The Grit and Growth of a Digital Marketing Agency: Lessons from Search Bloom

Hello everyone. Today we have with us Cody Jensen. Cody is the founder and CEO of Search Bloom, an award -winning search engine marketing firm, also named as an inaugural member of the prestigious Clutch 1000 list. Cody, welcome to the show. Really excited to have you.

Thank you, I’m excited to be here, I appreciate it.

Cody, you run a successful digital marketing agency which is growing and there’s much more to achieve for you. But let’s take a step back. How was Cody as a kid growing up?

it’s funny. I, I was a, I was a bit of a pain in the butt, I think, for my parents growing up. I was wild, didn’t do really good in school. didn’t really excel in a lot of things until I learned about golf and then I became obsessed with it, like infatuated.

Tiger Woods was my absolute hero and I was maybe 12 or 13 at the time and I picked up golf and just became obsessed and, you know, still golf to this day. It’s one of my favorite things to do.

Nice nice nice. Well, I think like, you know, it’s I mean would you say like, you know, like somebody who is pain in the butt, you know, and always like, I mean not breaking rules but like, you know, like kind of like, you know, like, you know, like as a kid somebody who is pain in the butt like is that like a trait of an entrepreneur or like?

You know, I think different strokes for different folks. I think it could be, you know, you could have entrepreneurs that have always been rule followers and, you know, done it the way that people consider the right way, you know. I think everybody’s just kind of on their own path. It’s all different. For me, I was a bit of a troublemaker growing up. And, you know, I got kicked out of school and this and that and the other.

The thing is though is that I learned a lot from that, right? And I think that sort of rebel is a part of what I do in SEO and pay -per -click as well. It’s like I’m almost competing against Google and I’m highly competitive. So I’m not only competing with all of the other SEOs in the industry that I’m targeting, I’m also competing against Google, which is like a moving target. So it’s…I don’t know, it’s kind of all come full circle, I guess.

I understand, I understand. You’ve had an amazing journey, you know, like working like in Google and then like multiple roles across agencies. What led to like, you know, starting your own, like what led to Search Bloom?

I think necessity led to it, but I’ll give that some color. I started, I guess, in the industry at Google, but really it was Google offers. It was like an arm of Google and Google offers was like Groupon. It was basically a knockoff of Groupon that Google started. It failed ultimately, but what I was introduced to was analytics.

And that’s when I first kind of got obsessed again with like digital marketing, marketing as a whole and web analytics. I mean, I grew up in the days where it was still dial up internet. You know, when I was making trouble as a kid, I was on AOL dial up, right? And the search engine was AOL. So we went from there to here and it’s just been, well, it’s been a wild ride. So I, you know, I started getting obsessed with it there. And then I went into a custom development company. I did business development for that and I learned about code, became obsessed with that. And then I went to Boostability, became obsessed with SEO. And then I went to 180Fusion, became obsessed with pay -per -click and all these other things like CRO and whatever. But it was built out of necessity because out of the last two agencies that I met with they were all, I mean, the agencies themselves operated fairly smoothly, but they were all, they had big sales teams and they were promising things that really shouldn’t have been promised, right? They were setting people up ultimately for failure and in some instances, not all. And I just, I couldn’t sell a service like that. I felt icky when I did that. So took some time, but then I finally said I know there’s a better way. This can be done transparently. It can be done with really a high level of service and still maintain a level of profit. It might not be the same level of profit or margin that other agencies might get, but for me, it was more out of obligation. I feel like people are getting taken advantage of and I didn’t want these business owners to have to go through that. So I…I started Search Bloom. That was 10 years ago.

Right, right, right. And what were some of the early challenges you faced, you know, like when you launched Search Blooms?

Getting clients is probably the biggest one, right? it also, you know, the, the company that I left didn’t appreciate that I left and started a competing agency. And back then it was totally legal. I was the director of strategy at the time, so it’s totally legal for them to come after me and they certainly did. so that, that, that costs some money.

some early struggles as well as like, you know, working out of my house, even having employees work out of my home. I mean, that was a struggle. Payroll at times, you know, I had to, I started this company with 30 ,000 bucks and I really had to make that $30 ,000 stretch. So I invested in what I knew how to do, SEO.

And golly, we still rank for, rank number one for this keyword, national SEO services. We have for like nine years. and that keyword generated leads and still does today. So we, we find, you know, we got a few clients, we call them partners. it’s kind of weird to call them clients, but we’ve got a few, we’ve got a few bigger ones and then we started cooking.

Right.

You know, at least what I was thinking, we were cooking and maybe we’re doing 50 grand a month or something still out of my house. Right. I had maybe three people working for me. and then, we say, okay, let’s get an office. But then one of our big clients cancels. Right. And I’m like, shoot. I can’t afford the office. So I have to negotiate with the landlord to see if I can get out of this lease that I just signed.

And luckily he was, he was wonderful and allowed me to get out of that. But what back to the house we go, you know, and now it’s five employees following me and now, now we’ve got more leads coming in and you know, that, that has, that’s happened, just once, but boy, it’s, it’s certainly humbling, right. And, part of, part of like the buildup now.

you know, since COVID, everybody is 100 % remote. We have employees all over the world. And yeah, the majority are in the United States. And a majority of those are actually still here in Utah. But boy, those would be just some of the struggles. I mean, there’s countless, there’s so many agency life is not for everybody, for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it’s it’s such a you know, like, you know, amazing experience and you know, you’re absolutely right. I mean, agency life is, you know, definitely not for everyone. When somebody is starting new, like, you know, when somebody is starting and, you know, a digital marketing agency, you know, there’s always this, you know, dilemma of like how to expand and how much to expand. Now, what I mean is, you know, like, let’s say somebody starts with offering SEO and initially like you said, SEO will take its time to kind of rank on keywords yourself and generate inbound leads. So initially you normally want to start with let’s say a niche, you already have some references or you have some advantage where you know, okay fine, I’m gonna get my first five clients from here. So normally typically you start with one service and one niche. And then when you’re growing, you know, you’re trying to do everything, you know, like some people would, you know, like offer SEO, but then increase niches or some, some people would just offer like other services also, you know, like, I mean, having been there, having, you know, grown a successful agency, like, how would you suggest entrepreneurs starting to kind of, you know, like go through that part of the growth?

Hmm. you know, I probably looking back now, I probably wouldn’t start with like a growth plan. I would start with a business plan and that would incorporate one arm of growth. But oftentimes you get a marketer that starts a, a marketing company, right? They, in most, in a lot of cases, maybe not most, but in a lot of cases, they’re not entrepreneurs, or they don’t know financial data, right? They don’t know what an income statement is or a profit and loss statement, which are basically the same thing. A balance sheet. They don’t understand some of these things. Bookkeeping. I didn’t do bookkeeping for the first year search when I was in business because I didn’t know. Like I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So having had to learn through the school of hard knocks, I would say first understand more about business and connect with business leaders.

Go to like your local chamber of commerce business group or whatever it is, BNI in the United States is big and bigger, I guess. But rub shoulders with those that have gone before you, right? Try to reach out and find people who have already done it so that they know kind of how to direct you. But part of that business plan might be and should be growth. And for me, I’ll tell you how I did it. I would offer free stuff to friends and family that I knew had businesses. And I would say, hey, can I build you a website? And so I would build them a website and then they’d really like it. And then I said, hey, I can actually get this website to rank, but it just costs me a little bit of money to do it. And it was…It’s from a book, it’s called The Go Giver. The Go Giver Sells More is the second book. Basically giving more value than you receive in payment is like the underlining principle of that book. So for me, it was giving for free, knowing that eventually it would pay off in brand loyalty and affection and it obviously sells. And you know, that worked for me.

Mm -hmm.

And then we started getting lots of leads, right? So then I could start charging. And I also, it’s important to know like in this business plan, what you want to do. Like, do you want to have a one man band shop? Because that’s okay. And you can make a lot of money just doing it yourself and you can be in full control. You also have full control over your time and your scheduling and all that stuff. It allows for a different lifestyle, right? Whereas when you own an agency that is medium to large size, you are needed. You’re needed in that agency a lot. And it’s a different component. It’s not about marketing anymore. I mean, sure, that’s a part of it, but it’s also about teaching leaders and leading leaders and then getting those leaders to lead.

their teams and working through people is a big part of owning a medium sized agency. It’s not just, do I know how to do SEO? Cool, let’s start a business. Like you can. And if you decide I want to just be a one man band, good on you. There’s plenty of people that are pulling down net 20 grand a month with maybe five clients, five big clients.

And that’s fantastic for them. They have a great work -life balance. So determine what you want first. And, you know, from there, you kind of build it out. For me, I didn’t know this. I had to learn it through the hearts, you know, school of hard knocks. So at first I was like, well, I’ll just see what happens. Okay. And now we started getting a lot of, a lot of partners, a lot of clients. And I’m like, holy crap. Now I got to figure out how to operate this thing and.

And I didn’t know how to do any of this. So I had to learn fast. And the best way for me to learn was just to jump in the water. So I did that.

I think it’s very important for somebody, you know, like I mean To know what they want right? Like you say, you know somebody can have like five clients You know like make net 20 grand and live a good life if that’s what they want, you know You know like definitely make sense Talking about you know, like client relationships, which is very important like, you know, like with a big agency like yours like you know, how do you ensure like long lasting successful client relationships?

Very carefully, it’s a very hard part of the job. And often the most underlooked aspect of an agency. And I think it comes down to building trust. And one of the most underrated part of the sales process, I believe, is building rapport.

And when you have built rapport with one of your clients and you have built trust by doing what you say you’re going to do, it makes it much harder for that client to leave you because they like you and you’re doing what you say you’re going to do. Whether the results are there or not, it still makes it harder for them to leave. If you’re doing the right things, the results should be there, right? So now you have three things going for you. Hard to lose a client when you, when you do those things really, really well.

So that’s what we teach our team. And with Search Bloom, our clients have direct access and work directly with our analysts as opposed to an account management team, because then it just comes straight from the horse’s mouth. Yeah, they may not be as, they’re not gonna sell you anything. They’re not there to sell you. You’ve already been sold. They’re basically there to do for you, right? To do the thing that we said we were gonna do and they do it.

Right. Was this like, was the structure like this from day one? Like, was it always like the analyst directly working with the client or did you like try the account manager style first and that did not work and then shift it to this? I just want to understand because it’s very interesting to know that your model is analyst working directly with the clients whereas, you know, the typical model is where there’s a client success person in between the analyst and the client.

Yeah, well, the latter is far more scalable, right? When you have an account manager in between an SEO, both of them can manage bigger books of business without raising costs astronomically, right? We have always, for the most part, been analyst first, right? So they were client facing, And that’s because that’s how I did it. You know, in the basement, when I was starting up the company, like I was, I was Cody and I sold you, I did the thing that I said I was going to do. And then I showed you the results, right? And then I taught someone else to do the same thing. And then I taught someone else to do the same thing. And it’s, that’s how it grew, grew very well in the beginning. And then maybe three years ago, four years ago, I can’t remember.

We decided, well, account management is the next way that we scale because for Search Bloom, we have more demand than we have supply, meaning we than we’re able to deliver for. So we have to pick and choose which partners we really, really want to work with Ultimately though, in order to scale, we tried the account management thing, but we just learned that it was a lot of a telephone game, right? Where…

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you know, the client would ask a question, the account manager, even if they were very well versed in SEO and PPC, maybe they didn’t know this particular thing. So they would put in a request for the SEO and turnaround times lagged. And ultimately the white glove experience, it went away and that’s what we’re known for. Like if you want to talk to your person at Search Bloom, you just email them and they’ll talk to you, right? That kind of, it wasn’t as good as we’d liked it. So we’d…we cut it off. We only tested it for like three months and only with a cohort of our partners. It just, it didn’t work for us in that, at that time. It could work for us for sure.

Right, right, right. When you’re, you know, like hiring is such a crucial, you know, part of, you know, building, you know, an agency, like what are, you know, what are like some of the main, you know, like qualities you look for in a potential hire or is there like a specific hiring model that you follow?

I think it’s changed over the years a lot. In the beginning, it was quick, right? It was very quick. I knew a person that I maybe had worked with in the past and I thought, yeah, you’d be good in this role. Let’s do it. Right. But now, golly, we have three rounds of interviews and the first round of interview has nothing to do with the job. We want to learn more about the person.

We want to learn about their core values. We want to ask them questions that they are not prepared for. And we want to see who they are as opposed to what they can do. And if we determine who they are, it aligns with who we are, then they go to the second round. And from the second round, we ask them questions more along the lines of what can you do? The final interview is a presentation where they have to show it. And you know what? Some people won’t do that for a job. They just don’t. They don’t have a shot at Search Bloom if they don’t do it.

Right, so basically the cultural fit surpasses the skill set. Like the cultural fit test is the first test that you do.

Yeah, you could. Yeah, I’ve made this mistake. So I’ve hired brilliant SEOs who come in to the agency and are within a month, they’ve become poisonous in the company because they were not a culture fit. And not only did they end up not working, the people that they poisoned along the way also left or we fired them because they become some, you know, they were having issues, right? So.

Alright.

Ultimately, yeah, fire, hire quickly, fire quickly. Big lesson. Also, definitely want to hire the who before the what first. There’s a book actually on it. I think it’s called Who, something along those lines. And that really was a defining change in the company because we’re able to find the…

A players that we need to do these harder things when you’re account managing and doing SEO and doing PPC and knowing how to do that, to find that person at a relatively affordable cost is like finding a unicorn. Right? It’s very, very difficult. So we only hire the best. That’s what we do. We only hire the best because that is our product. Our product is our people. in the searchable way or operating system of what we do, how we do it.

Right. You mentioned like a passion for both analytics, you know, what you call as the left brain and creativity, which you call as the right brain. How do you effectively balance these two opposing forces in your approach to marketing?

Embrace them, I think. I always start with the analytic side of the brain that leads me down paths. And those pathways then turn on maybe light bulbs that could be the other side of the brain, the creative side, which then turn into other rabbit holes and ideas and opportunities. What I’ve learned is as I do a thing, I just document it. I start documenting it. Because you can and I teach my team this all the time. You have your mind set on doing a certain task. You go to do that certain task and you find X, Y, and Z also are problems that need to be resolved. What do you do? Well, in a lot of cases, the undisciplined person might just go down all those rabbit holes, but now you spend a whole day on one client or one thing.

And you didn’t get it all done because you’re focused on all these different things. So instead, it’s like block and tackle. This is the thing I’m doing. I finished this thing, but I’ve documented all along the way all the light bulbs that happened while I was doing the thing.

Right. You know, as an agency owner, CEO, right? I mean, you also want to build like your thought lot, you know, thought leadership. Like any like, you know, tips for like, you know, new entrepreneurs starting agencies, like, you know, what are the best ways to start building your thought leadership?

I don’t know. I don’t really consider myself one of those thought leaders. I do podcasts occasionally like this. I do write on our blog. Right now I’m writing something about headless CMSs and how they’re the future. I do try to contribute to the community locally and nationally, but I…

If I were to make a suggestion early on, it would be as far as growth goes, I would say networking is probably the best thing you can do. LinkedIn has, I’m not trying to like brag or inflate numbers or anything, but I guarantee you I’ve made at least a million dollars just from LinkedIn, right? And it’s not hard to like,

I’m not even saying posting on LinkedIn. It’s like just making connections and having many conversations with people. Right. And, and maybe, maybe it turns into nothing, but maybe it turns into them referring you to, like the other day I got a referral from someone I didn’t even know. I thought, well, I didn’t remember that I knew them and I got a referral and I’m like, yes, I did speak to that person six, eight, 18 months ago. it, it does pay off.

Yes.

It’s kind of in the lines with that go -giver mentality is trying to provide people with value, you know?

All right. Tell us your favorite client story.

Hmm. There are many.

I’m sure but anyone that comes to the top of your mind.

will.

Yeah. Here’s one. This I think is a good one. We work with an attorney and still do to this day, but this attorney, awesome guy. We love working with him. We’re doing his SEO and his pay -per -click. He has multiple locations. We’re doing all of it for him. We built his website and he’s achieving results, right? At really, really good, strong results.

And he decides, well, I want to do social and I want to do all this other stuff. So he goes and finds an agency that does SEO and PPC and meta ads and all the things. They do all of it, programmatic. And in about eight months, he emails me, can I come back, question mark. That…

And now he’s back, we’ve recovered all of his traffic, we’ve built him a new website, all this stuff. We fixed all the issues. And I would say that just has to do with what we specialize in and what we don’t specialize in. Like there’s a lot of companies, as you alluded to earlier, that will grow by virtue of being experts in all things, right? Maybe it’s they add this discipline, like social media organic or paid social media meta ads.

to their lineup, but it’s harder than it looks, right? They think they can do it because they can do this really, really hard thing, but it’s apples and oranges. It’s right brain, left brain. So this is all we do. It’s search. Search Bloom is focused, dedicated on search, and that’s all that we really do. So now, full circle, the client’s been back with us for…

two years, a little under two years now, and we just applied for a Landy award with the case study that we’ve done for them.

What is the best use of AI you are doing right now at Search Bloom that you’re most excited about?

I, I like, I like using AI to help with, with like ideas, writer’s block, things like that. I think it’s helpful in that respect. I think it’s, it’s really quite helpful with, data aggregation. So ways in which we use it is to develop insights on the company’s scorecard based on our data sets. Right. So analyze this massive data set and tell, tell us what you, what you think. Right.

I think that that as a tool is really quite compelling. The machine learning aspect of large data sets is fun. Otherwise, I’m sure that our developers use Copilot quite a bit just to make sure that they’re doing it the way that they want it to be done.

Right.

AI is, I think, awesome and I think we’re still very much in its infancy. Really excited to see where things go from here.

Right, right. You know content is evolving so much, you know, like video like, you know, like is Evolving on a daily basis, you know, we are seeing people again depending on the niches But we are seeing tik tok also like, you know, like helping a lot of businesses, you know, like people Moving from blah like written blogs to like videos and all of that stuff how I mean, but still like, you know, like How much?

you know, like when you do like, you know, when you’re doing marketing, like when you’re doing like marketing for your clients, like, you know, like how much valuable, are you still finding like, you know, written form content or how do you kind of, you know, like decide between like which forms of content to go with.

How to decide is as based on the intent of the query, right? Generally speaking though, if you take a piece of content and you turn it into all Then you’re going to hit all of your marks, right? So video audio Text imagery infographic all of these types of things if you can create them all Do that thing right make a masterpiece and not?

A blog post that’s full of words that people don’t read. People don’t read on the internet. The irony, right? They don’t read. They skim. And what gets skimmers attention is video and audio and visual graphics, right? Headlines, things like this. So the way that a page is styled is critically important for user experience and thereby SEO, right? If someone goes to a blog post, but then quickly leaves,

Over time, if you get statistical significance or more and more data, Google is going to demote you. We know this by virtue of the latest leak in Google, right? So I think we had an idea that this was happening for many, many years. Rand at Moz kind of proved that click -through rate is a ranking factor. But yeah, I mean, ultimately, those are some thoughts, I guess.

Any any advice you would like to you know give like entrepreneurs like starting you know like agencies or like you know like in the early phases of their growth

well, yeah, it is, it is a, marathon. It’s not a sprint. build your business plan first, right? Know who you are and what you want exactly. determine what those things are before ideally you’ve decided to, you know, take the plunge or whatever. because that, when you have that vision written down and dictated,

you’re more apt to achieve that vision. If you don’t, like me, then you have to develop it on the fly and you have all these, you know, all these experts in the world telling you how to do things. So you try to piece it together. But ultimately, if like, if I were to go back, I probably wouldn’t change anything, but I would just use all of the years of experience in doing this and operating an agency to my advantage and knowing that

Hey, accounting is critically important. You got to do that, right? Hey, you need to understand how you’re getting your clients and what the other methods you can use to acquire new clients. Then there’s the hiring process and the SOPs and the documentation of your SOPs. All of these things are just so huge. They’re hugely important, you know? And…

I think sometimes going into something you’re so passionate about, pay -per -click or whatever it is, that you don’t know what you don’t know yet. And it’s about to hit you in the face, right?

Right, right. Perfect. Well, Cody, in the end, I like playing a quick rapid fire round of three to five questions. Ready?

If you’re sure, let’s do it.

texting or talking.

texting.

Early mornings or late nights?

Early mornings for sure.

morning favorite ice cream flavor

Mmm, right now it is chocolate brownie.

last Google search, if you remember.

It was search bloom, our branded term. I see it right now in one of my browser tabs.

If a movie was made on you, what genre would it be?

jeesh. Maybe, well, I mean, it could be like, I don’t know the genre, but you know the book Ready Player One? It’s kind of, it’s a bit out there, right? I would prefer it to be something like that, where it’s like, it’s like one of those books or those movies, but.

In reality, it would probably be just some lame ass documentary.

Perfect. Well, Kori, thank you so much for your time. It was fun having you.

My pleasure, absolutely.