SEO in 2025: What Still Works, What Doesn’t, and How to Win Long-Term

Jeffro (00:01.529)
If your business depends on Google to bring in leads, you’ve probably noticed the landscape is shifting and it’s shifting fast. AI answers are changing. I mean, changing the game. Like that’s the phrase, right? Search results are crowded with ads and SEO advice is all over the place. So what’s actually working in 2025? My guest today is Jason Hennessey. He’s an internationally recognized SEO expert, Air Force veteran, bestselling author and CEO of Hennessey Digital, which is a $20 million agency that’s helped law firms and service businesses rank, convert and grow at scale. So in this episode, Jason is going to help me break down what’s working right now, what to ignore and how to build an organic growth engine. That’s a tongue twister that brings in leads without depending on paid ads forever. So welcome to the show, Jason.

Jason Hennessey (00:48.12)
Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me and it’s an honor being here.

Jeffro (00:52.783)
Yeah, definitely. And, you know, we’ve talked about SEO a number of times on this show, but it keeps coming up, especially with AI seemingly taking over. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on SEO in 2025 and where it fits into a long term marketing strategy.

Jason Hennessey (01:07.522)
Yeah. So I think at the end of the day, know, I, well, you know, even myself, my kids, you probably, you know, we’re all kind of starting to use some of these services like Chad GBT or Gronk, you know, for answers to our questions, you know, but, you know, Google still has a large majority of the market share. And, you know, so, and the principles of organic SEO are still applicable to optimizing for these chat services as well. And so yeah, we can definitely get into some of the specifics and the details because I’m sure small businesses that are service-based probably want to know how do they dominate both Google still and also optimize for some of these chat services.

Jeffro (01:56.528)
Yeah, and what I’ve seen also in terms of stats is that a lot of the shift from Google in terms of the volume over to these AI tools is really just the zero click answers anyway. So it’s not traffic that was ever going to convert. And so a lot of people are freaking out like, oh no, I got optimized for AI now. It’s like, well, do you? Like maybe, maybe not. So what are you seeing?

Jason Hennessey (02:08.408)
Thanks.

Jason Hennessey (02:16.406)
Mm-hmm. No, that were exactly. like we’re seeing that impressions are continuing to kind of go up. Clicks are decreasing though. And it’s mostly for, like you said, like frequently asked questions, right? Where, you know, where somebody would have to type in a very long tail question see a bunch of results, click through to read the answer. Whereas now like Google and you know, is doing these AI overviews and it’s basically kind of, you know, addressing it without having to get somebody to click through, right? However, those are informational pages, right? But more of transactional pages, those are the ones where people are like doing research, looking for the best dentist or the best lawyer. In my case, I do legal marketing, right?

Now they’re actually clicking through and actually having to kind get their solutions.

Jeffro (03:11.407)
Got it. And so some businesses are relying just on organic, but there’s also a lot of others that do both organic and paid. And so this is also kind of factoring into the decisions on where to put budget. Some people are pulling back from SEO because like, it doesn’t matter anymore. What are some of the mistakes you’re seeing in this decision making process for businesses when they’re like organic versus paid?

Jason Hennessey (03:19.324)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Hennessey (03:26.637)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Hennessey (03:33.986)
Yeah, I think you can’t just kind of rush to making a major change in your business based on speculation. I think you should be monitoring things and measuring the results that you’re getting from the ad spend that you’re doing. And so if PPC is still a viable channel where you are getting leads and business at a good cost per lead, cost per acquisition,

Continue to feed that marketing channel, right? So I wouldn’t say kind of shift budget around just because you’re scared if it’s working continue to kind of feed that channel And then you know constantly be trying to kind of build your your brand You know like for me, it’s my personal brand I spent a lot of time and energy doing podcasts like this, right? So you can kind of boost your personal brand, right? And I think everybody listening to this podcast should be doing the same because that is only going to help in terms of the future of marketing as we know it.

Jeffro (04:38.316)
Yeah. So what about for a company that’s been more on the paid side? Maybe they’re running Google ads, but they’re not doing much with SEO. Do you recommend they start doing SEO as well?

Jason Hennessey (04:42.731)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Hennessey (04:49.791)
I think so. you ever go to sell your business, right? And your whole business model is based upon kind of building a paid campaign. Like what is the person that’s buying your business really buying? You know what mean? Are they just buying your Google AdWords account? You know I mean? So like, I think you really need to kind of build some kind of a foundation so that… you know, you can kind of, have an asset that is actually sellable, right? You know, don’t get me wrong. love PPC and I love paid ads and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, like a new company can kind of do that without you, you know, so you have to have more of an asset to sell. think. Yeah.

Jeffro (05:34.86)
Yeah, and to that point, SEO is kind of a long-term strategy. And I think that’s also a holdup for lot of owners who hear that and they’re like, OK, but I want some results now, not in like six months. So I mean, what do you tell people is a realistic timeline to start seeing traction with SEO? Are there ways to accelerate it? And how is AI impacting that timeline?

Jason Hennessey (05:56.514)
Sure, so I think the best way to look at it is yeah, you’re right, like the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago or today, right? That old analogy, and it’s so true, you have to kind of get started, and it’s very uncomfortable, but. You just kind of buckle down and it’s like, you accept the fact that you are not going to be, you know, dominating Google anytime soon. but, you know, you have to build a website. You have to start putting out good content. You have to start sharing it. It’s the same thing with social media too, right? You don’t kind of build a tick tock account and have like 2 million followers, right? You know, you kind of start small. One video goes viral. You start gaining that momentum. and I think that’s important and a lot of, services like chat, GBT are actually going, pulling data from the web. Right. I mean, that’s where they’re collecting. it’s not like, even if Google disappears, you know, which I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon, but even if it did, you have a website that, you know, these chat bots are also going and crawling for information. Right. And so you want to basically plant enough information about your business so that the chat bots find you too.

Jeffro (07:09.293)
So with all these changes that are happening, and the Google AI overviews like we’re talking about, has that reshaped how you approach content and keyword strategy?

Jason Hennessey (07:19.211)
Yes and no. We might not be spending so much time going after a lot of the long tail FAQs, right? Because if we’re doing that, now we’re basically just giving Google something that they can take and pre-populate and basically keep people on Google, right? At the mercy of us providing the answer. so, you know, but we, we, we haven’t really changed much in terms of like optimizing for a lot of transactional pages for our clients. you know, we work with attorneys. like building a slip and fall lawyer page, a car accident lawyer page, right? All of the different pages that we know when people go and do that search, you know, it’s more bottom of the funnel and it’ll actually, turn into a lead. Whereas

The other stuff is just more informational to kind of drive more traffic to a website. So we just have to accept the fact that, hey, you might not get as much traffic that you used to get. However, we still want to optimize for conversions.

Jeffro (08:24.63)
So in terms of content and content strategy, there’s content that ranks and then there’s content that converts, right? And then there’s all this AI stuff which kind of blends the two somehow. Some people use it well, some don’t. In your mind, what separates the content that ranks from the stuff that actually converts? Is it just where they are in the funnel or is it something else?

Jason Hennessey (08:46.515)
Yeah, it definitely has to do with like funnel, like studying funnels and studying, you know, optimizing the funnel. A lot of times, you know, sometimes just to make a page that ranks convert higher is just taking a video, right? And putting a video on the page that, that helps to articulate or sell your service. Like sometimes it’s just making little modifications like that to a page. But, you know, there’s also pages that are not really there to convert, right? I mean, they’re, you know, more top of funnel, right? And so, you know, and that’s fine. But, you know, I would study, you know, Google search console, I look at the conversions, make sure you’re tracking that. And, you know, any pages that are actually have had any conversions over the past 612 months, you know, maybe go throw a video on there and see if you can get more conversions from that page.

Jeffro (09:44.065)
What’s your favorite backlink strategy these days?

Jason Hennessey (09:48.376)
So we’re having a lot of success. Well, reverse engineering, like competitors that are ranking above you, like that’s obviously like a slam dunk, right? Because you can kind of see and have transparency to what links your competitors have that you don’t. And then you start to kind of go out and clone it. But in order to get links that your competitors can’t clone from you, I think that’s the effective strategy. And we’re doing a lot with this thing called digital PR. where we basically put together like a full study of the most dangerous cities in the country. And we do all this research and data analysis, right? And then we basically go out and we pull journalists that write about that topic. And then we do outreach to those journalists and then we pitch them and then they start to write about that. And then they link to us naturally. Those are links that we can get that our competitors would never be able to because it’s based on a particular data set. And you can drive some really strong links with the right campaign, the right research, and the right outrage.

Jeffro (10:56.276)
How do you decide what those topics should be for that kind of research or study?

Jason Hennessey (11:01.549)
Yeah, so we will study things that are kind of trending. So like if there’s something that’s trending that we can kind of relate to an industry, maybe it’s like a new TV show that everybody’s talking about and saying how, if this,

person got sued in real life, like what would really happen, right? And you can kind of spin it and then, you you have all the different, you know, TV publication websites and stuff like that. Well, that might blog about it or talk about it. you know, so or sometimes just kind of studying, you know, what had worked in the past. We might have did this study three years ago and it was a home run and we just basically recycle that and just kind of update it. Sometimes that’s also works too.

Jeffro (11:54.068)
So how fast do you have to create that and put it together? If you are looking at things that are trending, obviously you gotta get it out there quick enough where it’s still relevant and people are thinking about it.

Jason Hennessey (12:01.133)
Yeah, so those ones are quick, right? So when we’re doing stuff that we’re looking at trending topics, know, like to give ourselves like two to three days, you know, to kind of put the research together, pull the list of journalists and start the outreach. So those ones are very quick and it’s more proactive, I guess. Right. And then, you know, the other ones, you know, that we actually do like full studies on, like we do a campaign at Hennessy Digital, my agency, we work with lawyers. And so we do a full study where we actually reach out to like 1400 law firms. And then we measure the amount of time that it takes for them to actually reply to our lead. And then we score it, right? And then we put this full study together and we send out awards to the firms that actually responded in the quickest amount of time. Like if you respond under five minutes, you get an award sent to your office, right? So like, that’s one that takes like, five months, right, to kind of complete because we to kind of measure that. So it just kind of depends.

Jeffro (13:06.058)
Okay, that’s interesting. Yeah, and I can see how that would create a moat because most other people aren’t going to be willing to do that kind of thing, you know, to get those links. So back to just SEO in general, know, are there any like SEO myths that you see people believing that just for some reason won’t go away?

Jason Hennessey (13:12.617)
Exactly.

Jason Hennessey (13:26.071)
Yeah, I think the biggest one is that SEO is dead. know, people have been saying SEO is dead for as long as I’ve been in SEO and that since 2001. SEO is, is, is changing. It’s evolving. You know, it’s funny that I posted something on social media where the new term is GEO, right? And so, And so it basically said GEO and it was the Scooby-Doo, right? Where they pulled the mask off, right? And it was actually just the SEO guy, right? You know I mean? like, you know, we’re obviously optimizing for algorithms. We’re studying, we’re reverse engineering it, you know? And so now we’re just spending a lot of our time like figuring out like, how do we optimize for these different chat services too?

Jeffro (13:58.089)
Nice.

Jeffro (14:16.765)
Yeah. And I saw, so for those listening, GEO is generative engine optimization, but same thing. And what I’ve heard from other SEO agency owners too, is that when they’ve compared rankings on Google versus rankings in ChatDBT for certain terms, like it’s basically the same because I mean, it’s doing the same type of stuff to figure out what’s relevant. And so that means you just got to still make good stuff that people like that is relevant and helpful. So strategy is the same. Call it what you will.

Jason Hennessey (14:21.697)
Right.

Jason Hennessey (14:33.738)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Hennessey (14:39.521)
Yep.

Jeffro (14:46.921)
yeah, there’s always going to be underlying things like there’s little stuff. Like I recently have been looking into the LLM directives on the robots.txt file, which is a really, you know, technical thing. Most people don’t need to worry about it. a lot of it’s still being discussed as to what you should include and not, but in there, you can specify like your, attribution policy or the training windows, stuff like that. And so, okay, yeah, you can get nerdy and technical with that, but your SEO team should just.

Jason Hennessey (14:56.8)
Okay.

Jeffro (15:16.762)
add that one more thing to do. It’s not like a whole new world, Exactly. So are there any other like, what are some principles that have remained true throughout your career, no matter what other technologies changed?

Jason Hennessey (15:18.829)
Just to check that box. to check that box. Yeah. 100%.

Jason Hennessey (15:33.068)
Yeah, so I think as an SEO, we’ve always selfishly, always fought to get people to link back to us, just because that was the currency on the web, Backlinks pass. PageRank helps boost rankings, right? Rankings boost conversions, right? So that was kind of the process, right? And so if we ever landed…

You know, a client, you know, in a story on cnn.com, right. But there was no link. We kind of saw that as like a failure. You know what mean? Like, bam, we’re so close, right? You know? So the page rank never bled through over to the client. But I think now what we’re learning is that even a mention on sites like CNN are really adding a lot of value in terms of being able to show up higher.

Jeffro (16:08.571)
Yeah.

Jason Hennessey (16:27.847)
in some of the prompts that people are typing into like chat GBT. So I think that’s where I think we’re, we have an advantage now is because even if we’re doing all this outreach and we don’t get the link by just getting the mention, right? They call that like a co-occurrence or a citation, right? Like those alone without the link are adding more value than they have ever done. think.

Jeffro (16:53.979)
Yeah, and of course the owner can leverage that too. They can share the link on their own platforms, post about it, and it’s still, it’s not a total loss. Obviously there’s still a lot of value there. But that’s interesting to hear that it does help with the co-occurrence too. It’s interesting, because you never know how it’s going to interpret some of that stuff, because especially if you’ve got a generic name for your company, it might not give it to you. So that’s just a reason to have a more unique name too. So you know that anytime you’re mentioned, it’s only you.

Jason Hennessey (17:01.335)
Yeah.

okay.

Jason Hennessey (17:09.517)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Hennessey (17:23.499)
That’s right. Yep. 100%.

Jeffro (17:26.971)
So from a leadership perspective, what mindset helps a business owner stay consistent with some of these long-term strategies like SEO?

Jason Hennessey (17:36.782)
Yeah. So I think as a business owner, think, you know, it’s kind of your duty to understand all of these different marketing channels, right? You should not be a subject matter expert in PBC or a subject matter expert in SEO or paid social, right? But you should understand it enough so that you can avoid getting duped by bad actors in the industry, right? Cause there’s a lot of that, right? So, you know, I personally, like I don’t want to be an expert in everything, but I will watch videos and I’ll teach myself a little bit about it so that I’m educated and empowered to make the best decision for my business. And I think that’s just a duty that all business owners need to continue to do is stay up to date on the changes that are taking place, you know?

Jeffro (18:33.233)
Yeah, and that makes sense. it sounds like that’s kind of what you’ve been doing for your company too, and shifting how you approach this and thinking about, okay, digital PR and stuff. I’m curious for what your team looks like, because I know there’s the technical SEO, that might be one person, but the person drafting these research studies or the pitches to journalists, that might be a totally different person, because that’s a different skill set. So do you have dedicated PR people on the team now?

Jason Hennessey (18:48.002)
Yeah.

Jason Hennessey (18:53.131)
Yeah.

Jason Hennessey (18:58.829)
Yeah, we do. mean, so this is a service that we offer to others. So I think our team, we’re about 140 people now. And so we have a team of writers. We’ve got a team of editors. We have a team that actually pulls like the journalist and they do the outreach, right? So they put together the outreach and then they will also then follow up so that if… somebody does write a story about us and they don’t link to us, we’re still gonna go ask for the link, right? And so we follow up as well. And so that’s the whole team for digital PR. Then we have like creative team that might build like infographics, you know, and we do use like chat, GBT and different services to kind of make infographics a lot faster, whereas we would have to manually create those in the past, right? So like,

We’ve definitely gotten a lot faster and more efficient over time. We’re doing more with less. And, but, you and then we have a full engineering team and we’ve got management. so you add it all up, you know, it’s the cohesive unit that works very well together.

Jeffro (20:09.829)
And that makes sense. is there like an account strategist above some of those implementers though that decides, Hey, I think you should do this research case study.

Jason Hennessey (20:18.765)
Yes. So we will come up with topics and ideate ideas. then there’s usually like the leadership team in that department kind of helps to come up with different topics and stuff like that. And then we pitch those to the clients and we get approval because we want to do this whole study and then, know, spend all this time. Right. So we make sure that we get the blessing of the client. A lot of times we’ll basically get pre-approved quotes that we can use from the client because we’re moving so fast that we don’t want to wait. So it does take a little bit of preparation, but we continue to learn and then evolve over time.

Jeffro (20:58.181)
Okay, that makes sense. Well, we’re coming up close to our time here. I’ve got one more question for you before we wrap up though. If someone who’s listening wants to build a more sustainable marketing and growth engine this year for their business, but they’re not sure SEO is worth it, kind like we were talking about, what’s one small step or recommendation that you would give them, they can do this week to start moving in the right direction?

Jason Hennessey (21:04.064)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Hennessey (21:20.321)
Yeah. So you are a subject matter expert in some field, whether or not you like it or not. and so I would say, you know, if you don’t like to write content, if you don’t like to build websites, I would basically say, maybe just have somebody interview you, right? Like hop on like a site like this riverside.com and have somebody ask you 25 questions about your business. Right. And then just kind of answer those questions. and then take those videos and then, you know, get those videos kind of transcribed. And now you have actual content that you can put on your website. You edit it a little bit, you use the same video. And so now you might have 25 questions on your website that you have answers to that’s coming directly from you. So I would say that’s one small little step that you can take if you don’t like to just sit down and write content.

Jeffro (22:14.853)
Yeah, no, and I think that’s great advice too, because most people hate trying to script it out. And this way you can talk naturally to a person and it’s the best way to just get it out and then have something to work with. So thanks again, Jason, for coming on and sharing with us. I really appreciate your time and your expertise. Guys, if you want to learn more about Jason’s work or pick up his book Honest SEO, we’ll put all the links in the show notes for Hennessy Digital and his personal site and everything. So if you got value from this episode, please do me a favor, share it with someone who you think would like it, someone who’s been

Jason Hennessey (22:23.425)
Yep. Exactly.

Jeffro (22:44.256)
worried about AI and SEO, just share it with them and hopefully this will give them some relief and let them know there is a way forward and they don’t have to freak out too much. But that’s it for now. Thanks again, Jason. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. Take care and we’ll see you next time.

Jason Hennessey (22:58.338)
Thank you.