Kyle Roof:

When somebody comes to your site, we want them to do something, right? And that’s where the good copy comes in. When it comes to rank, that’s a whole other animal.

Chris Dreyer:

Links are votes. When you’re trying to win an election, you want to get as many votes as possible.

Kyle Roof:

And rank has nothing to do with good content, it has everything to do with math. If you give the algorithm the math that it wants, you can rank.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite legal marketing agency. Each week, you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. On these Special Toolkit Tuesdays, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere, the masterminds behind the technologies, services, and strategies to help law firms not just survive, but thrive in today’s competitive landscape. Now, this isn’t about selling you the latest software or getting kickbacks from affiliate links. It’s about bringing you the best so you can be the best for your firm, for your staff, for your clients, and for you. This is Toolkit Tuesday on PIM, your weekly guide, so you’re staying sharp in the legal world. Let’s go.

You need compelling content and high rankings to get more leads for your website. Today, we focus on rankings. SEO doesn’t require magic, just science and data. With patented methods and over 1 million uses of his tool, Page Optimizer Pro, Kyle Roof knows his rankings. He explains how simplicity keeps Google happy, the power of nailing your on-page SEO, content and internal linking, and best practices for firms with multiple practice areas. Here’s Kyle Roof, co-founder of Page Optimizer Pro.

Kyle Roof:

I got my GED in 2004. I passed the Virginia bar and I practiced law in Virginia for about four years. I was a trial attorney. I did family law, divorce, custody and support, and some light criminal defense. All the DUIs and probation violations that you can handle. I decided that I’d rather chew on shards of broken glass than do one more divorce. I did what I think most attorneys do, I decided to take a year off and I moved to South Korea, and I taught English to kindergartners. A to B kind of move.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. Well, what led you over there?

Kyle Roof:

Well, so my wife, she’s also a trial attorney and she was also burnt out and she was on the computer and she got an ad on the side it said, “Teach English in Croatia.” She’s like, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if we just moved to Croatia?” I was like, “That would be crazy.” And then, I started researching and I found that for what we wanted to do and the travel we wanted to do, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan were the best options. Then we settled on South Korea. And we told them we didn’t want to do Seoul, so we went to this place called Gangwon-do, which is in the northeast corner of South Korea. So, it was a change. Our one-year sabbatical turned into five. And while we were there, we started a business with a Korean business partner, and we had to build a pretty complex website for the business.

I went through all these devs and I realized no websites are this complex, or most are not. I got the bright idea of general contracting websites using the team that I had. And that was actually going pretty well. I brought my brother into the company, he does web design and development. Then I got the bright idea, I was like, “Hey, look, all of our devs are freelancing from India. What if we go to India, open a business there and then we can get more devs and we can get them in one place and we’ll get more productivity out of them?” And so, that’s what we did. We went to a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas, and we started a company. We rented this place where the business was on the first floor and the second floor were apartments.

We were told you’re going to get a shakedown from the police because that’s just how it works. I was in the US at the time, my brother was there, he was staying in the apartments. And there’s a knock on the door and it’s the police. And they go, “We need to see your papers.” He says, “Okay. Here are the papers.” They go, “These are the wrong papers.” He’s like, “Okay, how much do you want?” Instead of asking for a bribe, they put him in handcuffs and threw him in jail. So, now my brother’s in jail and he’s talking to the chief of police and the chief of police goes, “Look, these could be the right papers. I don’t know. You have two choices. One, you can leave town tomorrow. Two, you can sit in jail and wait for the magistrate to come and the magistrate will sort it out.”

My brother goes, “Well, when does the magistrate come?” The chief of police goes, “I don’t know.” So, my brother goes, “I think I’ll leave town tomorrow then.” So, he runs back to the office. Our employees have fled because they don’t want any part of this. He gets what he can, we get him out of the country. And now, we’re hemorrhaging clients because we don’t have employees. And my brother goes, “Look, I can take these four clients,” because he codes and I don’t code. We had just started doing this thing that I’d heard about called SEO where we sold the sites and now we can maybe get $100 a month out of them. Basically, for me to pay the rent next month, I had to learn SEO that day so that I could keep those clients and figure out how to survive, and that’s pretty much what I did. I was able to keep the clients that we had. Turns out I wasn’t bad at it, and I was able to grow it from there. It’s a wild ride at the beginning, I can tell you.

Chris Dreyer:

Absolutely. Talk about motivation.

Kyle Roof:

When I was trying to figure it out, I would search, “Is this a ranking factor?” I’d get three yeses and three nos and three maybes. I was just like, “This isn’t the way to do it.” Then I was like, “Oh, you know what? Everyone’s just doing their own test sites. That must be how they’re learning.” And so, I started setting up the test sites, and then I figured out a way to test Google’s algorithm. And then, in 2015 was the first time I spoke on stage and it was a really high-level conference, a great conference. Only about 40 people there at this particular one. It was interactive. You could talk to the speakers and I was talking on the testing method that I had developed.

And I really thought this would be collaborative. “I’m going to show you what I’m doing. You guys are going to talk about what you’re doing, we’re going to kind of figure something out.” And five minutes into the talk I realized, “Oh, nobody’s doing this. No one is doing this at all.” And I ended up getting a patent. I have a US patent on the testing method that I developed on whether something is or is not a ranking factor in Google. And then, from there, that got me into the idea of taking a scientific and a mathematical approach to SEO, that it isn’t pixie dust, it’s not witchcraft. You don’t need a wizard. That you can actually sit down and figure some things out, and that’s the approach that I’ve taken in my SEO career.

Chris Dreyer:

To prove that SEO isn’t magic but math, Kyle completed the Lorem Ipsum challenge. The competition was to rank for keywords like rhinoplasty, Plano.

Kyle Roof:

A rhinoplasty is a nose job and Plano is right outside of Dallas, Texas. And it was a sprint. It was 30 days and the only rule was you had to have a brand new domain, so you couldn’t have an existing domain you’ve done something to. Other than that, whatever you want to do. And I felt I had a pretty strong team with me at the agency. I felt I was pretty decent at SEO. So, it was me and 27 other, I think professionals jumped in. At the end of that 30 days, I think we took fifth officially. We were mid page nine in that fifth spot. Two weeks later we went to page one in Google, and we didn’t do anything to it. It was just after launch. And then, two weeks after that we were number one in Google. And about two weeks after that, we were one in Google and one in Maps.

And then we wiped out the Maps and we were the knowledge panel, so we were rhinoplasty Plano, which was pretty funny. And people really started to lose their minds at this time. And the reason that they lost their minds is because we did the entire site in Lorem Ipsum. So, we built a homepage in Lorem Ipsum. We built a target page for the term in Lorem Ipsum, and we built supporting pages and built out a silo for them all in Lorem Ipsum. And then what we did is we did the math, how many times we needed the target keyword in certain places, its variations in certain places, contextual terms in certain places.

And then, we very crassly copied and pasted the words into the Lorem Ipsum in those places the right number of times. Really, to show that while you certainly need good content, good copy to convert. When somebody comes to your site, we want them to do something, right? And that’s where the good copy comes in. But when it comes to rank, that’s a whole other animal. And rank has nothing to do with good content. It has everything to do with math. And if you give the algorithm the math that it wants, you can rank very, very well.

Chris Dreyer:

Is that where Surfer comes into play when I look at something like Surfer SEO and these other tools and it’ll say, “Hey, your content’s too long.” And you’re like, “What do you mean? I’ve got this really robust article that really covers the topic.” And sometimes you reduce the amount of content, does it play into that keyword density in that scientific portion of the algorithm? Is that what you think?

Kyle Roof:

The way to think about it is term frequency and specific areas. So, there are different places that Google will look on a page such as your title tag, your H1, your H2s, and H3s, your paragraph text. Those are all separate places that Google will look, and I think the better way to think about it is term frequency in those areas, more so than a density, but it’s so similar. I think if you thought about it as density, I think you’d be totally fine, density within those particular regions. Term frequency I think, the counts I think are a better way to look at it, but you’ll get there on density as well.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, and one other thing, and I heard this conversation with you and Matt Diggity, was talking about not trying to make it difficult for Google to understand. So, let’s say we have a personal injury attorney listening and he wants to rank for let’s say Houston car accident lawyer. So, some SEO specialists would say to optimize maybe in the title and the H1 one they would say, “Houston, car accident attorney, Houston, auto accident lawyer or law firm.” And we know that synonyms and the related play into that, but I heard where you mentioned like, hey, make them consistent. Don’t try to confuse Google. Can you kind of elaborate on that too?

Kyle Roof:

Can you imagine opening a book and you look at the table of contents, and chapter four has a title. And then, you go to chapter four and you get there on the right page, and the title is something different, close but different. Wouldn’t that be weird? Wouldn’t that throw you off a little bit? “Am I on the right page? Did I do this wrong?” That’s the same thing to me if you do a different page title. The title that search engines see and then a different H1, the title that humans see. It makes no sense to me to try to out clever it. We’ve run this test before multiple times and it always wins having the same page title and same H1 will always win. But bots, you have to make it as easy as possible for them. Google’s amazing, right? Unbelievable. And the semantic understanding that it has is unparalleled, but at the same time, why make it hard?

Make it easy for Google to understand what this page is about. There are top four places to put a keyword, they’ve been consistent since 2015 and that’s putting the keyword in your URL, your title tag, your H1, and one time in paragraph tags. And if you do those four things, you’ve probably done 60% of SEO right then and there. Don’t overthink it. Just put the keyword in those four places. One caveat though, if you have an existing page and it’s doing pretty well and you don’t have the keyword in your URL, don’t change your URL to put it in, because you’re giving Google a brand new page. So, do that on brand new pages going forward or pages that aren’t performing well, but otherwise you want your keyword in those four spots, and you’ve done a lot. Don’t overthink it. Just do that. Stick to those basics and you can do really well.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, and to the point where now Google’s even smacking people in the mouth and they’re changing the title tag based upon the H1 automatically. I kind of want to pull this together in terms of content, the content trust ladder and how it plays into moving up the ladder and not necessarily needing links, and you’ve done some studies there. But let’s say for example we have an attorney that practices criminal defense, but they also practice personal injury. Are you in the two sites camp? Are you in one big authoritative site? Because they’re different themes, they’re different topics and subtopics. How do you approach that?

Kyle Roof:

You can do two on one site for sure, and be very successful. The only thing you want to avoid is being thin on two things where you could have been deep on one. So, I wouldn’t sacrifice them both by going really shallow on each of them. If you have to choose, like if you only have so many resources, I would go in depth on one before I moved on to the other. That’s the only thing that I would consider. So, as long as you can go deep and be comprehensive and both of them, you can do both on the same site for sure.

Chris Dreyer:

Kyle and his team used Map to figure out how to rank the term rhinoplasty Plano. This led Kyle to start his company, Page Optimizer Pro. At first, Kyle and his team manual entered data. Eventually, the team created a way to automatically scrape data from sites and import it into Google Sheets to analyze, but the innovation came with its own problems.

Kyle Roof:

We started breaking Google Sheets like you wouldn’t believe, and then we realized we needed something a little more robust. And actually, my one business partner, Maria, she goes, “I think this should be a Python script.” She’s like, “I think I can go learn Python.” And then, she goes out and learned Python in two weeks. And in week three she writes the first script for the tool, which was unbelievable. And that script actually lasted for a little bit. What we did is we put it on the backend of the agency site, where you would just put in an email address in your keyword, basically. And then, we would email you a spreadsheet. And then, it got to the point that our bill was just too high on hosting, and so we took it off that and put it into an actual SaaS tool.

And we basically kind of gave it away for free for about six or seven months as people were using it, and we were just figuring out how it worked. And then, it was June of 2018, we were like, “Hey, we got to charge a dollar a spreadsheet, guys.” Blew my mind, was in that first month we made $2,600, which means we did 2,600 runs. And I was like, “That’s insane to me,” that many people were using it. And then, it’s only just taken off from there. If you look at the report IDs, that’s actually a running number of how many times we’ve run the tool and we’re over a million now, which never in a million years would I have thought that this would’ve taken off.

And I think it’s kind of a testament to the fact that it works, that we are consistently putting out good information. And we’re also priced at a point where you don’t have to choose between us and another tool. We’ve always kind of wanted to be there for the person that is going up against huge, huge and huge, and would like to be competitive. So, we’re giving enterprise-level data at not an enterprise-level data price for that reason. Because I remember being the little guy. It would be great to get a leg up. And so, we’ve really tried to be mindful in our pricing of where you can get all the bells and whistles and you can give us a lot of money, don’t worry. But you could also get in at a $27 a month price point and still get effective SEO out of it.

Chris Dreyer:

A lot of our audience uses Semrush or Ahrefs. Let’s say, a novice attorney listening, how could he or she use Page Optimizer Pro for their website?

Kyle Roof:

Those tools are comprehensive, right? They’re looking at keyword research, they’re looking at backlinks, they’re looking at keyword gaps, content gaps, that kind of thing. We are solely focused on on-page SEO. And big distinguishing factors. We do our own math. I wrote the algorithm. We’re one of the few tools that doesn’t give averages and doesn’t use somebody else’s API to do the recommendations. The recommendations come from us. We do our own scraping and we do our own calculations, and so what we do is we call edge analysis. There are times when you want to do more than your competitor, but there are times we want to do less. There are times we want to do the same, and that will give you the best opportunity for ranking well and that’s what we do.

So, we try to find those edges and what those numbers should be with the idea that if you get within a good score on our… We have an optimization score. If you get like an 80 plus, you can feel pretty confident that you’ve done just about all you can do on page. That is giving you the best opportunity to rank for your terms from an on-page perspective. And then from there, you can go do the other signals such as backlinks and stuff like that.

Chris Dreyer:

When you say on page what encompasses, titles, meta descriptions? What are you looking at in terms of those components?

Kyle Roof:

The easiest way to think of it would be the words that people see on the page. There are some words that people don’t see on the page that are counted, such as the page title, the title tag, that’s something that search engines see, whereas humans would see the H1. There are a few other things that are counted as well, but mostly, it’s what you can see. And I say that kind of with a hedge because people will be like, “I’m in my WordPress editor here and it says I have 600 words, but POP is saying I’ve got 1600.” That’s because there’s a lot going on on your page and Google is considering a lot of those things, and just you can’t see it. And that is a tricky concept for some people. But otherwise, the stuff that goes into the page, that’s what we’re looking at. We don’t actually look at meta descriptions, but there are other things within the metadata area that we are looking at depending on the signal.

Chris Dreyer:

Just descriptions more because they would impact more of the behavioral signals like click-through rate and things like that?

Kyle Roof:

That’s correct. That’s correct.

Chris Dreyer:

Google is displaying different titles than what you’re optimized for. Does it have some of those checks? It seems like, hey, you’re fighting against Google. Don’t fight Google, go with Google.

Kyle Roof:

The people that have that issue are usually people that tried to write two different titles, one that they’re giving to Google and one that they’re giving to humans. And it’s often what Google will switch is what it sees on the page. But this is experience that we’ve all had. Have you ever seen a title and then a description like, “Oh, that’s what I want.” Click on there and you get to that page and it’s not there at all?

Chris Dreyer:

Oh, yeah.

Kyle Roof:

That’s awful. That’s a terrible experience, Google knows that. And so, often if Google’s making a switch on that, Google thinks that’s the experience that people will have by going to your page, so they’re changing something. So, you want to give a stronger signal of what this page is about. That’s where those issues come in, where Google is changing a title or changing your meta description because it doesn’t think it matches what that search is. So, you want to make sure that what you’re presenting say in that meta description actually exists on the page, and that’s how you can kind of avoid those things from happening.

Chris Dreyer:

A lot of times when we’re doing benchmark analysis or competitive analysis, we’re going and we’re seeing the link gap or, for example, something like Surfer’s saying, “Hey, the top sites all have X amount of words and yours has this.” And we’re trying to beat the competition. You’re taking it more of an individual approach, obviously the external factors that contribute to rankings, but are you benchmarking and looking at industry-specific examples to make these? Without getting into the details of your math?

Kyle Roof:

I think it’s very keyword to keyword, niche to niche. All we can do is look at what Google is presenting for a particular keyword. But that’s an important concept because the secret is hiding in plain sight. Google shows you the sites that it likes for a particular keyword. Google doesn’t play hide the ball, it doesn’t like throwing an oddball just to throw you off the trail. The sites that are there are the ones that Google likes and it likes them for their on page, they’re off page or a combination of the two. So, if we can isolate what’s going on in the on page of these surfs, then we can start to give recommendations.

Now, a big thing that we do though is we do a pretty decent job with outliers. So, where say a particular page just has way too much of something in a particular area, we do a pretty decent job of ignoring that or at least muting it for the recommendations that we’re going to give. Another thing too is we don’t look at the page as a whole, so we look at actually the individual areas. So, while one page might have this section and like, “Yeah, it’s too much, they’re not getting an edge for that, so we’ll mute that, but this section over here actually might be pretty good. Those numbers look good.” So then, we will factor in those.

So, we do look at individual pages, we look for outliers on those pages, but we also look for outliers inside of all those specific places when we give our recommendations. We see what Google likes and then it is based off of that off, off of what appears there for that particular search. But then, we really try to find the place that is actually giving the edge and where things are actually happening, and those are the recommendations that we’re trying to give.

Chris Dreyer:

Win that election. If links for your site are votes to Google, then you want as many votes as possible to win higher rankings. Here’s Kyle’s take on getting votes with more weight and how to win.

Kyle Roof:

You certainly need them. In the legal space, you certainly need them as well. But what I’ve found is the more that you dial in your on page, the fewer links you need and so the one thing you completely control is what goes on to your site. And so, that’s the thing where I think you really want to invest the majority of your time is if you can get that as right as possible, then you need fewer things. It’s going to speed up time for ranking for terms, it’s going to reduce cost for ranking for terms when you do that correctly. Now, not just the page itself, but you’re going to want to build out pages to support that page. Things that are maybe answering questions that are kind of in the neighborhood, but maybe not specific that should be on that page, but it’s kind of around it.

If you build out those pages and interlink them together and then they start to rank for terms, they start to get their own authority, they start to gain their own juice as they get keywords and impressions and clicks. And so, if you have proper interlinking with those supporting pages and shoot those up to your target page, that’s essentially a back link that you built yourself on your own site. It’s also completely white hat. You don’t have to worry about Google not liking it because it’s your own site. And so, in addition to dialing my on page, I would also dial in my supporting pages and my internal linking structure, so I can take advantage of all the work that I’ve done.

Once I’ve gone through that process, then I’m going to look at, “Okay, what do I need to do externally then to boost this as well?” If you take care of those first two steps, that’s going to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Even for some competitive terms, you can start to perform pretty well. And then, that’ll reduce the overall cost and the overall need of backlinks or other external signals.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And also, just the amount of time in terms of those links, so not only do your prospecting and then you go through your quality review, and then you get approved and then the webmaster has to take the content live if you’re doing some manual outreach. And then, you got the speed of indexing. So, yeah, do your on page.

Kyle Roof:

And then, on top of that there’s probably a time factor where the link doesn’t do any benefit anymore. So, you did all that, maybe it only lasted for six months and you’d have to build more. But if you dialed in the on page a little bit better, you might not have needed it.

Chris Dreyer:

Let’s expound on that because that’s something different that you don’t hear often. So, you say, “Hey, it may only work for six months.” Is it because Google just stops crawling the page because the content’s no longer fresh? Is that the biggest issue you see there?

Kyle Roof:

Yeah, there are a lot of reasons for link rot. One could be Google just doesn’t like that page anymore. Google doesn’t like that site anymore. There’s probably a time factor to links anyway. You’re only going to get so much value for so much time, so after a certain amount of time, you probably lose the value of that link and that’s just that. Pages go down. All of a sudden it’s a 404. They might also even just take it down themselves. You got that placement they might decide that they’re to give to somebody else. All those things happen. All those things are link rot. Once you start building backlinks, you probably will have to consistently build them, which is true, as you will kind of lose those ones on the back and you’ll still want to bring in new ones.

But at the same time, you could also continue to build out content on your site to protect you from those variances. The other big thing is that if Google decides they don’t like a link anymore, like in a particular update, I used to think of people getting hit. They were building links, they got hit and now they’ve been smacked and they’ve dropped. I don’t really see it that way anymore. I view it more like Google kind of puts you down back where you belong because those backlinks were boosting you up higher than where you should have been. Because you didn’t have this foundation on your site, building up your authority through your content, through your internal linking, you’re doing it all through external links.

As soon as Google doesn’t like those, you drop. And in my mind, it’s not a penalty anymore. This is just where you belong and they’re putting it back down. So, I think you should have a strategy where you’re slowly but surely raising your authority through things that you control on your own site, so that when those updates happen, when Google decides they don’t like it anymore, maybe you take a hit but it’s a small little drop rather than the variances that go like this. You kind of want that slow steady gain and you can do that all through on page and through supporting content.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, and I couldn’t agree more with that. And I think that’s where a lot of people get into trouble is they’ll just concentrate all their link-building efforts to one page, and it’s super unnatural as it relates to the other pages that you’re competing against. And so, you get that boost. And then, it’s just the constant hamster wheel that you’re playing on.

Kyle Roof:

That’s exactly right.

Chris Dreyer:

Tell me, just general thoughts, AI, where’s the industry going, the opportunity for personal injury attorneys to drive cases using search?

Kyle Roof:

I think the big thing is it’s going to be okay. We’re going to be fine. I know a lot of SEOs that are on the ledge, and I have to talk them off the ledge. Right now, the generative AI that we have, the language models, that’s all they are are language models. And to be honest, they’re fancy spinners. That’s really all that they are. They aren’t creating anything. There’s nothing AI about them. They’re not intelligent, they’re not creating. They’re taking information or words that they know, and then they’re predicting what words should come up based on what you’ve asked it. That’s not anything that anybody needs to be concerned about in terms of losing a job.

My entire career, every six months, SEO has died, every six months. And somehow not only has it not died, it’s continued to flourish and it’s done remarkably well. So, I can see that maybe there are going to be some tweaks here and there on some things, but at the end of the day, as long as it’s an algorithm, that means there’ll be optimization. The only time we’re screwed is when it’s humans actually just picking the order. This is the order that should be. As long as it’s math, as long as it’s an algorithm, even if it’s an AI-generated algorithm, that’s still an algorithm that’ll still need optimization. Basically, we’ll be doing this, I think till we don’t want to do it anymore, instead of us getting kicked out of anything.

The one way I would use AI right now is that it does speed up content generation, in particular content ideas. I think that’s a great way to do it. But you cannot just ask it for content, and then take that and put it onto your site, especially in the law space. I’m sure you heard about the lawyer that filed the brief with the fake cases. That was intense. Where ChatGPT gave them four very fake cases. Lied about it too. “Are these real cases?” “Yeah, those are real cases.” Because it’s not lying and it’s not looking up information because it just doesn’t know. So, anything you get does need to be edited for tone, brand, factual situations, and then also uniqueness.

So, well, I think you can speed up the process of content generation a bit, you still have to have a lot of human intervention and you also need a plan. It can’t come up with a plan for your SEO. It can help you do SEO a little bit faster, but if you’re bad at SEO, it’s just going to help you do bad SEO faster. You’re not going to be an amazing SEO because of it. You still have to prompt it to get the stuff back out of it. You still have to manipulate that content and how it’s going to work in a broader scheme or campaign. AI is not doing any of that, so we’ll be good. We’re fine. I would use it for content generation, and that’s about it.

Chris Dreyer:

1,000%. And I am in complete agreement of article spinner 2.0 is essentially what it is. It’s-

Kyle Roof:

And it’s great. I mean it’s impressive, but that’s all that it is.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, and you have to have the unique personalization, make it personal and all that. Otherwise, you could get into trouble for a variety of reasons. The unique aspects, everything to that degree. And I’m with you, I think all SEOs when ChatGPT came out were like, “Oh, shit. We’re done.” But then, you use it and it’s like, “Oh, okay, here are the limitations.” And then, you have to take a step back and say, “Well, Google’s not going to change. They’re going to optimize their algorithm, but they still have to sort everything on the web. And if they have to sort that and it can’t be done manually, the labor arbitrage there would be ridiculous compared to what they’re doing with software and just algorithms.”

Yeah, there’s just a lot of opportunity. I think too, the other thing that I think there’s going to be more emphasis on the, and just personally, just on the review side from a local SEO brick-and-mortar capacity, and we already see a lot of pressure there anyways. But it feels like there’s this monopoly when there’s only three results, not counting paid. And when the new algorithm, there’s a lot more Maps, a lot more options. Kind of reminds me of an Amazon shopping cart compared to a shopping scenario.

Kyle Roof:

That just means more opportunities for optimization.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Kyle for sharing his insights. Let’s go over the takeaways. Keep it simple. Make things easy for Google to understand. Place the keyword in the URL title tag, H1 and then paragraph tags.

Kyle Roof:

Can you imagine opening a book and you look at the table of contents and chapter four has a title, right? And then, you go to chapter four and you get there on the right page and the title is something different, close but different. Wouldn’t that be weird? Wouldn’t that throw you off a little bit? “Am I on the right page? Did I do this wrong?” That’s the same thing to me if you do a different page title, the title the search engines see, and then a different H1, the title that humans see.

Chris Dreyer:

Maximize organic rankings. Nail on-page SEO content and internal linking. Invest time into creating high-quality relevant content on your main target pages. Doing this well will help them rank better and faster. It can also reduce the number of external links you need.

Kyle Roof:

If you build out those pages and interlink them together and then they start to rank for terms, they start to get their own authority. They start to gain their own juice as they get keywords and impressions and clicks. And so, if you have proper interlinking with those supporting pages and shoot those up to your target page, that’s essentially a backlink that you built yourself on your own site.

Chris Dreyer:

Go all in. If your firm covers two or more practice areas, go deep on one area first, then build out the second practice area.

Kyle Roof:

If you have to choose, if you only have so many resources, I would go in depth on one before I moved on to the other. That’s the only thing that I would consider. So, as long as you can go deep and be comprehensive in both of them, you can do both on the same side, for sure.

Chris Dreyer:

All right, everybody. Hope we added a few more tools to your kit. For more about Kyle and Page Optimizer Pro, head on over to the show notes. While you’re there, lead me a five-star review. I’ll be forever grateful. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Catch you next time. I’m out.