A.J. Ghergich invited me to his office in St. Louis right by Busch Stadium where the St. Louis Cardinals play. He is an SEO guy but he is now doing a full service health and life sciences agency named Brado. A.J., as you will hear in this interview, is a really smart guy who is way ahead of the game.
Since his early days in design he was more interested in how to market the sites he builds. He would take class project web sites and optimize them to rank, for the fun of it. He is truly an SEO at the core; he has the @SEO Twitter handle and he got it through a connection he had.
He had his own SEO agency named Ghergich Company with about 20 people and now is at over 170 people, acquired five companies, to help form Brado. He has been working on this for about two years but by the time this video came out, the brand is live and thriving.
The big issues with scaling he said is mostly about time management, he said. It is less about people being reluctant to adapt but more about giving people the time they need from you because you went from 20 people to 170 people and they all want your time. He said clarity of vision and focus is key and he described techniques he uses for that.
A.J. said he use to be a “manipulator” back in the day of SEO. Today he doesn’t follow the algorithm. He thinks about intentions and empathy. He believes Google is an artifact, not a search engine. He gets real philosophical with me in this interview. So he uses that to mine Google to pick up human and customer intentions. This allows him to not chase the algorithm, but he gets to be where Google wants to be with their algorithm in the future.
We then get into YMYL - specifically what he calls “door handle questions.” It is a pretty fascinating conversation, you got to watch this.
Here is the video:
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