Chris Dreyer:
You're excited about the AI opportunities, and once I flipped that mindset and I started looking at it as a tool, it totally flipped my mindset.
Ryan Stewart:
Instead of taking this top-down approach, look at the keywords that are going to drive business value for your law firm. In other words, if somebody searches for this, does this end up in a conversion?
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 that help law firms not just survive, but thrive in today's competitive landscape. Now, this isn't about selling you the latest software or getting kickbacks from affiliate links, it's about bringing you the best so you can be the best for your firm, for your staff, for your clients, and for you. This is Toolkit Tuesday on PIM, your weekly guide to staying sharp in the legal world. Let's get started.
AI is changing the rules of digital marketing, it is shifting theory on organic and local search, keywords and content creation, and even how marketing teams are structured. The technology is changing so quickly it can be hard to keep up, but this evolution can be a good thing. AI is requiring marketers become more strategic managers of the AI systems, they will have to embrace innovation. What this means for your firm is more value for your money. And here at Rankings we've got covered.
Today we're taking a deep dive into the potential impact of AI on digital marketing with Ryan Stewart. Ryan has been a top tier marketer for over 15 years. He has helped over 3,000 SEO specialists improve their systems and processes, and is currently managing partner at WEBRIS, The Blueprint Training, and Ryan Stewart Consulting. He explains why disruption might be a good thing for your bottom line, how AI can aid strategic content management, why early adoption will put you ahead of the path. Here's marketing master Ryan Stewart.
Ryan Stewart:
I went to College of the Holy Cross undergrad, played four years of football up there. Life-changing experience, it feels like a whole lifetime ago now at this point. But it really, it did set the foundation for a lot of what I do on a daily basis, just in terms of mentality, toughness, work ethic, stuff like that.
But after I graduated, it was 2009, economy was rough, I was very fortunate to get a job in consulting with Accenture and Deloitte, kind of bouncing around between the two of them, doing some marketing analytics stuff with them. Did that for about a year in Washington DC and moved on to Miami and quickly realized that I didn't want to do it anymore. It just wasn't for me. Wearing the shirt and tie, sitting in traffic every day. Didn't like being told what I could and couldn't make, it just didn't sit well with me. And at that time, internet marketing was starting to become a little bit of a thing. This is back in the day before ... I mean, you had to literally convince people that the internet was going to be a thing. Companies thought it was just a fad that was happening, it was nuts. But I dove into it and started discovering about SEO, and this is back like Facebook before Instagram days, and just realizing that there was an opportunity to make some money.
So I started building some side hustles, if you will, some blogs, and ended up learning a lot and getting really good at it and to the point where I started taking on some clients. And within about a year or two of doing that I was able to leave my job, quit my job, and ever since then it's been full-time as a marketing consultant agency. I've been involved with five agencies or so over the last 15 or so years. I sold two of them. I've done some stuff in software, sold some of that, but like micro SaaS stuff.
Which has led me to where I am today, which is I consider myself a marketing entrepreneur and a marketing consultant. No matter what I think I do, I'll always be involved in some sort of human-to-human marketing, coaching, consulting or done-for-you services. So I have three businesses in my portfolio right now. I have WEBRIS, which is a digital agency. We do search marketing. We specialize in working with a lot of law firms and also a lot of home services, roofing contractor businesses. Pretty much anyone with a high customer value, we'll crush it for them.
Then I had The Blueprint Training, which is a platform and a program for digital agencies, specifically SEO agencies, so we work on a coaching consulting basis. We've got training programs. We've built our own software suite for them. Basically take a lot of the learnings that I have on a daily basis running agency systems, processes, and roll it back in as a program for them. And then I also have Ryan Stewart Consulting where I'm a fractional CMO, and that's really like my high-ticket stuff where I'll get a lot more involved on a one-on-one basis with really getting my hands dirty with marketing. And it's all B2B stuff, I don't really do E-comm stuff. I like to stick with, like I said, the higher ticket customer type acquisition campaigns. That's really where I specialize.
Chris Dreyer:
I want to key in on a couple of things, some unique selling propositions on WEBRIS, so a couple of things. Tell me about the Sprints Model and how that's different from a traditional agency. And then also tell me about the blended approach that you're kind of positioning as well. Tell me about those two different aspects from a traditional agency.
Ryan Stewart:
Yeah, for sure. So within WEBRIS we have two different arms and departments. We have the Sprints Model, that's pretty much any B2B company. We have some E-commerce companies, but pretty much anyone that needs SEO we'll service under that Sprints Model. Versus the law firm stuff, it's a little bit more true retainer-based.
And we take what you call this blended search approach where that vertical keyword integration approach that I described, where it's like you're coming to us to get client ... Don't come to us for SEO, don't come to us for pay-per-click, don't come to us for social media. Come to us with the problem that you really have, which is leads, and we will determine the best way for you to do that, looking holistically at search engines. Because for law firms, search engines are by far the best way to generate leads, like hands down, no questions asks it's search still.
We operate a little bit more on a true retainer model there in terms of how we charge and bill and structure our contracts, but the Sprint Model is an operational model. As you kind of alluded to, when it comes to my business life I'm extremely Type A, extremely process-focused. Everything that I do I like to document, I like to put down, that's just how I think. I learned that at Accenture and Deloitte. I was doing business process for engineering, system architecture, stuff like that, so I was very fortunate that I learned to think in terms of processes. And what I really learned there too was that the biggest companies in the world, they run on processes, literally visual processes, documentation, all that stuff.
So my approach to that, when I first started in SEO, was looking at it and I was like, "Yo, SEO is a freaking cluster F, dude." There's so much stuff going on. There's so many variables, there's so much to do. I started looking at documenting it in a way that was scalable and repeatable that allowed me to bring on people that I didn't have to pay 150K a year. Because if you get people that you can train them on the process, then the labor rates can be a lot more favorable, as opposed to an SEO expert who's doing forensic SEO and when I really looked at the market too, I think that the SEO industry is amazing because it's very vibrant, it's very active, it's very passionate. But people tend to look pie in the sky at the top 1% of websites and think that that's the right way to do SEO. Not that it's wrong, but technical SEOs does not need to be done on 90% of the internet's websites, it just doesn't. It's not going to move the needle.
We started looking at a way that we could systematize and productize SEO as a service, and it ended up in this what we call the Sprint Model, which is broken down into three sprints. There's a foundational sprint, there's a content sprint, and there's a link sprint. And we found that, especially two, three years ago when we launched this model, it was received incredibly well by the market because people were tired of being locked in 12-month retainers with some agency that didn't know what they were doing. So we were able to go against the grain in how we were pitching and positioning ourselves, and essentially selling SEO in a productized Sprint Model, which has all sorts of benefits on the agency side in terms of the web strategy, foot-in-the-door strategy. You sell one sprint, get in, and then upsell more sprints. You're not on long-term contracts, but you're still doing recurring work because content links are recurring. So the whole system just kind of came together beautifully.
And that's actually a lot of what we teach at The Blueprint Training is, especially if you're an agency doing less than 25K a month you have to productize your service. You just have to. And you have to have one singular focus on who you're working with, otherwise you're going to spin your wheels and it's going to be way harder than it needs to be. When you're focused on solving a single problem for a single type of client everything opens up for you, which I know obviously you know.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, absolutely. And you've helped, I believe, over 3,000 SEO specialists adapt and improve their systems and processes and their education around SEO. And you've helped us on some of our Facebook ads and some of our strategies, I'm very appreciative of that. Dee, tell me about the fractional CMO side. That seems like a lot of fun, a lot of freedom, it gives you complete creativity. Tell me about that side of your business.
Ryan Stewart:
Yeah, it's really what I enjoy doing the most. Marketing is really what I love, enjoy doing, is solving problems around marketing. And the fractional CMO stuff allows me to do that at the purest form. It's essentially, "Let's sit down, let's have a conversation about your business. Tell me what's a pain in your ass and I'll come in and fix it for you." Again, B2B organizations. I have probably four clients over there now. I try to keep the roster small because it does take a good amount of my bandwidth, and I've tried building a team over there but I've got two ... I have a project manager and then a execution team.
But especially the core of what I'll do over there is, come in, diagnose problems, build a really good customized strategy for your business, and not just like, "Hey, you should do LinkedIn," or, "Hey, you should do Facebook ads." But really building out the system, the process, scoping out what a team should look like for you to put in place. And then I just have some clients where we just get on a phone call twice a week for an hour and we just talk about business. It's a little more of a coaching relationship. So it just depends on the entrepreneur, it depends on the business, but it is what I enjoy doing the most.
Chris Dreyer:
I did a Google query of something like "largest professional services organizations," and what I noticed was it wasn't the delivery side of professional services, it was the consultancy side. They were the top revenue generators, and the delivery side was actually significantly less on those lists. There were some exceptions, but for the most part, it's consultancy. You're at the top of Loom's taxonomy. You can synthesize this information and most people can't do that. You're one of the few that have the sales skills, the operational mind and the marketing, kind of like that blended. But your operations, from how you've set up everything through using Google Suite, going against the grain and not using the shiny object of ClickUp or Trello or Monday has really stood out.
And I guess let's start with WEBRIS and you have this specialty on legal SEO. Where do you see search engine marketing and SEO with the advent of AI I know everyone's wondering what you see, what your thoughts are in that area.
Ryan Stewart:
From business point of view, I've been in this game long enough. I've seen Penguin. Penguin back in 2012 was devastating to the SEO industry and how we were doing this.
Chris Dreyer:
That about took me out.
Ryan Stewart:
Yeah, it took out a lot of people, man. It took out a lot of people. Having been in this business for long enough now I realize that big changes like this, it's going to eviscerate a lot of the market, but it's also going to create a lot of opportunity for people that are willing to change their systems, willing to change their strategy, willing to say, "Okay, we've done it this way for X amount of years, but we've got to adapt."
So that's kind of the mindset that I'm approaching this with. And the initial strategy that we're taking is, we're calling it flipping the funnel upside down. The past couple of years content has become a big part of SEO. What's going to happen with this AI and generative search, this is just my hypothesis, is that content-based queries or informational-based queries, like what's the DUI level in Florida, that would be a piece of content that a lot of firms would probably build for a law firm and say, "Oh, it's good supporting content. It'll pick up additional traffic." Like, that traffic's gone.
So what we're doing is we're saying, okay, instead of taking this top-down approach, looking at volume first, we're going to take a bottom-up approach. Meaning we're only going to look at the keywords that are going to drive business value for your law firm. In other words, if somebody searches for this, does this end up in a conversion? And that's not just the intent behind the query, but also looking at what's the action in search engines. So is it an AI result, is it ad result, is it a Local Maps Pack, is it content? Whatever that is.
So we're taking this bottom-up approach by saying, "Okay, we're going to save you on the budget," because also we'll talk about probably what's happening in the law firm market, which I think budgets are coming down because of the increased competition. I think just the increased cost of running a business increased everything. Everyone's feeling a bit of a market burn right now in terms of operational costs running a business. So I think a lot of the prospects and clients that we are working with are going from having maybe a 20, 15, 10, 5K budget, they're shrinking. So if we can reduce our CapEx and we can pass that on to clients, so we're looking at how do we strip down our service to only focus on queries that are going to make the client more money. That's number one.
And then number two is take what we call this ... It's like a vertical integration approach to keyword research. So vertical integration in the business world is kind of how I have my company set up, meaning I'm able to vertically align my operations, my people, my staff, my processes, and then basically distribute them through different companies to service different parts of the market. Blueprint and WEBRIS really have the same product, it's just delivered differently. We're running the same core operations and systems. One's more of a training and coaching for agencies like yours, the other one would be for a law firm. But it's the same process, we're just building it differently.
So taking this concept and applying it to keyword research, meaning okay, once we've identified the keywords that we know without a shadow of a doubt intent-wise, if somebody is searching for this, then it's going to result in a call or a lead for a law firm. We're then going that and taking that to search engines and saying, "Okay, if somebody's looking for a immigration attorney near me, what's happening in search engines?" And we're literally just plugging that in manual and saying, "Okay, LSA is the top result here, so that is probably what we want to assign to get visibility for this keyword."
So we're basically going down this keyword list and instead of just jamming down one approach or jamming content and just doing everything, we're just being a lot more strategic and looking for the best entry point, especially for smaller firms. How can we get them to 10 to 15 phone calls a month that are going to be quality at a reasonable cost, and then expand from there. So if we start with LSAs or we start with local SEO, then we can go to local ads, then we can go to paid search ads, and we can kind of expand that way. Then we can look into going into new markets, things like that.
But we're really trying to strip it down because we think there's been a lot of fluff and a lot of waste in the industry over the past five years, and that's what happened when times are good. When there's money going around, we inflate our services, we sell more stuff. At the end of the day, marketing is about making people more money, period. And somewhere along the line the SEO industry got fat, it got bloated, which is fine, it's a great sign for this business and this industry. But I just think as a business and agency, if you want to make it through this AI wave, you got to make people money. It's that simple.
And I think if you're a law firm on the other end listening to this too, you need to be evaluating an agency based on that. Based on data, based on numbers, really looking at what's happening in search, and not just throwing money at a campaign and hoping that it sticks.
Chris Dreyer:
Kind of like when the tide goes out, you get to whose pants are down, so to speak. That whole saying. The one thing I've noticed from the SGE, the beta stuff that I've seen is, I will say, your money, your life, the legal, the financial space don't trigger the AI as much as other industries.
Having said that, we already had a lot of zero-click scenarios with rich snippets anyway, so I think it's just pushing more emphasis to the transactional queries anyway. And I think that bottom-up approach, while different, you're not going to have maybe as much total top line traffic, it's going to be more likely to convert. So I totally agree with that approach.
Ryan Stewart:
2023 has been the year of AI. I'll never forget sitting out in the wintertime in my backyard by my pool with my wife, and on Twitter, when ChatGBT came out, and I sat there and looked at it and I was like, "Babe, this could change our lives, either for the best or for the worst." This is the start of the next wave of business for us and looking at these things. But after SGE came out and I saw the demo and saw it, I was like, this really just looks like a new UI, to your point. To me it looks like Google had to upgrade their product, they had to catch onto the AI trend, but there's not that ... They've been using AI in their search results for years. So they're not changing how the algorithm is finding stuff, it's just changing the actual UI in terms of how people interact with the results.
And I'm okay with that. As a searcher I think they needed an upgrade, because you look for recipes, you look for travel stuff, and it's a mess. They killed their own product by putting too much stuff in there. So I think this will actually be good for Google. And like I said, I think to your point, this has been happening for the longest time and SEO's have been complaining about it. But I always tell people all the time, "We built a house on rented property here, people. Stop complaining. Google's paid for all of our lifestyles for the last 10 years. Stop throwing stones. You should be happy, if anything, and stop complaining that Google's taking ..." They're not taking your traffic. You chose to index your website there. You chose to create that content to get traffic from there. If you have a problem with it, go play somewhere else. But if not, adapt, and it's going to be fine.
Like you said, these informational queries, they don't really move the needle. And to be honest, as an agency, they've just created more work for us anyways. Creating content sucks, it's just created more stuff. So if we can strip it down and focus on really the local aspects of it, and I think a lot of paid search is really where we're going to win. Because if you go now and you Google, again, "immigration attorney in Miami," you have to go all the way down to the bottom of the SERPs to get to the true SEO listings. Those results haven't been impactful for years. It's ads and it's local. It's a Maps Pack that drives what we see is 60 to 70% of phone calls for our clients.
Chris Dreyer:
We have some clients, a few that dominate organic number one position, but if they don't show up in the maps, their calls dramatically decreased.
It's funny that you say all this and it's about how our lives changed. I originally went in there and I'm like, "Am I being a pessimist?" And I was like, "No, I'm a half glass full kind of guy." And I was talking to my coach, Bobby Castro, and then we also ... I was in a Performance Mastermind, and they were talking, "Chris, it's not you're afraid of AI. You're excited about the AI opportunities." And once I flipped that mindset and I started looking at it as a tool, it totally flipped my mindset.
Ryan Stewart:
Yeah. Look, I think as business leaders who employ a lot of people, it's a slippery slope for us, and it becomes a dangerous conversation because there's two parts to AI. There's one that we just talked about, which is how it's going to impact search and how people interact with search, and then the market share that we as marketers can actually take advantage of.
Then the other thing that we're talking about though is task automation, which is where, as a business leader, admittedly I'm excited about it because there's a lot of things that's going to help to speed up. And me and my partner at WEBRIS, the agency, sat down in February and I was like, "Dude, we might not have to hire anyone anymore. We might be okay with the team that we have now forever," which is amazing as a business leader. But then if I put myself in the shoes of staff and employees, well, I'm kind of hesitant to talk about it because I feel like we have to be a little bit careful because we are only as good as the team that we have. And the people that we have at our agencies have allowed us to put ourselves on this pedestal and have this conversation.
So it's a very difficult kind of thing. I mean, as a business leader, pure entrepreneurial, it's amazing because it's going to automate a lot of stuff that we haven't really liked doing and we've had to build processes around and outsource and whatever.
Chris Dreyer:
Back in the day there was, to get leverage, labor-based leverage, it's the up-and-out method, and revenue was coupled with the amount of bodies you had, but now it's decoupled. It's one person is this enhanced through all this technology and can do so much more. It kind of what goes through my head every time is farming. It's the people row cropping by hand and how many people you had to have in the field versus, boom, the combine comes in, it changes the game.
Ryan Stewart:
Yeah, 100%. I was at dinner over the weekend and we [inaudible 00:19:32] was with a couple, and we were talking about this and how AI is going to potentially impact the marketing space. And they were like, "Are you worried?" And I was like, "I'm not worried for myself and my family because I'm in a position where I know how to control the technology, and there will always be a need." There will always be a market for people like myself. I think the company of the future will have AI managers in each department. Instead of having a content department with a content lead and 20 content people, you'll have a content AI person who's responsible for the content AI. Like all the different departments. So you'll have five to three companies with a CEO and people that are managing the technology and the AI.
And I think what I'm trying to do with some of my people and team at the agency now is help them understand how to become more managers, as opposed to doers, because the doing is what's going to get eradicated. So I'm trying to help to understand that if you're doing something over and over again, document it, build a process around it, and let's figure out how to get that off your plate. Because I want you to develop into more of a strategic thinker in terms of how you're attacking an approach with this because that's going to protect yourself, that's going to make yourself more valuable to this company. And as we grow and our margins get better, I want to give that back to those people. So again, profitability in the company and the department so we can grow.
So instead of just having this savage mindset where I'm just using it and just cutting people and putting it in my pocket, I would like to try and build that culture in the company, because I'm still going to need these people going forward. And if I can develop them into that thinker, and also we can get ahead of this curve and have them thinking about, "Okay, instead of trying to protect my job, if I can advance this and go out and find the technology that's going to speed up my job, I'm going to make more profits for this company, which is going to come back to myself in the long-run as well." So these are some of the things that I'm trying to think about as a leader in terms of how do I ... I don't want to be that business leader that's just like, "Yo, AI's here. We can fire everyone." I don't want to do that.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, yeah. It's ruthless.
Ryan Stewart:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
Ruthless. You got the robot Ryan versus the emotional Ryan, and it's conflicting because, as business owners, we own a business to generate a profit otherwise it's a nonprofit or it's a hobby. Yeah, I love your idea, the concept of taking those grinders and making them minders.
You're a process guy. How do you go about, with time management, how do you approach it, having three healthy, healthy businesses. Not just one's kind of neglected, you have three healthy growing businesses, how do you go approach time management?
Ryan Stewart:
I think number one is people. Is that I had to make a commitment years ago to consciously not working on stuff. What I mean by that is, when I sit down and I'm like, I don't know, working on a sales proposal, and I'm like ... I had to constantly be like, "You have to stop doing this because you're enabling ..." And I think most of us are, we're always the biggest bottleneck in our companies because we stop and we'll be like, "Oh, goddammit, I got to do this proposal because you didn't do it right," and then you do it for them. It's like raising kids, I guess. I don't know. You have to pull yourself out of the way and let other people do their jobs, and you have to hire people and bring them in and be willing to take money out of your own pocket.
That was number one for me, and that's a constant daily thing. So most of my time is now spent in meetings with people, working for them essentially to help them do their jobs. So there's always stuff that I'm working on that I feel like only I can work on. That's really video content and some marketing strategy and relationship building with people and stuff like that and consulting. But for the most part, it's people. And then just being extremely organized and attention to detail, project management systems, taking notes. I don't go anywhere with without a notebook, you know what I mean? Every call that I have, I have a notebook, write everything down. And as soon as I get off that call it goes into a project management system and it gets assigned to somebody. And I film a Loom and I tell them exactly what they need to know, and if they need more help, then we'll jump on a call.
So moving to this system where it's much more of a delegation, dictation, teaching, coaching, as opposed to just an endless to-do list, which still happens of course. There's stuff that I'll have to do. But the goal for me is to constantly evaluate what I'm doing and ask myself if somebody else could do it. And if they can, then just, I'm a roadblock. It's a grind up. I also don't have kids yet, so I still have a little bit extra free time.
Chris Dreyer:
My life totally changed. The kiddo thing, so rewarding, I love it. But yeah, totally different. Now, when I hear people say, "Oh, you're not going to have time when you have a kid," and I was like, "Eh, I'll be good." This is it.
Ryan Stewart:
Yeah, I know people say all the time, they're like, "Once you have kids ..." I saw a funny tweet that was like, "I'll never take time management advice from people who don't have kids." It's like, "Fuck off."
Chris Dreyer:
[inaudible 00:23:52].
Ryan Stewart:
Don't give me your advice. So that's why I'm always hesitant to give time advice because I have a wife and a partner who's incredibly supportive of what I do, and she gives me the freedom to ... She's not the type of person that's like, "Oh, you're working still," or, "You're working on a weekend," she's not that person.
Chris Dreyer:
Great. Great.
Ryan Stewart:
She's incredibly understanding, and because of that she's helping me ... She's a part of what I'm building very much that I couldn't do without her.
Chris Dreyer:
Ryan, this has been fantastic. Where can our audience go to get in touch with you and learn more?
Ryan Stewart:
Yeah, YouTube is probably the best. I post videos every week. It's just Ryan Stewart on YouTube. Definitely the best place to check me out.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks so much for Ryan for sharing his predictions for the future of digital marketing in the era of artificial intelligence. Let's recap a few of those key predictions.
AI is reshuffling the organic search deck. To come out on top, focus on high-value transactional keywords and localization. Ryan calls this flipping the funnel upside down. It can help you target your marketing budget toward content that converts.
Ryan Stewart:
Content has become a big part of SEO. What's going to happen with this AI generative search, this is just my hypothesis, is that content-based queries or informational-based queries, like what's the DUI level in Florida? That would be a piece of content that firms would probably build for a law firm and say, "Oh, it's good supporting content. It'll pick up additional traffic," like, that traffic's gone. So what we're doing is we're saying, okay, instead of taking this top-down approach, looking at volume first, we're going to take a bot bottom-up approach.
Chris Dreyer:
Document those routine tasks. As AI grows stronger in its capabilities, those tools can be used to master automation, eventually stepping in as a capable assistant. This will increase employee utilization rates and drive profit margins for your firm.
Ryan Stewart:
What I'm trying to do with some of my people and team at the agency now is help them understand how to become more managers, as opposed to doers. Because the doing is what's going to get eradicated. So I'm trying to help them to understand that if you're doing something over and over again, document it, build a process around it, and let's figure out how to get that off your plate, because I want you to develop into more of a strategic thinker in terms of how you're attacking an approach with this, because that's going to protect yourself. That's going to make yourself more valuable to this company.
Chris Dreyer:
Evolve or fizzle out. The AI marketing era will reward efficiency and innovation. Track conversions relentlessly, deliver measurable ROI, and stay agile, or risk getting left behind.
Ryan Stewart:
As a business, an agency, if you want to make it through this AI wave, you got to make people money. It's that simple. And I think if you're a law firm on the other end listening to this too, you need to be evaluating an agency based on that. Based on data, based on numbers, really looking at what's happening in search, and not just throwing money at a campaign and hoping that it sticks.
Chris Dreyer:
All right, everybody, I hope you added a few more tools to your kit. For more about Ryan, his consulting agency, or any of his projects, 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.
