Carl Holden on Ranking Multiple Sites to Push Competitors Off Page One

0:00 · Intro & welcome

Jordan:0:00
Welcome back to the [High Ticket AI Systems] podcast. Everyone please welcome the one and only Mr. Carl Holden. Carl, how you doing today my friend?

Carl Holden:0:08
I'm great, thanks for having me.

Jordan:0:11
It's our pleasure. Now I ask everyone this question, what is your offer and who do you sell to? Basically, what do you sell and who do you sell to?

0:19 · What Carl does free traffic for 7-figure businesses

Carl Holden:0:19
My offer is, do you want free traffic off of the internet?

Jordan:0:25
Hell yeah.

Carl Holden:0:28
And to the people that want that are people who have to have the money to pay for it. You're not, I don't help small little businesses. We tend to help a business that's making at least a million or more a year just because SEO is a big investment. And, but it's also got a great return and we help businesses locally and other States rank both locally and nationally. There's a lot of. lies and misdirects on the internet about how that works. But we've built a system that helps businesses usually rank within a three to 12 month period and start just suddenly getting that weird like, yeah, I found you on the internet. And they're like, whoa, what is, I've never had that happen before. And so that's what we've built our business on over the last almost 15 years.

1:23 · 15 years in SEO team size and how the agency runs

Jordan:1:23
That's amazing. So aside from, you know, being in business for over a decade, congratulations on that. I want to give the audience more reason to kind of listen to you in regards, in regards to team size and don't get into specifics, but ballpark numbers from head count. Where do you feel like the company's at?

Carl Holden:1:41
Thank Yeah, so we have about half a dozen people that work here locally at our office and then lots of different contractors based on the job and the types of content, links and other things that we do. Any given month, our team is involving about 20 or so people in the process. But people whose insurance I pay for is only a handful.

Jordan:2:08
I hear you on that. is not cheap. Let's see. And then in regards to location of your geographical location, where you guys based at?

Carl Holden:2:11
Thank

Carl Holden:2:21
We're based out of Huntsville, Alabama, which is in the northern part of the state, about an hour away, hour and a half away from Nashville is the easiest way for people to, so like right at the top of our state.

Jordan:2:33
Troucher, okay cool. And then, I'm drawing a blank here. Not pricing exactly, but pricing model. I mean you can give exact pricing if you want, but the model more.

Carl Holden:2:42
sure.

2:46 · Pricing model why Carl never charges hourly

Carl Holden:2:46
We base it more on a value based system. I don't charge any kind of hourly. It is a monthly rate, which we know it's going to take us to rank people, rank a site. And just it's easier for businesses to budget that out. I try not to do exact like metrics of you rank at this specific time. Anybody who does that is just trying to get the sale. And we don't take any kind of commissions from traffic. or we don't do any kind of like lead selling. Because I find a lot of the people who do that end up being kind of pariahs to the system and just inflate the cost for everyone. We are providing a service. It has a value to it. And if you're willing to pay to rank higher and get free traffic, that's what we're looking at. So most clients range from the around the $2,000 $10,000 a month mark.

Jordan:3:40
Thanks for the contact. You'd be surprised how many agencies that I speak with on the podcast and they charge hourly. And I think it's God bless them. Really dumb to do that. Thank you. Thank you. Because you cannot scale time. You can scale value. Okay. So yes, thank you. Thank you for our.

Carl Holden:3:52
It is very dumb, yes.

Carl Holden:3:57
No.

Carl Holden:4:02
Yeah. I will actually, if I have clients come, potential clients who say, I just want to pay you for hours worked. Then I tell them you're talking to the wrong guy then. So if that's what you want to do, I'm not your solution. And zealous is going to do that for you. I'm not your employee and I will never be your employee. And I think that's the problem is a lot of agencies go down the rabbit hole of basically just being outsourced employees.

4:34 · Being an agency vs. being an outsourced employee

Jordan:4:34
Exactly. I think we agency owners are providing way more than an outsourced employee value driven anything, right? Whether you're driving leads to a business, you're making on SEO, which drives leads to a business. are recruit, you're recruiting agency that has infinite LTV. you recruit high quality players, you see like, an outsourced employee has an employee.

Carl Holden:4:34
It is not a failure of life, it is a failure of the soul.

Carl Holden:4:45
Thank

Jordan:5:03
Mindset you don't want to work with people that have an employee mindset and when I all with all the respect for employees out there The reason why business owners own a business is because we have a leadership mentality. We are very ambitious We're very driven. We want to go out and get it Employee mindset is you tell me what to do and I'll do it I don't you you don't you don't want to work with a company like that You want to have a company that takes a proactive leadership standpoint, which are what are your thoughts?

Carl Holden:5:30
I agree and disagree. I agree that people who think entrepreneurially are very valuable. I think those who think a little too entrepreneurially often end up becoming hard to retain and want to go do it themselves. So I have found that hiring the right type of person who wants to do really well and have a career with a company and can be entrepreneurial

Jordan:5:33
Okay, talk.

Carl Holden:5:57
is very different than hiring some young buck that I got off the street that wants to learn marketing, but I'm not 100 % sure. He's really, really good, but I'm not 100 % sure that he's going to stick around. I've learned to shy away from those. They actually are probably better performing people, but they're not trustworthy. And I've been burned before by that type of person. So there is this kind of unicorn that honestly, I've been lately trying to avoid any hiring anybody under the age of 30 because they're just too much of, and that's funny because you would think, marketing, you want to get the youngest and the best. They're Gen Z is really hard to, a lot of them are really hard to employ. And a lot of them, I mean, they watch the book, the guy that wrote the book, Alex Sermozzi and other stuff. And that guy has interesting, Viewpoints like learn what it's somebody else does pay him what they do and then walk away that great that works for the business owner But that doesn't work for an agency who somebody you hire somebody they come and learn what you do and then they piss off So there's there's those kinds of things that I think That you have to be careful of when you're running an agency especially when you got really good and You're able to provide stuff that other people can't People will start you start to get the wrong kinds of people that want to figure out what you're doing and you just have to be a lot more careful with your knowledge

7:32 · Hiring the right people and why Gen Z is hard to retain

Jordan:7:32
I love you. I don't want to argue, but I'm going to debate because it's great for you. Here we go. Layla Hermos. I actually learned this from Layla. If you are attempting to recruit and retain a plus players, entrepreneurial like-minded individuals, your vision needs to be so big that this other a player person, their vision can fit inside your big vision here. So you don't want to. I love that. Second thing is.

Carl Holden:7:50
right?

Carl Holden:7:55
Very good. Yeah.

Jordan:8:01
going to Alex Ramos's mindset with pay an agency, learn what they do, then do it yourself. Yes, but if you are the agency owner, you, oh man.

You could have a backend or an extension offer that essentially is solving the next core constraint within that person's business. So as an example, if you and I are the same, we provide leads to businesses, they sell them, they make money, awesome. What's the next constraint? Realistically, like throw some ideas out there. What is their next constraint?

Hypothetically, like.

Carl Holden:8:42
say what you did first for them again.

Jordan:8:45
We provide leads essentially, like you rank them on SEO, leads are coming in, what's the next constraint?

Carl Holden:8:51
The next constraint is them following up with those leads and sales and developing kind of the follow through of those becoming customers. Again, something that a lot of businesses aren't great at.

Jordan:9:06
Exactly. Exactly. That could possibly be a back end offer that you incorporate after you dial in that, right? The next constraint is like, need more sales reps, dude. We have so many freaking leads, any more sales reps. You can have another division. Now you have a done for you recruiting process. Like I'm not saying go out and do that. I'm just saying from the business owners perspective, I think that's how we combat. I'll pay you for four months. I learn what you learn or I learn what you teach me and then I dip. I don't know.

Again, not arguing, but what are your thoughts on that?

9:41 · The Alex Hormozi debate: learn it yourself or outsource it?

Carl Holden:9:41
I I mean, if Alex Hermosy came to me and said, I'd like to learn what you're doing, me personally, I would want to know under what context. Uh, but I totally get what he's saying too, because honestly, there's a lot of stuff that we do that if a company actually put the time and effort in to learn how to do it, there's a lot of value and lift that they would have. think a lot of it is though, that companies just don't want to. People are expensive. Uh, they're.

Jordan:10:06
Yes.

Carl Holden:10:09
constrained by budgets. And so the average company that isn't hyper optimizing like Hermosy talks about just can't really afford to hire and maintain those people. They also have like no knowledge on what a good one of those looks like. So while I think that it's great advice, it takes a very specific type of business owner that that's actually going to work for.

And that's why I think that guy has had so much success is that he's an anomaly. And a lot of those kind of course and book things, only like 1 % of the people who read that stuff really actually get the full message and can move it forward. But what I have found is that I like doing this stuff that's hard that other people don't want to do and has value. And if you could do those three things, that drives ability of Yeah, there may be an occasional person that comes by and say, I want to learn what you do, just pay me how to do it. But for the most part, there's enough value in that people like, I really don't want to do that, but I really want that. And it's kind of like Dirty Jobs, the guy that said, know, nobody likes, plumbers don't generally like digging around in people's poop, but other people don't want to do it. I dig around in the poop of the internet, but there's gold down there.

Just no one else wants to dig in the poop.

Jordan:11:39
Great analogy. I love how you brought that home. Yes, Alex is a rare breed. The average business owner, average person is lazy. They would much rather pay you to rank on SEO. They'd much rather pay me to get booked appointments. Most people want to outsource things they don't want to learn. I'm not comparing myself to the man, God bless him, but I am a little similar to him.

If I am going to pay an outsourced agency for something, I'm going to want to know exactly what you're doing, why you're doing it. Because at the end of the day, I can have that skillset in my tool belt. Now, even if I don't go out there and physically build my own SEO presence, I now can articulate back and forth with you what's going on. Why is this working? Why is this not working? can, Carl, how can you and I strategize together? to optimize our SEO approach. But if I just say here, here are the keys to my castle, and I do not partake in any calls and any knowledge, depth of information, I think you're being lazy as a business owner. If I mean quite frank with you. Does it, you know what I mean? Go for it.

Carl Holden:12:51
Sure.

I call those gravy accounts because those people don't pay as much attention as they want. I don't have to talk to them. I just deliver them the results and they pay their bills. I actually, that's my favorite kind of customer. And it should be the favorite kind of customer of every agency. Why the hell would you want to be talking to the business owner all the time? They're a pain. No offense to the business owners, but they're the same problem. They'll say the same thing to you.

Jordan:13:06
Yeah

Carl Holden:13:22
I really don't like my customers who want to talk to me all the time because it's that 80-20 rule. It's not that I don't want to tell people how their business is going and those other things, but the people want to know every and any detail about stuff or everything's always on fire. It's just hard as the one running the show to just manage that person. And I think a lot of business owners know that they're doing that, but it's a conscious choice. And sometimes as an agency, you have to decide, Is the opportunity here for this person's growth worth those kinds of things? I make that decision. Sometimes I stay on with somebody and I'm willing to take that because a harder situation is something that we can learn from, or sometimes it's not working out. And you've got to just say, look, we've done what we contractually obligated ourselves to do, contracts up, and we wish you the best.

Jordan:14:19
sure. I'm not gonna lie, I completely agree with you. The clients that don't ask questions and just accept the results, love them. Absolutely love them.

Carl Holden:14:27
Well, and that's to say that's great, if and only if you're being honest with the client. I run into a lot of companies like Thrive and Hiboo and those big corporations that just hope that people don't talk to them because they're doing a terrible job. And I have to go in and clean those messes up. So for me, I have to sleep at night. probably could, you know.

I probably could make way more money if I wasn't honest, but I believe when I die that I go somewhere. And so I have to like be somewhat ethical that people know what they're doing. So we send reports of everything we do. And like 90 % of my clients I know for a fact, aren't reading the darn reports, even though we put like three days into them every single month, because we want to show we're doing something and you're getting the value out of what you pay.

15:00 · What actually drives Carl winning vs. insecurity

Jordan:15:23
No, absolutely. And I don't want to get philosophical, but I feel like my heart is calling me to do it. So I think Alex, you may also have this. The innate drive to just be the best. I feel that way. I know like... deep down I want to be, but in actuality, like being the best at something, like that's really difficult to do and it takes years to accomplish. But I think it's the fact that we still want to be that. I played baseball for a long time and for a long time I was the best. Engored myself, became an entrepreneur, here we are now. And I know Alex also talks about, cause he's essentially a bro.

Carl Holden:15:53
really difficult to get those things to work.

Jordan:16:14
wrapped in private equity, right? So he like understands business to the fullest. He learned this from Warren Buffett. The more skills you have as a person, the more valuable you become. And if you want to become the best because like maybe you're just really deeply insecure, because I am, I will be fully transparent. That's why I want to be the best. I think you're willing to sacrifice a lot more and pick up these additional skills like, I don't know, learning a skill like SEO or learning this, even though you are a business owner, right? Yes, you will outsource it and pay it, but you will be not a business owner that you and I both don't like because you're willing to tack on that other skill because it's going to increase your value as a human and obviously your business. And I think the reason why that is possible for Alex for me, for other people that are semi annoying is because we want to be best. and that stems from like security. That was a fricking ramble I probably didn't have to go on, but I had to share that I don't know why. Thanks for listening.

Carl Holden:17:17
Let me answer a little, I wax a little philosophic myself. I personally don't like the bro marketer kind of mentality. Like, dude, like take the tape off your nose for your video. It's distracting. Nobody needs to see that right now. Unless you have a whiny, nasally voice like me, just take it off. You look dumb. But also I, and I was a nerd in high school. So people like him, and their insecurities are what picked on me. So just like, I know his type. I'm not going to ever like be, hey, Alex, let's be friends. He wouldn't want to be my friend either. I'm a very nerdy guy. And now like the people I really followed, the people that inspired me are like Seth Godin. Cause he's another little scrawny nerdy guy who did his best to stack the skills and win just like you did. But it doesn't really come from a place in my opinion, his or mine from insecurity, but more of a look I can do things too and I can't physically impress people whenever have been able to with strength or those other kinds of things. So, but I enjoy when people say, wow, that was really smart. I enjoy beating something that's hard for other people. I'm a huge gamer and the best video game you can play. is gaming an algorithm of a multi-trillion dollar company and beating them at their own game. When I win, I win. And I think chasing that win rather than worrying about maybe if I'm insecure or not secure, that's the thing we all chase that we all have in common is wins. And when you can win for yourself and win for your clients, that's what sustains you mentally and allows you to just keep going forward.

Jordan:19:02
Yes.

Carl Holden:19:10
And not all wins mean successes. There's a difference.

Jordan:19:15
A freaking man, Carl, I love how you articulated that, because I could get behind winning. Regardless if I'm insecure or not, I want to win. You know what I mean? So absolutely love what you said about that. Now pivoting, I appreciate you pivoting back to marketing. Let's talk about some systems that you have in place. Two things we love to discuss, my friend, client acquisition systems and then client retention systems. Let's start with client acquisition.

19:43 · Client acquisition: how Carl gets leads without outbound

Carl Holden:19:43
I wait for people to fill out the form because I rank at the top in my area and eight, I'm on the first page of 18 of the 20 largest cities in my state. So that's winning one, two, two, what we do is I am very well influential in my area in the, state of like AI. I'm on our mayor's AI task force. run an after hours AI event.

Jordan:19:57
there it is.

20:12 · Ranking in 18 of 20 major cities in Alabama

Carl Holden:20:12
at our big university here in town. So I'm very well known for that. I make a lot of posts online about AI via LinkedIn. It's really the only social media that Zellis is even active on. yeah, just, obviously we run some search ads because those have great ROI on them too, but it's all that SEO acquisition strategy. my competitors don't like me because I will build not only my site, but like three or four other sites that either rank me or outrank me and then just push everybody off the first page. So that's part of the play that some clients will pay for is can we rank multiple sites on the page? Even if those don't get leads, that's one less opportunity for our customer because you can kind of think about it. I'm a real estate agent of land none of us own.

And I have to bend the terms of service of this large corporation to my will. And it takes time. It doesn't always work. All of those things. But I think also just after time, especially in a local area, you just have reputation. And that yields things. You do a good job. You treat people right. They will just inherently talk about you when someone mentions AI. Well, I know a guy. when someone mentions SEO, well, I know a guy and that guy is me because I've been around. And that's really where we get really just word of mouth and being out and present in the community and just purely ranking for it. And you get the business both ways.

Jordan:21:53
I love what you said. We're to have a dive into that strategy really quick, but you have three pillars. SEO, you rank at the top for Alabama for 18 of 21 cities. Fantastic. Word of mouth, so referrals, like you said, you're pretty popular in the community. You also talk about paid search. So I would love to talk about the strategy of SEO, how you get lookalike domains or sites to rank on page one to remove the competition.

Great strategy, great mindset. When did you first think of that? And what is the, not secret sauce, but I guess the play behind it. We know the play. Go for it.

22:31 · The multi-domain strategy that pushes competitors off page one

Carl Holden:22:31
Yeah, sure. I'll tell you a funny story. My wife said, Carl, you're really smart, but she's from Mexico City area. And when I met her, she was up in New York. And then I moved the poor thing to Alabama. And I've had to explain to her, I'm stupid smart, like super smart in Alabama. I might not be as smart in New York City. So it's also where you choose to play the game.

You're probably at certain places really good at baseball at the college level, but maybe with an injury and other things, you might not be that tier. So why chase the tier that you're maybe not the best at? Because you can be the best if you're choosing where you play. I think some people, get a little bit of that hundred million dollar offer and think I can be hermosy too. And I'm like, there's only space for a couple of hermosies. Like you're not going to be that guy.

Jordan:22:58
So.

Jordan:23:12
Yeah.

Jordan:23:16
Mmm.

Carl Holden:23:27
choose your space and space that's available, and you can be that guy in this specific area. So all that being said, when it comes down to specific strategies, some of which I won't share, but the ones that I'm willing to share are Google is not as smart as you think. And if you check the right boxes and ignore their lies on the internet, what you do will work. But that's not stuff I publish, which is difficult because I could put a really good high ranking content on the internet, but I would never tell anybody the stuff that I'm doing that actually works unless they're a client and then I feel, you know, once they sign the thing, they can't tell other people because of the non-disclosure. But easy stuff like exact match domains. My wife told me, all right, fine, don't or we won't, we'll stay here because you're a big fish in a little pond, but I want to go to the beach more. And I'm like, that's fair. I do too.

I love the beach and she's like, you should get more work down at the beach. So I bought golfshoresmarketingagency.com and I use cod code and I built it up. And if you Google it right now on your computer, I'm the number one agency in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Then my zealous page is number two.

24:41 · Exact match domains the Gulf Shores story

Jordan:24:41
Actually That's so badass. Right on. Right on.

Carl Holden:24:49
So I have lots of pages that we're scaling out that if you do the right things, and funny enough, if you don't label them all as the same business and Google kind of sees them as separate entities, it will rank them. how long until everybody else catches on to that doesn't matter because I'm going to be, like you said, on the next step of the thing by the time they catch up.

Don't.

Jordan:25:15
It's such to me, like the play for SEO is keeping it local. It's easier. Please. You're the expert. I'm a novice. Like ranking locally for golf shore, Alabama. Right. So I imagine I'm a business and I'm looking for SEO or marketing and I have to look up marketing agency in city.

That's essentially how you would show. Do you find that to be really, really dominant for local service businesses? Like, you know what that means. Do you find that they look up agency in backyard or agency in city, opposed to, I guess, businesses like you and I, where we kind of work nationally, even internationally?

Carl Holden:25:57
Well, again, I remember what I said. It's picking your space that you can be the best in. If somebody searches best marketing agency in the world, that golfshores one will never show up because that's not what Google is going to surface. It's going to surface stuff from national directories and things. And yeah, you could eventually scale until those sizes, but you've also just increased the amount of competition that you have, increased the expectation and increased the workload.

Whereas again, where you're saying, you focus on local? The expectation of a business of a two or $3 million business is just going to be way less, way more low key to deal with that kind of client than Coca-Cola. There's a reason Coca-Cola doesn't keep any agency it has for more than a year or two, because it's fricking hard to like help companies like that. It's why those CEOs and the other top people get paid so much. is because most people quit because it's a lot of work. And I already have high blood pressure just keeping up with Google's ranking algorithm. I don't want to add that to my stresses. Now, all that being said, I market locally to businesses, but I take great pride in when I can take an Alabama business and go outrank every company in California. for that same thing nationally. Like one of my clients, Mad Security, they do CMMC consulting, which is a compliance for the government that's really important. If you search CMMC consulting on your computer right now, the first organic result is gonna be Mad Security out of Alabama. And I take great pride in showing people that we all don't sound and look like Forrest Gump, and that we can do cool things too, and that we can be the best in this state.

And that brings me a lot pride locally to go and help businesses that we know here show up throughout the United States.

Jordan:28:01
That is so sick. Like, Seriously. How, I to ask questions. How long did that take? Time is irrelevant. Who cares? Because they're number one now. Out of curiosity. And then what did you do to do that? Because that's really, really awesome.

Carl Holden:28:19
Yeah, so it's a guy I met through Vistage again through a networking program that other business owners and it took time because he's very much he actually went and did one of those from Rosie classes see definitely that type a personality but he's a really good dude and very intentional says exactly what he's thinking and I like that he pushes me to and

Jordan:28:40
Those batteries.

Carl Holden:28:49
When we were in the group together, told, you know, did some and said some things that really encouraged me to grow. But anyways, it started off at a fair amount of money in the first six months to really like push and get him caught up. And now it's sort of in a maintenance mode of we can keep running things at about half the cost and still like get the rankings that he needs and the traffic that he wants. And we may eventually ramp back up when he

Jordan:29:09
Bye guys.

Carl Holden:29:19
is ready to, but it did take over a year to really start hitting it. But then when you've got a client who is just getting traffic for a fairly well ranking term, they just keep paying. They're like, just keep ranking me for more stuff. We'll meet once a month and talk about what you're working on just to touch base. But it's clients like that where that's the the exact type of client I like, not so much the gravy where they never talk to me, because eventually they just kind of like, why do I keep paying all this money? I've never talked to this person in three or four years. The one that'll want to talk to me for about once or twice a month, touch base, have those things that they need, give me some input of where their industry at as in then we talk in a month from now. That's really the kind of client I enjoy. And obviously I really enjoy, again, helping people rank nationally.

Funny enough, the stuff that makes you rank nationally and the stuff you make you rank locally are really pretty similar. It's just a matter of scale and changing what you're saying. So there's no like exact opposite ranking nationally versus ranking locally. You just have to do more of it and phrase it different. And you can do both. And so the national clients, of course, they pay more money. but there is more pressure. So I have a combination of both and I enjoy both for different reasons.

Jordan:30:53
When you talk about the level of scale between national and local, how big of a gap are we talking about for national?

31:01 · How SEO is priced by competition level

Carl Holden:31:01
Right, mean local tends to hover around the two to three thousand for low competition, lower competition. Then you get like roofers and lawyers are in like the five to six thousand a month and then national is like five to ten thousand a month of the both on and off page SEO. So doing stuff on their site and doing stuff outside of their site.

Jordan:31:28
I'm, someone else has to be confused too. You're bringing up thousands, thousands of what? Like competitors or? do mean?

Carl Holden:31:35
you Maybe I misspoke, just the thousands as far as the difference in their budgets. Sorry, I may have missaid something, but.

Jordan:31:49
my mistake. No, not budgets, not budgets. You're referring to like the scale of content, right?

Carl Holden:31:57
gotcha. Yeah, I mean, let's just say for a local business, you can get a fair amount of results with creating 20 pieces of content out on the internet. But if you want to rank nationally as just economies of scale, you've got to be talked about in a much wider and horizontally and vertically sense out on the internet. And so we broker deals.

We check databases. There are all kinds of stuff that we have to do to get those signals out on the internet that nationally it means something to Google to pay attention to. And then it's just a function of time. If you can consistently have those in a way that doesn't like trigger any warning signal in Google's system. Because I've had people ask me, well, can I do like 30,000 a month? And I said, we could scale up to that.

But it might start be doing so much, given that you went from nothing to doing all of this, that Google might pay attention. So if somebody offers that kind of thing, I will talk about diversifying that SEO over multiple online entities rather than dumping it all on one specific entity. Because there's a certain point at which you create so many signals that Google could be like, that's pretty sus.

Jordan:33:23
I freaking love you. Oh my God. Sorry. But like you said, son, shit. Carl, I like you. I like you a lot for saying that right now. Okay. So when you say, imagine I'm a new business. Okay. I have zero listicles, zero blog posts, zero content. If I scale up to, I don't know, one a day and then three a day and then 10 a day. Am I gonna get flagged?

Carl Holden:33:23
Don't worry about it.

No, no, no, no, no,

Carl Holden:33:37
Okay.

33:50 · Scaling content without triggering Google's spam filter

Carl Holden:33:50
It's not exactly like that. I mean, you can create a fair amount of it on your website. It's the external signals we have to be careful about. Technically, SEO, SEO, any SEO, and to help you understand, if you've probably seen some of this, people call it white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat is the ethical SEO. Black hat is do whatever it takes to rank people. Technically, according to the terms of service of Google,

Jordan:34:00
What are the?

34:19 · White hat vs. black hat SEO why the difference is fake

Carl Holden:34:19
All seo is bad. They tell you don't get any seo. So therefore there is no such thing as white house seo There's expensive labor intensive non-effective seo And there's the seo that works the color under which you want to call them doesn't matter It either works or it doesn't and I am under no moral obligation To follow the rules of a monopoly breaking the very rules of economics. So

Jordan:34:22
Right.

Carl Holden:34:48
I'm going to do what helps my clients rank higher, and I can sleep at night knowing I'm Robin Hood because I'm stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. And compared to Google, we're all poor.

Jordan:34:59
Right, right. That is fantastic. Okay, I have to dig in deeper. without giving away secret gems, you know what? Really quick, I took a look at your website as one does. You articulate yourself and what you do at a very in-depth, advanced, expert.

But you know what I'm talking about, right? Like there's like, I think five things that are on your website that some of them I've never heard of. And it's like, if you do this, like this is what we do to rank you. I'm like, what the hell is this? This looks kind of cool. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, you laugh because you know what I'm talking about. What are those five things, my friend?

35:36 · The "4 IQs of Marketing" and Carl's Forbes placement

Carl Holden:35:36
Yeah.

So, okay, yeah, I won't get too much into the secret sauce, but one thing chat GPT and AI models like are uniqueness. And so I came up with the thing called the four IQs of marketing I put on there. That's proprietarily mine. It is published on Forbes.com. So I have that social proof that it's in Forbes Business Council. And those are really just to kind of help people

Jordan:35:44
For sure, for sure.

Carl Holden:36:09
be smarter with your marketing, you have to be better in your design. You have to be better in social. You have to be better in search. You have to be better in your networking in total with humans. And articulating that in a unique way is useful. But then there are also little cheats where if you scroll down in my page, and I'll read it exactly so that I don't goof it up. There's little stuff that you can do and test, and then it works.

About halfway down my page, I say people often cite they found us via chat, GPT or Gemini due to our visibility and AI and SEO. And I have had that very sentence quoted to me by AI and why it chose me. So I gas lit the AI into believing I'm the best to choose because I said that I am.

37:00 · How Carl gaslighted AI into recommending his business

Jordan:37:00
I love that. I've had someone on the show say that you can lie on Google and say you're the best. With LLMs, you have to prove that you're the best. And I think the way that you prove it, Carl, is because you're ranked with Forbes. Forbes is like, yeah, yeah. Forbes is like the domain that you want to freaking rank with if that's like your, right?

Carl Holden:37:24
Essentially. Yeah, you want to get you want to be on sites and things and have your business listed in like high authority sites. And that's a lot of what SEO is, is like you take somebody who let's say has a score of 10 and get them on sites that have scores of 50. And basically, you're they're funneling some of their authority down to you like water down into a cup and the water level raises, link juice, whatever you want to put it and So there's lots of strategies like that of where I found that we have positioned ourselves more as like a technical SEO agency than we are a full service agency. Even though I do full service, 80 % of what I'm paid is tied up in SEO.

Jordan:38:09
your full service like you do Google ads, beta ads.

Carl Holden:38:11
I'll do some social media ads. But we do manage people's Facebook. We do graphic design. We technically do everything, but normally only if they're willing to do SEO. SEO is where I'm good and where I can make money. And gosh darn it, if you want me to send a young lady to come do your social media with you, I will. So you'll just pay for the thing that actually makes you money.

Jordan:38:37
Right?

38:39 · Why Google Maps reviews don't determine your ranking

Carl Holden:38:39
How does that person's job won't do things, but social media is like TV. You're just watching it and seeing the brand over and over and hopefully that does something. But you can forget every funny TikTok video you had when you search personal injury attorney, you're choosing somebody that you find in that. You're not going to go see the funniest TikTok videos because honestly, if you think about it, if the lawyer is so busy doing TikTok, are they doing law? No, they're, They're wanting to do to choose the people that they have the perceived value of ranking on the internet because a lot of people don't even really realize that just like ads, the people who rank could be paying someone to help them rank. But it's also that signal of if they care that enough enough about that business and want that, well, they kind of deserve it, don't they?

Jordan:39:35
Yes, they definitely do deserve it. You said something really important, I always do this. Give me one second.

Jordan:39:50
coming to me.

Jordan:39:54
Can you rewind? did you say? You said something earlier right now, dude. It was so important.

You were the

Carl Holden:40:04
Can you think of this subject generally?

40:08 · Backlinks explained how other sites pass authority to you

Jordan:40:08
Thank you, listing on freaking 40 domains. Okay, so how exactly does that process work? Not secret sauce, but when you say I'm ranking on, if I'm a roof, okay, I'm in a roofing company. I wanna rank on whatever the hell the top priority is. Is that domain listing me, back linking me in an article or a blog post that they write? And if yes,

Carl Holden:40:26
about. Sure.

Jordan:40:36
How does that work? Or am I the roofing company creating blog posts and back linking to their website?

Carl Holden:40:43
No, you need other sites pointing to you. we write that content and propose it to other sites. And there are sometimes money, obviously, exchanged. Nobody does anything for free. But if you have, and that's sort of my moat too, is I know where to get these and which ones are trustworthy, which ones Google thinks are kind of spammy. We monitor all of that. like, even if You were hermosy asking me how to do that. There's like certain things I just wouldn't tell people because it's stuff I've proven out. Like if I give that away, what have I got left? And I spent all that time building that up and testing it and finding those resources. So yeah, you have to get your site listed elsewhere. And it's a bit of a moving target on what AI or Google pays attention to. But it's the fact that you're getting listed regularly. and showing up elsewhere that really matters because with ChatGBT and Claude, everybody can write and make a nice website. So if you think that just purely your content alone will rank you, you're sorely mistaken because anybody can write content nowadays. Will it be covered up and filled with m-dashes and every ending paragraph say in conclusion? Probably because you use ChatGBT and you don't know any better. But...

You have to create what I've said, both the on-page signals of the content you have on your site and off-page signals or the rest of the internet referencing you.

42:21 · Yahoo Finance links useful or worthless?

Jordan:42:21
Thank you. I love how you said if your content is using M dashes because that is a hard rule for my client. Never ever in your life ever use an M dash or I will kill you. Like, you know what I mean? Cause that's just that easy A I tell. So thanks for bringing that up. Okay, my friend, I know you can pay what? I forget the site name, but long story short, they put you in Yahoo Finance. Is Yahoo Finance one those where it's like a little spammy?

Carl Holden:42:30
What's

Jordan:42:49
Like even if you do get backlinked, there's like no bueno. Or is it like, no, you should do that, bro.

Carl Holden:42:52
Well, so funny enough, lot of Yahoo Finance links are what called no follow, and that it's tart won't actually count. Google will see the link, but Google is not allowed to follow it. That way, it doesn't reduce Yahoo Finance's SEO power by basically saying, sure, we'll link to anybody, but you don't get any of the credit. And so your bigger sites, the really big ones, don't generally push any of their SEO value to people. They kind of hoard all of their power. Because just like in those Jedi or those sci-fi movies of this guy uses his power and a little bit of his life force comes out of you to heal this person or whatever, the same kind of happens with website entities. If like a big Yahoo Finance allowed a bunch of links to go out to smaller, not great websites, That's a signal back to Google that maybe Yahoo isn't as valuable as it thought that it would and will reduce it. So you can't just reach out to the big ones that have a score of 90 to 100 and say, link to me and all my problems are solved. Most of them won't link to you. And if they do, it doesn't have any kind of domain authority. And like my link with Forbes does actually count. I had to talk to the people and see if I could get it to count. and that it is actual do follow, which is helpful. And that's something that you got to know the right people to talk to. Or you could spend a bunch of time and get it on Yahoo Finance and then it doesn't actually have any lift. There's some speculation that it has some lift, but it's like secondarily. It builds a trust factor and not an actual like ranking factor.

44:47 · Domain authority targets for B2B national companies

Jordan:44:47
I'm all about the rankings, right? mean, yes, trust is important, but if I rank, what do you think happens by default? Trust, know, you see what I'm saying? Okay, so I'm going to ask you a selfish question because I'm selfish. I own a B2B agency or I own an agency for B2B companies. Which domain authority would I try to rank with? And like, what's like the one, two, three step process you would encourage me to take?

Carl Holden:44:48
Thank

Carl Holden:45:10
Most B2B national companies are gonna be, and it's called domain authority is what we use from Moz. 40 to 60 is like generally the kind of B2B range you would wanna be in to rank. Like my client, MadSecurity is just under that, I think at like a 37, but a lot of their competitors aren't even at that amount. So as long as you can kind of get. a ranking score of close to 40, you can do pretty well. But that's again, like B2B and national, you've got to be getting pretty well established links. Whereas like a roofer who has like five domain authority, a link from a site that has double or triple has great lift for them. And so it's not specifically any given number because I have outranked people with higher kind of ranking total numbers. It's again the consistency over time. Like funny enough, Google Maps is not about reviews. People think that it is. You tell people get more reviews in Google and that doesn't work. Go to next time you visit a city and you look up Italian restaurant, you'll notice that the top reviewed one is not what surfaces at the top.

We've all noticed that. So why? Well, what is Google Maps? It's a map system. So there are other ranking metrics inside of it, like traffic. So if there is one that's popular in the area, that people search Italian restaurants that they've heard of and all those things, it's a metric of how many people get chosen from the list and driven to, not just reviews. Sometimes they correlate, sometimes they don't. And like all other things in Google,

Jordan:46:36
does.

Carl Holden:47:04
If it's got a lever, you can pull it. Wink.

47:09 · The freedom and trap of being an entrepreneur

Jordan:47:09
I love having experts on your podcast like you, Carl, because this is the shit that needs to get said. This is the things that if you are just starting now, I mean, no offense that you haven't started somewhere, but you're dropping serious gems right now, bro. Thank you. You know, I do want to end on a positive note here, not saying that this conversation was negative in the slightest, but looking forward over the next 12 months, future pacing here, what's like the number one thing y'all looking forward to?

Carl Holden:47:09
Thank you.

Carl Holden:47:40
we've got a goal, for, monthly earnings metric that I really look forward to, building. I never really built this business as a scale business. It was kind of a, want to be my own boss. And then about three or four years in, you realize I'm not my own boss. I just have a lot of bosses. I've just diversified who can ruin my day at any given time. so my advantage, your advantage over. normal people is that one single douchebag can ruin their day. No one person can ruin my day. I would have to have everybody fire me all at once for me to not be employed. That's the freedom of being an entrepreneur. The thing that you fantasize about, and you probably can think about this too, is sometimes you sit and think, man, it'd be nice to just go to work from nine to five and not worry about this crap. And just like, when I leave the doors of work, work is over. Work's not over even if it's not over in my head. And so I'm, as an entrepreneur, more trapped than other people think that I am. I've just chosen a different type of work and type of boss. So I know I kind of went all over the place with that, but my other goals are just continuing to rank. in the different cities that we're in just to get more traffic as instructed by my wife down at the coast so I can go to the coast to the beach more. And what else? We're also working on, I've kind of moved away from social media over the last decade. There are some new projects though, especially within TikTok on a local basis that I'm really excited about kind of building out some systems there to help drive attention and leads to local businesses using the TikTok system. So that's some stuff we're excited about too. And just generally, like, who knows where all this AI stuff is going. I mean, web design is cooked. You're not going to get paid to make nice websites in the next two or three years. That's done. Because I'm making the most beautiful sites I've ever made. Because I'm not making them anymore.

50:02 · Why web design is a dead business within 2 years

Carl Holden:50:02
And when everybody else catches on and figures that out, the whole web design business is just going to dry up. But that's why I have been doing the dirty jobs of marketing and going and digging in the poop and finding the gold for people. Because everybody else, they wanted to go cut grass. Well, when the lawnmower can run itself, you don't have a job. But somebody's got to go dig poop. And I can still do poop.

Jordan:50:27
A freakin' man, Carl, on that note, this is, you brought up a great freakin' market value add to your core services. If I can take this thing, which is called web design, right, and people pay money for this thing called web design, however, I own an SEO agency, I can provide this thing for free. Now you don't have to go over to this company, you can just pay me for SEO and I'll give you this thing for free, because of A.O.P.

There's so many different hacks like that where you can separate yourself from the competition, provide additional value, keep your services, the cost of the same. And like, wow, this person provides so much freaking value. Thank you. Where I could, I should have paid it, but I didn't. Like I'm all over the place cause I'm excited, but you see what I'm saying?

51:14 · How Carl bundles websites with SEO under $1,000/month

Carl Holden:51:14
Yeah, no, mean, so one of the things we've done this year is we have an option for smaller businesses that didn't used to be able to kind of hit under the thousand dollar mark. Cause I would charge 500 bucks a month for a WordPress site, partly because it's just a pain in the butt. It takes forever to build stuff. You have to maintain it and not get it hacked. Whereas I can charge like 200 a month for a cloud site that I self-host that I keep take care of myself. It looks just as nice, if not better than a WordPress.

And I can edit it faster because we're able to basically talk to AI and help us write the code. And so I'm able to cut down $300 and get somebody on an SEO life plan and get them a website and SEO for less than $1,000 a month, while still pretty much making the same money as I did before.

Jordan:51:43
Ready?

Jordan:52:02
Absolutely, Kamuro, that is what I'm talking about, brother. That's a freaking movie, my man. I love that. If they want it.

52:05 · Using ChatGPT Codex as an overnight AI research agent

Carl Holden:52:05
Yeah. So the funny thing, one last thing I'll tell you, I've also learned how AI can help me tip to you if you haven't done it yet. Do you, have you played with codex yet?

Jordan:52:19
I'm not a Codex guy, but Claude Code, of Fuck.

Carl Holden:52:22
Okay, go buy yourself a Mac, install Cloud, install Chad GPT's codex on it. And there's just a button that lets you take over the whole computer, no setup, out of the box in five minutes. This thing can write files. It can use the computer and keyboard and mouse. Fully just do whatever you want it to out of the box. You know, people were saying the claw bot and stuff. There's a lot of technical setup to that. You literally just need a Mac that please don't put your banking information on. A Mac, install Codex and that thing sits in one of my computers and I'll set it to work on something and come back tomorrow and it'll be done. So highly recommend Codex. And that does a lot of our SEO research, just like monthly looks at things and gives us some ideas. So that's definitely pro tip for anybody listening, try out chat GPT's Codex. And then in saying that, I figured out how this computer can go look on the internet and figure out all the sites locally that are using like the crappy services of Hiboo and Thrive, and then dump all of that information into a folder, create a sales funnel where I can then send them a letter that says, I know you're using Hiboo and that you hate those guys. You should use somebody local and it costs less.

53:41 · Claude Code vs. Codex what each is actually good for

Jordan:53:41
The secret gems right there. I assume, cause code, cloud code can essentially do it. How you're describing codex. Do you use codex instead of cloud code? Well, you brought up cloud code earlier though. So that's why I'm a little confused.

Carl Holden:53:54
So Codex is more of an assistant that can actually write, look, and edit files on a computer. When it comes to web design, we're still using Cloud. But if you're wanting something that will actually do research and write reports or reference documents that you give it, what I do is I sync into the MacBook, a Google Drive that I share with it. And so I give it all the information that I want, and then it can put stuff into the Drive like an employee and give me back the stuff I assigned it.

And so kind of a handoff where it's more of a research agent. Like here's the thing, and then we can finish up. People want to rank higher in AI, right? The only way to know what's showing up in AI is to query AI and ask it. So I have codecs, open the browser, and spend an hour asking chat GPT human-like questions, surface exactly all of the references. And then I have research. that you would have had to have done manually that agencies do done by AI.

Jordan:54:58
I love it, Carl. Now, I'm sure people that are highly interested in how you work and want to explore further, when that happens, where can they find you?

55:06 · Where to find Carl LinkedIn

Carl Holden:55:06
Easy thing is to find me on LinkedIn. I look like this.

Carl Holden:55:16
So Carl Holden, am quintessential bearded, short-haired, almost bald white dude. I've got orange behind my head. As long as you don't send me a sales mission message like two minutes after connecting with me, I'm happy to talk. If you send me my thing about how you can get me 10 to 15 leads after five minutes of connecting with me, I will mark you as a spam person and tell Google and tell LinkedIn about you because I don't like those people. I don't want to be those people. But I'm very, very reachable on LinkedIn and have great conversations with people throughout the US and even the world on SEO and AI. And I get clients that way to the extent that I can help other business owners that is advantageous to everyone. As you can tell, I'm an open book. I haven't said lots of things that I do, but I'm also willing to share lots of things that one might cause. you say is secret sauce, but really you can figure it out if you just sit there and watch enough videos like I have.

Jordan:56:21
So it's hot, I like that. Carl, thank you so much for hopping on, Like I said earlier, so many gems, so many nuggets. Audience, thanks for tuning in. We appreciate you guys.

Carl Holden:56:21
So, thank you.

Carl Holden:56:31
Thanks for having me.