Prologue

Welcome to The Rankings Podcast where we feature top founders, entrepreneurs and elite personal injury attorneys and share their inspiring stories. Now let’s get started with the show.

Chris Dreyer

Chris Dreyer here CEO and Founder of Rankings.io, where we help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings. You’re listening to The Rankings Podcast where I feature top business owners, entrepreneurs and elite personal injury attorneys. Today I have Jeremy Weisz on the show. He’s done thousands of interviews with successful investors, entrepreneurs and CEOs. And today we’re just gonna flip the script and he’s going to be interviewing me, Jeremy welcome on the show.

Jeremy Weisz

Thank you for having me. You know, I always get excited to talk to you because there’s a couple things. One, if people don’t, you know, we have a great topic which is how PI attorneys what they want is more clients and you’re going to talk about How do you get more clients from content marketing? What I love about what you talk about specifically, Chris is you this applies to any industry, right? You are doing it is one of the most competitive niches of all time. So I always tell people, if you want to see what marketing is, like, go to rankings.io and see what Chris does, because when you’re competing in the most competitive markets, which is SEO for personal injury law firms, that means you could do it for anything. Okay? So I encourage anyone to listen your podcast for that reason. So let’s talk about how people people ask you, PI attorneys asked us How do I get more clients? And we’re talking about content marketing. So I want to start with a question that you probably get a lot which is, what type and by the way, people should stay to the end of this because we are going to talk about you have a really interesting background and I figure I’m gonna ask a crazy Chris story, meaning something you’ve maybe never shared before and in a minute, I’m gonna ask about, um, you know, I do my research and you have some stint with involving poker. So we’ll talk about that. But what type of content should a personal injury firm produce?

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, that’s that’s a great question. So there are really two main types of content. And I know that it can you can kind of get bogged down into the nomenclature of, you know, what’s this? What’s that, but really, it’s, you need to have service pages, you need to have practice area pages on your on your law firm to give the consumer an outlet to convert. And when you rank pages, like Car Accident Lawyer for those types of phrases, they have a lot of intent to hire an attorney. And then really on the other side, you hear this thrown around pretty frequently but blogs, really what we’re talking about here is getting people into the top of your funnel awareness, kind of that middle area, you’re answering questions, and those are the two main areas and, and really, you need both. So if you’re going to market your firm, you can’t just have all practice area pages and keep trying to sell sell You have to also kind of drive them through the funnel to those pages through your blogs and top of mine.

Jeremy Weisz

There’s two things I want to dig in there with. One is practice area pages. And you give example two is, you mentioned something which always I latch on to when someone says this is high intent keyword. I love when you talk when you say that, because that means we all want high intent, right? You can do you rank for lawyer, like who cares? Right, but you want someone’s high intent. So let’s start there, high intent keywords, because I imagine you’re telling people to embed this into their content.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, so let’s take two examples. So let’s take steps to take after a car accident, you know that that could be a blog that answers that very specific question. Maybe they’re not quite ready to hire an attorney. You know, they have to go get their injuries checked out. They want to go to the hospital, they want to get treatment, they want to check to see about insurance, all these questions that kind of go through to their head, and then you’ve got Car Accident Lawyer, when someone types that in there, look, they’re most likely looking to hire an attorney. So those are the those are the big two. And there’s a ton a ton of problems that I that I see when attorneys go to create this type of content. So typically, you always hear content is king and you need to write you need to write long form content. So a lot of individuals just write this this very long content, but really, it’s about answering the intent. Because a blog, you can answer that consumers intent or their need, with not very many words, if it’s if it’s a long query, but in many cases, the reason why you want to write long form content for your sales pages is because there are multiple versions of intent you can answer. You can you can throw you know steps to take after a car accident at the top of a car at similar page and then get to things like statistics and types of injuries, types of racks, and just give Google a lot of options. to rank a page, and most importantly, a page that has the opportunity to produce revenue,

Jeremy Weisz

what would be an example Chris of like a short query? Imagine the people you deal with are super busy. And they’re like, I don’t know what the objections you’ve got of like, Chris is how much time is going to take like, what are some of the questions people get? And then I want to talk about, like, what would be example like a short query that actually does? Well?

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, so I’m gonna say the three words. So Car Accident Lawyer, truck, Accident Lawyer, Motorcycle Accident Lawyer, personal injury lawyer, all of those three word types of queries. Typically, you want to write longer form content there because, guys, Google can understand if you have a consumer has a smile on their face after they read the content, the only thing they can do is they can measure the amount of time that they stayed on your page versus another consumers page. Those well time metrics. The other thing that happens is when you write long form content, you naturally include related phrases and synonyms inside content that you can also rank for. And then the reason another great signal is, when you write longer form content, it naturally takes a longer amount of time to read, you’re gonna read a couple hundred words, you can just scan it, you’re done, you can, you can go somewhere else. But if it’s 10,000 words, it’s gonna take a long time to get through all that content.

Jeremy Weisz

That’s a good point. So Google is saying, this person’s spent more time on the page. So it’s going to start to rank higher because of that. So even if it’s good, short content, they’re in and out.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, they’re in and out. And a lot of times people point to bounce rate, which a bounce rate percentages is if a consumer comes to one page, and they leave, they don’t go to another page. So they always look at these high bounce rate percentages. But bounce rates on its own isn’t necessarily bad, because a consumer could have their intent fulfilled from that one article and just leave, it’s not necessarily that you’d get the content was bad. It’s It’s so you have to look at a lot of different things and I think dwell time and average time on site. Those types of metrics are way more important.

Jeremy Weisz

So I was trying to ask a shortcut question. You’re like, there’s no shortcut is what you’re selling. Talk about. So what are some objections people say like when you’re telling them this, like what type of content? What do people push back on you about like PI journeys.

Chris Dreyer

So the biggest thing is the biggest problem that we run into is a lot of thin content or old content. That’s that’s news based, because maybe there was a current events like take Paul Walker’s incident that occurred A few years ago, everyone was writing blogs about that and that had the opportunity to get attention during that time. But now it’s, it’s not current events. So now it’s like this, this piece of content that doesn’t serve evergreen value. So a lot of times it’s it’s maybe newspaper articles. A lot of times I see individuals writing content about accidents that occurred and the end tend to a consumer making that search. They care about learning about what happened in the wreck, not necessarily about hiring an attorney. So, you know, those are some mistakes. Some of the other pushback I get is, is basically trying to make them unique. Like let’s say an attorney is trying to target multiple cities. So they have a Los Angeles car accident page, a San Diego car, like how do you make them unique? Well, it’s a challenge that there are some challenges you have to have unique testimonials, maybe driving directions, maybe statistics from that information, or from that area, maybe you had an attorney that that specializes in an area of law in that location and, and the laws change from state to state. So there’s, there’s ways to make it unique, but it is a little bit challenging, so that we get a little pushback there from time to time.

Jeremy Weisz

Got it. So we’ll talk about practice area pages and what you mean by that. But I just want to sum up just to make sure I got it. So For this what type of content should a personal injury firm produce? Look at high intent keywords, look at evergreen, make sure it’s long form and make sure it’s unique. These are big thing when it comes to that. Um, any other things besides that? Go ahead.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, so I want to jump in there, because one of the things I’ve been on kind of a tangent here lately about is the word unique. And I’m gonna put that in quotations. Because just because an article passes copyscape, or a plagiarism test, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unique and going to provide value for Google. Because if we’re all citing from the same source, even though it passes that unique test, in Google’s eyes, it’s still going to get filtered out if it’s very common. So one of the most successful tactics an individual can make is to structure the content in a different manner than everyone else. So if, for example, if maybe a piece of content is written in the first person, and it’s your one opinion and that’s how All your competitors have written that piece of content maybe you bring in an expert and it’s an interview style or you have a roundup maybe a survey, or you have multiple contributors, maybe the list post a guy there’s a lot of different ways to structure a piece of content to be different to stand out and it helps it rank.

Jeremy Weisz

Got it. And we’re gonna talk about practice area pages, but I’m gonna pause for a second and do a crazy Chris story because you led me into it. Because you talked about just because it passes copyscape or plagiarism. People don’t know you have an interesting plagiarism story. I did I’m gonna put you on the spot.

Chris Dreyer

I was I was a pretty terrible student. I am definitely I’ve heard Gary V. say, you know what, what do most individuals learn in college and it’s nothing. I am the epitome of that. So in college I somehow I found myself in history education, and I actually hopefully I use not listening but I actually Really outsourced my, my college history paper to another student. So I paid this individual to write it and then that individual plagiarized. So I got brought in the office and I had to take over the entire class without all that money for the class and had to take the class over anyways.

Jeremy Weisz

So yours was unique for that person, plagiarize your paper,

Chris Dreyer

right?

Jeremy Weisz

Well, yeah, I think that’s I should have done more of that in college. It is considered unique and you know, you follow the rules. I don’t know what you learn, but you learned on the importance of outsourcing, which is actually a really important skill to learn. So practice,

Chris Dreyer

practice talking.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah. What do you mean by practice area pages.

Chris Dreyer

So practice area pages are an attorney sales page. It’s their service page. It is the page that you’re pushing a consumer to, to try to hire you know, make a higher a buying decision and These pages typically have a lot of search volume. It’s also if you do use any tool like hrs, SEMrush, whatever you use, you’re going to see high cost per click around these queries because, and they convert. So if anyone’s doing Google ads, many times, they’re bidding on these phrases. So it’s a challenge. They’re the most competitive. It’s a lot easier to rank a page, that’s a longtail query with five to seven words. Then competing against the other hundred or 1000 attorneys all trying to rank that one individual page and I’ll kind of go down another line here. If you’re a Chicago Car Accident Lawyer, all of your competitors have Car Accident Lawyer landing pages. So what are you going to do to make yours different it’s not necessarily making it longer it’s making a difference and focusing on better.

Jeremy Weisz

Got it? Any other points before we go to the next topic on what type of content should a personal injury firm produce

Chris Dreyer

So the practice of just the quick summary practice area pages or your sales pages, you got to have those to convert a consumer and you know, those pages can drive a lot of revenue. But the blogs can serve a purpose in your promotional aspects. You can get featured on other websites you can you can educate a consumer that they actually need an attorney, or you can use those to get backlinks. You know, nobody when you’re trying to do promotional link acquisition, nobody wants to link to a sales page. They don’t want to link to a page where you’re trying to sell something, but they may link to a page that’s, you know, has data or statistics or answers abroad consumer need or in acts as a resource. Got it.

Jeremy Weisz

So Chris, we talked about what type of content should a personal injury firm produce to get more clients Now, next topic next step. Okay. Where do you identify topics to write about?

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, that’s a that’s a good question. So there are a few Easy recommendations first Google Trends. Just go to Google Trends and see what consumers are actually talking about today. That’s where a lot of individuals got topics around COVID and Coronavirus. That’s where you can get topics around geographic specific topic, you know, things. So check out Google Trends. That’s number one. The other thing is do a competitive analysis. Look at the top ranking the most successful firms in your location and see what pages they have. Just from a from an exterior standpoint, you’ll see what they’re the types of content that they’re creating. The next thing that you want to do is go to directories like FindLaw, AVVO, lawyers.com, and specifically look for sites that collect consumer questions in a forum style. The consumers are actually asking questions on the site’s instead of answering the questions on AVVO or lawyers.com create blog. content on your site, you already know that there’s demand there’s a need there consumers are asking it. So that’s a great way to get topics. I use I personally the my main recommendation I’ve talked about this before is ahrefs.com. Sure. It’s it’s like hundred bucks a month, I think their base plan. But if you’re serious about SEO, and in particular, in a major market where it caught could cost 10s of thousands of dollars to get results. It’s from from that aspect, it’s actually very cheap. And you can plug in a query, it’s going to give you hundreds of topic ideas. It even has deeper competitive intelligence, so I can plug my competitors URLs into it, I can see what traffic is actually generating, you know, visitors for a competitor from that tool. I very strongly recommend that. There’s a couple other things. If you’re running Google ads, look at the search query report. You can you can get some great Information about that. And in general, just monitor your contact forms and just see, you know, the types of consumers that are coming to you and what are their? What are their pains? How can you solve their needs and make the experience better for them?

Jeremy Weisz

I love that. Chris, by the way, I think every business should use that, like looking at directories or forums and actually hearing the pain points that people have and actually addressing it is huge. Are there any other places that you’ve seen, that are valuable to get those type to learn those pain points outside of directories?

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, so there’s, there’s a free tool, I believe it’s still free called AnswerThePublic, huh. And it will try to generate questions from who, what, where, when, why and how. So you type a query in and it will give you those answers or questions centered around those. Yeah, the other thing that you can do is you can use Google’s autocomplete search. So if you go to Google and you type in car accidents, and then the letter A, it’s and just stop there don’t complete after you’re going to see all the words it’s car accident and then have the letter A. And then you can do B and C and D. I know it’s a little bit more manual. But but that’s a tactic, the autocomplete tactic, and then there’s one more. So let’s say that you want to look for additional content related to car accidents. I keep using car accidents a lot because I know personal injury attorneys that that’s one of their bread and butter, but it could be for medical malpractice, it could be for Zantac, it could be for whatever you’re looking for is this type the query in. Let’s let’s take Zantac lawsuits, and then look in the middle of google it will have related questions or people also asked those could be particular topics and then look at the very bottom people also searched for and then that will give you ideas for topics as well. So that’s it. That’s a big mouthful, but there’s no I love.

Jeremy Weisz

You know, you mentioned the Google autocorrect. Completely that is so underutilized. I know you know, top ecommerce founders who sell like millions and millions of dollars on Amazon. And that’s their that’s their tactic. They search the autocomplete their their keyword and then a and see what the because they’re going to tell you what the most kind of Google wants you to search. They know the most common searches. So why not just tap into it?

Chris Dreyer

Right? Absolutely. It’s it’s a hidden gem. It’s, it takes a little bit more effort, because it isn’t

Jeremy Weisz

even that much more offer. I mean, literally, it’s typing a and see what comes up. I mean, and be it again, like if someone has a business and they want to get clients. Taking an extra 10 minutes to do that is is nothing compared to the information you’re going to get.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, because if you’re just guessing if you create topics that don’t target a keyword or consumer demand, it actually could hurt your website, as it depletes or dilutes your Overall equity to the site. And and Google will devalue your site when there’s too too much of that. That’s why you see, a lot of times when, when an SEO specialist goes in and coals or nukes a lot of old content and you see a performance improvement, it’s because that other content was diluting your equity.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah. You know, Chris, are you ever worried like you, you give away some amazing information? Okay. Really next level information like Ahrefs. I’m sure those people have never heard that before. And it’s a tremendous tool. Are you ever worried like, I’m going to share this? And then they’re not going to need me?

Chris Dreyer

No, so yes, and no. I would say yes or no, but I’m pretty transparent guy. And I think it also comes down to execution and prophesizing things and having a great team that’s coached up and you know, Checklist Manifesto, making sure things are done properly, because I can go up here and I can tell you how to do it, but it able to actually do it yourself. There’s other challenges that go into that.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah. What’s the toughest part about what you do? You consider what’s challenging

Chris Dreyer

as a CEO or

Jeremy Weisz

CEO is like, you know, what is a huge challenge for the personal injury law firms when they are doing this content marketing in general.

Chris Dreyer

The most difficult challenge is upgrading or refreshing existing content. Hmm, that is a challenge. It’s easy to produce new content, something that doesn’t exist exist. And that’s also a big problem. A lot of times you I’ll see an attorney, they’ll have a car accident lawyer page. Oh, yeah, it’s written. I wrote it three years ago. Well, that’s your most important page. Let’s upgrade that every month. And give it a really good

Jeremy Weisz

working. I just set it and forget it. When you’re saying no, you need to keep improving. If it’s your highest, that makes perfect sense. It’s useful. It’s like a head slap. It seems so obvious and yeah. We don’t do that.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, it’s so incredibly important to think about this. You know, I just did a search for one of our clients sites on hrs recently and I saw that their car accident lawyer page, ranked for 600 keywords so that on its own, if you compare to the pay per click, you just see how SEO can compound

Jeremy Weisz

is there like millions of dollars? Like what is that worth in paid traffic

Chris Dreyer

that particular page 600,000 a month? Wow, traffic value, that’s insane. But what happens is I can actually see the queries the pages trying to rank for. And that gives me an opportunity of what words or sections I need to use to improve that page. I have competitive intelligence, I can say, Oh, this individual wants to know that types of cars, you know, what are the types of car collisions, I should probably have that section on the page. And it just gives you a lot of offered opportunities, a lot of information

Jeremy Weisz

that, you know, kind of gets into the question. Have you probably get this paid ads versus Seo? versus content marketing?

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, yeah. So you just mentioned like,

Jeremy Weisz

yeah, okay, you can get 600,000 a month. That’s a month.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. So that’s a great, that’s a great question. And we could probably have a whole podcast episode about this about the pros and cons. Because I would love to maybe even have a battle with my my pay per click. Friends. There you go.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah, in law firm battle. Mm-hmm.

Chris Dreyer

So here’s the thing. So pay per click direct response marketing, you know, it is lead gen. It’s a way to receive traffic immediately. If you don’t have good SEO results and your investments low, it could take a long time to rank on the first page, do pay per click, there’s leads there. That’s a math game, you got to make sure that you’re doing things properly and you can generate an ROI because the cost per click and the legal vertical, particularly for PCI is incredibly expensive, but You’re leasing and I am having said that I’m a huge proponent of a multi channel approach. Our agency only does personal injury SEO. I you know, I don’t have blinders on. I know social media works. I know YouTube marketing works. I know all these other tactics Pay Per Click work. But some of them are leasing and don’t have that brand building capability. That long term value like content does with SEO,

Jeremy Weisz

long term asset versus leasing.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, that’s exactly what it is you’re leasing or you’re building an actual asset with your site.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah, and people can do more than one thing at a time, but you want to be just, you know, you can even be doing both Um, so before I get to the next question, we’re going to talk about a question we asked a little bit we can go a little bit further into it, which is how long should the content be? But before we do you know, a crazy Chris story real quick. We talked I mentioned poker So what is the what’s the deal with your, your poker story?

Chris Dreyer

Well, I was afraid because of the first one, you hit me with the history paper. So, um, my roommate, right out of my roommate several years ago was a professional poker player. His name’s Ryan Carter. He’s who got me into digital marketing. And we spent a whole month that’s what he did for living just kind of having fun. He trained me how to play poker. We did 30,000 hands in a month. Wow. And we reviewed all of our losing hands. And it really, you know, I learned a ton and in that same year, he had you know, it was I can’t remember what birthday it was, but the next day I convinced him to pay for a poker tournament and it was $200 buy in and I told him I would give him 50% of the winnings. Well, just so happens that poker tournament I want 234,000 Wow. So addict got a check for half of the handed to him. But that was a pretty crazy time. That was also around the same time that full tilt. They seized our money for three years. If anyone was familiar full tilt and pokerstars and all that happened, I didn’t actually receive that money for I think for until 2014 or 2015.

Jeremy Weisz

Turn 30 Do you remember what was your winning hand?

Chris Dreyer

So there? There is a time there was 14,000 players in that tournament and I know third, I think so. Yeah, there were tons is

Jeremy Weisz

that like, for you? Um, you know, people say, you know, obviously, it’s luck is a skill. It’s reading people. It’s math. What is your secret skill with poker from that standpoint, as well as the SEO right? I mean, SEO, you’re looking at metrics and ranking and all this stuff. So what’s your poker strategy or prowess,

Chris Dreyer

so so I am definitely not the the one To talk about luck, I can’t stand it. It’s, it’s I’ve put my self in positions to be able to have those opportunities. Like that month I reviewed 30,000 poker hands. You know, it’s it’s not like, I just played a tournament got lucky in one I had to do, I had to sit through and evaluate 30,000 poker hands in that one month. And, you know, it’s the same thing, you know, entering multiple tournaments throughout the year, and it just so happens that one hits, it’s just putting yourself in a position to succeed, you know, playing that whether it’s, you know, basketball, and it’s all the practices that go into it or making a good podcast or doing great at SEO that just takes a lot of reps. You got to get those reps in.

Jeremy Weisz

Totally. Yeah. Interesting. I love that. Thanks for sharing that. So, you know, we talked about as far as getting clients Peter is getting clients from content marketing, we talked about what type of content should a personal injury firm produce Where did you know where Do you identify topics? Where now? How long should the content be?

Chris Dreyer

So that’s a good question. And this is a really common one in the answered it’s kind of it’s not the best answer I would say is it’s as long as it needs to be. And I would focus more on quality as opposed to link. So instead of just dropping your page into a tool, or a Chrome extension that shows you how many words and doing a direct comparison that your page has 2000 words and another page has 1500 words or more, just focus on again, that consumer intent and also intent needs to be the the organization of the page matters for intent, because maybe a consumer has a higher amount of intent. In terms of the steps they need to take after a car accident, then the types of car accidents exist or the types of injuries So the steps that that you take needs to be the first section on the page, because that’s where most what most consumers are coming to the page for. So even the order of these different sections can play a part. There are tools that you can use, like hot jar, to evaluate, you know, heat map things and figure out what the page experiences for consumer on that page and make adjustments just like you would optimize a pay per click landing page. And those types of things can really add up. And also, I would say, I would put an immense amount of importance on your sub headers. Because individuals, that’s how they navigate through the page, they’ll read a little bit of the content, then they navigate to the sub headers, and just to make those really compelling and not just put up you, you don’t want to just put a keyword in there, you want to actually make it enticing and more appealing to the consumer.

Jeremy Weisz

So what are some of the mistakes people make? So you mentioned a few, right? You don’t have the proper organization, you don’t have a step by step in the beginning because that’s what people are coming from you Don’t have sub headers, which makes it not easily digestible. What are some of the other mistakes people make with their content on whether it’s how long or how short or the, you know the organization.

Chris Dreyer

So a lot of times, it can also be the placement of the article, I see a lot of personal injury law firms trying to rank their homepage for personal injury lawyer with their website doesn’t have a section to include content around that subject matter where if you look, let’s say in Los Angeles, you type in Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyer, almost all of the top seven, I think the top seven, eight search results, the internal page is ranking for that query, as opposed to the homepage. So it could be the placement and trying. The other thing is, sometimes Google will force you into a direction. So it’s not binary like this is where you create content. Sometimes you’ll do a competitive analysis on the site and see that Google wants to rank a page for a different query than you’re even targeting. So just me Brace it up, just go with it and then create a new page on the topic. So the other thing is just focusing on quality and you don’t want to cover the same topic over and over again and with multiple articles, it would be better to just make a concise piece because you know, duplicate content can hurt you. And again, just focusing on stuff that’s evergreen and can provide value forever. And you know, last but not least, it’s it’s just focusing on how you can be different. I want to really stress that because if everyone’s writing first person and they’re doing steps to take after a car accident types injuries, and then you do the same thing, like why should your page rank and this other one should, you know, maybe you need to include an infographic or an audio grammar video, maybe you incorporate a podcast episode into it, maybe you come multimedia approach. Yes, it needs to be a multimedia approach. And without going down a tangent that creates a gap. So if you have Have these other forms of media that sets you up for competitive advantage, because then you can use that media to submit your site to PDF sites and get a link there or video directories or audio sites, audio aggregators. So there’s a lot of little things that kind of compound, but it’s just making sure the page answers consumer intent, make sure it’s better than your competitors. And it also just make sure it’s different. Make sure it’s different.

Jeremy Weisz

So what are some myths with this? Because you mentioned duplicate content. So people will go, Oh, that’s fine, or no, that’s not fine. So talk about some of the myths around whether it’s, you know, maybe in the long versus short or quality organization, what are some myths around this topic?

Chris Dreyer

Geez, myths. So, you know, one of the biggest ones is content is king. All I’ve got to do is produce content. Well, I hate to break it to many of our listeners, but if you’re only producing content on your site, you’re never going to rank. Not in the legal vertical because it doesn’t naturally lend itself to linkable assets or link acquisition, you have to promote it. So you have to, you have to, you know, contribute content to other webmasters or be intentional about your tactics, maybe, maybe take data and repurpose it, maybe it’s the Department of Transportation, or some type of statistic and put it on your site so people can source or reference your site for links. But the biggest is creating the contents the foundation, that’s that’s the requirement, you have to do that in order if you want to rank for a particular query, you have to have that. But in order to give that cop content, the opportunity or rank, you have to promote it. So  you have to do both.

Jeremy Weisz

This is not Field of Dreams. You build it in, they will come

Chris Dreyer

it is now a field of dreams. That is a great thing coming to take that

Jeremy Weisz

because that’s what I mean. That’s really what people think, Oh, I did it. It’s done. Cool. let it ride. It’s not enough is what you’re saying. Now.

Chris Dreyer

Not at all.

Jeremy Weisz

Um, any other myths you can think of that people are misconceptions or myths around this?

Chris Dreyer

Okay, so this is content marketing. And we’ve been talking a lot about contributing content on your site and your asset. I want to talk about something that is very important. And I’m seeing that more important than ever. It is when you contribute content to another site, whether it’s a directory profile, or it’s a guest blog, that content has to be exceptional. It can’t be thin, because remember, Google’s job is to filter out bad information. They get millions of pages every day. So when you’re trying to build links or promote your content, even the content that you’re placing on other webmaster sites, it has to be exceptional or it will be filtered out and that authority will not pass back to your website.

Jeremy Weisz

So Chris is the holy grail, getting a .edu. So,

Chris Dreyer

is that true? No, no, that’s funny. You mentioned that because I think it was like 2013, maybe 2015. I had an article on Moz about scholarship campaigns and really, really showed that tactic to the world. But really it’s more about the overall quality of the site, if it’s curated. The reason Edu is typically everyone wants an Edu because they often have huge inbound link profiles from other things like maybe their athletic program, maybe they’re in the news, and they have this huge amount of authority, but right.

Jeremy Weisz

It really depends. It just made me think of contributing to other places. And I’m thinking well, what other places? You know, obviously, there’s you talked about a bunch of the different directories and like other places, but you know, there’s other sites that probably Yeah, are high profile, I guess.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. So this is more link building centric, but but I guess it is content. I want to talk about like four core tiles. So the first one would be when you contribute content, you want to look at legal specific sites, if you can get links from legal sites, generating content for them, that helps build relevancy around your your industry. If you generate content around a local component, that hill helps build relevancy around a local centric information. So local Chamber of Commerce is local news sites. And then there’s authority. This is the one that everyone talks about, oh, there’s, I’m getting a link from a high da or a high Dr. High domain authority site. That’s the one everyone talks about. They really don’t talk about relevancy. or local. Yeah, the fourth one is completely different. It is trust. So authority and trust is different. So trust, like if you get on the National Enquirer?

Jeremy Weisz

I wouldn’t trust

Chris Dreyer

Yes. Well, well, government entities, legal journals, Wikipedia. There are sites that can contribute To trust so that it’s like four core tiles and most of the time personal injury attorneys and even SEO specialists, they don’t even think about this they just think about on it’s a high Dr. Link. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

Jeremy Weisz

Cool. So Chris, to just round out this part of the, you know, PI attorney, how do I get clients from content marketing, you know, portion. We talked about a lot of questions. The next question is how frequent should a personal injury law firm by how how frequently they blog.

Chris Dreyer

So the more frequently you blog, the more opportunities it gives you. I think in the beginning, you really need to concentrate on volume I do that’s a little bit different than other individuals will state. But when you start off, it takes a while for something to take off. And you need to get lay some of that foundation and then you can go back and improve it in the future. So I would say, lay the foundation with a lot more volume in the beginning. Get all your practice area pages. Written, target the top questions that are asked, create these resources that can help you for link building, do that in a heavy capacity up front, and then focus on how can I make them successful? How can I? How can I improve them? Because if you start off slow, and you’re right in one page a month, you’re just missing. You know, you don’t give consumers and have an avenue to navigate. And that’s kind of my opinion, a lot up front and then just continually make it better.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah, I want to, you know, explore a little bit how time how much time should be spent, someone should be spending on this, but I could see all the importance of the other other items you explain because if you blog twice a day, every day, but you are focused on the totally wrong type of content and you didn’t do the research on the keywords and then the high intent, then who cares?

Chris Dreyer

That’s completely true. So it all has to tie into a theme or an actual overarching strategy. So if your thing is I want to improve my visibility and acquire more truck accidents, well, you need to have a strategy that’s pretty cohesive. Lots of blogs, lots of linkable assets, you know that long form Truck Accident page and, and you need to think about consumer demand and intent on creating content around a particular strategy. And people talk about it in silos or pillar cluster, or link wills and all these different things, but really just has to be a cohesive strategy for content marketing.

Jeremy Weisz

So how much time should someone dedicate for us?

Chris Dreyer

So I would say that’s, that’s kind of subjective based upon what their goals are. So if you’re a niche practice, and you only do motorcycle accidents, you’re like the law Tiger of, of, of your particular city, then then maybe you don’t have to spend a ton of time because maybe you can cover all the queries. You In a few months and you can do other activities, other promotional efforts to improve that, that marketing wheel, that flywheel around motorcycle accidents, but it just depends on what your goals are. If you’re if you’re targeting multiple locations, it’s going to take a ton of effort a ton of practice areas. It’s again why I’m a big proponent of niching. Because you can really dial into your consumer needs and be topically known around a specific topic, you know, that can really help you rank as well.

Jeremy Weisz

Chris, when people reach out for your help today, listen, I don’t want to spend the time to do this. Okay. I want to be focused on cases. That’s what I went to school for. That’s what I want to do. What are some? Yeah, what are the most popular services or where do you start people?

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, the first thing we do is we have an exploratory call just to see if their goals are aligned, and they’re the right fit. So what we do is we do an SEO discovery similar to an attorney We’ll do a discovery before they go to trial. It’s it’s a comprehensive diagnostic of their existing assets, their structure. You know, it’s a site audits a link audit, we look at all your competitors just to establish targets using data. And think of it as you know, if your car wasn’t working properly, and you took it to an auto body shop, and somebody came up to your window and said, Hey, it’d be 10,000 bucks to fix your car, you would think they’re crazy, right? They didn’t even look under the hood. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re looking under the hood before you give, give a quote. So we figured out your goals and objectives. Then we look under the hood doing this SEO discovery, and then we create a campaign strategy to meet those objectives.

Jeremy Weisz

Chris, first of all, thank you, people can check out other episodes, you’ve amazing guests on your podcast, you have some amazing, you know, strategies that you walk through yourself. People can check out this, you know, listen to this in and there’s another piece which we’ll talk about more elements of PI attorneys. How get more clients from content marketing. I encourage everyone to check out rankings.io and the podcast any any final thoughts or final words that you could think of on this topic? And or we’ll just save them for next time?

Chris Dreyer

I would say Jeremy, first of all, thank you. That was really the biggest thing that I would say is this focus on quality, quality, quality quality, because Google gets millions of pages every day. So they’re just gonna filter out all the thin stuff. That’s not really. It doesn’t have an opportunity to rank so you have to focus on quality.

Jeremy Weisz

Check it out. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Dreyer

Thank you.

Conclusion

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