well right now. And I think you know, the people that are on this on this conference on this call that are watching this, they’re the kind of people that are actually making moves, and they’re going to be constraints. But talking about making moves, I want to bring up your interview, because you’re going to do an interview today. And it’s not something that’s going to be live like the show is live. It’s something that you pre recorded, because you got somebody who is sort of a legend in the field of digital marketing, but not related necessarily to legal marketing. And so talk to a little bit about who you’re going to be interviewing coming up, because I think it’s important for our viewers to understand who you got and how you got him.
So Rand Fishkin is sort of is a legend. he created SEO Moz that later became Moz which was the beacon for many people who keep that an SEO of how to read the Google tea leaf free leaves that they were leaving out there in the early days they’re much more transparent today not perfect but better than it used to be but used to be they give you hints, and through his through his software, and then his videos these these whiteboards. Fridays love it, he was the person who that helped us break it down. So when I had that epiphany 1012 years ago that, hey, I’m not gonna go hang out at legal conferences only, I’m gonna go to where the people are talking about how this stuff is done, the inner workings, flew out to Vegas and started going to these SEO conferences, and met people like red, and then basically use them as sort of that barometer of what, what’s where to spend your time, you know, the time is a finite resource. And he was very valuable both through the software he had and through his, his outward through his videos of helping myself and others navigate what where to allocate resources, what made sense and what didn’t. So this came from a cold email, and just shows you that the cold call still works. And, you know, I looked at my calendar one day, and there he was, so we got a great conversation. And I think the the, you know, the first part where we’re getting about geeking, out about SEO and, and how that’s evolved is great. But the second half, where we talk about, we talk about what happened to him, he took on, he took on a venture partner, and it was it was not a swimming as you would think for somebody who’s a rock star in the industry that you assume would be retired on a beach right now. Things didn’t go as planned. So I think a lesson learned from the business side, on the second half, I’m curious to see what you think once, once we roll it.
Yeah, yeah. So here’s what we’re gonna do, folks, we’re gonna take a quick break, we’re gonna, when we come back, it’ll be set to interview with Rand Fishkin. And I gotta tell you, if you Google his name, you’re gonna I mean, there’s just tons of stuff about him. He’s spoken on stages all across the world. If you want to really understand SEO, go back to his Whiteboard Friday stuff and just watch those videos. He actually inspired us at our firm years ago, with the whiteboard stuff to do Whiteboard Friday type videos for our clientele, to sort of explain things. You know how DUIs get prosecuted, how they fit in the field sobriety stuff that I needed to explain to people. We actually started using that in house in our sales process back years ago, when we were doing in office consultations. Now everything’s done over the phone. So it’s really sort of, he was a trendsetter. And as an educator, and I think that’s one of the things that’s important is that he gave away a ton of knowledge, man, he was just putting it out there. And his business was growing because of it. And so when you are the Johnny Appleseed, when you give away knowledge, you can actually get so much more in return. So why don’t we take a quick break when we come back, we’ll have sets interview with Rand. So stay tuned. It’s a great interview can’t be missed, we’ll be right back with the interview.
In this world today, if you want to grow your business, you want to grow your firm, you want to take on more cases and make a better impact. You have to have a digital blueprint. Statistically, throughout the time that we’ve been working with BluShark Digital, our law firm, the Atlanta divorce law group grew over 14 100% they truly understand where we’re headed, and how we want to get there. I have a team in BluShark Digital that I feel like has my back.
Welcome, welcome, everybody. We are honored and humbled to have Rand Fishkin here and icon in the SEO space. Welcome, Ron. Thanks for having me, sir. You know, you know, for somebody who built his law firm, and then digital agency, listening to Whiteboard Fridays, and, you know, SEO Moz. And then Moz, you know, it reading, reading your books, you know, you’re sort of at the epicenter of all things SEO. And I’d love for our listeners, just to hear, you know, you’ve you’ve, you’ve pivoted beyond Moz. But talk to us about that journey and some of the highlights along the way.
Sure, yeah. So, I obviously got into the SEO field, relatively early, I don’t think right at the beginning. The first folks were probably in there. 9596 and I joined around 2000 2001. And my, you know, my experience was basically entering a field that was very secretive, where consultants and agencies to the extent that they even existed, believe that their secret sauce was their knowledge. And so they kept that very close to the vest, Google. Microsoft, asked Jeeves, you know, AltaVista, Yahoo, all the all the search engines at the time that I entered the space were competing very heavily. And I believe that they thought they should be incredibly secretive for competitive reasons. And so this, you know, the field of SEO today, in 2020, there is a lot more transparency, there’s a lot more information. There’s a ton of SEO software companies like Moz, who basically provide information about how to do SEO for free. There’s there’s tons and tons of people who earn their living by providing free education, knowledge, resources, testing experiments, all this wonderful stuff that makes the field so rich, almost none of that existed 19 years ago when I started. And so Moz was really one of the first places aside from a couple other blogs, maybe Aaron walls SEO book is one of the better known ones, where you could go and every day read information about how SEO really worked. And Seth, it sounds like you did pretty early on.
No, I mean that that was it. There was I would go to legal conferences, and you get spoon fed by people that may or may not have known what they were doing. And instead, I got to Vegas and found people like yourself who were, you know, basically showing you what was going on? And if you did this, this would happen.
Vegas. Oh, that must have been the PubCon calm frankly. Yeah. Okay. I remember that back in the day who? Man I was. Yeah, Las Vegas is one of my least favorite destinations.
And then, of course, your Seattle conferences became you didn’t have to travel, you just walk out the door and speak.
Yeah, yeah, that was Seattle is beautiful for about six days in the summer. And if you can time it just right, you can get a really lovely, lovely event go. I say that. But even today, in December, we’re having we’re having a surprisingly beautiful early December. So maybe I shouldn’t complain, I’ll bring back the rain.
So you know, you as as you built this, and you started to basically help people understand what was going on, broke it down. And at the same time, one of the things that I know was going on as Google, through Matt Cutts and through their their messaging, which were to give you droplets of information, and I felt that you were like one of the one voices of sanity, because as an SEO, or as a business owner, where you’re trying to make decisions as to how to allocate resources, you very often are told one thing. Yeah, and whether or not that’s in your best interest may or may not be the case and love to just get your thoughts because that that cat mouse game was one that I think really brought SEOmoz back in the day to prominence in the sense that you were looking for direction and how to read the tea leaves that were being left out there.
Yeah, so I think, look, early in my tenure, I felt that I felt that my ethics and business, I shared a lot of goals with Google’s. And so you know, I had a reasonably close relationship with a lot of people at Google. And I don’t know about a lot, maybe maybe a half a dozen, a dozen, something like that. But you know, that there was discussions about, you know, I went to their campus and delivered some talks for them. And I, you know, occasionally with email with folks there, and that sort of thing I made Moz a place that was very, back in the old days of SEO, you sort of have this spectrum of white hat and black hat, which largely doesn’t exist today all that much. But, you know, in the early years of SEO is very much you know, manipulative links and manipulative tactics versus, you know, what were considered white hat tactics, sort of outreach, and press and PR, almost all the things that fall into SEO today, doing technical things, markup things, creating good content, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, basically my position was I wanted to encourage more of that good white hat stuff. I thought that was the way the industry should go. I felt that SEO Well, SEO at the time. I don’t know if you remember Seth, but extremely disrespected, it was treated worse than any used car salesman. You know, if you talk to someone who worked in software engineering, or web design and development or any other field of marketing, SEO was viewed as, you know, not the Wild West, not the new kids, but the evil, dark, terrible people who manipulate and spam and hurt you.
To be fair, there was a large, there was and to be fair, there was an entire half of the industry that that was based on until Google shut it down.
Yeah, I mean, I think that I think two things really happened right? As businesses became more serious about SEO as more of them started to invest. A lot of those tactics didn’t work as well because you couldn’t manipulate your way past the algorithmic signals of the Have the actually, you know, big brands who are willing to make the investment. So there was less opportunity. Certainly Google themselves got better and better over time started being at well, at the time MSN search, right, they got better and better at filtering out spam at recognizing spam techniques and manipulation. But during this period, I would say during that period, I was very much on Google side, and then around 2009 1011 12, somewhere in there, I started noticing more and more that while the industry was maturing, and getting better, and a lot of these folks were upgrading their practices, tons of agencies like yourself, right, were coming along, who were really helping people do this type of stuff. Google continued to be somewhere between cagey and misleading along all these different vectors of information about how their search engine worked. And I, I found that very frustrating, you know, I thought as, as you Google are making progress, the way to earn people’s trust and respect is to be transparent, to be authentic to tell not just the truth, but as much of the whole truth as you possibly can. And when you can’t speak the whole truth, just to say so, right? In my opinion, it’s totally fine to be a representative for Google, and to be asked a question on stage or on Twitter or over email, or whatever it is in some forum, and to say, I’m sorry, we don’t disclose that information. And they never say that, instead, they come up with some malarkey bullcrap. And, frankly, you know, because so many people in the search engine optimization world, try to read the tea leaves, as you put it, there’s just a huge industry of 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of people who every little comment made by someone who works at Google is interpreted, interpreted and interpreted, and that that frustrates the hell out of me, especially when you see things like, you know, last summer, for example, Congress interviewed the tech CEOs right beside our Pichai, from Google, for example, was, you know, was he was giving testimony. And as part of that testimony, David Cellini, the senator from Rhode Island, who I think is leading the Committee on antitrust for the Senate, you know, he subpoenaed a bunch of information when Google he said, hey, you need to provide all these documents, right? So he’s, his team does that. And sure enough, in the trove of documents, there’s all this information, all these emails between executives at Google about how things are working, and you go and look at those. And there’s just example after example, I sent a Twitter thread, I remember some time earlier this year, about it, it was just like, Oh, look at look at all these, you know, 1520 different examples. And I didn’t even read through the documents, all that carefully, of things that were clearly in Google’s internal documents that conflicted with things that they said publicly.
And that’s sort of that’s where I was coming, though my next set of questions for you is exactly that. What were some of those ones when you reflect back, because that was always the pull and tug between what you’re being told, and you’re sort of manipulating an industry versus your look, you had better access than just about anybody? Were there times, we were like, Hey, this is nonsense. But if they’re saying it, I have to give it some credence.
Let’s see, I would say, when I thought something was nonsense, I would try to do what I thought a good journalist should do. Right, which is essentially do some investigation work, talk to some people in the field, run experiments on my own, if I possibly could, and then share, here’s what Google says. And here’s what appears to be the case, right? And if what Google’s saying is true, it’s possible that we still got these results through some other way. And maybe here’s how, but it doesn’t seem likely. Right? And so, you know, then and then, in a lot of these cases, it would be years before you could truly prove that what Google said about whatever, you know, oh, well, we don’t count nofollow links or something. And then you’re like, hey, you have been counting nofollow links. Yeah. You know, from certain places in certain ways. Not as much as followed, like, blah, blah, blah, whatever, right? Or? Oh, no, we don’t look at any user and usage data in calculus. That’s what your whole machine learning algorithms based on. Yeah, lie and liars. You know, it’s it, it gets pretty frustrating to see. Example, after example of that, it gets especially frustrating, in my opinion, Seth, and look at we mentioned at the start of this, I’m a couple years out from the SEO field. So a lot of my complaints are sort of that leftover, you know, anger at the, at the systems and structures, and especially at Google who’s become one of if not the most powerful company on Earth, and they are still playing these silly games, which hurt primarily hurt small and medium businesses. And I look, I think we all know, right, we can all look at economy economists day and see that one of the worst things for income inequality and political instability is a bad distribution of power in the economy to a few monopolies overall, a lot of small and medium businesses, right? What you what you want, what Americans want in their economy is lots of small and medium businesses, that makes everything you know, that makes America great, right? That makes our economy great and healthy and able to survive and strong and all these things. And what we’re getting is Google and Facebook, Microsoft and Apple and a few others, taking a larger and larger share. And that is a really bad thing. And so when I see Google go, I know the people at Google, I know that they know this, I know that they know that they should not be playing these games and doing these things when I see them, you know, violating antitrust law?
Well, look, we’re in historically unmatched for most of our audience, you know, it takes a lot to go above the fortune 500 companies that own some of the major directory brands. So they want the best possible result. But the directories are up there. Now with LSAS. I know this is post your time at Moz. But the LSAS are now you know, a second bite at the apple where Google’s trying to control more of the market, the GM bees. So talk to me a little bit about that. That’s sort of the hot button topic in our space right now. The LSAS. You have any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I mean, I think that, broadly speaking, Google is essentially recognizing that they have they have a challenge, a worldwide global growth challenge, right? So the Wall Street, their investors, their stockholders, expect them to grow at certain rates. And this is this is one of the problems right? Once you get to be, you know, $100 billion plus company, and you already own your market, you have, you know, Google has, outside of China 95% of the global search market, around the world. And China is not really a market, they can enter because the government in China sort of released when I was there. I don’t know if this is still the case, Seth, but when I was in China, if you if you performed a search on Google, you get redirected to the Baidu results at the ISP level. So it’s tough for Google to compete there. Right. But the the reality is that since they have this global stranglehold on the internet, they they can’t create more users, right? They can’t create more people who are searching all the time. So they’re yes, they’re trying to increase the number of searches, they’re trying to increase the searcher satisfaction. They’re trying to get people, you know, more and more addicted to doing more Google searches, which is fine. But in order to get the growth Wall Street wants, Google has to start entering all these other fields. So they see oh, well go. Okay, what are the biggest parts of the economy? Alright. The financial field? Well, let’s make Google Finance and Google credit cards and Google accounts. So let’s work with all these banks. And hey, let’s have a Google mortgage calculator. Oh, travel? All right, we’re gonna have Google Flights and Google hotels, and oh, telecommunications and phones. All right, we’re gonna have Google phi. And some of these products are great. I think Google phi is one of Google’s best innovations, I think it is one of their best products. I love it to death. Fantastic, wonderful. I think that in a lot of these other cases, what they’re doing is essentially saying, hey, there used to be lots of opportunity for lots of people in the search results. Let’s take that away. That’s ours. Now. video. Video is a great example of this. You know, for years with Moz, and Whiteboard Friday, we hosted with Vimeo, right, we put we put our videos on our site, they ranked in Google, you got the little video snippet. What is it today, 90 plus percent of all videos that show up in Google’s top 10 are YouTube, YouTube alone, and that was a change one day change one day in 2014, you know, July, something or other in 2014, suddenly, it went from, you know, 50% 40%, YouTube to 90 plus percent. That’s not an algorithm change. Right? That’s a that’s a corporate practice of, hey, we want more money engineers make it all YouTube.
Like the LSA, we didn’t get enough out of the ads at the top. I mean, there are reasons and like, the crazy part about law is you have a license. So the idea that your verify, like, you know, if you’re barred, it’s going to be a verified user. You know, it’s not like a locksmith where they put the locations in the middle of intersections. You know, there’s plenty of spam. Look, that pivots me to a question because I’ve asked this to a number of guests on the show, and I haven’t gotten a good answer. Maybe you’ll have one. You know, Google did a pretty good job of combating spam spam in organic search. But in local, they really haven’t. Particularly in the legal space. It is rampid what’s what gives what’s going on here? They could do it.
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. Right. I think there’s a I’m, there’s a certain amount of I think, reasonable doubt that I have about the ability of Google’s machine learning techniques to be incredibly pinpoint accurate at only filtering spam and nothing else. And that’s because most of the spam and manipulation that happens in local world is much more difficult to detect and pull the threads away from, versus the spam and manipulation that happens in organic world of, you know, sort of link spam and comment spam and, and these types of things, right, and paid links and all that kind of stuff. Why that is, is is a little bit tough to answer. If I had to guess what I would say is because the spam in in maps and local is written by real people, right? It’s it’s, you know, reviews and its coverage. And it’s, you know, businesses that are created in a location where they don’t actually exist. And Google’s verification process is pretty good, but not perfect enough. And every time it gets a little bit better, spammers can still figure out ways to work around it. Right? I think you are. In the local world, a lot like where we were before Google’s are right around Google’s Panda update for for organic, right in 2012, where essentially, the, the spam fighting systems and the search quality team have not caught up to all of the ways that one can manipulate. And so there’s, there’s enough incentive and there’s enough manipulation. And law is one area where, because there’s enough money per client, it pays right, there’s a return on investment, to go through to jump through a ton of hoops, even if it only earns you, whatever, two or three new business new clients a month. Right. Right. As opposed to, for example, like a restaurant, right?
It’s not worth putting a stamp nothing worth it. Yeah, it doesn’t, it
doesn’t make sense, you’ve got to have a very high ticket item. And so the law is one of those few places.
Gotcha. taking you through today, and what we’ll get, we’ll get to what you’re up to now. But I wanted to get you there talking about today, from the point of view of SEO, you know, with Bert and the future of content, love to just thought, you know, your advice to our to our viewers and listeners on just where you see content today. And any any words of wisdom for those of us who are curating content for SEO friendly sites?
Yeah, my sense is, so Google is getting much, much better at first off waiting content more heavily in their algorithm, I think we can we can all sort of feel this that the content quality and not quality alone. But the combination of quality and solves my problem solves the searchers intent as comprehensively as possible. Those two things have risen in the ranking algorithms weighting systems substantially. And I think that that happens because Google has these deep learning systems where they can essentially, you know, machine learn off of tons and tons of searcher data, right. So you and I go to Google, we search for something where we click some result, we’re unhappy, we click back to the search result, we choose something else, Google knows, that was not the thing to rank, maybe they should rank the thing that clearly solved our problem instead of the one that didn’t. And over time, right, they get billions and billions these data points every day, they’re able to, you know, segment that in every sort of way possible. And now they can provide these great results. So as a result of that, you as a content creator have to be inside your searchers head. Right, you have to be able to answer their query better than anyone else. You have to and one of the ways right one of the ways to do that is with content quality. One of the ways to do that is by predicting intent, what are they trying to accomplish? How can I help them accomplish that better? One of the ways to do that is to build a brand that people associate with having positively solved their problem. Right? So if you are a recognizable brand in the search results, you are going to get far more clicks and people are going to feel like you did a better job than if you are an unrecognizable brand. So you know, whatever. Seth and rands candy bar.com might get, you know, maybe we go out there and we create a great candy bar and it tastes great. And people love it, but and we get tons and tons of links to our website. But how many people have heard of Seth and rands, candy bar versus Snickers or m&ms or whatever, right? And so instead, you know, we’re always hovering below them and even if we’d like, but our candy bar tastes better. Now, the brand association over the last 100 years Sorry friends It’s gonna take you a while, right? So brand is a huge way to stand out from the crowd as well. Those are the pieces of advice that I would be thinking about as a as a marketer or a content creator and strategist today,
you know, you’ve been pretty critical in certain some speeches over time about links in general, but you know, love them or hate them in our world, they are still huge. Your thoughts on the state of it today, you know, for most people in our space, we’re looking at, you know, authoritative links, the days of spammy links are gone, at the same time, the local links to be able to signal authority within a local community to to sort of get that local love, any words of wisdom that from your perspective, looking at it today from from a link acquisition point of
view? Let’s see, the smartest and wisest people that I follow in the local space, are telling me that links continue to fall in importance in local and that brand mentions clarity of brand mentions are still on the rise. And that makes a lot of sense to me. Right? I don’t I don’t see any reason why was the suit the there’s a there’s a Japanese as a kya, that I want to try here in Seattle, well for delivery, obviously. But since we’re all in quarantine, but oh to Nuki. That’s what it is. It’s called Tanuki. So, you know, if I am Google, and I see a bunch of whatever it is, you know, the Seattle Times and the pie and the stranger and, you know, random sets Seattle blog, writing about to Nuki is a Kaya. And they don’t link to the website. So what is that any less of an endorsement? Is that any reasonable? You’ve been saying that for for a decade? Exactly, exactly. And so what happens over time, when you have a machine learning system, is that rather than right? It’s not a team of engineers who sit around a table and say, well, let’s make links 24% of the rankings this week. That doesn’t happen anymore. Not that, you know, that’s a gross oversimplification what happened in, you know, from the 1998, to 2012, period. But in the machine learning era, what happens instead is engineers feed data, right, here’s data in and this is the result I want out. So Google ranking system, what I want you to do is do your deep learning and figure out which results we should show at the top that will engage the highest number of searchers in the most problem solving way. For most, you know, for most queries, that’s that’s how they think about it. In some cases, they’re like, Screw everyone’s happiness, put Google things at the top. But regardless of that, in local especially, right, it’s Hey, put to Nuki is a kya up at the top, if that’s the thing that will solve the most searchers queries, right, right. And so in the case of a learning system, you get algorithmic inputs that over time are better correlated with solving searchers problems. And ones that are worse, correlated, links over time have become a little bit worse correlated. brand mentions, especially from what I’d call sort of, you know, reputable news in media and listing sources. And Google gets better and better at figuring out which ones are reputable and not that really means something you get written up in eater, you get written up in Bon appetit. The New York Times food section says this is Seattle’s new hot place, you start to rise there, and a lot of us can see this right? If you follow for example, you know, food world very closely. I’ve done this in like Portland, Oregon, and suddenly there’s some hot you know, hot new restaurant, you know, new celebrity chef, or whatever it is, right, like making something and the New York Times writes about them, and then a bunch of places in Portland write about them. There’s not a lot of Link activity. But suddenly, lots more people are searching for that restaurant director, direct traffic coming through direct traffic is coming in the branded searches coming in, the mentions are coming in. And all of those signals tell Google that that’s the one when someone searches for steak restaurant, Portland, we should put, you know, ox up there.
And not surprising. We’re seeing that in the legal space. The recent updates, what we’ve seen is people who have a TV presence will end up with a bump that’s that happened on the last one, which would fit to this at the same time for some of the micro terms. And that’s one of those areas. If you go back to the spammy or days, the anchor text, you know, one of those things that many of us went as clean as we could be to make sure we didn’t get near the bad world. But some of this stuff still is working. And it’s one of those balancing tests where you want to do right by your client and you want to make sure that you’re getting them every possible advantage without going over the line. Because there’s a certain amount that you’re not going to be in Bon Appetit every day. And so this
is you know, I think this is the question right for a lot of digital age. And he’s an in house marketers and firms broadly, they have to think about it from a strategy perspective, right? So you play, you can play it both ways. You can play the, hey, let’s go right up to the line, but not walk over it on links and anchor text and all that. And simultaneously, let’s do a bunch of digital PR. Let’s have a reason why all the podcasts want me to be a guest on there. Let’s do some pro bono legal work. That’ll get us a ton of coverage. Right in the right press and publication. Hey, no one is talking about this particular area of law. How do we make that sexy and interesting to people who would write about that on the web and talk about it and share it? Okay, I got it. We’re going to whatever make this a political, you know, talking point so that all the press that’s covering the politics world, which is obsessed right there, we’re going to start mentioning us, right, we’re going to put out a report that blah, blah, blah, we have a new white paper, we did some research, we’re going to contract with a, you know, statistician, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, you can play both of those.
Right? And I just smile, because it’s like, that’s SEO, it’s not surprising that the Wizard of SEO is
oh, look, you know, my stepping back from the field means that I see it from a broader perspective these days, right? SEO, SEO can still drive great traffic, right? Tons of people are still using Google. Is it the only place that you should be getting your traffic? Should you be putting all of your eggs in that one basket? I don’t think so. Absolutely. I think that’s a good, I don’t think that’s a safe way to play anymore. I think, you know, 10 years ago, you could put all your eggs in the SEO basket, and probably be totally fine. Because Google didn’t look outside of their little world for that many signals. Nowadays, the better you do in social media, and digital PR, and email marketing, and content, marketing, and podcast, marketing, and video marketing, and all these other places, right, all these other spaces, the more Google wants to rank you as well. And so you could be doing all the SEO things, right. And one of your competitors is sort of not paying that much attention, but they’re doing a lot of digital PR, and they win. And you go wait a minute, they’re not doing the SEO stuff. Sorry. They’re winning, because Google wants to pay attention to a lot of stuff. That is not what we consider classic SEO.
Right? Well, along those lines, and you talk about this sort of combines the different elements you talked about, what do you see the search results looking like in the future? You have any thoughts on? We’ve seen the LSAS layered in but you know, you’re talking about don’t put all your eggs in the SEO basket? Where do you see this going?
So I think Google has very clearly signaled that they, they want to solve searchers problems as quickly as possible. With data that they show that does not necessarily lead to a click. And so I think what you’re going to see, right what, what Google’s trying to play, they’re kind of on the knife edge of this right now, they are trying to play this game of let’s grow the number of searches by having more and more people search more and more, because they get their answers faster and faster. And so they, they sort of, you know, get into this habit of coming back to Google again and again and again. And we’re going to make that as easy as possible for them. And at the same time, we are going to siphon clicks away from anyone who is not an alphabet owned company. Right? So if you’re not Google Maps, and YouTube and Google Finance and Google travel, and Google Flights and Google Trips, and Gmail and Google Calendar and Google Drive, and we could go on for the whole rest of the hour, but listing Google’s properties. But if you’re not in that group, Google is essentially siphoning clicks away from you that they don’t want to show your stuff as much at the top of the results. And so you can see this I wrote about this on the on the spark Toro blog, of course, the that less than half of all Google searches now resulted in a click, and it has continued to drop on mobile. What’s crazy is it stayed stable on desktop and because of the pandemic and everybody quarantining not everybody. Many people responsibly quarantining this year, you see that desktop growth, for the first time, right? For the first time in 10 years, desktop is growing again, mobile is shrinking. And so the click through rate has actually risen on Google this year. Next year, it’s going to fall pretty precipitously. Again, right? We’re all gonna go back to these devices,
God willing. Yes. And that look, that sort of before we pivot to your current venture, looking at that, what what you know, that is one significant COVID trend, any other trends that you’re seeing COVID related that people should either adjust for or take advantage of? Yeah, I
mean, gosh, so so so many in digital marketing field, I think you know, one to be Where have is certainly that there’s a huge increase in what I call that. infotainment consumption. Absolutely. Right. So that’s the greatest example. Yeah, yeah. Right. So today it was just announced, Reddit is now getting 52 million daily users. Wow. 52 million daily. Just read it right and read it. Supposedly, I thought they only had about 300 350 million users total. So the fact that they are now getting comparable, or maybe even greater than I think maybe Twitter is 60 or 65 million, but comparable to Twitter. Reddit is growing like crazy. We are all sitting on our phones, browsing through news and information and entertainment, right? Instagram, same thing, Facebook, same thing, Twitter, same thing. LinkedIn has risen right tons more LinkedIn, content consumption, tons more. Pocket content consumption, Hacker News is up. Spark Toro trending is up. I don’t know, if you follow you know, if you’re in the marketing space, we have this this spark Toro trending page, which is kind of like Hacker News, but for marketers. And, you know, we don’t do any marketing or promotion of it. And yet it’s risen from a few 100 people visiting everyday to 1000 plus 1500. Plus, now it drives a lot of traffic if you get on there. Well, so yeah. So that that trend, in my opinion, is indicative of the behavior shift, right of millions and millions of people around the world paying more and more attention to infotainment types of content because of that, if you’re a digital marketer, and you can be in that sector, right, get into Google discover, which is driving, you know, huge amounts of traffic and Google News and get on all these other platforms, you can drive a lot of traffic and brand recognition and email, signups. And then, you know, as I think, hopefully, fingers crossed, right, this this COVID situation, gets much better with, you know, sort of vaccines, new administration, all those kinds of things, we should expect a recovery in a lot of these sectors that have been very harmed. And when that happens, if you have the email addresses of your customers, if you have their attention, if you build brand with them. You’re gonna have a pretty good 2021.
That’s, that’s awesome. I like that. That brings us right back to what your your current project, why don’t want to hear more about it. And, you know, we’re following it since since you announced and want to hear what your where it is now. Oh,
cool. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, so when I saw I left Moz, was that February 28, of 2018. And I responsibly I waited a whole month, I didn’t start spark Toro until March 1. gave myself a lot of time off there. So yeah, I started spark Toro was two and a half years ago now almost. And the idea behind it right, the core of the idea was that I wanted to be able to research audiences behaviors, right? Our customers, you know, a group of people that were interested in research, there’s behaviors without having to survey them. Right? Essentially, there’s all this public data, there’s always people using Twitter, and Reddit and LinkedIn, and Facebook and Instagram, and YouTube, etc. And all of their data is out there, right? You can go find, oh, well, here’s Seth price on Twitter, and here’s his YouTube account. And here’s his Reddit account. And here’s his Facebook account. And here’s his Instagram account and did it. And he’s got his bio in there, and his job title and all the places that he’s worked, and he’s got, you know, his interests, and he’s following all these sources. And you can, you can go do that, right, if you want to learn more about you or me, whole, our public data is out there, right? You
can just go go go wild. But
doing that at scale is pretty ridiculous. So we saw in the early days of spark to our we saw some genius marketing firms, and in house marketing companies specifically. And what they did is they got an A list of all their customers emails, right. And they took those emails, uploaded them to clear a bit or full contact, got a list of all their, the social accounts of all their customers, and then built crawlers to go crawl that information, extract it and put it into a giant database. And then, you know, munge it and send their marketers data like, Okay, our customers follow these Facebook pages, these Twitter accounts, these LinkedIn, these people on LinkedIn, this on Instagram, here’s the websites they share, here’s the podcasts they listened to. Here’s the YouTube channels, they subscribe to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that data. Amazing. You know how much work that is? That’s like, you know, you take two or three engineers out of your engineering team and you take a marketer and you take a product person and a growth team, and you put them all together and you’re like, Okay, you have six months to go get me the answers to this When Casey and I went, well, that’s dumb, we should just build that for the whole internet. Like, let’s just build that for everybody so that you can go to spark Toro. And say, I want to find an idiot, an audience that’s interested in antitrust law, or I want to find someone who describes themselves as an orthodontist, or I want to find chemical engineers in the UK, or people who play the board game Dungeons and Dragons, or, you know, whatever it is. And I want to learn about what they pay attention to, so that I can go do marketing to them in all those places, and build my brand with them. And that’s what spark Toro is, it’s, it’s a super simple search, right? You go there, and you say, you know, there’s a, there’s a few different dropdowns. But you can say, Oh, my audience uses the hashtag clean energy. And you can find what media they read and what YouTube channels they subscribe to, and which podcast they listen to your
you do what you said, you’re essentially somebody’s in house team, but done, you know, so that you don’t need to have your own 20 person team doing this.
Exactly, exactly. And now you can bring data to those conversations that I mean, Seth, I’m sure you’ve been part of these, especially on the agency side, right? Where you go in, you know, and there’s a CEO, right, or a board of executives, whatever, the partners at a legal firm. And they’re like, I want you to get us in the Wall Street Journal. And you look at him and you’re like, really? Is that? Is that how you’re gonna get new customers? I golf with our customers every Sunday, and they read the Wall Street Journal. I don’t know why they sound like Richard Nixon. But But regardless, that conversation is really hard to have, because you don’t have in your back pocket a Alright, well, let’s see here. Oh, yes. You said, you know, you want to reach whatever folks were interested in, in this particular topic, or this subject or this area of the law? Oh, well, good news, you know, 7% of them, read, watch, follow, engage with Wall Street Journal online. But I have better news, this niche publication over here, 28% of them engaged with that, do you think we should put four times the effort into that one, maybe.
That’s awesome, and much more likelihood of happening, you know, you can probably buy your way into that one. Whereas, you know, you would have to network for years to get the other one.
Exactly. Right. You know, the PR game to play on Wall Street Journal. Incredibly, versus you’ll find a podcast, right? You find a podcast that resonates with an audience. Amazing, right? You pitched Yes, you pitched a sponsor, you you get an introduction, right, you network your way and so much easier, such a and such a more affinity likely audience for the kind of marketing you want to do.
That’s, that’s awesome. You know, like any brings you back, you’re saying, hey, there’s traffic outside of search, you’re saying you figure out those places, that’s awesome.
And when you figure out those places, the awesome thing is being a guest on that podcast or sponsoring it. You know, getting into that niche publication being in that white paper being covered by that market research firm getting into that blog, being covered by that, you know, local journalism publication, those things don’t just drive direct traffic and branded search, which are great on their own. They also boost your Google rankings. Some of them, many of them will link to you, you’ll get a link. Many of them, all of them will mention your brand, you get a brand mention, almost all of them will drive some people to search for your company plus keyword, which will boost your rankings and the machine learning system. This is a win win.
That’s, that’s awesome. Let me take you back. Because when you did when you built Moz, you started off and you know, you start off one day said I’m doing this, and you produce great content. But as you did it you built you’re not like to the face you were one guy out there doing a whiteboard. But you at the same time, we built a team built software created all this different stuff, as a talk to me as a business owner about some of the lessons learned in building what you eventually sold.
Yeah, so sad news is I we did not sell it. So I still own 17 18% of Mazda’s outstanding shares. But hopefully someday, fingers crossed knock on wood. There’ll be some sort of an exit there. But MAS is one of those frustrating sort of stuck in the middle of venture backed stories, right. So we because we raised venture capital, which is a very particular asset class until there’s a you know, sale for a very large number or manages to get growth up enough to go public or something like that. All that capital, all that stock is is illiquid, right so i i personally have, I don’t know, maybe $500,000 in savings and, you know, a decent income from Spark Toro, I think I’m probably in the top 20% 25% of American earners, but not, you know, not top 10% or five or one, which I’m very grateful for, like, I don’t, you know, I don’t regret anything. But if you think building a $50 million a year revenue company will get you will make you rich? The answer is not if it’s venture backed my friends. So So you know, you just have to be aware of that. One of the things I discovered, in addition to, you know, sort of that challenging outcome and the, you know, venture backed companies are essentially in this. Either you go bust or you become a unicorn, and anything in the middle doesn’t really work for the model. Right? So this time with Spark Toro, we raised money, but in a very different way from individual investors. In fact, a lot of folks like yourself, Seth, agency owners, other entrepreneurs, you know, people who had built small businesses, small medium businesses of their own, and generated a significant amount of wealth from that, you know, several millions of dollars, all of our investors are accredited, which means that they have more than a million dollars in net worth. And then they basically said, you have a spark Toro idea sounds awesome. We’d love to put, you know, anywhere from 25,000 to $100,000. In, we raised 1.3 million, which we spent almost two thirds of we just got profitable in September, we launched in April. And so had a very lucky year given COVID and all that, but yeah, that that structure, I found it, I’m really excited to hopefully inspire more business owners to do that. Like, for example, your your your business is probably an LLC, or correction. Yeah, so we’re an LLC as well, we, we can pay dividends to our investors. If spark Toro never sells, and never gets bigger than a few million dollars in revenue year, it doesn’t matter, it can still be a huge success for our investors, say you put in Seth $100,000, right. So essentially, the first 1.3 million that spark Toro makes we pay back to investors like you, we, you know, we’d say like, Hey, Seth, good news. Over the last couple years, you know, we made some money, here’s, here’s your money back. And now you keep owning the percent that you put in. And every year, you get dividends off of the profits, right, to the degree that we pay them out. And then if we ever sell, you get that money, too. So it’s sort of a win win, and you don’t have to be a unicorn, you know, we don’t have to become Uber or Tesla or whatever. In order to be a success, we can be a success at a small phase. That is probably the biggest takeaway for me is that the structure and the incentives of how the business is started and capitalized, influence everything about the company’s behavior.
So take me back, what would you have done in hindsight with with Moz?
I think I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have raised venture. I think Moz Moz, in my opinion, could have been an extremely successful, focused seo software company. For the long term, we probably needed that first round, the one point where we raised 1.1 million in 2007, if we hadn’t raised that, I don’t think we could have gotten our software to where we wanted it to be. But after that, you know, I raised 18 million more, and then 10 million more after that. It was just frankly, dumb. We mostly wasted that money. It made us inefficient. And we tried to expand way beyond SEO. And I talked about it in in last and founder in the book and have blogged about it, too. Just a lot of mistakes that we made that that came from money. And you can see right that Moz Moz today as compared to Moz, like five years ago, you know, you go back five years. And if you asked 1000 People in the SEO world, what software what SEO software they used and recommended, probably get 55 to 60%. Who would have said Moz? today? Maybe it’s 20% 25%.
It’s part of the mosaic, but it’s not the it’s not like that or nothing.
That’s exactly I think I think Mazda is you know, number of customers has gone from, hey, in the 25,000 range to the 30,000 range, but the industry has tripled, quadrupled in size, right? And that is mostly SEMrush and Ahrefs and Sistrix. And you know what it sounds like your company’s
and you’re in the right direction. I mean, your local product was early to market well priced, meeting you at some conference and was coming out and I was like, you know, give me I wanted to be like the first guy to try it. And it seemed like it should be a market maker. And yet Yaks seems to have sort of own that. Yeah, yeah. I
mean, I think Yext focused exclusively on that product and that space, they were very aggressive on the sales side. Moz was always very self service. And I think, frankly, the local product like Moz, tried to build an enterprise sales team, it spent a ton of the money that it made from the other parts of the business on the enterprise sales team, which never took off and failed. I think Moz is finally shutting that down now. But you know, it was like a five year experiment to do enterprise sales that never worked. And there’s just a lot of bad, bad bad moves all around. Well, I’m going
to take you try to stay away from the negative of that. But when you were building a team, because you did have resources. So the good news is, you had some you had some, you know, capital, which not everybody has behind you, what are the some of the things you think you did particularly well, as far as structuring the team to build it, you may not like the exit, or the whatever it is the lack of exit the the Purgatory, but yeah, what what, you know, what are some of the things you sort of think you did, particularly right, as far as using that venture money strategically.
So I think the 2007 round was used incredibly efficiently, like it was just, and maybe part of that is it was a smaller sum. And so we were just smarter with it. And more responsible, as opposed to you know, you get $80 million, and you’re like, Sure, throw 50k at that, sure, throw 100k at that. When when we raised the 1.1, just like with Spark Toros 1.3, we have been very, very capital efficient, very, very conservative. In our investment, the spark Toro team set is only two people, the MAS team back in 2007, I think we grew it to maybe eight or nine people kept it very tiny, right, we essentially had, I had two software engineers, eventually, three that I recruited, there were two of them were friends of my wife’s, who she trusted, and she has a better read for people than than I do. But by a longshot, especially when we were younger. I think maybe I’ve become a little more cynical judgy as I got older, but But regardless, we recruited these, these engineers, they, you know, built a product very efficiently on cloud services in the early days of cloud with Amazon Web Services, right? This was this was just as AWS was coming out and emerging. And we were able to build a product that people thought would cost 100 times as much as much as it did, you know, when I pitched investors, they were like, you can’t crawl the web and build a link index for a million dollars. And I, I found a couple of engineers who were like, Okay, if we do this, and this and this, and this, I think we can do it. Right. And we were very, very strategic in terms of testing, and experimenting before we got there, right? We validated the market, we knew that Yahoo Site Explorer and the Google link command. This is before Google Search Console and Webmaster Tools existed. We knew that that data was hugely important to marketers, we had seen, you know, we could see the data, we talked to people at Yahoo, we’re like, oh, yeah, we, you know, 10 million people a day are using Yahoo Site Explorer, like, okay, so if we build a better one of those, we can get, we can really get something. And and link explorer, I think it was originally called linkscape. at Moz, when we launched that, it was the day Lehman Brothers collapsed. Literally the day we were I was in New York for a conference, I went downstairs from my hotel room, I’m like, looking around ever, you know, all the people in the hotel lobby are glued to these screens. And it was real creepy. I had no idea what was going on. But despite the financial crisis, SEO Moz, which is what was called at the time, like, it really took off because we have validated the product. We had a huge marketing engine for our size, right? We had tons of people like yourself, who were reading the blog and watching what we were doing and paying attention. We knew what they needed, because we had built that audience and the product they wanted. When we got it to market. We were able to turn the corner to profitability, literally, I think was a month and a half after launch by November of 2008. After launching in what was that early October or late September? Yeah.
Well, that is quite a journey. And, you know, I’ll bring it back to the positive. You know what you did for many of us, you know, I got to sit next to your dad watching you present at the SEO church in Philadelphia, a number of years back, but that’s my grandfather, your grandfather, my grandfather, Seymour. Yes. And you know, to watch your journey and you helped so many of us to get to where we are so much gratitude, both for that and for coming on today. So thank you so much for having me. I
really enjoyed our chat. There. Good.
Thank you so much. You bet
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You know, a lot of it was sort of it enjoyable sort of understanding of what was going on in his world at that time. For me, ironically, not what I thought it was some of his lessons learned from business, and the fact that like, he took on money to build the software. But then when he took on crazy money to expand the program, he lost control. And it didn’t they didn’t use that money wisely. And I think that that is one of those things, like, if you’re gonna get money, what is it there? It’s not just money for the sake of getting money. But are you getting money in? And are you putting it to use so that, you know, lesson learned for me is, you know, you need a certain amount to get over the hill to sort of get yourself up and going, whether it’s developing software, putting your systems in place, but that if you take on too much, there are severe consequences. And I think he’s sort of become the the volunteer poster child for that.
Yeah, unfortunately, you know, the interesting thing about me is that, you know, in the forums that we live in, there’s a lot of talk about, you know, Oh, should I buy this practice should I take on this partner. And while it’s not direct one to one, there are corollaries that you can see in his and of course, we talk about outside money coming into law, we talk about Arizona, and how you know, California may be the next fall, you know, and, and the future is, you may be presented as a law firm owner with the opportunity to take outside money or have another firm invest in you, or invest in another firm. And so what I think you really need to do is listen to RAND story, and identify that it’s not always rosy. And there are things that you need to consider outside of the strict dollars and cents. And if you’re able to do that, then you can make educated moves, you can make moves that put you in a position to excel in the future. But I feel bad. I mean, I’m listening to this guy’s story as a rock star, and I’m like, Wow, I feel bad for that guy. And you know, he has a good life, but
his next venture will crush it, and he’ll be fine. So I have no doubt that he will navigate it sounds like he’s well on his way to another, you know, double or triple, if not more. So, you know, he clearly has a great head on his shoulder as an innovative thought leader, and we’ll, we’ll be fine. But it is shocking, that somebody who produce this much value for so many people is sort of in the is not excel the way you would assume.
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, you know, it’s what, what is interesting to me about lawyers who grow their law firms is that so often, that first job that you get out of law school kind of defines the rest of your career. And we see it we see lawyers who are like, well, I got a job doing this. And so now that’s the kind of lawyer I am for the next 50 years until I retire to Del Boca Vista, right? And then you see guys like Larry Kim with his word stream, which is all pay per click advertising, and now he’s doing messenger bots. And you see Rand with Moz, which is SEO and now you know, you start to see situations that we do have long lives and it may be that you want to offload your existing law firm and all of IT systems and everything, to start something totally new. And that’s okay. And that’s sort of frightening from a lawyer’s perspective, because you keep the steady path, right? As a lawyer, we’re trained, keep the steady path, don’t try, don’t take chances, that type of thing. But it’s sort of inspiring that, you know, your story is never over, you can keep writing it, you know, you can start a new chapter, and maybe that new chapter involves walking away from something that you’ve built. And it actually it’s given me some pause, you know, I love my firm. But maybe the best thing for me to do is plan to exit, you know, in two years, and started 50 with something totally new. I don’t know. I don’t know. But as we end the year, it’s, you know, I’m gonna have some more time to think about these things. And that’s a good thing. That’s not a bad thing. And, and because I have the systems in my office, I have the freedom to be able to do that. And that’s, and that’s something that I want people to take away from it. Spend some time deep in thought about your business, and not just in your business, not just on your business, but about your business and where you want to be. And so that’s the message that I wanted to send to you. This snowy Thursday here in Connecticut. But Seth, I think that’s going to wrap up our show for today. Sound good? Sounds great. All right. So as we stand right now, we are still going to be live next Tuesday, where we’re going to talk about some more things as we end the year. So please join us next Tuesday on another edition of Maximum Growth Live. I am your host, Jay Ruane. He is Seth price. Seth does SEO for law firms as well as runs one of the top law firms here on the East Coast. And I do social media marketing for lawyers, as well as run my law firm. And we are always available through the Maximum Lawyer Podcast through our own podcast this show. And all the shows that are part of Maximum Lawyer Media are a great opportunity for you to focus on your practice and do great things and really take yourself to the next level. So with that, Seth, I will say goodbye. Enjoy that warm weather. I have to go shovel. I’ve got 12 or so inches of snow. I’ve been holding off for doing it all day. I let the kids get out there. But now before it gets too dark. I’m gonna go out and do my shoveling. Now that the snow has stopped, so wish me luck. I hope I don’t turn into snow Godspeed. As you walk around in shorts and a T shirt, I’m sure you’re very jealous that I’m going to be doing some shuffling for the next couple of hours. So have a great day, folks. We’ll see you soon. We’ll see on Tuesday. Bye for now. I’m Jay. He’s Seth Have a great weekend.
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