Matthew Dolman:

This is exciting. It’s the first iteration, so we don’t know where this is going to go. We just don’t know how it’s going to interplay with Google. Some say and speculate that it may take over. I don’t think so, but I do think it’s going to play a large role in the future, but we’re in the presence.

Chris Dreyer:

Technology and consumer behavior change on a dime. Google adapts and leads the charge. Your site had better keep up.

Matthew Dolman:

And it’s hard to trust something that probably hasn’t been updated, it’s been a static page that no one’s touched in 5, 6, 7, 8 years. God knows what science has come out since then, what studies have shown, possibly might contrast or contradict what the results are on that particular page.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the preeminent personal injury marketing agency. Before we get started, if you like what you hear, head on over to Apple or Spotify and pound that five star review button. And if you don’t like what you hear, tell me about it in a one-star review, I got a big hug for all my haters too. Each week we talk to the best in the legal industry ready to dominate your market. Let’s go.
Want to dominate your region through SEO? Look to Matt Dolman as a guide for what you should be doing. The Dolman Law Group is one of the most trafficked law firm sites in the US. Matt is as obsessed with SEO as I am. He was previously on PIMM episode 25. We had a great conversation about SEO. Go check it out after the show, it’s linked in the show notes. And today we cover the most recent updates to Google, why you should care and what to do about them. Showing your expertise, Russian code leaks, ChatGPT, and the real threat to Google’s future. We’ve got it all. We dive right in and Matt makes the case for why every firm owner needs a basic understanding of SEO. Here’s Matt Dolman, owner and president of Dolman Law Group.

Matthew Dolman:

It’s almost like talking to a mechanic, if you don’t speak a language and at least have a basic, at least rudimentary understanding of what they’re talking about, it’s very easy to sell you on things you probably don’t need or you’re overpaying for things you might be able to do yourself. Or really truly understand how to scale the process properly, where should I be spending more money on Google Local and pushing the maps. Or should I be spending more money on content creation? If you don’t really understand how all these parts fit into one whole sum and how it’s going to really push your product forward, you’re lost and you’re going to get ripped off.

Chris Dreyer:

And a lot of times I think the SEO nerds, they try to complicate things and they talk about the super granular, but what are those basics in your mind when it comes to SEO?

Matthew Dolman:

The basics are content creation, I mean, content’s king, you have to have content. But without back links, those are links pointing to your website from other sites, it’s like a vote of validity in the eyes of Google. So without that, your content will never be seen anyway, so you have to start off with the basics are links and content and architecture. You have to have a flat architecture to your site. What does that mean? It means that no matter where you are on your website, you’re no more than two clicks away from your homepage and that’s how you share the juice. The equity that you have in the homepage of your site needs to be spread to all of your internal pages. Otherwise, those pages are not getting crawled properly and they’re never going to get ranked.

Chris Dreyer:

Those links being the endorsements and you’re trying to win an election. You want to get as many votes as possible. Same for those links in terms of the ranking factors, and then I think a lot of times where the architecture is like you got these orphan pages that you can’t access. Well, if you can’t access them and Google can’t crawl them, then why would Google put any importance towards those pages? There’s a lot of things going on right now with Google. So we’ll start with the fun ones, the Google algorithm updates. So Google helpful content update that was released in December 5th. So what is the Google helpful content update? What do we know about it and why should we care?

Matthew Dolman:

So that’s an update to the E-E-A-T algorithm. Now they’ve add an extra E to it. So it used to be a expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Now they added experience. So what the E-E-A-T algorithm was, it came out two and a half years ago and it’s for what’s called YMYL pages. These are your money or your life. So if you’re giving advice about law or financial advice or medical advice, Google wants to really ensure that you are an expert, that you’re not pushing off what’s known as pseudoscience or on disinformation. Again, these are very, I would call critical information that one does not want to rely upon in a cavalier manner without ensuring the person’s an actual expert. So how do one display it they’re an expert. Well, you have to show what’s your experience in that particular field? Have you been a doctor, are you board certified?
Have you published before? Have you been part of research studies? You’re a lawyer, what is your experience running a law firm? Are you giving comments about commercial litigation but you never actually handled commercial litigation cases? So if I’m going to put together a proper profile to illustrate my E-E-A-T or at least illustrate my experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness behind my name and behind my law firm’s name, well, I want to highlight what is my experience in practicing law. So Matt Dolman’s been practicing and I hate talking about my myself in third person. But for 20 years been licensed in the state of Florida. He’s handled X amount of cases. If you want to say you are board certified or you’re a member of the million dollar advocates form or you were selected legal elite. Whatever awards that you could put there that will actually show that you are an expert and trusted by others in your field, let alone you should be trusted by consumers.

Chris Dreyer:

The thing that I see wrong a lot of times on these law firm websites is they don’t even include a byline. So you don’t even know who wrote it. So then how could you trust the content? So that’s where those bios come into place. You need to put in all your ads seen in, all your experiences. If you’re on trusted sites, you need to reference that. The other thing that I see is there’s no publish date and the thing in legal, I find it very important, but in medical, for example, if you ever get sick and you Google your symptoms and you see a page that was published in 2016, you see one in 2023, I’m clicking on 2023.

Matthew Dolman:

Of course.

Chris Dreyer:

There’s probably been advancements in the medical field, and likewise what you’re saying, it’s your money, your life. In legal like a law or statute may have changed. So you need to have the most current fresh content.

Matthew Dolman:

And that goes into the A and T, the authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It’s hard to trust something that probably hasn’t been updated. It’s been a static page that no one’s touched in 5, 6, 7, 8 years. God knows what science has come out since then, what studies have shown possibly might contrast or contradict what the results are on that particular page.

Chris Dreyer:

And one of the big issues that we always see is all these… The firm owners are this constantly cranking out new to new content, but then the core pages aren’t ever touched again. They aren’t ever refreshed. And one of the best things you can do if you’re a personal injury attorney listening is refresh your content when it kicks over 2023 and next year when it kicks over to 2024, you should update your top 200 pages. It’s like a necessity for in terms of ranking better in the search results

Matthew Dolman:

For guard of a variety of reasons. One, it looks like it’s been touched. It doesn’t look like static. Google hates static. Two, going off of that, Google will be trained to crawl your pages more often the more often you update the page. So Google likes fresh content. We know this and anecdotally speaking, we can show that from trial and error having done this on hundreds of pages before, we will generally see a boost after we’ve updated a page.

Chris Dreyer:

And Matt and I have talked a lot about this and that’s one of the reasons why we did these surveys, these round ups. So we have the higher car accident page, we have a personal injury page that has multiple attorney contributors is because what’s more trustworthy than the not one attorney, but maybe 50 attorneys?

Matthew Dolman:

Yeah, sure. It looks like a proper resource page. It’s giving the information from a number of different perspectives and individuals who all have experience in the field of personal injury law.

Chris Dreyer:

Awesome. So then moving on, Google cracked us with another update in December. They love to just double hit, content then links, they came out December 14th, they came out with the link spam update and then what is that? And let’s discuss that.

Matthew Dolman:

It was a way for Google to kind of decipher, and I wouldn’t call it a penalty, so they’re not necessarily penalizing website owners. What they’re doing is devaluing specific links pointing at your website. So one could view that as a penalty. It’s almost like a demerit, but it’s not in Google’s penalty box. You never want to end up in Google’s penalty box, so you’re not ending up in a penalty box here. You’re just where you could… If you get in a penalty box, you could be eliminated from search altogether. No one will see your site for quite a while. In this case, it’s just devaluing certain links that are looked at as spammy, that don’t add value, that are not relevant or related to the topic matter at hand.

Chris Dreyer:

To me, there’s just so much misinformation on this topic. There’s so many SEO specialists out there that just want to disavow all your links when the truth is if they pop it into Semrush or they use some tool, they don’t really know if the link is good or bad. So where do you stand on the disavow file? Should users use the disavow file? What’s your thoughts on it?

Matthew Dolman:

We can go to our own personal experience. This happened I think in 2018 or 2019. I was sued by a lawyer referral service that I made fun of in a blog of mine, and then they started hitting us with just spammy links from whether it was hair loss supplements or dick pills or whatever it was, and it hurt our website, but it didn’t really hurt us though. We thought it was going to hurt us. It actually helped us. And for three to four years, man, those couple pages that they pointed all the links at, really they were ranking the top three, top four in the United States.
Then when this happened, we lost a little bit, but we’re coming right back without a problem. No, I do not agree with disavowing links. And actually, was it Mueller?

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah.

Matthew Dolman:

Was it John Mueller who actually spoke out about this on three or 40 different occasions who said, “Do not ever,” and he’s a Google Insider, “do not ever put together a disavow file, it’s worthless.” If Google decides to devalue these links later on, you’ll lose some equity. But why don’t you wait until it happens because it could actually boost your site in the meantime.

Chris Dreyer:

And Google’s looking for leverage, they’re a software company. They’re not going to be have these individuals auditing every single website. It’s too cumbersome. There’s too many. There was 3 trillion web pages and 2016, so they’re going to do that algorithmically instead of hire a whole bunch of staff. They have the best coders on the planet. Why not just fix the code to say, “Oh, that’s not a good link. We’re just going to ignore it.”

Matthew Dolman:

Yeah, they’re never going to be able to go individual by individual website by website. There’s hundreds of millions of pages being created every single month, and as you said, there’s over 3 trillion pages. So that’ll be not just cumbersome, be impossible. Pragmatically speaking, no one should not use a file. We’ve done that before and we’ve seen problems, so I’ll leave that alone prior experience, but I don’t think it adds any value.

Chris Dreyer:

It’s easy to pop in a tool like Semrush and it’ll say, “Hey, these links are toxic.” But what actions should you take? That’s a whole different strategy as it relates to your SEO.

Matthew Dolman:

No, I think if you plug it into Semrush or Ahrefs and you’re seeing toxic links, especially Semrush, what that should tell you is maybe I might want to improve my overall link portfolio. Maybe I want to get more stronger links. Maybe I want to contribute guest blogging, there’s a good and bad way of approaching that. But maybe I want to contribute on some blogs. Maybe I want to earn some media, maybe higher public relations specialist to get me some opportunities to speak to the media. There are ways to build really good links, but no, one should not take the drastic approach of cutting out all of the links because it actually could hurt your website.

Chris Dreyer:

Russia’s Google is called Yandex, and it’s the fifth-largest search engine worldwide after Google being Yahoo and Baidu, late January, the code was leaked. This is why you should care.

Matthew Dolman:

Lease their 70% correlation between the ranking factors on Yandex and how they rank webpages on Google. Those are known as a search engine result placement. So be behind ranking on a specific page. There’s about three to 400 factors that Google’s utilizing. Well, we can reverse engineer. We can figure out what some of those factors are. We can never figure out how much weight does Google actually attribute to each one. We can play around by removing certain things and then putting them back in, and we learn over time how much weight there really is. But we’ll never know the exact formula. What this allows us to do is look behind the lens a little bit and see what are some of the ranking factors that they’ve been playing around with on Yandex that actually will deliver some juice to your webpage or will in turn hurt your page.

Chris Dreyer:

And so there were the leak reveal 1,922 ranking factors. The SEO nerd, I think it’s Alex Buraks. The thing is this was a leak, guys. This was uploaded. They uploaded the code. It wasn’t like someone discovered this or a hack, this was a leak. And there’s a whole bunch of these that Alex went through. But I think one of the interesting ones that I saw was the average ranking position across all queries. I found that really intriguing because that means if you’ve got guys, and we’ve tested this, if you’ve got bad content that’s getting no traffic that Google doesn’t favor. We’ve always talked about pruning your content, but this is just another sign that you just have to do that. You’ve got to prune your content if it’s not performing. It just improves that overall average ranking position. What was one that kind of stood out to you?

Matthew Dolman:

Well, obviously including the keyword in the URL, we knew that. I thought it was interesting last night. I think I even sent you a text on this so we can pretend we hadn’t had this conversation already, that pay per click and relevant pay per click to the specific page you’re looking at could add some incremental, they weren’t sure it was an incremental or significant value to your overall SEO. And the way I look at it is it’s increasing the amount of visitors on the page which sends a ranking signal to Google, or in this case Yandex. I think that’s something that we should probably look at going forward, but then you got to weigh that as to how much is that cost going to be and is it worth my time?

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, that’s where guys, we went down a rabbit hole because a lot of times when you’re bidding on anything in the PI space, it’s a significant amount of cost per click. But I think we found a couple solutions on that, maybe some middle of the funnel, top of the funnel queries that don’t typically get bid on. The other thing is, I found kind of a correlation is back in the day when we used to run these scholarship campaigns with Matt, we always saw a giant ranking increase right when the scholarship deadline was occurring. And even though that wasn’t super relevant traffic to the law, we always saw an increase so that there’s something to be said about the traffic itself kind of resuscitating the site, so to speak.

Matthew Dolman:

Google sees traffic coming in, so that’s a ranking signal, even though it’s not to the specific pages you want it to be towards. And it’s a page that doesn’t really have commercial intent. It’s still traffic in the eyes of Google, which makes it seem like your page is relevant to the eyes of those who have quarries in the search engine.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, absolutely. And then a lot of it to me is just a no-brainer, crawl depth, keyword in the URL, host reliability, age of the link, UX signals like bounce rate and dwell time. We’ve talked about this a lot, but I did find a couple of those really intriguing as it relates to traffic in those average ranking positions across all queries, which I personally think there is something to be said there about that. The other one, Matt, and I want to see your take is Yandex specifically highlighted individual sites. One specifically they highlighted and gave a boost to was Wikipedia. And there could be something to be said about that where maybe Google can just manually boost a site if they think it’s super trustworthy.

Matthew Dolman:

Well, the thing about Wikipedia, and it’s very hard to mimic, is how robust the information is, and obviously they cite their sources. Now the only problem is often it’s user generated content, so how trustworthy is that? So you have to weigh the two. But I think they can manually boost a page that they see is trusted upon by the masses and has robust information to share and cites their sources. So when you have those, I think then you can show it has the necessarily experience because it’s not your money or your life page, but it has the authoritativeness and a trustworthiness you’re going to look for as ranking signals.

Chris Dreyer:

And we got to be careful when we link to external sources because that is, we’re giving away trust, we’re pointing a signal to them. So if you’re listening and you’re just linking to any citation or external website, just be really cautious about that because they have to be very legit, very trusted sources.

Matthew Dolman:

But it can help you though.

Chris Dreyer:

Yes.

Matthew Dolman:

Like when you’re reminded as a kid, you are the company you keep, hang out with good people. You want to kind of hang out with good websites. If you’re a personal injury lawyer and you’re quoting some site that the information might not be 100% trustworthy, some of its experimental science, it’s pseudoscience, you’re not going to get the same boost as you will if you’re setting the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic. And those are considered the epitome of modern medicine, Duke University, Harvard University, they’re going to be trusted a lot more. And those signals are embedded in Google. Google knows that.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, couldn’t agree more. And that’s where a lot of people talk smack about the scholarship campaigns, but that’s because a lot of them, the links were from these low end universities, maybe poorly curated EDU sites, but if you get a link from Yale or Harvard, it’s on a legit page that’s going to be a good signal no matter if the topic, the tactics kind of been spammed or overused. So it’s just an example in itself.

Matthew Dolman:

It doesn’t have to be an Ivy League school. Any decent university or college is going to have probably a very strong website, which we know as having a strong domain rating. That’s what we look at. And that’s, wouldn’t call it a made up number, but it’s an arbitrary number given by either Semrush or a Ahrefs. They have different rating formulas, but they’re very similar. And what they’re looking at is they’re trying to reverse engineer Google’s ranking factors. And it’s not an exact science, but it gives you a snapshot in time of at least we’ll tell you, this is a strong website or is this some spammy bullshit website. And you’ll know right off the bat, the most of these universities have very strong websites. They have domain ratings above 70 and usually in the eighties, nineties.

Chris Dreyer:

Absolutely, absolutely. And then the final one I wanted to touch on and just briefly guys, we could do a whole episode on this one on its own, is this ChatGPT.

Matthew Dolman:

Ugh. Yeah.

Chris Dreyer:

So where does that fit in first, just from my perspective, Matt, it’s like I asked my team when it first came out and was actually pumping out good material because Jasper existed and Jasper AI, the quality wasn’t there. And I asked my team, I was like, “Hey, are we farming without tractors?” Are we like row cropping by hand, is kind of how I was looking at it from an output perspective, a leverage perspective. I was really excited about it. What’s your thoughts on it in terms of use from an SEO standpoint?

Matthew Dolman:

Well, for a start, this is exciting. It’s the first iteration, so we don’t know where this is going to go. Microsoft’s putting a ton of money and they’ve raised a ton of funding for this. So the future is there with ChatGPT to an extent. We just don’t know how it’s going to interplay with Google, some say and speculate that it may take over. I don’t think so, but I do think it’s going to play a large role in the future. But we’re in the present. And right now, I would not rely upon ChatGPT or any of the AI devices. You’ll see Jasper or several different content writing devices that you can use that utilize artificial intelligence. The problem is if you ever look at it comes out wonky. The syntax is usually a bit off and there are tools to check.
Okay, we were always worried about when it first came out, “God, students are going to use this to plagiarize their exams.” And yes, you can have it write a nice thesis paper for you, but there’s now tools that can check to see if you’re using artificial intelligence. And just because you scrubbed the paper, you don’t get rid of some of those signals. It’s very, very difficult. You almost have to manually go through every last sentence and change around the structure and the syntax to avoid getting hit. And if you think Google’s not going to utilize that technology to scrub their pages on the internet that are indexed, you’re kidding yourself. They’re going to. So if you’re relying upon Jasper or just pump out content and get rid of all your content writers, you’re making a humongous mistake.
I don’t know if I want to actually say that. I want people to continue doing that because it helps us. But over time, and again, this is this first iteration, so they’re going to have many multiple iterations are going to come out for ChatGPT, Jasper, and all these other AI tools. It’s going to get better. And it’s scary what they can do with this intelligence. But you can use it now. You can use it to help you finish sentences. You can help it utilize it to crawl the web, but remember, I think it only goes up to a certain time period, it’s…

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. And I’d have to verify this, I believe it’s like eight months behind.

Matthew Dolman:

So you’re going to rely on some outdated material, but it can crawl and at least get you ideas. It can help put together an amazing outline for you. It can do that. It can even code, but what you want to avoid doing is just relying upon it.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. Now I see a lot of uses for ideation. I see uses for translation. I was talking to Dave Ables from Chicago, and he was talking about how a lot of times when he gets Polish content translated it. It doesn’t quite read, but when he did it with ChatGPT, it was like flawless. So I could see that being a benefit. I could see using for social media, for email newsletters, a way to come up with idea ideas, ideation. Again, Google checks this. The frustrating thing is Google has been adamant, they say, “Hey, this is against our Google guidelines, but do as I say, not as I do,” because Google uses AI to write a lot of their content. So it’s kind of frustrating, but I think this is something that we have to pay attention to. It’s one of those Blockbuster Video to Netflix scenarios potentially. And I think we just have to continue to watch it.

Matthew Dolman:

Yeah, I don’t think Google has a problem if you use AI. I think they have a problem if you use AI solely to write your content. If you’re using AI as a guide to help you to write more robust content, you’re going to have writers block when you’re writing. We all do. And you can plug something in, it’ll help you finish the sentence. It’ll help you structure your sentences. It will help you put together an outline. But what you do not want to rely upon is just pumping out the content and just blindly just placing it on the web. You’re going to have a huge problem there. I think you’re going to run to a humongous problem. I don’t know what the future of ChatGPT is because we learn new things about it every single day, this is pretty exciting. And they only rolled us out just a couple of months ago, so I don’t think it’s going to replace Google.
I don’t know if you’re ever going to have it because it’s not going to create search. It’s not going to create search engine result placements. But I think that some people will start relying upon to answer specific in-depth questions. So we’ll Google augment their search results to utilize this. I don’t know. Google is always one step ahead. They’re the best engineers on the planet. I don’t think they want to lose their market share to Microsoft. They’re going to have to now respond, now puts the onus in to make their product that much better. I think what it’s going to wind up doing is raising the ante a bit and making the product better across the web.

Chris Dreyer:

If you are the original source and you have something truly different from a content perspective than you’re going to automatically stand out. And there’s other implications as it relates to education and children in schools using it to write papers and things like that. Chatbots and AI may change the way Google and SEO evolve, but Matt sees the real threat to the future of Google in anti-monopoly lawsuits, especially in the European Union.

Matthew Dolman:

Google does monopolize the search space, we know that. And how’s that going to impact Google? Are they going to split Google up into multiple factions of Google? And maybe we can go into depth on that or another episode, but I think that’s a greater threat to Google then ChatGPT. I don’t think Google’s going anywhere. I think this just raises the ante and Google’s going to have to utilize artificial intelligence, which they have been doing forever, but in a much different way.

Chris Dreyer:

I agree. And that the conspiracy theorists out there are saying that the Yandex leak timing was from this to show like, “Hey, we’re not the only search engine that exists. Here’s this big leak to bring attention to this other search engine.”

Matthew Dolman:

Yeah, I don’t doubt it.

Chris Dreyer:

So who knows? Who knows? But we’re going to be monitoring that closely. There’s DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo is probably licking its chops and some of these other, Baidu, but we’ll see how that plays out.

Matthew Dolman:

I’ve always wondered why DuckDuckGo has not acquired a bigger share of the market space. I love their commercials. I love the idea behind it. Big Brother can’t monitor what you’re doing on the web, that we don’t sell your information. But it really has not grown much, a little bit, but it’s still a very incremental part of the market share. Bing is still much bigger than DuckDuckGo and Bing is only right a 10th of the size of Google. And do you think DuckDuckGo is ever going to take off?

Chris Dreyer:

I just don’t see it, just from the revenue perspective. If they could come up with a way, I know Ahrefs is creating its own search engine. Apples in the process of creating its own search engine. Maybe there’s some inside information there about breaking up Google that they’re aware of and that’s why they moved into this area. Who knows? But I think it comes down to speaking SEO to SEO. The more ads they put at the top, I mean just keep shoving down content and unique perspectives and all this original content creation. It makes it very difficult, it doesn’t incentivize new content creation if you’re not going to show up and get visibility.

Matthew Dolman:

No, the games changed, at least in the last five years, we went from, if you’re in the top six, seven spaces, you’re showing up in the first page. Now, depending on how competitive the search term is, they may only show two or three results on what we would consider the first page. Now it’s no longer our first page. There’s just a page and it just continually scrolls. But it’s really, we know what the first page is without having to go too much further down. So the organic content’s being highlighted, we keep losing more and more real estate, but which some people say, “Well then why do I market on Google?” Well, you still have to because otherwise no one will know who you are and you’re not relevant. And you need to focus more on instead of worrying about these vanity terms, like I’m in Tampa, so people are all excited about Tampa personal injury lawyer or personal injury attorney, that never really sells you.
It looks great. It tells others that you’re there. It’s more for ego because that doesn’t really convert. It’s the long-tailed search terms and you’re actually answering a question with your blog or the content. That’s what gets people to call you up, and that’s what makes your phone ring. If you invest in that, you’ll rank because there’s not that many people competing for those terms. If you look for a Clearwater Tampa personal injury lawyer, there’s only a couple of spots for the organic content because you have so many people advertising for it. And that’s why you have such a low chance of no matter even if you show up number one, you still have a very low chance compared to… It’s just so much going on. It’s so busy that landscape of being able to convert where you’re one of one or one of just a few if you’re answering a long tail search term.

Chris Dreyer:

Not only that, where the ads trigger for those transactional phrases and then may not for the long tail. So you get better placement.

Matthew Dolman:

Yep, 100%.

Chris Dreyer:

Basically SEO in a contest strategy, you’re functioning like a library. The more books on the shelf, the more opportunities a consumer can go to that library to find you. So it’s just more content. More content gives you more searchability. And Matt, this has been fantastic. So if they have any questions, where can users go to get in touch with you?

Matthew Dolman:

I’m an open book, so email me Matt, M-A-T-T, @dolmanlaw, D like in David, O-L M-A-N-L-A-W.com. You can reach me anytime. I always respond. If you’re interested in looking at our website, it’s just dolmanlaw.com. D-O-L-M-A-N-L-A-W.com, and you can reach us 24/7. If you’re a consumer and you’ve been in a car accident, (833) 55-crash.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Matt Dolman of Dolman Law Group for everything you shared today, content remains king, but how that content gets created and ranked is evolving, and you have to change with the times. You can’t just slap any copy on your site and think it’s going to boost your rankings. Strive for back links, they’re that vote to big Google to rank in a search engines and keep your house, aka your website in order. Any page should never be more than two clicks away from your homepage.

Matthew Dolman:

And that’s how you share the juice, the equity that you have on the homepage of your site needs to be spread to all of your internal pages. Otherwise, those pages are not getting crawled properly and they’re never going to get ranked.

Chris Dreyer:

Google hates static pages, not updating content kills your trust and authority. Think about it, if you see two pages with similar headlines and one from 2007 and the other from 2021, where would you click? Update your core pages every year, yes, every year.

Matthew Dolman:

Google will be trained to crawl your pages more often the more often you update the page. So Google likes fresh content, we know this. And anecdotally speaking, we can show that from trial and error having done this on hundreds of pages before, we will generally see a boost after we’ve updated a page.

Chris Dreyer:

Don’t let your friends get you into trouble. Google wants your site to be trustworthy. When your content links to another site as a reference, you’re voting for trust of that page, giving it an endorsement of your trust. Make sure those links are legit.

Matthew Dolman:

If you’re a personal injury lawyer and you’re quoting some site that the information might not be 100% trustworthy, some of its experimental science, it’s pseudoscience, you’re not going to get the same boost as you will if you’re setting the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic. And those are considered the epitome of modern medicine. Duke University, Harvard University, they’re going to be trusted a lot more, and those signals are embedded in Google. Google knows that.

Chris Dreyer:

I’m Chris Dreyer, thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. If you made it this far, it’s time to pay the tax. No, I’m not talking about your cash like Big G. I’m asking you for a five star review on Apple or Spotify. Leave me a review and I’ll forever be grateful. If this is your first episode, welcome and thanks for hanging out. Come back each week for fresh interviews where you can hear from those making it rain. And remember guys, shhh, do not share this episode with anyone.