Chris Dreyer:
You just dropped another 50 grand on billboards and LSAs. The phone rings, intake does their job, but the prospect ghosts you. Why? Because they Googled you, saw a stagnant 4.4 star rating, and went with a firm down the street that looks like they actually know how to win cases for their clients. Reviews aren't just a passive byproduct of good service. They are the fuel that feeds Google Maps, local services ads, and all those AI search engines that are completely changing how people find lawyers.
Today, I'm breaking down some of the mindset shifts and strategies you need to dominate the reviews in your local market. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Today, we're talking all about getting those reviews.
Now, this is only just a taste of the best practices to generate more online reviews. If you want all the best stuff, then just click the link in the episode description to receive the Complete Rankings Personal Injury Review Generation Playbook. It covers everything to help you get the reviews you need to get the cases you want. We cover the exact case milestones where conversion is the highest, how to structure a legal staff incentive plan so your team actually does the work, and the specific tech stack you need to automate the follow-up without violating Google's strict guidelines. So if you want all of that, just click the link in the description for your copy of the playbook. All right? Let's get into it.
How important are reviews when it comes to marketing? Okay, so I'm going to let you guys visualize this, and I'm a little bit of a nerd, right? So you've got the gaming tier, so you got the S tier. Let's call that the A++. And you got the A, B, C, D, and you got these rows. How important are reviews? It's S, A++, the most important thing that you can do. Because take a step back. You can't promise outcome. You can't make guarantees. You all are advertising contingency fees at a third. You can't advertise speed because speed's out of your control because of treatment time periods and insurance companies delaying. You can advertise decreased effort and one call, that's all, and that kind of works. But on the numerator of a dream outcome, likelihood to achieve. Likelihood to achieve is what you can impact from a marketing perspective.
That is reviews. It's the S tier at the very top. It's content. It is everything. And I'll take it a step further. Speaking from personal pain, being an agency owner, the clients that tend to not succeed with us place zero importance or low importance on reviews. They're okay with a 4.4. We worked with one of the biggest firms. I'm not going to talk about where, but their review ratings are 4.4 and they've got like 2,000 reviews plus. Can't help you, bubba. You're never going to rank in a map pack. Just like if you go on vacation and I type in best restaurants near me, you're not going to see a 4.4. You're going to see a 4.9 or 5. That's the name of the game. Reviews are everything.
Here's the thing. If you understand that reviews are the S tier of importance, let's take this a step further. It makes you better because you want to avoid bad reviews. Well, how do you avoid bad reviews? You give amazing client experience. You think about the customer, you limit the time on desk, you check in frequently, communication, communication, communication. And you try cases and you get good results. So how do you get reviews? You provide a good experience. That's how you get good reviews. So by focusing on reviews, the secondary effect of that is you actually become better as an organization.
There's always this question of, for reviews, should I just be the leader and have the most amount of reviews or should I consistently try to beat my competitor? And what are the tactics here? If I already have double the second-highest competitor, should I continue? And I think that's the mindset of most people's like, well, I'm in the lead, I should rank. But the thing is Google likes to monitor freshness of content. They monitor freshness of content for trust signals and relevancy.Think about it in the medical profession. Okay, let's just switch over for a moment. In medical, if you Googled something and you saw, you're Googling your symptoms, we all do this, right? Or we go to ChatGPT, what have you, and you see an article written from 2018, you might raise the eyebrow and the very next result is 2026. You're going to go to 2026, I promise you.
You're going to give that one more credibility. It's going to have higher trust. So that's baked into the algorithm content freshness. Well, what is content? A lot of times people, they use different definitions of it. It's a blog, it's a page. Anything that has words that goes on a website or on Google is content. So you get a boost if your content's fresher. Well, reviews are content.
So the more frequently, the more fresh they are, the more current they are, you get a boost. The same thing for your back link profile. If your back links are super old and nothing's been endorsed for a long time, it starts to decay and you want to get a fresh back link or update that page. It applies to everything across Google. It applies to the LLMs. So that's why if I'm in a situation where I'm up against a behemoth, maybe it's a Morgan & Morgan or one of these big advertising firms and they just have double, triple, I take it back and I look at the frequency.
Can I beat them at a weekly pace today? And that's what I would approach it. And eventually you're going to win. If you can outpace them, eventually you'll catch up and win. But in terms of you just need to be consistent and that's the name of the game. There's a lot of situations that in regards to trust that Google looks at. For example, when you open a new Google business profile and your reviews come in and they're clunky and they're sporadic or they don't have consistency, you lose some trust signals. And that can hurt you when you want to open the next office or reviews start to get filtered. If it's unnatural, it kind of raises the eyebrow. There's all these signals that occur. Just like if your back link profile, you had one page that was getting a link here or there and then got a thousand, it may not count all of those.
So there's all types of factors. And I'll take this. I know we're talking about Google and Google's the number one stunner, but Yelp's number two because of Apple Maps and Bing and its relationship with OpenAI, we're one of the biggest spenders in the legal vertical for Yelp ads. I don't know of an agency in the legal space that spends more on Yelp ads. And what I can tell you is if you get a review on Yelp, even if it's a Yelper, and then you get another one right away, it flags in their system. It is unnatural. I think you can even read that in their warnings in how to approach this. They want to see a slow increase and not just batched choppy links. That goes back to consistency.
I want to give a final 'it depends' though. If you're in a market that's not very competitive and you have 800 reviews and the next person has 15, you probably don't need to maintain that same frequency. You could probably sit there and maybe get one review every six months and be good to go. But in the most cases, you want to try to get reviews as consistent as possible and that'll help avoid any flags in their system.
There are situations that if you have a seasoned profile that's maintained consistency for many years, you've been at the same location, you haven't changed the phone numbers and made these radical shifts, I would say that you've accrued a very high trust rating. Google Business Profile carries a trust rating. So if you've accrued a very high trust rating and you get a batch of reviews, you may not get those filtered out. They may stick just because you've earned it. If you're a new profile, you get those batch of reviews, I could promise you, you're more likely for those to go away.
Now here's the thing, there is a form that you can fill out to recover those reviews. You can provide information and you can recover lost reviews, but it takes a lot of documentation. It takes time. It's not a guarantee. I've seen a big firm in Texas had, I don't want to give the exact amount of reviews, but a decent amount of reviews. They lost them and I think they went through this process and they were able to get them all back. So it hurts in the short term, but there are methods to recover lost reviews.
Reviews, let's just define it as content by. It's user-generated content by your customers and those that are endorsing you. Right? Let's just call it content. The more content, the better. And the more trust that you can acquire, the better. I don't know which book it is, but when it comes to social proof and trust signals, it's like if you say that you're the best, some people may believe you based upon your success. If someone else says you're the best, it carries more weight. And then take that a step further. If a trusted third party legit organization says something about you, it carries even more weight. And I'll give you an example of each of these. Chris Dreyer say, "Hey, we're the best legal marketing agency." You're like, "Eh." But then you go check out Clutch, you go check out our Google reviews. There's a little bit more credibility.
But then if Forbes or Ahrefs or Semrush or Search Engine Land says, "Rankings is the best legal marketing agency." It carries even more weight. So where I'm going with this is you want to get as many reviews as possible. You want to get them on Google first, then Yelp second, and then I would say probably Facebook third. Again, that's just a yes or no answer, but you want to get reviews everywhere because you're essentially creating assets and content everywhere. And what better content than content that you don't have to pay for?
The biggest question is when to ask for reviews, at what milestones and how often and all the things. Right? The answer is you want to activate your entire company. And a really simple signal is anytime somebody says thank you may be, it's not always, may be an opportunity to ask for a review. That's number one. When you start to try to processize this, if you're a personal injury attorney, let's just say an auto accident attorney in particular, on the front end of intake, you want to train your team for review opportunities. Maybe someone calls in and you're not able to help them yourselves, but you do provide help.
So it's, hey, instead of saying, "We don't take that case." You say, "Absolutely, we can help you. Let me connect you with so-and-so firm that can take that case." It's reframing the language, but there may be an opportunity on the front end to get reviews. There's also opportunities when you send out referrals and there's all kinds of scenarios where you're being helpful, you're providing value.
After the intake, when you sign up the client, the next opportunity is the orientation where you're going to set expectations of how long the case takes, what cases in the past may have settled for. Some people may want to avoid that. I get that. But you do want to try to set expectations as best as possible, provide information to the attorney, et cetera. You want to counter buyer's remorse, that's a great opportunity, is the orientation. The next potential time period is when they finish treatment. You want to check on them like, "Hey, how you feeling? Do you need a different chiro? Do you need somebody who specializes in pain management?" We don't want these individuals in pain. We don't want them to suffer. We want to check on them.
And if you can provide towards the end of their treatment when they're feeling better, that's an opportunity because you stay in touch with them. You want to stay in touch with them because it contributes to your values if they're going to get treatment. That's an opportunity. That's a phase. The next phase. So again, I'm not an attorney, but after that, it's like, what's the next natural phase when you file a lawsuit? When potentially, right? Hey, they're doing you wrong and hey, we're going bat for you. We're going to go to ... Could be an opportunity there. Everyone immediately just goes to the closeout. Close out, you hand them the check.
Here's the deal. If it takes a long time to disperse their funds, you can have a great outcome, but an unhappy client. They could be happy at the time, but if it takes a long time to disperse the funds, that could be a bad experience. So I would encourage you to try to set up opportunities across the whole life cycle to obtain reviews. There's this big question of what's AI doing when it's trying to find someone to recommend. And it's looking for trust signals, it's looking for credibility.
Gemini in particular, which is owned by Google, is going to crawl your reviews. Absolutely. It's going to crawl your reviews. It's going to look at the case results on your website. The one thing I think that's highly underutilized is client video testimonials on YouTube. YouTube is one of the biggest training models for Gemini. And so, I think there's a huge opportunity there. I think the video conveys more trust. I think when you think of reviews, everyone just immediately just thinks of Google reviews, but you could actually get video reviews. And that's Gemini.
The other thing I'll tell you though is if you think about it like this, like endorsements and comments on Reddit, it may not be on Google Maps, but those are reviews. Those are third-party comments. So that could be a good location. You got to be careful with how you engage and you got to follow Reddit's guidelines. There's also recently, Google and Anthropic just signed a deal with XAI, SpaceX, and their Colossus data center to supply information. So I actually think that X and comments on X are going to contribute to Colossus. They're all owned by the same company.
But really, you want to be cognizant of your reputation. One of the most important things that you can do is set up Google alerts. You could get email alerts anytime your brand is mentioned out in the wild. You'll get an email of an alert of any time that's mentioned and you want to go check. Is it positive or negative? Can you respond to a negative review? Can you flip a negative review to a positive one? Those are the things you need to be thinking about.
When it comes to discovery and ranking Google Maps, there's a big component of is it's relevancy. It's the keywords that are used in the review. But here's the thing, Google, it tries to stop manipual back links. You try to stop any spamming, but there's a little bit of truth in the middle that it is important. It does contribute to your discovery. You want to try to avoid coaching up a consumer to just say all the keywords imaginable related to your practice. If it happens naturally from time to time, they want to see a mix of the natural reply that, "Hey, I had a great experience, would highly recommend this firm." And then they want to see the, "I was in a car accident in Chicago on route whatever, and I hired this firm." There needs to be a mix and you need to be careful about, you want to avoid what's called keyword stuffing. You can coach up your client on what they can say, but try to not put the words in their mouth exactly.
There's a lot of questions on should I be paying my staff? Should I be incentivizing them to get reviews? And the answer is absolutely, because Charlie Munger, a lot of individuals talk about incentives create behaviors. Aligned incentives are everything. If someone's being paid to get a review, you can't pay for a review. You can pay the employee to do the behavior to ask for the review. Right? They're more likely to do it. It's more important.
And I'll go a step further. A lot of times you have your case manager, client experience person, and those are the only ones that are comped on this. I would comp the entire company from secretary to attorney, because everyone needs to know the importance and the value of review and how it impacts the firm's reputation, their ability to get cases on local services ads, local BAPs. That comes from the top. And you, founder, you CEO, you need to be getting reviews yourself. Everyone needs to be accountable. That's how you win this review arms race, which is what it is. And that's how you show up in Maps.
Stop playing defense with your reputation. Every month you don't aggressively collect reviews. A competitor closes the gap on the only ranking factor that actually is up for grabs. Treat review generation as an operational discipline. Train your team on the right triggers and watch your MAP pack rankings take off. Don't forget to click the link in the description to grab the full rankings personal injury review generation playbook so you can build this review machine for your firm today. I'm Chris Dreyer, and this has been Personal Injury Mastermind. Catch you next time.
