Matt Dolman:
However, if you're going to write good content, you want to write as many pieces as possible because content is SEO.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to a groundbreaking moment, the first-ever live recording of PIMCon coming straight to you from the premier conference for personal injury lawyers. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. After working with hundreds of law firms in years, decades even, of SEO, I can tell you this. Content isn't just around a ranking factor. It's a pillar of your digital presence. Content turns Google into your strongest advocate, and clicks into clients.
When it comes to leveraging content to dominate search results in the legal space, there's no one quite like our guest, Matt Dolman. Let me put Matt's expertise into perspective for you. In the last 12 months, Matt's premier website, Dolman Law, has generated a staggering 83 million impressions and over 670,000 clicks. If you were paying for this traffic through Google Ads, at a conservative estimate of $20 per click, we're talking about millions in equivalent ad spend. His second website, Lawsuit Legal News, is less than a year old. In the highly competitive mass torts space, he's racked up 10 million impressions and over 300,000 clicks. His passing sites have been around for a decade. To put it bluntly, less than 1% of websites in the legal vertical achieve this level of traffic. Matt isn't just playing the content game, he's rewriting the rule book. Let's get to our conversation, recorded live at PIMCon.
Matt Dolman:
To give everyone a quick glimpse in the color of myself, I come from very little. I didn't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. Family didn't have a whole lot of money. When I came out, and I was always spending faster than I made money. I remember looking to my partner, when I first opened my practice, and figured, "How were we going to make the phone ring?" I'm a little bit embarrassed about this story, but hopefully everyone finds it funny.
We used to look at the obituary every day. We'd wait for lawyers to drop off, and we would start buying their phone numbers. Think about that for a second. That's how I started building my practice. We'd just answer the phone, "Law office," and I would just send the case out to an elder planning lawyer, a criminal defense lawyer, it didn't really matter, and we started getting cases back to us. I've always run the opposite direction of the sheep. I try to be ethical. I think I'm a lot more ethical now. But I still want to throw that out there, because I'm very honest.
A couple years later, we had enough money to start advertising, but I wanted to get an advertisement in the phone book. The phone books, back then, if you weren't on the front cover or the insert, which is $10,000 a month, you were nowhere to be found. $10,000 a month was a lot to a brand new startup practice, even two years in. Again, we were living faster than the money was coming in. That's when I discovered search engine optimization. It's like language immersion. I started reading every blog that I possibly could. Going to every conference.
Now, that's all I pretty much do. I still run a practice. My goal is to try three to four cases a year. But for the most part, it's search engine optimization, day in, day out. That dictates the mood of my day, where we are ranked.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I'd say Matt's strength, it's content marketing. It really is. There's a lot of components to Google, and just leaning into that.
Let's start with MVAs, single event. What type of content should personal injury attorneys be creating to get more car accidents, truck accidents, those types of cases?
Matt Dolman:
If you asked me this question three, four years ago, before the advent of local service ads ... Lawyers always care about ranking number one or two in their geographic region for a car accident lawyer, personal injury lawyer. These vanity high volume terms. Those don't convert anymore though, because you have to go through local service ads that is pushed down pay-per-click, and now there's two more spots for pay-per-click. Then you get all the way down to the Maps. Then below that is where you start seeing organic.
I don't know if everyone knows what below the fold and above the fold means. Above the fold is when you're looking at your monitor, without having to scroll down, without touching the mouse, that's above the fold. As soon as you touch your mouse and scroll down, you're below the fold. Google organic results, once you get past local service ads, pay-per-click, and the Maps, it's so far down, your chances of getting a case is between slim to none. Ranking number one or two for a vanity term, it doesn't really mean shit anymore, just being honest with you. Sorry to curse.
The goal now is to make long tail search content. You want to answer the pain points of your client. Who do I hire after a car accident? Whose paying my medical bills? Whose setting up medical treatment? The typical questions that your clients ask, that's what you should be answering. The reason being is that, when you look up those terms, those search queries, there's actually no advertisements. You're swimming in a pond by yourself. You're not competing against tons of ads, especially Morgan & Morgan. I'm not pointing them out, they're awesome. But you're not having to compete against the 800-pound gorilla in the corner.
Chris Dreyer:
I think you hit the nail on the head, with the AI overviews, the long tail phrases, really specific questions. There's always the question about production. I think a lot of the PI attorneys, they'll throttle themselves. You do effective marketing, per se, $30, $40,000 for Google Ads, and you automatically think to move to a different channel when there's so much more opportunities, and you're throttling yourself.
I just want to talk about production, on the production side. We'll say words. Most PI attorneys are producing 4000 words a month, maybe 48,000 words of content a year. Maybe 48 articles. I just want, from a quantity perspective, let's talk about that.
Matt Dolman:
I'm afraid you're going to give the wrong message, though. You don't want to push too much content out there because what we're seeing a lot of law firms doing, and I hope they continue doing this, is using AI and having AI produce content at a very rapid pace. AI content is never going to rank. In fact, people who use that, there's numerous studies that show that. Search Engine World had a whole article about this a couple days ago. But if you read that, there's an expose about all these different, not just lawyers, dental practices, medical practices that use AI just to send out so much content that's not ranking, it actually sinks your website. However, if you're going to write good content, you want to write as many pieces as possible because content is SEO.
Chris Dreyer:
I couldn't agree more. It comes down to quality. Not everything comes with quantity. But I do want to throw some numbers out here. Matt, for the past six years, has probably averaged 200,000 words a month. That type of content, he's doing a year's worth of content that it'll take most PI attorneys an entire year to produce what he's doing in a month. There is a quantity perspective. It absolutely has to have quality.
Matt Dolman:
Something I would tell everybody here though is you can easily hire writers. You find somebody who's an English major, you're bringing them in, and you pay them $15, $16, $17 an hour, and they're just pushing out content. The more they're with you, they get used to the type of content, and what type of practice you're running. They start learning from you, and they learn what you want. You can start pushing out a lot of really good quality content and you'll see your search rankings go up because no one else is doing it. We have a team of six writers that are on staff at all times, writing content.
Chris Dreyer:
It's also not just about the same. There was a period, for about a three-year period where Dolman Law Group ranked number one for car accident lawyer nationwide, about a three-year period. Maybe you could just talk about how that content was different and that strategy.
Matt Dolman:
Yeah. Back then, I remember that page, actually. Everyone told me, including some of the vendors here today who do search engine optimization, not to do this. They were wrong. A broken clock is right twice a day, once in a while I'm right. What I did was I interviewed 20 or 30 different lawyers from around the country, and I interviewed them on when you should hire a car accident lawyer. Which sounds so boring, and vague, and just ambiguous. What that allowed me to do was I would now have links pointing out to their site, which you think is moronic. You're sharing all of your link equity with different law firms' websites. But where it worked is Google actually, they rewarded. It's almost like you're rewarded by the friends you keep around you, the company you keep.
When I have strong links pointing at relevant, related websites to what I do, all of a sudden, Google rewarded us. For three straight years, we ranked number one in the country for car accident lawyer. Then Chris took over my SEO, and that's no longer there.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks for that.
Matt Dolman:
I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. It's not true, by the way. Chris has done an amazing job. We stopped focusing on vanity terms.
Chris Dreyer:
Threw you the curveball there.
Matt Dolman:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
A lot of the PI attorneys here, you practice the same area of law. You got a car accident lawyer page, you got a slip-and-fall page. That's table stakes to have good content.
I also wanted to just touch on it's not a you produce the content and you're finished. Maybe you could just talk about content refreshing, and how you approach that?
Matt Dolman:
Yeah. Google will reward you on ... They penalize you for having static content, content that never changes. If you put a page up, for let's say ... Right now, I got involved in a mass tort called suboxone. We represent individuals who have lost teeth due to using suboxone film. We got on the steering committee.
With suboxone, we've updated that article now 20, 30 times. Every time something happens, like the little whiff of something happening in the mass tort, in the MDL, judge gives out an order, we're updating the page. We've updated that page over and over again. It looks like it's the most fresh content on Google, therefore Google ranks us number one for suboxone lawsuit update because we're the most updated content. It's not the best content. I don't think it is, but maybe not. But it's always going to rank one, two, or three because we update it so often. We do that with all of our pages.
Chris Dreyer:
Google has a crawl budget, right? There's trillions upon trillions of pages. Why should Google re-crawl your page? You have to give Google a reason to re-crawl your page. If the content hasn't been refreshed, it's just a caching system.
Matt Dolman:
You can actually train Google to crawl your site and your internal pages more often.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. Maybe just on that, let's talk about the difference between PI single event, auto, versus mass torts. How often do you think you should refresh, say a car accident lawyer or personal injury page, versus say a tort like you just mentioned?
Matt Dolman:
Car accident lawyer page, or any of your practice pages, I would say once every quarter. Add a little bit of content, change some things around. Maybe play around with your tags. I know this is probably, most people, it's going over their hard. Not that I'm any smarter, I'm actually dumber than most people in this room. It's just that I do this all day long. But you want to fix your tags, you want to change around your content probably every quarter.
Mass torts, weekly. If you could do it two to three times a week, all the better. There's so little competition in mass torts. Most mass tort firms spend money on pay-per-click. They don't put a lot of effort towards organic SEO content.
Chris Dreyer:
A lot of the car accident sites, there's been firms around for 30-plus years. You're in that race and 20, 30 years behind. Versus a tort, new tort hits, you're at the same starting line, producing content, refreshing it frequently.
Matt Dolman:
Sure.
Chris Dreyer:
The next thing that I really wanted to touch on, because everyone has this fear, AI is going to take over the legal space. I guess, Google's changed. Tell me your thoughts on, first, the AI overview section and top of funnel content.
Matt Dolman:
The AI overview section, that's you put in a search term, a search term that has high volume because this is not going to happen on most terms. Terms that have high volume like car accident lawyer or, "Who is the best personal injury lawyer in Tampa, Florida?" AI is actually going to give you the answer. It's going to crawl multiple sources, sometimes even one source.
Okay, this is twofold. It's bad and good. The bad part is you get what's called zero search clicks, where no one's actually clicking on any of the actual results, they're just getting the answer from AI. Where this benefits you though, if you're listed as one of the sources, all of a sudden you're going to get a flood of intake. You're going to get a flood of individuals calling you, filling out forms. They're going to be all over your website. You're now the best thing in town. We have that with suboxone. We have that with heavy metal in baby food, a number of the mass torts recently. We were able to bring in 6000 suboxone cases in a matter of four months just doing that. We ranked number one based on AI credited us with having the best answer.
Chris Dreyer:
Everyone in the crowd, I'm sure, is more accustomed to ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, some of the different tools out there. It's just becoming common. Apple is going to have it on your next iPhone, so people are going to be using it. In terms of an optimization standpoint, what are some of the tools out there that you use to help optimize your content?
Matt Dolman:
All right, so don't use these tools to write the content. But to optimize your content, I like Surfer SEO. It's phrase spelled F-R-A-S-E.io. What these tools will do is if you want to geek out and be a loser like myself and write search content, you put a term in there and it's going to show you the top 10 results, and it's going to show you how often they're using 50 or 60 different terms. And how often you should sprinkle it, and where you should put that content, or put those terms.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. It's going to scrape the internet, it's going to tell you where the opportunities are, what keywords that you're under-optimized for. It's really going to ... I think of AI as a tool, so it's just another tool to help maximize your content value.
Matt Dolman:
But there's a lot of law firms out there that are using these tools to just push content, proliferate content, all day long.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
Matt Dolman:
Those firms are not ranking fresh shit.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. Let's lean into that. In the legal vertical, there's what's referred to as EAT. Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. If you go Google your symptoms and you're sick, you don't want to see an article from 2016. That speaks to freshness. The legal vertical is scrutinized, in terms of expertise. Maybe you could speak to that and what you're doing to emphasize your expertise in content?
Matt Dolman:
EAT, it's important. But that goes back to even before, when we talked about why did I put external links to other sites. That goes to EAT. That goes to these are individuals that are considered other experts, or at least thought to be experts and influencers in the field. They're authoritative. And it's related to the very content that I am producing, so it's trustworthy.
That's all we do is focus on EAT. It's constantly refreshing the content, citing our sources. At the top of every page on our mass torts site, for Lawsuit Legal News, you'll see a byline that'll say, "Matt Dolman has handled 10,000 personal injury cases over the last 15 years. He's recovered $350 million." It sounds like all bullshit. Man, it is true. But where that actually serves is it shows you to be an expert and Google loves that. They just eat it up. Every time we put that in there, when we change the byline, we go from ranking eight, nine, 10 position to two, three, four overnight. Sometimes, up to the one spot.
Chris Dreyer:
That's really speaking to a content creation process, what you do to optimize it. But at the end of the day, you still got to promote it. What are some of the things that you're doing to promote content once it's live to help influence its rankings, too?
Matt Dolman:
Some of this is anecdotal. I can't prove that it works, but I believe it works based on experience. Whenever I get an article or I produce a video on YouTube that I want to get shown, I want to not necessarily trick the algorithm, because we believe in white hat methods. I promote my content by getting everyone in my office to share it on all their social media feeds. I don't want to do that too often though, because Google's algorithm will catch onto that you're trying to almost spoof the algorithm.
But when I get an article, let's say there's a new mass tort. For instance, Boar's Head meat caused listeria. We jumped into that project, and as soon as I got the article up, I had nine individuals in my firm share it that day. The next day, because I wanted it to look like it was ongoing and not everyone shared at once, you don't want to blow all your wad. The next day, we had seven. Then we dropped it down to a few more. Then I had all my friends and family members, and every last idiot that I knew share this. All of a sudden, we saw it go up because not many people are sharing listeria articles. All of a sudden, you've got 40 views, you're doing better than everyone else on the block who got two or three views that day. Then we suddenly went up.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I think I heard the CEO of Instagram say something about the likes and re-shares that matter, it was more of the engagement. It's a way to manipulate the engagement, but also from a distribution-
Matt Dolman:
But Google has told us forever that doesn't work.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
Matt Dolman:
Google's lied to you.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
Matt Dolman:
It always worked.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk about the release, the leak recently, just some things that were talked about.
Matt Dolman:
That was what, back in May or April?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
Matt Dolman:
Was it Wikileaks or was it Reddit came out, it was a Reddit community forum?
Chris Dreyer:
Okay.
Matt Dolman:
It published all the different algorithm factors, all the ranking factors. It showed that everything that Google has come out with, I think the guy's name is John Mueller, and a few others from Google, have told us over the years, all of it was bullshit. They told you that social media does not help search rankings. What they didn't want you to do was try to manipulate the search rankings by using social media, so they basically gave you a false narrative. Social media 100% helps search rankings.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
Matt Dolman:
Every last time we've done it, it worked.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, absolutely. I know a lot of the SEO people in the crowd are probably like, "Oh, it's a no-follow link so it doesn't help." But I think from the traffic itself, which is another reason why Google Ads to core landing pages could impact search, that's why social media does.
Matt Dolman:
It's the engagement.
Chris Dreyer:
It also helps with those back links.
Matt Dolman:
The more engagement you have on your page, and pointing at that one specific page, the better off you'll be.
Chris Dreyer:
Absolutely. Yeah, I want to touch on something that's a little different. I think the insurance companies, they're always collaborating. You guys know the tech way better than I do, the colossus, whatever, they're mining everyone's data and using it against us as the consumer. Why do you think there isn't more collaboration? You're Florida jurisdiction, maybe there's some states. Why isn't there more collaboration from a content perspective?
Matt Dolman:
Most lawyers, I think they missed kindergarten where you learn to share toys. I think that most people worry about losing their share of the market by working with others even in their own market. It actually helps you. It's always going to come back to help you because when you share content ... Let's say I interview somebody from my area, another Tampa personal injury lawyer, or I get someone who's a mass tort lawyer who serves in the same steering committee to comment on the very project I'm working on, yeah, they might take some cases from me. Great. But my article is now going to rank much better, because now I have relevant, related links pointing at my site or pointing at an external site, and it shows that we're in the same neighborhood, and Google is going to reward me for that.
Chris Dreyer:
The other thought that's really common is we'll have some content that's maybe really relevant today. Maybe a news article. You said the Boar's Head. Then it's on your website and it's no longer relevant. What should you do with the outdated content? Should you just leave it there? Should you think about prune it? What should you do?
Matt Dolman:
There's multiple ways to skin this cat. When you look at content that's old and possibly outdated, there's what's called evergreen content, content that's always going to be okay. That's always going to be, I wouldn't call it in style, but it will always be what is happening in the industry. The dangers of texting and driving is not going to change five years from now. Maybe 20 years from now people will look back and say, "No one is using cellphones anymore." I don't know what's going to happen in the next 20 years. But the dangers of speeding or not wearing your seatbelt, that content is always going to be evergreen. But writing about listeria meat, or writing about the suboxone lawsuit, when that lawsuit eventually gets settled or gets dismissed, that article is no longer relevant. Then you want to point that article at another page on your website. It's called a 301 redirect.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. That 301 redirect will help preserve the link equity, which helps drive the authority of the site. You just got to be cautious, look at tools. Make sure that they receive traffic. If they're receiving traffic even if they're outdated, put in those proper codes. Yeah, it's really important to prune your content, pull the weeds, just like maintaining the home.
Matt Dolman:
But most sites, 90 to 95 percent of your traffic is from 10% of your website, 10% of your content. You always want to prune and get rid of old pages that are getting no traffic at all.
Chris Dreyer:
Absolutely.
Matt Dolman:
That's going to bring down your site.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk a couple final things here, Matt. I want to talk about measuring success. It's the age-old problem of attribution. It's the 50% of your marketing is working, you just don't know what 50%. On content, on the content side, what are the tools, what are the strategies you're using to measure if a content piece is successfully working?
Matt Dolman:
All right, so track attribution. You want to have a unique phone number or a call tracking number for every page on your site. Or at least, the pages that drive traffic. You want to go through Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and you'll see which pages are getting no traffic. Don't worry about those pages. But if pages are getting more than 20, 30 views a week, those pages should all have a unique phone number. Otherwise, you'll never know what's actually working. Then just lather, rinse, repeat, or scraping that page completely.
How do I track it? Well, the most important way is your phone's ringing. We're getting intake. A couple of different third party sites work, too. There's Ahrefs, A-H-R-E-F-S, and Semrush, S-E-M-R-U-S-H. Those sites will show you third party data based on what they estimate your traffic to be, based on where you're ranking. They know how many times that term has been searched, they're just not going to know how many times people have actually been on your page unless you link Google Analytics to those sites, which you can do.
Chris Dreyer:
My follow-up question to this, and you'll have some fun with this probably to me, is the time orientation. First of all, I'll be the first one to say as an SEO, that the default in the space is how long does it take to get results is six months. You've all heard that. That's not necessarily true, especially if you've been practicing, you've had content for a long time. But what type of time orientation should you look at a piece of content to determine if it's working, if it's not working? What do you do there?
Matt Dolman:
Well, not all websites are apples-to-apples comparison. A strong website that has a lot of visibility, you put a new piece of content out there for a new project, you'd hope that it's going to rank in 60 to 90 days at most. Usually, within the first 30. A website that's not well-developed, doesn't have a lot of traffic, changes made to the website usually take four to six months before you're starting to see incremental improvements. It's not going to be substantial, but hopefully one or two of your pages are going to spike.
Chris Dreyer:
That wraps up this special episode of PIM with Matt Dolman. Over the coming weeks, we will reveal more insights from PIMCon. Follow and subscribe so you don't miss the next episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right, everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I'm out.
