Nathan Gotch:

The truth is when you land on a site and they do 500 things, you just kill conversions.

Chris Dreyer:

Don’t try to jam relevancy and change what it thinks that page is about. It’s just go with the flow baby. Optimize that title tag for that keyword that it wants to rank for.

Nathan Gotch:

This is a game of relevance. Relevance wins.

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, and for your clients and for you. This is Toolkit Tuesday on PIM, your weekly guide to staying sharp in the legal world. Let’s go.

If you want to grow your firm, SEO is as close as it gets to a non-negotiable, it gives you a competitive advantage by increasing your visibility, high search rankings, signal credibility and trust to the user. And SEO’s the most cost-effective form of digital marketing, so it has the biggest return on investment. Having a working knowledge of current SEO best practices is essential for your health of your firm. Today, my guest offers up a masterclass on how to do SEO the right way. Nathan Gotch, founder of Gotch SEO Academy has been teaching SEO since 2013. His seven figure business has helped students complete nearly 40,000 lessons, and he’s worked on hundreds of successful campaigns. He’s a good friend of mine and I’m excited to have him here. He last spoke on PIM back on episode 15. A lot has changed since 2020.

Guys, if you take one lesson, remember this word, relevancy, should guide nearly every SEO related decision. We dig into the five pillars of SEO, content, on-page, technical, local, and link building. And we cover the best practices for each one. This episode is a masterclass in SEO. I think you’ll enjoy it. Let’s get right to it. Here’s Nathan Gotch, founder of Gotch SEO Academy. What’s going on with content? What do the attorneys listening need to do to make their content be seen, to have the ability to be discovered?

Nathan Gotch:

I love this question because especially with personal injury attorneys because I obviously focus a lot on that in my training and helping other people in my training with this particular vertical. But when it comes to content on personal injury, I just see a lot of mistakes, unfortunately. And one of the biggest mistakes I see is that everyone understands the basic concept that we need to create service pages, we need to create very good service pages, and then we need to create supporting content for those service pages. But the challenge is on those service pages, there tends to be this idea that we just need to create a lot of content on these pages, right? Let’s just load them up. Let’s just put everything on here and hope that Google sees this as an authority. Well, Google’s been getting a lot better about that.

Before that used to really work well. I could really target any keyword and I could create a 10,000 word masterpiece, quote unquote, and just make it longer than everyone else. And that actually worked for a long time, and especially around 2015 I would just create these epic monstrosities and they would rank for everything. But now Google because their algorithms have changed so much, they’ve gotten really, really good at splintering off concepts and they want to see that granularity when it comes to targeting. So before you might be able to create one page for personal injury attorney St. Louis, let’s say, and you could also maybe rank for car accident lawyers, St. Louis, medical malpractice lawyers, St. Louis, you could capture it all on one page. Those days are long gone, long gone, because it’s really the most important part of this equation at the bottom of the funnel.

Chris Dreyer:

I agree this transactions, that’s where the consumers are going to make these hiring decisions. And what’s interesting, and I’m going to talk about myself just from, we have the SEO for lawyers guide, and you’ve seen the iterations I’ve had. And what’s interesting is I think I’m ranking like number three right now, and I’ve got that monstrosity. And in the past it was a little bit shorter and ranked number one, and it’s just I think maybe jamming too much. I think the situation where maybe users don’t scroll down far enough or they just lose interest if there’s not that really good hook to keep them on the page, similar to YouTube strategies in that hook. So I agree.

I do want to ask you one question though. The Google business profile destination URL, the page that you choose to rank to show in the map pack, what do you think about that page? Because typically that’s the only page, the only URL that Google’s, that’s the destination you were all for maps. So do you load it up with all the practice areas? What’s your thought on that page?

Nathan Gotch:

That part’s a little tricky, but my philosophy is always go back to intent. I always want to think about intent. So yes, you could load up that page and try to capture, basically to lack of a better word, manipulate the local pack, to try to capture as much ground there. But even then, even in the local pack these days, man, it’s gotten so granular. If you’re outside of that core location, if you’re addressed, let’s say we’re targeting St. Louis and your address is in Clayton, it’s going to be an uphill battle. And that’s a relatively new thing, I’d say the last year and a half, two years, it’s really starting to get really tight on that. And before I could be in Clayton and I could rank in St. Louis in the local pack, just because of the service area. These days, very, very difficult. I think when you look at the local pack ranking factors like location, location, location is absolutely by far the most important thing. It’s not even close.

Chris Dreyer:

I worked with a firm, Greene Broillet & Wheeler in California, and they had a Santa Monica office and wanted to rank in Los Angeles, and it’s just like-

Nathan Gotch:

No way. So let’s go back to the service area page just because for personal, really any local business, those are the money makers. And unfortunately most people, they try to mix intents. That’s the issue. We have bottom, let’s call it investigative intent, which really just means what is the searcher thinking about when they search that query. So if someone searches personal injury lawyer in St. Louis, they haven’t necessarily decided who they’re going to work with yet, they’re doing their research, they’re doing their due diligence. And so at that point if someone lands on your page, we need to make it abundantly clear that we are the personal injury lawyer that they should use.

And so that’s when case studies come in, that’s when frequently asked questions come in, specifically to the lawyer. Case studies, results, anything that can really push that person deeper into that sales funnel. And that’s really what’s going to make the difference on those pages. So for me, these days when I create a service page, I’m thinking about how do I convert this person. Truthfully, Google is actually tracking a lot of this as well. Google’s tracking how someone interacts with that page. And so we don’t necessarily want the searcher to spend a lot of time on the page. We’re not trying to do that. We want them to convert as soon as possible. We want to see a goal completion or even at least a second page visit, some user metric that’s positive ultimately.

Chris Dreyer:

I couldn’t agree more. Do you think that why us, all the validation of their experience and why the choice plays into E-E-A-T, the expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness?

Nathan Gotch:

Absolutely. And for me these days, the E-E-A-T standard is so good because it forces you to create better pages. Although it’s not technically every variable’s not programmed into the algorithm, it’s really designed for the manual reviewers. It’s still the standard that we should try to go for. And it’s also just from a non SEO perspective, thinking about just conversions, I always think about what the service page is. If I was going to create a page for PPC, what would I do? Would I create a 5,000 word article and waste my money getting them to read this, the history of personal injury on my service page? It just doesn’t make sense at all. So for me, when I think about it, I’m trying to create the best service page that’s going to convert.

And then to support that page, now we’re going to start talking about how do we build topic authority locally to support that local page. One of the biggest issues I see is first of all, service page is usually unstructured, right? That’s problem number one. Problem number two is-

Chris Dreyer:

You mean personal injury lawyers statistics and auto access statistics shouldn’t be on the page you’re trying to convert?

Nathan Gotch:

Possibly. The other part is the supporting content. So for a lot of personal injury lawyers for a long time it would be, what is personal injury or what is a car accident? It’s like, okay, we’re on the right track, but we’re not quite there. So the problem is I see, and I see this often, it will be focusing on the topic of personal injury. So that’s good. You’ve got about 50% of the way there. But the problem is you’re targeting national queries. You’re not actually building the topic authority and that local authority. So we have to combine those together. And so what I try to do is I try to find ideas that are specific to that location that we’re going after.

So instead of personal injury statistics, no, I want to see how many car accidents are there in Clayton in February on average. I want to get so specific on that front that now not only does that help build real topic authority locally, but it also functions as link bait too.

Chris Dreyer:

How likely is your car to be hit in Soulard on a hit-and-run?

Nathan Gotch:

Correct. Very high. So that’s where my mind goes with it. I want to make sure that we have both of those things together. And then one other nuance on that is sometimes I’ll give that recommendation and people will start to do that, but what they’ll do is they’ll take an idea that doesn’t have variance on the local level. So for example, what is creatine? Okay, I’ll see some people be like, what is creatine in St. Louis? Okay, that’s not what I’m talking about, because there’s no variance in California versus New York on that topic. So what we want to do is we want to find variance specific to that location. Personal injury is so easy. There’s so many things you could do. Medical malpractice specific to this area as far as the settlement amounts, right? Settlement amounts in St. Louis versus Los Angeles are probably radically different I would imagine.

Chris Dreyer:

Completely agree about those nuances and those things to make your content more specific, even to the point where we’re adding neighborhoods to our pages. So like that St. Louis page, we’ll have Clayton mentioned, we’ll have Soulard, we’ll have Central West End, just to make some super, super relevant because you’re not going to make a dedicated page for Central West End, right?

Nathan Gotch:

No, no.

Chris Dreyer:

I completely agree with all that. And I think you even touched on this in regards to AI. It may have been in one of your videos in terms of keyword research, that’s where AI looks at a topic and spits out all these things, but there’s not enough context and it’s really challenging to just use it for your sole source of topics.

Nathan Gotch:

Yes, especially on the local level too, because nationally, as far as broad topics, AI can spit out some pretty good stuff. It’s got enough data to be able to spit out some decent topics, but when you start getting to those granular levels. The example I use is if you tried to write an article about best Mexican restaurants in town and country, try doing that in AI and see what happens. It will pull restaurants that are in downtown St. Louis into the top five, and there aren’t many Mexican restaurants in town and country. It just doesn’t have the available data to really do that. And actually funny thing is, Google actually doesn’t have it either. And that’s where the advantage comes, because if you have that local understanding, you can create such granular content and be the first to create that granular content to give to Google, which means you dominate.

Chris Dreyer:

So on-page and impact, Google’s now choosing your title tags, they’re ripping that H1 and throwing into the title tags. Where does on on-page SEO optimization fit in, its benefits? What are the big 80, 20 impact in regards to this area?

Nathan Gotch:

I think you got to nail the basics, right? So it always starts URL. So URL needs to have the actual keyword in it. And I’ve seen some personal injury lawyers who tend to just get really intense with the URL structures. I’ve seen some URL structures that are bigger than my screen. So all of those folders, all of that intense, you want to call it architecture, even though technically that’s not architecture, it’s not really necessary. So for me, I’m pretty extreme about this. I love just going straight off the root. I know that’s not for everyone, but for me, I just like going right off the root, because I know that architecture is not based on URL structure, it’s based on internal linking.

So that’s why there’s a little nuance there. A lot of people think that, and it’s not. Now I will say the only effect it can have is automatically putting breadcrumbs onto the page. That can help when you have folders. That’s the one benefit, but you can still also do that, even with right off the root.

Chris Dreyer:

I will say this as an SEO specialist that does this, and you do this, sometimes you get these juggernaut sites and the amount of time that would take to go in and manually do the proper internal contextual links that are justified anchors versus maybe, hey, maybe we create subdirectory folders and maybe we have some custom siloed sidebars. It’s that big, just boom, here’s the theme, here’s the category. I don’t think that’s best. I do think doing it on the one-to-one is better, but sometimes when you get pages, sites are just thousands upon thousands of pages, it’s really challenging to do that.

Nathan Gotch:

It’s not like if you do folders that you’re going to automatically not perform well. It’s more of just like, it really comes down to your personal preference at a certain point. But for me, when it comes to URL, I want to get the keywords in the URL. However you slice and dice that, that’s fine. We want to get the primary keyword. So if it’s a St. Louis personal injury lawyer, I want to see St. Louis personal injury lawyer in that URL, no matter what. I don’t want to just see St. Louis personal injury. I don’t want to see just personal injury STL. We have to always remember that Google is like a child. We have to treat it like a child and we have to educate it and we have to give it the correct information. And anything that’s ambiguous, it’s going to cause problems.

And I can tell you, I’ve seen some personal injury campaigns, let’s just say friends of ours who have personal injury lawyers, it will be website.com/personal injury. Okay? Never going to rank in St. Louis for that. Just never going to happen, because this is a game of relevance. Google is a relevance machine and it’s always going to pick whatever’s most relevant. And we can talk about, just to prove this, I’ve been testing this across the board, but I created a test site in Houston. All right? Just to prove a point, just trying to prove a point. I just registered a business in the fire protection business, like vertical. I have no experience, right? I have no qualifications. I’ve got no E-E-A-T, quote unquote, I’ve got nothing.

I get an exact match domain just to proved that if I get an exact match domain, I’ll dominate the local pack. About two weeks after verifying that, I’m number two. No reviews, no E-E-A-T, nothing, just because of pure hyper relevance, exact match to that keyword. And I’ve proven this. Again, if you look up St. Louis SEO consultant, okay, you’ll find stlouisseoconsultant.com. And this is my site. It’s one page. I didn’t build 1,000 assets to build topic authority and, no, hyper folks-

Chris Dreyer:

But Nathan, Google cracked down on the EMDs.

Nathan Gotch:

Right, of course.

Chris Dreyer:

So let’s talk about this a little bit. So these EMDs. Has time shifted? What’s your thoughts? Are you more on the, hey, very specific sites, maybe very narrow focused sites versus the behemoth? Or have you shifted there a little bit? I will say this, not to give you an answer. When I get a firm that wants to target say, criminal defense and personal injury, because of local and because you can only choose one primary category, you can choose personal injury attorney or you can choose criminal justice attorney. I tend to split those. But just in general, where do you sit on these behemoth sites versus the niche narrow, maybe EMD type sites?

Nathan Gotch:

Honestly, I’m all about the narrow. I’m all about the specific. And honestly, it is an SEO decision, but it actually is a conversion decision as well. Because the truth is when you land on a site and they do 500 things, you just kill conversions. You’re a jack of all trades to the user. Jack of all trades is a master and none. So that’s what I see. And you’d understand this better than anyone by the way, but that initial feeling, they need to know what you do, they need to know that you’re the one to solve their problem. But when you do medical malpractice and personal injury and car accidents and whatever else, criminal lawyer, it’s like there’s so much nuance in each of those disciplines.

What I would rather see is you land on this website and they just do immigration law. That is all they do. Now, of course, on the backend, maybe of course they offer other stuff, but on the front end for Google and for the user, that’s what they do.

Chris Dreyer:

I got actual examples of this too, right? I’ve got PI attorneys want to rank for torts. The moment you start doing it, it’s like, Google now recognizes your site in the drug and pharmaceutical space and maybe deemphasizes injury and accident. I have several examples of this, major major PI firms. And I’m in this too. So we work with Dolman Law Group and they do torts and PI, and it’s like, maybe we should move torts over to a lawsuit themed website, because sometimes these torts aren’t evergreen. For the tort people listening, Zantac, what do you do with all your Zantac content? And it’s ranking, it’s driving traffic and it’s got all these links. You can 301 it. And now Google’s telling you not to delete content. There’s some mixed messages there. I’m in complete agreement

Nathan Gotch:

I’ve just seen it over and over and actually when I have these conversations, people are like, well, we’re going to spread our resources too thin and we want to make sure we’re isolating all the authority on this site. Those are all fair arguments, by the way, all valid arguments. But the thing is, when you splinter off and you go granular, you become the focus. Man, it actually is much easier to rank. So that’s what they don’t consider, is it’s not just like, it is literally easier when you think about it logistically, not only from just how you’re going to go about it even becomes easier, operationally, it becomes easier for me just to write content about immigration law. As opposed, okay, now we got to write content on personal injury, immigration, torts. You just start to sit on your hands because you’re like, I can’t do all that.

Chris Dreyer:

And my God, my God, immigration law, can you imagine just because of how often those laws change and the amount of content you have to update specific to that area,

Nathan Gotch:

But URL structure, keyword in the URL structure, and these are just the basics. You just got to nail these basics and then you can get into some advanced stuff. But basics, URL, title, meta description, H1 tag, first sentence. If you get that, you’re better than 80% of sites. You’re not going to beat me, but you’ll beat most people. Okay? That will get you where you need to go. Now of course for me, I don’t even think about on-page SEO before I’ve handled the content side and that content side’s got to be nailed. And then we think about, okay, how do we structure this properly? After that, then we can start getting into the little more advanced stuff. I’ll tell you in my agency or just when I work on any campaign, minimum 95 score on Grammarly, I know it seems weird, but I’ve just found once you get up to 95, at least when I’m thinking about my rankings, I’m thinking about it’s a process of elimination.

So I hit 95, I know that’s not a problem anymore. It doesn’t mean that it’s a huge ranking factor, it just means I know that grammar and spelling is not a problem anymore. It’s not something that could be holding back. You’d be surprised, I run so many pages through, there’d be a 65, 70. The amount of mistakes I see is just unreal. And now we know with ChatGPT, you can take a block of text, run it through ChatGPT and it will tell you what is wrong. So if it can do that, Google can do that.

Chris Dreyer:

On the content side, LinkedIn just released an AI based optimizer, and I was like, I really like my description from my profile and it rewrote and it was way better, way better grammar. I was like, it’s not that mine was incorrect, it was just better when it rewrote it.

Nathan Gotch:

And Grammarly does that now too, by the way. So you can have them rewrite things with AI. It’s just everywhere now at this point. But yeah, so URL, title, all the basic spots, you run it through Grammarly, make sure it’s clean. I get a little more crazy. I actually run it through Hemingway first. So not necessary, that’s overkill. But if you’re trying to create the absolute best copy, it’s the way to do it. So you write your initial draught, you run it through Hemingway, you get it really clean and readable, then you run it through Grammarly. So now at this point you have a very clean piece of content, you know that for a fact. And then the next phase is to run it through some on-page SEO tool. So that could be Surfer, that could be whichever one you choose.

Just so we can start to look at the NLP side of this, which is natural language processing for those that aren’t familiar with it. But basically what it means at a very high level is Google looks at a topic and tries to find what are the relevant ideas to that topic. And it’s also how Google’s able to understand pages. Google’s not a person, so it’s using algorithms to understand, it’s pulling ideas to understand the relevance. That’s it. What we’re doing with NLP is we’re looking at the top 10 that’s already ranking, and we’re pulling those ideas or extracting those ideas out and saying, oh,, I see they talked about torts here, or they talked about this and we didn’t. So now we need to add a section on the page to make sure that we’re the most relevant option for this keyword.

That’s where this gets a little advanced. It can happen organically and naturally just by writing normally and understanding the vertical, but it is good to run it through and make sure you are hitting those key things.

Chris Dreyer:

Absolutely. I’ve even from a trust perspective, even tried to incorporate some of the Wikipedia type information because we know that Google uses Wikipedia as a trusted source. And I’ve seen that a lot of times it pulls those variations for the rich snippet and those zero click scenarios. Just real quick on title tags, right? Title tags have a huge impact. Where do you stand on say, balancing maybe the keyword insertion versus maybe capturing the click with scarcity or urgency or superlative or just some other factor?

Nathan Gotch:

Let me start with what not to do and then we’ll talk about what to do, because I see this often, so I just want to make sure I get this out of the way right away. Do not put your phone number in the title tag. Do not put your phone number in the title tag. That will wreck your performance, I guarantee it. Because, okay, so it’s like a balancing act, right? So putting your phone number in the title tag could increase conversion technically. Right?

Chris Dreyer:

Temporarily.

Nathan Gotch:

Yes, temporarily. But when Google sees that your CTR isn’t aligned with the benchmark for that keyword, you’re below the benchmark for that particular CTR you’re going to drop, right? And it’s important nuance too. Google isn’t looking, doesn’t have a general, like this is what your CTR should be. It’s measuring CTR based on that one result, that one set of results. So you want to be in the range of what is expected. And if you’re way outside of that range, that’s like the invisible force, right? It’s just CTR, pure CTR. So don’t put your phone number in the title tag or in the meta description, just a bad idea. Next is you’ve got to try to find that balance between really getting the perfect keyword in there, the exact variation that you’re going for, and adding some clickable elements into it. Some copywriting conventions, typically some offer that’s real concise, free, works very well. Okay?

Free, you could use social proof of course. That’s another thing. Social proof free, just some sort of the basic psychological levers that you can pull. I think it’s an important balance. But the other part too is we test using seotesting.com. We’ll run split tests and we’ll see which one’s generating more CTR, and then we just keep continually trying to beat the winner, just keep trying to beat the winner. And I just recently did one, where I sometimes I’ll do a full re-upgrade, so basically start from scratch and rebuild, but I had one, actually I got SEO that does SEO require coding, and that was just the title. Just, does SEO require coding? And that is the keyword phrase. But I was like, okay, this isn’t really getting the CTR I think it should. It’s getting around 2%.

So I decided to completely change the angle. And I did, does SEO require coding? I asked 894 experts to find out. So I added, first of all numbers work well too, by the way. So adding numbers in there. But adding something that makes me be the Seth Godin, Purple Cow in the search results. Because you’ll see often, right now if we went and looked at Chicago personal injury lawyer or take any city, everyone is the same except for maybe yours, but almost everyone you’ll see where you’re not operating is going to be, they all look the same. And so you’re not going to get good CTR if you’re not standing out. You need to do something to get the eyeballs to stop and click.

Chris Dreyer:

I agree. And on the back to the torts and the things that are constantly being updated, I found putting the date of the last update really effective, the numbers most certainly, and those are just phenomenal tips.

Nathan Gotch:

You mentioned how the algorithm tends to, seems like it almost changes when you start to add another topic into your site. All of a sudden now you’ve been almost discredited as the topic authority. And I’ve actually found, because I do a lot of testing, not just in Google, but I do testing on Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube. I’m always testing algorithms just in general. What I found is it’s a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing when you pick a niche and you become that topic of authority. It’s a curse when you try to get out of it. Because what happens is when that algorithm, no matter what algorithm we’re talking about, when it decides that you are the authority in that one thing, it’s very hard to get out of it, algorithmically. Actually even from a user perspective too, right? People they’re weird like that.

For example, Brian Dean, we all know Brian Dean, love the guy genius. Go to his YouTube channel, look at his videos where he talks about SEO, look at his views. Look at his videos where he doesn’t talk about SEO and look at his views. Okay? You’re going to see a very big difference. Okay? Does this mean that Brian doesn’t have any extensive amount of knowledge building multiple seven figure businesses? No, that’s not what it is. But it’s that the algorithm and his audience is used to that. That’s what he does. So now that he’s tried to step out, you’re going to get pushed down a little bit. And so I’m not saying this specifically target, Brian, but I’m just saying as an example, it’s really, really difficult to get out of it.

And so when it comes to Google as well, once you have become the personal injury lawyer in St. Louis and now you want to do immigration law, the algorithm’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, you don’t have any authority in this space. Even if you on paper do, to the algorithm you don’t.

Chris Dreyer:

It makes it challenging where I found doing this at scale for a client where sometimes you want to have the destination URL for your GBP be an internal page. Sometimes they have multiple locations. Sometimes you want it to be the homepage. And what I found is, and we have a logic, an if then scenario that we analyze, is like what does Google want the page or think the page should rank for? Because sometimes the homepage wants to rank for that keyword, and it’s like, don’t fight Google, don’t try to jam relevancy and change what it thinks that page is about. It’s just go with the flow baby, optimize that title PAG for that page, that keyword that it wants to rank for, instead of trying to force the internal and change the narrative with all your external links and related content and internal links. Just all of that is just a major, major issue. It’s a major challenge.

Nathan Gotch:

Well, I’m glad you brought that up because I just had this discussion recently with one of the members of the academy. And they have a client who’s in pest control and they’re in Cincinnati, but they want to expand, right? They want to expand out Cincinnati. So classic thing, let’s build out dedicated pages for Cincinnati and whatever. So they did that and they’re like, why is this internal page just not ranking? We’ve done everything. We’ve driven links to it. We under optimized the homepage, and despite that, despite being under optimized, the homepage continues to rank. And that’s because Google has said that you are now the Cincinnati pest control company. You are not going to not be that. That is what you are.

So it’s just once that decision has been made, it’s very hard to break out of it. And so for me at this point, that’s why I was talking about the hyper-focused strategy, and I know it’s more difficult, it’s more logistically challenging. You have to create a lot of more unique content and new pages and new site. There’s just a lot that goes into it. But the point is, if you’re going to be a Cincinnati pest control company, be a Cincinnati pest control company, that’s it. And then if you want to go in Chicago, create a separate site for Chicago, it’s how it has to be done. People are trying to squeeze everything out and trying to get the most with the least amount of effort, and that’s just not the way it’s going to work.

Chris Dreyer:

Let me do the counter argument, and this is fun because I can play both sides. Site A has 900 referring domains with a lot of equity, a lot of authority, and if I start a new site, I’ve got no backlinks. So does that change your opinion on this decision?

Nathan Gotch:

Not at all. Because for me, I think about if this is a game of relevance, relevance wins. Relevance wins. Because even then, let’s say you are, okay, we have our let’s call it our big firm site, our big authority site. It’s got 1,000 referring domains. The referring domains are all over the place. They’re huffing in post and entrepreneur and some may have legal sites, but what I do is I go and create a separate site and it’s just immigration law, Losangelesimmigrationlawyer.com or LA whatever. You could do LA. But then what I do is every single piece of content that’s gets created is about Los Angeles immigration law. Then every link that I get is going to be from immigration based websites, immigration law based websites, not just your general stuff.

So yes, that site may have less links. Yes, it may be newer, but I guarantee with enough time it will crush that firm. I don’t guarantee very often, but if you execute that well, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll crush a general firm. It’s just a fact. I’ve seen it too often.

Chris Dreyer:

And if you look at a lot of the search results, you still see those EMDs, you still see those hyper-relevant. And then also that makes a challenge from you do an Ahrefs batch analysis, competitive analysis, you’re like, why is this site not ranking? It has 20 referring domains. Oh, the domain is San Diego immigration lawyer, and that’s what it’s going after.

Nathan Gotch:

And they won’t even have an SSL certificate. It won’t even be a responsive design, and they’re crushing you because relevance wins. Relevance always wins. So from that principle, if you approach your campaign from that principle always, you’re going to start to make a lot different decisions. Instead of how can we get more links? That’s how most campaigns go. How can we get more links instead of thinking about, well, are we the most relevant result for this keyword?

Chris Dreyer:

I like it. I like it. Back to local. What about things like engagement, like those requests for driving directions and maybe external images uploaded? To me, I always find it interesting when I’m working with a client and they’re like, yeah, I’ve got this office and I’m paying $200 a month in somebody’s basement just so I can have a Google business profile. I’m like, look, do you think the consumer’s not going to check and see that the office is in the basement or oh, it’s in this other PI firm’s office? How do you expect that to rank? Yes, you’re an approved Google business profile. That’s never going to rank. Where do you stand on all of this in terms of local?

Nathan Gotch:

Proximity, as you mentioned, is number one, hands down. When I have this discussion with other SEOs, they’ll say, yeah, our client hasn’t addressed in St. Louis, but we’re struggling to rank in the local pack in Ballwin. And I’m like, yeah, you’re not going to rank in the local pack in Ballwin because Google wants to show Ballwin personal injury lawyers. Although there’s about a 20-mile ish difference in distance, that’s a very different world. Ballwin is very different than St. Louis, very different. And Google wants to give you the most relevant results. So when we approach that perspective, like Google wants to give the most relevant result, that’s why you’re going to struggle.

And so that’s the first thing is location. So if you want to go after a second location, you better get an address there. Simple as that. There’s no workaround on that. You might as well just invest, right? Invest in that location. So that’s the first part is, and I’m talking purely local pack by the way. So local pack. Number two reviews. Easily reviews by far. Right? Reviews are the big number two heavy hitter. If you don’t have reviews or you have bad reviews, you’re dead in the water.

Chris Dreyer:

What about the context of the reviews? You got some PI attorneys that are doing the grassroots campaigns and they’re doing some type of giveaway to get reviews. To be transparent, I don’t know how many consumers are going to write a very detailed review about their case. They’re going to say they had a good experience with the attorney. Do you think that’s where manipulation comes into play? Maybe people buying reviews or being coached up on what to say? I had this great experience with so-and-so who was the best St. Louis car accident attorney in my auto collision. He handled it with excellent care. Where do you think that falls in terms of relevancy and the context of the review?

Nathan Gotch:

Yeah, I think it’s a dangerous thing to try to coach people into reviews because they just seem unnatural. And Google’s filters are really good at catching stuff that just seems a little too good. I think it’s wise to do things, to get reviews, even though technically it’s against the guidelines, you’re not supposed to incentivize for reviews. So technically you shouldn’t do that. So whenever I say when I’m asking for reviews, I say, so if you guys like the program, please leave me a review. Let’s just say if you leave review, there might be a possibility that you could get a free consultation. I don’t know if that’s actually going to happen, but if you leave the review, we’ll see what happens. So there’s ways to do it and incentives work. It’s difficult in that regard.

Chris Dreyer:

I don’t know how Google cracks down on this. Every time I go to the dental office and I do a teeth cleaning, the first thing I’m doing when I’m paying at the counter is I see the t-shirts behind the counter with the sign that says, leave me a review, get a t-shirt. And you see these with the swag shops and the PI, pick out your swag and leave them a review. I don’t know how they crack down on that. It’d be really challenging.

Nathan Gotch:

They don’t. They can’t.

Chris Dreyer:

Links. Where are we at in links? Give me the 80, 20 on links on your opinion.

Nathan Gotch:

So it flows in with the local pack conversation. So proximity, reviews, and then after that it’s basically all the other ranking variables. When people build links, they are thinking about it from the wrong perspective. They’re thinking about the fact, okay, we need links. And what they do is they go, okay, well let’s go to this vendor or let’s start doing this outreach. Let’s go push for links. That’s not necessarily the problem. The problem is that they’re just doing things in the wrong order. And the right thing to do is think about instead of how can we get links right now, think about what can we create that deserves links? And if you don’t do that, then you’re wasting your time because what’s going to happen, I’ve seen this happen so many times, someone creates a good piece of SEO content, right?

Everyone says their content’s good, so they create a good piece of SEO content, they prop it up with artificial link building, like a lot of agencies do. Prop it up, it hits number one, but they’ve spent zero time making that content good. They’ve spent zero time thinking about the experience there, and now they’re getting clicks on that page. And now you’ve gone through, you’re in probation now. This is what people don’t realize, that initial ranking phase is just phase one, because once you get to page one, now you’re in probation and whatever happens as far as users engaging on that page will determine where you’re going to end up. And what will happen is when you prop up a, let’s call it a mediocre piece of content, there’s not good signals on it. It doesn’t get shared. It doesn’t get natural links, it doesn’t get good engagement.

No one’s bookmarking it, no one’s doing anything with it, nothing good is happening. And Google says, wow, that is weird. That’s a disconnect. Why does this page have 100 referring domains, but no one likes it? So you’re gone. That’s the way it is. Start with the content. And the beauty of it now is with ChatGPT, you can really come up with some good link bait ideas. I’ve really been using that a lot for really difficult niches. We have a paving client, not easy to come up with link bait for a paving client. Okay? It’s very difficult. But I ran that through chat J B T, and it came up with some beautiful ideas. It was like how the Houston weather affects paving in the summer. And I was like, that’s a genius idea. That is a beautiful piece of link bait, because there’s no one that’s producing that type of stuff.

So that’s what I think about, is we need to create a pool, like a nice pool, a nice database of linkable assets, whether that’s three or five or 10, depends on the resources that the client has. But the point is creating something that you believe people would actually want to link to and then going out and promoting it and maybe using link vendors and whatever else.

Chris Dreyer:

It’s like you can’t look at a link just from the authority perspective, that game’s over. All these vendors buying expired domains and there’s no relevancy. And so that’s even from an external factor looking, it comes back to content. If the site has good content and it’s curated, then it could be sourced, the link could have authority, and if it’s not, then it doesn’t even matter if you have a good article, that link’s going to count for nothing. So it goes hand in hand with content on both ways, in my opinion.

Nathan Gotch:

But it also, just to go on the point, you said that it used to be like, okay, does this site have good DR, let’s go get that link, right? Now then people added, oh, well, if it has organic traffic, it’s a good link. Now that’s being manipulated by the way, because what they do is they buy an expired domain and then they rank for a bunch of junk keywords, and then they drive bot clicks to those keywords, which increases the search volume in the tools. And if you don’t do your due diligence and you don’t look at what they’re actually ranking for, it’s going to look like a good opportunity. Whoa, look at all this organic traffic. But then you go and you look at their keywords, just take one extra second to look at the keywords that they’re ranking for. It’ll be like 69743 ABC. That will be the keyword they’re ranking for, but it will say it has 1,000 search volume.

But that’s because they’re using bots to manipulate Ahrefs and Semrush. People don’t realize these link vendors play chess. They are playing chess to manipulate you to think you’re getting good links. And I’m not going to name names, but I’m just saying it’s more frequent than you would believe. So that’s why having that due diligence, number one is relevance. We’ve got to get relevant links. I don’t even care about DR or organic, I just care about relevance. If I’m an SEO business, I’m talking to you, you’re an SEO business. I want to get links from you. You’re an SEO agency. Not super complicated, but people really, they get so focused on how many links can we get, quantity of links that we can get every single month.

Instead of thinking about, if I could only get 100 backlinks ever, what sites would I pick? Seriously. The Warren Buffet method, right? You only have 10 companies you could ever invest in. You’d do it a lot differently. You wouldn’t be thinking about how many links can we get? You’d be thinking about, no, how do I build a relationship with Joe who’s the owner of this blog who I would love to get a link on. That may take six months. That could take a year, but it’s a different mentality.

Chris Dreyer:

I think Warren says something like, come up with a list of 20 ideas for your business to move it forward and organize them and one to 20 and then just remove the bottom 15 and never look at those again. Do the top five. Right?

Nathan Gotch:

Seriously

Chris Dreyer:

Prioritisation. This is great. I want to talk just briefly about, so Gotch SEO Academy. We are clients. I work with you personally. The one thing I can say that’s different about your course compared to many of the other SEO courses is in how you keep engagement. You have a very high completion rate. Talk to me just briefly about Gotch SEO Academy and how you are intentional about really helping people improve their knowledge and finish the course and not just buy it and then go off and never utilise it.

Nathan Gotch:

Well, this actually came from me making some mistakes obviously. That’s basically the way I learn. I just make a lot of mistakes and then I try to fix those mistakes and try not to make them again. So for a while though, I used to do the traditional launch model. I’d open up my training and the people have a week to join, and then I would shut it down. Number one, that was extremely stressful, because I had to bring in revenue in one week and come to find out 80% of sales would come on the last day, literally five days, 80% of sales on the last day. So think about how stressful that is going into the last day like, if I don’t close some deals today, I’m going to be in trouble. So from a psychological perspective, scarcity works very well. Urgency, scarcity, deadlines, they work. It is human behavior. We’re programmed to respond to it.

I was selling the training for about $1,000. So you would come, it was basically like you buy the training, you come into the course and good luck. That was it. And that’s actually how most courses are. Most courses are you buy the course, you get thrown in there and wish you the best of luck. I hope you can do it. I hope you can figure it out. Oh yeah, we got a Facebook group, but the person who created the course isn’t actually there. And sorry, but we have a refund policy, so go for it. So what I found is with that model, I only had about 15% completion rate.

Chris Dreyer:

And that’s higher than the average.

Nathan Gotch:

It is higher than average, yes. Because it’s about 10% I think average for large online courses. But when I found that out, I didn’t know that right away, but I started digging into my analytics and I’m like, are you kidding me? I couldn’t believe there were people that bought the training that never even logged in. I was like, how is this even possible? And what I realized is that there’s a few issues. Number one, when people buy training and education in general, they feel like they’ve done something. When you buy training, you get that endorphin rush and it makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something, but you’ve accomplished nothing. All you’ve done is just bought something. You haven’t done anything. You haven’t used it. You haven’t gotten any better. But it feels that way, because it’s like, oh, well, I made that decision.

Chris Dreyer:

I’ve invested in myself.

Nathan Gotch:

I’ve invested in myself. But no, you haven’t. You just bought something. So when I realized that, I’m like, okay, how do I get people to, first of all, how do I get them to log in? That’s a very important thing. If they don’t log in, I have no chance. And the thing is, this affects me. This affects my business if they don’t go through and go through the training and get the result. It actually hurts my reputation. And it’s not technically my fault, I’ve given them what they need, but I need to make sure that I’ve given them, I’ve done everything in my power to make sure that they go through the training. So what I did is instead of doing just good luck type of training, I changed the whole business model. I literally changed everything. And I found a partner, his name is Simon, and he does all the enrollment calls now at this point. He’s a genius salesperson.

But anyway, he used to work with a different SEO training program, and they did high ticket training. So a little bit different thing. And funny thing is the person who ran that program, what he did is every single week he would do two coaching sessions. Every Tuesday, every Thursday, he would get on a call with every member and answer every single question they had. And when I found that, I was like, wow, that’s really interesting. And yes, it’s a very big commitment as well. I think he had done almost 500 of these calls. So what I did is like, all right, well, if I’m going to have to jump on twice a week calls, I’m going to have to increase the price of this thing. I can’t just do this. So what we did is we increased the price and made it a much bigger investment, and I upgraded the training, made it much more focused really for agency.

So it’s more streamlined, has SOPs and templates, and it’s really designed for that. And then I added the coaching component. And I cannot express how much of a difference it made. It is like night and day, because now I’ve done, I think I’ve done 240 of these coaching sessions now at this point. It’s pretty crazy even saying that. But every Tuesday and Thursday I get on these calls for an hour long or so, and I don’t stop until I answer every single person’s question.

Chris Dreyer:

Amazing.

Nathan Gotch:

And what happened is my NPS on my old training was like, I think it was like eight point something. It wasn’t bad. It was fine. Now it’s a 9.7. 9.7 NPS score. But the best part is, going back to the original question, which is the completion rate is 80%. 80%

Chris Dreyer:

Unreal. That’s amazing.

Nathan Gotch:

And there’s a lot of psychology behind this, but a lot of it is actually quite simple. It’s the fact that I show up. If I show up, makes them want to show up.

Chris Dreyer:

You’ve committed.

Nathan Gotch:

There’s a level of accountability. If I’m showing up, you got to show up too. And I don’t say that to them, I’m like, you got to show up. I’m not giving them motivational speech. But it’s more of just like it’s watch what I do. This is what we need to be doing. We need to be showing up, we need to be doing the work. And it’s just leading by example.

Chris Dreyer:

One thing too that I like about that, is what you’re helping them do is think strategically and analyze a little bit higher and synthesize and pull it all together for them specifically, which I love. And I think the coaching component does that quite well.

Nathan Gotch:

It’s just been a night and day difference. We get 30, 40 people on these coaching calls and get this, on the coaching calls, if you looked at my YouTube data, when I publish a 30-minute video, if I publish 30 minute video, my average watch time is five to six minutes. So that means most people are falling off. A lot of people. And I have good engagement on my videos. On my coaching calls, the retention is like 90% and above. If I start with 30, maybe there’ll be like 28 at the end.

Chris Dreyer:

Wow, that’s amazing.

Nathan Gotch:

And that’s just because they just know what other situation do you get to talk to the expert directly to help you.

Chris Dreyer:

And you’re going to learn from the other individual’s questions too.

Nathan Gotch:

Exactly.

Chris Dreyer:

Like, oh, that’s a good question. Let me hear this out. Nathan, this has been amazing. I highly encourage anyone that wants to improve their SEO acumen to check out your YouTube channel to go to Gotch SEO Academy. But I’m going to give the ball to you. Where can people go to learn more and connect with you?

Nathan Gotch:

You can go to gotchseo.com. I have free training there. You can learn about the academy. But of course, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, I’m all over the place. I publish pretty frequently and I try to make every single place where I publish a different experience. I try not to publish the same thing across all the channels because I got different people across different channels, so I’m trying to give contextually relevant to that particular audience. But YouTube’s a good place. You can basically learn how to do SEO completely for free on my YouTube channel. If you want to take it to the next level, obviously my training is the solution.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Nathan for sharing his insights today. Let’s go over the takeaways. Relevancy wins Google. Google caress most about giving users the most relevant results for what they’re looking for. This core concept is found in every aspect of SEO. We’re going to spend some time on this, so settle in. Create content tailored to match user intent, write about issues important to your firm’s region, and build authority on those local topics.

Nathan Gotch:

So the problem is like I see, and I see this often, it will be focusing on the topic of personal injury. So that’s good. You’ve got about 50% out of the way there. But the problem is you’re targeting national queries. You’re not actually building the top authority and that local authority. So we have to combine those together. And so what I try to do is I try to find ideas that are specific to that location that we’re going after. How many car accidents are there in Clayton in February on average? I want to get so specific on that front that now not only does that help build real topic authority locally, but it also functions as link bait too.

Chris Dreyer:

Your firm’s physical location should be near the audience you’re targeting.

Nathan Gotch:

I created a test site in Houston, all right? Just to prove a point, just trying to prove a point. I just registered a business in the fire protection business, vertical. I have no experience, I have no qualifications. I’ve got no E-E-A-T, quote unquote, I’ve got nothing. I get an exact match domain just to prove that if I get an exact match domain I’ll dominate in the local pack. About two weeks after verifying that I’m number two, just because of pure hyper relevance, exact match to that keyword.

Chris Dreyer:

Google wants to see relevance and linking to, getting links from niche specific quality websites in your field is more beneficial than generic links from sites with high domain rankings.

Nathan Gotch:

We’ve got to get relevant links. I don’t even care about DR or organic, I just care about relevance. If I’m an SEO business, I’m talking to you, you’re an SEO business. I want to get links from you, you’re an SEO agency. Not super complicated, but people really get so focused on how many links can we get, a quantity of links that we can get every single month. Instead of thinking about, if I could only get a hundred backlinks ever, what sites would I pick?

Chris Dreyer:

Don’t forget about on-page too, optimizing the URL structure, title tags, headers, and the body content for your target keywords.

Nathan Gotch:

You got to nail the basics. It always starts URL. So URL needs to have the actual keyword in it. I’ve seen some URL structures that are bigger than my screen. So all of those folders, all of that intense, you want to call it architecture, even though technically that’s not architecture, it’s not really necessary. So for me, I’m pretty extreme about this. I love just going straight off the route. I know that’s not for everyone, but for me, I just like going right off the route because I know that architecture is not based on URL structure. It’s based on internal linking.

Chris Dreyer:

Create dedicated conversion focus pages. The user clicks on your page to find a solution, you are literally the answer to their problem. Don’t just inform the visitor. Focus on converting them while they’re on that page. Then offer your services within the solution you provided. The call to action or CTA should result in the potential client giving you their contact information.

Nathan Gotch:

I’m trying to create the best service page that’s going to convert. And then to support that page, now we’re going to start talking about how do we build topic authority locally to support that local page. So if someone searches personal injury lawyer in St. Louis, they haven’t even necessarily decided who they’re going to work with yet, they’re doing their research, they’re doing their due diligence. And so at that point, if someone lands on your page, we need to make it abundantly clear that we are the personal injury lawyer that they should use. And so that’s when case studies come in. That’s when frequently asked questions come in, specifically to the lawyer.

Case studies, results, anything that can really push that person deeper into that sales funnel. And that’s really what’s going to make a difference on those pages. So for me, these days when I create a service page, I’m thinking about how do I convert this person?

Chris Dreyer:

I hope we added a few more tools to your kit. For more about Nathan and Gotch SEO Academy and gaining that competitive advantage, head on over to the show notes. While you’re there, leave 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.