Chris Dreyer:
Hey everyone. Chris Dreyer here, CEO of Rankings.io. You're about to hear a replay of one of our live webinars at Rankings.io. We go deep on what's working right now to help personal injury law firms sign more cases. Today's session is all about how AI is changing local search and what you can do to stay visible when clients are looking for you. Let's get into it.
Ken Mafli:
Well, hello everyone and welcome to Rankings live virtual event where we'll be discussing how you can leverage ads to advance, local ads to advance your lead generation efforts for your law firm. I'm Ken Mafli, the VP of marketing here at Rankings, and I'll be your host for today. Today's webinar is one hour in length. We'll have approximately 30 minutes to talk through our findings before moving on to the Q&A session. Then we'll have about 10 to 15 minutes to answer any questions you may have. I would like to introduce our speakers to you.
First up, we have Shawn Denney. Shawn is the Vice President of Digital here at Rankings, where he leads the agency's evolution into a generative engine optimization powerhouse beyond just traditional SEO. With over 15 years of marketing experience spanning traditional digital and data-driven strategies, he oversees fulfillment across SEO, paid media, content marketing and technology. Shawn's expertise includes cross-channel strategy, advanced analytics, reporting and innovation, helping law firms maximize visibility and growth in competitive markets. Welcome Shawn.
Next, we have John Pennino. John is the local SEO manager at Rankings where he optimizes client websites and Google business profiles. At Rankings, John leads Google business profile optimization strategies for high-impact local rankings, implements advanced local SEO campaigns that generate measurable business growth and monitors and adapts platform changes, algorithmic updates and review management trends. He is your go-to resource for local SEO strategy. John is passionate about transforming complex SEO challenges into clear actionable solutions, ensuring clients not only rank higher but win more cases. Welcome John.
All right. Well, it looks like a lot of folks are piling in, so we will go ahead and get things kicked off. First, we do need to set the stage. AI is rapidly transforming the way people search for local businesses, making it essential for brands to rethink their local SEO strategies. In the past, it was enough to optimize for Google alone, but now the landscape has expanded to include a variety of platforms such as Bing, voice assistants and AI-driven directories. These each consume and interpret data about your business differently.
To stay visible and competitive, businesses must adopt the best practices of local SEO across all these channels. So, let's go ahead and dive into it. John, I will pass it over to you.
Why consistent business citations are critical for law firm visibility in AI-powered search results
John Pennino:
All right. Thanks a lot, Ken. And yes, as Ken was saying, basically what we're looking at with AI is the importance of our overall citations here, having them optimized for AI search and overall visibility. So, a lot of this is very consistent with what we would normally do for a Google business profile, making sure that your NAP information is consistent across all profiles and citations. Now, the reason this is very, very important for things like ChatGPT is because if you have inconsistencies with your name at all, it's not smart enough to know specifically which articles or citations are linked up to your exact profile if your information is not consistent.
So, what we find is where this tends to be an issue is when a brand and a firm decides to do something like a DBA change. And you have to realize with a DBA change that this is a full brand change that you are committing to. So, if you are only thinking of this on the side of, say for a Google business profile because you want to have a keyword in your names for his personal injury lawyer or a motor vehicle accident attorney, something like that, if you're not doing this across all platforms, you're basically going to be dividing up the amount of citation and equity that your brand is building in your overall imprint in the digital media.
So, above everything, it's very 100% important if you're not using citation platforms to push out updates that you're manually going and you're updating your name and address and phone number across all of these citations, and you really have to look at the ones that ChatGPT might be citing more. What are the really popular ones? It's super lawyers and Justia, stuff like that. Those come up repeatedly when they're looking at featuring a specific firm in a user query.
The other side of this, too, is so many people are just so focused on Google that you forget about things like such as Bing. And ChatGPT specifically is using Bing to get a lot of its information. So, if you haven't already linked your Google Biz profile information through Bing places, you can do that to make sure that you are listed there and then combine that with something like a lot of the reviews generated on Bing come from Yelp. If you haven't claimed your Yelp profile, you want to 100% make sure that you are claiming that Yelp profile and optimize all of these specific listings.
Shawn Denney:
My turn, chime in on managing your reputation. So, these AI models, how they operate is they use something called a large language model or an LLM, which is built off of entities or singularly defined person, place, thing, idea, company, something that is singular that it can understand. And when someone's talking about that entity, that's where the relationship comes in. Those entities and how someone's phrasing it, so whether it's positive connotation, negative connotation, the words that are associated with it help frame these AIs, understanding about your business, your brand, your entity who you are.
When someone has a negative review and they say you did a terrible job, these AI platforms don't really understand the nuance behind that if someone's just very unhappy and slandering or whether it's accurate. So, it's going to take these reviews and that's how it understands your brand and where everything's coming from. It's really important that when someone's talking about you online, that you are making sure a lot of that conversation has a positive connotation around it and that you're responding to reviews if something negative is said, that you are trying to address those negative comments and make sure that there's an understanding of why that negative experience or negative interaction happened.
And it's not just reviews, it's really any time someone's, talking about it. So, whether that's on social media, whether it's on other platforms, Reddit, Quora, some of those forum type places, the more that someone's having a positive affirmation in their words, the more it's going to help these AIs understand your brand and want to talk about you because they feel more positive about you.
John Pennino:
And if I could just chime in on that to follow up with Shawn, what he was saying is that it's really important that you have reviews from a variety of sources. Again, we've all been putting the emphasis on Google for so long, and as we see these sites like ChatGPT growing and Perplexity and all the variety of different platforms that are getting a little bit of the share, it is so important that we get reviews across all these different platforms because the AI is pulling them from multiple sources. It's not just going to be looking just at Google, they're looking at Yelp and reviews and Facebook reviews and stuff like that.
100% make sure that you are asking for reviews. A lot of firms are now proactive with this because it seems strange to be asking for reviews from clients, but it is really one of the most important things that you've been doing right now.
Shawn Denney:
Yep. And just to reinforce that, John mentioned Facebook, John mentioned Yelp, John mentioned Google. Those aren't the only platforms. It's really anywhere someone can leave a review about you. He mentioned some of the biggest ones out there. But more platforms that are leaving reviews for you are going to help that understanding and be a powerful impactor of whether you are being cited in AI or someone else's.
How to structure law firm website content so AI search engines cite you as a trusted authority
John Pennino:
All right. And now how should you be formatting your content for LLMs? And I think a lot of you are probably starting to be aware of this if you're not already, but LLMs, they really need a specific format of content. So, HTML formats are preferred and when you're answering specific questions, you want it to be very concise. So, in formatting, what you would want to be doing is utilizing your headers for the questions themselves and then in your body content, having a direct answer in a natural language way, how you would have a conversational answer. But you want to do it pretty quickly and concisely.
But what you can do is you can expand on that. So, if you're answering a particular question, have sub-questions about that are related as well that you're going to follow up on that because this is going to more robustly build out your content to show that you are a person of authority on a topic. And that goes a long way to send signals to both Google and AI that you have topical authority on something and you're going to be much more likely to get cited if you structure your content that way.
We have issues with sites ... a lot of websites are built on JavaScript and some of the LLMs, it's a lot harder for them to ascertain some of the information when things are built in JavaScript. So, traditional FAQ sections might be built with JavaScript where it's like a dropdown and the answers are hidden. With that type of formatting, you can have issues with ChatGPT and stuff like that, not being able to fully read that content.
So, you want to make sure that you're creating this content in a newer, more substantial format. And this should be really actual content itself as opposed to just a traditional FAQ section. Make it more like an article style, but answer the questions within your body of text.
Shawn Denney:
One other area to piggyback on what John was saying was have direct questions and then have answers with it, is don't be afraid of bullet points. Bullet points help these AI platforms really parse the data and understand specific intent and specific ideas within it. So, we're not saying just use bullet points, but a heading, a paragraph, some bullets, another paragraph can be very meaningful in how you structure that content to make it so that it's not multiple paragraphs or one very long paragraph that is much harder for these AIs to understand the intent and the purpose and how to interpret that content.
Ooh, PR. Everybody loves PR, right? Well, maybe not everyone does. But it is very important for these AI models to really understand because part of how they are crafted and built is they want to look at what other people are saying about you. This goes back to that reputation component, but also you can craft your own business how you want it to say, how you want it to talk about you. When you have other platforms, other publications talking about you, this is going to reinforce the sentiment and the engagement around your brand beyond what you normally have.
So, links is important, but also smart engagements with PR, whether that's a press release, whether that's being in the local news, something like that can be very powerful. And there are ways that you can craft this to be beneficial for your brand. So, things as simple as helping to sponsor and be present for a local 5K run, that can be a big PR opportunity that is going to enhance AI's knowledge about your location and how you fit into that community. Doing a scholarship for something, sponsoring a local high school or sports team can also be just easy ways to get some of that smart PR that's reinforcing your locality and why you are related to that community, which helps it understand where it should and should not reference you.
John Pennino:
All right. So, how can you control what AI is saying about you? And first and foremost, it comes down to what are you saying about yourself? The content on your website is fundamental in this. But what you can be doing is building out About Us page on you and your homepage with a lot of content around your accolades, what you've achieved as a firm. Because when people are searching top lawyers or they're asking for a suggestion, what's the best lawyer for personal injury and Somerset, New Jersey or something where I live? Having this content structured correctly on your website, so it's easily scannable is really going to help reinforce what the LLMs can learn about you and what they're going to be saying about you.
So, very, very important that you're putting things like how long you've been practicing for, where you got your education from. All of these are factors where that are going to be weighed by the LLMs to show you the featured in that particular query that comes up. Beyond that, also you have to be looking at with the LLMs, they're not necessarily putting as much of a factor on the proximity like Google does. You can actually be featured from miles, miles away and get a lead from someone that is not anywhere really that close to you.
Like I'm in Central Jersey, you could be getting leads from Northern Jersey because on your page content, you have a services page dedicated to the town that I live in. Even though you might not necessarily have an office in that location, but you do service that and you created content about that. The LLMs are able to read that content and that is going to be fundamental with you having visibility on these LLM platforms.
Shawn Denney:
So, to dive a little bit deeper in how all of this works, I know I brought up entities earlier, but I want to talk a little bit more about that to help you guys conceptualize this particular owning the conversation, how it knows what to pull versus what not to pull. So, it has the entity of you, it has the entity of your law firm. But other things on your page, like John was just talking about, with specific cities. As you're talking through that with your content, it's going to understand that city is another entity in this big LLM and then legal services or the law is going to be other entities in there.
And as you talk about these different entities throughout your content, whether you mean to or not, you are creating connections between your entity and these entities. So, if someone searches for legal services in South Jersey because your content talked about that already, it's going to say, "Hey, what are the other entities related to this?" And pull in you as one of those potential candidates based off it to know. Then when I look at your entity, what information do I want to show? What information do I want to pull?
How you can own this conversation and create it is making sure that the content throughout your website, you are very clear in talking about what you do and where you do it. So, it's a simple concept of making sure there's not ambiguity or there's a muddled message. The more that you can say, "I service these locations, I have offices at this area. These are my practice areas that I deliver or take cases in." The more that you can be very explicit and clear with that throughout your content, it's going to reinforce the understanding for these entities in this AI model.
John Pennino:
And then on the other side of that coin is trying to control what other people are saying about you as well. So, a lot of the content that gets pulled you'll find are from listicle style articles where there's a major law related website that's giving their top lawyers in New Jersey or top lawyers in California or the locality. If you can reach out to those sites and get featured in those types of articles, that's going to heavily weight with your overall ranking in the eyes of the LLM to be featured in that type of content. And that'll bring us to our next point, which is also your visibility on the forums.
Shawn Denney:
Yep. So, there are many different forms out there. The two that matter the most for AI are Reddit and Quora. Now, they operate differently in what they're trying to do and how you're interacting, but AIs leverage these platforms very heavily to understand user engagement, prominence of a brand, service areas, where it's being talked about, how it's being talked about. So, some of the most important things you can do is make sure that you have a profile on both of these platforms and that you are posting on them.
This does not mean you have to be posting 15 times a day on these. But it does mean once a week, once every other week, get in there and make a post on your brand's subreddit or answer a question that someone asked on Quora. Now, with Reddit, that's going to be more conversational in how you're interacting with someone. On Quora, they're looking for a lot of authority and expertise. They're looking for citations. They're looking for you to prove you are delivering the best answer out of all the answers that could come to that question.
When you do this, not only does it help Google search and get pulled into some of those search engine result page features, but it helps the AI platforms understand who you are, how relevant you are to the query that's coming up, and make sure that you're top of mind and the source that it wants to pull from because it understands these interactions you're having on these user engagement platforms.
John Pennino:
And to follow up with what Shawn said, with Reddit specifically, the more engagements you have, your local forums, you're going to become an entity on those forums. You could get to a point where you could do your own, Ask Me Anything, AMAs on a Reddit and just be the person of authority, topical authority on something and just ask me any questions about personal injury, accidents and law. And you'll get a lot of feedback on that and it could do quite a bit for your overall visibility and you probably even just get some leads directly from that for possible cases.
Shawn Denney:
We've got a bonus on here, which is just a takeaway for you that can have a big impact through all of this is when you are asking for reviews, ask your clients to mention your name specifically, your business name and your locality or where you are. This helps that correlation between the understanding of your brand, you as the lawyer or you as a team member and then the city or the region that you operate in. And this can have a meaningful impact on how AI is going to interpret you and how frequently it's going to show you.
The review request strategy that improves your PI firm’s discoverability in AI-powered search results
John Pennino:
Yeah. And as much as you can with coaching your clients on how to leave a review. Again, it mentioned the service that was provided specifically. So, if your case was like a car accident case, make sure that is in there combined with all of this business name, the locality, because all of that gets picked up and that will get featured in these different AI platforms. That could be Google too, like AI overviews, it could be ChatGPT, it could be really any of these.
But we're finding more and more that robust reviews that are really filled out with thought and give a lot of feedback goes a long way on your overall, just like the feeling about your brand, how you're perceived, and then just for keywords specifically trigger keywords for visibility metrics. So, great way to gain your overall visibility and spread it out, not just Google. As we said before, you really have to get these on all these different platforms and it's that even the different citation platforms like Super Lawyers, Justia, if they have a way where you can get reviews, lifts on those sites, those are always coming up in either ChatGPT or AI overview for visibility as one of the cited links for lawyers. So, very, very important that you're monitoring those and try to get reviews spread out on those as much as you can.
Ken Mafli:
Fantastic. Okay. Well, we have absolutely sprinted through this because there's so much to cover, but now we're going to slow down a little bit and we're going to walk through some of the questions that came up during this excellent presentation. So, let me get over to my notes and we'll start at the top. So, first off, Brad asks about regarding optimizing citations, what about variants in name like John Smith versus John A. Smith versus John Allen Smith? John, yeah, please go ahead.
John Pennino:
Yeah. That's exactly the point. It has to be consistent across all, otherwise you're splitting up where your perceived authority is going to go because the LLM is not going to understand what's the difference between this variation versus variation. So, it's hurting you is what it is. So, it's something that you specifically ... That's why when we talk about DBA changes, it's something that you really have to embrace wholeheartedly. It's not just like a gimmick to get a keyword to help you with your Google business profile.
It's something you have to embrace wholeheartedly and you have to be updating LinkedIn, Facebook, all your social profiles, all these other ones. So, again, that's where we utilize citation platforms that can help do this quickly in terms of changes across multiple different platforms. But sometimes you have to manually go and request these things or make an on these to get them updated because they might not be connected to some of these different citation platforms and stuff like that. So, it's a big to do, but it is 100% fundamentally important for you to make sure that you're getting the most out of your visibility and AI.
Shawn Denney:
And just for clarity on that, whether it's the full name or it has an abbreviation in the middle of it, it doesn't matter what name you're specifically going with here, we're just saying whatever one, pick one, don't have variations of it.
Ken Mafli:
Got it. Okay. So, Shawn, I think I'll pass this one to you. Eden asks, well, I love this. We are a new client, so welcome aboard. Glad that you're able to join the webinar. Absolutely love that. What if we did Google business profile name and added the words car accident, personal injury or a worker's comp attorney? Would you suggest that?
Shawn Denney:
So, you want to have those peppered throughout your description. You want to have those peppered throughout your approach of what services you offer, where you offer them. Adding them directly into the name of your business profile can cause some confusion here with AI. Now, it can help in the short run with the Google understanding and Map Pack visibility, but it will cause some confusion on the AI side of it. So, the best answer is to find the right balance of what's going to be most important to you.
John Pennino:
Yeah. And to follow up on this, this is a decision that you're going to make for a DBA name change because if that's what you want on your Google business profile, that is your new branding. So, your website has to have that. So, if you had old branding of a logo that is just the first part of your law firm name, you now have to redo that and update all of this to reflect what it is. It is beneficial. Definitely, it does move the needle for especially Google Business profile, having those keywords within your name, we definitely see it.
Now, so much of your competition already does it, so it's hard to gauge now because everybody's doing it. But you can't just on a whim change your name on your Google business profile. Something like that can cause a re-verification. And then you need permanent wall-mounted signage and your documentation, like your DBA would have to show your lease agreement, would have to show that new name change. So, it's a process that you have to be willing to go through completely because if you do have an issue, if your business listing gets suspended because you did a name change and Google says "Your keyword stuffing, because that's not allowed on the Google business profile if you're not doing this legit. Now, you're suspended."
Now, if it's a full hard suspension, you have no visibility and now if you don't have your documentation, you're waiting the amount of time it takes you to get the documentation before you can submit an appeal. So, something you have to think about, 100% commit to it and then it can be great. I think something we definitely recommend to our clients to at least examine again, but you got to just do it correctly so you don't have issues.
Ken Mafli:
I love it. Okay. So, moving on, Maggie asks, how does ChatGPT respond to multiple locations? I'll throw that up in there. Who's going to take it?
Shawn Denney:
I'll take this one.
Ken Mafli:
Okay. Please.
Shawn Denney:
So, with multiple locations, it's going to create a unique entity for each location of your brand. And based off of what someone's searching from the context that ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Perplexity or any of these AI platforms are operating off of. If it knows my location, it's going to try and reference the entity that's most closely related to my location. If it doesn't have any context clues about whether my location or your location where it's at, it's going to pull the one that has the most authority for what to reference, i.e. If you've had a legacy brand that has more reviews that's more prominent than a new location that's been opened up, it's likely going to pull from that more prominent brand if it doesn't have any location reference to try and say, "This one's closer, so I should pull from it."
But having multiple locations is not a problem at all and can actually be very beneficial as long as you are being articulate about here's all the different offices we have, here's the services that are offered at each of these different locations, making sure there's clear ties between those.
How Bing, Yelp, and Super Lawyers profiles influence AI-driven law firm recommendations
John Pennino:
And again, I think this tie in too with making sure you're listed on Bing places, too, because so many people just forget about it. All the eggs are in the Google basket and you might not have a listing, especially if you have lots of satellite offices that you've created to just increase your footprint. If you are creating these satellite offices and then just not really going through it all the way to make sure that you're listed on Bing, you're not going to have a visibility as much in those areas. So very, very important that you monitor that you're getting listed on Apple Maps and Bing and so forth.
Ken Mafli:
Fantastic. Okay. Well, John, I'll let you kick this one off. So, Nicole asks, especially about managing your reputation, if a client has a bad experience and writes it in the review, how should we respond so they don't keep responding to ... the businesses responding, create this super long thread?
John Pennino:
Yeah. I mean the best thing to do is just to be as respectful as possible, be a really so sorry that you had this experience and the best thing you could do is try to handle that offline with an upset client. It might not be possible, obviously, if a case is lost and they have a bad experience, they're going to say some bad stuff and it's very, very hard to get a review like that removes because if it's an actual experience that the person had with you, Google's going to just leave it on.
But yeah, the best thing you could do is just not get into any kind of a verbal battle with a client or just he said she said, bickering back and forth, that's just not professional in anybody's eyes. I mean, the first thing that I do when I look at someone I want to do business with is I look at the reviews and I look at the negative reviews first and I see what experience someone might've had and then I see how they responded to that. I put weight on that just as much because there's plenty of mumbo jumbo five-star reviews that are just like, okay, blah, blah, blah, and it's a bunch of malarkey. But I want to zero in on the real experiences and I want to make sure that was responded to in a professional manner, and that helps me make my choice.
Ken Mafli:
Anything you'd like to add, Shawn?
Shawn Denney:
Yeah. So, one way you can do this is in the review, like John said, "I'm sorry you had this experience, reference whatever it is they're talking about, we would love a chance to chat with you more about this and see if we can help resolve it. Please feel free to give us a call at ABC-XYZ number." Something where you're trying to say, "Look, I'm trying to help you. Let's take it offline. Let's have a full conversation to see if we can address your pain point."
Ken Mafli:
Yeah. Yeah. Because then at least that presents the company in a positive light in that public forum.
John Pennino:
And it can diffuse a situation to the point where maybe they take down the review if that's what you really want.
Ken Mafli:
Yeah. Okay. Shawn, Marybeth and Jeremy both ask here, don't Redditors hate brands, is it better to post as an individual attorney rather than a brand?
Why participating on Reddit and Quora can boost AI search rankings and generate direct law firm leads
Shawn Denney:
So, this has to do more with what you are trying to achieve through Reddit. First off, yes, Redditors greatly dislike and have a negative affinity towards brands. But if you are creating a sub-Reddit for your brand and you're posting once a month a new case study or some basic information about it, you're not really posting that for Redditors. You're posting that for the LLMs to understand more about your brand.
And so, that you're not going to get a lot of interaction from it, and that's fine. But if you're looking to actually engage the community and build more of a positive reputation through those interactions, you are correct that the individual, the attorney themselves, and actually going off into other sub-Reddits and interacting with them there would have a bigger better benefit from that side. So, it depends on how much resource you want to allocate and what your ultimate objective from it is.
Ken Mafli:
Love it. John, please.
John Pennino:
No, Shawn's right on there. Yeah. Definitely. I would say on the personal level for when you're doing outreach directly, talking in this other sub-Reddits or again, just answering questions that people have about law that are on there, just go in there and you could have it on your profile that you have your own law firm and stuff like that, or that could be part of your handle name or something. But yeah, that's definitely the way to proceed.
Ken Mafli:
Okay. Great. Boy, listen, you two have generated a lot of buzz here. So, we have about 10 minutes left and I'm going to try and rapid-fire these a little bit. So, I'll just pick on one of you to answer each. So, let's see here. We've got Michelle asked, do tracking numbers on various platforms hurt NAP or NAP and/or the authority seen by the LLMs? Shawn, do you want to take that?
Shawn Denney:
Sure. So, it depends on if you're using the same tracking number across it or if you're using different tracking numbers across each platform has its own, if you're using different numbers per platform, that is going to cause confusion because it's going to say, I don't know which number is rightly associated with it. If you have a singular tracking number that you're using across the different platforms, that can be okay because you're essentially just providing a consistent number, whether it's a static number that you have for your brand or if it's a tracking number to give more clarity to it. It's about consistency is the core part of that.
Ken Mafli:
Okay. Wonderful. And then John, Tina asks negative Facebook comments, hide, keep, respond, is any PR good PR or should we monitor that heavily?
John Pennino:
It's always best practice to respond to every review. Every review you have on Google, every review on Facebook, Yelp, anywhere there's a review that you have access to respond to them, you either thank the person or you reach out to be like, "Oh, how can I make this better? I'm sorry you had this experience," as Shawn went through before. But yeah, one of the worst things you could do is just have negative reviews sitting on your profiles that you didn't respond to. So, 100% of the time always respond.
Ken Mafli:
Okay. Love it. And then, Eden, see your comment. Yes. We're glad to have you on board and we're glad that we're able to help you. Then Dustin, it looks like going back to the naming convention across all profiles says, so then is the name that needs to be consistent would review all need to also ... Sorry. We keep on getting more questions. This is wonderful. It looks like just asking, does the name just need to be consistent? And if they're going to have personal injury lawyer, should that be in every single time with the name? Shawn, what are your thoughts there?
Shawn Denney:
There is benefit to that, but it is not imperative that that is included in the review. What we're trying to do is establish a connection between your entity and its understood component because that review is already being placed on your brand. If it uses just say the starting point of the law firm but doesn't include personal injury attorney, as an example, you're still going to get some credit for it. It's not going to be as impactful as if you use the entire name with your new DBA, but you'll still get value out of including even if it was just that first part.
Ken Mafli:
Okay. Good. Thank you. And Dustin, my apologies for butchering that question, and Shawn, thanks for picking that up. Jonathan asks, do the LLMs differentiate between a paid listing and an organic listing on the legal directories when it comes to indexing the content? Shawn, what say you?
Shawn Denney:
It is all structured data that it's pulling from. It may have a paid or an organic moniker as part of what it's pulling from, but in terms of how valuable it sees it, no, it doesn't care.
Ken Mafli:
Okay. Thank you. And then John, Doug asks, what about advertising case investigations you are looking to source for when an attorney versus a brand posting? Let's see here. This is back at 12:36. I'm looking that through case investigations you're looking to source clients. Oh, for when ... I'm going to think about that one. We're going to come back to that one. But looking on the next one, Matt asks, is there a platform that pulls in all the reviews from across the internet into one place for the team to respond to? This might be a good next step.
John Pennino:
Are there platforms for review management? Yeah. There's all kinds of ones out there. So, yeah, I think it's probably something that is really beneficial for everyone to explore. Yeah. But a lot of the different citation platforms offer review management where they'll bring in the reviews from the different sites and then you could answer them all at one place making it much easier. And yeah, it does exist and it's very cool.
Ken Mafli:
Okay. So, going back to Doug's question, I think we're asking the question between paid advertising versus just regular brand posting. How would you want to wait that? Is there one that's ... I mean, if it's all ...
John Pennino:
Yeah. I mean you're going to do both. I mean, generally, mean, most studies show that if you're doing paid and branded like organic, it all works synergistically together, because you're getting just more of the pie, what people are seeing. So, if paid ads are at the top, but then you're also appearing organically there, it's like you're there, you're there, and your local listings there, you're coming up in three times. So, that's for specifically Google. I think, I'm not an expert specifically on paid site for LLMs. I know that will be something that's be evolving over time, but maybe Shawn could chime in on that.
Shawn Denney:
Yeah. So, with paid right now for a lot of LLMs, depending on how static those paid advertisements are and if there's a database associated with them that can pull in and be a meaningful action with it. But a lot of the LLMs are learning their data based off organic listings. And so, it's organic is what's driving a lot of the AI interactions and how you can influence whether you're showing up or someone else's.
Ken Mafli:
Love it. Okay. Then Margaret did have a little clarifier about the Facebook comments. We're focusing specifically on negative comments. Should those be removed, hidden, responded to?
John Pennino:
Yeah. Go ahead, Shawn.
Shawn Denney:
For comments, if it is relevant to you or the conversation at hand, they should be responded to. If they're completely erroneous, that's when you would want to remove them because they're often Lalaland about whatever they are trying to ...
Ken Mafli:
Okay. Yeah. You're attorney and they're talking about Goodyear tires. Well, okay. We don't need to worry about that one. Okay. Thank you. And then finally, man, we're running right up to the wire. So, Doug asks a second question of suggestions for getting a brand profile removed from being banned on Reddit when the brand profile was banned with no real reason or nothing having to do with bad posting practices or anything like that. Is there any way to get it out of Reddit prison?
Shawn Denney:
So, you can reach out to Reddit support for an appeal and see what comes back from it? There's not too much in terms of direct action that you can make XYZ happen. Reddit can be a little aggressive with some of its banning or some of its cease and desist or some of its making things go away. So, unfortunately, that's not one where you have a lot of control over, but you can reach out to appeal to try and get it either completely removed where there's nothing wrong with it or get full access back.
John Pennino:
And I see he had a follow-up there where I guess Reddit support doesn't reply to him. Yeah. I mean, I think that's really difficult. At that point, do you try to make another profile and that's related to your brand still and just go from there and see if they ban you again? I don't know if you did anything secretly bad nefarious that came down. I don't know.
Shawn Denney:
If Reddit's not doing anything and you're trying to get access, then yes, I would recommend just making another profile and make sure you're following the guidelines, get a few posts out to show that you're interacting, that you are following Reddit's rules and it should, I'm asterisk on that, it should be fine and not get banned.
John Pennino:
Yeah. I think where the issue gets is because so many people are seeing that Reddit has so much visibility now across ChatGPT and AI overviews and Google and whatnot. This has been on the bandwagon for the last year. A lot of people have been just going, and if you're just commenting on everything and making an ad out of it and like, "Oh, here's my information," it's spammy. So, you have to do it in a bit of a moderation and just make it so that it seems like you're really trying to help and just try to avoid being spammy with it. I don't know if that was an issue with why you might've got taken down, but that's just something to consider.
Shawn Denney:
Just as a clarifying point on Reddit here really quickly, you should always go to Reddit with the mindset of "Be helpful first. Advertising is not the point."
Ken Mafli:
And if you inadvertently ran afoul of Reddit's guidelines, it's okay. Like you said, start fresh, really understand their guidelines and moving forward. Then if you're adding value, hopefully there's no additional issues. Well, first of all, I want to thank Shawn and John for the presentation and especially the Q&A time. But a big shout-out to the audience. I think this has been one of the most interactive times that we've had. So, I really appreciate everyone coming in, sticking with us, asking the questions, making this a very informative time.
But moving on to the next slide, I want to always mention we're always cooking up something fresh, and as the slide mentions, we are going to keep bringing you the freshest insights on how you can continue to be at the top of your marketing game. So, please be on the lookout for next month's webinar in your email inbox.
But as we wrap things up, I do want to close with one final stat. A recent poll by Youtech shows that 27% of Americans have used AI assistance to find local businesses in the past week while traditional search still dominates. Remember folks, that's up from 0% just a few years ago. So, if you want to be found by your clients both now and in the future, you need to optimize for AI search. That all said, finding the right marketing partner to supercharge your AI optimization efforts is essential.
They can help outline your goals, construct the right strategy, build the right content, and make sure you're hitting your intake goals. As always, Rankings is here to help you get the most out of your lead generation efforts. Our expertise and understanding of the legal market puts you, our clients, in the winning position. So, 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:
Hope you got a ton of value out of that conversation. We run these webinars live every month. And the easiest way to get the next one straight to your inbox on the day it happens is to head to rankings.io/webinars. I'll drop the link in the show notes. Don't miss the chance to join us live to get your questions answered real time. I'll see you on the next one.
