Blog

In this episode, Tyson and Seth will go over the fundamentals of digital marketing and SEO.   

Seth’s digital marketing company: https://blusharkdigital.com/

4 Fundamentals

“When somebody comes to me and says: hey my website is not performing the way I want to, more often than not 1 or more of those areas is being neglected or ignored.”

• Content:
• Links:
• Coding component:
• Local component (Google My Business: REVIEWS!)

“What’s difficult is executing on each of theses areas, and consistently month after month continuing to move the needle, to demonstrate to Google that you are an authority in the area you wanna be, and that when somebody searches, that you come up as the best answer for what somebody is looking for.”

“Make sure that everything that’s done it’s genuine and done right.”

Listen to the episode and learn how to get a $500 PPC bonus with Blue Shark Digital!

//

Thanks so much for listening to the show! If you want to know more about this and keep on maximizing your firm, please join our Facebook Group or like us on Facebook and comment!

You can also go to MaximumLawyer.com or, if you’d prefer, email us at: info@maximumlawyer.com

Do you want to get on the show? Shoot us an email or message us!

The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Partner up, and maximize your firm.

Resources:

• Join the Guild Membership
• Subscribe to the Maximum Lawyer YouTube Channel
• Follow us on Instagram
• Join the Facebook Group
• Follow the Facebook Page
• Follow us on LinkedIn

Transcripts: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing and SEO ft. Seth Price 

Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast.

Tyson Mutrux
Everyone takes in new tricks here with national lawyer podcast. And we’re trying something new we’re bringing on people to talk about their products and services to help you all out. And today I have a friend of the show awesome SEO guy and lawyer, Jeff price. What’s up, buddy? How you doing? Good, man. So we’re gonna talk a little SEO today, you’ve got some tips and some inside information for some people. But before we get to that, some people don’t know this, you got an SEO company blue shark, you want to talk a little bit about that. Before we get into what we’re gonna talk about.

John Fisher & Seth Price
Sure, blue shark digital was sort of a passion play grown out of our own in house marketing at price bento. It’s so I started a law firm, 10 years ago with a college law school buddy, we basically grew the firm with digital beings are the backbone from the two of us to now 32 lawyers. And we’ve used digital as one of those accelerators. You know, some people do TV, some people do networking lunches, they all those different marketing ideas work, we just dug really deep into digital. And through doing that, ended up with an eight person team and said, Hey, I think we could share the love and expense. And were formed blue shark digital two and a half years ago with the idea of replicating the success we’ve had for ourselves in digital for other law firms around the country.

Tyson Mutrux
All right, we were talking a little bit before we started just about the fundamental your focus on the fundamentals, which I think is pretty cool. We always hear about like, okay, you know, in basketball and baseball, you start with the fundamentals. So what are the fundamentals?

John Fisher & Seth Price
Right, and therefore, everybody’s heard me speak before knows its content, its links. It’s the coding or technical component of the website, and the local component, the Google My Business is what it’s called now by Google. And if you focus on those areas, and actually execute in those areas, websites take off. And when somebody comes to me says, hey, my website’s not performing the way I want to, you know, more often than not one or more of those areas is being neglected or ignored. And as a consumer, like anything else, whether you’re buying malpractice insurance or signing commercial lease, you almost have to become a mini expert in that area. And I think that digital marketing, SEO and PPC are no different. It’s really expensive. For a lot of people, it’s a black box, and that the world has changed. While there are some nuances and angles that digital marketing players use. In general, their fundamentals. Like, if you don’t have any content going on your website on a regular basis, that’s a problem, you’re not going to be able to perform, as well as somebody who’s writing awesome, great authoritative content on a regular basis. Same with links. If somebody says, hey, you know, my competition is crushing me, and you do an A refs tool that you can search once for free online, until you Hey, what links do I have? When have they been coming? If you’ve been paying somebody for months and months, and there are no links being added to the website, that’s a problem. So really, what we’re trying to say is, you know, it’s not just, you know, talking about it, that’s not that difficult. What’s really difficult is executing on each of these areas, and consistently, month after month, continuing to move the needle to demonstrate to Google, that you’re an authority in the area you want to be. And that when somebody searches that you come up as a reasonable answer, and ideally the best answer for what somebody is looking for.

Tyson Mutrux
So is there a way to cherry pick some of the stuff and I know that you if you’re gonna do all four things, you should do them? Well, but I mean, is there a way for someone to easily get started and sort of cherry pick, like, for example, Google My Business, an easy one to get into? Is there a way of doing it?

John Fisher & Seth Price
Right, and something that I that I’m a big believer, and you and I have talked about, people do what they like to do, if you like making videos, make videos, because if you dig really deep in it, there’s a good chance you’ll find a way to make a buck. So if you love to write, writing content, there are people even within the maximum alert community, they don’t hire an SEO company, they just write great content every day or every other day. And that content grows week after week, month after month. So you know, resources in competitive markets. Yeah, it’s important because you need to be able to produce things in a meaningful way. But particularly if you’re in a second tier market, or frankly, you’re starting out of limited resources, pick something and dive deep. I would argue that almost any of these areas that we talked about, can make you money. You know, if you produce content, if you say hey, I hate content, but you know, I have a good 40 pages on my website. I’m not going to write everyday cuz I hate it but I love relationships, and I’m going to call people up and I’m going to figure out ways to get links back to my site. And I’m going to find, you know, get myself in the press. There are people, you know, like Mitch Jackson who are great about getting in the news. Now he’s not doing it for SEO. But that same amount of effort that it takes to get yourself quoted by somebody, a nominal extra effort to have it link back to your website, that’s SEO. So if you love being on TV, and you can get yourself on TV and convince those reporters or newspaper writers, if you’re in the paper, to link back to you, each of those fundamentals is SEO. And that, you know, what we try to do for our clients is bring all of that together. And frankly, understand that most people don’t have the time or inclination to do the writing to do the link, build and do all these components. That if you’re able to do some of it yourself. It’s awesome. And I know people who have done remarkable things simply by writing every day.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, Willie immediate is one of those people that just put a lot of effort into that element of it. So he does a really good job.

John Fisher & Seth Price
And I’m a huge fan of his we got to know each other both online and in person at the maximum lawyer meet up. And you know, people say, Oh, do you disagree with them? No, I don’t disagree with him. And he doesn’t disagree with me. It’s like, what he’s doing is great. And he says, Look, if I had a bundle of money, I’d go build links as well. But right now, from where he is, and where he stands, he’s crushing it with content. And that’s just awesome.

Tyson Mutrux
Alright, so the last thing I want to talk about is Google reviews that’s topical these days, you and I were talking about it, I actually saw the person that has the most reviews in our area plummet recently. Let’s talk a little bit about Google reviews and SEO, Google My Business. What do you say? Sure. So

John Fisher & Seth Price
like Google, my business and Google Local, it’s huge, right? The three pack is all important. It’s something that everybody can get into. If you’re enjoying it, assuming you’re not in a mega market, a big city with a generic type of law allows you to get your local search traffic. So if you have an office in the suburbs away from everybody else, Google is saying, Hey, this is your opportunity to give people an answer for a location that’s close to them. So it’s got to be taken really seriously. And you’re right, it’s not that much effort to set up. If you’re not, something’s wrong, generally, what I see is most people have their main office set up, but they don’t necessarily have their exhilarate offices. So first, is everything clean, give it second, make sure mistakes, people make a unique phone number for each office. Okay, Google wants to look at each independently. Third, there’s a ton of stuff, it’s coming fast and furious, you’re getting the ability to put posts up that you can leave up for a week at a time, you get the ability to put a company description of 750 words, you can put photos and videos, videos, under 30 seconds, you’re able to take photos with a third party service, there are contractors that will come and connect Google Streetview into your Google My Business, all of those are conversion factors. But what it’s doing is it’s taking seriously a piece of real estate that’s really, really valuable, the sort of penultimate of this component is the review factor and look their reviews on Google their reviews on Yelp on avo on Facebook, but for many people out there, the Google review is a really important factor. And one of the things to take seriously, as Google is really smart. They watch what we’re doing. They know what we’re doing, you know, a lawyer who’s part of what this extended community started saying, I’m gonna go review all my lawyer friend, and if people do their same, and you know what, it may work for a minute, but at least from that campaign, they all came down. And that lawyers now spiked reviews, again, don’t spike things, do them gradually do them organically. If it’s something that wouldn’t make sense, if Google’s gonna look at this and say, look at the algorithm looks at and says, Hey, this is unnatural, whether it be links, or whether it be content, or whether it would be for reviews, Google knows what’s not natural, and eventually, it’ll catch up with you. And the last thing you want to do is see your reviews disappear overnight. So making sure that you’re not having a computer in your office with a single IP address for people to review from bad idea, making sure that everything that’s done is genuine, done, right. And it takes more effort, it’s I won’t lie, it will be a lot cheaper to have a computer in your office. And if people sit there when they check out to leave reviews, Google doesn’t want it if Google doesn’t want it, we shouldn’t be doing it. So reviews are something that, you know, it’s asking for something from your clients. But if you first of all, do a great job, it’s a heck of a lot easier. So I think reviews are one of those sort of humbling moments. When you look at your close cases for the week. And you say, Okay, who’s review friendly, you want to make sure that you’re producing a product, you can be proud because that’s the easiest way raving fans, you know, secondarily, now you need to sort of get by sort of the logistical question of how do you get people to do this While not angering Google, and, you know, part of that is whether it’s from somebody’s computer at home, whether it’s on their phone, on their own mobile plan, rather than through the firm’s Wi Fi, making sure you think about and execute a plan with your staff, so that you can have people demonstrate online, how great a lawyer you are offline,

Tyson Mutrux
I’m gonna give a little mini tip on how we do it. So we’ll actually send a text to our clients, we’ll make sure that they’re not in the office whenever they do it. But we actually do go the additional steps. So you can find your Google My Business page, but there’s an up do the additional step of clicking the review section, where the reviews automatically pop up, you copy that link, it makes it that much easier for them to get that review, because it’s actually kind of hard if you send them the link, it’s actually kind of difficult to find the review section of the review. So if you take that element out of it, we’ve seen a much higher rate of people giving us reviews when we send them the link. So that’s a little mini tip. And

John Fisher & Seth Price
ironically, it sort of dovetails into an area that Google has been making noise about, and I’m not sure where it’s going. But it certainly needs to be looked at carefully. So Google has stated publicly that they don’t want to see what they call gateway pages. Gateway pages are a page on your website or a third party provider like a podium, where it says, Were you happy with our services? If the answer is no, it takes you to one place. And if it’s yes, it allows you to leave a review. Google clearly doesn’t want this. And so I believe they’ve made an investment in podium and those gateway pages came down. Other companies like Birdseye and others out there may still have some form of them. But it’s sort of buyer beware. So Google is trying to figure out how can they get genuine reviews that aren’t being manipulated by people. So one thing to keep an eye on, I’m not sure where it’s going, is I love what you’re doing. And historically, that’s been a great way to generate reviews, there may come a point where Google doesn’t want to see that link, emailed if it’s a unique link, and that they want people actually searching, finding and leaving the review. Again, I’m not telling people that they have to abandon their current tactics, I know, it’s a heck of a lot easier, it’s very hard for the average person to find the right place to leave a review. But making sure that everything that we do doesn’t leave footprints. And that if you’re able to get people to leave reviews, through Googling and finding you that may, at some point in the not distant future, be an issue. And that I don’t want to see people who use a technique that Google ends up disfavoring losing reviews, because the worst part is there’s no judge or jury. It’s whatever Google wants to do. And if you’ve been playing this game for a while, as we have, we’ve seen cycles where you know, every once in a while a dozen or two dozen reviews can disappear. It’s really disheartening. So anything you can do one thing, for example, if you have multiple offices, and somebody reviews all of those offices all at once, Google’s saying No way. And I’ve seen examples where if somebody reviews all the offices, either at once, or possibly even over time, Google doesn’t want to see that. And it’s really, I think rule of reason, don’t get too aggressive. And there are exceptions to every rule. If you’re sort of in a super competitive market, you have no choice but to do it, but understand the risks. Okay. But for most people listening this podcast, you know, slow and steady is going to win you a lot better ROI over time than if you try to spike something with a new fangled hyper approach.

Tyson Mutrux
I love it. All right, we’re gonna wrap it up there. Tell everyone how they can reach you. And I understand you have an offer for

John Fisher & Seth Price
listeners. Sure, I’m at blue shark, digital B, Liu, shark digital.com, come to the website and fill out a form or just emailed me Seth ACTH. At blue shark digital micelle is 34766199993476619999. And anybody who starts with us via the podcast, we’re gonna throw an extra 500 hours of PPC at them in their first month after launch. You know, we didn’t get a lot into the distinctions between organic and PPC. But we’re sort of playing around a lot recently, with the advantages, particularly as a new site of pumping some PPC dollars in to show the Google algorithm, traffic flowing through it. Well, Google will say, you know, loud and proud that they don’t take paid traffic as an indicator of the value of a website, meaning they’re not trying to make it pay to play as far as the organic algorithm, what we are seeing, and again, I cannot prove this definitively, but anecdotally, what we’re seeing is that paid traffic is traffic. And then if traffic is coming through and people were engaging, that we’re seeing an extra bump organically, so we thought hey, why not give the listeners an extra bump? That’s our sort of from Motion for anybody listening to the podcast.