From Lawyer to SEO Guru: Building a Successful SEO Agency and Launching PageOptimizer Pro

Oh, thanks for having me. I’m really happy to be here.

What am I doing? My hobby is watching British crime dramas, not like true crime, but like TV shows. And I watch them all. I have subscriptions so I can watch all the new stuff that comes out from the serious crime dramas to the light-hearted ones where it’s like, murder is hilarious. It’s like a detective who’s quirky but solves the crime. I truly enjoy watching those, and I watch a lot of them.

I found that I was at a fair, and they were selling a little mini Nintendo that had all the original games on it. And that was a lot of fun just to grab it and play something like Mario Bros. But to be honest, as soon as Nintendo changed from the little controller with two buttons, games lost me. So I haven’t gamed much since. I do a lot of Sudoku, though, if I’m trying to kill time. Right.

You know, so I was a trial attorney for about four years. I was in court every day. I did divorce, custody and support, and criminal defense, and I hated it. It was it was such a grind on your soul. I remember there are not a lot of people that do trial work. You think of a lawyer as somebody who goes to court, but that’s the smallest percentage of all people who practice law. I was doing, I think what most people think is the sexiest thing you can do and the most entertaining. I remember, so I got out of law school, I was 24, and so I’m 24 to 25 to 26, 28 in that range. I was looking at all these old dudes in their 50s and 60s, and I was like, Is this my crystal ball? Is this the person I want to be? It was depressing. I ended up taking a year off. I traveled overseas, and in that time, I started a business and needed a website for that. I found that a lot more interesting than anything I was doing in law. I started general contracting websites. Then from there, I got into the marketing part of websites and then gravitated towards SEO.

I found it just a It was a lot of fun. It was interesting problem-solving where sites have different histories to them. They’ve got different goals, they’ve got different products or services or objectives, or whatever they’re trying to get across in their messaging. Putting all that puzzle together was a lot more interesting than I was doing. I was going to do in-law. So as soon as I got into CEO, I knew that I thought it was the career path for me, and haven’t looked back since.

Yeah, so far, so good. We’d like to keep it going. When you tell the story about your life, it’s often linear, like here to there. And life has a ton of ups and downs along the way. But there have been more ups than downs, which has been great. And you’re right, in the end, there has been a lot of success. So it’s been a really good ride

We had an exit event, and it’s more of a strategic merger where another company merged, we merged with them, and a lot of my shares were then sold. I’m on the board of directors now for the company. But one of the biggest things is SOPs. You have to have Pretty much everything written down in order and in a way that’s going to be done the same way every time. I think a big reason for that is companies lose people all the time. People come, people go. You can’t be dependent upon one person knowing how to do a particular thing. There needs to be an SOP for that. If that person goes away or if they take a break or they’re sick or something like that, that somebody can step in and with minimal training can do the work that they were doing. I know when we set out to do SOPs, it sounds easy. I’ll just write your SOPs. But I think it took us a good two years before we had SOPs that I felt really good about that this will get the job done every time, even if this person is fairly new to the agency.

Another thing is something unique, like a unique USP, a unique selling proposition, or some IP that you’ve developed. Nobody wants to buy a book. They don’t want to buy your clients. They want to buy something. And so you have to be able to give them something unique about your agency. What exactly are you selling or what? Even if it’s just a perspective, we do SEO this way or we do SEO for these things, that could be enough. But there has to be something there that is a little unique. And a huge thing is that you have to get to the point that you are not closing the clients. You’re not closing the sale. You have a sales team for that. And then they’re doing all that follow-up because if you were to leave, there’s no guarantee that the sales will continue. That’s a big part of that. Then you also can’t be the one providing the service. You can’t be doing the day-to-day with the clients because, again if you weren’t there, are those clients going to go away? Are you that one focal point for the client that you sold them, brought them in, and then you’re providing the service for them?

That has to be done by the team. And so that also took several years to move and also my business partner, Andy, for us to move out of those roles where we weren’t part of the sales process or we weren’t directly providing the service. There were team members that handled that. So that way, when somebody comes in, the thing is turnkey. The SOPs are there so they don’t have to learn SEO. And necessarily the way you’re doing it, the way you’re doing it successfully is already written out. They don’t need to worry about you selling or providing the service. That’s already being done by other team members. The very last thing I would mention is that you need to sell when you’re growing. People want to buy, and this is any company, people want to buy a company that’s going up because their idea is, I can take this successful company and I can put my vision on top and grow it more. A lot of people try to sell when they’re flat or maybe down a little bit. And the pitch they give there is, well, if you bring your vision in, then it’ll grow again or a little rebound.

And nobody wants to buy that type of company. Or if they do, they’re going to buy at a discount. So if you want to sell, there’s always that dilemma, should I sell now because we’re growing or should I hold on to it? If you’re at a point where this is a good time to sell for us and you’re on an upswing, then that’s an excellent time to sell. And even though the future is the future and maybe you could have gotten more a year later, if you’re in that position where you’ve got the right buyer and you’re on the upswing, and you can show how that upswing is going to continue as well, that there’s a vision for growth, then that’s the absolute right time for you to sell.

That came out of the need from the agency. We wanted to do good on-page SEO. We were using a tool at the time, by a very good company, and they changed their tool, and they changed the thing that we were using, in particular, to benchmark our optimization. I reached out to them and said, Hey, I’d like to roll back to a previous version of this tool. They’re like, That can’t happen. I was like, Can I buy it? Can I buy just that? And I’ll just run it locally? And they said, Absolutely not. The annoying thing was I was like, Well if you don’t use it, I’m going to use it. Can I pay something for this? And they were like, No. And I was like, Well, then I think we need to put something together that’s ours. And so it came out of that need to do on the page. And also there was a real internal need because the tool we were using, which we were we’re having success with no longer existed. So what happened is I went out and wrote my algorithm and we were doing it internally. We were doing a lot by hand.

And while we were getting some success, we realized that’s not sustainable. You can’t do this by hand at scale. And so that’s when it turned into a Google script. We’re doing it to Google Sheets. And then from there, it turned into a SaaS where we were logging in and doing it on the cloud for speed and ease of access. We also started breaking Google Sheets. They have a limit as to how much data you can throw at them at once. And so, yeah, I was showing it to some SEO friends. Would you like this? Does this look useful? And they said. And that’s how we were able to then spin it off from the agency and turn it into its own company. And the software became its own thing from there.

Well, there were a couple. One was finding a developer. The back end of the tool is mostly Python. The front end is JavaScript. And finding a developer that could do both of those things is almost like finding an asset engineer. Developers do one thing or the other. And so finding the right developer that could handle both of those, especially at the beginning, because we were bootstrapped. We don’t have any debt. We didn’t have any debt. Finding a developer that could do that was quite a challenge. Then also explained to a developer because they don’t understand SEO, we need to do it this way. They’re like, Well, it’d be easier if we did it that way. I’m like, I’m sure it would be easier, but that’s not going to give us the results we need. You also have to then get a developer who has some concept of SEO or is willing to learn all the concepts. That was a big issue out of the gate. That’s been an issue the whole time we’ve had. The tool is finding the right people to work on it. I don’t code. I understand what Python can and can’t do or what JavaScript can and can’t do, but I’m not in their coding.

It has been a real challenge to find people who understand how to do the things we need them to do and then also have enough concept of the way that they can implement what you’re talking about and get the output that you need.

Especially when you’re starting because you don’t know what businesses will work and what won’t, and what the market will like and what it won’t like. And so I think you have to keep it as low cost as possible. And that’s going to be through contractors. Now we have people who are still contractors, but they’re full-time. I mean, they’re working just for us. But you will have to realize at the very beginning when you’re putting your own money out unless you’ve unlimited money, that they’re going to be splitting time between your project and other projects. So that will slow things down. But I think that’s a better approach anyway. That will give you time to iterate, to tweak it a bit, to make it what it needs to be, but it also keeps the cost down. And then once you get to the point, Hey, we can raise your rate and we can give you this many hours a month, then they’re essentially in-house and yours. But I think it takes a little time to build up.

The biggest thing we did, which was the smartest thing I think we did, was we gave it away for free. We launched at the end We just had it on the back end of our agency website where you just put in your keyword location and an email address and we’d email you a report. It was really how it started. That started crashing our website, and that’s the way we needed to put it as a SaaS tool. But I think we gave it away for free for about seven or eight months. And that created a user base that was willing to be beta testers for us. And they were going to give us a lot of grace because we weren’t charging them. But then once it got to the point that, A, the server cost is expensive, we need to start charging, everyone was cool with that. They had no problem at all because they understand, yeah, there’s a cost associated with these things. So initially we switched over to one report was $1 or something like that. And that first month, it was June ’20 when we launched, we pulled in $20.

It blew my mind. I was like, that means that there were 20 reports run in a month. That was a staggering number to me. I was like, I can’t believe that. Still, the price was at a price point that people were still, You create brand ambassadors is what you do. People are using this. It’s cost-effective. They’ve been using it for free. They’re happy to tell other people about it. And so it gets this organic growth. And to be honest with you, that’s still been our main source of marketing is through word of mouth. Me doing podcasts and YouTube shows like this to spread the word, but then also people using it and just telling people, Hey, this works. Check this out. And while we’re not a dollar a report now, we’re not too far away from that price point, to be honest, because we tried to keep the price point where you don’t have to choose between our tool and another tool to get your SEO done. But we also remember when we were we’re hustling, and we couldn’t afford a couple of hundred dollars a month on an SEO tool. And so we wanted to give enterprise-level data at a price that wasn’t enterprise-level.

And so we tried to stay true to that in our pricing model that I think we are the cheapest, our most cost-effective tool on the market today.

At first, you’re just making it up, right? The biggest thing is you don’t know how much it costs on your end until you do a lot of runs because there are certain fixed costs. You’ll use a server for this or that, and there’s a fixed cost there up to a certain amount of usage. But then other costs grow as you use an AWS, for example. If you’re using their hosting, it’ll scale with you. But even knowing what that scale might be, it’s hard to know exactly how much things are going to cost or how much people are going to use the tool, for example. You have to fly with it initially and then try to get a good number, a good handle on what your cost per is. Then from there, that’s how you can figure out how many credits you give or how much access you can give at certain price points. But you have to think at a minimum, you do need a 3X, whatever your cost is, to even be competitive so that the tool can handle fluctuations or your service can handle fluctuations and new clients are within churn and stuff like that.

So whatever your cost is, you have to at least 3X that and then work from there on numbers.

This comes up a lot with people who are newer to SEO and using PageOptimizer Pro in word count or what words Google is looking at. We’ll hear a lot of people say, I’m in WordPress and WordPress says I only have 500 words here, but Pop says my page, clearly pop is wrong. Or they’ll be like, I wrote in a Google Doc and there were only 500 words and Pop is saying there are two things. The thing to understand is that Google is looking at more than just the words that are on the page. There are maybe words within the code that Google is going to be looking at, even though that’s not visible to the user. And so all of that is considered. And that’s, I think, an edge that pop gives because it’s difficult to explain. I think a lot of tools have stopped doing that, or some tools are doing that initially and they’ve stopped because it is a difficult concept to explain and people just complain. Some people don’t complain, they just don’t use the tool because clearly, these numbers are wrong. But I think that’s an edge also that we give is that we’re giving you more of a true word count and we’re considering things that Google is considering within optimization.

It’s a really big myth that Google is only looking at the words, say that you’re putting into a WordPress editor. There’s a lot more going on on that page that Google is looking at and it’s going to consider your word count. We’ll count toward your word count, but then also we’ll count toward different signal areas or different factor areas that Google is considering. Right.

I think we are one of the few tools that has an ETH feature. I was trying to remember when we launched it, but it was probably ’20, I think, somewhere in there, that we got the eating tool in there. And what we’re looking for are signals that a bot can find so they can trust your page and your site more. These come on things we’ve identified from the quality rater guidelines that Google puts out, but to talk about what is a trustworthy page or what is a trustworthy site. And so we go through the page and we look at your competitors and what signals they’re putting out. And we look at your page and what signals you have there. And then we let you know, Hey, the vast majority of your competitors have these three or four and you’re missing them. And they’re often pretty low-hanging fruit. There are things that you should probably do for a website anyway to show that you are trustworthy. And you have to think about it from a Google perspective, they want to put sites where they know who’s responsible for the content and who is responsible for the site.

And that’s a lot of what these signals are. If somebody has a question or somebody has an issue or somebody followed your advice and they were hurt or something went wrong, how can they get redressed for that? And so there are a lot of signals in there like, do you have a privacy policy? Do you Do you have a returns policy? Do you have multiple ways that people can contact you? And so those are some of the things that we’re looking for within the ETH tool to help people identify if they’re in the correct range. An important point on eat, though, is that getting those things on your site isn’t going to improve your rank, but it’s going to help you keep your rank when Google checks for those signals. And so it’s like once you’ve invested all that time and effort into SEO, you want to make sure you keep the rankings that you’ve earned once Google decides like, okay, now this site is taken off. Should it be here in the first place? You want to make sure you’ve got those eat things covered. One nice thing about the ETH tool, too, is you only need to run it a couple of times.

You have the option of running it on every run if you want, but that’s not necessary because it’s going to be consistent across all of your pages. So once you dial it in on a page or two, you probably don’t need to run it again, which is nice. It’s a, let’s see where we are, let’s get that fixed, and then you’re probably good to go after.

A really important thing in SEO is that the secret is hiding in plain sight. Google shows you the sites that it likes, hence And so Pop really can’t lead you toward the type of page or the type of content, but it’s going to give you recommendations. What you should do is look at those recommendations and look at the pages that Google is rewarding. And that’s going to be different keyword to keyword, niche to niche. Google could be putting product pages in the search. They could be putting category pages or they could be putting long-form articles. What you need to do before you start writing that page or going into your optimization is to make sure that you’re giving Google the type of page that it wants. And once you’ve identified that type of page, then it should be pretty easy to hit the benchmarks like or the recommendations that Pop will give because they should match. Then like, okay, it’s this style of page. It’s a long-form article that’s got three-thumb words on it. So it makes no sense to try to optimize a single product page because that’s not the type of page that Google wants.

And so it’s impossible to get three-thumb words on a single product, The content that you want to focus on is the content that Google wants. And you’re not going to teach Google anything new. You’re not going to go out and change your opinion on something. Whatever those pages are that Google is rewarding, that’s what you want to give it. And then that’s going to be your most successful.

Yeah, that’s a great point because you could have something that seems like a really good feature, a good idea, and you implement it. Out of your user base, you only made two people happy. Or two people are using it, and then it costs money to develop these things. One thing that’s been beneficial for us is that I do SEO, and our lead product developer does SEO. Then also we talk to the agency people a lot that are also using the tool. A lot of the features that we end up developing are things that we need to use to do better SEO. We do take a lot of client feedback into consideration. A big thing is ease of use, especially for users that are not as SEO savvy, that they’re not used to looking at spreadsheets, for example. All day. They’re used to running their business and how they run their business. However, analyzing a spreadsheet is not always the easiest format. Technically, as a spreadsheet, if you think about it. We’ve tried to de-spread, spreadsheet the design and make it more easy to use. While we still get some complaints that it’s clunky, and I don’t necessarily disagree with a lot of those points.

Each iteration of the tool that comes out is certainly easier to use. If you used the tool two years ago or use it six months ago, it looks completely different now. Each time we update the tool, even with a new feature, we’re also usually updating something on the ease-of-use side. A lot of the feedback we get from clients or users is on ease of use, and that’s really what we try to implement as much as we can.

Well, I can give you two quick ones. One is recently where somebody came in and like, Hey, I ran my page through a couple of other tools and then even pop, and I’m getting a score of like a %. I’m getting a really good score, but the page isn’t performing. What’s interesting is from some of the recent updates that have happened, like the helpful content update and a few others at the end of last year, we found that over-optimization is becoming a bigger factor. When we launched pop in ’17 or we’re working on ’17, launch in ’17, over-optimization was a factor then. But then ’28, ’29, ’20, even leading up to ’22, it seemed to go away in terms of importance. And so we devalued that within the scoring. Something that we’re able to do within POP is we can adapt because we have our algorithm. We write our tool is our tool. We’re not using somebody else’s recommendations and repackaging them. We’re not using an API to repackage our recommendations. And so actually, it’s something that we’ve been able to do, and this comes actually from feedback and some user pain points is that we now have a toggle where you can include over-optimized terms into the score, and you can see where you might need to adjust your score to be more competitive.

And that’s really just based off of some feedback from users, but then also what we’ve been seeing in the surfs and how Google has changed, we’ve been able to change with them. That led us to another thing that we’ve just launched called a keyword precision tool. Google shows you the sites that it likes, and it likes the sites because of their on-page or their off-page or a combination of the two. And that gives you a roadmap for what you need to do for a particular keyword. But because there’s that off-page element, not all the sites you’re looking at always have the best on-page SEO to build that roadmap out of. And so while we were building that toggle for over-optimization, that led us into doing keyword precision where we can go through and find the sites that look like they’ve done the best SEO. Then we can create a roadmap off of that and provide that for no additional cost. If somebody wants keyword precision like these are the best to build the recommendations off of, we can do That all led from just good interaction with users. That was a lot of fun.

I’ve been working on that in the last month, and that to me was a lot of fun to work on. That was a good problem to solve so that we can provide something that becomes more and more useful. On the client side, back in ’20, is when I started experimenting with silos and virtual silos. We had this client that came to us and they had 10 target pages, and they were competitive terms. They were the terms that only get 20 searches a month. If they could get one of these clicks, it would be huge for them. Depending on whatever metric you like, they had a DA of zero or their domain score was zero. We’re looking at these pages and we’re looking at they had these blogs, and the blogs are getting some action. They had this great content that they’d been writing for three years. It was excellent content. We were experimenting with virtual silos, and I was like, How about we divvy up these blogs and we put them into virtual silos to support individual target pages? So that’s what we did. We were like, Okay, these five, they’re going to support this target page.

Then we redid the internal links, the links within the body to point to the target pages. We did for all 10. And within about two months, we had eight of those 10 on page one and not tweaking too much else out. So it took us a long time because we’re doing this by hand and we’re implementing it and watching it, but it was a wild success. And then they fired us in month three. And they said they fired us because we didn’t do anything, that we didn’t do any SEO. I was like, What are you talking about? We did SEO. We optimized these pages. We optimized the internal structure and pushed it in, and they really couldn’t see it. They’re like, Well, no, we could have done that. I was like, Well, of course, you could have done that, but you didn’t have the expertise. That’s what we’ve been running all these experiments on. Yeah, we’ve been running all these experiments on silos. We think this will work, and we implemented it, and it worked great. They got the results they wanted, but apparently, we didn’t do SEO, so they let us go.

But it was one of the things that was a real bummer. But at the same time, it was satisfying because we knew, Okay, we’re really onto something here. We can do really good SEO with this structure setup. And that was 2015. It still works very well today. We can implement those on client sites, and it’s still very successful and it’s a powerful technique. And I would still argue that we’re still doing SEO when we do that.

When I did that test, that big show and that was in 2020, and leading up to that, I’ve been running a lot of tests, and I realized Google can’t see this page, and Google can’t read as a human can read. And also different places on the page are more important than others. So Google is looking at these spots more intensely than other spots. And then I realized that Google’s algorithm is an algorithm. And if you can give the algorithm the math that it wants, you can be very successful. So in a public competition, I launched a page in Lorem ipsum. So that’s just fake Latin text. And then I did the math, and then I copied and pasted in the terms that were needed to satisfy the math for the algorithm. And then that page went to number one. What was a lot of fun about that, though, is that I got a lot of flack for it, and I redid it in ’29. And then I still get flack for it. Like, oh, there have been all these updates, the helpful content update, MEDDIC update, RankBrain, Hummingbird, Mom, Bert, all these things.

And that’s supposed to have killed that. And some people even said there was a specific Lorem ipsum update as well. And so a couple of months ago, I was speaking at Chiang Mai SEO, and I redid the original tests. And wouldn’t you know what? They all still work. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And that’s actually should be reassuring to a lot of people. There is a lot of uncertainty in SEO, but the foundations of it are immutable. This is what SEO is, and it does come down to satisfying the algorithm at the end of the day. And so long as Google is using an algorithm, there still will be SEO, and there is still value in doing SEO.

We’re about to launch our API. Let our API be public so people who want to, say, access their credits through an API can do that. Then, people that have maybe their internal tools and have some savvy there, can access pop through the API. That’s one of the biggest things that we’re working on right now. I hope to launch that this week, actually, and I’m pretty excited.

Solving your problem, I think, is one of the biggest things. We’re able to grow and develop the tool because we use the tool. These are problems that we have, we need to do on-page SEO. And so we’re able to continue to use the tool and iterate the tool to meet our needs because our needs are pretty much what the user base needs are. I think one of the first things you want to get into is solve a problem that you have that you understand. And if you can solve that problem and you can charge $10 to $20 a month, that’s a no-brainer price. Other people will pay that to get that problem solved, even if it’s a very simple solution, but it just makes their lives so much easier. You can offer it at a price that’s quite low. It’s just a no-brainer for them to do, then yeah, they will do that. Especially as a first So once you get a feel for how SaaS, I think you could branch out maybe a little farther away from there. But I still wouldn’t go too far from the things that you know and solve the problems that you have.

I think you could do pretty well within the SaaS business.

Okay, let’s do it. I’m ready. By the way, for people who are watching, a lot of those questions, this is a good YouTube show podcast because you get the questions in advance. You can think about them a little bit. But I don’t have these questions. So we’ll see what happens in the rapid-fire round.

So in the last few months, I’ve dropped about eight kilos. I want to drop about another eight. So we’ll put weight loss as the number one resolution. Right.

Late nights. I’m a night owl. I can stay up late at work, and I often get a lot of inspiration when I’m working late. Coming up with ideas or problem-solving usually happens to me later in the night. I’m a late-night person.

There’s a band called Cake. They were from the late ’90s and early ’80s, and there are a few albums on there that I can put on forever. There’s also a band called Built to Spill from the late ’90s. They have an album called Keep It Like a Secret. I can put that on a loop or pretty much anything by Rage Against the Machine will work as well.

I don’t know, but I think I want either Joshua Jackson or Jack Black to play me. So if it’s Jack, it’s got to go a little more comedy. If they get Joshua Jackson to sign, it’ll probably be more of a drama.

It was Motivational Basketball Quotes. I did it for a person who’s having trouble with a page that they’re trying to rank. All the quotes are from Kobe, apparently, or LeBron James.

Thanks for having me. This was a lot of.