Jake Ward

Started an SEO agency in 2019. Making $20M/yr for Contact.so clients. Also building: Mentions.so Byword.ai Kleo.so

I’m 27 with 4 businesses and no home.

Here’s how I got here:

Age 0-15:

Spent early life growing up in a hippie commune.

Raised by an incredible single mother who wore both hats. Gave everything to support me.

Overly shy and didn’t speak much.

Seen as a problem by a teacher who suggested there was something wrong with me.

Age 16:

First job stacking supermarket shelves.

Completed high school with bang-average grades.

Started sixth form college.

Age 17:

Quit sixth form college after 3 months due to illness.

Doctor said I was 24 hours away from dying.

Spent my 17th birthday in hospital, tubes everywhere.

Became an apprentice at a print marketing agency. Learnt my way around Adobe’s design suite.

Started doing bits of design work on the side.

Age 18-19:

Discovered search marketing to help get more clients for the print marketing agency.

Became obsessed with SEO. Spent my free time messing around with the websites I built.

Age 20:

Wanted to take marketing more seriously. Quit my job to start a marketing degree.

Quit after 2 weeks.

Started an apprenticeship at an SEO agency where I managed 25 clients and attended college part-time.

Quit after 9 months.

Realised traditional education sucks. I learnt 100x more (and quicker) through self-education.

Went all-in on learning and building whilst living at home with my mum and 2 young siblings.

£0 income.

Age 21:

Got my first 2 freelancing clients on Upwork. They referred me to other clients.

Built a 6-figure business by the end of the year.

Age 22-23:

Started a podcast side project and quickly reached 300,000 listeners per month. Sold it for 5 figures.

Bought and sold 5 websites.

Maxed out my freelancing capacity.

Age 24:

Founded Content Growth and built a team to help companies turn their blog into a 7-figure sales channel.

Started posting on LinkedIn.

Grew revenue by over 200% in 6 months.

Age 25:

Co-founded Byword and launched a platform to help marketers generate articles at scale for SEO.

Sold my belongings, moved out of London and started travelling the world.

Merged Content Growth with Contact Studios to take the SEO agency to the next level.

Helped my mum quit her 15-year corporate job.

Age 26:

Lived out of a suitcase and travelled around 16 countries.

Grown the userbase of my SaaS tools to over 130,000.

Helped multiple unicorn companies scale their SEO with our 25-person team at Contact.

Age 27:

Continuing to levelling up, exploring, following my curiosities, collaborating with great people, and helping family and friends along the way.

Founder

We help software companies get more qualified traffic, sales and revenue through conversion-focused SEO and content marketing. Turn your blog into a 6 figure sales channel.

"I don't know how to do SEO in 2026"

Start from level 1 in The New SEO Game:

SEO isn't just Google rankings anymore.

It's now "Search Everywhere Optimisation".

Reframe your “New SEO” project as a game, and you'll become addicted to levelling up.

Level 1: Traditional SEO

- Fix technical problems killing your rankings
- Research keywords and target quick wins
- Optimise on-page elements (titles, content)
- Earn quality backlinks through outreach and PR

Level 2: AI Search Optimisation

- Format content so AI can parse it easily
- Build pages that AI platforms want to cite
- Structure information for machine consumption
- Test how your brand appears in AI search results

Level 3: Paid Search Visibility

- Run Google Ads for high-intent keywords
- Target competitor terms with YouTube Search Ads
- Capture Bing traffic through Microsoft Ads
- Measure paid performance across every platform

Level 4: LLM Answer SEO

- Produce authoritative content LLMs trust
- Build a knowledge base for AI training data
- Position your brand as the definitive source
- Monitor brand mentions in LLMs with Mentions

Level 5: Brand Authority SEO

- Get unlinked brand mentions across the web
- Feature in industry roundups and expert lists
- Build brand recognition without traditional backlinks
- Track brand mention volume and sentiment

Level 6: Community SEO

- Provide value in relevant Reddit threads
- Share expertise on Quora in your space
- Engage in Slack communities and Discord servers
- Build reputation in industry forums and groups

Level 7: Parasite SEO

- Repurpose content on Medium and LinkedIn Pulse
- Publish beehiiv newsletters to rank in Google
- Guest post on high-authority platforms/websites
- Leverage existing domain authority for quick rankings

Level 8: Platform-Specific SEO

- Optimise for Amazon search if selling products
- Focus on YouTube SEO for video content
- Master TikTok's algorithm for short-form content
- Optimise App Store listings for apps/extensions

Level 9: Topic Domination

- Own conversations across ALL channels
- Create content ecosystems to reinforce each platform
- Become the go-to expert mentioned everywhere
- Monitor and maintain authority across all channels

Completed all levels?

SEO is constantly evolving going into 2026.

Stay ahead or get left behind.

PS. Need help levelling up? We'll help build and execute your “New SEO” domination strategy.

Book a call: https://www.contact.so/

If you're an SEO who's ever wanted to work with me, now's your chance.

I'm looking for exceptional SEO strategists who are excited about the future of search.

This isn't just another SEO role.

You'll be working on "new SEO" strategies for some of the most impressive companies out there.

You'll be getting companies visible in a search world that's changing faster than anyone's figured out.

You'll be experimenting with tactics most SEO teams won't touch for another 2 years.

If you're the kind of person who gets genuinely excited about this stuff, I want to hear from you.

Reply below if that's you (or someone you know).

And fill in this quick form: https://lnkd.in/eBgSGK2V

I'll DM the 10 most impressive SEOs this week.

I analysed 66,796 sites to understand where their SEO traffic came from last month.

(You can too at chatgpt-vs-google .com)

Google still dominates at 40.31%.
ChatGPT is just 0.24%.

But here's what most people miss:

Traffic isn't the ONLY metric that matters anymore.

Zero-click searches are everywhere now.

ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion prompts every day, but barely any of them send direct traffic.

AI Overviews now appear in 60% of U.S. searches. And position 1 CTR dropped by -34.5% when AI Overviews appear.

People aren't clicking through like they used to.

They're getting answers directly from AI, and that creates a massive blind spot.

Your brand could be mentioned 10,000 times in ChatGPT responses.

Your product could be recommended in Claude conversations.

Your company could appear in Google AI Mode answers.

None of that shows up in your traffic data.

That's why I've been building Mentions for the past few months. I needed a way to track this visibility.

Because the future of SEO isn't just ranking on Google.

It's being visible wherever people ask questions.

Successful SEO looks like:

- 120 new blog posts
- 60 high DR backlinks
- 500 AI-created pages
- 1,000% growth in traffic

But remember, it also looks like:

- Removing 3 cannibalising pages
- Improving a cluster’s internal linking
- Tweaking 5 titles for better targeting
- Fixing internal links to canonical pages
- Writing a featured snippet in 10 minutes
- No-indexing low-quality pages in Google
- Redirecting a 404 page with 30 backlinks
- Creating indexable URLs for 15 sales pages
- Adding a new section to an existing blog post

Don’t forget to consistently do the little things.

They can be just as impactful.

Marc Eric Wallner ✌️

Recogni

Senior Director Marketing & Branding

metahead

metahead is the world’s first enterprise-grade, Git-based metarepo.

Powered by a fast, deterministic, bi-directional git filtering algorithm, metahead helps dev teams engineer and scale software faster and more flexibly than ever before by creating a single-source-of-truth repository.

- No more disconnected code. 
- No more manual code synchronization.  
- No more downstream code breaks. 
  
Designed to combine the best of monorepos and multirepos, metahead empowers organizations to build software sustainably, at scale, and with high velocity.

Co-Founder

Studio Wallner

In a world where facts alone don't matter, it's the narratives that shape our perception. A good narrative drives growth. It makes all the difference between success or downfall, no matter if you are a startup or established company. 

Hi, I am Marc. Since 2020, I work with top decision-makers from B2B SMEs to find their narrative and align everything with this narrative.

Selected clients: esr_labs (acquired by Accenture), QAware, Hyperbowl, mantro, philoneos, treetrust, doctra, neograph, xelper.

mantro GmbH

Hired to lead all marketing and communication activities in the mantro ecosystem and a member of the commercial senior leadership team with the mandate to take an important step forward in the brand’s journey as we supercharge the Erfindergeist of German companies.

Chief Marketing Officer // mantro group

mantro product studio GmbH

As a marketing and narrative advisor to the senior leadership team of mps, mantro’s flagship studio for company and digital product building, I advised and directed the management team to tell their company’s narrative and story and help the marketing and branding team to establish their own brand in a crowded marketplace. 

- Lead brand strategy, brand development, and all communication in the account-based marketing 
- Advised various mantro product studio clients in matters of branding, marketing, and communication
- Spearheaded the development of  an award-winning brand identity (German Design Award, German Brand Award)
- Developed award-winning brand identities for mantro product studio client TreeTrust

Fractional Chief Marketing Officer

Kape Skateboards

As interim CMO and creative director, I led all marketing and branding activities in its early stages.

- Developed the kape strategic narrative and aligned all marketing activities along the narrative
- Responsible for the relaunch of the entire corporate identity across all channels (web, print, social)
- Created the go to market strategy for the grassroots product launch in Europe

Interim Chief Marketing Officer

ESR Labs GmbH

As Head of Business Development and Marketing at esr_labs, one of the world’s leading embedded software companies, I was responsible for building a world-class developer/employer brand, growing existing business, and identifying new revenue streams. 

Reporting directly to the CEO and CTO of esr_labs to take esr_labs from a German embedded software company to a world-class software company, home to some of the best developers.

- Led the organizational shift from traditional marketing to narrative brand planning
- Spearheaded all creative development, brand plan, and media strategy for esr labs and its initiatives such as esrlabs.ai
- Pioneered the introduction of video marketing (YouTube Tech Video Style) to explain esr_labs’s products and services to audiences, resulting in a 70% increase in win rate
- Owned the exploration of various verticals to bring esr_labs’ capabilities to new markets
- Managed start-up collaborations and investments

Head of Marketing and New Business Development

noclip.gg

I started this non-profit initiative to help parents explore the world of videogames. I held talks and workshops for parents to learn about the vast world of video games. I helped parents to understand both the potential of video games and how to successfully introduce videogames into their kids’ lives.

Netbeast

As business and marketing advisory I worked directly with the founding team to shape both narrative and marketing strategy. 

- Helped transition netbeast from a development platform for IoT devices to a smartphone app:

- Lead marketing and narrative strategy
- Advised on stakeholder communication

Business and Marketing Advisor

Parkpocket GmbH

As Head of Product at Parkpocket, a leading big data company for parking data, I was responsible for the integrity, quality, and enrichment of all parking data.

Head of Product

My name is Marc. 

I am a B2B marketer with a default to strategic narratives. 

My work tells the story of innovation and growth in high-tech B2B industries. 

———————————

Bonus information 🔮

Amateur photographer and filmmaker; gaming enthusiast; old-skool skateboarder, what-ifer; jack-of-all-trades and master of some. 

To know more about what makes me tick – read my personal user manual in the featured section.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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The Battle

Jake Ward

Marc Eric Wallner ✌️

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The Battle

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Marc Eric Wallner ✌️

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Engagements

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jake Ward's LinkedIn Performance

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