Ken Mafli:
Hello everyone and welcome to Rankings' live virtual event. I'd like to introduce to you our speakers. First up, we have Chris Dreyer. Chris is our CEO and founder here at Rankings with over 15 years of experience in SEO. In that time, he's worked on ranking hundreds of websites. He's built rankings into 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, including the Forbes Agency Council, the Rolling Stone's Culture Council, The Business Journal's Leadership Trust, Fast Company's Executive Board, and the Newsweek Expert Forum. Welcome, Chris.
Next up, we have Steven Willi. Steven is the president of rankings and was the agency's very first full-time hire. Steven's digital marketing journey began in 2007, starting in design and development, and then later moving into management as the creative director. Even before Rankings had a name, he was working alongside Chris on legal SEO projects, helping lay the foundation for what Rankings is today. He's known for deep technical expertise in SEO, a creative, hands-on approach to problem solving, and translating complex ideas into clear, actionable strategies. Welcome, Steven.
Steven Willi:
Happy to be here.
Ken Mafli:
All right, Chris. I am going to exit stage right and let you take it from here.
Chris Dreyer:
In this webinar, we're going to be talking about the 10 Tips for Performance Marketing in 2026. Really, we're talking about high-intent, bottom-of-the-funnel strategies, strategies that drive leads. Some of them can be applicable to brand, but really we're talking about making money. It's shorter orientation performance marketing.
How AI overviews and LLMs prioritize structured content, local signals, and entities for law firm visibility
Steven Willi:
Let's get into it. What I'd like to talk about is clear up some nomenclature and give disclaimers. So throughout this presentation, you're going to hear the words AIO. Oftentimes that could be AI search optimization, or it could also be AI overviews, which is the native search or AI search within the Google results. So for clarity here, when I'm talking about AI or LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Gemini, I'll refer to them as LLMs. When I'm talking about the specific answer box or snippet or AI overview, I'll simply call it an AI overview.
So what we're looking at here is a ChatGPT for the query who's the best car accident lawyer in St. Louis. We're going to talk a little bit how to rank within ChatGPT and the LLMs, but also how to rank within the answer boxes, which has a very, very high volume of searches. But let's kick it off.
So tip number 1, win top placement with structured content. So this is where I had to give that disclaimer about the nomenclature, because right now I'm going to be talking about AI overviews. AI overviews used to be called rich snippets. They used to be called answer boxes. Right now, typically when you do an informational or query-based search, you'll see that little AI overview. It thinks for a second, and then it generates content typically above the fold. That's an AI overview.
That is an amalgamation of different sites or sometimes usually just a few sites. They pull that information, summarize it, and try to answer it for the user within that box. Oftentimes they'll display the sources within the content, but they'll also display it as a little sidebar entry. Usually it shows around three different thumbnails. So that's what I'm going to be referring to in this slide, but it also kind of has an overlap because a lot of the tactics that we're going to be talking about also positively impact LLM rankings or visibility within the LLMs.
So to start off, structured content. Both AI, LLMs and the AI overviews are looking for unique, well-written, authoritative content. But what helps with that is something like what we like to call as a quick answer box. So AI overviews typically present within 60% of all informational-based queries on Google. I actually think it's a little bit higher. That study was out in November. I'm almost at 90% on all informational queries that I type in that I actually see that answer box.
When we're looking at commercial or transactional intent, we see it significantly less, anywhere from 7 to 20%. Usually that is involved in a query based on who's the best car accident lawyer rather than just car accident lawyer. But for the sake of this example, we're going to be talking about an informational or query-based piece of content.
So what a quick answer box is, is a little section at the beginning of your content, often beginning within an H2. And it summarizes via bullet points, 40 to 60 words, usually, a table, bullet points, where it will walk you through and give you an overall valuable summary of what that piece of content is. That's helpful for the user because they can digest it really quickly, but it's also helpful for Google and the LLMs because they often will prioritize that top layer of content. So if you're giving context and a summary of what the overall article is, it oftentimes will, it'll help Google and AI read and understand before they get to the meat of the article.
It's also a good user experience. For example, I've got three kids. We make Christmas cookies every single year. Last night, I looked for a Christmas cookie recipe, clicked on the very first one. I think it was like an image search or something. And there was seven pages and seven scrolls worth of content before I just got to the ingredients and what temperature I should set the oven on. That was a massive waste. I even appreciated it because that's historic SEO where you tried to put keyword density and all this other content.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't necessarily answer my query. All I wanted to know was the freaking ingredients on sugar cookies. If they would've given me that in this answer box, it would've been a way better experience for me as a user. And like that, so with key takeaways after PTSD after a car accident, we're summarizing the article into bite-sized pieces so the user and the LLMs and Google can understand it better.
Moving outside of that is publish hyper-specific local stat pages. This kind of ties into include relevant entities, which is the next bullet point. And disclaimer, I'm from the St. Louis area, a lot of us are based in the Midwest. All throughout this slide deck, you're going to see Midwest-based firms. I'm outside of St. Louis. If I'm a St. Louis firm, I'm going to be talking about the Arch. I'm going to be talking about accidents on 270, because if you're from St. Louis, you know that's a wild interstate. I'm going to be talking about 55. I'm going to be referring to, "Hey, my office is three blocks away from the Arch."
A lot of times what we've found a lot of success in is something that we do call source magnets. What source magnets are is we will pull Department of Transportation data, crash data, intersections, traffic corridors, population density, ages, commercial versus non-commercial. And then we'll put them into an infographic or a interactive page where you have all of this really cool data in it, and then we'll do outreach for that as well.
But what that does is that allows Google and the LLMs to understand where you are at. If I am a Chicago-based firm, reasonably I'm not going to have an enormous amount or a dense amount of St. Louis-based content. Specifically, if I am a personal injury attorney that wants MVAs, which most do, I'm going to be talking about those hyper-specific local statistics within my market.
Moving on to include relevant entities, it's kind of the same thing. Now, even outside of Schema, if I am a St. Louis firm, again, I'm going to be talking about St. Louis-based entities. Again, it is going back to, "Hey, my office location is three miles or three blocks away from the Arch." You can also mark that up within Schema, which is very helpful, but I like to mention and then put little different contextual data points throughout the content, both onsite and offsite, to relate me back to a location or an entity that I want to be related to.
Chris Dreyer:
Just one little tip there too. So hospitals, so you're sticking with St. Louis, you're going to be talking about Barnes-Jewish, you want to talk about neighborhoods like Soulard, Central West End, different areas to just create those associations. A lot of times you want to go to Wikipedia and see what's referenced on Wikipedia, then you can start to incorporate that into the content. Well done. So structure the content, summarize the content at the top, include H tags to kind of break it up. Let's continue to keep the ball rolling. Let's go to a tip, let's go to number 2.
Why legal directories like Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers, Justia, and Yelp now drive law firm discovery and conversion
Steven Willi:
Got it. So build authority with Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers, and Justia. When we started, when the agency was started 13 years ago, a lot of these profiles were very, very powerful, much more powerful than they were even five years ago. Google was rewarding them. FindLaw was in its heyday and they kind of lulled out for a little bit until the LLMs started tapping them.
Because the LLMs, in regards to superlative-based queries like super, like best, best firms, best lawyers, voted best, and Google is the same way and you're the same way, they can't directly say, "This is the best firm." But what they can do is they can go into Best Lawyers and see who has a profile within Best Lawyers, they can go into Super Lawyers, they can go into Million Dollar Advocates and so on and so on and look at these citations or oftentimes the superlative-based best citations, and then they will relate you to that term because you are in that directory.
So not only is LLMs tapping these more and more and the traffic actually is dramatically increasing from these sites, but a lot of these sites that have been slept on or these directories that have been slept on over the years are starting to see a resurgence. And honestly, you can see it in their pricing. They're riding that wave.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. So great tips here. The SEO specialists are spamming these listicles as well. That's another strategy getting links and being incorporated in top 10, top 7 lists. It's the nature of the beast. It's because what's fueling these LLMs. But again, just to reemphasize what Steven's saying, if a superlative is used, that's going to help your chances to rank from a discovery perspective on these different LLMs. Justia also made an update to their directory where they now have a top-rated feature where after you get one review, kind of similar to Avvo where they have the peer-rated nomination, except for you just need one review to get a 10 out of 10 rating. So they're all playing the game.
Steven Willi:
Yep. All right, yeah, let's talk about compound anchors and brand signals really quick. Oh, slide before. There we go. So when you're actually doing outreach or building links, brand signals are like my A, number one emphasis for 2026. So what a compound anchor is, it's a link that basically says your firm name plus a modifier that's like an exact match or transactional term.
So an example of a compound anchor would be Nike running shoes, Nike being the brand, running shoes being the transactional anchor. And Ken, I'll use you for example, the St. Louis car accident lawyers at the Ken Law Firm. That is an example of a compound anchor. So what that does is it basically relates that transactional query over to your firm plus giving you a link.
For LLMs, I even focus on mentions. Links are super important. The mentions are almost just as important for LLMs. Oftentimes within an authoritative base article, it is even if you were mentioned alongside others that Google or the LLMs deem authoritative or experts, that's all it takes. And then brand signals are just that. Brand signals are placements out there on the web, press releases. Honestly, you can even tie in branded queries into this that go a long way to both Google and AI.
All right. AIO visitors, boost SEO with clean site architecture. So Chris and I have been working together for 13, 14 years. When I started, I had hair. So when it goes up top, you quantify dates as pre and post-hair. So I know we've been working together for at least 13 years. During that time, we very rarely disagree. We run congruent on everything, there's a lot of success in that, except when it comes to permalink structures. And he's smiling right now because he's chomping at the bit to talk.
I am not so dogmatic. My mentality about permalink structures is you need the slug and you need the geo-modifier in it. At the end of the day, the site needs to be structured in a way that is consistent with the rest of the website, but it is also easy to read, understand, and crawl. So I personally am leaning towards the foldered structure right now, which I know Chris is as well. But at the end of the day, there's many different types. There's flat architecture, which would be St. Louis car accident lawyer. Then there is St. Louis, which is nested in a foldered structure like st-louis/car-accident-lawyer. What this does is it just helps Google and AI relate that, hey, this car accident lawyer is related into this St. Louis personal injury page.
I am less dogmatic of the actual syntax of the permalink than a lot of others. I just did a query St. Louis personal injury lawyer just before, and I had two flat structures and one nested structure. But I do think the future is moving towards this nested structure in permalinks. Chris, I'll let you jump in before I go to my next one.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. And we're going to have to increase the pace on each tip here, Steven, and keep the ball rolling. But really what we're looking here is, it's Google's job and these LLMs to organize the web, to make discovery easy. My whole argument in regards to structure is the idiot tax. Most people are morons. And if you have a flat structure, people don't understand how to do the internal linking properly. So I'm a big fan of the sub folder structure because it forces you to actually organize your content.
So just moving on to that. So basically, you want to make sure that you are organizing your content into topical categories, clusters, whatever nomenclature you want. Just think about grouping your content. This is particularly important if you're going to go into multiple jurisdictions. If you're in just one market and St. Louis is your only market, then it doesn't really matter. You could do flat or folder. But if you're going to go after multiple states, multiple jurisdictions, you really need to think strategically on how you're going to organize this content.
Steven Willi:
Same mind. So there we go, performance, local SEO. So this is a map pack. We're going to be talking about how to rank within GBP, which is what we're looking at, but also for those local queries within the LLMs.
First and foremost, clean up all NAP listings or NAP placements. So NAP is name, address, phone. If you're an older firm, you've worked with a lot of agencies, you've worked with a lot of specialists, maybe in-house people, you probably have a lot of stuff out there on the internet. We're going to use Brown & Crouppen just because they came up within my St. Louis queries.
Anytime when you hear the word cleanup NAP listings, you want everything to be consistent. You want the phone to be consistent, you want the address to be consistent, you want the syntax of your name to be consistent. For this example, for Brown & Crouppen, they have an ampersand. If there's an and in there on some directories that needs to be cleaned up. If they're using some older syntax that does not include their DBA, then you need to go back into that old Justia profile from 2013 and update that bad boy. With the multiple amounts of LLMs that are out there all crawling different things, the limiting confusion or entity confusion by correcting some of this syntax now will go a long way.
And the next thing would be claim major platforms. That's going to go social, that's going Facebook, that's going Better Business Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, all of your Yext citations. It is anything to get your link profile, your digital profile out relating back to St. Louis or wherever your area is would be helpful.
Build cross-platform reviews. The user journey has changed a bit. So not only does cross-platform reviews help specifically with the LLMs, they're pulling in Yelp, they're pulling in all of these other things. I'm 41 years old, when I make a search, I'll look at GBP. I'll then go into the website. I immediately go to social after the website, and then I will do a branded query of your name to see what else is out there. That's important because I need all of this social proof to make my decision. And I don't think I'm unique in that.
So users and clients have become both more and less trusting, and so they're going to do a little bit deeper dive on you. That's not counting for specifically Yelp, which we'll get to that a little bit later, is that aggregates all through a multiple amount of platforms like Apple Maps, specifically ChatGPT, et cetera.
And then brand and CTR, this is the easy one. The more your brand is searched for within GBP or Google Business Profile, the higher you're going to show up. It is brand is everything even from a click-through rate. Say if you're number three, but you have a brand and the top two don't, odds are they're going to click through you because you're more familiar and they trust you. And the next one, I'll let Chris take this because we just had a conversation about this one.
When Performance Max compounds results for law firms and when it starts cannibalizing true demand
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. There's behavioral signals too. And there's been some studies by Whitespark and other individuals talking about this on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it, recently. But just like when you're trying to rank organically, if you get a capture, a click-through rate, your click-through rate improves, they click on your website due to brand. The same can improve your local results if you get more requests for driving directions. It's just the nature of the beast.
And then one of the things I just want to mention is just the review rating. If you want to rank for those superlatives, best car accident lawyer, top truck accident lawyer, you got to have at least a 4.8 or higher. And last but not least, on the cross-platform reviews, Facebook right now, you can do a, do you recommend the business or not? And if you say you recommend the business, it aggregates to expertise.com, to Trustpilot. We already mentioned Yelp and it's importance. So the most important review for ranking in the local map pack for Google is of course a Google review. It helps you with your local services ads, but these other reviews are very important as well.
And I'll kind of jump right in here. The next we're going to talk about is Performance Max. So Performance Max utilizes its cross-channel capabilities across the whole Google ecosystem. And then you can move on to the next slide. So there's a couple ways to set this up and I want to talk about two ways. So the first way, in the image, you can see if you just select Performance Max or you select lead gen, it's going to set up your primary campaign. And this is where you're optimizing for calls, for contact form submissions, and there's a lot of things that you want to do to set this up properly.
So the first thing that you want to do is include all of your negative keywords, so CBLs, fix my car, all those lemon law requests, particularly if you're trying to get auto accidents. You want to block repeat IPs. You want to exclude your brand because your brand campaign should be a separate search campaign. You don't want to pay for that and have them competing against each other. Typically, with a PMax campaign, you only want to set up one campaign per practice area. So if you're going to set up a PMax campaign for auto, but then you also want one for dogs, dog bites, that would be an entirely separate campaign.
It's also a necessity to import offline conversion data. So data from your CRM that tells if the case was a wanted case that you actually wanted to convert and if you signed the client. Because the more data that you give Performance Max, the better it can optimize it to send you more of those. The other thing that you want to look at in terms of optimizing a lead campaign is establishing keywords from your custom segments. You also want to optimize for auto accident website visitors. You want to ignore the other pages that they visit.
And on a PMax lead campaign, this campaign, you can actually spread out the radius. You could go statewide, you can go much larger. This is where you're going to pull in some of those conquesting competitor queries naturally, even if you didn't bid on them because the AI is going to be optimizing and forms relationships with these keywords.
The biggest thing that I would say though is when you're trying to set up a lead gen PMax campaign, you want to do it after you've done a brand campaign and your Google search campaign for those high intent phrases. It's afterwards because you want to train your campaign for the types of queries that you want to rank for.
I'm out of order here, but if you're going to set up a Google Ads campaign, the first thing that you want to set up is a brand campaign. We're going to talk about that in a moment. You want to capture your existing demand for paying that Google tax. The second thing that you want to set up is a Google search campaign. You want to structure it with phrase or exact match phrases, those super high intent phrases to train the campaign.
The third one that you want to set up is actually the local visits campaign. This is before the lead gen campaign. In the image displayed here, that is how Bruning Law Firm is showing up for the query, St. Louis car accident lawyer. But there's some critical, critical things that you have to set up. First, this is an entirely separate campaign. You may have another PMax campaign going. This is its own campaign. You want to make sure that you're clicking on the local store visits. You're not optimizing for phone calls or form submissions. You're optimizing for local store visits. By choosing that, it will show your result in the map pack like in this result here above the local organic results.
The next thing that you want to make sure is a necessity in order to, look, you're paying for this. Google Ads is expensive. You want to make sure you have a 4.8 or higher. Don't run a PMax local campaign if you've got a 4.7 or lower. You want to restrict the radius. When you optimize for local store visits, optimize for a 5 to 10 mile radius. Don't do a 20 mile radius or larger. You want to optimize similarly to how a GBP would rank. GBPs typically rank in a 5 to 10 mile radius. And again, this is separate from a lead gen campaign. You do not want to cannibalize forms or calls.
The last thing I'll say here is really the more that you train it, the more inputs that you give, the more optimization of your negatives, your exclusions, the better it's going to perform over time. So it's just a necessity that you feed it offline conversion data for PMax to really perform. It has to go through the learning process. That's typically three to four weeks. So you can't make major adjustments.
One of the worst things that you can do if you're a personal injury law firm, when you're running Google Ads campaigns is to start, stop. You should never stop entirely. If you need to reduce budget, drop it down to a lower daily bid, but don't stop it because it's trained, your campaign. And if you restart, sometimes you got to go back into that learning mode.
This is a result. I think TopDog does this really well. He's got a huge brand from his radio, from his Facebook ads and everything that he's doing to build brand awareness. One of the reasons why I wanted to show this image is I love the official site. There's so many lead gen campaigns. Look, you spend all this money on TV, broadcast television. You're spending all this money and then these lead gen campaigns go and bid on your name. I think it's important to put official site. It is a necessary evil. So let's go to the next slide.
If you're spending tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars on broadcast television or any type of branded efforts, it is the absolute first thing that you do is you set up a Google Ads brand campaign. And what I mean by that is you want to bid on the name of your site. So I'm going to continue to use TopDog since we got an image up of him. You would bid on TopDog Law. You would bid on TopDog. You would bid on James Helm because you have demand that you've created through your distribution and you want to capture that. If it's structured right, most of the time on a maximized conversions price, you want to set it around $200.
So if you're spending tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a brand, spend $200 to acquire the case. If you're not doing it, your competitors are, and these lead gen companies are. So it's an absolute necessity. Unfortunately, it goes, if you're going to play the Google game, you have to pay for it. You can advertise everywhere, billboards, but at the end of the day, they're going to go to Google to convert, at least for high intent situations.
And performance channels. So local services ads, and Steven, just if you want to chime in at any time, I'm on a roll here.
Steven Willi:
You're doing great.
Chris Dreyer:
So we got The Bruning Law Firm here. Again, we're doing a local query because Steven and I are local to St. Louis. And local services ads are shown at the very top of Google. It's the best virtual real estate. If we're playing the real estate game, location, location, location. It's the best location you can be in. Let's move on to the next slide.
There are three methods of ranking in local services ads. They fall into three central categories. Region, that's your location. Response, which is your activity and if you're answering the phone, if you're managing a platform, if you're responding to messages quickly. And reviews, there are not a lot of levers. You can't add negatives. There are not a lot of levers like there are in Google Ads.
So what we've seen work really well is first of all, you have to have automated responses to the messaging side of the platform. Not only that, messages have to be on. I understand that Google retrades your leads four times, but that just means that you have to respond hastily. You have to have value props to convert those leads because they are going to be distributed to other people. But because LSA ranks based upon response, if you're going to play in this channel, you have to have it on.
Now, the reason why Intaker and Juvo Leads are mentioned here, and I think both of these tools are phenomenal. They each have their own pros and cons and I think they're both phenomenal, but both of them will automatically respond to messages on platform. These are chat tools. You can have them sync into a local services ads campaign to automatically respond when there's a message. That is essential to that second component, the responsiveness.
Not only that, the other thing is basically getting reviews. And these tools, there are some methods that you can use to get more cases and more reviews through the communication. Reviews are just critical nowadays, not only on Yelp, on Google Local, but on LSA. And it has to be a frequency. You can't see that you're behind 40 reviews and just think that I'm going to batch, go acquire 45 reviews and think that's good and you're one and done. Google is looking for velocity. They're looking for consistency. It's a necessary evil.
The last thing I'll say is if you do find yourself missing a call and you're in that graveyard and you lose visibility, you may have to initiate some mystery shopping campaigns and you're going to have to pay for the leads to reengage and reposition yourself in the local services ads. There's other strategies in throttling on and off your categories, but the biggest thing here is you need a lot of categories to get response to get activity.
So once you get placement, you can narrow down to improve your CAC, to improve your cost to acquire a case, but in the beginning, you got to have everything wide open. Anything you want to add to this one, Steven, on the LSA?
Steven Willi:
Nope, that's great.
Chris Dreyer:
All right. Sticking with the performance marketing channels, we're going to go with Meta Ads, Facebook ads. This is just some creatives here. I just want to point out, we've had a lot of success with dog bite campaigns. Obviously, they don't have the same competition that an auto campaign has. But due to Andromeda and how Meta utilizes their AI, we have some campaigns where we have 20 to 30 different dogs, and that's the only variable that's changed to determine which creative converts the highest. So we've got Andromeda choosing which creatives and which dog to use.
I just want to point out a couple other things here. The CTA, that's a native form for Roblox. And then you got to click the call there for Brooks Law Firm. The immigration campaigns are absolutely slaying. So if you're an immigration firm, definitely need to look at Meta.
The biggest thing here is native forms. You've got to understand, Facebook doesn't want to drive traffic and visitors to Google or anywhere, to your website. They want to keep you on platform. So if you want a cheaper cost per lead, use native forms.
The other thing that I'll tell you is Facebook, it's more top and middle funnel. So you're going to get cases all over the place. So if you're too narrow with your case selection criteria, Facebook ads may not be it for you. Also, if your intake isn't designed to weed through a lot of leads to really take action quickly, to respond to these forums immediately, Facebook ads is going to be really challenging.
I will tell you this, we monitor the lead gen companies because as an agency owner, look, we can compete against other agencies in the space, but our biggest competitor is lead gen agencies. So we want to see what they're doing to acquire cases for the clients that they have. And the biggest thing that we see outside of conquesting on Google Ads and Bing is they're really heavy into Facebook ads.
The other thing that I would just tell you is due to the Andromeda update and all the AI abilities through Facebook, you need to give it a massive inventory of content and creative, a mix between static and video. And then when you make changes and when you're initiating a new library of content, do single variant tests and changes. Maybe it's just the color of a conversion button. Maybe it is instead of free consultation, it's free case review. You want to isolate what is actually making the difference. As opposed to making multiple changes, you want to do single variant testing.
I'll just say one other thing, Steven, I'll let you chime in here. Today, outside of capturing brand, and if you do have great placement from an SEO perspective, this is one of the lowest costs per lead, lowest cost per case that we see at our agency.
How Meta and Yelp fit into a modern performance marketing stack for law firms and why their impact is often misread
Steven Willi:
Yep. Then two quick points on the overwhelming amount of creative that you want to be putting in this. Chris mentioned dog bite campaigns. I'll just use this as an example of granularity. What we've run is multiple different breeds, multiple different postures, and see what works. So you have to look at it from that level, that granular of a level, rather than just dumping a bunch of stuff in and then hoping it works.
In regards to native contact forms, what I would make a suggestion is to, there's a program called Zapier, tie it directly into your lead management system or your CRM because Facebook notifications can get a little bit clunky. You have to read them in dashboard. Speed to lead is everything. So if you can kick these directly into your lead management system and then immediately follow up with them, it makes a world of a difference specifically within Meta Ads.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I would say one other thing, just one final on the Meta, because I know it's tip number 9, but there's just so much volume of leads here that you don't want to be too selective in your interests and all your criteria that you're trying to target in terms of your demographics and all of this. You want to let Facebook do its thing and try to determine with AI who it wants to display its ads to. So I would keep it wide open.
By the way, it's more top and middle of the funnel anyways from a brand perspective. It does have that benefit. So Google Ads really doesn't build a brand outside of a little bit for Performance Max, but Facebook ads can absolutely supplement and build a brand and be a performance marketing initiative.
Steven Willi:
100%. Tip 10. So six months ago, I would've bet my next paycheck that I wouldn't be talking about Yelp Ads on a webinar, but here we are. So what's happened with Yelp is it's seen a resurgence. Historically it's been kind of a bummer. Reviews don't stick. A lot of times firms and agencies will devalue Yelp in favor of Google or these other more valuable properties. But now that LLMs are taking over and citing Yelp for those superlative-based terms, Yelp, again, is dumping into Apple Maps, the Yelp traffic, both that I can see on my tools and supplied data from Yelp, it's like climbing a mountain right now. And so leveraging that via ads and/or even organic Yelp, we're seeing a lot of success.
So first, align your Yelp to your core case types. So in this case, it would be personal injury, workers' comp. You don't want to maintain just a blank profile or a generalist. If you're a PI attorney, you don't want to incorrectly be labeled as a criminal defense attorney because you won't be displayed for those queries. And I'm speaking in regards to organic Yelp at this point, and then we'll get into the paid stuff.
For organic Yelp or to be more visible in Yelp, office check-ins make a world of a difference assuming that your client or whoever is at your office has a aged-in Yelp profile because that helps. So if they get to your physical location and they've had a successful settlement or verdict, they're happy, have them check into Yelp from your office, from their phone, preferably using their cellular data, and then have them leave a review, a five star review preferably. And then ... Oh, go ahead.
Chris Dreyer:
Steve, I just want to jump in here. So one of the things, absolutely hit your core categories when you're setting up Yelp. But Yelp uses dynamic search capabilities based upon keywords. This is critical if you're listening here. When you're optimizing your profile, you have to say the phrases for the types of cases that you want to rank for, car accident lawyer, truck accident lawyer. If those aren't in the description, you will not show up because they don't have the narrow categories that a Justia or a Google Business Profile has these very ... Well, Google Business Profiles is not a great example. But a FindLaw would have an auto, a truck, and motorcycle, et cetera. Yelp is dynamic. So you have to have those words and phrases on your profile in order to show up.
Steven Willi:
And those can be done in the description box. And I think that's a nice segue into the enhanced profile. Enhanced profile is essentially just a premium profile. It blocks competitors for putting ads on your page, which is great. We want that. We don't want competitors on our page, but we want to put our ads on our competitors pages. It also allows us to fully flesh out the profile with portfolio items, which could essentially be case results, firm news, a lot more information in categories. You can also customize CTAs, which will also kind of tie into the request to quote. Request to quote is just a macro name that Yelp uses. In our instance, it would be request a consultation.
From an organic standpoint and ad standpoint, Yelp will say, "Typically replies in one day. Typically replies in one week." It's very, very important when setting up your messaging integration from your Yelp profile that you are on it right away. If I'm a user, I'm not going to somebody that typically responds in two days because I can see that on your CTA. There are different integrations and automated messages kind of like Juvo and Intaker that you can integrate within Yelp via Zap as well to benefit you in regards to that metric.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, let me do a couple of final things to close. In summary, if you have a good Yelp review rating, go and bid on Yelp Ads. Go sign up. It's a very cheap cost to acquire, but there's not a lot of volume. You got to have a good review rating. If your review rating isn't good and you're having problems getting your reviews to stick, start incorporating in office check-ins because they geo-tag the user at the office and then those reviews will stick.
The last thing I'll say is these LLMs are aggregated. They look for case result information. The enhanced profiles, you can list the case results. So you want multiple locations, not just your website that aggregates your case results because it will help power the LLMs.
