Chris Dreyer: Powerful SEO for Attorneys without Compromising Authenticity

Strickland Bonner: So your lawyer and your clients are squeezing you for lower fees. How do you put more cash in your pocket? We want to expose you to new ways of practicing law. Endless hours with no home life and a lease on an expensive office are so 1999. It's time to make a change for the better. Here to help you with that are your hosts Ron Bockstahler and Kirsten Mayfield. Welcome to the 1958 Lawyer Podcast.

Kirsten Mayfield: Are you looking to thrive differently? Amata office suites Empowered and Breakthrough Bound have collaborated on a growth mindset mastermind designed specifically for lawyers. We launched February 2021. Emailed Tricia Dao at t r i s h [email protected] for more details.

Ron Bockstahler: All right, welcome to the 1958 Lawyer. I am your host Ron Bockstahler,

Kirsten Mayfield: and I am Kirsten Mayfield, and we have with us today Chris Dreyer. Chris is the founder and CEO of Rankings.io, which specializes in assisting personal injury firms with generating leads via SEO. He has been in the SEO industry since 2006 You might recognize this company's name. Started off with Amazon. He moved into the legal industry, working with Power Advocates, where he worked with law firm marketing as well as website build brings us to today. He's almost at an eight-year anniversary here with Rankings.io. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today.

Chris Dreyer: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Kirsten. Thanks for having me, Ron.

Ron Bockstahler: So let's kind of humanize you a little bit and let's talk about back in the day when you were a history teacher, and were you the cool teacher? And if I had a detention and you were my the supervisor in the room, would I enjoy myself?

Chris Dreyer: That's a great question. So I have a history education degree, but I actually haven't taught history. I was a detention room supervisor, so probably the worst job you could possibly imagine. I had to be at school at five or six in the morning to prep the the tension room before school, and then I'd stay an hour after every day. Then the other thing is, is I coached basketball, so sometimes I would be there at six a.m. and not be home till nine or 10 p.m. and then do the entire thing over again. But to answer your question, I was definitely the fun teacher, and and you know, I was younger, and and definitely could have been more strict in the detention room.

Ron Bockstahler: Yeah, definitely. You know, you've got your own show, your your own podcast. I've watched a lot of shows. Love listening to you. So I kind of, in my mind, I'm like, all right, this would be a cool guy for me to be sitting in detention hall with. I think, yeah, I think I get that. So anyway, great to have you on the show, Kirsten. You want to open it up?

Kirsten Mayfield: Yeah, you know, Chris, I was really curious. I work in the marketing department for Amata Office Suites, and I am just curious. Why did you go into this very specific niche you went into? You went into personal injury. You specifically say on your website, 15k minimum spend. Was this a existing gap in the market? People were requesting it, and you're like, I can fill this, or did you feel like you needed to come in and teach personal injury lawyers, like, hey, this is a way for you to make money?

Chris Dreyer: It's a long way of saying I've had this niche journey when I first launched my company, it was AttorneyRankings.org, and we did PPC SEO design, and we found that our core competency and what most people came to us to work with us for was SEO. And after a few years, we looked at the P and L, and we were like, you know, we're not really making a lot off of design and PPC. Let's just go all in on this SEO thing, so we referred out all of our business. We had, you know, a decent book of business, but we referred them out, and the reason was because so we could focus on our core competency, and also so that we could set up strategic relationships for reciprocity. So if we sent, say, a PPC only agency an SEO lead, they could reciprocate and send us an SEO lead, or send them a PPC lead. They could send us an SEO lead. And after several years, I remember listening to a podcast where Seth Godin was talking about being remarkable.

Kirsten Mayfield: Oh, I love Seth Godin.

Chris Dreyer: Yeah, he's amazing, and it it really embodies that purple cow. Where I asked Seth what was Purple Cow, and he's like, it's not really being different; it's being remarkable. And I looked at, I had our accountant break down who we worked with as attorneys, so not only just you know the area of the law, but actually the the specific practice areas. And I found that 70% of our revenue was from less than 40% of our clientele, and it was personal injury firms, and it's who we really liked working with. It was it's more competitive. It brings out that competitive nature in myself, and we just decided in 2019 so not too long ago, to just go all in on personal injury marketing.

Ron Bockstahler: Have you done any work with Ken Hardison by chance?

Chris Dreyer: I've had Ken on the the podcast, and and we've met we've we've conversated briefly. I've got a funny story about Ken. There was Chris Video gave away. I think two years ago they were giving away a Tesla to the their number one referral partner, and Ken was number two. Or sorry, Ken was number one and got the the Tesla, and you you want to take a guess at who number two was?

Ron Bockstahler: You hit home.

Chris Dreyer: That was me. I got Zilch. You got the Tesla. I got steak knives.

Ron Bockstahler: You got the steak

Chris Dreyer: knives. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. Chris is a great partner. I think they do great work, video production, social media, and their Chris coach. But so nothing negative to say about them. Just kind of a funny situation where Ken got the Tesla. I think he beat me out on a couple referrals.

Ron Bockstahler: So let's let's start with you know our audience is law firms, and I guess the first question I want to hit on is why should a solo attorney not do their own SEO marketing? The

Chris Dreyer: biggest reason is is to focus on what you do best, and that's the main reason. Find other individuals who can help you where you're deficient, or maybe you just don't have the passion to learn that area of expertise. There's a there's a saying from it's you know take Walmart as an example. If Walmart tried to offer better customer service and these higher end products. Well, they couldn't be Walmart. They couldn't be cheap. They would be Target, and but Target can't offer the same prices as Walmart. So, I think if you're an attorney and you're great at going to trial or whatever, you know, working up a case, that's what you should focus on. You should let other individuals focus on what they're good at.

Kirsten Mayfield: You know that's very interesting because there are a handful of attorneys who I speak to on the daily and I see every day and talk. You know about you know I'm in marketing, so that comes up, and a lot of them will say I'm not really interested in being online and being digital because it is taking away from that thing they love about marketing or about being an attorney. It's that face-to-face stuff. It's about helping the people. They don't feel this need to be in this digital space. But when I was reading through some of your case studies on your website, there was one that really stuck out to me, where you set up a scholarship to actually help this firm market their SEO, and that's like a real life helping thing that also assisted in this digital interface. Can you kind of dive into why you did that, how those things work?

Chris Dreyer: Yeah, that's a great question, Kirsten. So, in in 2014 through 2015 we're looking at different strategies to bring exposure to a firm, but also to acquire backlinks to help with their search engine optimization. And we wanted to kind of be a win-win all-around approach. And one of the things that we did was we would offer a scholarship to either a local community or or nationwide, and we would reach out to these universities to just all we did was just let them know about the scholarship. Hey, we're offering this to you know potentially to your students, and many of these you know websites had financial aid pages. So what happened is they would link back to the listing, not because they thought they were doing SEO, but because it was it was good for the consumer, it was making it a resource to help them find the scholarship, and it ended up just being something that we could utilize for the entire flywheel. So not only was it goodwill, and you could be used for social media, it could be used to earn backlinks. It it's good for PR. It just ended up being this kind of rising tide effect. Now, you know, moving forward to to today, that tactic has been very abused, and now you'll see these little $500 scholarships that are just abusing it purely for the SEO play. But I think that those that are doing it the right way can still get that that full advantage for what it was really created for. The reason it was it was created.

Ron Bockstahler: Yeah, you got to have the passion for what you're doing, and if you're going to be supporting something like that, there's got to be the reason besides the you know immediate gratification for your firm or yourself. I kind of want to kind of go back a little bit because you know most of our listeners might not know what SEO even stands for, and then if they already have their own web page and they got some marketing going on, you know how do they bring in an SEO firm, and what exactly does the SEO firm do?

Chris Dreyer: That's a good question. So SEO is search engine optimization. The simplest way to explain what that is. Is if you type in a keyword on Google, it's it's showing your results on that first page. So an SEO specialist's main goal is to get you on the first page. So when consumer types in a query, they can find your result. And how it affects or impacts the area of the law is if you're. Family law attorney, a personal injury attorney, and someone, whatever whatever area law you are, if someone types in divorce attorney near me, you want to be that top result because it has very high intent, commercial intent, and they're looking to hire an attorney. There's all different tactics you can approach SEO with in terms of getting someone into the top of the funnel, maybe you're just educating them through blog content or awareness type pieces, but really, that's that's what it's all about. And to answer your question about how to find an SEO specialist for you, I think the first thing that I would do is I would really get a basic understanding of SEO. There's many basic courses. HubSpot has one. Moz has one, and you can finish these in a day or two because you first have to be able to at least know the basics and the foundation in order to evaluate if the SEO specialist you're working with is even doing a good job, and you need to be able to speak the same type of language and understand those KPIs and goals that everyone's striving for because SEO is not immediate like Google Ads. It definitely takes time, and it and that time is dependent upon the level of competitiveness in your market, the area of law that you're in, and you know your geography, all these different types of factors. So, you know, just learn that foundation and do your research. Ask for referrals. That's the best. The best thing that I could advise is get referrals and read reviews.

Ron Bockstahler: So, when you're an SEO specialist, are you going onto the website and are you? So, as keywords, is that like the the driver is it backlinks and can you explain backlinks?

Chris Dreyer: Yeah, absolutely. There are there if we really wanted to break this down into let's say like a two components. There is on-site SEO. It's everything that you do on your website, creating content, creating content that targets keywords that consumers type in, making sure that your website's clean. It has conversion points. It has good copywriting, and you know really highlights your unique selling proposition and what you do. All of that's on-site SEO. That's, in my opinion, one of the most easy things that anyone can do is is write good content. Make sure you're highlighting your services. That's also to me table stakes. If you're a personal injury attorney and wants car accidents, all of your competitors have car accident lawyer pages. So it's just table stakes for you to have a website that's set up. The thing that's a little bit more difficult is what I call off-site SEO. It's the promotional things that you do to get your website to show up. That would be local SEO. That's why it's very important to get reviews on your Google My Business profile to get citations, which are name, address, phone number, mentions on other websites. That's how Google scrapes that information to understand where you're located, and then also link building. Link building in the legal vertical is the most challenging component of offsite SEO because basically what a link is is when you get a reference on another website that mentions your website, so a link from their website to yours, and everyone has the same opportunities. They can go and fill out a directory at Avvo and Justia and Fine Law and Yellow Pages in Yelp, and then you can go and write guest posts on other websites. Those things are easy, but it doesn't create a barrier of entry or a gap because they're easy to replicate. So those tactics, like the scholarship or getting mentioned in the press or creating a linkable asset, become tremendously important when really trying to separate your visibility from someone else's because everyone can write a practice area page, everyone can submit a directory, or everyone can write a guest post. It's it's those other unique USP type of things that that can really help your website stand out.

Ron Bockstahler: So writing a white paper does that stand out, or is that kind of well? Everyone's doing that.

Chris Dreyer: If you have a unique opinion that's that's contrarian or different that highlights something different, then yeah, it could absolutely work. I I've been saying recently, it's Google's job to filter out duplicate content. So even if you go and research an article and you write it and it's unique, but you you use the same sources that everyone else uses, it's it's going to be similar. Even though it maybe passes a copyscape plagiarism tool, it's not really unique. And if you create something different by the. Nature of being different, you automatically stand out in the search engines.

Kirsten Mayfield: So there's a level of authenticity with that. Do you help firms find their brand and help them develop that authenticity, or do they usually know it and you step in and just help them apply it? It's

Chris Dreyer: a great question, and we help guide them, and it is the most challenging circumstance when they don't have something that's different. It makes it really hard for any type of marketing to to have the extreme effectiveness that it could have. And I think that's why individuals you're seeing substantially more nicheing because today everybody has their mobile device in arm's reach, and it's there's no longer this territory restriction, right? Everyone's on the same street, and the same street is your phone. Whereas before, before mobile devices and technology, you know, location, location, location. You you always heard that phrase, and that still applies to some degree today. But now, if someone's a consumer is going to make an action, they're going to go to their phone and and they get to see all 10 websites right there on the phone. So how are you different? Do you have more reviews? Do you specialize in particular niche? Do you have more years of experience? Do you have bigger case results. All of those things become critical. It's. I remember Jonathan Dane from Client Boost. He's a very successful PPC agency owner, and he mentioned that basically today businesses. It's like imagine you you had a lemonade stand, and every single lemonade stand was on the same street. How would your lemonade stand be different, and how would you convert that customer? And that's that's what businesses today, because of the mobile device, you have to do things different to stand out.

Kirsten Mayfield: You know, with law firms, that seems like a harder thing to do because we're living in this world where being like the crazier and zanier you are, the more attention you can get. That's not necessarily in line with a law firm. So, how have you like? Is there an example you can give for how you've helped a firm find that brand identity and stand out on that you know line of lemonade stands without like dyeing their lemonade bright blue and wearing a tutu,

Chris Dreyer: that's a great question. There are a lot of ways that you can you can be different as an attorney. You can charge a different fee structure. Imagine you're a personal injury attorney that no longer did contingency. Maybe you did hourly work. That would be different because everyone else is doing contingency. And imagine that you went and visited an individual at their home instead of having them come to the office. So you've got a logistics thing there, or possibly you do something more quickly, or you have a particular specialty on a sub area of the law. Say instead of just personal injury law, you specialize in Uber and Lyft accidents, and you can maximize value there. So there, there could be even differences in demographics or or territory, and just many different types to niche. And I think that's the key thing. Is and you can even niche with your marketing. Now, take take Jim Adler in Texas. He was the one that started the guy on top of the semi truck swinging the sledgehammer. How many of those guys exist now?

Kirsten Mayfield: Yeah, we you know what we just talked about that in one of our other podcasts because there's a hammer in every state.

Chris Dreyer: Yeah, he was the guy. He stood out. He's different now. Everyone's modeling him and copying him. You could you could be totally different. And I just think there there are numerous opportunities. And I think it comes from personality. People like to do business with humans. That's why I think everyone that's this oh we're this aggressive attorney. You're just like everyone else, but maybe you show the family side or your geeky side or whatever, and they can relate to you and build rapport with you. There are just numerous opportunities to market yourself, and and those are just some that come come top of mind to me.

Ron Bockstahler: So, Chris, you're working with hundreds of personal injury attorneys around the country. Some of the biggest personal injury attorneys around the country. What are a couple of the maybe the top two three things you're seeing right now as trends that that's seeing great success?

Chris Dreyer: Yeah. So from a from a marketing standpoint, I would say, and I'm not trying to be biased, but SEO is a very good opportunity because it's one of these, especially in this global pandemic. It's something you can invest in and can pay dividends in the future. Local service ads are huge right now, of course. There's not as many people that have been approved for those, so the cost is a little bit lower. And you know, pay per click. It's it's every. I'm a big multi-channel approach person. I'm also seeing, you know, like your show and my show. There's more individuals doing podcasts. I think podcasts for attorneys is very smart. You could you could do two approaches. You could interview other attorneys, your peers, for potential referral relationships and and kind of establishing yourself as an expert and a thought leader next to other attorneys, and then you can go the consumer route. Maybe you interview local businesses in St. Louis, restaurants and other service businesses, and get known through the local community to direct a consumer. So I think podcast is really huge, video, and it's really the biggest thing I can tell you is the most successful clients we work with don't take just one approach. It's they're doing many approaches that they're multi-channel advertising, and it's kind of this rising tides effect because they all kind of benefit each other.

Ron Bockstahler: What was the second thing you mentioned? Like local ads. What is that?

Chris Dreyer: Yeah. So recently, within the last month or two, local service ads came out, and they're actually above the Google ads. They run horizontally. They show three individuals. It's the attorney's profile, and it's just another way that Google's, you know, taking that that that very good virtual real estate above the fold, and and now it's just another way for them to to monetize that that real estate.

Ron Bockstahler: And so very few have been approved for that. So you got to go through Google to get an approval. So it's a process.

Chris Dreyer: Yeah, there's there's background checks with Pinkerton, and you know, getting approved, and then it's highlighting your experience and and basically setting up your categories properly. And we could go really granular here, but setting up your categories is critical because then you want to make sure that you can challenge and and ask for refunds for cases that don't fit a certain criteria. That's why many individuals, particularly in personal injury, are shutting off the pain and suffering category because it's just so subjective and it's harder to challenge as opposed to, you know, motor vehicle collisions. But it's, you know, the name of the the game is being up as high as possible on Google's first result. Well, that's local service ads is the very top position now. Then it's the Google ads, and then it's the map pack, and then it's organic. So it's it's all of these opportunities, and showing up in each of those gives you the greatest opportunity to capture that that consumer query.

Ron Bockstahler: So in the personal injury world, do you need to specialize? I do, you know, car accidents, or I do plane accidents.

Chris Dreyer: In my opinion, this is very controversial. I'm glad you asked this. We

Ron Bockstahler: like controversy.

Chris Dreyer: I would say that if you have a very healthy budget and you have, you know, you're willing to invest in in media, media buys, billboards, TV, radio, the whole works. Then I think that you could go broad. You could go just personal injury. If you're a new firm, you're a solo practitioner. It's imperative that you really you do a sub niche of personal injury, become known as the auto accident guy, and maximize all your advertising opportunities just for that area, and and you know you'll learn the intricacies of that area of the law. You'll build up efficiencies through your operations that lead to better profit margins. You'll be able to stand out with your peers and be known as the person to refer cases to around this topic. It could even be you know slip and fall or nursing home abuse or whatever. It's it's imperative if you are early in the game, in my opinion, the niche to just really stand out. And there's a lot of competitive advantages to that too that we could go into.

Ron Bockstahler: So now I've heard you talk about the three funnels, which I'm going to ask you explain to our audience what the three funnels are. But you know, if you're you know fill in the top funnel, it's better to be broad, and I could be misstating this, so feel free to correct me. But and then if you're in the what's that third funnel called. You want to be more specific. Can you

Chris Dreyer: consideration? Yeah, there there are many names to this, and I think the one that's most common is know, like, and trust. People like to do business who they know, like, and trust. So first, the consumer has to know that you even exist. That's the top of the funnel. You have to put your billboard out, your TV, your radio, your Google Ads, your SEO, whatever it is. They have to know you exist. Then you get to the middle. This is what's called as the middle of the funnel or engagement. I like to call it the like portion. This is where they found you and they follow you on social media. Or they've joined your email newsletter, or they've visited your website. You have to have things that that make them like you, and whether it's your your you know your personality, your USPs, your your what you're putting out there in the community, your reputation, and then at the bottom of the funnel is consideration. That's right before they hire you. That's your social proof. That's your case studies. That's your your testimonials, case results, your as seen in their your awards. All of those things to just really capture the trust, and ultimately every conversation for sales is a conversation of trust. That's why I'm not trying to go down too big of a rabbit hole. That's why individuals like Jay Abraham really push risk reversals. Hey, if we don't get you X amount in 30 days to get you the full money back, it's because it's a trust lever. The other reason why attorneys love referrals is because referrals bring with them trust, and that's why the years of experience and all these different types of components are so critical. It's because a consumer has to trust the individual that they're going to hire, and it's also why individuals lower their prices to practically nothing. If you go to Walmart and you buy a camera for 10 bucks, and it's only 10 bucks, and it doesn't work. Oh well, you know, no big deal. But if it's a very expensive camera, or or let's say a watch, right? You have a fossil watch. Watch it breaks, whatever. But you're going to go buy a Rolex for 10 grand. You want to know that it has a history of of really being a phenomenal watch, and I kind of went the luxury route here, but the same for attorneys, right? And in the nature of your case, if it's a soft tissue case and you just got a couple bangs and bruises, and maybe you want your medical bills paid for, they're not going to dive in and read every single review. They're just going to want to make sure that it's convenient for them and you're close to them, probably. But if you lost a leg or a family member lost a leg and it's really somebody else's problem, they're probably going to look at who the who the best attorney is to help you. So, anyways, it's that that top, middle, bottom of the funnel, and and marketing falls in in all areas of that funnel.

Ron Bockstahler: So I think I heard you say earlier that SEO doesn't happen overnight, and I might have maybe not on this show, but I definitely have heard you say that before. But can you you know give us an idea how long does SEO take to produce results?

Chris Dreyer: That's a great question, and every SEO possible is going to say it depends, and I'm going to try to explain that a little bit better.

Ron Bockstahler: You know, we live in the world of immediate gratification, so we got to keep that in mind here.

Chris Dreyer: If you have a new website you just put up, and you're in a major metro and very, and it's a very competitive space, it's going to take a while. You got to create content that's substantially better than your competitors. You have to do a tremendous amount of link building and promotional activities to show up, and it's going to take months. There is no way around it. That's just the nature of it. Google doesn't crawl every single page at the same rate in an absolute instant. It takes a different amount of time for them to crawl your backlinks, to crawl your pages. So, so that on its own would take a long time in a competitive marketplace, and that's even if you have someone highly qualified helping you, because if you don't have someone qualified and they tell you it's going to take six to 12 months, six to 12 months later, you're probably going to be at the same spot, and and SEO, no matter what specialist you're talking to, it really comes down to production, the number of content, the number of articles, the quality of the articles, and length and scope and depth, the number of backlinks, the number of citations. It's all these things that Google's crawling to measure if a site should rank versus another. Now that's the long approach. Let's say you have your firm that's been doing a lot of TV, and you got some brand, you got some PR, you've done some big cases, and your website's set up, but maybe it's just not optimized for SEO. Maybe there's some technical things that are wrong with it. Maybe you don't have the keywords targeted properly. An SEO specialist can go in, and within a month, in that scenario, could have a site ranking invisible. So it's every circumstance is a little bit different. It's it truly matters on the the level of competition and your current state and what assets that you have that you can use as leverage versus your competition.

Ron Bockstahler: So I got this new guy. I was just talking to a bankruptcy attorney yesterday. He told me his business is kind of slow, and I said that's crazy. But you know, I look back to the 0809 period, and yeah, it was about 18 months lag time when things really kicked in. But he started saying. And you know, I got to go back into you know marketing, and I mean, I happened to know I was going to be talking to you the next day, and I thought I got to get one piece of advice for this cat and take it back to him and say, try this because you should be busier than anything right now. So

Chris Dreyer: yeah,

Ron Bockstahler: give me one piece I could take back.

Chris Dreyer: Well, if you're owning a business, you have to market. There's no. It's it's you have to do it to get. You can't depend upon referrals. Referral sources aren't scalable. I mean, read Mike Morse's book Fireproof. That's a great book. They have they utilize the traction framework. Mike Morse's law firm is the biggest one in Michigan. And what you talked about is he had a huge referral source, and then one day the individual just came in and said, "Hey, we're not going to send you cases anymore. And he's like, "Oh God, what am I going to do? You know, and and and he jumped right, you know, head heels in the into marketing. But if you don't do marketing, you're kind of guessing when your next lead is going to come in, and you're dependent upon referrals. And I would say if that's the how you're going to run your firm, don't own a firm. Go work for someone else that is doing the marketing. Be a great attorney for

Ron Bockstahler: them. You know that's a great point. You know they're on the roller coaster. They go out, they do they do some networking, they get some business in, then they practice law for six months, and they have nothing left. Right, those are gone. Now you got to go out and do the whole thing again. So you're saying, you know, just consistently do some marketing all the time, so you have multiple lead sources coming in.

Chris Dreyer: Yeah, if you're not investing at least 5% of your top line into marketing, I mean, you might as well close up shop. I would highly recommend at least 10 to 15%

Ron Bockstahler: Okay, let's get into some more details, and let's talk a little about keywords: long tail versus short tail. What's most effective?

Chris Dreyer: Yeah, great question. They they each have their own place. A long tail query, which is a phrase that contains several words. So, what are the steps I should take after a car accident would be a long tail query. The advantage of long tail queries is the intent of the consumer is defined in the query string. You know that if someone types in what are the steps I need to take in a car accident, that they want to know what the steps are. You can create your content that really specifically answers that consumer query, their needs, versus a short query, car accident. You don't have a clue, like it can be anything. And here's the thing: the reason why everyone's pushing so for long form content is because you can incorporate multiple versions of intent into that longer article. You could have a section about the steps, the types of crashes, the types of injuries, the whatever you want to cover. You could cover basically every type of iteration that you could possibly imagine that that that consumer could want from typing in that very short query. The other thing is the short queries typically have a lot of commercial purchase intent. So someone types in divorce attorney or bankruptcy attorney, they're more likely to be in that hiring purchase state, but not always. So the shorter the query, it's harder to define consumer intent, you have to write longer form content to to answer multiple versions.

Kirsten Mayfield: So, what comes first? Is it the the long tail you know query, or is it the content, and then you build into the content the queries?

Chris Dreyer: Yeah, great question. The first thing I would do is I would make sure that your practice area pages, which are essentially your sales pages, are are well written, and those are your bottom of the funnel short short tail queries. That those are all made. You know that's where you're trying to funnel a consumer to to get them to take action and hire you. And so I would start there as your foundation to give you an example. If you're a, I'm trying to give examples that are non-PI to kind of some different versions. Let's say you're a, let's say you're a family law attorney. Well, you'd want a divorce page, a child custody page, a child support page, maybe alimony, high net worth divorce. There could be several different service pages on your site. I would do that first, and then I would try to create resources and try to answer as many questions that consumers ask. And those would be your blogs, your top of the funnel content to bring awareness to your business to drive them back into a hiring decision. Also, the top and the middle of the funnel content that don't have that commercial salesy solicitation type feel to them; those are easier to get backlinks to. Other websites don't want to link to a sales page; they want to link to a resource that answers something.

Kirsten Mayfield: So you're talking about making like. Longer content, but like attention span-that's the word I'm looking for-of human beings is nearing closer to that of a goldfish. So when we're writing our content, are we writing it for the person to read the whole thing, or are we writing content and we need to kind of organize it so that they can easily skim things, or is there a different thing we're doing?

Chris Dreyer: Such a good question. I love the description of that too. The attention span of the goldfish. The there's a couple things here. The first thing is consumers will scroll and and to different subheader sections of a page, and so it's really important that your copywriting is very. It can capture the section of a page because they may want to skip over three sections and just read the one area that they care about. So copywriting is essential. The other thing is, at the end of the day, Google can't. If you could see me, they can't tell if if an individual has a smile on their face and they're happy when they read a query. All that Google can do is measure the activity of that individual on the site. So if you got two pages, they're both car accident lawyer, and one consumer stays for 10 seconds, and one stays for a minute. Google may think that this person that stayed for a minute got his answer; he stayed there longer, consumed all the information. The one that stayed 10 seconds, you know, didn't like the page. But the reality is, maybe the person that stayed for 10 seconds got their consumer intent met, but Google doesn't know that, so it has to look at these algorithmic factors: the time on site, your bounce rates, the average number of page views, and by nature of creating longer content, it naturally takes a longer amount of time to read. If I'm going to read 200 words, boom, I'm done. If I got to read 2,000 words, it's going to take a longer amount of time. So it it's kind of gaming the system a little bit, but unfortunately, that's the way it works when it comes to Google's because they can't read emotion or happiness. They have to look at those algorithm signals.

Kirsten Mayfield: So Google is just like all these other sites for people that are like social media advertising. Google is also doing this, where they they're changing their the game all the time. And one of the big things, and you know, when you're running your business, is you you want like for instance the laws that are in place to be solidified, which is something a lot of people have been dealing with in the past few years because they're like, well, we can't predict anything. The laws aren't in place. You can't really do that with SEO because it's always changing, and you can't really play this Google game all the time. You have to you have to keep up because it's always changing. So, how do you how do you kind of rectify those things? Is the answer just always you've got to hire someone else?

Chris Dreyer: Well, you have to hire someone that's on top of the the new changes, just like if you're an attorney and they change the law, you have to be aware of what changes impact your profession. It's the same when it comes to marketing and SEO. The biggest thing that I can tell you, and I've learned this the hard way, back in 2011 when I was that that new newbie affiliate marketer, where maybe I wasn't playing the long game, and I got slapped around by Google. It's if you're really focusing on quality and and helping the consumer, and and not just creating fluff pieces of content where it's it's excellent, resourceful content that can really go a long way in the evergreen approach. But the other thing is, and he kind of triggered something on me that that I see many individuals do incorrectly, is they'll create their practice area page, their you know their chapter seven bankruptcy page, and it's written, and they never touch it again. They'll create a blog on something that gets searched one time a month, or a new news article on chapter seven. But they never touch that practice area page again because it's written. The reality is, it's consumers only type in certain type in certain phrases more than others. So you should constantly go back to your main, most important pages and continually update them with new content, better information from what you learn, and just constantly improve those those top pages.

Kirsten Mayfield: So it's never a one and done. You've got to always go backwards and reevaluate.

Chris Dreyer: Correct.

Kirsten Mayfield: That's that's exhausting. I don't think it is a lot more. Happy about that. I'm

Ron Bockstahler: glad we outsourced this because I would never want to be doing it all. It's a lot.

Kirsten Mayfield: He says this, but he's got his hands in all those pots all the time.

Ron Bockstahler: I like to know a little bit about everything. Yeah, I'm the ultimate sales guy, and I could talk to you. For 30 seconds about any subject,

Chris Dreyer: love it, love it. That's that's a great skill that most people don't have. Those soft skills.

Ron Bockstahler: Hey, so we you are a brilliant marketer. I love listening to your podcast, and we could talk for hours because I've listened to you for hours talk about different areas within the SEO realm just in itself, so I want you know we're gonna we're gonna have to finish up here. So we always finalize with one question. I'm gonna modify our last question for you. You know what trends do you see in law marketing today? Where are things going in the business of law as far as marketing goes?

Chris Dreyer: Jeez, that's a hard one. The biggest change is how consumers are taking in information, and I think that there's going to be even more of an emphasis on audio and video. So I think it's just imperative. YouTube is the second largest search engine. It's going to continue to grow. I think there's going to be a huge shift away from traditional TV advertising over to YouTube and streaming, and I think that's the biggest shift. It's already occurring, but I think it's just going to continue to to grow even more.

Kirsten Mayfield: So, God, I ask this then, since we're talking SEO and Google, Google just acquired YouTube, and they've got video campaigns that they can do. Is that something that lawyers should start looking into, like now?

Chris Dreyer: Absolutely. At the end of the day, all marketing is is trying to capture attention at the lowest cost, and it's that's where attention's at. And you can get it for a fraction of what you could for a TV or media buy.

Kirsten Mayfield: All right. That's kind

Ron Bockstahler: of scary. We just had an attorney on that was celebrating 50 years of practice, and we chatted with him a little bit about what it was like then. When you know you had a typing pool, and so you talk to a client and you never answered yes right away. It's that's a great question. Let me get back to you. And then about a week later, you'd send him a letter, right? Because that's how long it took to process that your thoughts, and then put it in writing and then have someone type it up and then mail it to you know today he says someone calls me at three in the morning they're looking for an answer by 315 so the the business of laws changed so much and you know we named our podcast the 1958 Lawyer because it's it comes off a pamphlet the ABA put out back in 1958, called the 1958 lawyer and his 1938 dollar, and the end of the gist of it was that attorneys were making about as much as a plumber was on a per hour basis, so they were falling behind their counterparts as doctors and dentists, other professionals. So that was really the beginning of the billable hour, which really kicked off and became the primary way that attorneys build back in 1960. If we looked at any one thing since then that's changed, that's really changed the business of law. Meaning, every law firm it has to be marketing. And if you're talking marketing, you got to be talking SEO. You got to what's digital? What's happening online? Because we're not printing things anymore. As you said, I put a website out there, and I got to go back and rechange my pages on a regular basis. It's it's mind boggling, but the ones that are successful at doing it have thriving law practices. So, you know, I'm going to recommend everyone goes to your website and goes to listens to your blog. You talk to attorneys on a regular basis. Anything you want to finish with? Anything you want to add? You want to tell our listeners?

Chris Dreyer: No, it's just this. This was a lot of fun, and yeah, you guys can reach me. The best the the social media network I'm most active on is LinkedIn. So just go to Chris Dreyer, accept all invitations, and you guys can message me anything on there. And I, Kirsten and Ron, I just appreciate you having me on your show.

Ron Bockstahler: Absolutely, Chris. It's been great talking to you. Love to have you back. We can maybe talk a lot, a little more detail about a specific topic. In the meantime, check out Chris's website and blog at rankings.io. He's always interviewing attorneys on what they're doing, what's going on, what's changing within the business of law. So it's very valuable to go check it out and read it, and reach out to him on LinkedIn because I follow him on LinkedIn. He sends out a lot of great articles, and I would say free opportunities to learn what you need to be looking at. So thank, keep doing it. Great job, Chris. Really appreciate it.

Kirsten Mayfield: Yeah, thank you for joining us.

Chris Dreyer: Thanks so much, guys.

Ron Bockstahler: This has been the 1958 lawyer. Appreciate everyone listening, and we'll catch you next week.

Strickland Bonner: Thanks for listening to the 1958 Lawyer Podcast. If you like the show, tell a friend, and please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to hear more about Ron, Kirsten, or Amata, go to amataoffices.com All the links are also available in show notes.