Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10. Golden Rules, Jay Berkowitz.

Well, good morning, good afternoon. Good evening. Whatever time this podcast finds you, welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms Podcast. I'm with us today. Good day Ike

How you doing? Jay, another great day, another beautiful day. How has the webinar How are you feeling postgame?

Yeah this is our postgame chat. We do different kinds of podcasts as y'all know, if you're a regular listener, and we have some amazing rock stars and superstars of law firm business growth and law firm marketing. And every month we do a recap of the monthly webinar or workshop. And the reason we do that is because when we do the webinar, we show slides and we you can see see our faces, but on the audio only podcast, sometimes without the slides, it sounds a little little silly. So we try and bring it to life, right?

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yeah.

So this month, we are talking about how to triple your success by getting your internet marketing, right. Like, what do you think?

Oh, yeah, definitely, definitely gave some great gems in the webinar. So if you missed it, definitely catch it on YouTube, on the 10 Golden Rules YouTube channel, because there's a lot of gems in there. And I think we're gonna go over a few over this podcast. Right?

Exactly, yeah. And we'll try and try and bring it to life with audio. And, you know, basically, the concept is how do you triple your business. And, you know, a lot of it, we talked about, you know, an annual plan, because if you're listening to this in real time, you know, it's almost the end of the year, and you're looking into another year. But, you know, regardless of when you're setting your business planning, and when you're thinking about your business, you know, every month is a new month, every quarter is a new quarter. So you've got to have a plan in place. So we talked a lot about that. We, I gave a couple examples. There's, and we've also done full webinars case studies on these if you want to see them. Brian Garrett is our solo attorney in Oklahoma City. And he tripled his business, he tripled his number of cases, he went from signing 10 or 15 cases a month to signing 45 cases. And we talked about all the pieces he put in place to do that. We give a case study of Stewart and Stewart, based in Indianapolis in Carmel, Indiana, and they kind of for extra cases, we called it the hockey stick growth because if you looked at the curve, they went the you know, the the things start going up a little bit like the blade of the hockey stick, and it went crazy, like the shaft of the hockey stick. So I don't want to talk too long. So hit me with another question.

All good. Oh, my God. Oh, good. So it's definitely amazing what you did with Brian Garrett, Stewart and Stewart. And I got to ask why do you think that the methods that you know you've created and have been using throughout the years? Why do you think they're so beneficial for especially personal injury lawyers? Like what what are the key things that help that type of lawyer? So well?

Well, look, I mean, a lot of the things we talked about work for us work for 10, golden rules, and work for other types of lawyers. But I think you know, a couple of the things we talked about today were particular to Google. And for personal injury, I always say that you don't go to Facebook or Instagram, to look for a car accident lawyer. You go to Google, you know, if you're searching, you don't know a lawyer, you go to Google. So we talked about the four different parts of Google AI. Could you ever heard anyone? Explain the four parts of Google?

No, actually no, not broken down the way that you broke it down. So I guess the people need to hear that.

Yeah, that's, that's sort of a concept that I came up with. And there's really now four different disciplines or four different practices that we have within our firm about mastering Google. And there's different experts in our firm, who are very good at different parts of Google. So the first part is the Google Local Service ads. The second part is Google Maps. The third part is Google Pay Per Click the paid ads, which is different from the local service ads, if you haven't checked out that program yet. And then the SEO, the search engine optimization or the old fashioned free 10 results per page. So those are the four parts, right?

Yes sir. Which part would you say is the most important like which part would you say brings the most traffic?

Well, maybe not the most traffic, but I think the most important is the local service ads, the Google screen. And if if you haven't, if you're not familiar with this Going right now just on your phone and search for personal injury lawyer near me. Or if you're another practice area, you know, family attorney near me. And if the Google screen checkmark doesn't come up, just search Personal Injury Lawyer near me, because it almost always comes up for personal injury lawyer. And in some practice areas, there's not enough advertisers yet for it to come up in in some areas. But if you haven't seen this, it's very, very important that you figure it out. Because when Google does open up your practice area and and your market, I would say 30% 20 to 30% of all calls are going to these local service ads. And the reason is, they're right at the top of the search, they've got a big green checkmark saying Google screen. And the consumer knows that Google's like check you out in some way, shape, or form. And what that really means is a Google has, you know, sort of check your license, make sure you're good with the bar, check your address, make sure you've been at your location for a period of time, you know, there's about 14 Different things that Google checks off to give you the screen approval. And with the program that they initiated five years ago with home service folks, it's called Google guaranteed, and they're actually vetting your employees. They don't do that for the law firms. Really, it's, it's your, your current license with the bar is gonna get you that screened checkmark from Google. So like, that's the first part is like you got to get screened. Right? And then the second part, we call it our secret algorithm. And like, do you remember what the algorithm is?

Are you talking about the you gotta pick up the phone? And this this amount of time? And all those things? Yeah, yeah, I remember a few those.

I'm trying to get involved here. So I don't do all the talking. So, you know, I told the story about the red phone in the White House. And supposedly, you know, I don't know if it's an urban myth or real story. There was a red phone in the White House back in the days of the Cold War. And when Russia would call, and they were, you know, disputing something, you would immediately pick up that red phone, or, you know, Batman had the bat phone, and the commissioner could call Batman, when there was a crime committed in Gotham. So you got to now think, start thinking about your phones. Like it's a bad phone. Like it's the Kremlin calling. Because if you don't answer your phone, if you miss a phone call, or if you don't answer your phone for more than 15 seconds, it's hurting you in the Google algorithm. And there's less likelihood, you're going to show up in those top two positions of the Google screen. So like, what do you think? How do you answer the phone?

Yeah, as far as possible, and it's best to have somebody on attendance, that's sole job is to answer the phone as soon as possible, because that'll definitely help the process a lot. And I'm sure you gave, you know, some other tips like that, you know, about maximizing LSAs, you mind telling the people some more?

Yeah for sure. So, so the first thing, answer the phone 24/7 availability. So if you don't have an after hours call answering service, there's dozens of them that specialize in legal, they do a great job answering phones, some of them will even sign a case for you. But you want to have the 24/7 turned on, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because Google has that built into the algorithm. And clearly being available for those leads, improves the number of leads or increases the number of leads Google's going to give you. So going over the 24/7. The next thing is you got to get into the system, and do what we call disposition, the leads. So you've got to tell Google, hey, this was a good lead. We booked a meeting with these folks. You can even put the time and the date of the meeting in the system. And tell Google, hey, this, you know, I want lots more leads like this, get in there right away, and tell them that it worked for you. And then the next piece of it is you want to put lots of text, you want to say you know, Mr. Smith was injured, and he was injured on highway 95 In a rear ending multiple car collision. And he's seeing the doctor is treating, he saw seeing a chiropractor, and he's got neck injuries, and we're meeting him tomorrow at three o'clock. So the more text you put in there with some keywords, talking about car accidents and injuries, seems to boost the algorithm and seems to help you get in those top three positions.

Wow, that's a big key. I don't think I heard that one before. So there you go. Good job for listen to the podcast. Again, stuff, you know, other people aren't getting. So you guys are about to be successful. Now, I gotta ask you another question. On the other complete end of the spectrum. What is the least useful part of the four parts of Google?

Well, you know, it depends a little bit some people can still master Pay Per Click to pay down But I say, you know, get get your local service ads, right? Do the best, you know, follow these criteria we just talked about, we have available on our website, it's what we call our secret algorithm, unlocking the secrets of Google screen, go through all the criteria to make sure you're getting all of those pieces, right. So that you can show up in those top two positions as often as possible and get those phone calls. Number two, you want to get your maps right, number three, want to get your SEO, right. But the Pay Per Click the old paid Google ads, I find it's not working as well as the local service hats, it gets very, very expensive, depending on your market. So let's say in a smaller market, you can get those local service athletes for like, you know, $50, in smaller practice, you know, less expensive practice areas, maybe $200, in personal injury, and then the Pay Per Click, if it's $50, in your marketing in your practice area, the pay per click is probably gonna be $200. And if it's personal injury, if you can get the LSA leads for $200, the Pay Per Click leads are probably gonna be five or $600. So that's why you want to get as many of the LSA leads to a Google screen before you start spending money on pay per click. In my opinion,

I hear that I hear that so pay per click has obviously been around since the beginning of Google, in a sense, and I think, you know, it's kind of becoming outdated. And you know, things like LSAS sounds like it's like the new wave the new technology that's really taking over, do you think there are improvements that can be made to the LSA program? And if so, what do you think?

Oh, you mean, from Google's side? What's what's on my

exam? Exactly?

Well, there's definitely some practice areas that are not being served. One of our clients are cup, we have a couple of clients who are sex abuse attorneys. And it's a terrible practice area, because unfortunately, they have to help families who kids have been abused, terrible, terrible stuff to hear about. And Google right now, doesn't really have a feature in the local service ads. For someone who's looking for help, you know, if their child was was abused, you can't find a lawyer through the LSAS. Right now, the LSAS are really designed for folks who did the abusing, you know, the perpetrator of the crime. So trying to fix there's another practice area. Oh, and the other area is family law. Right now, there's just like general divorce. But one of our attorneys specializes in, in the friendly divorces, consultative divorces, where, you know, they're not looking for that Bulldog to sue their partner or whatever. And that differentiation isn't available. In LSAs, it's available on Pay Per Click right? You can search like, you know, consultative divorce lawyer, it's not available in the LSAS. I think that's the one thing, they're making a bunch of other changes, trying to think of some of the other things, but really, it's those practice areas being available. That I think is what I'm looking for next for our clients. Not

God bless God bless, it's gonna come, you know, sent in a couple of petitions as on call Google up, you know, tell them that this is what the people need. But I also got another question. For those people who are like, who swear against LSAS? Because I know I've been on a couple of calls where they're like, oh, I don't want to do LSAS. Again, blah, blah, etcetera, etcetera. What is the best alternative LSA alternative?

Well, then the next thing in priority I say, is Google Maps. And, you know, a lot of people just skip the ads, if you talk to some people, and, and some of the lawyers we talked to, they're like, I never click on ads. And as consumers, a lot of us don't click on ads. And some, you know, I'm obviously very knowledgeable, but Google, but there's some categories where like, I want to go down, and I want to look at the maps, or I want to look at the SEO, because I don't want to see who's advertising. I want to see who's you know, who's local, you know, like the most I would say like for shoe repair, iPhone repair. You know, if I'm traveling, you know, if you want to, you're looking for a salad restaurant, you know, you're going to look at Google Maps, because it shows you right there on the map. Where are those businesses are located? So there's a lot of people who are just, you know, their map people, right? They're not they don't want pay per click, and they want to see on the map. And even though a lot of times you don't even go see your lawyer, sometimes not, you know, throughout the entire case, a lot of our clients now, you don't have to go to court. You could do zoom court, or even zoom depositions and stuff. So a lot of times you don't actually meet the lawyer in person. You get the check in the mail, and you sign up by Docusign. But people still would rather have, you know, they don't realize that before the case, they want someone that they assume they're going to eventually go to their office. So Google Maps has a whole SEO algorithm, a whole protocol surrounding it. That helps you get in those three positions on the Google Maps. Right.

Sir, and I tell you, we're about to get into it. How should one get into those top three positions? How do they what should they do?

So the number one thing is still reviews. And that's where Google reviews live, right is in the maps. And where you get the reviews is you ask folks from a link, you can actually send them a link that you get in the back end of your Google review program. Now, the Google Map program is called GBP. Now, Google business profile. And if you claimed your location, you have access to the back end of your Google profile. So you can get a link in there and ask folks for reviews. Now, the Google Maps sort of used to be driven by whoever had the most reviews in the market typically, you know, always showed up in that three pack. But there's something we learned from LSAS that we believe, is also being weighed into the map algorithm, which is, you need one to two new reviews per week. And that cadence of fresh reviews, is helping, definitely helping you show up in the LSAs, the Google screen, and also helping Google Maps. So when we're designing programs, with our clients, like a lot of times we do an incentive program, where the legal assistants and the paralegals can get a 25 or $50 Restaurant gift card, every time they get a four or five star review. So we want to develop the cadence so that that happens every week, we were talking to one of our larger clients this morning. And they had this program that was hanging around for years where the paralegals could get $25 for every Google review. And we said, let's change it up, let's make it $50 For every Google four or five star Google review, every week, this is a $50 prize, you know, gift certificate available every week. And then at the end of the month, we hit four, we're gonna have a big pizza party for the whole office, so that we call it like, gamifying, you know, making making it a bit fun in the office. So there's that $50 Pretty nice gift certificate available every week. And at the end of the month, everybody's working towards getting those four reviews, so that everybody gets in on the pizza party.

Yo, that sounds great. As long as there is vegan pizza as well, you know, like that, you know? Yeah, I love I love those incentives. I love the way you're incentivizing people to do you know what's best for the Google algorithm? So what are the things I

agree with one more thing, because you're gonna you're gonna get this one. Because some of you may or may not know this, because you've been listening to on this podcast, in his spare time, when he's not helping us with 10 golden rules. He's Hurricane Ike. And he's a very successful artist as well. Now, there's only one other artists who's a little bit more famous than him right now. And that's guy named bad bunny. I'll biggest in the space like,

yeah, a bad vote. He's definitely doing his thing out here. And he's inspired me, he's been inspired me on a few tracks, you know, singing in Spanish, so definitely big well to him.

So I'm gonna bring this back now to LSAS. So one of our clients get $50 for every Google review, and an entry in a contest to win bad bunny tickets. Wow. And they're located in the southwest. And they're, you know, all their staff and their assistants and their paralegals are crazy for bad money. And they, they had a deal with their local stadium. So they actually had the box and like the different section tickets available for bad money through their sponsorship. And they made those tickets available. So what they did is in addition to getting a $50 gift certificate, you got a ticket to when the bad bunny tickets, their reviews went crazy. They got like 300 More reviews in the quarter so hurricane can bad bunny can can move the needle.

Yes, sir. That's the mood music. Music is the great movies. So I'm glad you know you're implementing that and looking into other industries and combining things. It's beautiful. You know, it's art. Its art, what you doing out here with digital marketing. So I really, really got to add that's quite the call problem.

Can I touch on websites because it's another thing I'm super passionate about? Oh, head we're listening. But a lot of people asked me like, you know, when do I need a new website? Like, I like what do you think like, as a consumer, when does a website start looking? A little data to you?

I think websites website technology gets better like every year is and it's only getting faster. But like, if they want to just be in the pack? I would say like every two to three years, they need a refresher.

No, no, I get my question was more like, as a consumer, when you look at a website, and it looks out of date, what are some of the clues?

Oh, yeah, the bots is ugly, it takes a long time to load. The pictures are kind of blurry. The text is like, you know, when you can't read the text, and it's on top of a color that you can't see, like, yeah, the those are all little things.

You know a lot of websites now have one big, nice graphic, right. And the old websites, you know, maybe had, you know, a lot of text and a big form and stuff like that. Right. You know, basically, as consumers, we just have, I don't think we think about it. I mean, obviously, you know, I can I think about it more than we go to a website, because we do this for a living. But you know, as a consumer, when you go to a website, and it just feels a little a little out of date, you know, probably communicates that that business might be out of date, right? Agreed, agreed. I always say like, you know, after four or five years, it's time to start looking at a new website, just because like, you know, the technology is probably lagging. And there's better things we can do with new website for Google, for SEO, for usability for mobile phones, for iPads, which, you know, a ton of your traffic is coming from mobile, but you know, if it just feels like it's a little bit out of date, it sends a subconscious message. I don't think that consumers consciously thinking about it. But it just sends a little bit of a note that, hey, maybe this business is on top of their game, right? Absolutely. You know, here's some of the component parts of award winning website. And you know, it's not about winning awards, it's really about, you know, having the right metrics, delivering the right metrics from the website, to triple your results, right. That's what we're talking about today. So I use the example of our friends keeping our nice pasta our clients in Atlanta. And if you want to check it out, it's the foster firm wins.com, th e, the foster for wins.com. And it's a beautiful new website, it's a website, I'm very, very proud of that we did for these folks. And the first thing is, you know, if you if you have a look at it more, if you saw it today on the webinar, it's very contemporary design, you know, they look extremely current and hip, and our niece is beautiful. And she's got a beautiful red dress on. And we use red as the accent color throughout the website. So you know, it's a big graphics, it's are you injured and the injured is in, in script, it was written by the web designer, and it's, it's matching the red on her dress, and it's matching the red that's popping on the call now. But so there's like, your eye is going to these very contemporary things, the picture the graphic. And then the third thing, the phone number, which, obviously we want them to call. And so you know, having a contemporary design that fits their brand, right like these are, you know, contemporary, just fits their brand as South Atlanta injury attorneys. And then the next thing is we got the picture of Keith and Bernice. And they're a couple that owns the firm. They're both attorneys, but you want to have some of your employees. Like it's not a it's not a must. But it's, you know, it really helps you connect because most law firms are local, right? Like with the exception of the big multinationals, you want to be part of the community why see that show the people and show real people that are going to be working on your case, we talked about the phone number, it should be in the top right position, and it should stay in the top. As you scroll down through mobile phone. I remember the first time I saw this was five or six years ago, I gave a guy an award and the million words we judge because it was so appropriate, so ingenious, right? Like leave the phone number right there at the top of the screen, as I'm scrolling down because you want them to click and call when they're on their phone. And we got chat on the website, we talked about this a lot. Adding the chat function is going to increase your leads 20 or 30%. Some people are never going to call you. They're just never going to call you like some people when they come to your website. They're doing research for a family member. It's not their case, they're just not going to call you there's a zero chance they're gonna call you. Or let's say they're doing research at work. Again, zero chance they're gonna call you they're working. They're being paid to do something else they're researching there aren't medical malpractice case, they're just not going to pick up the phone. So the chat is going to get you 10 to 20% of leads that you wouldn't have gotten because they're just not going to call they're not going to fill out a form. They don't want you sending them emails, because again, it's not their case. And so the chat fills that window, that opportunity. And then you know there's a ton of social proof and credibility on the site. I'm talking about the results for 25 years, their million dollar case in a in an Uber $593,000 Car Accident $375,000 slip and fall. So, you know, This website's hitting on all cylinders. And it's working phenomenally well, like I said, on the key metrics, right? The SEO is working well, the conversion, we're getting more phone calls, we're getting more chats, we're getting more leads. We're kind of checking off all those boxes. As

beautiful man, I've literally been on Google trying to find the website myself. But I forgot how you said to type in the foster

firm wins. So th e, Foster, FOS t er, firm, wins. Wa ns, the foster firm wins.com

got All right, let's see. Let's see. Look, see? Oh, by

the way, when you're there, I go over to click on their on their maps and give them a five star Google review to Okay.

We love Okay, okay. Oh, wow. It's beautiful, right? Yes. Yes. Just just out the feedback. And yes, I love the red idea. The colors are really poppin the chat pops out beautifully. They got a nice beautiful girl that's talking to you already. Susie, you're on the website. And then they got the nice fonts, man, like the modern fonts, modern pictures. Everything was loading pretty fast. Yeah, this is a great website, man. And they got the nice little sliding, you know, animations. Wow, this is beautiful, man. Beautiful.

Yeah, it's fire. Anyways, what do you think I should hit one more topic and then wrap for today?

Yeah, sounds good to me. Was there anything on your mind? Or? Well,

you know, the one thing that I share often, and I apologize if you heard this few times, if you're a regular listener, is our you know, our sort of solution we've come up with that covers off a lot of your SEO, your video SEO, your blogging, your social media, your Google Maps, your newsletter, all in one simple solution. Like does that sound too good to be true?

It sounds good enough. You don't I mean

THis is what we call cascading content. And it also is a program we've developed for the Google help algorithm. And so Google, you know, we saw this coming. And we started doing this strategy seven years ago. And Google has introduced what they call the Help algorithm in the last two or three years. And there's been three or four iterations of the change to how Google evaluates your website. But the simplest way to think of it is, in the old days, when you used to do a Google search, you had to have a keyword that described, you know, very precisely the subject area, like bankruptcy attorney near me, you know, or bankruptcy attorney, and city where you live. Because if you weren't very precise, Google didn't give you very good results. And we all got good at refining our search, refining our search, like, you know, if you search for bankruptcy attorney, and you get all these guys from across the country, and you get the biggest guys in New York and LA, and then you'd refine it for your city or your town. And as consumers, it was frustrating. We're always refining our search. And so Google also realized that people were going to start searching using language because with Siri, and with Alexa, we can ask a question. And so Google started rewriting their algorithms to understand human language. They call it semantics, like the actual words we use in sentences and understanding the intent of a search within a sentence or a phrase. So like, you know, if you search things like think the example we used is, you know, how much can I get for a car accident? Or what do I need to sue? If I was in a car accident, the kind of questions we would ask when we're starting our research for an attorney. And what we've been able to accomplish with our with this strategy, is what we do is we have the attorney, ask and answer the question in our SEO. So literally, what we do is the attorney will say, you know, someone was recently in my office, and they said, Do I need to hire an attorney, if I was in a car accident in Virginia? And so, by phrasing it as a question that they were asked, we literally get the keyword phrase, that's the question in the video, so it's recorded on video. Now, the video is going to go on YouTube. And Google's YouTube algorithm actually reads the words you know, understands the words through artificial intelligence, and puts that into your SEO ratings. So literally asking the Question. In the words you speak on the video, and then answering the question, which is the helpful part we talked about earlier? The new help algorithm is really designed to help people right. And it's straightforward. People are doing a Google search, they want an answer. And Google, you know, Google's gonna reward your website, if you answer questions better than anyone else on the internet, or better than anyone else in your town. So we literally record these videos, we do a dozen videos at a time. So we save the lawyer's time. And then we've got one a week for 12 weeks, or three months. And when I said before, this is like our simple solution. So first off, we put the video on YouTube, YouTube is the number two website in the world, right behind Google, owned by Google. And very, very important for the algorithm. So we create a video SEO posting on YouTube. And the name of the video is actually the question. So when you go to upload a video to YouTube, you got to put in the name of the video, and you can put in descriptions and keywords and tags as well. So we use all of those SEO, you know, factors, with the question with the description video with the tags using the keywords that we're targeting, in the form of a question. So that goes on YouTube. And then the YouTube video itself goes on the blog. And we write a blog post about the video. So we write a search engine optimized blog, and include the video. So now our blog post is what's called the video blog. It's great to video and blog. And we're taking advantage of the best of Google. We're sort of proactively search engine optimizing with an advanced strategy, which is like a video plus a blog. Google loves that, and they love YouTube videos, because obviously, they own YouTube. Okay, so now we've got a video. The video is optimized for search, it's on YouTube. We've got the video blog on our website, it's optimized for search. And then we also use those question answer videos and social media. So the same effort, the same, you know, minimal cost to record those q&a videos, we've got a video blog, we've got a video on YouTube, we've got all our social media posts, because we're gonna post it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, tik, Tok, LinkedIn, we're gonna use that video as our social media posts for the week. And then we also post it on Google Maps, super valuable for map, search engine optimization, you can put videos on your Google Maps, and you want to be updating your Google Maps at least once a week. So I apologize for going to the buffet there. But you know, that's one of my favorite strategies we've developed and all the years. Super simple. And it checks so many boxes for you.

Yeah, definitely buffet worthy. That was about like, 12 birds in one stone. So yeah, highly, highly, highly, highly, highly recommend. Try what you just said, and, and I also recommend, you know, working with Jay and us at 10. Golden Rules ourselves, because of course, it's a lot of information. But this is what we do, like every day. So if you want to get it done for you, definitely give us a call. We'd love to talk to you, and love to look at your business and tell you exactly how we can help. So yeah, great job, Jay. That was beautiful, man.

Yes, sir. Be blessed and never stress duce.

Thank you for listening to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 Golden rules.com That is podcast at t e n Golden rules.com.