Never Run Out of Lawyer Marketing Video Ideas!
Best Local Links for Lawyers To Help Your Law Firm Rank Higher in Google
In this video, I’m going to show you how you can use two types of links to increase your law firm’s Google My Business ranking and your Google Maps ranking. I will also show you what will allow you to attract more leads, which will lead to more consultations, which will hopefully lead to more clients. Of course, all of this is in an effort to help you grow your business.
Two Types Of Links
Now, there are two types of links that we’re going to talk about. I’ve also got a bonus source that’s actually really powerful if you can make it work. Now, the first one is geographically relevant links. And one of the easiest ways to get these types of links is by joining local associations, your local chamber of commerce, your local bar association. Set up your local Better Business Bureau listing. If you can get links from local organizations
Type One
One of the things I like to do is to contact local youth sports organizations. And we’ll donate a couple of hundred dollars in exchange for a link from their website to your website. Now, the reason that this is important is that when Google sees that there’s a lot of websites and organizations that are all local to a specific area, Google can then detect that you’re extremely relevant for that area. If you’re located in Atlanta and you have a bunch of Atlanta organizations that are linking to you, then Google is going to see, “Okay. Well, this business is clearly extremely relevant for Atlanta.” Obviously, if you were located in Atlanta, you wouldn’t have a bunch of businesses and organizations in Miami linking to you. It just wouldn’t make sense. By doing this, by getting these geo relevant links, you can make sure that Google thinks you’re hyper-relevant for that area. That way, when someone searches Atlanta car accident lawyer or Atlanta criminal defense lawyer or Atlanta divorce lawyer, you’re much more relevant for the Atlanta part of that search. Now, one thing to note: if you do join the chamber of commerce, Better Business Bureau, or anything like that, make sure that they actually have a searchable directory that Google can crawl. Because it might be good to organizations but if they don’t actually have a directory, then it’s not going to do you any good from a Google ranking perspective.
Type Two
Now, the second type of listings and directories and links that you want to get are niche relevant. Niche relevant, first of all, on a broad scale, is mostly just a legal directory. You want to make sure you check all the big ones. You want to get your FindLaw, your Avvo, your Justia, your Martindale, all those types. And then what you want to do is you want to make sure that you get local bar associations. Now, local bar associations actually check the geotag also. But it’s really good because it’s a lot of different lawyers that are all being linked to so it makes you hyper-relevant for that. What you can also do is you join trade organizations or things that are specific to your practice area. For example, personal injury attorneys could join Million Dollar Advocates Forum where that’s basically an organization that’s linking out to a ton of different personal injury attorneys. And most of the practice areas have at least one or two of these that you can join.
Another thing: make sure that your NAP, your name, your address, and your phone number, are all identical on all of these listings. If you get all these set up properly and they all link to you, that will actually boost your Google Maps ranking quite a bit. Now,
Bonus!
I’ve got one bonus way that will actually supercharge your Google My Business ranking and we’ve done this many, many times. And that is to get featured on the local news websites. Now, one of the best ways to do this is to find reporters that are in your area. You can just basically go to the local affiliates, go to your local newspaper’s website, go to your local ABC, NBC, CBS affiliates, all the different news organizations that are in your area and find the reporters that are creating content where you could actually help them and you could actually provide value to them. And then what you want to do is you want to start reaching out to them and start providing value. When they write a story about something that you’re able to comment on, send them an email or tweet at them, and provide value to them and give them some additional information. Because what’s going to happen is they’re going to see you and they’re going to be like, “Okay. Here is an attorney that is making my life easier because he or she is giving me all of this great information.” This might not happen the first time and it might not happen the second time but eventually, they’re going to reach out to you for a comment. And then once they do that and you provide more value, then they’re going to keep going back to you over and over and over and over again. Anytime you can make someone’s life easier, you become valuable to them. And once you become valuable to them, that’s where this becomes valuable for you. We’ve had clients that have done this, a personal injury attorney in Miami, actually. She created content. She formed a relationship with a reporter at a local news station. And her brand gets mentioned in the news all the time, which is really important also. Even if you don’t have a link, if your brand is mentioned in these places, then that actually will help you increase your relevancy as well. But she actually gets links back to her website from the news. I think it’s an NBC affiliate. She actually gets links to her website from the NBC affiliate’s website and it’s all because she just developed a relationship and started building links. And her rankings have just completely skyrocketed, just absolutely gone through the roof. So if you get geo links, niche relevant links, and then if you can develop relationships and actually get featured on the news, you will rank higher in Google Maps. Honestly, there’s a lot more that goes into Google Maps also. I couldn’t really cover it in just this video. But there’s a lot more that you can do if you want your law firm to rank in Google Maps.
So if you like to see how we can help you, how Social Firestarter can help you rank your law firm higher in Google Maps, then I want you to click the button below and reserve a free 45-minute strategy session with my team. What we’re going to do is hop on the phone, we’re going to figure out what’s going on with your website, we’ll do an evaluation, and if we think we can help you, then we’ll let you know what that looks like.
And then at that point, you can decide if you want our help or if you want to go at it by yourself or whatever you want to do. But there’s no obligation. The call is completely free. So if you just want to see what it would look like to work with us, then click the link below and book a free strategy session today. If you have any questions at all, let me know in the comments. I’ll talk to you guys soon.
Ethically-Pay For Law Firm Reviews! (Here’s How!)
Hey everybody, Andy here. In this post, we are going to answer a question we are asked often. How can you ethically compensate someone for Google reviews without fear of getting disbarred or any of the scary stuff that comes along with that?
Free Training
Before I do this, I want to let you know I am doing a one-day live training on July 29th where I’m going to basically show our entire strategy about how we get lawyers ranked in Google Maps. And a big part of that is also getting reviews. If you’re interested in signing up for that, it’s one day. It’s live. I’m actually going to be teaching it. I’ve got a few members from my team that are going to be doing it also. And one of the big ways that you get ranks is involving reviews. That’s why this is relevant to that. So go to lawyergmb.com if you want to sign up for that. If you want more information about that. Just click the link posted above.
Who Do You Pay?
So here’s how you compensate. Basically, what you do is you do not pay the client. You pay your receptionist or paralegal, whoever is at the front, your assistant. The reason why you do this is somebody has to have something in it for them. How many times have you talked to a client, you give them a great result, and you say, “Will you leave me a review?” and they say, “Yes, of course. I’ll leave you a review. I’ll leave you a great review” and they just never do it? That’s the problem. The second there’s any sort of friction in the way that’s going to stop them, they’re going to quit–if they can’t remember their password if they can’t find your Google profile if their kids are screaming at them. Whatever it is, any sort of friction and they’re going to quit.
So there’s gotta be somebody that has some sort of incentive in it for them. If you can’t pay the client – because obviously you’ll get disbarred for paying for reviews – then what you need to do is you need to find somebody. And the best person to do that is the person who sees them when they come in and the person who sees them when they leave. And if you can basically compensate the person at the front of your law firm, honestly, I would say, $50 a review, it’s completely worth it. Because the more reviews you have, the better you’re going to rank, and not only that but for conversion rate optimization, the better you’re going to do the more reviews you have. There’s a direct correlation with having a lot of reviews and getting a lot of phone calls. We see it all the time with all of our clients. So that’s how you do it. Basically, you have to have somebody that has some sort of skin in the game, somebody that’s benefitting from a review being posted. Otherwise, it will never get done. So if you have a person at the front of your law firm, compensate them. Honestly, $50 a review, it is totally, totally worth it. And there’s a lot of different ways and a lot of different tricks that you can actually use to get them to leave reviews. Actually, if you go to my YouTube channel, I’ve got an entire hour-long training just about how to get reviews. But I’m going to be diving deep into how to get reviews and how to actually have reviews that have keywords so that you actually rank higher when you get these reviews. I’m going to be diving deep into that in the GMB training that I’m going to be doing on July 29th. I hope this helps. Let me know if you’ve ever done this before. I think there were one or two people that got it correct. I think Jay was the one that got it correct and a couple of other people got kind of close. But that’s what you do. Basically, compensate the person to do it. If you want to learn more about getting ranked in the Google 3-Pack in a very simple, non-technical way… As you know probably by now, you don’t have to be tech-savvy to implement the stuff that I teach. Go to lawyergmb.com and let me know what you think about this strategy and let me know if you’ve ever done it before. Talk to you guys soon.
Thanks.
2 Ways Lawyers Can Use Images to Rank in the Google 3 Pack
In today’s video, I’m going to show you two ways that we help our clients use images. The images I am talking about are photographs that you take with your iPhone or Android device. We are going to show you how to use them to optimize your Google My Business profile so that you can rank better in Google 3-Pack. This is something we do for all of our clients because it works so well,
For those of you who don’t know, the Google 3-Pack is the Maps below the Google ads. When you go to Google, if you search something like “DUI attorney” or “personal injury lawyer”, whatever the keyword is that you’re searching, a lot of times, you’ll get ads at the top and then you’ll get a Maps pack that has three, sometimes four listings. If there’s an ad in there. So what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to figure out how do we get listed in that 3-Pack. If you can appear in that 3-Pack, then you’re much more likely to get phone calls.
Bootcamp
Now, before we get started, I am hosting a one-day Google My Business, Law Firm, 3-Pack Bootcamp type of thing. (I keep changing the name on it.) But basically, what I’m doing is, for an entire day, I’m going to be teaching step by step everything that we do for our clients to get them into the Google 3-Pack in the most competitive areas. It doesn’t matter the practice area. It doesn’t matter the city. It doesn’t matter what your competition is doing. This is the stuff that you can actually do. This is what we actually do for our clients.
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to take you through the entire process step by step. My team is going to get on and talk about some stuff that they do also. So it’s actually real-world things. Everything is going to be very practical, very actionable. It’s not going to be overly technical. You don’t need to be tech-savvy to actually benefit from it. So if you want to hang out with us for the day, it’s going to be July 29th. If you come by and you can’t stay for the whole thing or you can’t make it, the entire thing will be recorded and you will get the recordings. The recordings will not be available for purchase after the event. So go to lawyergmb.com if you want to sign up for that. Click the link in this video.
Two ways to use images to rank higher
Alright. Now, let’s talk about two ways that you can use images just taken from your phone to rank higher in Google Maps. Part of the reason that we want to do this is we’re trying to build our Google My Business profile out as much as we can. Because the more complete your profile is, the more information Google has to pull from and kind of learn a little bit about you. But, also, it kind of makes sense that the most authoritative, the most trustworthy businesses are going to have the most complete profiles. And that is what Google is typically looking for. They are typically looking for who is the most authoritative, and who is the most trustworthy. Because Google doesn’t know who the best lawyer is. They just know who kind of meets their criteria of what makes an authoritative business. Complete your Google My Business profile.
Adding images is a good way to do it. But there are some ways that you can actually enhance the images that you add and get the most out of them. So the first thing that we do whenever a client hires us is we tell them to take 20 interior photos of their office. We also tell them to take 20 exterior photos of their office. Now, when you take these pictures, you need to make sure that you’re using an iPhone or an Android and you need to make sure that the location services are turned on. Because what that does is that actually stores the latitude and the longitude of the location where the picture was taken. So what we do is we get 20 interiors and 20 exterior pictures. The first question our clients always ask is, “What do the pictures need to be of?” The pictures don’t need to be fancy. They don’t need to be of high quality. 99.99% of people are never going to see them. So just do a walking tour of your office, just walk around with your phone, just snapping pictures around your office, and make sure that you have the location services on. And, also, do the exterior. You can just do the outside of your building. You can do your parking lot. You can do your sign. You can do a parking garage, a lobby, all of those types of photos will be fine. Basically, anything you can think of.
What you’re going to do is you’re going to take these 20 pictures and you’re going to go into your Google My Business profile and you’re going to upload them to the interior photo section of the photo section of your Google My Business profile. So when you’re logged in, on the left side, you’re going to see something that says “photos”. You’re going to click that. There’s going to be a lot of options across the top. One is going to say “interior”. You’re going to upload the 20 interior photos. Another is going to say “exterior”. You’re going to upload the 20 exterior photos. Google can read the metadata on those pictures. And what that does is that gives Google the latitude and longitude of your location on your Google My Business profile and makes you much more relevant.
So that’s something we do for all of our clients. We always tell them, “20 interior photos. 20 exterior photos.” Now, the next thing that you want to do is you want to do something (I’ve talked about this quite a bit) called the team selfie hack. And I’m going to show you how that works. So we’ll call that TSH for a team selfie hack. Now, the team selfie hack is a trick that allows you to get the latitude and longitude of the entire area that you’re trying to serve on your Google My Business profile and it’s going to make you much more relevant for the area that you serve.
Now, let me try to draw this out and I’ll see if I can show you exactly why this is important and how this works. Let’s say this is your city. Let’s say that your law firm is located right here. One of the biggest things that determine if you show up in the Google 3-Pack is the distance from the searcher. So if somebody searches from right here, there’s a good chance that you’re not going to show up. Because a lot of times, what you’ll notice is you’ll rank really, really well right here, like around your area, and then it gets a little lower as you get further away. And then as you get outside of these areas over here, you might not have any visibility at all. You might not show up at all. And that’s why if you’re at your office and you Google yourself, you’ll get different results than when you’re at home and you Google yourself, especially if you live a couple of miles away from your office. So the goal of the team selfie hack is to make you more relevant for this entire area that you’re trying to serve. And basically, by doing this, you’re going to be able to expand your reach so that you’re going to reach this entire area. So what you need to do is you need to pull up a map and you need to look at the actual city that you’re located in. And then what you need to do is you need to find landmarks that are around the entire area that you’re trying to rank in. So maybe you can find a landmark here and you can find a landmark here. And you can find one here, you can find one here, you can find one here. And what you want to do is you want to go to all these places just like this and you want to take selfies with your phone, again, making sure that the location services are on. Actually, I should note, if you can have your team do this, if you have several members of your team, you can have different members of your team go through and take selfies. That way, you can upload them. And make sure they’re all using their phones and they all have location services on. Then what you can do is you can take those pictures, you can upload them to the team’s section of your Google My Business profile. And what that is going to do is that is going to make you more relevant for all these locations and it makes it much more likely, that when this person right here searches, you’re going to have more reach and then you’ll actually show up in the Google 3-Pack. Because you’ve got all the latitude and longitude of all the locations stored on your Google My Business profile and it makes you much relevant for the entire area.
So those are two different ways that you can use images to rank better in the Google 3-Pack. You take 20 interior photos and 20 exterior photos and upload them to your Google My Business profile in the interior and exterior section. And then you do the team selfie hack where you go around and you take selfies all over the city and you upload them to the team’s section. Now, the reason that you’re doing selfies, the reason I call it the selfie hack, is because you’re uploading them to the team’s section. That way, if Google looks at it, it’s pictures of people that work for you under the team’s section. If you’re just going around and taking pictures of different monuments and uploading it to the team’s section, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So that’s what you want to do. Now, there are other things you can do also with images that are not really complicated but they’re a little bit above and beyond this video.
More ways to get an edge
I’m going to be revealing more ways you can use images and other really simple, practical things like this that you can do that can really give you an edge on your competition. And I’m going to be doing it on the live Bootcamp that I told you about at the beginning of this video. It’s going to be on July 29th. All you have to do is go to lawyergmb.com and just sign up. I hope to see you at the Bootcamp. If you have any questions at all, below this video, let me know. Also, if you use photos to rank your law firm and if you’ve done the team selfie hack, let me know. I want to know how it worked for you. Let me know in the comments. I hope everyone is having a good day. I hope to see everyone on the 29th. I’ll talk to you soon.
Law Firm Content Strategy That RANKS!
Did you know that you can rank your law firm higher in both Google Maps and organic rankings in Google if you use the right content strategy that just makes sense? It’s actually a really common-sense strategy. Well, in this video, I’m going to show you what that strategy is and how you can very easily implement it for your law firm. Now, what you have to do is you have to think as Google thinks.
What Google is trying to do at the end of the day is trying to return the best result for the searcher. So the best result for the searcher is typically going to be a website that covers the content that they’re searching for or covers the topic that they’re searching pretty thoroughly.
What Does Google Search For?
If you look at the Google results when you search for something like a divorce attorney or personal injury attorney or DUI lawyer, Google actually gives you some clues about what they think people are looking for. There are going to be two sections on there that you can look at. There’s going to be one section called “People Also Ask”. And when you actually search something in Google like a DUI attorney or whatever your practice area is, you’re going to see a list of questions that people also ask when they’re looking for that specific search. It’s really important to pay attention to what those questions are. There’s another section at the very bottom of the search results called “Related Searches”. Now, if you look at the content in both the People Also Ask section and also the Related Searches, then you can put together a content plan that is exactly what Google is looking for. They’re really not hiding it. They’re showing you exactly what they’re looking for. What you do is you create that content and you use it strategically on your website by linking the pages together.
What Does That Do?
What this does, first of all, is it allows Google to easily navigate your entire website and find all these different pages that are related to one another. Then it also tells Google that you are the most relevant and your website has covered the subject to the highest degree and answered all the questions that Google thinks people are searching for. By doing that, you’re going to rank higher and higher and higher, and you don’t need to do backlinks or anything like this.
This is just an on-page content strategy. Now, you would do this for any practice area. But let’s just say, for example, we searched divorce attorney. Now, if you’re a personal injury attorney or a criminal defense attorney or whatever it is, you can do that. But I’m going to give you the example of divorce.
So our main page that we want to rank for a divorce attorney covers the topic of divorce. That’s an actual page right there. Now, if you actually go to the People Also Ask section and the Related Searches, you’re going to see that there are a lot of other things that people are searching for when they search for divorce. One of the biggest things that they’re going to search for is the cost of a divorce attorney. Another thing they’re going to search for is information about flat fees. Now, each one of these should be a page. Each page should have information about the cost of a divorce or information about flat fee divorces. Even if you don’t do flat fee divorces, you still should put some information on there because Google thinks that this is what people are searching for so it expects to see this information on your website.
Even if it’s talking about why flat fee divorces are bad, that’s fine. You might talk about alimony. That should be another page. Now, this could also be another page that actually breaks off into a page like this where it has its own subcategories such as how do you calculate alimony, how long does alimony go for, who deserves alimony, can the husband get alimony, is it possible to break alimony, all these different types of things, all these different questions that people have. And you can do this pretty much for all these pages. Now, each one of these pages should then link back to the divorce page. But the divorce page can also link to these pages.
Google Cares About Customer Satisfaction
What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to create a network of pages that are actually going to provide a very good user experience. That’s what Google is trying to do. They’re trying to return the best result and the best experience for the searcher. Another thing you could do is retainers, information about how retainers work. You can do child support. Now, child support is one of those things that is probably going to have subcategories that branch off, just like a divorce, and you’ll want to create those and you’ll want to link to those. And by doing this, what you’re actually doing is you’re laying out a hierarchy of pages that are all related to one another but everything funnels back to family law. And if you can get your interlinking right and you can actually create all of these key anchor pages… Maybe we do child custody and that links to the divorce page and then that has its own satellites coming off of it. Basically, what this does is this provides a very, very good user experience. Every question that they have about each one of these topics is already linked to from these pages and they can get there very easily. What that does also is when Google is crawling your website, it is finding all the information that it thinks that people are looking for. You know this information because you already found it in on the People Also Ask section and the Related Searches section.
Now, this can be a little overwhelming to put together. I understand that. And it’s actually not quite as complicated. It can be a lot bigger than this. But when it’s actually all laid down, it’s actually not very difficult. But it is a lot of content that has to be written. There is a lot of interlinking that has to be done. There’s a lot of technical stuff that has to actually be done. It’s totally doable. You can definitely do it. It just takes a little bit of effort.
Now, if you want my team to help you implement a system like this, then what I want you to do is I want you to click the link below this video and I want you to book a free strategy session with my team. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at your website and we’re going to let you know exactly how we can help you. And we’re going to determine if we can help you also. That’s a big part of it too. If we can help you, then what we’ll do is we’ll tell you how we can help you and we’ll let you know what that looks like and what the program looks like. At that point, you can decide if you want to have us help you or if we want to try to take this on on your own. There’s no obligation. The call is completely free. All you have to do is click the link below, enter your information, just answer a few questions so we can learn a little bit more about your law firm and your goals, and then we’ll do a free strategy session with you where you can learn about everything that we do and how it actually works. If you have any questions about this, please feel free to leave them in the comments below. I will see you in the next video.
How Lawyers Can Use the Team Selfie Hack to Market Their Firms
Can taking a selfie actually improve your law firm’s ranking in Google Maps? Well, the answer is yes. In this video, I’m going to tell you exactly how to do it. By the way, if you want more tips about how to get more clients for your law firm, then be sure to subscribe and be sure to click the bell so that you’re updated every time I create a new video.
Hey, everybody. Andy Stickel here, author of “How to Get More Law Firm Clients Without Losing Time and Money or Getting Screwed By a Marketing Company” and founder of Social Firestarter. In today’s video, we are going to talk about how to use selfies to get into Google Maps, to get your law firm ranked in Google Maps and the Google 3-Pack. What’s really important about this is that people use Google 3-Pack like it’s the yellow pages. It’s really important that you rank there. I want to show you what typically happens.
Typical Ranking
Now, when you have a Google Maps ranking, you’re typically going to rank within a geographical location of a specific city. Let’s say your office is in Miami. Let’s say that this is the city limits of Miami and your office is located right there. What ends up happening is that you get some pretty decent rankings. You’re probably in the top three. Right there, if this is the city. As you go around, you start getting maybe fourth, fifth, sixth in that area of Google Maps. But, then what ends up happening is that in this area of the city, you end up getting no rankings whatsoever.
You Can Change This
So the goal is: how do we take this blue circle right here and expand it so that, when someone actually does a search, you rank in the entire area, not just really well in this really close area and then okay in this area and then non-existent? Here’s how you actually do it.
What you need to do is you need to take selfies around the entire city. But, there’s a very specific way to do it. You have to use an iPhone with the location services turned on. And the best way to do this is to have different members of your team do this. You can use an iPhone. You can use an Android. You just have to make sure that the location services are turned on. Now, let me show you again. Let’s say we’re using the same scenario and your law firm is located right here. What you’re going to want to do is pull up the map of your area and you’re going to want to take selfies at all these different locations. You could take them like this. (It’s helpful if you can actually find landmarks that are at those locations.) What happens is when you take the selfies at all these different locations around the entire area, around the entire city, then, when you’re using your phone, it’s actually storing the latitude and the longitude data of where each of those pictures was taken. These photos are gold! What you do next is you take those photos and you upload them to the team’s section, in the photos of your “Google My Business” photos. What ends up happening is now you’re relevant for all these areas because you’ve got these latitudes and longitudes on your Google Maps. What ends up happening is this. (We’ve seen this many times.) That’s what ends up happening. You end up becoming more relevant for the entire area.
Let Us Share Our Free Hacks And Tricks With You
Now, this is just one of the many, many tricks that we use to get our clients ranked in Google Maps so that they can get more phone calls, generate more leads, and ultimately make more money. So if you want to learn about how we can help your law firm get on Google Maps using strategies like this and a lot more innovative strategies as well, then what I want you to do is click the link below and book a free strategy session with my office.
What we’ll do is we’ll evaluate your website, we’ll let you know what we would do and what you can expect, and then, at that point, you can decide if you would like to move forward and you’d like to join the program. There’s no obligation if you book a call. But you’ll get a lot of value out of the call because we’ll be able to give you a lot of insights on your website. So if you’re interested in having us help you do this for your law firm, get you ranked in Google Maps so you can get more cases and ultimately grow your law firm, then click the link below and book a strategy session today.
