How the SEO Expert Is Shaking Up the Digital Marketing Industry

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The digital marketing industry hasn’t been the same since Jon Zacharias burst onto the scene in 2019. The SEO maverick saw a desperate need for change in how e-commerce companies grew their traffic, and he single-handedly changed the game with his company, GR0.

“We give these brands an opportunity to work with huge celebrities that they wouldn’t normally be able to work with because they couldn’t afford to put millions of dollars down up front,” Zacharias explains about his unique matchmaking approach. “But they can afford for us to basically do a whitelisting campaign. It’s a new type of campaigns that we’re doing, and they are very, very powerful.”

“We are basically matching the hottest direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands, working with the biggest celebrities in the world, and creating real partnerships,” he continues about the secret sauce behind GR0 (and their clients’) wild growth.

Zacharias stumbled upon the value of search engine optimization while in law school. “I have a law degree, and when I was in law school I was working for one of my dad’s friends at a wage-an-hour class action law firm,” he remembers. “I realized that I was way more interested in getting the cases than litigating them.”

The law field was becoming familiar with SEO, but it had yet to be used in a serious way in e-commerce, and Zacharias became “obsessed” with learning everything he could about it.

“I spent the next seven, eight years, from 2011 to 2019 — when we started the company — perfecting the science behind SEO, and then once I had that perfected, I basically started applying tactics that had never been used in e-commerce. It was really like the second wave of SEO,” he says.

But he needed a partner, and he found one in an unexpected way. “I got sober in November of 2016 with the support of [residential drug rehab center] CRI-Help,” says Zacharias, and that’s where he met his future business partner, Kevin Miller. “We immediately became best friends, talking every single second,” Zacharias recalls. “I feel like my entire life shifted as soon as I met him.”

Miller was a digital marketing expert in his own right, having worked at Google and Opendoor. He quickly saw the possibilities of Zacharias’ knowledge and knew they had to jump on it.

“I was showing him how to grow traffic through SEO and he loved it so much that he was like, ‘let’s just start a business and do this for as many direct-to-consumer brands as we can, because it’s such a powerful channel,’” Zacharias recalls. “Everyone trusts Google, and obviously if you can get high on Google for certain words, it’s incredibly valuable to the client.”

Clients like Venus et Fleur, Theragun, Hydrow, Nugenix, and Funboy have all learned how valuable it is first-hand through partnerships with GR0. They only started two years ago, but they’ve already become leaders in the digital marketing space, and we know that growth will only continue!

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