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 we’re going to do a little different we’re gonna flip the script and Jeremy, who’s interviewed thousands of entrepreneurs, investors and CEOs and we’re gonna flip the script and he’s gonna be interviewing me,

Jeremy Weisz

Chris, thanks for having me. And what I like talking about how do you get more clients for less money, you know, and so that’s what you’re an expert at, because people can go all different routes, but you help people with organic rankings? So the same equivalent of what they would be paying, let’s say paid traffic or something else, which could be I’ve seen you certain keywords for the amount of clicks they’re getting could be millions of dollars. Yet, if they’re organic, SEO, then they’re not paying that same amount, right?

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, that’s the so there’s a common misconception. Everyone thinks, oh, I need to do paid ads. They have the best real estate but but the reality is paid ads aren’t always shown. And also the difference between pay per click and SEO is one page could rank for 600 to 1000 keywords. one page. The other thing I like about SEO is it has the potential to become a flywheel very naturally. It has this momentum that this continues to get stronger and stronger as you contribute to it versus pay per click. It’s just kind of works. It’s a legion source. It’s quick, right? It’s the best way to enter and get immediate traffic. But it once you shut it off, you’re done. Your visibility is gone. We’re, you know, SEO every article you create, it just creates this momentum that continues to power the flywheel.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah. And you talk about kind of leasing versus buying. And that sounds

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, yeah, you’re building an asset with SEO versus leasing.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah. So we’re going to talk about I encourage people to check out other episodes of you’ve amazing guests. And there’s another episode we talked about some of these other concepts of, if I’m a PI attorney, how do I get clients from content marketing? So content marketing for lawyers so people can check out the other episode? What type of content should a personal injury firm produce? Where do you identify topics to write about how long should the content be? how frequent should a personal injury law firm blog in general? So we’re going to cover some other topics today, but I encourage people to go to that episode. So the first one is what recommendations do you have for blogs for PI attorneys.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, there are really two main areas you need to concentrate on. So the first one is you need to concentrate on answering questions that your consumers are asking. And the biggest problem here is identifying what those questions are. And the easiest way you can do that is just go to Avvo go to lawyers.com go to lawyers.com. And you can actually see on these forums on these legal directories, what consumers are actually asking. So instead of answering the question on those particular directories, where they get the benefit of the content, just generate a blog of your own and answer the question and be the expert on your website and drive the consumer to your site. So those are great topics to generate for blogs. The other thing is, you want to link acquisition it’s it’s a very important aspect of SEO It’s not this generate content and they will come the Field of Dreams. You know, if you build it, they will come. It’s not that you have to be intentional about link building in the league legal vertical. So what I like to recommend is when you’re doing your prospecting to contribute content on other webmasters sites, create content that’s about their topic. So if you’re, if you want to get an article from a health and fitness site, maybe you have something that kind of cross relates to health and fitness, you know, avoiding injuries in the A, with personal fitness, you know, um, and then maybe it’s a technology blog. So maybe you should create, you know, technology for driverless vehicles or how to prevent distracted driving or technology components. That kind of crosses over to your area of expertise. Because if you’re going to try to guest posts on these other websites, they want to make sure that they have something relevant that they can link back to.

Jeremy Weisz

Actually, that’s a great example because that is a big concern for especially in that space in the technology space of what are the accidents going to look like? In a, you know, a self-driving car?

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s very important being first in on some of this new technology. technological advancements is very important, because you can get the attention you can be the source, and then individuals can naturally link to you. It also gives the medium press something to talk about that’s different. You don’t want to be the same creating the same type of evergreen content as your only method of content production. And not only that, think about it, take a step back. Let’s let’s say that you were going to try to build links to your website, and you just started outreaching to all these different When the the the likelihood of conversion to to have that opportunity to do a guest post will be very low if they don’t if there’s no resource for them to link back to.

Jeremy Weisz

I also see Chris that they can, they could be a thought leader in their niche with this too if they start, you know, creating this content, and they’re seen as the PI attorney for self driving cars.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, it’s it’s more important than ever to be remarkable to be an expert to have something to talk about to be an authority in a space. And a lot of individuals think that niching is just personal injury law. It’s a lot more than that. niching one of the main benefits of niching is becoming remarkable becoming an expert. It allows you to focus in on this topic. So the more granular you can get about something, the better because everyone’s doing this broad strokes content. And if you can get granular you’ll automatically stand out.

Jeremy Weisz

You know, you mentioned link, link acquisition, um, are most people not doing this at all? I mean, are they just too busy to do it? What are you seeing out there with that?

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, so here’s the thing. Most attorneys, if you’re in Chicago, they all have Car Accident Lawyer pages. They’re all 2000 words long, they all are talking about the same type of information steps to take after a car accident statistics, injuries, types of wrecks. So what does Google look at to determine who’s going to outrank one page over another? So you can definitely have an article that’s a little bit better in substance but they’re going to look at external factors. And that’s where backlinks are very important. It’s it’s been said many times but it and I’m kind of doing air quotes here. But if you’re going to try to win an election, you want to get as many votes as possible. If you’re if you want to try to win the first Page of Google, you want to get as many links as possible. That’s your votes in the content marketing game.

Jeremy Weisz

Got it. So that’s about any other thoughts on what recommendations do you have for blogs before I move to the next next topic?

Chris Dreyer

Just be very intention, ask a lot of questions, survey your customers, and find out what information they want you to contribute. And they want you to write about so that’s another great topic is just to do those retrospectives. Do those post mortems and figure out what truly would provide value to your consumers?

Jeremy Weisz

Nice. So the next about this with, you know, content marketing for lawyers, which is what are recommendations for generating strong practice area pages.

Chris Dreyer

The biggest thing that I can tell you about practice area pages is these are the most important pages on your site because when an individual comes to that page, they have a much higher percentage or they’re more likely to make a change. buying decision. So I would just say make sure they’re very robust. And I would try to take a step back and think about all the different types of intent that a consumer could be wanting when they come to that page. What information do they truly want to see when they go to that page and just make sure that it covers a wide variety of topics all around that topic, make sure you have it’s easy to navigate, make sure you got a table of contents, you got a lot of media, video, images, audio. Also, the way that a consumer travels through the page, so they’re, when they’re traveling down the page, they’re going to be looking at your sub headers. It’s more important than ever to have amazing copywriting for your sub headers. Don’t just put other keywords it needs to be compelling to draw them to a particular section because they may skip over three or four sections and then stop and read one section. That’s truly important to them. So make them robust. The other thing is, you want to consistently improve these pages. It’s not a write the practice area page and you’re done. You want to revisit, make it better continuously improve Kaizen retrospective, and just constantly be making this page better. You also want to showcase expertise. This is incredibly important in the legal and medical verticals. You have to understand Google doesn’t want to provide you know how to be cancer, and it’s some blogger, they want to they want to know that an expert wrote that they want to know that whoever’s speaking this information there, there is some truth to it, and it’s the same in the legal vertical. You want to show your accreditations so it’s important to source your information that you know cite your, your, your sources, you want to make sure that your profile pictures on there, and you have all of you Your accreditations, your JD, your awards, so that it’s more trustworthy. I like to even put those actual citations on the page similar to a research paper. I think that, you know, Wikipedia dominates organic search and model what Wikipedia is doing. They cite everything. They have great internal link structure. And I think it’s just incredibly important that these pages it’s not they’re not just a set it and forget it, it’s revisit them and think about how you can make them better and provide more value.

Jeremy Weisz

So it’s on strong practice area pages. Chris, and you talked about sub headers, which are important. Is there an example of like a compelling sub header or example of a boring versus compelling sub header as an example?

Chris Dreyer

So I can’t remember where I got this and I’m going to kind of do a crossover. You know, if if you’re trying to to approach someone in the dating scene, and you said, and you went up to them, and you just started talking about yourself and trying to hold this conversation, they would be very defensive because they don’t know what to expect, right? If you went up to this individual, you said, Hey, I’m going to be back right back with my friends in five minutes, but I just wanted to tell you, blah, blah, blah, they’re going to let their guard down. They know what to expect. They know that you’re only going to be there for five minutes. Okay, so let’s take this kind of principle back to content. If your sub header doesn’t explain, what what the topics about are what they can expect, they’re just going to skip over it, they’re gonna, they’re not going to be willing to absorb that information. They’re just, they’re going to be closed off. So if your sub header actually is, it explains what the topic or what the material is going to be about. It’s just going to provide more value, they’re going to consume it and and that’s what it’s about. You just can’t. It has to be descriptive. That’s the most important thing. You can use, you know, Ogilvy advertising Dan Kennedy all these types of things Frank Kern types of copywriting tactics to make your sub headers better but at the end of the day they just need to be descriptive. Yeah

Jeremy Weisz

so like there’s a sub header that just says car accidents as opposed to the three steps you need to do for blank you’re actually telling them a little about what you’re giving them some idea of what the content is going to be about.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, yeah, you’re giving them that you’re setting expectations and that’s what it’s all about.

Jeremy Weisz

Got it. Awesome. Thank you. So obviously people should check out you know, their practice area Page, because that is you said one of the most important things they should be doing. The next question I have about you know, content marketing for lawyers is should you know people will ask you all the time, should I create news and accident blogs.

Chris Dreyer

Jeremy, this is one of the things biggest mistakes I see. So they think that by writing about the accidents in their local area, that they’re going to get more attention or it could be a lead generation source. But the reality is, the individuals that are searching for these accidents, want to know about the accident, their intent is not to hire an attorney. their intent is as morbid as it is to say it’s more about to figure out what happened is in this incident, and here’s what happens when you create these pages. Sure, you may get traffic. That’s what everyone that tries to sell this tactic to you says, oh, look how much traffic you have, but traffic, not all traffic’s the same. And when you look at this, you’ll get a ton of traffic wallets in the news while wallets it’s current. But as soon as it’s not, it is a dead page on your website. It is a page it’s not going to provide any value, and it’s just going to dilute or deplete your overall liquid equity throughout your entire site. You need a simple Having just a bunch of garbage pages on your website that aren’t going to provide value to anyone in the future?

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah, I mean, you’ve said before highest keyword intent. Yeah. And this is kind of the opposite of that.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, I wouldn’t even put them in the awareness or even in the in the engagement or consideration. This is this, like, just totally off topic. You could there are. I guess you could make the case that maybe someone else was in the vehicle, and, but I just I don’t know. It’s very far fetched.

Jeremy Weisz

So why do people do is more for vanity? vanity metrics?

Chris Dreyer

I think it’s vanity. I think it’s just it’s just a misunderstanding. I think it’s placing a lot of value in the traffic itself when the traffic even if it was 1000 visitors it’s it’s worthless.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah. You know, a quote I love from I think John Wooden is like activity doesn’t lead to achievement. Right? So it seems like this creates a lot of activity. But and then people think it’s doing stuff. But it’s not creating what you’re saying is achievement.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. And not only that you’re giving all these signals to Google that, hey, you’re a news site. You’re not a news site. You’re a law firm. You provide a service.

Jeremy Weisz

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Any other big mistakes that you see people making. So that’s one, you know, news and accident blogs. And the other big mistakes when you look at someone’s site,

Chris Dreyer

yeah, the biggest ones are, it’s this kind of your basic SEO, it’s targeting a keyword in the title, making sure that the permalink the URL incorporates that keyword or a synonym close variation of that keyword. Making sure again, even blogs that you refresh them, use tools like Ahre, Semrush to see what that page starts to rank for. And if if you identify to keyword that maybe isn’t covered quite very well, maybe you can add a new section to that piece to give it the opportunity to rank for that at the end of the day. It’s also what Google wants. So you may target a keyword and have this big plan. I want to rank for this keyword. But then Google says, nope, you’re going to rank for this keyword, well, sometimes you want to pick your battles. And maybe you just want to switch the optimization to what Google wants versus what you want.

Jeremy Weisz

Got it? Yeah, go with the flow. So, you know, I just want to hear we covered a lot in this and in the other episode, so I just want to hear any final thoughts regarding content marketing for lawyers.

Chris Dreyer

So final thoughts, the biggest thing is to you have to provide value, it has to be what the consumer is looking for, and it needs to be different. I can’t stress that enough. If you follow the same structure of all your competitors. You’re just getting filtered out, why should that pay? Why should your page rank for another page when they’re almost identical, create a different structure a different type of format, use multiple experts pull in, maybe a physician to write a quote in there, or a consumer, maybe a former client, it just has to be different. Otherwise, you’re just going to get filtered out, because that’s Google’s job. Google’s job is to filter out similar duplicate content, otherwise, the Google, the search engine would just be terrible. It’d be a terrible experience, because everywhere you go, just be the same information.

Jeremy Weisz

Chris, thank you. Thanks, as always great hearing your expertise. Where should we point people towards where should they check out more about you and what you’re working on?

Chris Dreyer

Yes. So the easiest way to get in touch with me personally on a social media network is just go to LinkedIn and find me, Chris Dreyer, I accept all invitations, and then you can just go to my website. Rankings.io

Jeremy Weisz

awesome. Check it out Rankings.io. check out more episodes of the podcast, Chris. Always a pleasure.

Chris Dreyer

Thanks, Jeremy.

Conclusion

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