Google Local Service Ads: To Brand or Not to Brand?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Hey, Gyi, happy spring. Are you doing the thing that everyone does and planting lots of flowers and vegetables and mowing your lawn?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, we have an elevated planting box, but I want to go full greenhouse this year. My wife’s a little bit reluctant and she’s probably right in that she’s concerned. I won’t tend to it as I should, but you’re a farmer. Do

Conrad Saam:

Greenhouse. I absolutely have a greenhouse and I will tell this, we grow lots of different things like the classic garden stuff, we make our salads every day from stuff that you get out of the garden. There’s a couple problems in doing so, slugs like lettuce and so if you put out a lettuce mix and then you serve the lettuce to your kid, they will never ever forget that. So I would be careful. But the problem with your greenhouse idea here, and I’m sure there are going to be some, I’m sure there’s a Venn diagram overlap of someone who’s a lawyer and listens to us and also loves gardening. You’re a little bit late. The whole point of the greenhouse is to get your plants growing when it’s still cold as opposed to now

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m getting ready for next season. Next season.

Conrad Saam:

Well then you are. You’re thinking ahead, dude. You’re thinking ahead. I like it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What else we got today? Conrad.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, we have a lot of news. So we’re going to go through a lot of news items fairly quickly. We’re going to go back to talk about local service ads, specifically my take on branded and Gyi is going to give you some best practices for running local service ads, including I believe A KPI. And finally, hold onto your hats. SEO People SEO’s Debt. Again, Google confirms links are not important that either ends with an exclamation mark or a question mark. You’ll have to stay tuned to find out.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lockwood, hit it.

Announcer:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, welcome to Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing. We have a heavy pact news segment for you to listen to and I see we’ve gone back to the modern news audio drop instead of the classic wonder what she liked better. Anyway, we’ve got a lot of news to get through starting with, Gyi, Google just had their Q1 earning call. What did they share and what did this tell us about the future of legal marketing?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I want to give a shout out to near, if you are not subscribed to near media’s coverage, I think you’re missing out. There’s a lot of great local SMB stuff pertinent to law firms there, and they covered the earnings call and they called out a big thing that I think was probably thematic, and some of this is of course pr, but Google, CEO confirms that they’re seeing early confirmation of their thesis that SGE is expanding the universe of queries and they’re seeing an increase in search usage among people who use the AI overviews. And so what does this all mean for you? One, you better be trying to track what’s going on with search engine results relevant to your practice in the context of both SG and Gemini. This is one of those, like I’m probably going to botch this saying, but the frog in the boiling pot, they’re saying it’s not going to be this light switch moment. They’ve already tested it across billions of queries. It’s here, it’s just you might not be seeing it right now. So anyway, and of course they’re still making a lot of money from ads and YouTube. So that’s a side note.

Conrad Saam:

So SGE, we talked a little bit a couple episodes ago about how it hasn’t really come in and blown us away. You’re suggesting this is more of a dip your toe in the water Google and slowly get into the deep end?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think so. And it’s not just in organic, it’s their usage of AI in their ad products. I don’t want to be part of the AI hype cycle, but I do think that there’s going to be some surprises for lawyers who have been playing the SEO game, especially in local for a long time and the impact that SG might have on that. So anyway, check out the near media article on this. I think it’s good they talk sources and where some of these places they’re getting SG data.

Conrad Saam:

Speaking of Google Search Engine Journal article came out and we’re going to make this the coverage of our second segment. Google confirms links are not that important. We’ll come back to whether or not we think this is news or otherwise. Later in the episode, Google also finished their core a update. There’s been a lot of conversation about the Google Core algorithm update being fairly seismic that finished on April 19th, more than a week from our date of recording. So note that any turbulence from the core algorithm update should have settled down by now. And speaking of Google, one more last Google news item. I thought this was kind of interesting. Google is testing QR codes on LSAs, basically showcasing a QR code that will then activate a phone call off of your phone. It reminds me of my mom taking pictures of a monitor to send me a picture of what’s going on on her computer. But we will be seeing QR codes in the LSAs. If you see one would love to, I’ve seen them outside of legal. If you see one in legal, take a screen grab not with your phone and send it to us. Hey Gyi, do you remember that old Microsoft thing called Bing and Microsoft ads? You remember that? I do. Still around? Yeah. Yes, still around. Actually yesterday, sorry, we’re recording on May 1st. Yesterday they sunsetted the manual bidding that you could do on your CBC campaigns through Microsoft ads.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What’s that mean?

Conrad Saam:

That means you can’t do that anymore. It is no longer a thing. You cannot manually

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Control it. I cannot manually update bids for my ads on Bing.

Conrad Saam:

So for all of you who were spending a lot of time manually updating your ads on Bings for all one of you who was doing that, it’s gone. And Gyi, you are our regulatory expert here. You’re always making sure that we keep people abreast of things to keep them licensed. FTC rules about reviews and followers. Tell me about this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This is an old news that we discussed that we feel like really isn’t getting enough coverage. And I would love to hear people ask me all the time, what are we supposed to do about this fake review problem? Who’s sorting this out? And I’m like, Google’s not the state. Bars aren’t maybe state ag office, but there’s an FTC rule that’s floating out there. They had a hearing on it on February 13th. If you look at it, if this goes through and I don’t know what the status is and people that are more informed than me can feel free to let us know. We’d love to hear from you. But the rule bans selling or obtaining fake consumer reviews and testimonial bans, review hijacking bans, buying positive, negative reviews. There’s a bunch of other these, I’m not going to call ’em all out selling fake social media indicators.

Conrad Saam:

So that’s kind of a new part of the conversation we’ve had on this pod.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They list fake followers, fake views, and the proposed rule also bars anyone from buying such indicators to misrepresent that. The importance for a commercial purpose.

Conrad Saam:

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What’s

Conrad Saam:

That mean? Can you read that again please?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The proposed rule also would bar anyone from buying such indicators to misrepresent their importance for a commercial purpose.

Conrad Saam:

Well boy oh boy. Are there a bunch of digital marketing agencies in a world of trouble not to mention their clients.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, lawyers. I mean I know lawyers doing this stuff.

Conrad Saam:

Let me ask you this. So you’re a lawyer, you’ve been buying your followers, I can’t imagine you would. What do you do right now? Gyi, can you un-buy those followers? Is there the follower disavowment of you can what?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Can close your account, delete your account,

Conrad Saam:

Close your account.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Delete your account.

Conrad Saam:

I’ve spent so much money getting all these people from Thailand following me, dude.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean this could be a big one, could send some aftershocks, but again, people will say, oh Gyi, you always say this stuff and the regulatory bodies don’t ever do anything and they’re right.

Conrad Saam:

Well, that’s what I was going to say, right? So we’ve been hearing this crap forever. We’ve talked about John Henson who follows this stuff really, really carefully. He is great person to follow if you’re interested in staying really abreast of this stuff. And yet there’s kind of a wait and see very pragmatically, what do you think about this?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think it’s going to be like how the IRS audits, tax returns. They’re going to only audit like 2% of them, but when they get you, they’re going to make a big fuss about it. And so somebody is going to get the hammer dropped on them,

Conrad Saam:

The hammer dropped on them. Are you making any allusions? No.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, no, I’m not. No. Someone is going to get some other large, one of the top. An anvil. An anvil. An

Conrad Saam:

Anvil. Okay, I’m unfamiliar. Is there

Gyi Tsakalakis:

An anvil

Conrad Saam:

With the anvil in a market? I do believe there is the, I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Don’t know, Texas not making, not making that connection at all. I was just using hammer more like the traditional sense. It’s a bit

Conrad Saam:

Of a dog eat dog world. Isn’t it key?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. The big dogs are coming. I don’t know. Anyway, so I think that’ll be interesting to see. And again, people will say, well someone that gets made an example of this, it’s going to hurt and it’s going to hurt. I think it’s going to hurt pretty badly. So anyway, at the risk of staying the obvious, don’t buy fake reviews

Conrad Saam:

Or followers or followers. That’s the part that I don’t think we’ve really, we haven’t talked about that much and I don’t think a lot of people are, and I don’t think a lot of people think there’s a lot of harm in it. And yet that may not be the case.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Now they know it’s not right. They know it’s not right. Well,

Conrad Saam:

They know it’s not right. The do the right thing. Principle that a lot of people struggle with. What would Atticus do? That’s one of our core values. What would Atticus do? He would not be buying followers. Okay, two events coming up. Gyi, I want you to promote from the pod, the Law Firm Growth Summit and local you that you’re coasting with Giant Hawkins in Detroit.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. Law Firm Growth Summit. We are both participating in that. And that is a virtual summit and that is going on. Whoa. May 21st through 23rd, sorry. Law Firm Growth Summit automatically plays some very intense music when you land on their site, which by the way, from a web design standpoint is not a good user experience, is garbage. Not a great user experience. The second event that I’m super proud to be participating in and trying to get Conrad to come too as well. I’m sending

Conrad Saam:

One of my people,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Which is great, we’re grateful for that is Local U where we’ll be talking. Lynx and SGE, Greg Gifford’s going to be there. Joy Hawkins is going to be there. We’re going to have fun. The Tigers are in town, so hopefully we’ll catch a ball game. Come to local U, learn local SEO.

Conrad Saam:

So very bluntly, there’s a lot of conferences you can go to.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There are

Conrad Saam:

Getting a chance. Don’t go to those to listen. Don’t go to those Getting a chance to listen to Joy gh. It’s a good one. Pragmatic, relevant.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Local Joy’s doing a talk on whether or not links impact the local PAC and studies anecdotal studies, well she won’t call them anecdotal, but data-driven studies on how you measure the impact of links in local. So I’m looking forward to that one.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, we’re going to move on when we get back. We’re going to talk about local service ads in a moment. Alright, Gyi, this next segment we keep bringing up maybe beating the dead horse, but I personally can’t believe that it’s not getting more coverage and that is the auto enrolling of all of the clients of local service ads into their branded queries. Gyi, can you tell the audience really quickly what this is and why we are annoyed about it?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, you just did, and we’ve also did talk about this on a prior episode, but the short version is, is that you’re probably buying leads for searches on your name if you’ve got local service ads brands enabled. And especially true if you get a lot of brand queries, if you get a disproportionate number of brand LSA leads to non-brand, that’s a pricey fee to be paying for people who are looking for you anyway.

Conrad Saam:

And my big problem with these was the opacity in terms of which of those phone calls are you paying for that are branded queries and which are non-branded queries in pay-per-click. You can separate those two things out and how much are you paying for those things? And when we talked about this initially when we announced this initially Gyi’s response was that he had opted his clients out of this and my response was, we don’t know and we’re going to try and wait and see. And so we’ve had, I dunno, six weeks of experience with this six weeks of data to try and click. We’ve got a couple six

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Weeks of winning,

Conrad Saam:

Six weeks of burning your kids’ college fund in Mountain View as it turns out. So I want to give you a couple of anecdotes. It’s really hard to analyze this because the access to data is very, very limited. And so we’ve looked at this in a couple of ways. We looked at was there a change in the refund rate if you had this on or when you turned it off, did it fundamentally change your refund rate? And theory behind that is if you are getting a brand query, you can’t really suggest that that was not a relevant search. So you can dispute that, but if they’re looking for Smith and Jones and you’re Smith and Jones, it’s not really disputable. And so did the refund rate fundamentally, I don’t

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Know about that. You can dispute based on practice area,

Conrad Saam:

But if someone’s calling Smith and Jones and you do family law, they’re probably

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. But in the LSA platform, if your practice is not set to those other practice areas, you can dispute those.

Conrad Saam:

Sure. If

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I call Conrad and I’m like, Hey, Conrad due to divorce law, and you’re like, no, I do PI Law, you can dispute that.

Conrad Saam:

Sure, a hundred percent. But if you call and say, I’d like to talk to Mr. Smith because I did a query for Smith and Jones, that’s going to be very difficult to dispute.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You got to get him to a point where it’s like we are not, it’s out of category

Conrad Saam:

A hundred percent. But my point being, there’s a fundamental shift in the data pattern when you start doing branded queries and people are calling you and all of a sudden the overall behavior of people running branded queries, you’re not going to be able to dispute that at a similar rate at the same rate as you were the other calls.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I hear you. I’m a little bit suspicious, but go ahead. What’d you find? Well, what

Conrad Saam:

We did find is that there was, and again this is anecdotes, not data, so there’s no statistical significance in this, but we did find that in cases where there was a very strong brand awareness, so a firm of ours that had a very strong offline presence, lots of TV advertising, lots of billboard advertising, et cetera, their dispute rate actually did change dramatically

Gyi Tsakalakis:

When you opted them out of brand when

Conrad Saam:

You made the change. The whole point is like, is there a difference Without the data, the only thing that you can actually change and look at differently is opt in or opt out and then compare those two date ranges because there’s nothing else to look at, which is so unbelievably frustrating.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Here’s another idea, and again, this isn’t much science here, but you can go look at, is this firm also running traditional ads?

Conrad Saam:

What in comparison to running PPC?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, so you compare LSA data to paid search data to search console data and segment each of those by brand non-brand. And you’ll see a trend between look, the percentages, you’ll find a window of that percentage is probably carrying to LSAs too if assuming you’ve got enough impression share, right? So

Conrad Saam:

What you’re doing is extrapolating your pay-per-click branded versus non-branded queries into

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The biggest problem is, is that if you don’t have high impression share, it’s probably skewing disproportionately on brand, right?

Conrad Saam:

Yes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So anyway,

Conrad Saam:

This is the problem. You don’t know, it really comes out to you. And I can sit here and kind of theorize as to what the makeup is. What I mean, you could be super cynical and say it’s only showing up for branded queries and they’re just overcharging for that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Now, here’s a question for you. Did your anecdotes show anything about impact on impression share after you turned the brand off?

Conrad Saam:

Well, so it doesn’t show the impression share. You don’t really have a feel for impression share within the LSAs, but what you can look at is the overall spend when you turn it on or off. So what you’re trying to determine is how much of my spend is going towards branded versus non-branded? We’ll turn it off. Does this spend dramatically change? What did that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Show? What’d you see on

Conrad Saam:

That when we ran that? And again, and so these anecdotes are going to be influenced by the marketing strategy of the individual firms, but across our clients, across the ones that we looked at, we saw a change of between 37 and 55% in the overall spend when you turned in cost, right? So that’s not an insignificant amount, which means that you are probably spending a lot of your money on these branded queries. I did talk to another firm, big spender, both offline and online, big spender on LSAs. They ran their own numbers and their perspective was they were paying about 60 to 70% per call, and this is a PI firm of what they would pay for a head term right car accident lawyer San Francisco. They were paying 60 to 70% of that for their brand queries, which turned out to be like 150 to $200 per query. So to me, my read is if these things are true, this is a really expensive way to spend money on your brand. It might

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Be, it might be. This is my view of it. Those are really good insights and I think that’s a good way to look at it. I would take LSA as a channel in and of itself, and even using what you think brand is contributing to the spend, see whether or not it’s profitable for you. Because the question

Conrad Saam:

Is that you’re talking the big average,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Is it worth paying the premium on your brand in order to capture the market share that’s using LSAs for non-brand?

Conrad Saam:

I hear some cynicism coming.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

My hunch is that if you’re a big player, you got to have LSAs on. You’re incrementally cutting yourself out of a significant part of the market by having LSAs off. And let me take it one step further. My other hun is, is that having brand on is having a positive impact on your non-brand visibility

Conrad Saam:

In LSAs?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. So I told you I felt a cynic coming. Can you say that again? Which rationalizes your big average? Go ahead, say it again. I This

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Is really important. So my hunch, and this is totally anecdotal, but that opting out of brand on LSAs is having a negative impact on your search impression share for non-brand. You’re never going to be able to tell.

Conrad Saam:

Well, you could try and validate that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The best you’re going to do. You already talked about you can measure the turning the on and the turning the off. That’s

Conrad Saam:

Right. That’s the best you can do.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But you don’t know. So you’re like, okay, before we’ve got this is with brand on, this is with brand off, but you’re not controlling for

Conrad Saam:

All the other things,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? And your share of impressions, they’re not segmenting impression share by brand, non-brand, right?

Conrad Saam:

They’re not segmenting by anything.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But again, to me, this is very simple. How does Google make money? Google makes more money when your brand is on. All of Google’s machines are designed to make Google more money. Why would it be any different in LSAs? So if you are a firm, if you’re calculating booked lead per impression as a comparison to conversion rate on ads, right? Pixel fires on ads, why would you think that Google wouldn’t show your ads more often? Even for non-brand, they’re getting paid on leads, lead leads per impression. Leads per impression is that’s their magic number.

Conrad Saam:

You’re arguing on the big average, right? And I think my problem, and I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you, my philosophical problem with this is finding waste in pay per click is the way to make pay-per-click work. Well, finding those little things. What are the a hundred things that we can cut out of our spend so that we are really, really amazingly targeted and we’re only spending on the things that are going to actually drive our business? What are those things? And there’s a panoply of things that you can do. Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So what do I think you should do? Yeah, yeah. I think short term, make your money while the making money is good. If your LSAs all in are net profitable for you, this isn’t the only place you’re spending money. This isn’t your sole ad budget and you look at it and you’re like, and for sure if you don’t have a lot of brand, if you’re not at a lot of brand traffic, I would just opt into it. I’d be like, I’m paying a premium on some brand queries. I’m going to measure whether this is actually generating a return that’s in the window that I need to make for them to be profitable. For me, I’d have messages on, I’d have messages auto answered by a virtual receptionist 24 hours a day within seconds. Same thing for calls. And I would be booking those appointments, book everything in the platform, book everything in platform, who cares? Doesn’t matter. Maximize Google’s good fortune and make sure that it’s profitable for you while your cost per acquisition is still within your target.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, so the caveat that you just put on this, it’s a big caveat, is make sure that it’s profitable for you. Right? Okay. Now you’ll remember dear listener, the extent to which I hate the term ROI and what GI has just specifically suggested that you do is not minimize your ROI, but cut the ROI down because you’re happy enough with the cost per acquisition to take on the extra cost of what I would consider wasted money on branded LSA queries, right? Yep. The thing that I hate about that is I hate seeing the waste in the system. And if you are correct, well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The other thing is at some point the economics aren’t going to work. And you’re right, it’s an auction basis. It’s the same problem we have in PPC. That’s true.

Conrad Saam:

You need to know the economics that does this work for you. And to me, if those economics start to not work for you, that begs the either turn it off or at the very least cut the fat, which is the brand new queries. If you are on the border of LSAs being too expensive, I would drop the brand queries because either you are losing unprofitable business or you’re going to improve the ROI on that channel. I just said ROI and I meant it. You’re going to improve the ROI on that channel by cutting some of the spend fat

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And do what Conrad recommends, which is test this stuff for yourself, test it on your own data, turn it off, see what happens,

Conrad Saam:

Turn it on, turn it off,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And check that impression. Share number over time.

Conrad Saam:

Enough about LSAs After the break, we’re going to come back and dissect the search engine journal article, which is getting a lot of play by the way. Google confirms links are not that important. That is the headline coming to you on the other side of the ad.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hey dear listeners, I know I’m pretty, I don’t know, but I’m pretty confident there are more than 39 of you listening to Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing. And yet only 39 of you have left us a review on Apple podcasts.

Conrad Saam:

Are you shaming the audience?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Stop lurking. So like hate or indifferent, I love those indifferent reviews. Please do go drop a review on Apple Podcasts for Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing or Spotify. You can also leave a review on Spotify. Alright, Conrad, have you heard the breaking news? Google confirms links are not that important. According to Search Engine Journal,

Conrad Saam:

I was emailed a bunch of times with this, they’re like, oh, we’re all done now.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I had the good fortune of recording a webinar with our mutual friend, joy Hawkins, on the day that this article dropped and just coincidentally, I mean it was the day after in fairness, but just coincidentally,

Conrad Saam:

And you didn’t cancel your talk because this came out.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No joy. She was like, we couldn’t have time this any better. Coincidentally, we had a webinar link building and I’m going to give a shout to Seth Price, SEO insider podcast. We just talked about links on the SEO Insider podcast.

Conrad Saam:

You mean the death of links, right? Gyi, the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Death of links. And today we are going to continue piling on the death of Lynx Conrad. Has Google confirmed that links are not that important?

Conrad Saam:

So if you were to take a little time to read beyond the headlines, you’ll

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Realize no one does that.

Conrad Saam:

Clearly. No one does that. Otherwise no one would be talking about this shit. Damnit. I was trying to get PG all the way,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Another R rating.

Conrad Saam:

I went 39 minutes

Gyi Tsakalakis:

E ratings pretty

Conrad Saam:

Good. So if you read the article and look at the sources, I’m going to read what was used to confirm that links are not that important. This was heard by Patrick Stocks from Gary Isles. Gary is a Google guy. For those of you don’t know, Gary said, we need very few links to rank pages. Pages over the years we’ve made links less important. That’s it. That’s what this entire thing is based on. That translated into a headline that says Google confirms links are not that important.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And a subheading that says why Google doesn’t need links,

Conrad Saam:

Can you,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Man?

Conrad Saam:

So

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m going to give everybody here a very judicious reading and say that maybe links matter less in the overall signaling pie than they have in the past because Google has more signals than they’ve had in the past. So when links were one of the few signals, they had links made up a big part of the linking pie. However, not all slices of pie are created equally. So even though it might be less of the pie, it’s still in my experience, a pretty big piece of the pie. What about you? You rank in sites without links content only,

Conrad Saam:

Content only baby, just throw some H ones in there, get some chat. GPT generated content. And that’s SEO.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, the other thing that, this is another observation that I always think is worth talking about. You’ve got all of these updates going on and all the SEO communities, angry as they always are when there’s updates. And then you see some of the actual results, not the people talking about it, not the snapshots of unmarked accesses from search console data and all these other third party tools that track rankings. But when you actually go and just head enter on Google and you see sites like Forbes ranking for top personal injury lawyers and you’re like, wait a minute, great content, let’s click in and see what Forbes has got going on for great content for best personal injury lawyer. And the answer is they don’t. And by the way, you can tell me, I have no idea what I’m talking about. Tell me about how great the directory content is. Talk to me about great directory content because that stuff ranks

Conrad Saam:

It, ranks it has. And I’ve been saying for and

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Why is it ranking? Is it ranking because of content

Conrad Saam:

New? I’ve been saying for

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Years the ranking

Conrad Saam:

Google is going to deprecate directory listings because the content is so bad. It is at best a copy and pasted resume. They’re awful. You guys know this. I didn’t need to explain this to you. And yet, Gyi’s, right? They’re ranking. The other thing that I’ve seen, Gyi, to prove the death of Lynx is you’ll get someone who will do an analysis of result and they will then do like an ah refs domain rank review of each of those results. And they’ll talk about how the top ranking one is not the highest domain rank. Gyi, can you explain to our dear listener why they should not do that nor listen to people who do that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Because judiciously, they’re totally missing the point. More likely they have some kind of incentive to tell you that information. But again, we talked about this on Joyce podcast. I talked about it with Seth. Not all links are created equally. It’s not get the most links game. It’s a, in my experience, what I tell people get a highly relevant either topically or geographically relevant link. I don’t care what the third party tools report on the quality of the domain. If that local link is from a real business and it’s topically related to your practice, and obviously if it’s even better, if it’s both geographically and topically relevant to your practice, those types of links tend to impact your visibility. And you don’t have to have a sheer number of them. It’s not about just raw numbers, but those work, and again, that’s kind of my view of it.

But I will tell you, even if you don’t take that specific, you’re like rolling your eyes. There are people that are growing big link profiles that are ranking on sites that are less than relevant. And so again, my point is, yeah, look, many of those links might not be doing anything, but some of them are moving the dial a lot. And we also have the example of go take any local pack in any major practice area in any major city, look at the top local share of voice leaders and run backlink analysis on them. You’ll see with some exceptions, because of some people that have really done a great job of reviews and keywords in the business name, most of them will have a very competitive number of linking root domains.

Conrad Saam:

So where I thought you were going to go with this, and when you said analysis and then you said linking root domains, you get more specific on this, those tools are so bad.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh yeah, listen, not should we even waste our time talking about the tool metrics. I mean, no, we have to

Conrad Saam:

Waste our time because people use this to make what they believe is a well-informed assessment. Those

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The zero hundred, do you beat up the tool metrics?

Conrad Saam:

I do, because I keep hearing them.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay. And

Conrad Saam:

I don’t think the audience knows this. I really genuinely don’t.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, so let’s just say it.

Conrad Saam:

The tools, they’re always zero to 100 schools, domain ranked, domain authority, whatever you want to talk about it. And people sell links based on the domain rank that they’ve been able to develop. That is not a Google metric. It is the best approximation that someone has been able to make about the quality of a link. And it’s a really, really ill-informed poor score, which very specifically does not take into account the location. That is one element that is not taken into account at all. And so when Gyi is talking about Google ranking, the local pacs, the driver are those localized links, you don’t get the location of those links tied up into the domain rank or domain authority. Those zero to 100 numbers, it is a terrible, terrible metric. So when you hear people definitively talking about their assessment of things based on what is a really, really bad and inaccurate metric, I’m not saying we don’t use it, you just need to understand the context. I wouldn’t be betting my SEO future on anything that is based around any of those third party tools. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be mean to them, but I just feel like people tend to look at this as, oh, we want to go from a 37 to a 38. We’re winning SEO now. Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, yeah. And again, the issue I even the tools are doing with the tools are doing, and most of the major tools are pretty transparent about the limitations of the metrics. They tell you how they’re calculating

Conrad Saam:

If you read it, but

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s not my problem. I’m sorry, you got to be listen a little bit more closely anyway. But again, none of them are designed, the tools are designed on very rudimentary links in, links out old school kind of page rank analysis, right

Conrad Saam:

Page rank.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But everybody knows that the links are not equal. They’re not the same. And so when you get a site that’s got millions of linking route domains and high DA and DR and all this stuff that has nothing to do with, it’s going to help you rank in the local package. Look at Forbes. Forbes is a great example. Forbes, they got all sorts of links, right? It’s forbes.com, they got all sorts of links and they do rank for everything, personal injury, a lot of things, how

Conrad Saam:

To cut

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Your, you’re never going to be Forbes, first of all. Secondly though, guess what? Forbes doesn’t rank until they figure out a scheme to put Google business profiles. They don’t rank in the local pack. And so that’s my point though. You’re not competing with Forbes in all of those local contexts. And so thinking that building a link profile that has a bunch of sites like Forbes, and by the way, the ones that are the easiest to devalue are the ones that everybody can get from the emails on high domain authority. Those aren’t the links that if you’re Google and you know that that’s going on, aren’t you going to try everything you can with your fancy math to make those links not count?

Conrad Saam:

Yes, you are.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Anyway,

Conrad Saam:

Summarize,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Links matter. Links matter, my summary.

Conrad Saam:

But to take that, the contrapositive, what you just said is the harder the link is to get, probably the more valuable it is because everyone else doesn’t have it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s how I view all this stuff. It’s like, do what other people can’t do. That’s why. Wouldn’t wouldn’t that be the thing, right?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. And that’s how you stand out in a competitive, crowded, underhanded, dirty, buy my followers, buy my links, buy my reviews, market like

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Legal. And again, does a lot of that stuff still work? Sure. Until it doesn’t. Well, unfortunately, dear listener, we must wrap this link conversation up because we’re out of time. Thank you so much for listening. We do appreciate it. If you just landed here, hit that subscribe button and join us for office Hours. Conrad is going to read user submitted fake reviews, and we’re going to expose nasty backlinks during our office hours, which will be on what day, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

It is on the 17th, May 17th. So if you can’t go more than two weeks without listening to me, and Gyi, you can catch us live on the 17th. LinkedIn and YouTube are your destinations for that. I will tell you the last time we got together and talked about this, Gyi got pretty animated and he was naming names, which I have failed to get to do on the pod, but it was a good one. So join us, put

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Our expertise to work for your firm. There’s our ad

Conrad Saam:

By torching your competitors in real time. If you can’t think of something to suggest, you can send something to Gyi that’s like, Hey, Gyi, does it look like these reviews are fake? What do you think?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s the never ending wrap up. The never ending wrap up. Do you know what some movie that song’s from?

Conrad Saam:

I have no idea. I love when you sing to me though.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, left letter listeners. Hashtag it. Alright, we’re out of here.

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