Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Gold Medal Moments on Personal Injury Mastermind. This is a special miniseries that highlights my favorite lessons from former PIM guests. Each of these trailblazers and thought leaders will speak live at the inaugural PIMCon, the Personal Injury Mastermind Conference. Trust me, you don't want to miss them live. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer. Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing can't-miss insights and bite-sized pieces to help get your firm from good to go. Google takes a closer look at your law firm's website than most other sites out there. That's becomes law firms, just like doctors and accountants, offer advice that can drastically alter the life of the consumer. The legal industry fits into the category of your money, your life, or YMYL. When anyone can post anything on the internet, how does Google know which pages are legit? That's where the Google algorithm comes in.
You may have heard me talk about EEAT on this show before, E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust. The days when you could post the longest article on a subject and spec to rank and Google are long gone. The content on your site needs to put the consumer first. Does your site demonstrate your experience and expertise? How about authority and trust? Does the content on your website match your key user's intent? Are you identified as a clear entity in the space with Schema. To offer clarity and break it all down is the GOAT of content marketing and AI, Matt Dolman. To hear Matt live at PIMCon, secure your spot at PimCon.org. Use code PIMMATT for $200 off your ticket. That's P-I-M-M-A-T-T for $200 off your ticket. Matt explains what it takes to rank on Google and convince consumers that you are the expert they need. Let the Gold Medal Moments begin.
Matt Dolman:
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 does one display that they're an expert? Well, you have to show what is your experience in that particular field? 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 handle commercial litigation cases?
So if I'm going to put together a proper profile to illustrate my EEAT 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 Dolan's been practicing. I hate talking about 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're board certified or you're a member of the Million Dollar Advocates Forum, 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 how could you trust content, right? So that's where those bios come into place, you need to put 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.
Matt Dolman:
Of course.
Chris Dreyer:
There's probably been advancements in the medical field, and likewise, like what you're saying, it's your money, your life in legal, a law or statute may have changed. So you need to have the most current fresh content
Matt Dolman:
That goes into the A and the 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:
Yeah. And one of the big issues that we always see is the firm owners are just 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 2024, you should update your top 200 pages. It's like a necessity in terms of ranking better in the search results.
Matt Dolman:
Yeah. For guard variety reasons. I mean, one, it looks like it's been touched. It doesn't look like static. Google hates static. Two, 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 the page.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. And Matt and I have talked a lot about this, and that's one of the reasons why we did these surveys, these roundups. So we have the hire a car accident page, we have a personal injury page that has multiple attorney contributors is because, hey, what's more trustworthy than they not one attorney, but maybe 50 attorneys?
Matt 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:
So we could do a whole episode on this one on its own, is this ChatGPT. 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?
Matt Dolman:
Well, for start, it's 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 of 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, there's several different content writing devices that you can use that utilize artificial intelligence. The problem is that if you ever look at it, 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 I can check to see if you're using artificial intelligence. And just because you scrub 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, they are indexed. You're kidding yourself. They're going to.
So if you're relying upon Jasper to 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 utilize it to crawl the web. But remember, I think it only goes up to a certain time period, right?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I believe, and I'd have to verify this, I believe it's like eight months behind.
Matt Dolman:
Yes. So you're going to rely on some outdated material, but it can crawl and at least get you ideas and 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, I see a lot of uses for ideation. I see uses for translation. I was talking to Dave Abels from Chicago, and he was talking about how a lot of times when he gets Polish content translated, it doesn't quite read right. But when he did it with ChatGPT, it was flawless. So I could see that being a benefit. I could see using for social media, for email newsletters, a way too to come up with ideas, ideation. Again, there's Google... Google checks this. The frustrating thing is Google has been adamant. They say, "Hey, this is against our Google guidelines, but it's 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.
Matt 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 throughout your content. If you're using AI as a guide to help you to write more robust content, you're going to have writer's 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'll help you put together an outline. But what you don't 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 every single day. It's pretty exciting. And they only rolled us out just a couple 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 and 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, so they have 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 it puts the onus on to make their product down much better. I think what it's going on up doing is raising the ante a bit and making the product better across the web.
Chris Dreyer:
That wraps up this Gold Medal Moment featuring the GOAT of content marketing and AI, Matt Dolman. Visit PIMcon.org to go from good to GOAT and join me and Matt live in Scottsdale September 15th through 17th, where we will conquer personal injury marketing, network with industry titans and become the greatest of all time and personal injury Marketing. Tickets are limited, so secure your all access pass today. Just head to PIMcon.org, that's P-I-M-C-O-N. O-R-G. I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to these Gold Medal Moments, and I hope you see at the winner's circle at PIMcon. For $200 off, use code P-I-M-M-A-T-T.
