Veteran Owned and Operated
Called by Faith to Serve You
00:04 Well, hello, and welcome to another guest interview here on the Profit With the Law Podcast. I'm your host, Mosha. I'm Cell, and we have a repeat guest today, and I'm really excited to have Paul Mackowitz back with us again for another round.
00:19 Those of you who remember Paul imparted a ton of wisdom in his last interview with us. And if you don't remember, or you missed it, You definitely want to go check it out.
00:31 You might even want to hit pause. Go listen to that one and come back to listen to this one because we're not going to repeat his story and who he is.
00:40 And he might also lean into some things that he's spoken about before and kind of gloss over it because we already know that.
00:47 So go to profitwithlaw.com forward slash 362 or search your podcast player. It was how to manage your firm's online presence and attract your ideal clients with Paul Macowitz episode 362.
01:01 Go listen to that and come back. All right, awesome. You consume that entire episode. You are quick. You're back with us.
01:08 That is really, really wonderful. So who is Paul? Paul as the CEO of Hashtag Smart Life and CEO and founder, I get that right, CEO and founder of Honorable Marketing as well, US Army veteran, husband and father, entrepreneur, marketing expert.
01:25 He's been working with high character, legal and medical professionals to positively impact their communities. His approach is simple, find the unique value and mechanism his clients use to build trust and emotional connections with their prospects so they can help more people and display that online
01:40 in a way that generates more revenue from their online presence. Outside of his professional endeavors, Paul is usually playing golf, volunteering or enjoying this beautiful world he sees as a gift from God.
01:54 And I think if I remember correctly from the background that you have there, you are a US Army veteran, correct?
02:04 Yeah, I'm also a Spider-Man. And you're Spider-Man. So I want to say thank Thank you for your service in the past with the U.S.
02:11 Army, and thank you for your service currently as you go out and save us every single day out there in the world as a spider-man.
02:19 But Paul, welcome back to the show. I'm excited to have you and have another conversation with you. Yeah, this is going to be great.
02:25 I'm excited for it. Awesome. So what we are going to do is we're going to jump right into some stuff and in green room before we started talking, you were talking to me about this idea of unique mechanisms and it's something that law firms might not be doing with their marketing and maybe they should
02:46 start paying attention to it and finding their own unique mechanism when it comes to their marketing and getting their word out there.
02:54 So talk to me about what in the world is that and how does somebody unlock that for their firm. Yeah, it's fantastic working with lawyers because one, they all might, so many of them have the same problem, right, like there's only so many car accidents, there's only so many employment law cases, you
03:13 know, there and it's a constant competition for that awareness and the end all goal of actually getting the conversion out of it.
03:21 And so we run hundreds of thousands of dollars with paid ads for all of our clients every single month. And so we get the opportunity to really do a lot of AB testing and seeing what works.
03:32 And last time I was on here, we spoke a lot about building those emotional connections with people when they land on your website, giving them a reason to trust you, a reason to relate to you.
03:41 And those are all incredibly important. But when you take that same concept and you start looking at it with paid ads, you have a much smaller canvas in order to do this.
03:52 And with that, you want to find some sort of verbiage that you can use to differentiate yourself really quickly.
04:00 And the best way to do that is really a unique mechanism. So you start with the very broad topic of your unique value.
04:09 And that could be anything from the type of people that you like to work with, the areas you serve, or the practice areas that you have, you know, so at the end of the day, your unique value tends to be very similar to a lot of the other law firms in your area.
04:22 You know, you can find some cool taglines or things like that, but all in all, you know, it's you that they're buying.
04:29 So you got to find something special about you. And a unique mechanism is actually just putting a title on the special way that you operate.
04:38 The probably the most famous example of a unique mechanism is the P90X. You know, there's a million different workout options out there.
04:47 You could, you know, do jazz or size, you could do Pilates, you could do, you know, CrossFit. But what P90X did is when they came into the market, they introduced this idea of muscle confusion.
04:59 Now, they made it sound like this is a brand new thing, right? Oh, you know, now optimize your body using muscle confusion.
05:05 But really fitness has been doing that for years and years. You know, That's why you don't do leg day back-to-back because then you walk around like you got jelly-old and you get up.
05:14 It's the same idea, but by them pushing this concept as a brand new thing that they created, they invented, they brought to the market.
05:23 It really allowed them to take a huge, huge market share in short order. How a law firm could do this would be introducing your specific way of dealing with clients.
05:35 And that can be anything from the onboarding process, the intake process of, hey, you know, truly understand your case with the, you know, attorney, a master class onboarding or the, you know, really, whatever you can use to define something special about you, we use one for one of our law firms that
05:55 We just called the Drake Difference. You know, it's cool, we talked about Drake last time. He's an awesome guy.
06:00 He's one of my favorite clients and I talk to him like every week. So having that level of communication with your marketers, also very, very helpful.
06:06 They can get to know you very well and come up with these things, like the Drake difference. So what's cool about that is one of the major complaints that you get as a law firm is they aren't communicating with me now.
06:18 I wasn't informed of my case. I didn't know where it stood, things like that. So the Drake difference is you get a text message every three days on your case, no matter what, just to let you know where it is.
06:32 One, it shows that internally they're holding themselves accountable, being sure that all their cases are progressing externally. You can imagine the immediate objection handling, unlike, should I work with this attorney, I see maybe a negative review that mentions he never got back to me.
06:50 But now when you have the Drake difference, where I'm updated on my case every three days, that's fantastic. That's something that not a whole lot of other attorneys are doing.
06:58 Now, there's programming, there's third party software, there's resources that you can do in order to do this outside of maybe an internal process where somebody's doing this manually.
07:09 But just by instituting and advertising it as something new and different in the industry, his ads are performing about twice as well as they were before.
07:20 You can tell people all day, we've recovered 250 million for our clients, but if you tell people, we've recovered 250 million using, or because of the Drake difference, and now you've peaked a little curiosity, a little intrigue into it, and it's just text that's going on an already standard display
07:39 ad where, you know, what would you put there anyway, or just about an image. So now you're using that room in a way that's building intrigue and building curiosity and curiosity is one of the major things that converts, you know.
07:52 We like to choose people that we think are going to push us to the next level and whether they can or not, that's yet to be determined, but that curiosity is going to push them that extra step to make the contact.
08:06 I love this concept of creating something that you can just give a name to, and then that's the vehicle that's going to get them the success that they want.
08:17 And now if another law firm doesn't have it, then essentially they're kind of locked into needing to use you. So I, you know, I'm just curious if there's a difference between like the Drake difference or Drake method.
08:37 I forgot what you would call it where it's named after the attorney or the law firm versus a name like muscle confusion where it's named after the actual thing, right?
08:52 Like, do you think that it makes a difference? Like, for example, a PI firm, maybe they'll say like the, the injury Robinhood method or the, you know, or something on that like Robinhood play, like the insurance, the Robinhood of insurance companies or something like that, right, like where it's more
09:18 about like, oh yeah, we're gonna go and get what you deserve from the insurance company for you. Yeah, that's a great point because it's difficult.
09:32 It's not the easiest thing in the world to sit there and come up with ideas. I truly think that's one of the gifts that God blessed me with was being very creative and coming up with different marketing ideas.
09:44 Mad Men is one of my favorite shows and it really kind of typifies that concept of extending yourself outside of the standard marketing box and thinking of different ways to do it.
09:56 Because tactics can only take you so far and really it's the creativity and that's what I love what I do is because I get paid to be creative every day and come up with ideas is I'm also, I mean, I'm very clear about like what I do and how I come up with these ideas.
10:12 I mean, I know it's a PG show, but I've had times where I've been, you know, in a rut, and I've sat in a hot tub for about two hours and, you know, got a little high and walked away with a pad full of new ideas.
10:25 You know, I'm not going to expect an attorney to sit there and, you know, take the same steps that I do in order to unlock some creativity and some different things, but there's other resources that actually bring us right into the benefit of using AI.
10:42 I mean, I'm not totally sure how well versed your audiences are in utilizing AI content creation and things like that. But that's one aspect of it.
10:53 The other thing is you can really train an AI to be very creative for you. So, I have some scripts that we use with all of our clients where we get into the system and we say like, hey, I am a law firm that specializes in personal injury attorneys.
11:08 My favorite type of clients are females, 35 to 50. My favorite type is the case or car accidents. I think one of my biggest values is this and you kind of, you give the AI the base, the kind of foundation of what you're looking for.
11:22 And then you can introduce these kinds of cool outside aspects, like one of my favorite authors is Mark Manson. He's the author of the subtle art of not giving out F.
11:34 Keeping this PG for you. And so I've actually gone in and created content for my own company because I like what he's, you know, how he presents himself in the way that he speaks in his communication.
11:49 I know it's better than mine. And so there's been times I've written an article, and then I submitted to AI, and I said, rewrite this as if you were Mark Manson, you know?
11:57 And then by having that, then I can now get this cool piece of content where I kind of built the framework around it, but get a whole new spin on it.
12:07 So you can do the same thing with AI. You can come up with a few different ideas for your mechanism or just put in there, hey, the one thing that's special about our law firm is, you know, We guarantee X, Y, and Z.
12:20 No fee unless you win. We do this. Give me some ideas for a unique mechanism that would, and AI knows what a unique mechanism is.
12:30 If you find that it doesn't give you back the right information, just ask. Do you understand what the unique marketing concept is?
12:38 It'll say, oh, yes, a unique mechanism is . . . and say, okay, give me a unique mechanism for this special thing about my law firm.
12:46 And it'll give you a top-time list. It's really quite fun to do. Actually, it's some of the dorky nerd-out marketing stuff that I really enjoy sitting down with my team and showing them, like, hey, this is the world we live in now.
13:01 We don't have to sit here and throw ideas at a wall and hope something comes up. Let's solve some AI and see what we could come up with here and then put our own spin on things.
13:10 And we don't have to go for two hours in the hot tub and get high anymore. We just have the ice, putting it out there.
13:18 Although, you know, AI, it's, as competition for all of us, right, it's, if you are not in a, we'll say kind of a creative or has to be person to person type industry, AI is going to make your, your job difficult, you know, we're seeing it everywhere and I know I currently have half as many content writers
13:37 as I did a year ago on the reason of being is because AI satisfies a lot of the things that we need to, you know, like fermented descriptions or title tags or even keyword research and things like that, you know, that we just don't need a human person for anymore.
13:51 But utilizing AI as a creative sounding board is actually pretty fun. I'd highly recommend that that's been the number two thing I'd tell people to do.
14:02 Number one is always the comp shop. You know, you gotta go look at your competitors, let's see what they're doing and then do what they're doing better.
14:07 number two is to have a conversation about marketing with AI because I think that you'll really, you come away with some different concepts and some different kinds of plays on what you're doing.
14:20 Yeah, I love that. I think AI is one of those things where it's like, you try to figure out is this like, is this just a buzz word or is this like the wave of the future?
14:33 And you know, I kind of attribute it to like when Snapchat came out or when or when clubhouse came out right like that it was the next big thing.
14:43 But then is it really here to stay and I obviously think AI is such a broad terminology that the technology is here to stay right. The idea of having a computer be able to have progressive thought and be able to take different inputs that it's able to do.
15:03 to find on its own and then come out with a solution for you, that's not sci-fi anymore. That's really happening.
15:13 The question is, what is it going to do for legal, what is it going to do for law firms, and there's a lot of talk in the marketplace about, hey, eventually AI is going to replace your job.
15:29 And I don't think, I don't think that's true. I think that, I think that people iterate, right? I think it's, it's going to be the thing.
15:38 That's the, that's the impetus of you needing to up your game, of you needing to become better at what you do.
15:44 If you no longer need to do hours and hours of research, because AI could just spit it out for you, then great.
15:51 What are you going to do with those hours? How are you going to become a better attorney? You're going to work on your neuro linguistic programming skills.
15:59 Are you going to work on your courtroom skills? Are you going to work on your client acquisition skills? Like what are you going to do as those things happen so that you continually evolve and become a better version of yourself?
16:13 But when it comes to marketing, I can totally see where AI can really give somebody who's willing to put in the time and effort to learn it, and can really give them a lot of tools that otherwise they would have had to go and pay for working with somebody.
16:31 But you're here as a market or talking about AI right here on the show, right? You're not afraid that, oh, it just gave away my secret.
16:37 Now everybody can go and figure out their own unique mechanism without coming to me to get it. The reality is that 90% of the people listening are not going to go and try to try this for themselves.
16:50 You know, they're just and now they understand that it's out there, it's possible. We can do this with a unique mechanism. I know that Paul is going to do it efficiently for me.
17:00 So I'm going to give Paul a call and we say, Hey, I need a unique mechanism. Help me out. You know, I want to create muscle confusion for my clients.
17:11 Yeah, it's not only fun, but it's, I mean, I think I think you speak to this too. Attorneys go through a ton of education to get where they're going.
17:24 I have one attorney client who I think he is now, now passing the bar in like his 13th state or something like that.
17:33 I'm like, man, you're crazy. Like that. It's a lot of work that guy puts in, you know. But in sitting down and talking with them, I've asked them, hey, do you enjoy marketing?
17:42 Like have you ever taken a class in marketing? No, you ever sit down and think about how people perceive you as a business and what you're doing to proactively impact that.
17:54 And his flat answer was like, no, I think I took one marketing class in college. It's just not my thing.
17:59 I like doing law. I like to positively impact my community. I like finding good cases. I'm not interested in the rest of that stuff.
18:08 That's why I have you. You know, you keep my phone ringing and you keep the form of submissions coming in.
18:13 So, you know, what's nice on the marketing side is, if you're pointing to an ROI and you can let an attorney be an attorney, it's the best situation in the world for them, right?
18:25 They didn't go to school so long so they could sit on Facebook. You know, that's not the dream. And honestly, it is not my dream either, just sit on Facebook at all.
18:35 It's my dream to be the creative side of it and then I have people in my company that do that legwork and that's really what building a company and scaling up is, is finding your area of expertise, shuffling everything else off to other people.
18:51 I have two executive assistants because I was shuffling things so fast and one couldn't cut it. So I need the second one to shuffle things off to you.
18:58 So, and now that we've been able to incorporate AI, I would say I spend probably 20 to 30 minutes a day utilizing the tool in some way, whether it's, you know, giving me so much, and most of the time, it's giving me ideas for just because it's great to have a list of say, like, 10 options for a unique
19:23 mechanism. And, you know, maybe I like a little bit of one, I like a little bit of seven, but then I combined those two.
19:29 I figured out something that AI couldn't generate that you know kind of matches those two things so one of the things For our unique mechanism is our ebook is called the prospect to patient protocol You know my military guy.
19:44 I like protocol. I like systems. I like AVC and following a set You know path as I'm doing something and so for my medical professionals No, it's a great way.
19:57 It's like 35, 40 pages of, here you go, here's how to optimize your online presence. And even building the outline for it, you know, coming up with some different concepts around it.
20:08 I consulted AI while doing it. And then I would have it generate a little piece. I put it into my own voice.
20:15 I would find ways to put it in the same order that logically I think of the things even though it would spit out, spit out at me, you know, sometimes some garbage, you know, sometimes some gold.
20:24 You know, so you've got to kind of know how to pan for that gold and put that together, but When I talk about unique mechanisms I mean the prospect of patient protocol.
20:33 It's really like changed that whole aspect of my business It changed how we sell it's changed how we set appointments that changed you know how we pitch It Change even like my video sales letter and how I'm building trust and building emotional connections with people Because now it's it's a much more
20:50 well framed concept around what we were doing already but now it's got, you know, some nice bows and ties on it and some nice, you know, almost like a site map, you know, I'm able to kind of go through this thing and it turned into a fantastic checklist to really double check some of the work that my
21:06 clients are what my employees are doing for my clients. So if you think about just really all of the positives that can come from just getting a second set of eyes on something, getting a second opinion on something, it can really just change, which, you know, one small little lever that impacts a lot
21:24 of things down the road. Yeah. I love that. And the concept of being able to use it in all these different ways and you almost need to spend your creativity figuring out how to take advantage of the tool instead of being creative.
21:44 And then twisting whatever the tool gives you to be something that's useful and you know but one thing you want to be careful about is you know there's that story going around with the attorney who you know went into AI and said give me three cases you know three court cases that that really happened
22:06 that had this in this in it or this in this result AI spit it out he just without verifying it dumped it into his into his brief and and turned out that none of the cases actually existed.
22:21 So you don't want to get caught in your pants. You don't want to be using something that's not real, not legitimate.
22:30 So make sure to verify things like that. Even if you're asking AI to do the work for you, it already found it.
22:38 Now you can just verify and make sure it actually is true or it actually exists and it's authentic and it's being.
22:45 and the meaning of it is being taken correctly, right? Like you could pull a case and, you know, that AI tells you it has this result and you verify the cases there, but you don't go and make sure that that's really the result.
23:01 It could have the same type of adverse effect on you. So there's a lot of ways to use AI. It's actually a topic that we haven't spoken about much on the podcast because I wanted to see where it's going to go.
23:18 I wanted to really understand how lawyers can use it without giving them another shiny tool to get lost in. I kind of jumped in when Clubhouse came out and I started jumping into the rooms and I thought that it was a great thing.
23:35 It was going to be a good marketing tool and brought it back to the podcast audience. But in hindsight, I don't really think it was good.
23:42 but I think the people who went down that rabbit hole probably wasted a lot of time on it. And maybe some people benefited from it, but I wanna be more careful with sending you down a path that makes sense for you, that it makes sense for you to get lost in this and spend your time on this.
24:02 This is gonna actually be your fruit that's gonna move the needle in your business for you. And I think we're getting there.
24:09 I think that even people who are teaching people how to use AI, like the stuff that you're able to find on YouTube and consume, to learn how to, you know, how to get the most out of it, those people are learning on the fly and getting better at giving you that content to learn how to make the best of
24:28 it. So as it matures, that, you know, that's when it's going to become, makes more and more sense for us to look at it.
24:36 I want to switch gears here, though. So one of the things that you shared with me and the green room before we started is this concept of answer engine optimization.
24:47 And I know that everybody wants to get a leg up on SEO. They want to get the latest and greatest way of ranking in Google and other search algorithms and really win at that game of showing up for their clients at the right relevant moment.
25:11 What is the answer to engine optimization? Will it help us do that and how does somebody take advantage of it? So as crappy an answer as this is, it is still yet to be seen.
25:25 AEO, well, I'll give you my personal feeling on it, as buyers generally are always looking for the least barriers, there's the least friction in making a decision.
25:39 And we're seeing kind of the convergence of that along with AI. So you've got Bing already has a contract with ChatGPT.
25:49 So Bing and AI are already integrated. Google has their own version called Bard. I don't think it's been, I think it's still in beta right now, but maybe by the time the show comes out it might be already available.
26:02 And with that, what we've been finding constantly and constantly is, I don't want to say too loud because it's always listening over there, but we got Google and we got Alexa and things like that.
26:13 More and more people are utilizing voice search, even Syria on your phone. And so as that number continues to grow, which last time I saw it was about 25% of searches are actually done through voice.
26:28 Because people are asking less and less of, you know, find me a personal injury attorney near me. And they're not asking, you know, who is the best personal injury attorney near me or find me a personal injury attorney that specializes in dog bites.
26:45 Or you know, they're asking a question and what they're expecting now is not, well, here's the top three or here's the top 10, which is what you basically get with SEO.
26:57 Now they're expecting, you know, one answer, you know, tell me what to do and point me in the direction. I'm going to go do that thing, you know, kind of as we continue to get lazy and lazy as consumers, you know, we're looking for those shortcuts.
27:11 And that's really what AEO is, is answer engine optimization. It's ensuring that when people are utilizing voice search more often than they're getting less options, that you have content that's really catered exactly to what they're asking.
27:24 and so there's a few different things you can do with it. One is there's a great service that we utilize a lot over here and it is publicly available it's called Answer the Public it's by Neil Patel if anybody is a marketing door like me you certainly know who Neil Patel is he has I believe it's the
27:42 largest social media management or online presence management company in the US they are huge and they are one of the few full service ones out there. A lot of market companies you'll find are either doing it with you or do it for you.
27:58 They are kind of a cool mix of the two, they give you some options. Similar to what we do over here, most of what we do is do it for you, but we do also have some do it with you options.
28:07 But with that, he's got this great website called Answer the Public. And you can go in there and just type, say, a personal injury attorney in Los Angeles, California.
28:18 And it will show you the top 80. It's usually 80 and maxes out at questions that were asked that Fall under that category.
28:28 I recommend that you definitely get like more and more specific with it as you go because Otherwise, you're getting these very broad questions in which you're trying to capitalize on a question that is asked A thousand times a day and there's another law firm out there that's probably already got that
28:44 locked up pretty well So if you can niche it down a little bit and find something that are a little bit closer to you But it's also great, again, just like I was saying, use AI as a creative input, answer the public.
28:56 It's also another great creative input. If you don't know what to blog about for one month, shop there, put, you know, dog attacks.
29:03 And it'll tell you, you know, top somebody Google to like, what's the dog most likely to attack you? You know, things like that.
29:10 And then you can create a blog off of that topic. Now you're kind of positioning yourself that if somebody did asset over voice search and you've got the best content, you've got the best website, the highest authority, then you potentially could be, you know, Google found that the answer to this question
29:28 is here cited on, you know, your website. So that's, it's nothing that's bearing down on us right now, but we're already seeing kind of the writing on the wall as things moved over to chat GPT and Google's got barred coming out and series growing in usage and, you know, It's all kind of going in that
29:48 direction. And so well, you might not need to run out tomorrow and start generating a ton of blogs about every single question that's potentially asked in your niche.
29:58 Understand that that is how a significant amount of people are going to be making buying decisions in the relatively near future.
30:06 And start prepping for it in a few different ways. You're already seeing more with Google even on the SEAside.
30:13 If you search for something and you get that little dropdown, down the little accordion where it'll have a bunch of different questions that are right in there.
30:20 You click on that question, the answer comes out with a little link to the website right underneath it. I mean, that's basically the visual form of exactly what I'm talking about.
30:31 Those are called snippets. And it's only become more prevalent. So something about those ideas? Is there is there a strategy yet that we figured out is the way to present information to Google so that this now becomes the answer to a question like does is it better to have a really short blog that just
31:01 answers the questions succinctly with no additional fluff you know kind of moving away from the, oh, you need at least 500 words to rank.
31:12 But now if you have this post and it asks the question is the title and then it provides the answer as the blog post, maybe that's, you know, that's going to get, you know, Alexa's Googles and series attention better, you know, then something that has way more information in it that it needs to comb
31:32 through and try to figure out what the answer is. Yeah, so there's no tried and true 100% this is the way to do it.
31:40 It's a few reasons for that one Google's not real big about releasing information about how their algorithms and things work, but I will tell you what we have done and we have seen some early success on it and it's kind of a twofold.
31:57 One whenever you're writing a blog you should answer the question in the first paragraph And then dig into the details throughout it so that if you think about the introductory paragraph as you know two to three sentences that would be perfect for a snippet, that's a really good way to start.
32:12 The other thing is FAQs. So we have seen quite a few FAQs get pulled in or snippets and coming up in voice search.
32:23 So what's cool about the FAQs is one, you can answer a bunch of questions and you can We just do it in like the two, three little sentence blocks.
32:30 But second, as far as a user experience on a website, they're pretty effective, pretty efficient. If I go to your car accident page, and I see on it, you know, the top 10 questions that get asked around it, and I can just kind of click through it, it's providing me the information I'm looking for without
32:48 me having to jump through a million hoops or to read this giant thing of content, Google also appreciates it. So it's kind of twofold.
32:56 One, make sure you're answering the question to introductory, and second is FAQs. Yeah, I love that. And FAQs, it almost goes back to the web design side of it, and really helping with the navigation of your site, and the jumping off point for the foundational content of your blog.
33:19 So even if you're not going to consistently blog all the time, having a blog post around each of the FAQs makes a lot of sense to have as your foundational content on your website.
33:31 So now understanding that FAQ now serves as another, for another purpose, really is helpful information and people can use that to just revisit, make sure that you have that there.
33:43 And you can even test and see when you run, ask the question and Google and see if, you know, your site, your FAQs coming up in a snippet is it coming up on, you know, as a link, you know, what's it doing with that?
33:55 And then even ask the question to the audio gods, right? Let's see, it's A, G and S. Can we, yeah, to the sag, to ask the sag, if, you know, that question, just pose the question and then see if it pulls the answer from your site.
34:20 Yeah, and it also kind of goes hand in hand with, just like I was saying, you should be competition shopping.
34:25 You should always be looking and checking and seeing what the other guy is doing. If you have a snippet that's really right in your niche and you see somebody else has it, look at their website.
34:35 Look at, here's one little behind the curtain to ask anybody can do, is if you have a Cori URL, So it was you know honorable dot marketing.
34:45 That's our URL. If you wanted to see how many pages we have indexed with Google And I guess I can give you the quick like 22nd idea of what indexing is When you Google something you're not searching the internet exactly you are searching Google's file cabinet of the internet.
35:02 So Google goes out and they send they call spiders the crawlers they crawl through all the content on your site figure out what it is put that page of content into your into your search console, your file in your file cabinet.
35:16 And if you just take somebody's URL and you do S-I-T-E colon, and then the core URL, so no WWW, no backslash at the end, and hit enter, you'll see Google come back with something like, you know, 250 pages found.
35:34 And that means that basically Google has index 250 pages on that website. there's like maybe bigger, maybe smaller, but as far as Google's file cabinet is concerned, that's what they've got on there.
35:47 So that's um, page or website size is not like a BL end all for SEO, but if you got to decide on competition, if something is worth really you know, trying for, and you know, you Google something, you take the top guy, you do that check on his website and you see that he has like a 3000 page website
36:09 and you've got a 40 page website. You probably move on. Like that's probably going to be quite a barrier for you to overcome and it's not like you're going to generate 2960 pages of content in the next few months to be up in that league.
36:26 But that'll give you at least point you the direction of some things not to do with it, but it's kind of one of those things.
36:33 If you don't know that, that's how Google operates, that's one way to kind of at least narrow your focus on some of these different topics.
36:43 You know, I think that when it comes to organic marketing, sometimes we're just looking for a treasure that hasn't been found.
36:51 The one keyword that somebody else isn't ranking for. And the one like that, that you can rank for it all the sudden, it starts making your phone rang.
37:00 Like, um, and that's why I, you know, I think it's like trying to, trying to, all the different iterations, trying all the different things that you want to have that, you know, that you're showing up for, uh, so, so that you can get one or two that's actually working.
37:17 Um, and, you know, when, when, when you're doing this, it's, it's trial and error, right? like I'm going to try these FAQs that they're not doing it for me, let me add some more and see what happens.
37:28 And see if you can figure out the secret sauce that's going to move the needle for you. But it's part of the challenge with organic in general.
37:43 And this is an ongoing challenge. change, algorithms change, platforms change, usage by people changes. So the people who are consuming it changes.
37:53 And what worked for you yesterday doesn't necessarily work for you today or tomorrow. This is also a benefit to you because what somebody spent tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars getting themselves to rank first on Google can overnight lose that because Google changed how it's looking and what
38:17 it's looking for. And if you happen to be ready to jump in and put in what they're looking for, you can suddenly be wearing that hat.
38:28 So it's comforting to know that there's a possibility for you. It's challenging to know that somebody who's been at this for longer for doing a better job at it, you're not going to unseat them that quickly.
38:42 I mean, Paul, just in general, your thoughts, it sounds like a lot of your business is in this realm of creating content and really getting sites to rank and to also drive people to the firm for that decision.
39:04 Just your overall thoughts on organic versus paid and where should the efforts be placed? where do you sit in that conversation?
39:14 So I will never knock paid advertising. The paid ads is great. Really they're both great. It's different if you're looking at what your end all goal is to get new clients.
39:30 Organic traffic converts at a much higher rate than paid traffic. So if you wanna look at like doing the maximum amount of effort for like the longest term benefit, I would say, you know, really focus on the SEO side.
39:44 The problem with that though, too, is like sometimes you can't get a page to rank because it just isn't getting any traffic.
39:50 And so if you've got maybe really good content on it, really good FAQ on it, it's laid out. Well, it's indexed with Google, but you just not getting the traffic to that page that you want.
39:59 Run some paid ads to it. Traffic to a page is actually one of the fairly important algorithms for SEO. So it's kind of like the chicken and the egg here, you know, like I can't get traffic because I don't have authority I can't get authority because I can't get traffic.
40:14 So that's really when paid ads becomes a great idea Beafing up a new practice area that you have maybe or even like like when you're doing this competition if you see yourself as maybe two or three or maybe in five or six on a keyword term that you really think If you were number one, you'd be killing
40:33 it for if you're in that five and six range You know, maybe that one thing that you're missing that those guys above you have, if you take a look and the contents about the same length and, you know, they have just as many backlinks and things, the biggest difference might just be traffic.
40:46 And so even injecting some paid ads into a standard SEO page like that might just give you what you need to see that SEO benefit.
40:55 So it's hard to say like do this one, don't do this one because they they both have their pluses of minuses.
41:02 The downfall of SEO is, it's a lot of work, you know, it's a lot of concentration, it's a lot of, you know, how do you get backlinks?
41:10 I mean, backlinks are very difficult to get. I've got these, I think, like seven or eight different people now that I have out there looking, hunting, finding good backlinks and setting up situations with our company and them and, you know, we have to buy some backlinks, we have to trade some backlinks
41:26 , we have to, you know, do this in the other, And I would never imagine an attorney taking time out of their data to do that heavy lifting and and yet backlinks is still a really important part.
41:36 If I was going to say like what the lowest hanging fruit is a lot of businesses just really suck on their citations, which is as easy as utilizing, you know, yaks or sign up as another one.
41:50 What was the one that you just said, yes, yes, yeah, like yes, it's a business listing builder So those are citations So if you think about If If I'm just if Google's deciding between one page and the other page and This business here has the exact same information everywhere on 250 directories And this
42:13 one here has their name is you know Bob Bob law firm over here, and it's attorney Bob over here and you know the hours aren't the same and you know maybe different phone numbers who knows but if if Google is not seeing that continuity and everything looking great and all of these different directories
42:31 linking back to the same site that's going to determine the authorities so those are called citations if they're coming from directory sites if they're like really big and strong and maybe from like a high traffic site like Yelp or something like that those could be considered a backlink.
42:49 But in most cases, those are considered citations. And those are pretty easy to get. I mean, you just got to do the legwork of using those directories and getting them out there.
42:57 There is one thing I would say which is kind of another inside baseball thing which is aggregators. So four square, new star.
43:08 Those are two of the aggregators. There's two more big ones too. It's too late in the day. We got to do these But you could just Google like business directory aggregators, but when you submit them to those aggregators, those diffuse out to about 80 other directories.
43:27 And so really as long as you ensure your information is correct, like who uses four square, right? But you got 80 other directories that use four square.
43:36 So if you put on those, then you got all these other sites here. And maybe somebody's gonna find you on that, maybe not, but the bigger thing is Google seeing all these links back to your site from these directories, they know you got your stuff in order, they're gonna assign a higher authority
43:54 to the URL, and potentially that can make you rank better. So that's just some kind of low hanging fruit on that.
44:03 As far as kind of like pushing it with the paid ads, Doing paid as SEO pages is not always the best for conversion Organic like just so I got something like back it up here when somebody is Google something and they get to your personal injury or your Car accident page and obviously your page should
44:26 have a form amount. It should have one button calling all those things When they get to that page, they're generally there 50-50 either to contact you or to do a little research on making this buying decision When it's a paid ad, you've got their eye for a moment and they, you know, maybe clicked on
44:44 a display ad or they googled something and clicked on your PPC. You've only got their eye for like a second.
44:51 So really any paid ads, you should try to funnel towards landing pages, which are built for conversion, you know, form submission right in their face, hit some value propositions right next to them.
45:01 So it's like, cool paid ad form submission, fill it out. Whereas SEO pages are more a little bit more the research side.
45:07 So when you are taking a little bit of funds and putting it towards an SEO page to get it to rank better, just know that A little bit of that paid ad money is going to waste as opposed to if you're sending that to a landing page.
45:22 So again, And then, it is good to test, and we have found some really great success on funneling a little bit of paid ad traffic to SEO pages to get them over that last home.
45:39 Yeah, and I mean, this is part of the challenge for business owners and part of the fun, but also the drawback and challenge is, you know, you got to test this stuff, you got to figure figure out what works for you.
45:54 There isn't a one answer fits all. There isn't one solution fits all. And you got to spend some money to get the answers.
46:04 After you got the lowest hanging fruit of family and friends getting the word out there and maybe some relationships with other attorneys referring business to you.
46:13 When you need to start really driving the lead engine, you got to decide where you're going to put your focus and just lean into it.
46:21 And then add the other layers on top of it. And I think from what I'm hearing and understanding is, you know, it's not necessarily choose SEO or choose PPC.
46:33 They're ones better than the other. It's, you know, choose one based on whatever feels good to write to you or how long of a runway you got or whatever it is, you know, and then go with it and then use the other one to kind of boost it.
46:50 And that's really where we need to be focusing our efforts and at least one of those camps. Paul, great conversation with you as usual.
47:01 Some new hot topics that we talked about really excited about what's coming, you know, whether it's a bunch of attorneys coming up with terminology like muscle confusion to really get the marketplace interested in what they have to offer.
47:21 You know, if you can really get it to sound like something that nobody else has, that's really what you want to get to.
47:32 Then we talked about AI, and then we talked about this idea of the AEO and the answer engine optimization. It's all new stuff, but as you start to just go out there and try things, that's going to, that's going to perhaps give you the leg up that you need, you know, for your business growth.
48:00 So really enjoyed it. I want to wrap it up with this. And you know, this is typically how I ended if you remember from last time, one parting piece of advice or wisdom for our audience.
48:11 And then how can they learn more about you again and touch with you if they're interested in trees and what you have to offer.
48:18 Yeah, I feel like I gave way all my advice. But the one thing that I would highly recommend for a lot of law firms, and I think a lot of this comes down to a bit of fear.
48:33 I'm a big proponent like yeah, they're operating out of love and faith or you're operating out of fear. And I think a lot of marketing decision made for law firms is fearful.
48:44 full. And I usually see it like the first month or two that I work with a client. And they're like, oh, you posted this thing on Facebook.
48:52 And it was, uh, it was a settlement and not a verdict. And I'm like, oh, totally fine. But I'm like, change the graphic.
48:57 And it's up there. And like, they were very concerned about it. Like, oh, this is a huge thing. I'm like, it's, it's truly okay.
49:04 We just change an image. And everything's good to go. Um, and, and yes, you know, that's important. And it's important to work with your marketing team to kind of like help them understand.
49:14 Things like that because you know we don't always know the difference between a settlement and a verdict in a case that you did You know, we don't know if there was a jury there like sometimes you just send this over an amount and tell us it's for a car accident Um, and so you you kind of have to understand
49:26 Those things But one of the things I would say with with law firms is whatever you can do To really release whatever fear you have about the perception people could have of you online or or like mistakes that could potentially happen with your marketing and things like this.
49:46 So much of this stuff is not permanent anymore. A lot of things can be edited and there really is some massive, massive benefits on the other side of fear.
49:59 My clients that are willing to sit there and do a short little video for me night and day on the type of results that we get for them versus the ones that we beg for videos all the time or we beg them, you know, for some personal information that we can put out there.
50:14 It, we see a direct correlation between the businesses that are willing to put themselves out a little bit and the revenue that we generate them versus the ones that hold back.
50:23 So that'd be my biggest piece of advice to law firms is I know it's hard, I'm not telling you it's not hard, but if you can find a way to quell the fear of public awareness about you or people getting to know you a little bit more personal level.
50:37 I would highly highly recommend you do that. If anybody wants to get in touch with me, my website is honorable.marketing.
50:46 I think it's probably changed since the last time I was with you most. You could always still go to hashtag dash smart.com.
50:51 It'll just brought you over there anyway. But our company's now officially honorable marketing. You can always find me on LinkedIn.
51:00 Just link to dot com backslash ZeeMot expert Z-M-O-T expert and all over Instagram my personal Instagram where I allow people to see a little bit about the personal side of me trying to get rid of my own fear on those things is honorable entrepreneur so you can always find me an Instagram as honorable
51:22 entrepreneur all one word awesome folks we're gonna link all that up in our show notes which can be found at profitwithlaw.com as well as should be in the resources section of your podcast player in the description of this episode.
51:37 Really appreciate you hanging out with us as we covered some of these new topics and maybe maybe it made your head spin or maybe it's just because I'm at the tail end of a day of batching podcast interviews that you know that I you know my brain is not thinking as clearly as as it should, but it's exciting
51:58 stuff. I mean, when there's new stuff that comes out at, you know, it's scary to try something new, it's scary to think about what it might create or cause, but at the same time, leaning back into your fair versus love, and, you know, I think that all of these new things are an opportunity for us to
52:20 step into a better version of ourselves. And we really need to take advantage of those opportunities that are presented to us because we get a chance to do something that other people couldn't do.
52:36 I mean, just think about like a word driving cars and flying on planes and people who lived 200 years ago didn't.
52:43 And it's a completely different life. We're able to see parts of the world that nobody else could have done back in those days.
52:52 you know, somebody could spend their entire life and never, never go outside of a five-mile radius. You know, and now it's, we do that just to go to the grocery store.
53:03 So we have to embrace the new as an opportunity and just look for the ways that we can step up our game and just become better through this process.
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53:43 And one of the things that we're doing is we're extracting a bunch of these small snippets of gold from our our past content, past guests, past talks at the law from growth summits, stuff like that.
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54:35 Take care
