Logan Mosby:
The flip to that is, "Okay, where can I sneak in and write unique topics that the competition's not writing about? Where can I carve out my niche there and get eyes on that?"
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. The SEO Revolution is here. AI has changed everything including how leads find your firm. That's why I teamed up with our director of SEO, Logan Mosby, to help you maintain your competitive edge.
In this special webinar replay, we break down structured data strategies, review optimization, and how to adapt your content for both traditional search and AI. You'll learn exactly what personal injury firms need to implement now to dominate search in 2025. Let's go.
Ken Mafli:
Well, hello everyone and welcome to Rankings live virtual event where we'll be discussing how you can master your SEO in today's AI landscape. I'm Ken Mafli, the director of Demand Generation here at Rankings, and I'll be your host for today.
We will have approximately 45 minutes for our experts to talk through mastering your SEO and GEO game before moving into the Q&A session. Before we get started, I would like to introduce our speakers to you.
First up, we have Chris Dreyer. Chris is our CEO and founder here at Rankings with over 15 years experience in SEO. In that time, he's worked on ranking hundreds of websites. He's built Rankings to be an elite law firm marketing agency that works with some of the biggest PI firms in the country, enabling them to dominate the SERPs for their core markets. He's also the host of the podcast Personal Injury Mastermind, author of the book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing: From Good to GOAT, and a member of multiple leadership councils.
Next up, we have Logan Mosby. Logan is the director of SEO here at Rankings where he oversees the SEO department and helps drive high impact strategies for some of the most competitive law firms in the country. With over a decade of experience in technical SEO, content strategy and local search optimization, Logan specializes in data-driven SEO that maximizes visibility and revenue. His expertise in GEO and enterprise-level SEO makes him a key player in helping law firms dominate search rankings. Welcome Logan.
The truth ism more and more Americans are using AI. In fact, Salesforce conducted a recent poll and concluded that 49% of Americans are now using AI. On top of that, the majority of younger Americans now rely on AI to help them make informed decisions on major life events and who to trust. And while this shift might cause alarm for some, for SEO professionals, this smells like opportunity.
Let's face it, SEO is the art of overcoming disruption, and nothing is more disruptive right now than generative AI. In the past, it was search engines constantly updating the rules of the game. Now it's both the search engines and AI rewriting how we get our message out to our customers. In this new environment, the game is mastering dual optimization strategies: search engine optimization and generative AI optimization or GEO. While SEO focuses on improving your law firm's visibility in search engines like Google, GEO ensures that your website's content is easily understood and prioritized by generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google Bard.
The challenge? Striking the perfect balance between creating content for humans and ensuring it aligns with algorithms that power both search engines and AI. It's both an art and a science folks, but don't take our word for it. On the next slide, you can check out this talk that Google gave just last week. In it, they talk about the growing trust the public has with AI. Folks are learning how to use. It's becoming increasingly intuitive and it's helping folks get the tailored answers they need fast. So it's on us to figure out how law firms can be showcased in the answers AI gives to our client's questions. That's what this entire hour is devoted to answering.
So with that said, I'm going to exit stage right and let the experts have the stage. I'll be back in the Q&A time where they'll be able to answer your questions.
Logan, I will let you take it from here.
Logan Mosby:
Thank you, Ken, and thank you everyone again for joining us. Chris and I are incredibly excited to cover this topic with you all and we've got lots to cover as Ken mentioned. So we're going to hop into it.
The first section here we're going to talk about is conducting keyword research for SEO and GEO. So if you haven't heard the term GEO before, it stands for Generative Engine Optimization and it is specific to AI SEO. So keyword research is no longer about identifying and putting our focus purely on high-volume keyword phrases. And so we're merging that with understanding user intent, adapting to natural language queries, and then providing relevant keywords to align with traditional SEO search and understanding that the AI search landscape is shifting to be more conversational than it ever has been. So we're interacting with AI search engines much differently than we are with our traditional Google search.
So how do we go about conducting this research? The focus should really be more on topics and topic clusters or content silos, producing content around things that your users, your target demographics care about, have questions about. And the good place to start with this is looking at intake forms and seeing, "Okay, what are some consistent questions that I'm getting that I can turn into some content on the site to provide value to my audience?" And then using our tools here to expand upon that.
Ahrefs has an awesome keyword explorer tool that also adds in and brings to you related questions around specific topics that can be incorporated into your content and your research. SEMrush, their Keyword Magic Tool does the same thing, and it also provides an AI-specific recommendation for you. And then of course, Google Keyword Planner to get volume data as well as trend data on specific topics and queries.
And then a new one that I have found within the last year, which is called Google AI Overview Impact Analysis, quite a mouthful. It is a Chrome extension that allows you to search queries at scale, and what it'll do is with two things. One, it'll tell you if that specific query inside of Google is producing an AI overview, and if so, it will actually bring in the cited domains that are being used for that current AI overview, which will allow you to go research what's going on on those sites and how to emulate that and make that better.
So keyword research, again, just to recap, this is more about topics and providing content in a more conversational manner to adhere to these AI search engines. And so now I want to pass it over to Chris.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, so the first thing I want to talk about before we jump over on the topics I just want to expand is, look, a lot of you guys are PI attorneys that are trying to get auto accidents, and you have probably written some variation of, "What are the steps to take after a car accident?" And that query or that article has been written 3 million times, so why should Google index your article or show it? And quite frankly, why should you even that for your site? I mean, you're going to rank in the AI overview for queries like this and it's not going to drive direct traffic to your site, similar to rich snippets in a zero click scenario in the past. So when you're looking at those topics on number one, you want to be focusing on questions that are bottom of the funnel or there's optionality related to the query itself. That's what you need to focus on is those bottom of the funnel primarily.
So just in itself, the topics that you're going to be targeting are going to be completely different. So I just wanted to state that those types of articles, steps to take after an accident have been written a gajillion times. The likelihood that you're going to rank and drive traffic for those that has intent, it's going to be very low.
Recently, Google had a summit. This was actually the 20th of March, and one of the things that they talked about was writing from firsthand experience. And you've all heard the topic before, E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. You're going to want to start incorporating that into your content, and writing for humans first and search engines second. So before it used to be all about keyword density and the keyword perfectly in your title tag and then in your H1 and a perfect balance of use throughout the copy, that's no longer the case. And here we want to really just answer the intent of the topic within the body of the content itself.
So number one, because Google wants you to write from firsthand experience, it's incredibly important to be an authority in your space. That means to speak at CLEs, to speak at conferences, to have experiences to share with your audience and speak from those specific experiences. That's also writing content that may not be out there. You may have a unique case that's never been written about and you want to create that on your website. You want to demonstrate your credibility. That is through those avenues that I said, through the books, through citations, through case results, through video, all of those things kind of demonstrate your trustworthiness.
And look, a lot of times Google, no matter how you optimize your content, it's going to pull what it thinks it should be about. So a lot of times your title tag and your H1 historically, if they were different, now Google's starting to display that keyword in the search results. So to basically summarize here, you really want to write from experience. It's more important than ever. I'll give you an example of a couple scenarios that you may have. So you could be trying to get cases for mass torts or auto accidents, and you may even have two websites. Well, your bio on your auto accident should speak only to auto accidents. Your bio on torts should only speak about torts, and maybe you're on steering committees and those types of scenarios. But you want to be incredibly specific at a page level anytime you're trying to demonstrate its human first and speak from first-hand experience.
Logan Mosby:
Listen, from there, we want to focus on improving our off-site authority and AI search engine referencing. So search engines, as we know, have long relied on these off-site signals to review authoritativeness and credibility. AI is doing the same thing and it's looking at a wide array of these sources.
So in this image that I have here on the right, I did, as you can see, a more conversational search with GPT asking it, "Hey, can you find me the best car accident attorneys in Chicago?" And one, it's going to give us this map that's pulling from multiple sources. And on the right-hand side, this is where this is key and where this is important and this comes into the AI search, is it's looking at the citations. So where is it pulling this information from to give you and the user this recommendation? So we'll see here at the top, Wikipedia, and then we have a couple Reddit posts and then some industry specific publications like Fine Law and SuperLawyers. So this is still so important.
Chris Dreyer:
When you look at these site, it's going to be very common that Wikipedia is listed. It is incredibly important to be listed in Wikipedia. So that's number one, and you constantly need to be updating those profiles. There's a lot of strategies that goes into that. One of the easiest is major news publications and books.
The other that you'll see is, unfortunately, Reddit. Well, Reddit is powering a lot of the LLMs through this user generated content. So having content, replying to comments and questions on there is important. But then the third thing that you're going to see that's really common is a lot of legal sites or GEO specific sites. So I know you guys get harassed by the Fine Law crew. They come to your office trying to sell you SuperLawyers, but now it's not necessarily about the link, even though a lot of times doesn't pass equity, but it could be about the LLMs pulling that from a trust perspective. So it now has more value than it once did from a credibility perspective for these AI referencing.
Logan Mosby:
So optimizing those frequent AI sources, and then traditional link building and link acquisition still matters. So focusing on obtaining strong links, increasing the brand mentions across the web, even unlinked mentions are being utilized in their references.
Optimize your Google business profiles, we talk about this a lot. So not only optimizing it, but also making sure that your information is consistent across the web because it's using that as a credibility check too. So making sure that your name is accurate, your phone number as well as the address, and then it's fully optimized. And then engaging in expert commentary, some thought leadership with guest posts and expert roundups, as well as being quoted in legal news articles that all can strengthen your credibility. And then leveraging social proof and reviews, and we'll touch on reviews in a little bit more detail if you're later in the webinar.
Chris Dreyer:
So the biggest thing is how, so use NLP-friendly language, and it's natural language processing. The biggest thing here is how to user search throughout the multitude of ChatGPT, Perplexity, whether it's Claude, et cetera. A lot of times people are using more long-tail conversational phrases because they're speaking to their phone. They're using audio, so the way that you're optimizing your content should be more about these long-tail phrases. You're minimizing jargon because your consumers aren't using the jargon or technical terms themselves. They're asking really simple, direct concise queries.
A lot of times they are doing many versions of frequently asked questions. So there is something to be said about some of your pages spinning out the FAQs and the individual pages themselves. And look, today, that's how I use it myself on my phone. I'm speaking to it. It's almost to the point where I could have a conversation back and forth. It's much more quick, and that's how you need to your content because, today, that's what's powering all these LLMs. So it's more about long-tail phrases and simplifying the use of jargon for your consumer.
Hey guys, Chris here. You know TV ads work. I know TV ads work, but only when you do it the right way. You're throwing away money when you don't know how to negotiate rates or create compelling ads. Don't worry, I got you. I brought in Sarah Parisi, our VP of Media at Rankings on how to do it the right way. On April 29th, that's tomorrow, we're hosting a master class on winning with TV right now. You'll learn the specific strategies for rate negotiation, scheduling that actually reaches your ideal clients and creating ads that convert views in the cases. Link to sign up is in the show notes. All right, let's get on with the show.
Logan Mosby:
You're speaking of minimizing jargon, I'm going to go down a little jargon on the SEO side with regards to structured data and schema markup. So structured data is a piece of code that goes on pages to help markup and structure the data that's in the content. It also helps AI tools better understand that content and it speaks directly to them. From that conference that Chris was mentioning earlier is they made two points that I thought were really telling to the importance that structured data is still going to continue to have, especially with AI, is one, a lot of their systems run a lot better when they can see structured data on this site on these sites. And then two, it's actually cheaper for them to crawl it as well.
So we're looking at structured data. We're looking for things that are specific to the niche. So legal service schema that can help mark up the practice areas and the service pages. Attorney schema for our bios, and our attorney information, as well as articles and blog postings for the informative information that we're launching. And then other things like FAQ, as Chris mentioned, putting that into structured data and having that very concise, conversational question answer in that code.
So a few things here. I included a couple of right tools that we want to look at when we're analyzing our structured data. One is going to be the Rich Results Testing Tool. And this is one you can hop in Google it right now and throw a side into it and see what it produces. But this will let you know if there's any warnings or errors in the code that may impact that structured data to show a rich result. So a rich result is, I'm sure you've seen if you've been doing searches, where you have a star rating associated with a traditional organic search listing in Google that comes from structured data. So we want to make sure that we're using Rich Results Testing Tool so it's not impacting our traditional SEO.
Then then the Structured Data Testing Tool as well. This will analyze it from a code perspective to make sure there's no errors in the code. And then as we've touched on, really make sure to highlight these Q&As. So I'm going to stay on this topic for a few more slides. We'll go into a couple best practices and dos and don'ts of leveraging structured data for our traditional SEO as well as these AI search engines.
So first and foremost, we want to use JSON-LD. I don't want to get too in the weeds here, but it's a piece of JavaScript that Google has come out and recommended that we use. So that indicates that they can more easily understand that code when they are parsing content. And then we want to touch on making sure that our information's up-to-date, it's original and it's complete. So we want to be making sure that the information we're providing is complete.
And then on the don't side, we don't want to provide any information in that structured data that's not on the website or on the webpage in which we're using it. We don't want to mislead a user should they see something in a rich result or a featured result in search, and then they come to the page and it's not there. And then we don't want to duplicate the same structured data across the site, shoving the same piece of code in the header or footer. This code needs to be specific to the page that it's being used on to give us the biggest bang for our buck.
And then in the next slide here, I have a live example of a search that I was doing last week to show you what this looks like in action. So on the left is a snapshot from that Structured Data Testing Tool, and this is an FAQ page schema. And you'll see here at the very top we have this question, and then right below it, I have an answer. In the AI overview here. You'll notice it's condensing that information, it's looking at all these sources and it's providing a more detailed explanation. So we'll see some similarities here with witness statements, police reports in the left-hand side that we're seeing in this overview. And I pulled that structured data test from that top result on the right, it's labeled, "What is considered road rage?"
So these things are all working together to provide a more concise, easy to feed to these search engines, content in this code. So structured data is incredibly important. It's going to continue to be important as we move in advance into AI search.
Chris Dreyer:
And before we move on from this, Logan, thank you for that. I want to stay on schema for just one more, we have three slides on schema for a very important reason. It's one of the most important things you can do to rank in these LLMs and in the AI overview section. This actual example that's pulled up is for a client. We added FAQ to the schema on the left and then it resulted in pulling the result in the AI overview on the right. So this is an actual in practice, this isn't some random thing. This is direct use of this.
And the biggest thing that I want to emphasize here too is it decreases Google's crawl budget when you use schema. So it costs them less money. And that's one of the biggest issues right now with indexing and crawling your site is a lot of times we have too many pages on the site that are irrelevant, and this is just another thing that emphasizes those crawl rates and their ability to scrape and understand information. So this being number five, right in the middle of this presentation, it's probably the most important thing.
And then the last thing I want to say is a lot of SEO agencies, the lazy approach is to throw schema in site wide. That's the lazy approach. You should have schema on every important page on your site, especially if you're using video. You can do video schema markup. It's incredibly important. I am sorry for going on a rant here, but I just really want to emphasize how important this is, particularly right here in the middle. Then we can go on to number six.
So with this multi-format content: text, video, visuals. So there is, whenever you do a query, the thing that I would recommend you do is just take a look at all the different types of content that is being displayed in the search results. So video, you'll have video for a query. You'll have the user generated content in the middle. So we want to make sure to incorporate that onto our webpages themselves.
And the first thing that I want to emphasize, and I don't think many people know this, and I'm going to circle bullet point number one, you need to create a dedicated page for your videos. If you have a video that targets a keyword or a topic, instead of just embedding it on your practice area pages, on your bios, et cetera, in order to get it to display on Google, and according to video SEO best practices, that page along with the transcription should be on its own page. I want to repeat that. It should be on its own page. So if you do a video on what you need to do after a car accident, instead of just putting that on your car accident lawyer practice page, it needs to be on a dedicated page and it will display differently, and it helps it rank in the search results.
That's the most important. The other infographics, you can do some image SEO optimization, you can repurpose content in other formats, but really the true most important thing here is going to be the video. And so add that, add video schema and incorporate that on a dedicated page itself.
Logan Mosby:
As I touched on earlier, we're going to get into a little bit more about reviews. We all know how important reviews are, especially for traditional search and then analyzing that to gauge our authority and relevance and credibility in the market. So we have this graphic here on the left just showing that in numbers. So the impact that having positive reviews and a high number of reviews has on traditional search is also being included in the AI search as well.
So they're looking at this just the same, looking for business with strong, positive reviews when they're providing their recommendations. So the focus here is really to improve and continue to get high quality reviews in quantity. So making sure that we're soliciting and we're getting in front of our clients, and then also encouraging them to be as detailed as they feel comfortable. So in some of these steps here, what I mean by that is, and providing more information on their case type. Was it a car accident? Slip and fall, a truck accident? What location were you helping them in too? So what city? That location helps as well, as well as the attorney that they're working with.
So we want to encourage them to be as detailed as they feel comfortable. Of course, we don't want to ask them outright, but encouraging is always a good thing. And then a couple other things here too to show the engagement of the business with your clientele, respond to all reviews: positive and negative. On the negative ones, respond to them professionally, and of course don't get defensive because everyone can see that. So we want to make sure that we're addressing both positive and negative reviews, then leveraging our testimonials onsite as well as the user generated content that we've touched on with Reddit, especially since it's becoming more and more prominent in both.
So the key here and what to focus on is to have a 4.8 out of 5.0 star rating with over 200 reviews. That's going to be the real sweet spot.
Chris Dreyer:
The biggest thing is I would tell you to take a look at your, if you're using ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude or any of these LLMs, take a look at how you're using it yourself. How many times have you used, "What's the best X, what's the top this?" So I recently went on vacation to Naples, and I'm like, "What's the best restaurants? What's the best beaches?" And when we're trying to rank for those superlatives, they're pulling third party data from the reviews. And primarily Google. So that's why it's incredibly important to rank and get a 4.8 or higher because you're not going to rank for superlatives in the LLMs or even on Google in the map pack itself if you don't have a high rating.
The last thing I would say is just like when you're looking at the sources in order to do your offsite link building or to create content, you also want to look at the top review sites. So right now for attorneys, it's going to be surprising to hear, number one of course is Google, but number two is Yelp. I know Yelp is tricky, and those reviews get filtered, but there's a reason for that. It's because that's what Apple Maps pulls on a phone. So when a consumer gets in an auto accident and they're on their phone and they pull it out, if they do a search on Apple Maps, they're going to be pulling from Yelp. So don't completely ignore Yelp from your review outreach strategy because it's more important than ever, not only from a rankings perspective in Maps, but also from an LLM perspective and ranking in these GPTs.
Currently, when you look at things, a lot of times you're going to see in the search results, the Instagram results, you're going to see more and more social media, you're going to see X, and they all kind of tie in together and they create relevancy together. I think it's a matter of time before they start pulling from the social media itself. A lot of these have restrictions, so whenever you're optimizing, and this is more just about SEO in general. I think a lot of times people think of SEO, they think of just Google, but now it's so much more than that. You need to be thinking about search everywhere optimization. So that means the titles that you're using that are very conversational for YouTube, the titles that you're using on your Apple Podcast and the titles for Instagram and just what you're using for descriptions, it all kind of ties itself and feeds the algorithm.
I'll give you a perfect example. If you go to Apple Maps or Apple Podcasts and you think about utilizing its search to find another podcast, you're going to type in queries and keywords, and it's going to prioritize those that use those keywords. So whenever I started my podcast, I believe we called it the Rankings podcast or something like that, but I found that it had a lot more discoverability when I renamed it to the Personal Injury Mastermind podcast because now when someone types in personal injury, it's way more searchable. So it's utilizing content and keywords properly for this AI environment, not only on just your website and Google search itself, but also these third party sites as well,
Logan Mosby:
And monitoring and updating our content regularly here. So as Chris had mentioned, there's a lot of sites that are going after the same topics. A lot of our sites are also bloated, and we have a lot of content that's out there, so we want to make sure that we're leveraging it the best way possible. And these search engines, these AI engines are trying to get the most up-to-date applicable information. So it's important to go through and perform regular content audit. So when we're in the PI space, family law, defense, we're looking anywhere from three to six months that we're regularly doing that. It's going to be expedited or it's going to be more frequent when we're looking at mass torts monthly at a maximum, sometimes weekly. So we want to make sure that we're updating statistics.
I came across something, I can't remember what I was searching for, but it was throwing me statistics from 2018 and 2025. So I was looking for something a little bit more relevant. So make sure that we're updating the statistics as well as links. Websites change so frequently, so if we're linking to data that's no longer on the source or it's redirected, and we need to make sure that we're not sending our users to something that no longer exists. And then also examples, republishing content as well. We don't want to do thin updates though. When we're republishing content, we want to make sure that it's valuable. And back to the first point here, and providing information that your users care about and are actively searching for. And then adding in new sections and insights to already generated content that's on the website. Rather than reinventing the wheel and doing another article or publication, leveraging what we have, adding new insights and sections to it that are applicable to that.
And then lastly, of course, monitoring competitors' content. This is a big one, and you can get a couple of things from this. One, it allows us to see, "Okay, what are they talking about that we maybe aren't?" The flip to that is, "Okay, where can I sneak in and write unique topics that the competition's not writing about? Where can I carve out my niche there and get eyes on that?" So again, monitor and update content regularly and make sure that it's fresh and up to date.
Chris, anything to add on this one?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I would just say just a couple specific examples, and I'm going to keep using examples for PI attorneys, but if you're trying to rank for car accident lawyer, that landing page may be more evergreen and maybe you refresh it and tune it up every, say, quarter, every three months. If you're trying to rank for mass torts, Suboxone lawsuit, Depo-Provera, et cetera, you need to be regularly updating it anytime there's a news update. I mean at a minimum every month, but in most cases, if you look at the top ranking results for these mass tort lawsuit pages, it's weekly or even daily in some cases.
The big one here, guys, it's to write a book. There's a lot of advantages here. The book is going to help you with the authority and expertise component that Google's looking at. They say you want to write from firsthand experiences. It's also going to allow you other link opportunities. So a lot of these publishing sites, you can add descriptions that link back to where your book's located. They also help you to acquire knowledge panels, you can be listed as an author. And it's one of the easiest ways to get listed in Wikipedia if you have a credible book. There's this tremendous advantages that kind of touch on all of this by writing a book. And there are a lot of individuals that can help facilitate this. You could get a ghost writer, you could have someone interview you, and a lot of it can be tackled through the on-demand publishing and Kindle Direct publishing platform. You don't have to go out and get one of these top-tier publishers to get a book live. It's just something I would highly, highly recommend.
Yeah, so let me in my own summarized fashion here, and then we'll open it up to Q&A. The first thing is, number one, keyword research and how you're approaching it is going to change significantly. It's more about topics and less about the individual keywords. It's optimizing for the intent behind the query. It's using natural language processing and how consumers are typing in these queries into the LLMs. So that's number one. It's right about topics.
Number two, focus on first-hand experience. We just talked about the book. We want to talk about our personal experience and more human-first, human-led.
Third, this is a huge one. I put this right up there with one of the top of the 10, is look at the citations that these sites are using for references. You want to be listed on those sites, get backlinks from those sites. That's how Google's sourcing and making these recommendations, it's incredibly important.
Number four, again, use NLP-friendly language. So think about how a user would be speaking to their phone and how they would be dictating to their phone. And right in that style. Number five, schema markup on every single page. Individually, it helps Google crawl the page, understand the page. It helps you rank in the AI overview section like we showed with the FAQ section.
Six, use multi-format content, video being the primary and also remember to have a dedicated page for each video on your site.
Seven, the review sites. Think about Google and Yelp. The main use here is to rank for superlatives. So when a consumer says, "Who's the best car accident lawyer," and they type it into ChatGPT, because of your review rating and because of these third party sites, you're going to be the reference, you're going to be the source there.
Eight, it's more about search everywhere optimization now. So think about your keyword use, your descriptions and the topics and titles that you're using on all these third party sites, especially the UGC, generated sites like Reddit.
Monitor and update your content regularly. Legal is in your money, your life space, just like medical and financial. So in order to rank in the top of the search results, particularly in the AI overview, you're going to have to frequently update your content.
And number 10, write a book. It kind of hits on multiple points here, from writing for firsthand experience being an authority. It helps you get listed in these third party sites like Wikipedia. It gives you other link opportunities.
Those are the big ones. If I had to pick from this list, they're all really important, but if I had to pick the most important, I would say the structured data and schema markup. And then the second thing that I would pick is really try to get listed on all of these third party sites that are referenced as sources.
Ken Mafli:
We have some questions that have come in, so I want to make sure that we use the time wisely. And let's see here, this one. "What is the best way to increase my number of positive reviews and which platforms matter most?"
Chris, do you want to take that one?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, so jeez. I'm going to rapid fire here to strap in. You need to be just primarily focusing on Google. That's number one. But you need to incentivize the behavior for all of your employees. So that means pay them. Pay them for the activity to get reviews, 50 to 100 dollars per review, it's well worth the investment. Make it top of mind. Consider doing a weekly email that goes company-wide, so everyone understands the importance of why of these reviews.
You need to ask at multiple points throughout the engagement. So even before they're a client, when you onboard them, anytime they have a positive experience, anytime they say the word thank you, is an opportunity to leave a review. Certainly if they're coming into the office, I mean, it's almost like don't let them out of the office until they leave a review. But just like where you go, you get your teeth cleaned every six months or whatever at the dental office, technically you're not supposed to incentivize and give a t-shirt or things of that nature. But I've seen some firms like Gordon McKernan that have a swag room where you could go pick out a hat or a t-shirt, and it's kind of, you want to make just their overall experience strong enough to where then when you can ask for a review, they're more likely to give it.
Those are some of the best methods in terms of review acquisition.
Ken Mafli:
Love it. Okay. The next question that came in, and Logan, I'll pass this one over to you. "Is there a need to optimize for YouTube with videos on my website?"
Logan Mosby:
Yes, absolutely. So not just the videos, but also the channel too. You want to optimize the channel. And then video optimization is becoming more and more prominent in search. We have video search along with voice search too. So those are just going to continue to be more important. YouTube has some great things that you can leverage with the descriptions, looking at the title of the videos, leveraging their tags, as well as closed captioning, thumbnails, and then end screens and interactions throughout the videos. So yes, absolutely there is a need to optimize for YouTube videos. And then on site, as Chris mentioned, leveraging video object schema to give exactly what that video is about on that specific page and make that the core component of that page.
So as carousels pop up in search, those videos are going to add a lot of value. And people's attention spans are short, so they want to get a video, they want to see something that may be a little bit more complicated, spoken to them rather than reading through a 5,000 word article. So absolutely. Yep.
Ken Mafli:
Wonderful. Okay, so this third one's a little bit longer, and Chris, I'll pass this one over to you. "Are there tools to help write content using conversational language while still maintaining a professional and authoritative tone? Is there a way to test that to know that I've struck the right balance?"
Chris Dreyer:
Really good question. So there's a lot of AI writing tools. There's Surfer, there's JasperAI, there's Neuralink, there's a ton. I would look at Jasper and Surfer AI, but you're going to have to be really cautious to add that human element. None of these are standalone writing tools. You're going to have to edit those from your firsthand experiences. That's where you can add a lot of value. I will tell you that you can feed it, you can feed any GPT your content and get a Flesch-Kincaid reading score to see what the reading level is for your consumer. Because I think the biggest issue that a lot of attorneys have is that they write too technical, but we need to be writing for our audience and our consumers. So you can plug your content into these and then check that Flesch-Kincaid score. I highly recommend that.
Ken Mafli:
Perfect. Okay. Actually, I was today years old when I knew about checking the reading level. That's actually really good. So this last question that came in is, what types of videos... Oh, Logan, I'll pass this over to you, since apparently I'm talking to you about videos. "What types of videos should I have on my site and how long should they be?"
Logan Mosby:
Good question. Yeah, so anything that is informative about who you are, what you do. People still trust, attorney bios are great for that as well as testimonial videos from clients that you've helped. And then informational based videos too. So we're getting informational, as I mentioned, attention spans are relatively short, so you look into that 30 second to a minute sweet spot for more informational type stuff. And then longer videos, longer form content for your bios and reviews, anything else that we're leveraging?
So Chris, anything to add to that too?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I think whenever you're looking at any channel, whether it's TV and you're doing daytime television, it depends on the strategy. So if you're doing daytime television, maybe you want to a punchy, direct response type of video that's shorter. So on your site, or if you're using the video for Meta or TikTok, it needs to be really punchy, 15, 30 seconds with the hook early on, heavy call to action. If you're trying to build a story and a brand, those can be longer. And you can check the watch rates and when people drop off, but it just depends on what you're going to use the video for. If it's direct response, that needs to be punchy and quick. If it's building brand, typically it's a little bit longer.
Ken Mafli:
Perfect. Okay. So I know that we placed a really big emphasis on schema and I did see some buzz around that. Is there any resources that either of you would point to? Maybe this is the first time someone is starting to build schema into their web pages. Any resources they should go to start learning about that?
Logan Mosby:
Yep, absolutely. It's called schema.org or schema.org, which will have all of the different types that are available to you. You can get down some rabbit holes. I've seen stuff for waterfalls. I don't know why I'd be marking up a page with waterfall schema, but there's a lot of stuff that you can do with it. So that, and then Google's developer tools as well gives some really strong examples and some guidelines around what you should and should not do when you're producing the structured data.
Chris Dreyer:
And guys, the real benefit of ChatGPT and some of these LMS is, use them. "How could I mark this page up with schema? Give me the code," and it will literally give you the code and recommendations. "Well, what is wrong here? What could I incorporate if I was going to use schema on this page?"
Ken Mafli:
That's fantastic. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Okay. I love it.
Okay, well, it looks like that is the questions that have come in. Any last words before we wrap up?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I mean, you got to kill your darlings here. You got to change how you're doing things. You got to utilize and think about AI in the future. S search is more about capturing band and search everywhere optimization. So it's just essential to change the old school way of doing things on a singular keyword, and keyword density, you're out. You've got to adapt or die.
Ken Mafli:
All right. Logan, all good?
Logan Mosby:
Yeah, a hundred percent. Ditto to that.
Ken Mafli:
Okay, well thank you Chris and Logan for that presentation and the Q&A time. I can definitely tell from how many people actually piled into this in the questions that we got, the folks greatly appreciated it.
As we wrap up, I would like to close on one final thought. As Chris said, if you focus on GEO, your SEO only becomes that much stronger. Why? By focusing on intent driven keywords, high quality content, structured data, and building trust through reviews and engagement, it follows SEO best practices. In fact, it's what we should have been doing all along. But now, it's do it or face the consequences. The days of gaming the system are long gone. Give the people what they're actually looking for or get left in the dust.
That said, on the last slide, finding the right SEO partner is essential. They can help you outline your goals, construct the right strategy and track your outcomes. The best part is you get to focus on what you do best: winning cases for your clients. Obviously, we are here to help you get the most out of your SEO and GEO efforts. Our expertise and understanding of the legal market puts you, our clients, in a winning position. So use the QR code to contact us today to see how you can get the most out of your marketing campaigns. You won't be disappointed. Bye for now.
Chris Dreyer:
AI is completely changing the SEO game for law firms. And look, if you're not adapting your strategy right now, you're getting left behind. It's that simple. Up next, we have a webinar that will help you do TV ads the right way. Please, please don't do media buys on your own. Our very own Sarah Parisi will explain everything you need to know. Link to sign up is in the show notes. I'm Chris Dryer, this is Personal Injury Mastermind. Catch you next time. I'm out.
