Does My Website Suck? | Law Firm Website Teardown

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad football is back. How are you feeling about the season?

Conrad Saam:

Well, as I’ve said before, I am really hopeful that my Michigan National Championship gear is extremely well-made because I believe it might have to last quite a while in order for it to stick around.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are you worried about it being vacated?

Conrad Saam:

No. No. I’m enjoying watching the Ohio State fans and Donald Trump act exactly the same right now.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, you know how I feel about Michigan football. I’m also excited for the Lions. It’s kind of bittersweet because I’m going to miss Sunday night football in Detroit. But that’s because I’m going to be recording a live episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing with you on location in Salt Lake City.

Conrad Saam:

More and more on location stuff coming to you from Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing. You think you and I have a good time when we’re 3000 miles apart? Wait till we are one beer away from each other.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’re going to talk about ROI, but not today. What else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

So I want to make a shout out because this is going to be a beautiful segue into a discussion about the news. We have a lot of news to talk about in this episode because last episode, mid recording, my internet completely disappeared. And none of you know that because our amazing Adam and Allie did post-production. And so the episode went out on time despite the fact that I disappeared. So we have a lot of news to cover, including some more news from the FTC, fake reviews, AI o reviews, and much, much more. And then you and I are going to talk about something that we do on the regular every single week. We are going to go into a law firm website and determine just how terrible or great it is. This is our segment called, does My Website Suck?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hit It Money.

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:

And welcome to the news Lunch Hour Legal Marketing News. Let’s get caught up on the last four weeks.

All right. Welcome to the launch our legal marketing news. We are really excited to talk about this, although I have questions as to whether or not there’s going to be any enforcement. FTC is really coming down heavy on fake reviews, at least from a regulatory perspective. We have an article from John Henson called The End of Fake Reviews. Those long-term listeners know that John is our go-to person for all things digital marketing, regulatory, how to keep your business alive. So that is a really, really good step in the right direction. I hope there’s some enforcement behind that. Gyi, there’s news about Google AI overviews being impacted. What’s going on with the Google AI overviews?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So there’s an August core update by Google, and they’ve noticed that there’ve been some changes in the AI overview, aios, both visibility and also what’s being displayed. I’ve been diving deep on this prepping for my local U talk where I may talk in all AI overviews and we’ll put some links in the show notes here. It’s still AI overviews are not showing for a large percentage of queries. However, I’m in the camp that I think that’s going to change. I still think Google’s a little slow playing because of ads, but they got to stay competitive. And you look at apps like Perplexity, you look at what’s going on with chat GPT and search GPT, which we’ll talk a little bit about. And in order for Google to keep up, they’re going to have to figure out this AI overview stuff.

Conrad Saam:

You mentioned that you were speaking at Local U. My understanding is that you’ve got beef with some of the things that Joanne Hawkins, the Queen, the goddess, the originator, the og actually, she’s not the OG of local, but she is one of the absolute best, but you’re taking her on with regards to localized links and their performance in local, true or false.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, that’s a very pointed way. We’ll put a link to the show notes. Joy published on Moz and also had webinar, and I anticipate she’s going to be releasing some of this research at Local U. So folks are going to local will be privy to this. But the implication is is that links seem to be moving the dial a lot for traditional localized organic results, but not as much in map packs. Now the example that she used yet at a link, and she’s measured the impact, which again, I’m all for this kind of research and studies. It doesn’t align with my experience generally, but I will say this, I have to admit, we’ve seen more local PAC results where sites with less linking route domains are starting to show up in the local pac. So I do have to acknowledge that, but I think we have to be careful with the messaging here because again, competitive environment, you go to downtown Chicago, it’s very rare that you’re going to see a site competing in local PAC without a substantial number of linking route domains in my experience. But anyway, it’s exciting stuff and I look forward to showing some counter examples.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, there’s also a bunch of news out about researching Google’s AI generated answers and researching the sources. We’ve been doing this kind of ad hoc, but there’s more tools coming out to actually do that in a deeper way. You and I were talking about one of those beforehand. What do you want to share with that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, it looks like there’s about, from my, and I’d be curious if listeners are on this, if they’re tracking aios independently, my hunches that most law firms are not. But there are three tools that I’ve come across. Search analytics, which we love for universal results. They’re starting to, because just recently is like two weeks ago, started showing these aios for logged out users. That’s probably a news item we should have mentioned. So it used to be that they were just showing for logged in. Yeah, we were showing ’em just for logged in users. Now they’re showing for logged out users. That also gives the tools the ability to now to track these stats doing it, SE ranking is doing it and zip tie are doing it. Those are the three that to my knowledge se ranking, which will put a link to the show notes.

They did a big study on the AI generated answers and they did a recent update on this, but still not showing for a ton of aquas. But I got to tell you, again, preparing for this deck in legal, the how to searches in legal who are, there’s a couple of different ways you can trigger more aios and you’re starting to see ’em show up more, especially for these how to results. And so again, lawyers that are trying to forward look and future proof your visibility and search, you got to be on this stuff because it is going to dramatically impact what Google’s showing for these types of queries.

Conrad Saam:

Alright. And finally, we would be remiss in not mentioning Cleo’s record setting raise Clio raise $900 million. That’s at a 3 billion with a B valuation that’s based on a $220 million annual recurring revenue, which is really, really impressive and unprecedented in the legal industry. When we originally talked about this two weeks ago or four weeks ago now, the question was kind of who cares? It’s just a funding conversation. However, one of the things that Key and I have talked about quite a lot is a lot of these technology games and a lot of these technology plays aren’t really financially sound and they are therefore somewhat risky. And I think as you are looking at the technology that you purchase and invest your time in, you kind of want to make sure that that technology is going to be around. We’ve seen, and I’ve experienced as an investor, I’ve experienced two failures this year of companies that I’ve invested in the legal tech world. So I do think this bodes well for those people who are tied into the Clio ecosystem, the stability of all of that cash and the innovation that can come out of that from a company that has proven to be very innovative, pretty solid. What do you think? I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Think it’s great that we question the why on why do we care about this stuff. I think your point’s good about being with partners that have funding. I think the other thing though, especially for lawyers that are forward thinking on this, it’s not just whether or not your technology, it’s like is your technology that you’re using competing with Clio in a way that Clio is going to be building this? Because even if your technology is funded today, if they’re competing with a Clio and the tech you’re using now can’t compete, that’s where you run into the issue. So we think it’s important for people to be informed about what’s going on in the legal tech eco space from the standpoint of you’re a market participant in choosing software, who has the funding and what they’re building matters, right? It’s like I think of the Scott Galloway with don’t compete with the four.

If you are purchasing technology, that’s a direct competitor with a Clio, that should be part of your calculus in terms of what the longevity or future of that particular tech is. And again, I say that and legal tech founders are going to be like, ah, eye roll if someone’s got to compete with them. And I think there’s truth to that. There’s value in being with the scrappy startup, you’re going to get probably better pricing in a lot of features and stuff. But anyway, we do think that it’s a good check on us to be like, how is this actionable for law firms understanding the legal tech ecosystem? Understanding the financial ecosystem, understanding the integration ecosystem I think matters a lot. And so funding does matter. You just have to face it. It’s just how it is. And now let’s take a break.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, Gyi, I’ve got a sad story for you and I’m wondering if this has happened to you before. We recently lost a client, and this

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Has happened to us too.

Conrad Saam:

I didn’t mean this week, but it was one of those things where you’re like, this should not have happened. So what I want to do is we’re now talking to other firms in the Colorado market. I want us to share with our audience what you and I go through when we look at a law firm website as to whether or not there’s room for major improvement or if they’ve got all their stuff dialed in. And for me, Gyi, affirm that’s got all of its stuff dialed in. I probably know the agency that’s doing the work and it’s not necessarily a client that I want to pick up. I tend to find that I like to find those guys who are not doing a great job so we can come in and make some major changes. Similar perspective on your part.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I mean, I’m actually curious to hear more about your story of how you lost this client.

Conrad Saam:

Oh, you’re poking the bear.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well,

Conrad Saam:

Listen, let’s have this. You share what

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You can share. Share what you can

Conrad Saam:

Share. Let’s have this as a tangent. And I will give you one of the things that really pisses me off, and it’s really hard for this to not come across as sour grapes, which is why I didn’t want to bring it up, but you poke the bear. So I don’t know if this has happened on your part, but there are a lot of people out there right now as coaches, as business consultants that are working with law firms.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’ll have to put a link to our coaching episodes. We’ve talked about coaches,

Conrad Saam:

We did talk about this, which is why we shouldn’t go too deep on this, but I think one of the things that you guys need to recognize and realize and not be so naive about a lot of these business coaches, a don’t know all that much about digital marketing and we’ve run that across that a lot. But B, and I can’t validate this, but I’m certain that this happened because I know who we lost this client to. They’re making kickbacks. Gyi, you and I get offered this all the time. So we’ve got these referral relationships, let’s send money back and forth. Gyi and I, the people that I send referrals to, and this is true with Gyi, and there’s a couple of other people, we send him stuff, he sends me stuff and Gyi, and I swap beer and Michigan stories and that’s kind of it. And I like to work that way because if you don’t, you end up with a incentive to send business to someone who doesn’t deserve it. And that I think Go ahead.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I don’t even have the issue as much with you want to make a commission, fine. My issue is, and this happens to us too, the third party intermediary person that’s building this coaching relationship, they’ve got this kickback. They don’t disclose that they’re making money off of it. That

Conrad Saam:

Thing keep going to the ethical disclosure side of things, right? Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think you got to be like, Hey, look, I don’t care how you say it, this is our trusted partner. We do receive a commission. I mean, you’re supposed to be publicizing when you make money off this stuff under a variety of FTC rules. I think it’s only fair that you’re telling people that you’re making money. And the bigger issue, and lawyers know this even because lawyers do referrals too. When you make these referrals and there’s a referral fee, you should be putting in your fee agreement that there’s a referral going on, referral relationship, that’s the right thing to do. But the bigger issue is, is that in the lawyer lawyer context, you’re only making referrals hopefully too. Lawyers that you feel like are going to do a good job. And I will tell you that in our industry, that is not always the case.

There are a lot of situations where the coaches or consultants, they’ve got the referral thing, but they don’t even know heads or tails about whether to vet the partner at all. And so again, and this is why we’re here in Colorado, because this happened to Conrad, and again, we’re going to protect the identities of everybody involved here. We’re going to pick somebody that’s nothing to do with our story. So who’s listening to this is like, Ooh, this is going to be some negative selling, but we think people should be aware of it. And that’s what brought us to looking at the Denver PI market.

Conrad Saam:

And that’s why I have the sour grape ski. This was a client for whom we were actually talking about doing a case study about how great things were going, and then all of a sudden it disappeared, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And then again, here’s the other side of the coin is, and I know you believe this too, is you just want them to make an informed decision, right? At the end of the day, I look at it like this, if one of our clients leaves because of this, because some coach convinced them that we didn’t do a good enough job articulating the value of what we’re doing because it was easy for them to make the switch. Now again, that’s an uphill battle when you’re going against somebody who’s got this incentive and is doing a hard sell and everything, and it is what it is, but we just want people to be informed. And so that’s why we’re going to walk through, at least in this case, we’ve talked about doing unquote tear downs before. But again, this is just an arbitrary firm that we’ve chosen from the Denver market. This isn’t anybody thing to do with the story that we’re telling, but this hence why we’re in Denver.

Conrad Saam:

We did, however, choose this carefully because we wanted to be able to share some things that we would do differently. So the firm that we’re going to look at is Baku, Schenker, personal injury lawyers. One of the first things, I don’t know if you do this, Gyi, but one of the very first things I do when I’m looking at a new website, scroll down to the bottom right of the homepage and see who’s doing their work. I find that their frequently, I don’t think I’ve ever gone wrong when I’m like, oh, these guys are working with X, Y, or Z, so they’re probably well taken care of, or these guys are working with A, B and C and they have a major problem, right? So let me use an obvious example. If I walk in and I find a scorpion site, I already know what the pain points are for that law firm. They might not even know what those are, but we know. And the same is true for people who work on WordPress sites. Do you do this to your very, very first thing? Look at who’s doing the work.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I do, and I’ll say this though, for people that are vetting their agencies this way, it’s a horrible way to vet because while Conrad’s right, we do it as well, we do tend to know the pain points, especially for some of the bigger players in the industry. The issue that you all are missing out on is you don’t know when they started with this business. You don’t know what engagement that they’ve actually are paying for. And so this is the classic paradigm is you do a search in your local market, you see who’s ranking, you scroll down to the bottom and you’re like, well, they’re doing it from my competitor. They’re going to be able to do it for me. And that is an absolutely horrible way to go about vetting your agency in my humble opinion.

Conrad Saam:

Also, because your firm and your competitors’ firm live in very different realities from an asset and liabilities perspective.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And if they’re working with your competition, we can go back about the exclusivity thing. You explain to me how they’re going to help you rank in the local PAC for your head terms as well as the people down the street.

Conrad Saam:

So I love consult webs. That is one of my digs on, I think they work with two or maybe three firms in a given market. That’s how they’ve kind of defined their exclusivity. Gyi, and I believe, I’m not speaking out of church for you, but we kind of believe in a one person to the prom kind of perspective, but consult webs does a good job. So we moved

Gyi Tsakalakis:

On. Yeah, look, at the end of the day, at the the day, if you’re getting the result, you’re hitting the objective and you’re informed about it. I think that’s the other big thing. Are you informed that they’re working with the, I mean obviously if you did the shop, you know that they’re working with this firm down the street because you picked them that way, so you can’t be upset about that.

Conrad Saam:

No, no, no. Okay. Back as Schenker, if you are listening in your car, you’re not going to be able to enjoy watching. Gyi. And I poke around the site and use some of the tools that we use. So it might be a good reason to, but

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’re going to describe it so you can do it on your own. So when you say you can do a search for back at Shanker, but the URL we’re [email protected] play along at home,

Conrad Saam:

But this is a good reason to actually watch us on YouTube there. I got in a plug for our YouTube channel back at Shanker. Let’s get to it right off the bat, you said it’s Colorado law.net. So interestingly, very interestingly back at Shanker from my understanding, is a fairly big brand advertiser, offline advertiser in the Denver market. And yet they’re using a domain, also a net domain, which I don’t super love. And they also, interestingly, as I look at the site, they’ve got a 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 2 for Denver and Fort Collins and Colorado Springs. They’ve got the eights. So they’re clearly doing some offline branding in three different markets and it’s not necessarily represented with their URL. So there may be some interesting branding issues there. I’ll always roll down to the bottom, as I mentioned, to see who is actually doing their work. This example, I like this because we don’t know, we have no idea who is doing the work for this.

So we’re not flaming a specific competitor on this, but that is certainly something that I look at. I also, I’m just looking at the site. Gyi, overall kind of busy, really heavy on the call to actions we’ve got, at least on the homepage. There are one, two, three, four, five call to actions before you even start scrolling. And it’s okay, the design’s okay, it certainly doesn’t blow me away. I don’t think they’re losing business because of poor design, but they’re certainly not incremental business because of amazing conversions. And that is a completely subjective perspective. Would you agree on that? Gyi, is that something you look at as well?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t care about prettiness honestly. I’m like, do I think this is going to convert or not? And I think that generally speaking, they’re hitting a lot of the high notes on conversion. It’s not one of these sites where you come in and it’s obvious that they went in a cab to nowhere to try to win a webby or something. This is a site designed for conversion. I’m looking at the, and again, I encourage folks to do this on their own. I’m looking at it on my iPhone, it’s got the call us and get a free consultation as the primary call to action. But I’ll tell you a big mistake, and a lot of you are doing this, they’ve got what I’m calling the intaker problem. They’ve got the interstitial that pops up on mobile, blacks out the entire screen. And that’s a bad experience. And in fact, Google has talked about how they’re not trying to reward that experience on mobile as well. If you’re using one of these widgets, it’s great, but make it on demand. The user has to click on something to make it come up, not popping up out of nowhere and blocking out the entire screen,

Conrad Saam:

Blocking out the entire screen includes. And this is why this is so relevant and obvious if you take a moment to think about it, that includes blocking out the phone number while you are holding a phone wanting to talk to this firm. That’s right. That is absolutely a problem. Alright, the next thing, Gyi, I always run is just a site colon search. I love knowing what’s out there.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What is a site colon search? Conrad. So

Conrad Saam:

If you go to google.com, it’s a tool G-O-O-G-L-E. And are we getting funny here? The site colon search is you do SITE colon, and then you put in the URL, and it is not the Dow Dov H DP s, none of that stuff. It is just site Colorado law.net that is going to show you all of the pages that Google has indexed and you can actually, well, not all of ’em. Well, it’s going to show, it’s going

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To give you a good benchmark of how many pages are indexed.

Conrad Saam:

Not only how many pages are indexed, but also you can walk through and look at the pages. And so what I like to do is, Gyi mentioned not all of them. If you had tools right here, you can see actually the number of pages that a site has indexed or that Google is showing up in this site, colon search, in this case it’s 827. And that brings up a question for me right off of the bat. Gyi, 827 pages isn’t a massive site, but it is by no means a small site. And so I start to wonder what type of content they have. And I suspect when you’re knocking on the door of a thousand or over a thousand, it’s often that you have a bunch of pages that are completely useless.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You know what I like to do right after this kind of search?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Drop the minus in URL blog and see how many pages that are not blog posts.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, funny. So he did this, I run this a little bit differently. If you actually find out what their URL structure, this is exactly what to do. So if you want to know how many pages are within a folder in this example blog, you can run the site colon. So it was 827 pages before 591 pages of those 827 are in their blog, which suggests to me that there is a bunch of useless content in their blog. And what I did is I kind of rolled through this and found a bunch of useless content in their blog. So I mean, think about this, 78, I’m pulling numbers out of the air right now. 5 91 divided by 8 27 is roughly three quarters of the content is on a blog. This suggests to me that the vendor that is servicing this account is probably delivering a set number of blogs on the regular, and that is part of their deliverables.

And I’ll also suspect, and we can’t look at this because we don’t have access to their ga, that most of those blogs are not generating any traffic. And if they are generating traffic, they’re not generating business. One of the things, the reason I love this cycle, and you can do this really, really quickly, is you can start finding a bunch of what I will call useless content. And in the blog world, again, you can just run through the blog and look through some of these pages. I pulled out two specifically that are completely useless in different ways. Here is tips on staying safe on the ski slopes this winter with some really poultry amount of content. And I suspect, and I don’t know this key, but if you are in Colorado looking for tips on staying safe in the ski slopes this winter, you’re not going to land on a law firm website.

And if you do land on a law firm website and you read this, it’s things like wear a helmet, right? I don’t think that’s really relevant. I found another example here that I thought was gross. This is different. But again, you can see up here in the URL, it’s in the blog. This is in memory of Anna Pryor. This is an example of the only SEO rationale for doing this is to hope to get people who are looking for this teenager who was killed tragically in an auto accident. You’ll note here that this blog was launched in 2024. The accident happened almost 20 years earlier in 2006. And this is a girl who was killed, and it ends with a call to action. This is content for content’s sake and it’s gross. And I think if someone were to unfortunately land on this page, I actually did a query for Anna prior, and this actually ranks for that name.

This is gross. This does not give anyone a really, really solid feel. And this is an example of using generating traffic for traffic’s sake maybe. So those are some of the things that we found. The other thing is you can find often, this is a page, and I found this through the site colon search. This is the page where it says, here’s the founding partners, and there’s a link to Kyle and Darren and then generic content that lives elsewhere across the web. So this is a useless page with absolutely zero unique content on this, and it’s just a page that shouldn’t exist. So there’s lots of pages on here that aren’t really helpful. Here’s another one, Colorado Law blog. This is just a link to all of the articles on their blog. None of this content is unique. This is example of a page that should never be indexed, right? It’s just navigation. It should never, never be indexed. So these are examples of pages where I look at this from like their 827 pages are not really, really helpful. Anything else you want to talk about with Lange?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, I think the biggest thing for me is directionally how do you compare in terms of your investment in content? And I agree with you that I think one of the biggest missed opportunities is that all the content’s living under the blog subdirectory. I think that if you’ve been following it all, what Google’s been doing recently, these individual blog pages are getting hammered, right? All the helpful content update is all about these small publishing sites just getting hammered. Some of ’em are trying to recover, but it’s clear that creating topical authority hubs, meaning pages with sub pages that are topically relevant, that are internally linked in a more useful way, Google’s trying to reward that. And the days of these of trying to just create a permutation of every query you can think of as a question to create a blog post, that’s the stuff that you’re just seeing. To Conrad’s point, if you open up Google Analytics, if you open up search console, you’re just going to see that those pages exist and they’re not really providing any value to users at all, and they’re not generating any traffic.

Conrad Saam:

So I’m going to go a quick view through Screaming Frog and show you exactly what Gyi is talking about visually. Screening Frog is kind of an advanced SEO querying tool. I look at this all the time when I’m talking to law firms, but one of the things that you can actually see in Screaming Frog is what’s called site structure. And it is the depth to which you can find content. And so a large site with roughly a thousand pages, the vast majority of those pages live just three clicks deep from the homepage and something that has real structure with that volume of pages, those pages are going to be distributed further into silos about what that content is about. And that’s what Gyi is talking about. Screaming Frog. One of the great tools to look at. The other things that I look at in Screaming Frog, Gyi, I dunno if you look at these, I’m always looking for a 4 0 4, right? So if you find a page that’s 4 0 4 error, that’s a great example. Frankly, when I’m talking to a law firm and be like, Hey, you’ve got some broken pages on your site, and better yet, if you find links to those pages that are broken, that’s an even better example of you really aren’t looking in this example here, I’m not seeing any of those.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, though, just to add onto that, the other thing that people should know, screaming Frog, if you’re doing this, one of these Screaming Frog calls, they do integrate with Search Console, Google Analytics, and the major third party link data tool. So the stuff that we Conrad and I are talking about like, Hey, do you have a 4 0 4 page that’s actually got links to it from that’s identifiable while with the link indices? You can quickly see that. And when you use these integrations and screaming Frog,

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, and these are things like if your agency is missing this, you’ve got low hanging fruit and mistakes and it’s kind of careless. Now, do we have clients where we’ve run into four oh fours on occasion, but that’s why we look at these things over and over again because things break right and things change happen.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point too, is that as we know, the web’s dynamic websites are dynamic. That’s why this stuff isn’t set and forget it.

Conrad Saam:

Yep, absolutely.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s gardening.

Conrad Saam:

So I look for four oh fours. I always look at the H ones. I’m always looking for H ones where you have the same exact H one showing up over and over again. That used to be a pretty big common problem where H ones would be repeated. When I look through this, you can also find some of the pages on here that are completely useless. And the other thing I don’t love on this, I’m not quite sure why they’ve got caps on some of these H ones. It’s just kind of why are you screaming at me, dude?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I agree. Here’s the other thing too that I think when you’re talking about heading tags, if you notice the homepage is missing an H one tag altogether. This is one of those examples of great, they coded the H two, but they didn’t code the H one on the homepage. And then the other thing, Conrad’s point, some of these are pretty generic. I bet you if you sorted them by alpha numeric, you would see that a lot of ’em are pretty close to duplicative. They’re not very descriptive. Again, I think that the OnPage mappings, URL structure, H one tags, meta descriptions, these are important things, especially when you realize that you’re in an age of Google where they’re using user click-through data. These are your opportunities to increase the number of clicks and you’re not getting an increase of number of clicks with these generic page titles and meta descriptions.

Conrad Saam:

So interestingly, on the H one side of things, they actually have two H ones on their homepage, one of which is blank.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, they have an empty,

Conrad Saam:

I mean, another example.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I bet you, you know what? I didn’t look. I bet you it’s the logo. I bet you the logo is an H one.

Conrad Saam:

So coding mistakes is just sloppy code. So Gyi, while you’re doing that, we’re going to take a break. You guys are going to listen to one of our amazing sponsors and when we come back, Gyi’s going to share his screen. We’re going to look at some more tools

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back from the break and we’re still talking about this website for Baku and Shanker. Another tool that I like to use when we’re looking at websites for visibility and assessment is local Falcon. Now local Falcon will show API local PAC rankings for a query and a business on a grid. There’s a lot of different local PAC tracking tools that we’d like to use, but we wanted to call out local Falcon. And in fact, it’s a little bit of foreshadowing because we’re going to do a deep dive on some of the other ways, interesting ways that we use local Falcon for a variety of different purposes. But from understanding the competitive environment of a firm and getting a sense of like, Hey, where are there opportunities? Local Falcon is a great tool for that. So what this is showing for folks that are seeing this, we’re looking at a visual map.

It’s a grid for the query personal injury attorney. And what it’s showing is where Baku and Shanker ranks in this grid, and it’s also showing competitors. So as we’re looking at this on the east side of this grid, east of where local Falcon is identifying downtown Denver, we’re seeing ones in twos, meaning that their visibility in the local PAC is pretty sound. The other thing that you can look, do a review analysis, but just some of the top level things that we like to look at, how many reviews do they have? One of the biggest things that we talk about is you can rank all day, but if you don’t have a competitive number of reviews, don’t rely heavily in the short term on local PAC for generating business because it’s not going to convert as well if you don’t have those reviews. And let’s face it, reviews are also a ranking factor.

Conrad Saam:

Hey Gyi, can you explain for our dear listener how you have zeroed in on Denver with your query of personal injury attorney? Where did the center of this graph get defined?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, so the center of this graph is defined by the location of the firm. So local Falcon will ask you, what business do you want to run a grid for? And they put the address of the business at the center of the grid,

Conrad Saam:

Which is really fascinating in this specific example where you’re seeing they’re not ranking where their offices, but as you go outside of downtown to the east, they are. So this is an interesting, and probably I would call atypical graph. Sorry, not a space. Typical, I mean atypical.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, it’s true that you usually don’t see this pattern except that in some of these downtown areas there are some weird patterns depending on the competitive nature and how things are optimized. But these are also sorted by share of local voice and this grid based on their positions for the number of data points that they’ve got. And their average position, they are the share of local voice leader for this grid. It’s just odd that it’s so heavily weighted east of Denver. And so some deeper analysis to unpack there. But the thing that I like to see is how are we lining up against other firms that were competing within that local grid from a visibility standpoint and also from a review standpoint. And then the other really useful thing that we use this for, and I’m curious your thoughts, because in these types of grids, in these competitive environments, your proximity matters a lot. And so this is a great tool for advising on whether we should open a new office location and where we should do that

Conrad Saam:

A hundred percent. I would look at this in terms of office location. And the other thing that you could even before that is should we be opening another office location or do we need to be doubling down on our existing location because that’s where the reviews or an existing location have we maxed out the potential, not even maxed out, but are the returns of incremental improvements for office A there compared to trying to build out office B? And I do think this is one where you can spend a lot of time, and this is time that should be spent on determining a, do I need to keep working on building out, for example, reviews of my current office or if I maxed out the potential of where I can go? Because there is a distance at which competitors start cropping up where you can no longer really compete because that ranking factor of proximity is so key. But then if you do have that one office nailed, where should we go next? This is a great tool for guiding mathematically what I call the centipede strategy of building out offices around the market.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I also like to see the competitive landscape in terms of keywords in the business name. In a lot of these competitive locations, and this one included Bakka. Schenker is using this strategy. Personal injury lawyers is part of the business name. So one, when we’re validating, the first thing we’ll do is to make sure they’ve actually updated their business name with the state bar and with the state entity licensing. Because if they haven’t, those firms that are showing up there, they’re vulnerable to having an impact based on being reported or edited. And that can have an impact on how competitive it’s to rank in that local pac. So in this particular case,

Conrad Saam:

What he really meant to say was, if he finds a competitor to Smith and Jones law firm who hasn’t done that, they are vulnerable to getting kicked out of this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They are. And the other question is, how many of the firms that are ranking are deploying that strategy? Because in some locations you’ll see nobody’s deploying it and in other places like everybody is, and that can weigh in your decision of whether or not you update your domain. Do you do an exact match domain with keyword rich in the business name? In some areas that can be a huge competitive difference maker in more competitive spaces where they’re already doing that, it’s not as big of an issue. Alright, another tool that we like to look at is refs and get a sense of the backlinks. Really, there are other things you can look at in here. I know, and we’ve talked about third party tools and the reliability of the data. I’m not huge at looking at organic traffic metrics, but backlink profile and the backlink profile within the competitive landscape, those are things that I like to look at over a variety of terms. And you can dive deep and look at the referring domains. And to me, this is one of those two where you’re like, this can show you how much of a vulnerability you might have in terms of some of your historical backlinking depending on what kind of backlinking you look at. What types of things do you look for in backlink or do you look at backlink profile at all when you’re doing an initial kind of assessment? I

Conrad Saam:

Used to spend a lot of time looking for spam, right? I mean, this goes way back in the day and I looked for a bunch of crappy backlinks. The thing that I like to look for now, and this is more of a competitive research, but this is the impossible to quantify thing that you and I talk about all the time. How many of their backlinks are actually local? And this is what you want to talk to joy about. The only way I’ve ever come up with identifying that the localness of links is to spend a lot of time going through a backlink profile. And you’re not, this is organized right now, or it’s not right now, but this is often organized by dr. Right? So domain rank, most of your localized links aren’t going to show up at the top of that Dr. Sort. And so it’s really a painstaking process of going item by item by item, looking for those backlinks, doing that for yourself as well as for competitors.

And that to me is a major indicator as to whether or not is there potential here. If you have a DR of 40 and zero localized backlinks, but you’ve got an otherwise solid review profile, I feel like we can move the needle for you. If you’ve done an amazing job of localized backlinks, which you haven’t, if you’re listening to this, you probably have not done an amazing job of that, then maybe there’s no more growth for that individual office. So you’ve got all the localized backlinks, you’ve got a ton of localized reviews, but there’s not much room, more room for us to actually move your needle. And so I look for those opportunities where it’s easy to get some victories, low hanging fruit, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Totally. The other thing too, to Conrad’s point that you can do to help filter by localized links is you can add a location modifier like your city name to the target URL contains. So sometimes that’ll pick up local, you can do it in the domain. Sometimes local sites might have Denver news.com might be a thing. But just another way to sort by identifying some of those local links with the tool. So here’s an example, Denver Insider, that’s probably more localized at least just as an example.

Conrad Saam:

And then amazingly down there, there’s Las Vegas Law Biz for this Denver based law firm, which looks to me like a whole bunch of spam.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, I think in terms of competitive, you got to bucket these things in terms of links that we think are mattering links that we probably don’t think matter, and then links that might actually be more of a liability than a benefit.

Conrad Saam:

You want to show broken links here? Sure. Because a beauty one too, and also something that we should be able to find fairly, fairly quickly and should really not exist.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And it looks like this one doesn’t have a name.

Conrad Saam:

There you go. The null data set’s really valuable here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And so just describe what you just did for people that aren’t following along the video.

Conrad Saam:

Great question. So there are plenty of tools. We already talked about screaming Frog, but we’re now using a hre to look for links coming to your website that go to pages that no longer exist, and that is the easiest lowest hanging SEO fruit you could possibly come up with. And yet we find these on the regular. And so the tool a hfs on your backlink profile, you can do, there’s actually a report for broken back links which will show you both where that link is coming from. So is it a valuable link? And then it’ll show you the page, the URL that is actually pointed to. So you can either redirect that or recreate that or in some way recapture the value of that link.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, in a link by link basis, you can also see things like whether it’s followed or no followed from a competitive standpoint. The other thing that we like to look at backlinks is it gives you a good insight onto some of the strategies that have worked for competition. So you’ll see scholarship links will pop up in here, the different types of localized content campaigns. This is a good way to do competitive intel to see what they’re doing that’s worked and with what sites it’s worked on.

Conrad Saam:

And along with that, what you’re getting here is when these links were found. So one of the difficulties in doing this is there’s linking strategies that worked 15 years ago that will still show up in here. So you can actually look at and you can ignore those linking strategies that are really, really dated. What’s happening now? What are they doing right now? How active are they now in developing links? What does that look like? Because you can actually see this at the link level, and there’s also a graph in ah HFS that’ll show you what that link profile looks like over time. That’s another one that I like to look at. When that link profile spikes, all of a sudden we got 1200 links on November 7th. That tells you a lot about what that firm’s agency is trying to do to drive links and therefore traffic.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, this is also a good thing to have a conversation with your own agency about what are some of your strategies, leading indicators, if part of your service offering or engagement includes backlink growth, what types of things are they doing? I think having those conversations is healthy, even if you are not shopping around for a new agency, but just having valuable conversations with your current agency.

Conrad Saam:

Just to riff on that, if your agency is reporting, we got seven back links and you’re like, good job. You’re supposed to get seven back links, that is a problem because you’re not probably talking, I can get you seven back links right now. I can get you seven links. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Not all links are pretty equally.

Conrad Saam:

That is my point. So evaluating someone on the number of links that they’re reporting that they have generated for you is probably not a good way to think about your SEO from an overall perspective.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. Another thing that I want to bring up, and I think this is a good, this isn’t so much like website tear down as it is when you’re doing an assessment of any kind of competitor is looking at what they’re doing on other platforms. Because again, YouTube, social media, it’s going to play a role in, frankly, to me it’s interconnected. With SEO, your ability to distribute content on social networks is going to play some role in whether your ability to also earn links and earn meaningful attention. This YouTube channel pretty robustly built out. They’ve definitely made some investment. You’ve got 264 videos. One thing too that we look for is potential issues with rules of professional conduct. They’ve got Denver’s best injury lawyers. A lot of times firms don’t even realize that some of that messaging is in there is arguable that under the Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct 7.1, that it’s arguable that using superlatives like best might be not objectively substantial. Thank you.

Conrad Saam:

Don’t blow the ethics rules with your vendor because of your vendor,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But there are also firms that are finding creative ways to be able to use this. So instead of saying Denver’s best injury lawyers, you can have content that’s like how do identify the best injury lawyers in Denver? That can be, and as long as it’s not like just choose us, then you can get into ways of incorporating superlatives into your content in an ethical way. But again, for me, I’m looking at some of these videos, especially with firms that they’re doing a lot of brand building, which you can tell this firm is doing. This is a great place to identify what they’re doing in offline media in terms of TV commercials. Sometimes they’ll even, some people will post videos of their billboards or have imagery of their billboards on their social profiles. You can also use the Facebook and LinkedIn ads library to look at competitors and see what they’re doing from an ads perspective.

This is another thing that we like to look at when we’re looking at new clients and new competitive environments because this brand stuff, it does matter a lot and there are benefits. We’ve talked about this before on the pod, if you are indexing high on clicks to through brand queries, those signals are positive signals that a Google is using to be able to make decisions about showing your pages for a non-brand too. And so getting a sense of what the brand looks like in the competitive environment is a very useful thing for us to look at.

Conrad Saam:

I’ll counterpoint this. Gyi, look at the content here is nine years old. This does not look like they’re spending a lot of time 16 years ago. Jesus Christ. To me, and again, we’re looking at this almost in real time, oh, we’ve got some recent stuff here

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That was sort of by popularity. So now, so for folks that are looking, I’m not the YouTube channel. You can sort by popularity, you can sort by latest, but they published stuff three weeks ago, a month ago. Interestingly though, and this is another one of those indicators, and this is the questions I’d be asking recently, their content within the last weeks, months, five months ago, all the way up to really about a year ago, you got 11 views, 14 views, 15 views, and then there’s 11,000 views, 4,000 views. Something changed. How did they go from averaging 11,000, 4,000 to 15 views? What

Conrad Saam:

Happened? They’ve stopped advertising. They have decided that spending money to get their videos in front of people is not worth it. What’s happened here?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Or even that’s a very strong possibility. Sadly, and again, I don’t want to cast aspersions at them, but we’ve seen too where people have paid for fake promotion of videos right now, and again, in

Conrad Saam:

Light of, hold on, hold on. Lemme just explain to our dear audience, fake promotion. What does that mean? Gyi, what’s going on? What are you, he’s not accusing, but what could someone be doing to make this look good?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, you go and you go to Upwork and you say, we’ll pay you a dollar to go in and watch this YouTube video. It’s not an actual valuable view. It’s just inflate the social numbers and arguably under the FTCs new rule, that stuff is against the rule. It’s the same thing as paying people to like your pages or follow you or engage. Those are artificial social signals are expressly listed in the FTC rules, and so it’ll be interesting to see. Again, to your point, will there be enforcement? My view is that somebody’s going to get made an example of it’s going to be like tax audits, right? They’re only going to audit like 2% of them, but the people that they catch, they’re going to hit pretty hard.

Conrad Saam:

Now that we’ve scared the crap out of you and talked about what we look for when we pull back the curtain, I hope you can go back to your own site, spend some time and think about whether or not your site’s got a whole bunch of useless content, how to look at the links, some of the tools that we use, go download Screaming Frog and get really deep under the hood if you want to find out what’s going on on your site and where we would look if we were looking for a problem with your site and what your potential is.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

As always, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Hopefully you got some actionable tips you can take back to your marketing team or your agency or things you can fix on your own website. That’s the whole goal here, so that you have some examples of some of the things that we look at. If you had questions about this, please drop us a comment, right? We’re happy to do specific deep dives. If you’ve got a site you want to see torn down, you want to see a competitor’s site torn down, let us know. We’re happy to pick them apart. If you’re just landing on lunch hour meal marketing for the first time, please do hit that subscribe button on your podcast. Would you ma Bob, or subscribe to our YouTube channel? We’d love to hear from you. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi saying, farewell

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