How Can Your Law Firm’s Content Beat AI? with Gert Mellak

Episode Notes

Transcript

Karin Conroy:

This is Counsel Cast part of the Legal Talk Network, and I’m your host, Karin Conroy. When you face a complex case outside your expertise, you bring in a co-counsel for next level results. When you want to engage, expand, and elevate your firm, you bring in a marketing co-counsel. In this podcast, I bring in marketing experts who each answer one big question to help your firm achieve more. Here’s today’s guest.

Gert Mellack:

Hey Karen. My name is Gert Mellack. I’m the founder and CEO of SEO leverage.com. We are a conversion driven SEO agency leveraging all kinds of new technologies like AI language models, but also our proprietary software to make sure that we help clients get an SEO process going that actually makes sense for them and really, really stick to this process. So we facilitate all the execution, all the implementation work, and really make sure that they streamlined and focus their efforts. Myself personally, I’m originally from Austria, live in Spain. I’ve been living in Spain for a while, have always been in tech development, SEO, online marketing, lead generation, all these kinds of things because I’ve just found that it’s really exciting and challenging every single day, something new to learn. So I really enjoy it and I’m actually really thankful that I can be back on this show here.

Karin Conroy:

Oh, I’m so excited. Thank you for being here again. Last time we were talking more about SEO and how to kind of focus leads and all of that stuff. This time is going to be so interesting, a little bit different. The title for the show is How Can Your Law Firm’s Content Beat ai? So I’m excited about this and I know that this is something that you find so fascinating as I do as well. So let’s first talk about this. You reached out and you had this story about something you saw on Twitter about content generation in terms of SEO and this battle that you saw. Can you recap that story?

Gert Mellack:

Absolutely. We should probably start describing a little bit what the SEO is like. It’s just really, really content heavy. What does this mean? It means that we, in my case, at SEO Leverage, for example, we obviously work with law firms, but also people, other businesses from other industries, and it’s always for us a challenge to know the industry well enough to write a text that actually sounds at least correct. I’m not a lawyer, I can write it and I could probably with some research, write a text that for a non-lawyer sounds almost correct. And then a lawyer goes through and crosses everything out and says, Hey, this is start fresh. This doesn’t make any sense. Right, exactly. It’s normal. Everybody knows from their industry, everybody’s an expert in the industry, and for an agency it’s really, really tough. So workarounds here, we have people try to focus on certain industries.

They have been doing a lot of legal tech, they’re really proficient. We know that what they produce is probably almost like 60, 70% correct, so much better than getting a VA to write a text they have never written before. Other workaround, we actually get clients write texts based on our instructions. This has been working really, really well. We give them a complete content brief from a search marketing perspective, this is the text they need, these are the terminologies, the phrases, the story, et cetera. And then the client writes the content. Obviously the content then is correct. It might not be as SEO optimized, it might be a little bit of an issue. So we have a little bit of a back and forth content creation with every client works a little bit differently based on their preferences. So we try to adapt but then enter artificial intelligence into the ring.

So what this now means, and many of your listeners probably have been playing with chat TPT at least, or Google Bard or copilot or Perplexity or whatever, where you just pretty much say, Hey, create a text about, I don’t know, brand protection or intellectual property or something like this, and it’s just going to start writing and you can lean back, Sipp, drink a cup of coffee and really look at what this is. It seems like it’s doing your work. And until you look a little bit close and say it’s not that easy, I think we are going to talk about what kind of strategies we can use to work a little bit about this. But for agencies especially SEO agencies, this opened up a huge opportunity window and it was how if I usually would create one or two articles per day with a person, this person suddenly was able to do 20 or 30, and those were texts that actually sounded pretty good, and they were also SEO optimized.

So I know agents that usually to create like 20 a week, they’re now creating 200 or 500 a week and they’re getting bas, virtual assistants train them to a certain level where they can just use those AI tools to even move faster. So we have huge masses of content that are very, very optimized and we have this AI movement that’s actually moving much faster than search engines probably want because they try to keep in touch with the latest movements, but it’s not that easy. So we have a situation where people have figured out ways to really outsmart the search engines with tons and tons of content. You then read those case studies, they created thousands of pieces of content, really original content is not copied from everywhere directly language model. Then obviously grabbed information from somewhere, but this original content and suddenly is blasted at the internet. And there was this case study where we saw somebody getting millions of visitors in a very short amount of time just by firing up this content machine consistently and definitely did his SEO right and got the basics right and got very quickly to really huge, huge graphic numbers that would be completely unreasonable or unrealistic for the type of business he had.

Karin Conroy:

So he went straight after one of his competitors posted all this content were describing and was getting millions of views on the content, which normally with a human generated content, this is going to take months and months, maybe years. So then what happened?

Gert Mellack:

Absolutely. So then usually, obviously this gets published, this is case study. Everybody wants to know how does this go and did this work, et cetera. What usually happens in most cases happen in this time as well. Sometime later, I think two months later, something like this Twitter user, I came back and said, Hey look, this is the latest result after one of those core updates that we were launched where they just update their algorithm and actually devalued a lot of his content again. So there is this situation now where we are right now where say, Hey, we have a lot of potential. We can actually do a lot really, really fast. But it is a little bit of a sidestep from a long-term sustainable strategy and it obviously also has a lot of risks involved here.

Karin Conroy:

So do you know anything about the content? Why did Google devalue it? Because earlier you mentioned that he had done the SEO, right? He had kind of worked the content. What happened there? Why did Google come back and devalue it?

Gert Mellack:

In this case, we didn’t get really specific answers. What I know from other similar case studies is that Google, first of all, they make an assessment about your content and they say, okay, if the sites so far had quality content, probably what you’re publishing has quality as well. So I think about it like they give you an entry level rating. So you have a decent website, you get an eight out of 10, but then you need to prove it. This content needs to prove that it satisfies Google users’ expectations. If it doesn’t, it catches a lot of negative signals, as we call it. Things Google picks up where they say, Hey, this Google user wasn’t happy and this is all it’s about. Google wants to make a Google user happy. Google couldn’t care less. Whether this is true, whether this is nicely written, whether there are spelling mistakes, the only thing Google really cares about is to make this Google user happy.

If they don’t pick up those signals to justify this eight out of 10, they’re going to slowly downgrade it. And then you also have these masses of content that you need to update over time. There’s no evergreen content because user’s expectations change. So if you have thousands of articles, you also need to have a really good updating process that makes sure that all those articles are still in line with what Google wants today after a Google update, which is not necessarily the same it was before. So this process, you can go very high, very fast, but it’s not at this stage at least really sustainable the way it was done here.

Karin Conroy:

So have you seen sites where they do have the thousands of outdated articles and they’re getting devalued because the content’s not working for them?

Gert Mellack:

It’s one of the main things people come to us with where they say, Hey, I used to be really, really big five years ago, three years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I was the first in my industry. I have been blogging for nine years straight. What happened? And they just don’t see that the competition level this year is probably 10 x what we had last year and last year probably five x what we had the year before. And it’s just not happening. It’s evergreen content. Even if though the content hadn hasn’t changed, the laws for a law firm probably haven’t changed that much, but the content doesn’t work anymore. Why? Because a few years ago you could have a title and a wall of text with 800 words, and if there were a few keywords in here, there and there, you’re good to go. You were good to go. You got leads probably you even got leads. You didn’t have to work really hard compared to what we do today to actually get something ranking and it doesn’t work this way.

Karin Conroy:

So what do you do? What’s the first thing that you do in those cases? I get those same conversations all the time. What is happening with our site? We’re doing the same thing we did five years ago. And it’s like, well, okay, well that’s the problem, but what’s the first thing you do in those cases?

Gert Mellack:

First we definitely get on a call and make sure that we really can help, that we have seen this before, that we know we’re confident we can actually make a difference here. And then the first step is definitely auditing the website. And part of auditing the website is auditing the content specifically and go through the content and okay, how has this content been performing in the last six months? And then we are going to find out something that really shocks people a lot, which is that we have an 80 20 here, 80% of the content is only going to account for 20% of your traffic, so you can pretty much throw it away and nothing bad is going to happen. We have a client now literally removed thousands of articles. He removed I think 2000 already. Nothing happened on a website. Google couldn’t care less about this content except

Karin Conroy:

His heart broke a little bit because it’s like all that work.

Gert Mellack:

Kiva shared this experience with me, what it meant, and also the sunk cost of tens of thousands of hours of his team preparing this content, him creating it, editing it, et cetera, podcast, hundreds of podcast episodes. They’re not doing anything anymore. So either you do something with those episodes and bring them back. We have done this in this example as well. We had him rerecord some of those episodes, put up fresh content on the same URL, present it in a different way that makes more sense these days and the content can come back. But chances are that over the years, a lot of things have happened in the business and this content isn’t that important anymore, as to really spend a few more hours bringing this really back.

Karin Conroy:

And if you’re talking about thousands of posts and articles, you can update some of them, but updating all of them is going to take years.

Gert Mellack:

Absolutely. And it’s also not about the traffic, it’s about the conversions. And once you check the conversions is one of the first things we do. We want to know what is actually happening on the website. Where do people come into the website before they convert, but before they do something that we really like, they check out your contact page, check out your about page, they check out your testimonials. Where do they come in before they go to these pages? We call it soft conversions. We want to track those soft conversions, those behavioral conversions because then we are going to say, okay, there might not be a lot of traffic coming through one of those articles, but whoever comes in is checking us out. So we have done something right? Let’s go back to this article to spend half a day on it, bring it back, let’s remove 500 others that don’t lead to this kind of engagement. And we know why, because it’s just not happening. But if you don’t even have the conversion tracking in place, it’s really, really hard. So this is very often after the audit is the first step, put the conversion tracking in place, gather us some data at least for a month before you actually make the call.

Karin Conroy:

So the next thing I wanted to talk about ties into this because you were talking about a pretty complicated conversion tracking with your content. And so I wanted to talk about the weakness of AI content because what we’re trying to get to is how the title of the show being how your law firm’s content can beat ai. So let’s first talk about where are the weaknesses in AI generated content as we recognize these weaknesses and these little holes, those are the gaps that a human generated content piece could come in and fill and do a better job of.

Gert Mellack:

Absolutely. I think it’s important that we understand on a very basic level how those language models actually work. They’re predictive models, so it’s fascinating what they’re able to achieve with a very simple principle, which is they predict what the most likely next word is. So if I have a phrase in the evening I come home from, and the language model is probably going suggest work probably, and then I say, okay, and there’s an end and I, it’s suggesting dinner. So this is the kinds of things we can expect from a language model. It’s fascinating how well this works until it doesn’t. So we have this situation where it’s predicting based on how it was trained. Training a language model means giving it a lot of data to process, to analyze and to reuse. So whatever the language model puts out isn’t the language model going through legal texts, making the connections and the logic.

And if this was true in 1950, then this case in 1980, then this must be, it’s not that way, it’s just going to invent it. We said it has hallucinate really because sometimes doesn’t make any sense and we are getting better. So it’s definitely getting more and more into a place where we have a logical layer or pretty much a database and on top of them then the language model interpreting it because we have seen if it’s just interpretation of or language model content generation, it doesn’t work. So they first want to check the facts and then use the language model to just describe those facts. This would be the ideal scenario and I think it’s going to get better, but right now it’s pretty much rewriting what already exists based on whatever it was trained on. And then we have funny situations where it might just grab whatever testimonial it finds because in this text right now, there must be a testimonial. So I think when I talked about SEO leverage, we were apparently working for the ac e corporation and their boss gave us a really good testimonial would be great. I was really happy about the testimonial. It’s just not true. And this happens with all the text,

Karin Conroy:

It’s totally fake. Yeah,

Gert Mellack:

Absolutely.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, I’ve seen that so many times. So what are some things, I wrote down some ideas about strategies to outperform the AI content, and I just want to be clear that we’re not saying not to use AI because I think there’s lots, I know there’s lots of useful uses. That’s not the word I’m looking for. Lots of use cases for this ai. However, there’s some places where you just can’t do that. So one example is like a testimonial like you were just describing, and it needs to sound, first of all, most testimonials like on Google reviews, that’s going to be linked to someone’s account. So you can see this as a real person and it needs to sound like a real person. And as a lawyer you cannot misrepresent things like that. That’s illegal. So your reviews and testimonials need to be real. So if there’s nothing else that you get out of here, don’t go to AI and generate some fake reviews. That’s such a bad idea. But what are some other places where you can use your own writing and content to outperform ai?

Gert Mellack:

I actually like to use a blended approach. I want to be really direct here. The times where you sit in front of a blank document and word and start writing are over, this is over and whoever is still working this way, unless it’s to write a legal document and even I guess for contracts, probably there’s some templates or some generator that actually work pretty well. Those times are over. So we need to recognize this ship has passed, it’s been fun, it’s not going to come back. So what we are looking at is to always base our content at some sort of structure. The way we work with clients is that we would give them, for example, an outline to start with and maybe suggest a few topics they could talk about in each paragraph. And this is already SEO optimized. So they know when they really fill this in and pretty much base their content on this, it’s going to be good. We sometimes even pre-write continents can maybe add a story or something like this. And this is really a really important point. The content is going to be as good as your input, your prompt as we call it. And very often the best comparison I’ve heard, I would love to credit somebody, I don’t know where I have heard it was to compare this with an intern. You hire an intern, you’re not going to tell them, look, create a contract for a company,

Karin Conroy:

Our biggest client

Gert Mellack:

For a merger with a one line sentence and then expect a suitable result. But this is how people have been using chatt PT since the beginning because it seemed like you just said, please do my work, full stuff. So how was this realistic? It’s not right.

Karin Conroy:

However, if you, it’s like a magic wand

Gert Mellack:

You put absolutely, but you even make it an easier job. Say, okay, run your Facebook page. You wouldn’t tell an intern with one sentence to run your Facebook page. You give them a lot of input, you give them training, you give them samples. You say, look, this is what we like. This is what we don’t like. This is how we sound, this is how we sound. This is the Brandt. Exactly. There you go. And if you do all this before you put in your sentence, please create my piece of content, the content is going to be much better. So if I say for whom, literally you can type this in. Now I want to create a text that’s for Facebook. I am a law firm specializing in intellectual property. The content should be about 800 words long. It’s going to, it should be ranking for this and this keyword. We want to make sure that it has space for some visuals or suggest them in the content. We want to have calls to action so people actually are entitled or triggered to reach out at least three times across the content. We want to have certain keywords in bold, so it can be skimmed. We want to have a table of contents, we want to have all these things and

Karin Conroy:

Oh my gosh, you just wrote the best outline for a blog post in whatever that was, 10, 12 seconds. That little blurb you could use just as a general outline and get amazing results as opposed to what you were saying earlier. Please do my work for me.

Gert Mellack:

But it’s so funny mean there are really, really good platforms out there. I just do this with a notepad, honestly. Yeah, honestly, I have my templates, which I use. I copy and paste this in and you can do all kinds of things. You can do role plays with chat tpt. Say, Hey, pretend you’re a client. I’m the lawyer. I need to sell you on trusting me in this case and I can help you, et cetera. And we have a conversation back and forth. You can have it help you for, I don’t know, prepare for certain hearings or something like that. You just give it all the information it needs obviously need to be careful about sensitive information you share because unless you are on a certain plan, it might be using your information as well as training to make the machine better and

Karin Conroy:

Suddenly, oh, that’s a good point. Certain

Gert Mellack:

Data comes out. You want to be careful and always anonymize it.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. I keep a lot of templates. I keep them within chat, GPT so that I can find them right there. The other thing that I wanted to add in terms of a tip was that you can go into your profile settings and save the details about your business so that every time it makes these assumptions. So every time for me it assumes I’m a agency who works with lawyers and these are the things that I’m typically talking about. This is my audience. And so I don’t have to restate that every single time. It already knows that. So that’s a really good place to start also. And then it’s going to assume that you’re going to use that, and then if you’re using it personally for some other purpose or something, then you just need to clarify that. Like, okay, I’m not the marketing agency right now. I need a question for my sixth grader.

So I’m not kidding how much she uses it and in legitimate ways where this is their future and it would be silly to ignore it. Alright, so let’s talk about we’re putting together the content. We’re recognizing that AI has some limitations. So how can we do this better If the goal here is to create content as a law firm that is better than what we just get just generically from chat GPT in terms of SEO. So what are these kind of implications for SEO? How can we really focus in, I mean you mentioned a minute ago when you’re putting together the outline of that blog post. There was a bunch of really good stuff in there.

Gert Mellack:

I think one thing AI just can’t replicate is your experience. Yeah. So in the moment you would write this post, you would remember a similar case that you want to describe. You would go in the details, remember as Mr. Smith who had this issue and this is how it affected them and this is how they struggled when they came. They hardly could afford services, but we help them anyway and this is how this ended and this is now linked to the case study or whatever. If you’re in a similar situation, reach out. I like to have this as part of what we feed into the prompt. So I literally say, here are three facts I want you to use. Here is a customer story I want you to use and you just tell this story. You can even use the app and audio recording with chat TPT for example, and just talk about this story and say, Hey, talk all this into the app and share your story there.

It’s going to transcribe it, it’s going to use it, it’s going to find ways. We are actually to go back to the story. If you ask it to and it’s going to show the story or showcase the story, tell the story, and then at the end maybe go back, make a connection, have a nice ending or a nice really closure on this particular piece of content. Taking this into account, you can specifically ask it not to make up any effects. So not to use any effects that you wouldn’t use. This is also interesting. So sometimes you might suddenly get statistics and they’re

Karin Conroy:

All invented

Gert Mellack:

Fake data, probably invented fake data, but it sounds really, really legit. Just don’t let it use it. Put the boundaries up like you would say and tell an intern, don’t make up anything you can’t prove. Here are the facts we can use. This is a book you can use in order to cite any facts, but this is what we actually want. But really the most important thing is your experience, your stories that you have as an established business on your own history, your cases, your clients, whatever you can share in this context that might be relevant and feed it into the machine. Make sure that they know this is the story we want to use because everything else is going to get better and better and more easy to replicate, but the stories are going to be really hard. Is there,

Karin Conroy:

Sorry to jump in the middle there, but is there a way to tell it that you don’t want it to take your story and use it anywhere else?

Gert Mellack:

I think there are now, they just came up recently in JTPD, at least with a team software that’s supposed to actually maintain your data within the team, I believe is definitely something to take into account. At the same time, there is a likelihood that similar stories have happened to similar lawyers, so it’s probably going to be a little bit harder. I would always try to anonymize the story and maybe make up a fake place or location where this actually happened or something before you actually feed this in and then update it or whatever. But also be aware that whatever you put up on the internet can be then training data for JT pt unless you block the access, which in my point of view hardly makes any sense. So jtt point open ai, the platform behind it is going to read your website, is going to read the story at the end and might then use it. So in this case, I think it wouldn’t even be a point of discussion here, you just use this feed in your story, it’s going to end up in there anyway.

Karin Conroy:

That’s true. Yeah, that’s a good point. I just believe that the more time I spend with this and looking at this whole strategy, how can I as a human present information that’s more useful and better performs than ai? It just comes down to this. It comes down to stories slash case studies, which is the same thing just in a different format and it comes down to testimonials. And so telling the stories of your cases and your experience in whether it’s within a blog post or a case study, but then also having that supported by testimonials, that’s something that other firms can’t replicate with ai. So the value of that type of content, I think that’s one thing I see really just exploding over the next few years is the value of Google reviews, the value of these testimonials and then the just real focus on case study type content. What do you see as kind of the future and where you see AI going over the next, I mean, it feels like it’s been so fast. I was going to say the last two years, but it’s been maybe a year-ish, what do you think for maybe the next year and then long-term?

Gert Mellack:

Definitely a hard question, but I’m thinking about this a lot. So I do have my answer, which might be different next month. So I believe short term we are going to get rid of all the small issues we have been facing in t, pt, pt t, pt, not able to do simple math T PT making stuff up, TPT, getting facts wrong. I think this is all going to move away within the next 12 months.

Karin Conroy:

Oh wow. That’s amazingly

Gert Mellack:

Fast. I would expect that because it’s just really so simple for Google and other engines to really use what we call a knowledge graph where they try to connect concepts like the founder. They have it somewhere connected to the company and the company to the podcast and the podcast to iTunes and iTunes, again back to the company or whatever. They have those connections and Google has it in what they call a knowledge graph, and it’s really a simple step to use more and more knowledge graph before actually creating content that might be wrong.

There is not even a fact checking layer. I’ve heard people talk about fact checking after the generation and then adding, I think it’s just going to be a construct effect and then they wrap the text around, which seems to be making more sense, but I do believe we are not having those basic issues anymore. Now TPT four is much better than TPT three in this regard already. We are getting much better in writing, in better prompts. We are going to get much better. We’re not going to do those simple one-liners anymore. We are going to copy and paste templates. We’re going to use platforms that make it easy where people share templates as well. So we are going to,

Karin Conroy:

Well, that’s what I was thinking when you were saying the idea of a blank document is dead. And so then I was picturing we only use Google Docs and Google Forms and everything. We don’t use Microsoft at all. And I was picturing Google Docs opening it up, it’s already getting there. It already has some AI starting to be dripped in there, but I’m imagining that being something that is drastically different in the next, I don’t know, I’ll just say near future in next year or two or whatever, but I could easily see that being the document saying, what are you making? Are you making a letter? Are you making a contract? Are you making a blog post? And then having some prompts where it just helps you to develop that. So it’s not necessarily like a chat GPT version, but it’s more of the outline prompted version like you were describing.

Gert Mellack:

Absolutely. I would expect AI really long-term, maybe two, three years, be everywhere. And imagine you open up, you take your Gmail and this already pre-answered those, you just sign off on them on those email answers. That would be amazing because based on the history that we had, you and I talking about doing a show together and talking about marketing back and forth, probably an AI could figure out what we probably answer or we probably agree on when we record the show and what we are going to do. There’s no need for a machine to actually ask anything. They can just say, look, do you want to answer this and you want me send

Karin Conroy:

Him your

Gert Mellack:

Calendar? Calendar? Exactly. There you go. There you go. There’s no need to really do a lot of complicated processing. I think Google is pretty much holding back. They just say, okay, we don’t want to move too fast because then people are going to freak out, might run into issues, people are going to freak out. It might be legal considerations as well. What are the governments going to save if suddenly email is transparently available and automatic everywhere. Nobody signs off anymore. Everybody just blindly says, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. And what happens and send everything without reading it, but technically Google would be in the position. We use Google Docs exclusively as well. We don’t have Microsoft here, so Google would be in the position to just have it in Gmail, have it in all their office suit pretty much. And pretty much guess what we are probably going to do. I open this up and say, Hey, got another SEO strategy. Yes, of course, please. Right?

Karin Conroy:

I’m going to the beach.

Gert Mellack:

You give it a sample and say, okay, this is a Shopify site. Should we use this other Shopify site template as the baseline? Yes, of course. And you have a conversation more than really starting to copy something. I would think this is realistic. And then there are also going to be tools on the way that enable this before actually the big tools jump on this. There’s always going to be plugins that already now help you fill in a form with chatt PT or fill in some texts or social media posts, et cetera. So we are going to see those things. And really what I see more and more, and finally all the big guru out there start talking about it as well, is that it’s going to be a huge reputation issue.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah,

Gert Mellack:

This is going to be huge reputation, meaning it’s going to be so easy to make everything up that it’s going to be really, really hard to prove you’re real and you’re legit and that actually a real person got a really good experience with you.

Karin Conroy:

So what do you think? How are platforms like Google? So recently, before I finish that question, I’m going to back up. I recently have been working on my knowledge panel. So my name has been out. I’ve been on the internet for what it feels like forever, pretty much since the beginning. So my name has been out there. I’ve also secured, I secured my own domain name with my name decades ago. So Google has found me and created a knowledge panel just for my name. This is not the same as a Google business profile that my business has. This is a knowledge panel based on me that’s saying I’m a real person and Google has verified that I have the following knowledge and am associated with the following things. And so it has some links to certain profiles and whatever, but there is a pretty involved process in verifying your identity and going through the verification of this whole process as it should be because Google is the place people are going to go and trust the most. And so if Google is saying this person is legit and these reviews and not just the reviews, it’s more like these things that are associated with this person are real and verified. I had to take a picture of my driver’s license with my face that was dated that day and send that in. And so do you think that it’s going to be more like that where it’s you’re going to have to find these sources that support verifying your identity because otherwise it’s way too easy to fake it all,

Gert Mellack:

But it’s even more complex because there are people with the same name doing completely different things. So we work sometimes with brands that just sounds similar. We have now, right now, a client, his name, it’s two words, he writes it separately. There is another competitor in not the same but similar space writing in the two words. They come up both obviously because Google can’t figure it out. So people end up on their website, don’t find what they’re looking for, get frustrated, look for something else. They try to log in, they try to log in the wrong site. And with a person, the same thing happens. Sure, right. There’s a chance somebody with the same name is also doing something on the internet and has been with your name, not with mine necessarily, maybe,

Karin Conroy:

Or with Karen, because Karen is much more popular in the us but so mine has an eye in it, but people are misspelling my name all the time. And so if they’re searching for my name with the E, they’re going to find a different person. That’s confusing. So plus imagine if your name is John Smith, that makes it really tricky.

Gert Mellack:

Absolutely. Absolutely. So this is definitely going to be an edit complexity, and we can assume that people probably might add some sort of additional attribute to it. So Karin, Conroy podcaster, for example, a lawyer or something like that. So you would probably expect to search my name with SEO at the end. And so even if there was somebody else and they or don’t find who they want to find, they might search for something else. But what you’re describing, the knowledge graph is actually a really very important piece of the puzzle because it just means that Google has a lot of dots. They connect like to join the dots game. My kids usually play, but now they have another dot. They have pretty verified because they even have your id and they know that you identify with your id. Somebody or some algorithm actually has done the necessary checking and says, okay, this actually just seems to be this person we believe is running this podcast and is running the marketing for lawyers.

So it all adds up. But this is really very similar to your educated child. I have two kids here. If I have the slightest inconsistency in my way of saying this is okay, this is not okay, they’re going to use it against me. Oh yes. And it’s definitely not going to work. It’s not going to work. And with Google, the same thing happens. If you’re inconsistent, Google doesn’t figure it out. The best example I’ve seen is people’s social media bio for example, where on LinkedIn they would say, I’m a lawyer specializing in intellectual property. Then on their Instagram they say, I’m a lifestyle designer. And then on Facebook they said, family, father. And then you go to Twitter and they are like a tech geek.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah,

Gert Mellack:

It’s make a decision. So if you’re Google, if you’re Google, you’re truly trying to figure it out. Of course in different circles, you try to be somebody else or stress a certain characteristics or hobbies, et cetera, it’s normal. But if you at the end of the day expect Google to recognize us as one person, we need to be very, very, very consistent to the point is that the phrase you use to describe yourself is always the same, even if it’s boring. Right? Melik is an SEO expert and the founder of SEO Leverage. This is a phrase you’re going to find everywhere.

Karin Conroy:

Everywhere.

Gert Mellack:

Yeah, everywhere. It’s just this phrase, the moment I start to do something completely different and I do a woodworking business, I’m in trouble. All of a

Karin Conroy:

Sudden

Gert Mellack:

You’re like, but for now with SEO O, I think

Karin Conroy:

Pickleball expert,

Gert Mellack:

Whatever is going to happen, you can rebrand. You can rebrand, but it’s probably another year or two until Google actually notices because they just check all the places where there’s something about you. And if there is an inconsistency, the knowledge panel is not going to happen. So close us to you forgetting it. Yeah, absolutely.

Karin Conroy:

Alright, it is time for the thought leaders library. Remember, our website has a curated collection of all these top book picks that every episode our guests have curated. So Gert, what’s the one book that you believe every lawyer should have on their bookshelf?

Gert Mellack:

I have been doing a lot of sales training lately, and I think it should be Spin Selling.

Karin Conroy:

Spin selling. Tell me

Gert Mellack:

More. Spin selling Spin is a framework that helps you walk a prospect through a process that helps them to see how valuable your solution is for them

And actually recognize that it’s worth the investment. And I like the book because I’m a data-driven person. I like to have the research and I like to have the numbers. It’s a scientist, Neil, a scientist actually, who has been doing thousands of interviews with salespeople, successful ones, not so successful ones, accompanying them to their meetings, listening to their calls, et cetera. And he pretty much describes what is working and why and how a high ticket is very different from a low ticket sale. And really how the price you can charge really depends on this value equation. So how much value do they think you provide for them?

And very often this means that you really amplify the pain for this prospect. What does this actually mean if you don’t solve it? Love that. So it’s one thing that I think I should have a lawyer helping me registering my trademark, but you tell me this is, I don’t know, $2,000, $5,000, and I say, oh no, okay, I’ll be in touch. But if you now walk me through this process and say, Hey, what does it actually mean if somebody tomorrow registers SEO leverage and you can’t use it anymore, how does your business change? How does your branding change all the effort you have put into actually making this name known in a certain circle, et cetera. Now the pain is getting a little bit harder to bear. So suddenly more exactly. It’s suddenly I have another expense here if I don’t invest into your services.

And this is where the spin selling framework is really a nice guideline for a conversation. We have always been doing this. It’s situation problem implications and need payoff, the abbreviation. So we always analyze in SEO the situation, what is the situation? How have we come here with content creation in the past? How does this work now, what is a potential solution? But we are definitely not focused as an SEO agency so much on amplifying this, how bad this is right now. And it even can be a bit awkward sometimes for a conversation, at least if you’re not used to this framework, but just having this knowledge that it makes sense to talk about the problem a little bit more before you actually present a solution. Even if you know it after three words, you know what the solution is going to be is a very interesting approach. And at least if nothing else, it leads to more interesting conversations.

Karin Conroy:

So I have a great example of this and to be able to compare using it versus not using it. And it was in the past, we worked with an attorney who did a lot of criminal defense and it was very high level criminal defense stuff, not just DUIs and things like that. And in the past, the website messaging was about we understand what is at stake and then underneath that it would explain, I understand that maybe your immigration status is at stake. If this case goes in a negative way, you could lose your immigration status. I understand that your family relationships are at stake. I understand that your job is maybe at stake. I understand all of these really, really critical pieces of your life are on the line right now, and I’ve done this before. I understand how to work through this. I understand how to get you to a solution that is better than what you might otherwise expect.

And they’ve since changed. This was years ago that they had this messaging and they’ve since changed it. I was talking to someone about this, I bring it up all the time and I pulled it up and now the website I can see it doesn’t perform as well. And it’s very generic criminal defense. This is the kind of case we do. This is where our office is located. These are some of our results, and then maybe they have some testimonials. But this understanding of what’s at stake was so cutting edge at the time. This was probably six or seven years ago that they were using this messaging. And this is what it comes down to when you’re a lawyer in a law firm, this is what you are trying to convey to your clients regardless of what kind of practice area you have, whether it’s business, and I understand that maybe you’re going to lose some money if your contracts aren’t well done, or if it’s estate planning and your family relationships are at stake, or if it’s something really serious like criminal defense, whatever it is, you can pretty quickly and easily demonstrate that you understand that negative side of it.

And there’s a fine line between walking and being really negative and being understanding and conveying your understanding. And I thought this was a perfect example where she wasn’t just saying, I understand that you could be facing jail with a picture of a jail. That wasn’t at all her message. It was, I understand these things that are at stake that you care about and that you’re coming to me with these worries and concerns. I get it. So I love to use that example because it’s a fine line between trying to convey that message,

Gert Mellack:

But it’s also so important to really be realistic and upfront and say, Hey, in my position as a professional, I understand there are certain implications you might not even be aware of, right? I get this all the time when people tell me, okay, they’re going to do some link billing on their end for their site. And I’m like, whoa, let’s have a conversation. The only thing I pretend on this conversation is making sure that you know what you’re possibly getting into. You might lose your business. I’ve seen sites get penalized by Google, disappear completely. They weren’t even being found for their brand name, which is the easiest and most normal thing that could happen. And then I just give them a hint in an email and say, let’s just have a conversation. Let me just tell you what you’re getting into potentially. So you know that with a simple decision and paying a few hundred dollars, you might be putting your business at risk that you have been billing up over 15 years. And this is where this being upfront, I can totally relate this is it’s going to convert better because it’s going to be a wake up call where they say, Hey, how would they take my house away?

Karin Conroy:

I didn’t even think of that. And even as a marketing person, but as a lawyer, there are these things, and that’s what you’re being hired for. That’s what they’re expecting out of you. They’re expecting an understanding that’s beyond what their basic level understanding of this topic is. They assume you’ve been doing this longer than the five minutes they’ve been thinking about it. And so there’s things that they’re probably not thinking about. And so this is what you’re being hired for, so that’s what you need to demonstrate. So that’s awesome. Okay. Spin selling is the book. We will link to that on the show page and also in the library. So Gert, what is one thing that that really works?

Gert Mellack:

Consistency in maintaining relationships. And I really bringing this up because I have been having so much feedback from just the feedback round I did among clients from years ago. So much great feedback. I reached out to them, Hey, what are you up to right now? And many coming back, let’s have a conversation, et cetera. You need to be consistently, proactively creating and maintaining those relationships. This absolutely works.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, it’s so true. And then that feeds into one of our big points about how you can win at this content battle with AI is those testimonials and those stories and staying in touch with those people. That’s what leads to those awesome reviews, the awesome testimonials, and that is what sells the next person as well. So I feel like this was such a great conversation. I think everyone is talking about AI and all the little tips and tricks and everything, but this is how can we rise above and how can we demonstrate that as humans in these businesses that we’re not going to set AI to the side, but we’re going to provide better content and do a better job than just generic AI content. T thanks so much for being here. Gert Mellack is the founder of SEO Leverage. We will link to everything on the show website, and we are also planning another episode that’s going to be coming up in the next few months, so stay tuned for that. Thanks so much.

Gert Mellack:

Thank you so much, Karen. Pleasure to be here.

Karin Conroy:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Council Cast podcast. Be sure to visit our website at council Cast dot com for the resources mentioned on the episode and to give us your feedback. If you enjoyed this episode, I would appreciate if you could rate and review the podcast on Apple and subscribe to your favorite podcast platform. See you on the next one.

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