Digital Marketing

Taly Goody, Goody Law Group — Finding PI Clients on TikTok

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When Taly Goody set out to form Goody Law Group, she knew she would need a creative way to find new clients. Despite being slightly skeptical, she took a leap and dedicated herself to building a TikTok presence. Not only have her posts received millions of views, but she’s also been able to use the platform to expand her network, attract new clients, and inspire others.

In this episode, Taly and I discuss the crucial role social media plays in lead generation, as well as Taly’s journey to founding her own firm, and the importance of supporting the next generation of lawyers.


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What’s In This Episode?

  • Who is Taly Goody?
  • Why is it so important that new lawyers find the right area of law to practice?
  • What led Taly to found her own company, and has she discovered any misconceptions in doing so?
  • Why are small and solo practices increasingly popular options for lawyers?
  • How has Taly used TikTok to grow her brand, and what are her top tips for the platform?
  • Why is mentorship so important to Taly, and how is she using TikTok to help a new generation of lawyers?

Episode 104

Taly Goody

I was a little bit skeptical, to be honest with you. I was like, who am I really going to reach? Who’s the demographic? I just feel like it’s a lot more of the younger side.

Chris Dreyer

When you’re deciding on a social media strategy, it’s hard to know which platform to focus your attention on, especially when you’re considering one that’s relatively new and untested. But sometimes, you have to take a leap.

Taly Goody

People were like actually interested. And so I continued posting and I ended up getting two or three of my biggest clients from Tik Tok.

Chris Dreyer

You’re listening to Personal Injury Mastermind, the show where elite personal injury attorneys and leading edge marketers give you exclusive access to growth strategies for your firm. Many of our guests in the past have talked about the value of social media, but we’ve never had on a Tik Tok specialist. Taly Goody’s posts not only reach millions of people, but she’s even met some of her biggest clients through the site. I asked if she’d sit down with me to share advice for using TikTok to build a brand and clientele, as well as her experience founding her firm, Goody Law Group. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. We help your personal injury law firm dominate first page rankings with search engine optimization. An important first step for any lawyer is to really understand the people around them. So let’s get to know our guests. Here’s Taly Goody, founder of Goody Law Group.

Taly Goody

My journey starts back in college. I always say I’m not one of those people that knew I wanted to be a lawyer from the age of 10 or 13. Never have even idea until I went to I was in college, started an internship on Capitol hill. It was my last year in college. So it was really exciting. It was during Obama’s inauguration. And it kind of sparked a inspiration for me to look into politics. And so initially getting into the whole legal. Was kind of sparked by the politics idea. And then once I went into law school, I kind of pivoted and decided to focus on becoming a lawyer. Cause it, you know, things change or ideas change what you want to do as you go through each stage. That’s kind of how I’m here today, but I had no idea I wanted to get into personal injury law. I’ll throw that out there.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I, in preparation for our conversation, I was like heavily watching all your TikToks cause they’re very informative. And I think there was one video where you said something about like the attorneys that are frequently unhappy, maybe chose the wrong area of the law. So maybe you could expound on that.

Taly Goody

Yeah. I mean, I feel like right when I got out of law school, I fell into a job. I was just like kind of desperate to find a job. It was tough to get jobs back then. So I was like, okay, I got a job working in art law. And initially I wanted to go into entertainment law. So I was like, this is kind of a good segue for me to eventually get there. And so I started and it was great. But I knew, you know, within the first few years that this wasn’t something that I can see myself being in forever. And I could just sense that if I stuck around or if I kept, you know, if I, they stayed in like the area of law that I was in I’m I might not be happy. And I’ve encountered a lot of people. When I was going through the process of people saying, don’t become a lawyer, don’t become a lawyer. I can’t even, I don’t think there was one person that told me to become a lawyer when I would tell them. And, you know, they would say you only can be successful if you graduate from a top 14 law schools, you’re going to be in so much debt. Don’t even try. Like, you know, there was just so much negativity. And you know, I know that’s just kinda how the case is now. And so that’s kind of why I’ve also, I mentor people at the same time. Like I try to tell them. Hey, it’s not, I mean, yes, it’s tough. I don’t try to sugarcoat it, you know, but I’m like there are benefits to it and finding the right area of law is the number one most important thing, because you can be super unhappy depending on where you’re working. You’re working in a horrible firm. That’s just, you know, working to the ground. You don’t see any benefit from it. You’re not really working for yourself. I think those are really big factors in your happiness level and the area that you’re practicing.

Chris Dreyer

That’s fantastic. And I like that, you know, so not only that you didn’t know, but you like went for it, and then you found this area of PI you love, but not only that within five years of passing the bar, you set up your own firm. You know, Did you always want to be a business owner? You know, what led you to take the leap? Not only to go to law school, but then to go out and start your own firm?

Taly Goody

Yeah I, you know, it was, I think at the four year mark where I was like, I can take two roads here. I can either find a new job and start over at a firm, you know, start like as a baby lawyer or start as, you know, just like, as a minion and work myself up or I can start my own practice and. You know, I was like, okay, what should I do? There’s a riskier move, the safer move. And at the job that I was in, I was, you know, making a comfortable salary, you know, I was good, you know, I could see room to grow, but I, you know, I told myself, I feel comfortable with what I’m in with like salary wise resources. I think I’m just going to take the leap and open my own law firm. So I think I’ve always kind of known. I wanted to be a leader business owner deep down. I just didn’t know it would be as a law firm.

Chris Dreyer

One of the things I think it’s really interesting about your story too, is, you know, you do you have so much education out there that you’re constantly sharing, like what you learn. And I think I’ve heard this saying, but it immediately makes me think of you, as like this competency builds confidence. Gain more competency, and you’re like, you know what? I can do this like that. Did the confidence come with that?

Taly Goody

You know? Yeah, I think so. And I think people always ask me, like, how much time did you spend preparing before you started your own practice? And I said, look, I made the decision in the summer of 2019. I gave my boss notice by like mid summer. He was super supportive. He was like, that’s great. I’m really happy for you. I think it’s going to be a great move. And then I had like a one month before I was going to leave my firm. That’s when I started like doing all the like business formation side of things, getting my actual entity up and then that was it. And then I just dove in and I always tell people, Hey, I think the best way to learn. To just go for it, just to do it by actually doing something that’s when you’re learning versus, okay, I’m going to spend six months reading a book. I’m not saying that’s not going to be helpful, but I think the best way is also just to get hands on in it, because that’s when you learn, okay, you make a little mistake, you know, that’s not gonna work, modify it for the next time. Or this really works for me. I’m going to keep doing this, you know? So I think having a. Somewhat of like a base foundation is very necessary getting into your own practice but be open to be flexible, to learn on the job.

Chris Dreyer

Let’s shift over to kind of like operations and you know, you’re wearing a ton of hats. You you know, as you grow, you shed more of those hats, let’s talk about like, what are the things that you really enjoy? What are the things that, that bring you the most passionate in terms of the operation and doing the legal work?

Taly Goody

Yeah, I mean, I think for me, I really liked the business side of things. Running my firm. And also just getting clients. I think that’s my favorite, like talking to new clients intake. I like the legal side, but I really like the business side, probably just a little bit more than the legal side. So for me, that’s something that I wanted. Building and then maybe bringing on more people to help with the legal side. So that would be my ideal goal. Eventually I do have help right now. I have an assistant that helps me, but eventually, maybe within the next year, hopefully I’m gonna expand a little bit more.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, fantastic. Yeah. It’s always interesting. You know, that, that book, the E-Myth with Michael Gerber. The technician, the manager and the owner, it’s like, we all kind of experienced these different growth. We’re like we’re wearing all these hats and you get the shed. One when I started my least favorite was just accounts receivable and like billing clients and following up with credit cards, bounds or whatever, I could stand at select. When I started, I was like, that’s the first one I’m trying to get her.

Taly Goody

See, luckily for PI we’re contingency based. So we don’t have to worry about that. It’s just, whenever we settle a case, we got our payment and then we move on. But yeah, I can feel that.

Chris Dreyer

Love it. Love it. Let’s talk about some of those obstacles. I had a Bob Simon on recently. He was hilarious. He’s really funny and great. And there’s just so many of these misconceptions, like, oh, I got to have this expensive office. I got. Have business cards and I got to do this and do that. So like, Now, so many people think it’s too expensive and have this misconception about starting your own law firm, but could you kind of walk us through that a little bit?

Taly Goody

I mean, you really, you could start a law firm and not spend any money. I mean, it could be as low as just paying for a phone bill. I mean, Of course, you’re going to want a phone bill. You’re going to want an email. You’re going to want a way to fax. And I faxed through my emails, so it’s not like I have a fax machine and you don’t really, I work my mostly I have a nice home office. I do have a shared workspace I can go into when I have clients or depositions or meetings, but mainly like the legal industry is shifting to virtual law firms and it’s making it easier for anybody to open their own practice. You don’t have to be this fancy. Law firm having 10 attorneys, you know, 20 assistants, you could be simply like a small firm, have one assistant, one paralegal, two attorneys, and you know, it’s nice because I think it’s becoming more. Desirable for attorneys to want to open their own practice because they’re working for themselves and it’s become a lot easier to bring in your own clientele, just with the technology that we’re all, you know, that the world’s shifting towards.

Chris Dreyer

I couldn’t agree more. And the COVID what, you know, it had this such a boom in technology for legal specifically before it was like zoom, you know, and I know you’ve probably seen like the. The cat filter some of those, but like technology ramped up and previously, you know, as a marketer, I would try to set up zoom meetings and it was like challenging because individuals didn’t know the technology, but now everybody is on zoom and it’s just so much more convenient and efficient. Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been in the game for decades. Lead-generation is crucial. We all know that social media can be great for this, but one platform you may not have considered it’s TikToK. I asked Taly why she chose to pursue this route and how effective she has found the platform.

Taly Goody

Like I said, I switched into personal injury. I didn’t have this background. I didn’t have this huge network of attorneys switching in, you know, so I was kind of this new attorney. Everyone already had their referral sources, their clientele. And so I had to get creative and think of a new way to bring in. And so TikTok had just kind of started taking off. It was before the pandemic. So it wasn’t still that big of a deal. I feel like once the pandemic hit, it became way more used. So I decided, okay, I’m going to, first of all, I knew I was going to do a business Instagram, but that’s so like standard and everybody has one, you know, but I was like, all right, I’ll get on TikTok try it out. I was a little bit skeptical, to be honest with you. I was like, I don’t know, like this just seems like, who am I really going to reach? Who’s the demographic. I just feel like it’s a lot more of the younger side. Like children, teens. But anyway, I got on there, started posting and you know, I noticed that some of my videos started taking off and they were videos just about me sharing how I became a lawyer or sharing some tips about it. And then I even started doing some that are like tips on personal injury and that those ones start taking off. People were like actually interested. And so I continued posting and I ended up getting so. Two or three of my biggest clients today from TikTok. I’m very happy with that. It’s great. I love TikTok. I think it is becoming a bit saturated now, just to be honest with everybody, I don’t know, like I haven’t gotten in a really big client recently just like just gonna throw it out there. But when I first got on there, it was, you know, you have huge reach and I think there’s still a lot of potential for a reach. I just don’t think it. As good as it was at the beginning. If that makes sense.

Chris Dreyer

And talking about your impressions, like when I was researching for our conversation, some of your videos have over a million views total, like every single video on average has a substantial amount of views. And when I compare that to say like YouTube, even YouTube, substantially saturated, there’s a lot of competition, but the thing that I like, and I don’t want to talk about strategies and things, but one of the things that. It can be your platform for original thought leadership, and then you can chop it up, put it on reels on Instagram, throw it on YouTube, kind of use it as like the source of original content and then use it all these different manners. Let’s talk about content creation. I get on there and I’m like, what is this trend like? Cause the trends change, like how do you stay up to date? What, like, what’s your process for creating content on there?

Taly Goody

Honestly, my, my favorite way to create content is kind of in two ways. The first way is just when I’m randomly, you know, end of the night kind of just winding things down and I’m scrolling through TikToK. I’ll be on the FYP page, which is the, for you page. And that’s where the. Usually the, like the semi to most viral videos are played just in case people don’t know what TikToK is. You can see things that people post that you follow, or you can see just random people’s posts, which is the, for you page. So I’m scrolling and that’s where you see. The trends, for example, you see like the trending sounds, you see the trending videos and, you know, people get creative, they might take one trending video and I’ve seen a lot of doctors, lawyers, professionals switch it up. So it matches their profession where they’re either sharing a couple of tips with the trends. Or they’re doing it just to match their profession. You know what I mean? So it’s cool. So I that’s one way I kind of get ideas and I’ll save them. So when I’m ready to film, I can kind of come back to it and I script what I’m going to do. And then I film the other way is just, I think you need to have your own style on top of trends. It’s known, like if you’re just going to do trends, it’s not really good. I think your page is just going to be like, you’re just following the trends, but you’re not providing anything of value separate from the trends. So you want to be able to find something that, you know, your followers like that you do. So I started with just like sharing tips and I would just use maybe popular sounds in the background, things like that, just to make a little bit more hip and you know, you could talk or you could point. It really there’s like different things you can do. And I think for me, it just took a matter of trial and error to see what videos worked, what videos don’t work and what people like. And then from what you see from people, commenting on videos, those give you the ideas for your next videos, because there’ll be like a lot of the same questions like, oh, but what about this? And you’re like, oh, that’s great. I should make a video about that. And then you create a video on that topic.

Chris Dreyer

That’s excellent. So you have like a feedback loop, so then that supplies your next topic. What about, is it just you, do you have like a videographer? Are you like setting up the stand and working off of your apple phone? Like kind of like, how are you? I saw there’s a couple of funny ones. I don’t even know the name of the music, but like there was one where you’re sitting in a chair and it had like this weird music and then it was like further away and it was but I was like, you know, You definitely had assistance there. And I’m just wondering. You know, how do you produce these?

Taly Goody

You know, I have my husband is the one that does the ones that are like, but when that you were just talking about, he was standing kind of further away, so he’ll help me here and there when I need it. I usually just do all of them on my own. I have my ring light that has a stand in it and I set up my iPhone and then I just go from there and then I take time and I edit my videos. I think TikTok has a more user-friendly way of editing your videos versus reels IG reels. So I know that there’s like a people have a preference. I know a lot of people that create their videos on reels and then transfer them to tick-tock. But I do it the other way. I create everything on TikToK, and then I transferred to reels. So that’s another tip is to repurpose your videos for both Instagram reels and TikToK.

Chris Dreyer

Nice my team that’s listening they’ll probably crack up at this, but I do everything in paint, that old school program, just to kind of troll my team and I really get a kick out of it. You know, I am very much a noob when it comes to TikTok and even real. So like, I’ve got a team that does like repurpose house. We use that and a social media manager, but like, explain to me, you know, like, let’s talk about the platform itself. Have you experimented, do they even offer, you know, like paid boosting, like you can Facebook boost a post or Instagram boost? Do they have any ways to extend your reach? Maybe not necessarily viral, kind of push it to more people. Do they have anything like that?

Taly Goody

They do. I think I’ve seen sponsored posts similar to Instagram. Like, so when you’re scrolling through the FYP, I’ll see randomly sponsored or advertisement. And things like that. Now, I don’t know if they perform as well as if they do on Instagram. I’ve never experimented with those myself personally, but I definitely see them where it’s a sponsored post or an advertisement basically.

Chris Dreyer

Taly’s TikTok covers a wide variety of topics, from PI to life as a business owner. One area that has proven particularly popular though, is her advice to young and aspiring lawyers. So I asked Taly how she found this niche, and why she felt it was so important to share this sort of information around motivation.

Taly Goody

Yeah. I think like right when I got on, when I started experimenting with the different types of content that I put out there, and so most of my stuff is divided between the mentorship. And then I do some PI stuff here and there too. So I started posting things and I just noticed that people really, there are so many people that want advice and I still get. You know, aspiring lawyers writing. What about the LSAT? And I’m like, look at my LSAT playlist. You know, I get a lot of the same questions, but there’s so many people that I was so surprised that really come to tick, talk for help, or to help them find their path in life. And I know when we were going through the process or at least when I was there, there wasn’t anything like tip talk. I had to go on Google and I had to find, or like, let’s look up stuff on Google. And there was always negative things on there, you know? For me, I feel like by doing this and by sharing. My experience and sharing the some positivity, of course, keeping it real. It helps people and that’s all, it’s really just like, I like giving back to aspiring lawyers and helping them out. And I’ve actually hosted some mock law school classes and they’ve done really well. I had 500 people sign up for my first one. And and then from 500, we had 150 people actually show up, but I mean, that’s still a good turnout. I mean, it’s fun. I feel like I’m building authentic relationships. A lot of them reach out to me and go, thank you so much. I’m in law school now and they’ll email me and you know, it’s just nice to get those messages and say that I’ve helped them.

Chris Dreyer

Yes. So my my good friend, Maria Monroy, who we both have in common. She’s fantastic. And she said that at some of the conferences, individuals that come up to you and say, Hey, I saw your videos. That’s awesome.

Taly Goody

It actually happened for the first time when I was with Maria, I was there. And then he was like, oh my gosh, I’m so like, excited to see you. And I’m like, wow, like this is, I don’t really feel like I’m like that big of a deal, but thanks. Like, I’m like, you know, it’s exciting to see that people really like what I put out there. So I it’s a good feeling and I try to do my best.

Chris Dreyer

Absolutely. And it seems like too, that it could be like a long-term play for. Potential referrals in the future, like, and get someone on that trajectory. And I like the other thing I wanted to mention was when you gave notice to your previous boss, he was really supportive, which is fantastic. You know, not burning the bridges, like having the rising tides mentality, like say, Hey, maybe there could be potential referrals.

Taly Goody

And that’s actually another thing about TikToK and just being on social media is I’ve met a lot of different lawyers from all over the country. And I’ve already started referring them cases. They’ve referred me cases. So I mean, it’s great. Like, I honestly think that social media, whether it’s Instagram, TikTok, whatever you’re using is great. So if you want to build professional relationships, I always advise people to get on their clients. I mean, I think it’s awesome.

Chris Dreyer

Just a couple more questions on marketing it, like, just in general, big picture, like, what’s your view? Like obviously you got into TikTok, but like what’s your view? And overall, like on how you think someone that starts up and founds their own firm should approach like marketing and lead generation?
I think

Taly Goody

it’s the most important thing, because you want to keep your overhead low. You’re not going to have a lot of money to spend on advertisement. So get on social media, put yourself out there and build your brand. The more and more you post about what you do, but also make it really authentic and tie in your own story. So it doesn’t. Super salesy. I think that’s a number one thing. I try not to be like back. Cause I just think it, it turns people off. They’re like, okay, you’re really pushing us on me, but you know, tying in your story and also showing them how you can help them and letting them know that you’re a real human. That’s not just a lawyer. I think that really helps with your brand and showing people what kind of lawyer you’ll be for them. And knowing that, you know, whether or not you’re getting a client that day from what you post, you’re not necessarily going to, but you’re always going to be in the back of that. Person’s mind if they ever need a personal injury lawyer. Oh, wait a second. I remember they post things and I know that’s a PI lawyer, I’ll reach out. So it’s, you never know who’s going to reach out from social.

Chris Dreyer

Fantastic. Yeah. So it reminds me like that and them know like trust. So it’s right. The, like the likability, the trust factor, you know, that can go a long way. You know, how can people reach out to you? You know, whether it’s for cases or for advice how can I get in touch?

Taly Goody

Yeah. So I’d be happy to help anyone with any questions you can send me an email. My email is Taly and that’s taly@goodylawgroup.com. Or you can reach out to me on Instagram or TikTok. My handles are both Taly Goody Esq on both.

Chris Dreyer

Perfect. And I have one final question Taly. You know, what’s next for Goody Law Group?

Taly Goody

What’s next is so we’ve just celebrate our two years in September. So hoping to just expand more get more clients. And I really want to focus a little bit more on my marketing and get some more videos up. Cause it’s been a little bit tough, balancing everything and just doing everything on my own. So I think my goal is to be more consistent with my my video production video posting on Instagram and on TikTok. But Yeah, I think that’s kind of where we’re going. I’m very proud of the business so far.

Chris Dreyer

Absolutely. You should be so great having you on the show. Thanks so much.

Taly Goody

Thanks Chris.

Chris Dreyer

Having a strong social media presence can do wonders for your practice and Taly’s use of TikTok is a perfect example of what’s possible. I a hundred percent agree with her advice that trial and error is key though. You have to be dedicated, flexible, and most importantly, you just have to keep. I’d like to think Taly Goody from Goody Law Group for sharing her story with us, and I hope you gained some valuable insights from the conversation you’ve been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you liked this episode, leave us a review. We love to hear from our listeners. I’ll catch you on next week’s PIMM with another incredible guest and all the strategies you need to take your personal injury practice to the next level.

Second Take — Brian Dean on Becoming a Linkable Source

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Happy Holidays Everyone!

As it is the last week of 2021, I wanted to share with you one of my favorite interviews from this year, and that was with Brian Dean.

When Brian was searching for SEO advice back in 2012, he found a lot of generic to-do lists, with no real direction about how to execute. Deciding that a change was needed, he created a platform to provide others with the information he wished had been available to him. Nine years later, Backlinko is providing next level SEO training and link building strategies to some of the biggest companies in the world. On top of that, Brian’s latest venture, Exploding Topics, allows marketers to add yet another string to their bow by providing insights into upcoming trending topics.

In this episode, Brian and I cover a ton of ground, discussing everything from the role of SEO in an ever changing digital market, down to the minutiae of keeping your articles updated.


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What’s In This Episode?

  • Who is Brian Dean?
  • Is the importance of long form content changing?
  • To what extent can podcast show notes and transcripts improve your blog ranking?
  • Why is data particularly effective for generating links? 
  • How important is SEO compared to other digital marketing channels?
  • Why should attorneys incorporate trending topics into their legal blogs?

 

Holiday Rewind Part 2

Brian Dean

What I’ve seen a lot of people have success with, is creating data around these topics. And having that be the link magnet. And from there you boost your domain authority and your service pages will rank.

Chris Dreyer

Backlinks in the legal industry isn’t easy, but by providing data, you make yourself a valuable source for other content creators..

Brian Dean

I think in the case of the attorneys, in that whole space, I don’t see this being done, and it’s a huge untapped opportunity in the space. It’s just a matter of collecting it and organizing it in an attractive way.

Chris Dreyer

You’re listening to personal injury mastermind, the show where elite personal injury attorneys and leading edge marketers give you exclusive access to growth strategies for your firm. If you ask any SEO expert who the GOAT of SEO is, most of them, including myself would say, Mr. Brian Dean. His SEO training company Backlinko is home to one of the most popular marketing blogs in existence, boasting millions of readers and trusted by companies such as Disney, Amazon, and Forbes. And if that wasn’t enough, a few years ago, Brian also founded exploding topics which helps companies strategize about their marketing, products and investments by predicting upcoming trends. Brian dropped by to share his expertise on a wide range of SEO strategies, from building your backlink profile to incorporating trending topics, as well as how these tactics can be best employed by the legal industry. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of rankings.io. We help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings with search engine optimization. An important first step for any lawyer is to really understand the people around them, so let’s get to know our guest. Here’s Brian Dean, founder Backlinko and exploding topics.

Brian Dean

I started it really to scratch my own itch because I had, at that point, been creating my own sites for years. Had ups had downs really focused on SEO with every site that I launched. And I was learning what I was doing slowly, but learning through a lot of mistakes, a lot of sites got panelize. A lot of sites got wiped out and then around 2012, I put the pieces together and I built a site that went from zero to 10k a month, in 90 days and I was using white hat SEO for the first time. I was like, whoa, this white hat SEO. Maybe that was something to this whole thing. I should try it and really doubled down on it. So I started researching for the first time. What has SEO? I get away from all the spammy stuff. And I’m like, there’s nothing here. There’s a whole wilderness of what has SEO information that’s just missing. I couldn’t find anything. So I realized there were probably other people like me who wanted to transition to this more legitimate way of doing SEO and we’re coming up empty and we’re finding nothing helpful, just vague information, like create great content and build relationships with other people. And I want to know how to do that stuff. And I was actually doing that stuff a little bit. So I created Backlinko as the blog that I wanted to read and that I want it to learn from.

Chris Dreyer

That’s fantastic, and looking back at myself, because I started around 2006, I think around 2011, 2012, that first penguin algorithm hit. Right. Really nuked everyone from oblivion doing the build my rank links and the e-zine articles and all that stuff. So your blog was like the shining light in that space.

Brian Dean

The timing was really well. I was lucky that it just happens a launch right after, soon after that, the update and it was April, 2012. And that’s when, after that was what got me into white CEO, actually that penguin update happened. And I was like, I need to just press reset. Like I’m sick of logging into Google analytics and seeing this, and then I could go all the way up and then crash like a rollercoaster. I want to see consistent growth and penguin was meant, I think, to send a message like that, and it worked for me. So I transitioned to white hat SEO, had that success with my own site and then built Backlinko all within six months. And I, as soon as I started posting stuff at Backlinko, it resonated with people like you’re saying, because there was this, okay, this build my rank doesn’t work anymore. What’s next? And I was trying to figure that out myself and I documented that journey along the way.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. And I remember in my research that you had some experiences, you tried initially to do the outsource, have someone else try to do it. What were some of the things that you saw them doing incorrectly, you know, maybe taking shortcuts and things that, that you learn Hey, I need to go basically experiment through this myself because these SEO agencies aren’t doing it probably.

Brian Dean

It was exactly that. It was that I didn’t know what they were doing. And I think I was at a point where I could finally understand whether they’re doing a good job or not. And I recommend that to anyone who hires an agency, educate yourself just a little bit. So then when they send you that report, you can say, this is bad. This is good. Otherwise you’re just at someone else’s mercy. And when something that’s so important, like SEO, you don’t want to be in that position. And it’s the same with me with, I’ve been in a position recently with Facebook ads. I was hiring Facebook agencies. There were delivering stuff. I have no idea if they’re doing a good job or not cause I was like I’m too busy to learn this. And when I finally learned it myself, I realized this isn’t really rocket science. It’s a lot of hard work. That’s why people hire agencies, they have expertise, but they can also execute on the work. And it’s probably something you don’t want to do, but at least you can evaluate it. So for me, it was shortcuts. It was a lot of things, but at the end of the day, the buck stops with me. It was my business. I was hiring people that were either not delivering or they weren’t delivering enough, or if they were, I wouldn’t even know, make heads or tails of it. So I put the onus on me because I didn’t get educated about SEO. And then once I did, I could evaluate whether someone was helping so easily, even if I wasn’t doing the work.

Chris Dreyer

Absolutely. It’s a great piece of advice. I think for a lot of the law firm owners listening, you know, they may have that marketing manager, you know, they need someone to hold the agencies and individuals they work with accountable so that they can really deliver the results they’re looking for. And Brian let’s jump into some more tactical type SEO and just get right into it. And we’ll start with kind of content. Yeah, that you’ve had some studies about long form content about how they perform better. I know you, you have a lot of the ultimate guide. It’s just really ranked exceptionally well in the search results. You know, do you still feel that this is the best form of content to rank in the search engines or is Google passage rankings, another nod to long form? What’s your thoughts on this type of content?

Brian Dean

Google is more into search intent. I think passage ranking that sort of a different animal, but you’re right. That is a not to long form content, kind of saying Google, for those of you that don’t know it passage ranking is basically a Google taking one page and splitting it up into several different sections and indexing them like they’re their own pages. So if you have a really long form piece of content, it might say, okay, this is really five sections that cover different things. We’re going to index them like they were their own pages. And that is a nod to long form content. It’s basically saying look of long form content is just too much. We want to really zero user zero into that section that they need. So, yeah, I think there’s a place for it. I think it generally ranks better, but it’s not like you have to create some word limit and hit that word count, especially when it comes to the specific keyword. Now I hate saying it depends because that’s just like a cop out that every SEO person says, don’t ask them the question, but in this case, I think it really does depend on. Whether or not that person, that long-term content is what a searcher wants. If it’s what a search is looking for, go crazy four thousand five thousand six thousand words go nuts. But if they just want to know what is X, then give it to them with 400 words, 300 words. It doesn’t matter. You see that stuff ranking all the time for these shorter keywords, but then you see the longer stuff. Instead of thinking, I just look at what’s already ranking and say, Google has basically figured this out, Google and users over the years, I figured. They determined that a result should be around this many words, this is what they want. So I just go with the flow as opposed to just saying, oh, and it’s great. It’s super long for a piece of content because that’s what you’re supposed to.

Chris Dreyer

I completely agree. And Brian, so many of the audiences lawyers, so they’re very familiar with it depends. You know, one of the things I saw too is in your long form content, a lot of individuals are creating these table of contents with the jump navigation and exactly, we’re what you’re saying. Those upended jump navs will have like additional keywords in and them to build relevancy and, you know, back in the day, Google would just take you to the top of the page if they didn’t have the algorithm dialed in to jump to a specific section on the page. And I think it’s it’s interesting how they’re trying to adapt and shift to the consumer behavior and their intent.

Brian Dean

Yeah, for sure. I think they’re also adapted to devices. Like it’s just when you’re on mobile of course, some people just will read a long form piece of content on mobile and it’s actually somewhat comfortable to read on, but a lot of times you’re on the go, you’re looking for something quickly, you just need to get right to it. And they showed that with the featured snippet feature, where if you click on the link and the peaches snippet, it takes you to that section of the page, knowing that people want to skip to that specific section. So, yeah, I think in general, I still lean towards long form because like you’re saying, Chris, with passage ranking with these other features, Google will just get better at taking you to that section. So you don’t have to worry that much about it in terms of being like, I need to be short and sweet. Yes. It should be short and sweet, but Google is getting better at saying this section is for this user. Let’s just put it in front of that. And I think they’re going to get much better at that in the next couple of years.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And you know, it wouldn’t make sense for someone to write a 4,000 word article on a definition. The other thing. There’s been this boom, particularly around COVID, podcasts. There’s so many more podcasts and individuals like myself we’re doing podcasts, we’re creating content and we will do a transcription and put it on the blog and part of the reason, and I don’t want to get your opinion on some of this is the reason why I do it. It’s because it gives the guest somewhere to link back to their their in. And for example, like we had Seth Godin on and then Seth from his blog, which as you know, just tremendously powerful link back to our site. But, you know, at what point does the content start to hurt you? Because you did an article that I thought was very interesting about evergreen content and after that first, you know, week or two, it’s just not going to generate links or shares these podcasts interviews, you know, do these pages end up being dead? Should we 3 0 1, these pages, should we. Do we even make transcriptions for podcasts? What’s your just general thought about this thinner transcription type content?

Brian Dean

I’m not a fan. From my, for this interview should definitely have a really nice page with the link back to my site, but for every other guest I think you should keep into mind, but for me, it’s that the pages, like you said, they don’t. No one links to them. No one shares them and they don’t rank. So they don’t really do a lot for you. But that said, if it’s getting links from Seth Godin, in that case, it is getting so it’s definitely worth it. So it depends if you’re going to do a thousand episodes, I think that does become a problem at some point. Because the issue with the transcriptions is that they don’t rank because they’re just not really user-friendly, you know, they’re good to listen to you, but what’s a read, it’s like reading a play. It’s like Chris said, that’s Brian says it’s really hard to keep track and I’ve seen people try to transform the interview into an article. And I think that can work to a certain extent, but at some point you just go to up writing the article from scratch, making an article, just optimizing on that. Also the title, a lot of times isn’t really SEO optimized. Cause it’s you know, such and such whatever. You’re going to name this like SEO tips for attorneys with Brian Dean. Not really SEO optimized. No, one’s searching for that. So yeah, I would say overall, I’m not a fan. I think it’s good to have some page, like you said, with site links and w and resources and whatnot, but I don’t know if the transcription really does anything.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. You know, what I found too is I tried to optimize around a keyword around the overall theme of the conversation, but I found that was very difficult because of the nature of the content itself from those transcriptions so we started optimizing around the guests name, but then even the intent there for individual wanting to search for someone like yourself, they want like a more history about you versus maybe just one single interview.

Brian Dean

Yeah. But if you could write for the name, then it could be worth it. But like you said, a search intent, it’s just search intent for podcasts in search. It just there’s. No, it’s just a mismatch overall people don’t search for podcasts on Google. They index them, but no one listens to them. On browsers for the most part, people download them. The transcriptions, they’re just not, I’m not like saying don’t do a podcast. I think they’re a great format, but just it hasn’t really worked for search. You know what I mean? It just, like you said, there’s the intent. It doesn’t make sense. Like I want, if I’m on search, I just want answer. If I’m on my podcast, I want a long form interview. I want to listen to someone have a conversation. So it’s just a different format. So I would say, yeah, maybe do the show notes and throw it out there. And, but the transcription, I don’t, I haven’t seen that really work. I have a whole, I have an article on my site about how to get the most out of your podcast, show notes and transcriptions, and it goes into some detailed, but it’s, I even in that article, I’m pretty honest. This is going to help a little bit, but these things probably don’t rank.

Chris Dreyer

There’s kind of like a similar parallel here on this next question, but I’m kinda kind of shift over to like on-site SEO and UX a little bit. And your blog, you know, in some ways is anti to what SEO experts would recommend. And let me kinda jump in here. It’s you know, you don’t have breadcrumbs, you don’t have these Bruce Clay type sidebars that we’re just all FEMA around this, you know, a certain location or category. You know, most of the navigation is internal linking, you know, why do you take this approach to internal linking and navigation? Is it more about controlling Google’s narrative or is it, you know, because SEO is search more like a library where you’re accessing a phrase versus a show. You know, I just kind of wanted to hear some thoughts on, in general about why you take the approach of more, just contextual versus like the traditional menu or sidebars or categories, things like.

Brian Dean

There’s two reasons. The first is just conversions. You know, the more links you have on your site, the more stuff you have going on your conversions go down. Like the best landing pages are just a page. So if you’re an attorney and you want to get more leads, the first thing you should do is look at your landing pages.
Just strip out a bunch of crap and have a button that says contact us or contact us form and you’ll see your conversions double doing anything else. So that’s the main reason actually. I’ve done plenty of tests and the more widgets and sidebars and stuff we add, the fewer conversions there are. People don’t spend any longer on the site either because they don’t click on that stuff. And I think that, yeah, there’s a place for the sort of like categorizing your content and whatnot. But I think it just, Google is getting smarter and they need their hand held a little bit less. Like not to say there isn’t a place for that now. Like I have hubs on my side that are exactly what we’re describing here, but those are independent because that’s really just for rankings. But I think in general, I don’t think you need that to rank, although if you can swing it great, but it’s mostly for conversions, but also just before I even prayed the hubs, I’ll add tons of competitive keywords, a pages ranking for competitive keywords without any of this stuff. And it kind of, I think, yeah, it probably helps a little bit, but you can do fine without it. So that’s why I never really went into it. But now that I have these hubs, they ranked super well. And I think part of it is they have this interlinking thing. I just haven’t figured out a way to get married to have that working and also have the site convert really well, which is my number one priority.

Chris Dreyer

Link-building is one of the most influential factors in getting a website to rank well, but it’s also notoriously tricky in the legal space. I asked Brian how attorneys can encourage others to link back to their websites.

Brian Dean

I mean, I have, I’ve experienced, I used to run an agency myself and I had tons of attorney clients and you’re right. It’s tough because no one wants to link to a DUI lawyer website. The content that is usually around those topics are usually uninteresting like what to do if you get pulled over drunk, drinking and driving. Like they’re just not content that people generally link to. So what I’ve seen, a lot of people have success with is creating data around these topics and having that be the link magnet. And from there you boost your domain authority and your service pages will rank. Because like you said, Chris, it would be amazing if you could get people to link to them. But they’re not the same way with an e-commerce site. If you have a product page,to sell this toaster. No, one’s going to link to that page ever. So just forget it and instead, build your domain authority create pages that people will happily link to the Watson link to, and that’ll boost all the pages on your site. So I think in the case of the attorneys, it’s in that whole space, I don’t see it as being done. And it’s a huge untapped opportunity in this space because you guys, they have tons of data. They have tons of smart people working in all these firms. And they just, what they usually do is just hire some random freelance writer to write 10 things, to know about hiring a DUI lawyer. It’s not going to do anything. You got to create something that people will link to. And there’s tons of interesting data around your actual niche, but also just in general. So if you’re a patent attorney, how about writing – I would love to know this – how many patents are getting filed now versus 10 years ago and tracking over time, that’s the type of thing people will link to happily. So yeah, I’d focus really on data. So instead of being a resource, be a source for other blogs, journalists. So they link to you when they reference, you know, the number of patents I’ve increased by such and such, or the number of DUIs has decreased by, you know, 83% since the pandemics or whatever. These, this data sitting out there already, it just a matter of collecting it and organizing it in an attractive way.

Chris Dreyer

Couldn’t agree more. And I got a couple of follow-up questions to that. And one of the things that we did, one of our clients which I won’t name, but we created these statistics pages, you know, motorcycle accident statistics. And we pulled data from the department of transportation. And then what we did was before it started ranking, as we did paid traffic to these keywords, because they didn’t have the. And 10th for hiring. So they were very cheap and we found that they were attracting links and it became a really good link acquisition tactic, obviously not scalable because these are nationwide types of phrases, but you know, on a followup to this, here’s the pushback we get as an agency owner, and I’m sure you were on the same page is you’ll have a client that is somewhat educated about SEO knows the importance of links and things like that. And they’ll say, Hey, how come my car accident page doesn’t have any backlinks, you know, I want more backlinks there. We have to make this, explain that, you know, we’re building the overall sites authority. So basically I just kind of wanted to reiterate, do you think. You know, ranking a very good resource page that maybe doesn’t have intent. Maybe it’s top of the funnel, middle of the funnel article can then pass authority to your sales pages. Do you think that is a really effective tactic? Or do you think that they really need just those direct links right to the sales pages?

Brian Dean

Oh no, that’s a super effective tech. You definitely don’t need links to the sales pages, like in a perfect world. The links to the sales pages are better. If you can get those, get them all day long, but the problem has practically no one will link to them. So you just have to do something else. That’s where I’m coming from. Like I think, and the good news is Google is focusing more on the trust and authority of the site than a page. So you’re trending in the right direction. If you’re focused on getting a domain authority, plus say you just, you want a new department, you’re going to, we’re going to start with. M and A’s for example, whatever. You’re you have this domain authority and that page already has a good chance to rank on day one versus, oh, we only have a bunch of spammy links toward individual sales pages and we don’t have anything to the site. So yeah I’m a big fan of seeing it happen in the, in, in the legal niche, in all their niches. E-commerce also building a domain authority. That right. You know, the rising tide lifts all boats. It works really well. And that’s actually my focus for even Backlinko like most of the pages that have the most links that back and they go aren’t guides on how to do something. People do link to those occasionally. It’s mostly date. It’s industry studies we’ve done, it’s that page is like you had mentioned when we pulled data from different places. That’s where we get our links from. And that’s where I’m even tripling down on now on getting more links using that strategy just because it’s working so well. And people happily linked to that versus creating a guide or a blog post it’s like pulling teeth to get someone to link to that now. So the stat pages and data, it just works so well that, yeah, I would make that the focus, if I was in that position.

Chris Dreyer

I completely agree with what you’re saying. In fact, in many of our articles about legal SEO, we source back to your data pages for a source to validate what we’re saying and not an opinion. So for our audience, many of the individuals listening, you’ll see, oh here’s this giant survey, right? A survey. If they survey SEO specialists, that’s typically an opinion. It’s just one SEO’s opinion of what works versus what Brian’s creating. He’s deconstructing the data with data scientists and reviewing the data. And it’s kind of more logical versus like a subjective opinion of what someone thinks.

Brian Dean

Yeah, exactly. And if you can create something that proves someone’s point, they’re going to happily link to it. That’s one of the secrets, like you said, when you’re writing this post, you’re like, I want to mention that, you know, people should try long form content. And you could just say it, but it’s so much more impactful to be able to point to data. I do it all the time too, when I’m writing, because I don’t have a study on everything. I remember those ones, there was a couple of studies that have referenced like 40 times because I’m too lazy to do it myself. Someone else did it years ago and it just a good study. So I just linked to it over and over again. And guest posts and my own stuff. I mentioned on podcast. Sometimes like this guy must love me. I mentioned in the study all the time, but that’s the kind of thing that anyone can create it doesn’t yeah, you can do your own study and make it complicated. But like you said, Chris can be as simple as just pulling data from government agencies, which they publish tons of this stuff, but it’s usually very dry in a PDF and all you need to do is collect it and pretty it up. And you’re good to go.

Chris Dreyer

It’s one of the first things that I recommend for the mass torts attorney. So they’re all competing nationwide for these phrases. And it’s this new drug that comes up where it’s a Roundup lawsuit or Zantac, or what have you, I’m like what unique insights do you have about. How can you be the source? Is there an individual you can talk to so that everyone else, when they create content they’re referencing you, they’re referencing your article and that’s the way to do it.

Brian Dean

And that’s a way Google would recommend you do it. If you had asked them how, you know, I have the site in the legal niche, how would you rank? They would tell you to do exactly that. Be a source that other people want a site, because they know that’s the sustainable way to get ranked.

Chris Dreyer

Shifting over to a couple of broad questions. And I want to ask a couple follow-up questions on exploding topics. I’m really excited to get your opinion on some of my ideas on how to use exploding topics. But first is just a couple broad, you know, SEO, there’s less real estate now than there was in the past, right? There’s more Google ads at the top. Now there’s local service ads. You know, how does today SEO, in your opinion, match up to other digital marketing channels.

Brian Dean

I’d say it’s still incredibly strong. It destroys any other channel by a thousand. It’s not even close despite the shortcomings that you brought up, which are completely legitimate. So as the changes to the services, more ads, like you said, this featured snippets, there’s people also ask there’s all sorts of stuff. They’re probably going to come out with more stuff between now and when we publish this podcast, but, and the big picture. It’s SEO still brings in way more traffic than any other source by a mile because those other sources also aren’t necessarily getting more organic reach either. If you look at YouTube, there’s more ads, it’s more competitive. It’s harder to get your video seen on Twitter, organic reaches. It’s more busy. It’s more loud. It’s hard to get your message seen. If you just kind of check off every other possible channel, it comes back to SEO and email, and those are the two channels that just work really well. And on the bright side of this whole, like Google adding more stuff, I don’t know if you noticed this, Chris, but I’m just seeing that two years ago they rolled out a bunch of stuff like two or three years ago since then it’s been kind of. Like in terms of rolling out these features that reduce clicks in the search results. I feel like the last two years they’ve been kind of quiet. I think maybe they found an equilibrium there or it’s like, all right. You know, we definitely want people to stay in Google and not leave Google, which is understandable, but we also want to give people what they want in general. I think people do want a quick answer sometimes the feature snippet, but sometimes they want to go to a site. So I feel like that trend isn’t really. Clicks aren’t dropping. Like I feel like they’ve been pretty consistent over the last, maybe two years, two and a half years. So for me, I’m not that worried about it. I’ll try every marketing channel under the sun and SEO and email are by far number one and number 2.

Chris Dreyer

I a thousand percent agree. And I’m so happy that we had that whole segment of a marketing expert, SEO guru, like yourself, stay kind of reinforcing that. A couple other things that I noticed just in agreeing with you, Brian is yeah. The, what I’m starting to see is actually some indented listings where they’re doing multiple search results for one domain where they kind of got away from that. And now they’re introducing that again because of. When an individual types in a query, they may need options. Maybe they’re typing in a query and they’re not sure what they actually need is an answer. And that’s more virtual real estate. And the other thing I like is it’s particularly in the legal vertical. If you’re bidding on car accident lawyer, it’s going to be two or $300 a click and that’s one click versus. You could have a car accident page rank for hundreds of keywords, hundreds, right? Even though you ranked number one for car accident lawyer, they’re still auto and motor vehicle and all the synonyms, and there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity compounding effects that you can get with improving your content over time. And I couldn’t agree more. And then a second, just general broad question. I just wanted to ask this. You know, what’s the biggest surprise you’ve had in the last few months as it relates to SEO and why?

Brian Dean

I actually have one ready that for my exploring topics, I’ve noticed that updating content and changing, like giving it a legitimate update and changing the updated date on the page has made a huge difference for rankings. And in fact, I recently hired an update czar whose job it is to go through and just keep the. Content on the blog up to date. That’s his only job. He doesn’t write content. He doesn’t edit content. He just goes in and makes sure everything is up to date. And there’s a lot to do. Cause it’s a lot of data related content. There’s a lot of stats. There’s a lot of sources, things change. So there’s a lot to update and in some spaces you won’t need to necessarily do this, but I’m surprised that I know it made a difference because I’ve done it a lot, but I was surprised at how much of a difference that it made.

Chris Dreyer

I can tell you from my own experience, Brian, if I’m like sick and something’s wrong and I’m like typing in the symptoms, I think everybody’s done this at some point in their life. And I see an article that was updated 2016 and one that’s, you know, 20 21 I’m clicking on the 20, 21 all day. I think in the legal vertical, that’s highly relevant as well. They want the, because the laws change. And so one of my biggest recommendations is when it clicks over to 2020, All your top blogs need to be updated to 20, 22. And that’s just a no brainer. But I think because people want that relevant new information.

Brian Dean

Yeah. I think it’s a combination of the user and Google, like Google probably gives you a temporary bump, and then when you’re there, like you said, then people are going to kind of scan and be like, oh, there’s article one from three years ago. And there’s article two from last month. It’s a no-brainer which one you’re going to click on. Right. You’re always going to almost always going to click on the more recent one, even if you’ve never heard of this site, especially in the legal space, like you said, where laws change things change. It’s something that I’m making it instead of a year end thing, which I usually do, a regular ongoing process

Chris Dreyer

At the end of 2019, Brain also exploding topics, a site identifying the next trending topics before they go mainstream. I asked Brian for his thoughts on utilizing trending topics to create linkable assets.

Brian Dean

Yeah, that’s a great idea. Tying a piece of, you know, link bait, if you want to call it that, content that does relate to what the attorney does because it’s, it can be challenging. And a lot of times people can be rigid about ah, my site is about this and everything has to be about this, but like you said, if you can draw a line, even if it’s a little bit of a stretch, that’s more than good enough. If you have a DUI attorney and you’re writing about hard kambucha, that’s totally related. So it may be in your own eyes you’re like, ah, I don’t know. From a search engine point of view, and even from people like users and journalists who might link to it. Yeah, because the thing is when I get pitched all the time to link to stuff and what really peaks my interest is something that is on a trending topic and journalists are even more like that. So if you know, let’s say you’re going to do this data approach that we had discussed earlier. The first topic is about something evergreen, you know, like motorcycle accidents. The second one is about e-bike accidents and scooter accidents. This tutor accidents, that page, you’re going to do 10 times better and Porsche because it’s less competitive, but partially because when you email it to someone, they’re going to be like, oh, I’ve seen this everywhere. They’re on the sidewalks all over the place. I want to, you know, I want to cover this as opposed to an evergreen thing. So there’s a place for evergreen. But I always try to focus on shiny topics. The tricky part is finding these trending topics. That’s why I created exploding topics because there’s Google trends, which is a great tool for confirming trends that you know about. So I feel like, oh, I wonder like how, you know, people are really into e-school is how popular is that you type into Google trends and you get all the data you can ever find that super accurate up-to-date it’s perfect. The problem is if you don’t know what trend. It can be hard to find out until you go to Thanksgiving and your 12 year olds on his phone and it shows you an app. And you’re like, oh my God, you know? Oh, wow. That’s, I’ve never seen that before. And that’s how most people discover trends from younger people. But there has to, I was kind of like one of those that had to be a better way moment. So yeah, it’s one of the reasons we created exploring topics to surface these unknown unknowns, these topics you didn’t know existed.

Chris Dreyer

And trying to acquire links in the legal vertical is very challenging. We talked about data and I know some people are on the fence. I’m calling, you know, guest blogging or blogger outreach. Right. A lot of individuals have dressed up the name of it. Right. They’re guest blogging but now they’re calling it blogger outreach or digital PR and they’re all kind of using different phrases. But the interesting thing is if you go to a, let’s say a travel site, And you’re trying to pitch the travel site to right on their site. Maybe they have good authority and you don’t have a blog on your legal article on your blog, or sorry, on your legal blog. Right. You’re never going to have this opportunity to really acquire that link, but let’s say you picked up an exploding topic and you wrote an article on van life safety, right? Cause you’re a PI attorney in the opposite of it. Right. You might have the opportunity to acquire that link. So I think creating these top of funnel, these broader category, you know, types of categories can be as smart opportunity for even your pitches as well.

Brian Dean

Oh, absolutely. I mean more so, especially if you can bring some combine that with data. Oh man. Anyone would take it because mostly sites are getting the same way and guest post pitches that are just I’ll write an article. I wrote nine tips for traveling in Thailand. You’re going to say, okay, here we go. This thing called van life. It’s huge right now, like searches for Vanlife are up a thousand percent in the last two years. And I have an article about how to do van life safely, and I’m an attorney or a firm. It doesn’t have to be the attorney themself, but like our firm really specializes in this sort of thing. So we can bring expertise that you wouldn’t have. That’s a no brainer for them to accept. So, yeah, absolutely. If you can combine that trending topic it’s really can help you stand out from those multitude of guest post pitches that these blogs are.

Chris Dreyer

Fantastic. And Brian what’s on the cusp, on the future, what’s some of the things you’re working on an exploding topics what’s some things that you’re dialing in and trying over there.

Brian Dean

Yeah. So our big thing, our sourcing. So we’re looking, always looking for different sources because basically it’s a, we have an algorithm that scrapes multiple and scans multiple different sources, millions of data points to try to find these trends. And we’re always tweaking. And we’re adding sources, moving sources because there’s a lot of signal inbound signal to noise ratio, like of you know, 99 trends, our algorithm identifies maybe two are good. The rest is just, you know, not really valuable. So we’re always on the hunt for new sources that will have a better signal to noise ratio. And we’re also focused on SEO. You know, we started the blog. I mean, we had a blog post. A year and a half ago, maybe two blog posts, but we really only started about eight months ago. And traffic’s going up a lot because we’re just focusing on what we talked about here. Creating data worthy content, getting people to link to it, not worrying about links to specific pages and just putting out really good stuff that satisfies your search intent. And our traffic has increased by 10 X over the last six months. So. Yeah it’s basically the playbook that I outlined in this podcast is what we’re just trying to double down.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, and I can definitely agree. I went to the blog. I was looking at some of the topics and those top X and many of those list type posts which are really good at attracting links and the super smart to, to focus around data. You know, Brian, this has been fantastic. It’s been so, so helpful. So tactical, you know, just final question, you know, where can our listeners go to connect with you online?

Brian Dean

Yeah, the best place to go is my newsletter. So if you go to backlinko.com and sign up for the newsletter, you can get updates that have all this stuff on publishing and some exclusive insights that I only share there.

Chris Dreyer

Brian, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Brian Dean

Thanks for having me.

Chris Dreyer

Brian is an SEO beast. There were a ton of takeaways from this episode. I love Brian’s thought process and using data to make your content more than. And don’t forget, you can always check out exploding topics for fresh content ideas. I’d like to thank Brian Dean for sharing a story with us. And I hope you gained some valuable insights from the conversation you’ve been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you liked this episode, leave us a review. We love to hear from our listeners. I’ll catch you on next week’s PIMM with another incredible guest and all the strategies you need to take your personal injury practice to the next level. .

Alex Valencia, We Do Web — Content Strategy is King

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Alex Valencia and his wife Yvette dipped their toes in the legal web waters with a single law firm, and after explosive success, quickly found themselves in high demand. They created their company We Do Web in 2009, and have been providing effective and affordable digital marketing solutions to attorneys and small practices ever since.

From topic selection to promotion, Alex dropped a ton of tips in this episode, so if you have any questions about your content strategy, this is one you won’t want to miss. 


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What’s In This Episode?

  • Who is Alex Valencia?
  • What strategies can you employ when selecting article topics?
  • Why is content gap analysis so important in a content strategy?
  • What are the different types of content that law firms should be covering?
  • How can you revamp past content that has dropped in rankings?
  • What is the We Do Web key to ensuring each client’s content is unique?
  • How much content is optimal?

Alex Valencia

There’s always opportunity with a company that’s already got tons of content to go in and revamp it. Add images, add video, change some of the headings.

Chris Dreyer

If you’re looking to revitalize your content marketing strategy, you don’t necessarily need to start back at square one.

Alex Valencia

Google’s already index’ed that content. There’s no point in you having to start from scratch when you already have a page that Google ranked. Maybe it’s no longer on page one, but Google already liked it. The user already liked it. So what do I have to do to go in there and change that page?

Chris Dreyer

You’re listening to Personal Injury Mastermind, the show where elite personal injury attorneys and leading edge marketers give you exclusive access to grow strategies for your firm. When it comes to content marketing, it’s crucial that you have a plan, but knowing what that plan should be is easier said than done. Luckily, Alex Valencia is here to guide you through all the key areas. His Inc 5,000 company We Do Web has been tailoring specialized strategies for law firms and small businesses for over 12 years. Alex and I sat down to discuss all things content, from updating and enhancing previous pages to spotting the gaps and opportunities available to you. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of rankings.io. We help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings with search engine optimization. An important first step for any lawyer is to really understand the people around them, so let’s get to know our guest. Here’s Alex Valencia, co-founder and president of We Do Web.

Alex Valencia

I was an industry leader in a totally different industry. I was in the banking industry. I quit college to just go make money. Made it really big into the banking industry, so much where I was an executive at Citibank. And shortly before that, I was with a company out of the Netherlands called ABN AMRO. And then the market crashed, late 2007, 2008. Fortunately for me, I had some amazing bosses that fought really hard for an awesome package once we got let go, where I think they continued paying my salary and all my commissions for a year, so I was in a good spot. I had two little babies at home, so I was like, you know what, I’ve been working my butt off. Let me just spend some time at home and be with them. And, even to go back further, the way we started We Do Web Content is we had a lawyer friend that we traveled the country with teaching people how to use the internet way back in 1999. So my wife and I met this man named Ken Liban and we, we hit it off. We did some video commercials with him in both English and Spanish on using the internet safety. So we started on a bus tour and went all around the country, teaching low income schools on how to use the internet. Years later we worked together, hung out. And then he finally started practicing law separate of being an entrepreneur. And he’s like, Hey man, I got to get a website going. What’s Yvette got going on? And I’m like, you know what? She’s at home with me with the kids. She’s not really doing anything. She too got fortunately laid off right after the babies were born. So she was happy. So she could be a stay at home mom, but you know, she’d be happy to help you out part time. And he’s like, yeah, I know she’s six Sigma. So I want to build out a whole cost is for this whole website and content. And so she just started working with Ken and interviewing him, working directly in the law firm, learning everything legal that she had to learn and launch this first site with him and. All of a sudden it’s just starts getting all this crazy traffic, within the first month there was 3000 organic visits coming to the site. By month three, there was 10,000 by I think like a year in, we were 150,000 visits per month. Organically, no specific SEO. No, pay-per-click. Nothing. And they were just getting told so many cases where the company that helped them launch the site actually said how did you guys do this? What did you guys do? Can you duplicate it? I have an attorney in Boston that I’m about to lose. You guys want to try your strategies there. So Yvette did the same thing. Hired a couple of writers, did the same strategy for him in Boston. Then a guy in Virginia Beach, and it just blew up. And then she’s like, I think we’ve got a business here and now they’re inviting us to a conference to speak. You’re not doing anything at home. Why don’t we get going? So we worked out different names. At first it was like, Articles, Blogs and Vlogs. We eventually came up with We Do Web Content and I think honestly we were the pioneers definitely in the legal space when it came to writing content, we were one of the first companies to actually do content in 2008. Cause a lot of people in 2011 is when content is king, the phrase came out. So we were already ahead of the game. But at that time, that’s where saturation of content began.

Chris Dreyer

That’s such a great story. And I love the story about how you did great work and you got the referrals, like that’s the best, that true expert. That technician turned business owner. Ands so you saw a lot of success from the content marketing side, so you just fully embraced it and thank God you didn’t go with that other name that you did go with the We Do Web way.

Alex Valencia

Exactly. Yeah. We asked around to some of our old friends like, what do you think of this name? They’re like, I don’t even know what those are. Like, what is that? So you know, this was a good one. I’m sure my wife who’s much smarter than I am was the one that. Yeah.

Chris Dreyer

So on your wife so six sigmas. I don’t know too much about it other than like Jack Welch and like a lean methodology. Is that like a project management type skillset.

Alex Valencia

She learned it in our old industry. She was trained on it too, to change the efficiencies and processes within both operations and sales. So she knows how to map out and create everything. So you have to go around. Interviewing every single employee interviewing management, interviewing everything and find out exactly what their job is, how long it takes, what the inefficiencies, what is working, what’s not working. And you build a plan to reduce costs, reduce inefficiencies, and just create a plan to do it. So for us, that worked because we’re such a volume-based content creator, that was the bulk and the heart of everything we did was we had a process and we built a. Everything else came after that. So once, once we had an idea of what we needed to do a formula that worked, we had to create a factory setting, not only for training people, but also for producing, managing, and publishing.

Chris Dreyer

That’s great. So you had like that yin and yang type situation. You could be the visionary, the front end, biz dev and you had your wife that could do like the operations and scalability because content is such a volume game. It’s just. It’s just insane. Now, the amount of content you’ve got to produce, and we’re going to talk more about that later. That’s amazing. And that’s how you scale. It’s go so many companies, so they’ll do the opposite, right? They rule by abdication. Does this go hire someone and go, here you go. But now you’ve got these processes, so you can have someone follow the process for consistently.

Alex Valencia

Yeah. And it makes it easier, because we know what works, we know what our partners like. It makes it a lot simpler and we’ll dive in deeper as the questions go further, but so much so that now we’ve built a software to help even evolve and grow more and then get more customized within our clients. Because we’re both in the legal space. So we know. So many different innuendos words that can and cannot be used. So it’s very verbal and everybody’s got their own language that they want spoken and that can and cannot be said by the bar. So that’s all implemented in that software.

Chris Dreyer

So true. So let’s dive in kind of the tactical is SOC content. So let’s go right to the very beginning let’s talk ideation and selecting topics. One of the common issues that law firms have is, what do I write about. There are a lot of people that just, they’re looking at the news, they’re trying to write articles about maybe a car wreck that happened, or I know a lot of personal injury attorneys. They know they need to have a car accident, truck accident page, but what are some of the strategies involved to selecting topics and kind of that that starting point for.

Alex Valencia

So for us, it’s really now learning who the client is, who the client’s content base is. So the demographic, right? So you have so many different types of lawyers. You have that volume based lawyer who loves the quick car accidents, big billboard guy that says send. A thousand of these car accident cases that tend to $20,000 a month. For those, you know exactly who you’re writing to, then you have the lawyer who super-specific, where I’m only going after catastrophic cases or anything over 150,000, it’s a very difficult to do. But you know, if you’re working in partnering directly with the firm and writing a certain way, as far as the different practice areas, you can eliminate some of that. And also how they’re doing their external marketing helps too. It doesn’t, we talked about this before, you don’t just put all your eggs into the SEO content basket. It’s what you’re doing externally, too. That drives it. So depending on how that client or law firm is advertising, how they’re speaking to people on radio, television billboards, or any other internal or network marketing that they’re doing. All really comes in and ties all that together for them to be able to get that perfect client.

Chris Dreyer

Building a site from scratch is always hard, but incorporating old content into new strategy poses even its own challenges. I asked Alex what his method is for helping clients with past SEO and content marketing experience, and how they analyze the wealth of preexisting.

Alex Valencia

So we built a tool as well. And alongside with other partners in the tools that are already out there to do a gap analysis. So when we have someone that already has been generating content, there’s always an upfront opportunity to fix what they have. That’s currently not working for them. Had some people come to us and they’re performing really well, but there’s always some low hanging fruit that you can go after and revamped, redo, go out and see. What their competitors are doing, right? Because it’s such a competitive market that we’re in. Someone might’ve been ranking for three years, four years kicking butt, but all of a sudden you get this young law firm close, a couple of cases. They’re like, Hey, I’m putting all my marketing money back in putting all my profits back into marketing and going after an SEO strategy and get really aggressive. With a newer SEO agency, and they start developing content. Now you’re competing right now. I was third, second position. Now move to five by this brand new law firm that just came in because their SEO strategy was just a little newer. Their content strategy was just a little fresher. So when you’re developing. A hundred pages a month, 50 pages a month. It’s important to always go back and see how the performance of that is. You’re keeping track of the performance as opposed to let me create new content. Let me fix the content that’s already there because Google has already index that content. There’s no point in you having to start from scratch when you already have a page that Google ranked. Maybe it’s no longer on page one, but Google already liked it. The user already liked it. So what do I have to do to go in there and change that page? So there’s always opportunity with a company that’s already got tons of content to go in and revamp it. Add images, add video, change. Some of the headings, the meta-description is huge. Like I’m a big meta-description guy. That’s how I choose. When I look for something, I look at meta descriptions because there’s. W not badly written, but uninformative meta descriptions, right? Why am I going to click on this page? If the meta-description does it almost answered what I want? So it’s important to tell Google and the user, what your pages are out about and your meta-description and you’d be surprised how much that changes the page.

Chris Dreyer

The meta-description is not strong and you don’t entice the consumer to the website. They don’t even have the opportunity to see how good the content. And if it doesn’t have that signal, then it doesn’t matter about the quality of the content. I think you bring up a good point on the content refreshes because so many of our audiences is as focused on new, more and more. But at the end of the day and the legal vertical, when it comes to like volume and impressions and searches, like when you’ve hit some of those core topics, you’re really looking at low hanging fruit when maybe it would be better just to go update and. Make your higher volume opportunities better.

Alex Valencia

Exactly. And what we’ve seen like with researching other SEO companies, even for our own work is, that’s usually what they do in the beginning is they’ve analyzed the site and itemized 20 opportunities in the beginning. Like the first month we’re going to go in and optimize 20 pages that you already have we could make perform. So it’s important to always have a custom look at the client, as opposed to, I think the factory setting, the way we have it is great. And it works. And there’s a formula. If you take the first 30 to 90 days to really fix what’s there, you might have a really good opportunity to rank and get the person moving much quicker than if you were to create brand new content for them.

Chris Dreyer

Moving from kind of topics, ideation, and we touched on some of it, some of these points, but you know, what are the different content areas of law firms should be covering? Should I just focus on the practice area pages? W what types of contents should they be producing?

Alex Valencia

I’m a big believer in your money pages, and those are your practice area pages. I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of SEOs and all their strategies pretty much align within the same idea of developing those pages that are specific. Well, I think it’s your primary, secondary and tertiary pages. Your primary is your personal injury page. Secondary, the car accident, Uber all car accident, rear end car accident. I bought right. DUI accident during DUI. So you start secondary and then tertiary, and then also supporting that content with frequently asked questions. And eventually getting into a blogging strategy. Like I’m, we’re getting back into it. When we first started this we would do a package. It was a page and FAQ and a blog post and talk about saturation, but it was easy because the writer. I already had the topic. So they would write a long form page. They would do a good FAQ size page to help support it. And then they would do a blog posts that would hopefully drive traffic to both of those in, in, in a similar topic. But it just was so much content around the same topic that there was a fear of cannibalism. So we stopped that and then went more towards the and I think strategically done today. You could do it, but we would need the right direction.

Chris Dreyer

I think that’s so first of all, HubSpot, one of the biggest CRMs, that’s basically their strategy today. They write those pillar pages and they have the cluster pages, the support pages, people talk about it in different nomenclature, whether it’s Bruce Clay, talking about silos and writing thematically similar content. I think that the real fear is avoiding, is the duplicating topics, the keyword cannibalism situation. And that’s why to why I asked, like, Hey, if you take on a client, that’s already had been working with an SEO agency or been working with a content marketing agency, what do you do to avoid that when they have so many pages of content, and I guess your tool is fantastic for that. They do it manually would be a very tedious process.

Alex Valencia

Right. Yeah. The tool is going to be great because it’s going to pull the site maps of our current clients and their competitors. So it immediately show us a gap analysis that we can use. And it’s going to pull in a headings as well. So we can see whoever’s ranking at the top, who has the best headings that we could use and say, okay, they’re either using the keyword in the front, the back and all those things are, you never know exactly what the answer is. Are they using sales copy, within those headings, that’s helping that push? What’s really Google liking? So it’s a lot of really great information that, that it pulls to, to guide you in the right direction.

Chris Dreyer

That’s excellent. So it makes it more objective and instead of like an opinion based, and another big challenge that I want to hear your opinion on this, because I’m sure you face this, do the volume of content you produce is how do you make content truly unique? If you’re working with 20 PI attorneys, they all want a car accident, lawyer page. So what do you do? I mean, do you do those semantic, phrases, the LSI keywords that are all, what do I do after car accident? How long, like how do you make them unique so that they have the opportunity to rank?

Alex Valencia

Location vernacular of the law firms. So like I said, we go through a conversation with them and we create a client profile. So every client has a client profile that also helps with a specific, for an Achler that they like and the tone. So that helps with that. But again, it’s hard. To really pull out right. What you’ve written one personal injury page you’ve written or read them. All right. So it’s all the same information. We have a certain style format that we’ve always used which is the pyramid that we like using, which was taking from journalism. Style that, what you find from a lot of other non-content focus agencies is they don’t really know how to format a page for the reader. So that helps eliminate a lot of things. But the content is unique for us is because we have teams of writers and then we also have teams of editors and then also software tools to make sure. That none of it’s been duplicated, but I mean, there’s really no way out of it. And you’ve written a car accident page. It’s all the same content. It’s just a different market.

Chris Dreyer

And I guess a follow-up question to that in terms of. Just how SEO’s evolved. And Brian Dean’s done studies, I’ve read studies all over the place about content links and there is some something to that back in the day, there wasn’t all, every subject area wasn’t covered. You could write a 500 word article and you could rank because that topic, or maybe that phrase wasn’t covered, you could hit a long tail. But now like most Google has most topics covered unless it’s like original. So what’s like the balancing act in terms of long form content versus maybe long tail what’s just your general opinion on approaching that, that topic.

Alex Valencia

I would say it’s kinda like when you’re at the and I’m not a gambler, so it’s a table where you put a bet on black and white. So you break even, I think you got to do both, Google doesn’t really say, Hey, we’d rather long form. They really say, if you can answer the question in 500 words, then go for it. You can overwrite as well. If a page is, you could get a page to rank for 500 words and someone has a 3000 word page that’s also ranking, but it really comes down to. What’s the technical aspect of the website. What’s the usability of the website. How many links are coming to it? Where are they coming from? So many variables really tie into it now with SEO, which is why, your job is SEO is so important to make sure you’re backing up a lot of the work that we do. Google doesn’t see anything, but the content, but it’s all the backend work that’s being done to make sure they can actually get to it, technically that the websites, crawlable that it’s fast enough to get crawled. That there’s schema right? There wasn’t schema when we first started. So now you have all these other variables that you can add to pages and sites that on the SEO and the technical end are so important that you can get different pages to rank. I love long tail keywords. But are they always. Your money pages, they can be, but am I going to generate 20 cases a month from it? No, I can. I generate 20 cases a month for my cards accident page, probably a 200. Yeah. But a long tail, like, we had a client not who got a really big case from a parachuting accident, right? You don’t have a lot of people writing about parachutes accidents. So having that page on their site being long-tail afforded that client to be able to not only pay for us for years. Have a nice settlement for their client. And that goes into, really having a little bit of everything, not putting all your eggs in one content basket, but doing different things on your site. And that’s why strategy is so important. Don’t just look at it where I got to build a hundred pages. Of this, unless they’re just foundational. And that goes back to your original question. When you get clients that have tons of content, they might just have foundational pages, but they don’t have supporting or tail pages. So then there’s opportunities there. So that’s, that goes into my argument all the time with these law firms and everybody. Do you even have a strategy, right? Like you, you just have your lawyers blogging, you’re wasting everybody’s time. You could have your lawyers doing something else instead of hiring an agency and actually doing this correctly, like starting a workout plan without a workout plan. Hey, I’m going to try to do it. Like today. I was listening to podcasts and the guy was making fun of the comment that people say, or the quote that people say you do, you boom. I’m like, what have you been doing you all along incorrectly? Like it’s time to pick up a book and figure out a strategy. Like, don’t go. And do you, do what some of the other people are doing or find out how to do things. Yeah.

Chris Dreyer

Hey let’s not reinvent the wheel. Let’s follow them.

Alex Valencia

I’m guilty of it too. Like for years, I’ve been following people and, I just joined a mastermind and stuff like that I should have been doing this years ago. I’m one of those people where it’s like, oh, I’m just gonna keep doing it my way.,

Chris Dreyer

so I’m not going to say it’s throwing paint against the wall and like seeing what sticks but because there is strategy to choose in the topics and the ideation, the keyword research and all that. But I do like the approach, a little bit of volume. Then you can see what takes off and maybe double down in that area. And then you have additional resources that you can use for editorial outreach, no matter what you call it. Edits or outrage, guest blogging, digital PR, whatever you want to call it, but you have those pieces of content that you could link.

Alex Valencia

And that’s true, right? Because people do double down, there’s been cases where we’ve written on a certain topic and the person starts ranking. They’re like, all right, let’s start doing it in another market freight. Let’s double down and hit truck accidents. Heavier let’s hit lung cancer heavy because it starts to work. But all of it comes down to strategy and on your SEL end. W what data are we getting back? What phone calls are we getting from this? So all that’s really great. You gotta have it all working together.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. And I think, I think that’s good on the measuring success sides. Like so many attorneys, like, I don’t care, like I just wanna, I want the cases, but when you’re looking at an SEO campaign and you’re trying to measure success, the success of a top of the funnel piece of content might be. To acquire a link or to support that main practice area page. What are the things that you look at when you’re measuring the success of your current?

Alex Valencia

I don’t really look at bounce rate. I know it’s important, but on law firm sites, we don’t look at that because the idea is for them to pick up the phone and call or fill out the contact form. So you’ll see a lot of that happening. Call tracking metrics is a big thing that our partners use phone calls. You can’t go wrong with search console and Google analytics. And have. The pages and certain goals set right. For form or for a phone call or anything that happens within that page is how to track it. Like I love, I think call tracking metrics is my favorite because you can actually see a phone call from a page and that’s super cool. It’s like, all right, this is working right. Didn’t they came in organically. They didn’t go through the home page. It wasn’t a referral. It wasn’t direct. They landed on this page and something within that page, drove them to pick up the phone and call and talk about their case. That’s I think the best measurement that you can get and, I think that’s the biggest treasure is seeing that someone’s advancing and phone calls from content that we’ve created.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. Fantastic. If there’s an attorney listening now that just doesn’t have a content marketing strategy for their firm, w what’s one of the things they should do straight away. And then what’s some things they should avoid at all costs when it comes to content marketing.

Alex Valencia

So I would say check out what your competitors are doing. Go down on the bottom and see what their site map looks. See if he can pull it, open it up, see what pages they currently have. If it’s something you want to take on yourself, then I would start with whatever content they have on their site that you don’t. I would start recreating it in your own words, in your own vernacular. Pay attention to the page, title, page, attention to the meta descriptions. Definitely the first heading and all the following headings. How paragraphs of starting. And started developing a strategy for that. First thing to avoid is blogging. Do not start a blogging strategy unless you’ve built foundational content. It’s like building a house. You’re not going to put up carpet and furniture without putting up the walls or flooring or anything like that, though. Your foundational content is everything. Go into Bruce Clay. I’m a big believer in the silo. You got to create a silo. Think of your website. As a personal injury theme, everything that falls under personal injury that you want to take on should be on that website. And even the things you don’t want to take on, because once you’ve built authority, that site, you can slap a good page on a website and refer that business out. I happens to me all the time, which is why I started two years ago telling all my personal injury attorneys start putting mass tort content on your website. Even if you don’t do mass torts, I’ll figure out a place for you to. And it’s happening, man. I got Roundup. Zantec 3m, now so much so that I partnered with a couple of people to just start building organic mass towards.

Chris Dreyer

And that’s fantastic. And so in mass torts, we’re so heavy right now and they’re competitive. So if you’ve had authority, you can rank early. I think that’s also key too, if you’re like one of those first in, and you’re the original source versus playing catch up later where there’s already 50 Zantac pages and you’re like one of the last people in, so it’s like an early nod to. I get that content in there because Google’s trying to filter out duplicate content. They want to show consumers, original content.

Alex Valencia

Exactly.

Chris Dreyer

We all want to maximize our output. And Alex is even overseeing a campaign that has produced 400,000 words a month, but I wanted to know how much content is too much. And at what point does it become unsustained?

Alex Valencia

So the reason we did 400,000 words with our partner is they were in a totally different space in one, at a start, a new space, and they had none of the content. So for them. How hard can we go? How quick can we move? And how long will it take? And like, our partner was like, well, this is what it’ll take. This is what it’ll cost. And this is how much time so what happens for, with them is you just scale back. Once you get it once the cases, the traffic, the rankings are where you want them to be, then you scale back to maintaining revamping right now. Now. It’s kinda like taking your car for an oil change or, every three months now you’re just checking out, make sure what you have is working. Now blogging is good, continued, frequently asked questions are good, but most of the foundational content has been built. Anything new that’s going on there is maybe they’re starting a new practice area or something, but you can do it. It can be done. It’s not super cheap, but a. It can be done. Most people don’t really go that hard, but you can’t write if you’re super competitive, we know this market, right? I know you guys got egos. You want to be the best. You want to go quick, go hard. Hey, you can do it, but it’s going to take time and obviously an investment, but you can make it work.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. And one of the things I like about what you mentioned is like, when it starts to build that authority, it starts to acquire links naturally, which is what every SEO agency loves when the content starts to bring in those links naturally. And one of the things I see different is like so many attorneys, when they’re looking to expand their markets into a different geography, they always lean first into the traditional, like what’s my billboard TV, radio strategy going to be in that market. But a simple thing that they could do is they could create a whole geography siloed for that area. Get some traction there, then go open the office and boom, you have a better opportunity to rank in the map pack and start automatically generating some leads.

Alex Valencia

You had a conversation with my friend and client the other day, a great podcast, by the way, he’s an amazing marketer. Mark Anidjar one of those persons that did the exact same thing. I mean, talk about super smart, amazing marketer, the guy, I don’t know anyone that reinvest that money. Back into their business like he does. And that was one of our strategy. It wasn’t even our strategy was we built such a good friendship early on that when he wanted to just go after certain markets, the site had so much authority that he wanted to start going into other areas. So we were like, alright, why don’t we just start building out pages in those markets and see what happens? Some of them perform better. Some of them, they’re still taking longer. Depends on how competitive they are, but it wasn’t just the continent. Like this guy invests in radio. He invests in television. He invests, he doesn’t do billboards, but he goes hard with it. He invests in pay-per-click. So all of it working together, right? Like, you also spoke to Gary’s radio ads are so super specific to driving traffic to the site for those. If a new market goes out, that radio station knows exactly to get started on here, help support this content, help support everything that we did. So it’s working everything together. Like if you want to take over a market and you have the funds for it, like you said, exactly. Pick a geographic area, go after it, see how it works. Put in a small office. I mean, he’s, did he tell you he’s buying a building in a field of now he went so well in some of those markets that he just bought two buildings in two different markets. .

Chris Dreyer

Set the LLC up for the real estate company, rent to the firm. Yeah. I love it. On that strategy, one thing that’s really overlooked and I see. Even tons of SEO agencies do this. And I’m sure you see this too, is you’ll get that Google analytics report and you go to source and you look at organic traffic. You’re like, cool, I’m up 10, 20%, whatever, but they don’t drill down into the cities. And I always find that really interesting because you may have, let’s say a Florida client or a Philly client, and you look at the source traffic and you’ll see, oh, 25% is from this city in California. Or X amount from this other city. And it’s like, well, those can be really good opportunities too. You can use that data to expand, to like, oh, I’m already getting a thousand organic visitors from, X city. Maybe I should go there.

Alex Valencia

And that’s great because I’ve seen it happen quite a bit, like you said, most people don’t go into the CDs and since we’re writing so many city pages for me, it’s important to look at that. And surprisingly enough, there were cities, like you said, that we weren’t devoting that much content to that. We’re generating more organic traffic, which is funny. So we did start investing in those, but I think it had a lot to do with some of the other media that they were doing that was driving it.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. And on the other end of that, in terms of the city pages, are you using breadcrumb silent those out? Are you a flat permalink kind of guy or is it, Hey, both work. You just have to have the strategy executed.

Alex Valencia

So it all comes down to really the partner SEL that we’re working with because they do the architecture, but we’re using the breadcrumbs and also the internal linking to it and sidebar for everything. I mean, not much different than what you’re doing with a lot of your work.

Chris Dreyer

Nice. Okay. And then what’s the biggest surprise on the, on, kinda coming to the end for a last few questions on content. What’s the biggest surprise you’ve had in the last few months in regards to content?

Alex Valencia

So we’ve had this conversation personally, I think 2021 was the year of the revamp. And, we had a couple of algorithm updates in July, so it was surprising that, in efforts to get ready for it, and in full transparency, the original content at lower workouts that was already ranking, I’ve seen in some instances, still working better than some of the long form. Which was weird. That was super surprising for me. And this is just looking at about five of my favorite client sites that I look at, but I’m like, Hm, that’s surprising. Like we revamped these pages. They’re performing well, but they were already performing. I wonder if we didn’t do anything to them, if they still would have been affected or not. And it’s hard to tell, right? It’s like, damn.

Chris Dreyer

When you have a page that’s really performing well. And it’s like an old page and maybe it’s. Jeez, should I touch this up or should I just let it roll? You know what I mean? Just let it keep on doing its thing. And it’s a hard.

Alex Valencia

It’s still surprising because you can still, we talk about this, all that 10 X page. And they perform amazing, like. You can still be competing with someone with a shitty ass site. That’s still from 2003 with, a thousand pages. And because they have so much authority, it’s still ranking better. It’s just hard to understand it, but it’s better to be safe when you play it safe and do the best you can for your client. And you can always just go back and redo it. Yeah. But, you don’t, you definitely don’t want to take any drastic drops. Yeah.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. And so Alex, I’m really trying to cover the gauntlet in terms of content for our audience. What, is there anything that we didn’t cover in regards to their content marketing strategy that we really need to talk about? Or you think we hit it on the head? Kind of what’s on your mind?

Alex Valencia

I just think there’s so many other forms of content that, that you can be doing. First of all, understand that Google is still only reads texts, right? So if you’re creating video, it’s important that you’re getting it transcribed, but I love video. I think it, it adds to the page so many, I mean, you got to get ready for that next month. My kids don’t even watch TV. They watch YouTube. So they’re not dry. They’re almost they’re driving. So YouTube video for that market and, they’re smart lawyers and people and marketers that have been doing this for years is definitely through video, but don’t ever lose the sight of doing text along with it. I know it’s a double call and you got to do it, but at least do 30 seconds, 45 seconds of your practice area or your FAQ’s and stuff. In video, alongside with your long form content, anything from a thousand words to 3000, 4,000 words. If it allows for it, don’t go out and try to just find words to say, because you want to hit a word count. Don’t worry about that. Just answer the question as best as you can and pay attention to how Google is changing their pages, right? They secretly do things when you do a search now, pay attention to, what, they’re, what they’re picking up. What the questions that they’re asking, like the featured snippets are now, they have that whole nother according where if you’re there, you’re fake. Think about all these questions and jot them down and add those to any strategies. Just always be paying attention to what Google is switching around without you knowing it. I think they’re even doing more organic stuff in. And the three-pack, or is it going to be the two pack soon, right? So they’re testing different things out, so don’t lose sight of texts. It’s going to be important, but definitely implement your other videos, other areas of content that you want to do, make sure you’re writing for other publications externally to show your expertise. LinkedIn is still one of those things that I don’t love being on, but I think it’s a great market. I’ve been researching more. This when you do a search, if it’s a really good article on LinkedIn, LinkedIn is already an authority site, right? It’s ranking. Well, so you can post some really good content on LinkedIn and it’ll rank above your site. So don’t lose sight of using LinkedIn for some of your really good content.

Chris Dreyer

That’s fantastic. And yeah, Google’s always changing things around. I feel like recently they’ve throttled back a lot of the rich snippets where they’re driving users to the website more than they did in the past. They went through that whole phase where it was like, great. I write, wrote this amazing thought leadership piece of content, and now. You’re just going to show a featured snippet and they don’t even get to go to my website, like, come on right now. Fair you’re monopolizing my content. I, yeah. And I can echo what you’re saying on LinkedIn ever since they started indexing posts and the, just the authority. I just wish they would optimize their titles and their permalinks a little bit better, but geez, you can really rank incredibly well there. Yeah, this is fantastic, Alex. I can just really echo. And first of all, content is. You had one from doing 400,000 words of content per month and keeping an editorial calendar for that and making sure you have the silos built out there internally, linking there, you’re not duplicating topics. So I just have to echo and I’ve seen the back end of your software and how it works and how you utilize site maps. And I think it’s just an incredible unique advantage that you have in terms of the legal content marketing strategies versus other content marketing.

Alex Valencia

Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah, and I, I gotta give credit to our partners too. They do a great job with if we’re not developing the strategy, someone else’s WMS strategy. So a lot of work goes into that. It better than anyone, right? It’s tough staying on track with the strategies and growing that, but it’s definitely one of the heart and souls of making things happen is your confidence strategy. You’ve said it before content is the backbone of any marketing strategy. You need it. You got to have it. If you’re going to start anywhere, you at least start with your content.

Chris Dreyer

Completely agree. And Alex has been fantastic. So where can our listeners connect with you online?

Alex Valencia

I’m at, wedoweb.com. We actually haven’t fully externally done our launch, but that’s our new URL or Alex@wedowebcontent.com soon to be wedoweb.com. And you can always try my cell 9 5 4 6 8 0 5 6 5. Happy to consult with you, guide you, help you with your content strategy, your content. We work closely with other SEO agencies. So if you’re working with someone already, we’re happy to jump on a call and work directly with them to make sure we can implement any of our strategies and help you guys out.

Chris Dreyer

Fantastic, Alex. Thanks for coming on.

Alex Valencia

I appreciate you, man. Thanks so much. I appreciate you as a friend and as a colleague and look forward to checking this out.

Chris Dreyer

So many great pointers from Alex in this conversation, and each one reinforces the central fact that having a strategy is key. If you’re constantly researching and analyzing your target audience, your competitors, and your existing content, you can then map out the necessary route from where you are, to where you want to be. I’d like to thank Alex Valencia for sharing a story with us, and I hope you gained some valuable insights from the conference. You’ve been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you liked this episode, leave us a review. We’d love to hear from our listeners. I’ll catch you on next. Week’s PIMM with another incredible guest and all the strategies you need to take your personal injury practice to the next level.

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