This week we’re sharing an incredible speaking engagement from Seth Price and Nalini Prasad about Search Engine Optimization at MaxLawCon18.
Seth Price is an accomplished attorney and transformational thought leader who scaled a 2-person law firm to 38 lawyers in less than a decade. Seth Price founded BluShark Digital LLC a digital marketing company using the same cutting-edge marketing techniques (high-quality technical optimization, sophisticated content, authoritative link-building, and local optimization) that Seth used to grow his own business and has established itself as a best in class digital agency focusing on the legal sector.
Nalini Prasad works alongside Seth Price helping small law firms build their business and stand out online. Nalini frequently speaks to legal audiences across the country on the intersection of utilizing best practices of trending SEO techniques and generating quality leads online. Nalini also shares tips on creative ways to leverage traditional offline marketing efforts to increase a firm’s online presence.
Listen to this episode here.
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Transcripts: “Search Engine Optimization” with Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Jim Hacking
Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m tasting Music. What’s Up?
Jim Hacking
Well, we got a special episode today a broadcast from 2018 a blast from the past our buddy Jay price from blue shark digital is millenia on the call as well, Tyson
Tyson Mutrux
yet and Alenia in Illini Prasad is also presenting, lift, lift, be honest, between the two of them, she’s the rock star. So yeah, she’s on there as well. Yeah, so they’re gonna be
Jim Hacking
giving you some SEO tips, we think there’s a lot of good nuggets in here. So enjoy the show.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and I’ll even say this, even though it’s from 2018, there’s still a lot of good information that’s still useful today. So make sure you give it a listen.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
So we’re talking to the crowd here, there’s so many very practice areas and stages that people are at. And I know tomorrow or later today, when we do the panel, we could talk more about like scaling and some of those techniques, but because I have your attention, since this has been my passion. And what we’ve created a digital agency doing. What I’m going to try to do in 45 minutes, which is a tall order is trying to go through the world of digital trying to give you my two cents and our two cents on the different facets to figure out what may be right for a particular practice what’s right for you what may not be get some takeaways here, if there’s a checks and balances of things to bring back to whoever’s doing it your own shop to say, Hey, are we doing this, if I’ve accomplished that, that I’ve done my job. So without further ado, I’m gonna start this sort of rapid fire paperclip, right? It’s a necessary evil Google AdWords is the majority of what we’re talking about in the Pay Per Click world. You know, everything that Google is doing to get its stock price up, has been to make the real estate for paid ads that much greater. And what you’re seeing right now is, this is a great example, we now see four ads at the top of every Google result page. So that even if we poopoo it, even if we’re like, Hey, we’re hardcore organic, we get better ROI. It’s something that Google keeps digging further and further into. And something that is really easy to spend a lot of money and not necessarily get ROI. The great thing about pay per click is it’s a spigot you can turn it off and on. But there are a couple of elements with it that I just want to highlight that I think are super important and not often focused on. So when you’re doing your ad campaign, there are a number of factors like negative keywords, making sure that what you don’t want is focused on and that Google can eliminate those search results. That’s really, really important. But the piece that will make or break a campaign, often trying to get ROI from pay per click is quality score. So if you take Google at its word, besides making money, the thing they want is good, high quality results for their users. That’s why people return to Google. And so what they’ve done is they’ve created a system, where they reward you based on how closely your ad and the content that lands on matches the person’s inquiry, so that the more you create content that matches the longtail searches that you’re going for the money terms you’re going for, the less you’re going to pay for clicks, and the better chance you’re going to get ROI. And so one of the pieces that I sort of say to you is, for many people out here, give me the worst example would be if somebody’s buying your name, a competitor’s buying your name, Google saying, hey, look, this guy is going to put a get by a click for something’s completely on relevant to that to that search, you don’t have anything on their site about you. And so they’re going to jack the price up. Whereas if you by your own name, and it’s your site, and you’re the most relevant answer, they’re going to make it a lot cheaper. So just to take away from that, with pay per click, the next most important piece of my opinion, is figuring out how to use all the bells and whistles. You can do call out extensions, you can do social extensions, review extensions. And basically, these are places and give people an opportunity. Google likes it because it’s more clicks, which means more revenue for them. But for you, when you want to stand out having an ad that isn’t just a single line or two, but with all of these different bells and whistles, and links really goes a long way and gives you the opportunity to take up more real estate, social media. So in social media, like there are people here, Mitch and others who have used social media to build a tribe to build a following. It is great, I would call it the piece of piece I caution against is if you’re doing genuine social media. If you’re like Annika and you’re giving away bikes, or if you’re like Mitch and you have people following your video, great, but the idea of buying a social media package, I think is one of those sort of like those trigger areas to just be careful of to me, and I’ll talk about on the next slide. There are plenty of positives and social I’m not trying to say they’re not and they’re SEO positives, but it is a pay to play service for the most part. Again, if you as a person have your own following great but the Do that on your business page, unless you’re paying to boost it. Very few if any, people are going to see your posts. So one of the people often come to us at our agency and say, Hey, will you sell me? Will you do social for me, I’m like, No, we’ll set you up on Facebook, we’ll make sure the links are coming from LinkedIn, Instagram, and all these places. But the idea is, if you want visibility there, through the commercial channels, Facebook and others are going to make you pay for it. There are exceptions to everything. But generally, if you’re not doing it yourself and building a following and building a brand, the idea of just posting things randomly, my recommendation is to use low dollar labor to make sure your Facebook is covered with community events, but not to attempt to pretend that posting stuff to your Facebook account, your commercial Facebook account, your firm Facebook account is going to make you money, it is a pay to play situation. And that if you don’t look at it that way, that you’re that it’s going to put you in peril and put money and resources that could be used, whether to be paid or towards organic, that could be used for marketing effectively, that you feel you’re checking a box when you don’t really get ROI. That so Okay, enough about that the place that we really have sort of differentiate ourselves as a firm as an agency has been SEO. You know, as I mentioned, the game of SEO has gotten harder, and that we have for paid ads before a three pack. And in doing so it means that it’s no longer good enough just to be on the first page of Google, if you want to have meaningful return and meaningful search traffic, you really want to be towards the top. I mean, it’s not easy to do. But my point is that what used to be okay, being a position seven, eight, or nine really doesn’t even get visibility anymore, based on how Google has changed things. So there are four areas of SEO, I mentioned the first slide content, links, which Malini runs in our, in our agency, the technical side and local. And they’re easy to sort of mention, but it’s the execution of these things. If you execute in these four areas, you will you will find success. And when somebody comes to me and says, Hey, why am I not ranking? Why is that something happening? You turn back to these four different areas. And you will find there are some people in this room who’ve done a ridiculous job of ranking and making money using just content. There are there are different ways to be successful at it. But these are the components used in you know in dare in differing ways that will make get the results that most of you are looking for. So content, okay. content, and is something that right now Google tells you its content and links and content, creating unique information, looking to find things that are not just your money term, whether it be St. Louis immigration lawyer, that’s great, you want to own that. But if you’re able to get those longtail searches through content, and through localization, talking about the areas of both the types of cases you want, and where you want the cases, that’s sort of step one of content, going local and content. And this is where you go both beyond is not just that you have a state level page. But which counties do you want? Which cities do you want? It’s a little bit of a fiction, because, as you probably know, Google does not allow you just to copy and paste the same page and change the county, that’s a no, no, don’t do a duplicate content. But what they do allow you to do is to create unique content for each of those places. And as you do that, and as you find those nuances, whether it be the judges, how you know, type of geography, it is roads, accents, whatever it is, if you can localize the content in some meaningful way, that will give you a distinct advantage over people that don’t sophisticated content, Google is getting more and more apt at telling what is good content, what is not the days of anybody is getting content from overseas, stop it. And if you have it on your site work to start replacing Google knows what’s written by a native English speaker. And it is looking for more and more sophisticated content. And that the if you could see this from the patents that they’re filing, that Google was able to tell what is crap and what’s not. And so just like you might go through and do any sort of cleanup in your business in your life, whatever it is, that needs to be done, we take over a new client, we triage the current site’s content, check, plus Check, check minus what’s great for today, what needs a little bit of improvement and what’s either just not well written or too short. You know, we want to make sure that there’s no reason that Google was not loving the site and what they’re seeing on there. And this is where everybody in this room and I think what I’ve seen from the podcast is we have a lot of experts in this room. And if you leverage what you know, and get it onto the page, whether it’s through blogging, whether it’s through video, transcribing your videos, transcribing your podcasts, if you’re able to get the actual knowledge that’s in your noggin onto the page. It’s so far beyond what you’re going to get from legal writers that are paid to do this. We believe we use plenty of legal writers a lot of them are JDS in their bathrooms sitting at home with young kids. But if you’re able to get your industry specific knowledge onto the page, you It really can revolutionize what’s going on. And I guess we’ve talked a little bit Mitch mentioned blogging earlier today. You know, blogging is one of those things, if you love to write, and you can create a niche or a following great. But if you’re doing this just to do regurgitated news, because you knew there was an accident, on the highway nearby, again, there are exceptions to every rule. And if you’re doing this with purpose, whether it be newsjacking, or otherwise, and you’re able to either get massive traffic, and or try to land a client, great, but if you’re doing it because an agency says, Yes, we’re going to sell you two blogs a month. To me, the regurgitated news is a thing of the past, we eliminated all of our old blog posts to kill mu paid a lot of money for those. But we went back with real content, if you’re gonna spend the time and effort to pay for content, making sure that it’s not regurgitated news, what I call evergreen content, something that every time somebody lands on that page, it’s a potential client. That’s the ideal. So that instead of having something that’s interesting, with the exception being massive traffic, but if you can’t get massive traffic, it can’t get to that level, the idea is to focus on things that you pay a lot of money for Pay Per Click, we just talked about that, right. So people in competitive markets 80 to $120. A click is not unusual in heavy PII markets. But if you’re able to create content and get one page, click from it, it shows you the economics if you can get those pages to read. And this is where you’re taking it to the final level, which is sort of the jumping point between content and link building, which is if you can become a thought leader, if you get yourself to the point where you’re thought of as somebody that people want to use as a resource. That’s sort of the home run, because then you’re creating high quality content, Google likes it, the readers like it, and you’re getting inbound links. And that’s when you’re doing sort of the 360. So this is a benefit of high quality content, which is if you’re writing stuff that is directly answering questions that are asked, Google is starting to extract that content and using it in search results. Will you want to talk to this for a second?
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
Yeah. So generally, in technical SEO, what you would see when you Google something is a small snippet, which you see at the bottom, it’s a it’s character limited. It’s your meta description. But now the richer your content is, Google’s actually crawling that and replacing that in the search. So what you see above is actually content from the website. And that’s really nice. That’s just rich content
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
and extra conversion factor when people are searching. There is not a magic way to get this. But if you write exactly what Google was looking for it in answer to a question, they will take that text, and then put it in your search results so that somebody who’s doing the search says, here’s the information, I’m looking for it, it’s right there, featured Rich Snippets let million continue.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
So going along the lines of that content that’s rich that Google is crawling, one of the things that you’re seeing at the top of the search engine now. And that page is really good information that Google is calling the number one answer to your search. There’s a couple of different examples that you’ll see, you can see that there’s answer boxes, you’ll see that their videos, and then there’s also these questions. If you’re putting your content into your website, to mimic these kinds of answers, you’re going to have a better chance of actually showing up at the top of even the ads,
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
very high level. I mean, this is it takes a takes a lot of hard work and some luck. But this is sort of the brass ring, if you’re able to get to the point where you’re providing an answer. And as we move to voice search, where they’re looking for a single answer, this is sort of what everybody is focusing on, can we give a direct answer that Google could show as the definitive answer for the question? It’s Google has to find you. So that’s what I’m saying. It takes a little bit of luck. And there’s scheme we’ll talk about in a minute, there are different signal that you can give. So you can’t just raise your hand, say, hey, please take this. But if you’re raising the bar and giving high quality information, when you get it, it’s awesome.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
And the foundation has to be there that Google is already saying that your site is an authoritative site. Right? So you have to be showing up on the first page to be considered for this as well.
Unknown Speaker
Can you talk more specifically about this? And let’s say that you have a client and you want to try to achieve this? What specifically would you do to try to create content that might achieve this sort of result? You know, what kind of research tools would you use? Or how would you approach it specifically?
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
Yeah, no, absolutely kind of the method that was just discussed, right? So if you’re an authoritative site, you first have to be there. Google has to understand that you have the sophistication, your content, and that you’re an expert. Right. So now you’re there. At that point, once you want to get to the next level, you want to look at what is being used as the featured Rich Snippet. You want to see what site is being used. You want to see how they’re using that content. You want to be typing in different strings and questions to see what’s coming up. So you’re basically doing a search engine result, okay? You’re testing the cert. You don’t necessarily have to use tools for that particular item, right? But if you’re looking into Moz or H refs, you can see the authority of certain sites. You can figure out what they’re they’re doing as well with their content from those kinds of tools. But essentially, I would do more of what was just discussed.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
Understand this is sort of what we’re aspiring to this does not happen every day. But I’m just trying to say, Hey, this is you know, you have an aspiration this at the top of the mountain, if you can get to it. It’s
Unknown Speaker
just that next level, you mentioned speech and how there’s a lot of people trying to get on the Alexa, kind of what’s the answer to the question? Does Google Home like, is Google working on a similar type of thing? Where?
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
Yeah, so Google has the home device, and it’s pulling off of this correct. So everything we’re talking about here, Alexa is winning the race, but they’re not with Google? Yeah. So assuming that at some point, Google figures out how to win this race, because you don’t get rich betting against Google. Yeah, at some point, like anybody with a pixel, anybody with a droid here knows the voice search is just incredible. The pixels gotten the point where I rarely type. And you know, if you get to the point on the home device, the conventional thinking right now is they’re looking to try to give an answer. And if you can somehow figure that out how you can give that best answer. It’s going to be harder for an injury money term. But for more eclectic terms, it’s something that’s definitely achievable, that you you’re fighting for that it’s something that we can continuously trying to figure out how to table. Thanks. So we will now move from the witnesses that will jump fully into technical SEO and Malini just sort of this is we’re starting with sort of the basics that need to be done and we’ll move from there into the more advanced
Unknown Speaker
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Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
So this is more of your quoting guys who are doing work on the back end of your website. This is actually going to help your question of understanding how Google was filling in the search results. When you’re filling in each page, you’re doing very simple things like adding a title tag, adding a meta description. So a title tag is also character limited. It’s telling you what the page is about Google’s reading that to understand what should be on that page. If the content matches, that’s how you’re building your authority and content. The Meta description is a little bit longer. And that is what you actually see in the SERP. So when you Google something, and you see the results, you’ll see one line. So sentence that’s what we had the picture of it because Google is now rewarding you for having richer content, as they’re able to say this answers the question so much better. Google is not putting the meta description that you’ve created in your back end of your website, it’s actually taking direct content and a longer snippet of your website. So two to three sentences, which means people have more information as they’re reading that search engine page. And they’re more likely to click. So this is where the conversions helping, you’re putting these things into your back end because you need them there in case your contents not rich enough. But then Google is also helping by filling these in with the meta content. The Meta description is automatically populated with like the first few lines of whatever you are writing in your piece. Yes, so and we need to make sure we change that absolutely from something. So that’s like sometimes if you are posting a page and you automatically see that meta description, just remember, like, don’t go with what WordPress automatically,
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
unless something unless you love it.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
Right, right. But yes, or that many times is the first sentence of your page, actually what the whole page is about right? You probably optimize that better. And what Annika is talking about too, is if you’re using a plugin on your back end, where you’re not doing it encoding yourself. So sometimes we will use coding and it automatically fills in as you saying, both title tag and meta description, a lot of things are filled in for you, it is important to go back and definitely check
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
that and I’m gonna take it back a step for those of you who are like, wow, we’re blowing your minds this is but if so, Title Tag, it’s been around forever. It’s a limited number of characters. That is something if you let’s say you’re doing yourself you bought a Wix site, that is the place where you get to say to Google, this is what a page is about. Definitively, you’re allowed to spam their meaning not repeat the same word over and over again, but you’re allowed to say these are the words I want to be found for and it’s amazing how I’m friends with three guys Through the most successful around the country did a joint venture and they paid mid six figures for a website, I looked at it. And the title tag was the name of their firm on every page, it was insane. This was couple years ago. And the point is that it’s a basic fundamental, it’s easy to change. And then if you the firm is going to be found, you don’t need to optimize for your firm name, this is your chance to say, hey, Google, this is what this page is about 101, it needs to be there. And just if you’re doing this yourself, and you’re like, hey, what could I do, what I get home to make sure is go through the title tags of your site, very easy and quick, especially if you have a plug in and make sure it reflects what you want to be found for
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
only one title tag that you can have. It should be different for every site. That’s what I was gonna say every page every page, sorry, if you were to use the same exact title tag for every single page, Google is going to think that every single page is the same. Right? That’s human. That’s why you want it to be different. Another just quick tip is where does the title tag appear? Right? Is this only in the backend of a website? No. So when you open a new tab in a browser, and you hover over the tab, you’ll see a short snippet of what that page is about. That’s your title tag. That’s where it’s appearing. Right. As we just discussed, the meta description actually shows up in your reading that title tag doesn’t show up very obviously. But it’s, it’s for Google, and it’s there for you to to understand what that page is on. Right? And then head to head with headings, each one’s in a shoes. Yes, those are important as well, because that is being crawled by Google. But those are things that are not going to show up in the search. Right, that’s just for the technical back end.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
There’s there’s some some theories, like it doesn’t matter as much anymore, I think it’s still best practices to leave them in your talk schema for a second.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
Yep. So schema is essentially structured data that’s in the back end of your website as well. It’s certain coding that you can say, here’s where the location of my office is, here is a social icon that I’m putting here. So you’re putting actual language regular English into your coding so that Google can crawl it easily and know where exactly on your page items are. It’s language
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
that Google is asking you to use to give them information. I’m not expecting people here to understand it, I’m not, you know, it’s it is something that if it’s not being used for you, that’s a problem. And it’s something that you should continue to look at and focus on. Because as reviews become more important, it’s a way to say, hey, Google, here’s a review for this page that’s relevant, here’s the location, you’re interfacing with Google in a way that they want you to and when Google wants you to do something, you should be following their lead.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
And this is the one topic that I would say, leave it to the experts, right, because it’s very technical, and not something that you normally will look into or try to do yourself on your back. Absolutely. So structured data, this is just what we talked about. It’s schema.org, some of you may be heard, that’s the exact language that Google wants you to use. And then these are just rich snippets that you can see that occur as a result of putting in that information in your back end, Google’s able to know exactly where you’re located, or what your menu is on your website. So here, you’ll see this as a menu rich example. So when you look something up, you’re seeing every single clickable item that’s on our school, because that’s not for every single one, you can pull up a page, this one has links, and the other five results don’t makes it more appealing,
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
somebody might want to get more real estate better. Alright, so
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
as we talked about content, the biggest takeaway, right is that it needs to be sophisticated, it needs to be that you’re the expert. And you always hear the phrase, you want an authoritative site. That’s how Google is going to rank, you need content, in order for your links to work. Links are only as good as your content. If I was to use an analogy, let’s take it back to high school, right, you have great content, you’re a great personality, people like you. But now we need other people to talk about you to endorse. That’s what Link building is. It’s not that you have to have it. But it helps Google understand that your content is not just an expert, but other people think you’re an expert, the better the people are, that are talking about you and endorsing you, the more authoritative you become to Google. So that’s number one is you want to be on the best websites, the most authoritative websites want to be linking back from that. If we’re gonna talk about a couple of examples, resource pages are great to help you become an authority. You also could be linked as a resource from other pages, use your network, people that know you in the community, anybody that you would look for, they can link back for you. As we talked about local, something that Seth mentioned earlier was now there’s pay to play, there’s ads, they’re taking up a big part of the top fold of your search. The next best thing is your local three pack. One of the ways that you can also optimize in terms of getting in that local three pack is by building local links. That means that you’re going to engage in your community, people will have the same city as you in their footer. The more sites you’re on that share that same city, the more that Google is saying that you are now authoritative in your community as well as
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
historically like for a while links didn’t matter you just want the more the merrier. Google has made it clear, authoritative links much much better one from CNN better than a bunch of crappy nonsense links. However, the one exception where you’re looking at domain authority or however your judging the quality of those links, is that if you’re able to get local links, we feel that demonstrating that local universe to go Google particularly for showing that you’re a player in the community is an exception to hyper authoritative links, if it’s demonstrating that you’re part of that local, local ecosystem,
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
and the examples of that, that we have here, or you could do a food drive a closed drive, a school drive, and what you’re essentially doing is asking community members to share that information on their website, to have people come by your office and drop off some clothes or some school supplies. What’s happening with that content is that they’ll pace that this events happening. And then for more information, click here, it’s gonna take you back to your homepage to talk about that event. And that’s where you’re getting that link choose locally, thinking outside the box, right? Because we’re not just building any kind of link or just throwing them out there, because they’re not gonna help you right now. So when we say that links are good, let’s do something and let’s try some new things. Infographics are one that we’re pretty hot, there’s lots of places to go with that. But again, your infographic is only going to be linked, if you have good content, that content has to come from the expert. So if you don’t have the good content, who’s gonna say yeah, I’ll throw that up on my website. Now, they’ll say none of this makes sense. But your content, the better, you have chances blinks. Podcasts is one that I chose to put on here, because we’re obviously maximum lawyer. But it’s also a pretty new and fun link project. There are a lot of different sites out there, that will give you a link back to every single episode. So you’re not just sharing the fact that you have one podcast, but every time you put out a new podcast, that’s more new, relevant content, use it on these sites.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
And if you know, if you’re not already, in theory, at some point, Google if doesn’t already can listen to your podcast, and get the words out of it. But my feeling is, if you spent that much time getting a transcribed, getting it as an additional search feature, getting the pages on your website up, you’ve already spent all this effort, a number of different options for doing that. And just seems like a nominal extra amount of effort to bring additional Robbie toss to the site.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
A traps is one of the tools that we use to look at backlinks to see what other competitors are doing. You can also test use it to test your website and see how that’s doing. It’s also a good way to see if your link profile is fresh. So links will come down once an event is over. And maybe you have to go back and write a blog about Twitter or something that will keep that link fresh. You just want to make sure that you’re making sure there’s a constant flow of links
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
like this is when people call me and say, Hey, how are we doing? You know, there are a number of different sources for getting the actual backlinks to your site. But whichever one you use in a refs is one of the good ones. The question is what’s being done. And so you don’t want to like spike links that Hey, today, I’m gonna start I’m coming back, I’m gonna do tons of links tomorrow, and you get a spike of 50 links. And if you don’t do anything for the next six months, the idea is to make it natural habit over time. But whatever you’re doing, when somebody says, Hey, why am I not ranking for something? It’s generally because nobody’s built any backlinks to your site or to the pages you care about. And that’s as YouTube follow. alliinase analogy is, you’re a great person. But if you want other people to know that somebody else has to stand up and say it, and I would say that, more often than not, that is one of those things that gets neglected is something that you don’t want to be so it’s sort of like the stock market want to look at it every day. But if you are checking it monthly to see where are you? How are things evolving? Are you getting what you want? And what are your competitors doing? This is the sort of the tool, one of the tools you can use to make sure that you’re staying competitive.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
And I guess when you’re in the race for homecoming king, right, you need the most votes. So maybe five people have linked and talked about you and said, You’re good, but your competitor has seven, who’s gonna win that who’s gonna be number four, and who’s gonna be number five, right? So you’re always wanting to stay up.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
And so if you’re, if you’re having trouble, you’re like, hey, I want to catch this guy. One way is to look say, Hey, where are they getting their stuff from? Because you already have your own stuff, if you can add a few from that. And so reverse engineering competitors is an awesome way just to see, hey, what other opportunities are out there that are working for them that could help me boost myself? Great local search? Sure. So local search is the we’re talking about the three pack, it’s changed names over the years, it’s changed. It’s gone from Google Plus and Google Places to Google My Business is the current interface that you’re viewing. And the success of getting into the three pack is this combination of both the organic that we’ve just talked about the content and links, as well as the separate local algorithm that’s taking into account local signals. What are the main ones being the name, address and phone number, your citation short, got a nap for name, address and phone number. The key here is to let and make sure Google knows clearly and definitively who you are, what your name is, where you’re located, and what your phone number is. So if you’ve changed names, kicked out a partner, if you’ve moved offices, or you’ve changed phone numbers, each of these things can be problematic if not handled properly, and there’s a whole process there are third party tools I will mention in a second. But at the end of the day, those will get you so far, but as people continue to use Yext and Moz Local require Should is what else can be done beyond them. Because this competitors sort of start to use those, you want to make sure you’re not just doing the basics, but you’re finding citations that are relevant, Better Business Bureau is a great one, which is it’s a pay to play. But it’s great for both conversion and trust of potential clients. But it’s also just a great citation of showing Google in the local ecosystem. Here’s the name, address and phone number from a trusted place.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
And I think that this this last one, I just want to bring that to everyone’s attention, as we’ve been saying, right authority of your website, is what essentially gets you on that first page before you can go the next level with all of these little things that we’re talking about. So when we give the suggestions of here, you can do this, you can do that, you have to first be in the game, you first have to be on the first page.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
I mean, there’s you there are a couple of reasons that that can happen to me, again, it’s not a perfect back and forth. But generally it’s close. One of the reasons you could do it is you can currently still spam. If you put magic words, you know, in there, if you’re St. Louis immigration lawyer, and you call your firm to St. Louis immigration law firm, you’re going to have a huge advantage for those searches. If you’re able to bulletproof it with trade names and things like that it may stick if you’re a more competitive pi markets, it’s gonna be a cat and mouse game where people try to take it down all the time. So the answer is generally when we see something which has no SEO presence, it’s the spammy anchor text in them that currently still works. I used to see more of that. I haven’t seen it for our cases recently. But again, we’ve focused a lot on that as SEO. But uh, historically, there was a point where like, yes, if you’ve gotten the map, you might not be the first one organic. I’ve in our in our world generally seen it, that you’re if you have the top organic, and that they’re gonna let you in both. But again, they changed their minds on a regular basis. So look, this is one of the things that has been a frustration, and for any of you in shared office suites that Google has done recently, is they have been, they’ve created something local algorithm to only allow one lawyer doing one type of law in one location. So God forbid, you’re the third criminal lawyer in office building, or the fourth immigration person. So a couple of factors here, one, when you do if you are choosing a place looking to see who else is in the building, because right now that’s a factor. Knowing that it’s there, there are some workarounds, that on the back end that could potentially pop you in. But the default right now is not to allow multiple people at the same address to show for the same type of law. It’s frustrating, because if there’s a place across from the courthouse everyone wants to be, but that is the current lay of the land for Google. Now, if you are eight, there’s we’re working on stuff. And we’ve seen that moving the pin on the map on the back end, can get around that. But you know, suite number would prevent you from being a duplicate listing, they’re not going to confuse you necessarily. But right now over the last six months or so, we’ve been seeing the algorithm has only allowed one. And the way you could sort of tell is if you if you’re not there, and then you zoom in on the map, and you see a bunch of people, and all of a sudden the person is there, if you zoom in, that’s the the filter that we’ve been seeing. In theory, it’s being used to prevent fraud. But I think more likely is just frustrating lawyers who are in clustered downtown locations. And, again, some jiggling can break it free. But it’s definitely if you don’t do anything about it, it will filter out somebody who’s not number one at a single location. So we’ve spent a couple of minutes the Google My Business is the interface that you have for the information in the three pack. Over the last six months, Google has dumped a bunch of new bells and whistles, they’re free. They’re not necessarily SEO, or gonna get you into the three pack, but their conversion pieces. And at some point, they could be part of the actual optimization, but I’ll let millenia walk through them. Yeah, so Google,
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
my business recently has come up with so many new features. The reason behind keeping up with the features, honestly is because the more you keep up with it, the more Google sees that you’re active, and when they roll out new features, you’re going to be one of the first people to get to put more information in there, this is really conversion. So the prettier your Google My Business looks, the more information that’s there, the more understanding the person has of what’s your practice areas, the more likely they are to click on that. Your Google My Business essentially, is just your profile that Google understands who you are. So the more information you can put on there, the better for them to also be able to give you authority. So going right into it post is one your posts are shown right here on your Google My Business, they expire after seven days automatically. So it’s kind of tech time sensitive and you have to put in some time to to put that information there but that’s a good place to put any event that’s coming up. That’s a great place to put any kind of sales or deals that you have not really for this industry, or what’s really cool is putting some facts and tidbits to utilize can get you X number of years in X state. That’s pretty interesting to some people don’t just read and then you have a link there that goes to any page you want it to go to on your website. Messaging. This is a good one and I think a lot of people We’ll have set this up. But essentially, your messaging is that on mobile, people can message you directly, it will go to a cell phone. So it has to be connected to a cell phone. One thing there is that you can use call rail. This is a new feature. If some of you use that. The only thing is that with call rail, you have to do it within an app on call rail on your phone, you’re not going to get these messages directly to your phone. So you want to be careful if you do that. Additionally, you want to be careful with the phone number that you get, it needs to be somebody that’s going to respond very quickly, you don’t want to have it be a call center, nobody’s going to answer there. Because it will actually show up how often you respond down to this person responds in 13 hours, this person responds within five minutes. Business subscriptions is something that is there in the past and has come back. This is going to show right at the very top of your Google My Business and it just gives people more information. There’s a 750 character limit, it’s very new, last couple months. So if you don’t have one, it’s an easy update, it’s an easy way to add more to your profile multiple phone numbers is another good way that people can now use their call rail number, if you’re going to do that, you want to use the primary phone number as your call rail number. And then you can put your additional office numbers, only one that will show up well
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
to just say taking a step back, if we did this before this feature was here, you had a choice, you either use your phone number, and you would use a tracking number at your peril unless it was a dynamically generated number through something that comes up only when a certain page is shown. But again, a couple of uses for this one, if you have a primary tracking number, and you want to be able to let Google know this is me. So they’re not confused. And then the second piece would be if you’ve moved or you lost a number and a partnership change, whatever, it’s a way to be able to combine things. It’s brand new. So we haven’t it’s not we don’t see a history with it yet. But it’s exciting. And Google’s finally saying, Hey, we get that there may be more than one phone number, and we’re not going to get confused. You’re gonna tell us what they
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
are. Yes. And in addition, I don’t know how many of you play in the back end of Google My Business, but there’s a part that’s inside. And it used to give you information for up to two weeks, but it would reset. So you would only ever have research for two weeks, flakes outside. If you have a tracking number, you can go into your own program. And you can see all of the history of it from months ago. So it’s much better than insight data. And it’s recommended. These are where we were talking
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
about. Yes, the module we talked about that. And since I think yes, what’s the
Unknown Speaker
stuff coming out every month where they’re showing you photos and the number of people who are viewing your photos. And I’ve been seeing that come email every
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
right Google has failed with their local, right, they they tried you were part of the whole Google plus hangouts world. You know, before we have Facebook Live, people were spending tons of time but it really never, I think, had better technology than Facebook, but it never got buy in. They are trying to get people just like Yelp and others, they want you to start interacting with your local profile. When people leave reviews, they’re now sending you a reminder about how many times it’s been engaged in, they’re trying to make it a central place of engagement. The longer you stay on Google, the more money they make. And this is all part of their master plan to make Google My Business the interface and have people adding reviews and interacting and messaging through it and setting appointments through it. They want that to be your place. And they’re just reminding you, hey, we’re here.
Unknown Speaker
Can I follow up on that? The have you guys been doing anything with the posts now that they let you put posts up through Google My Business for I think they have like 30 days, seven days, whatever. We’re doing what we do
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
weekly for every single client because we want to keep the profile fresh, and so that it understands that we want all the new features as soon as they come out.
Seth Price and Nalini Prasad
I think this is a double edged sword because with limited resources. I like the idea of doing it I get annoyed if it’s not at the same time. The next slide we’re on, this isn’t making you money, the posts, it’s cool to have it it should be there. If it’s not, they’re not going to lose any money. We were at a time we’ll talk about on the panel, but reviews are everything right now. So if you’re choosing literally I had this decision of a person working on posts every day, I’m like, should I take that person off a day of posts and put them on a day of reviews? Reviews are the lifeblood of the firm and need to be focused on and we’ll talk about that on the panel. And you know if you have questions, I can geek out on this all day.
