Strategies for Law Firms: Navigating SEO and Google’s 3-Pack

Host: Alex Valencia, WDW

Guest: Seth Price,  Blushark Digital

 

In this webinar, Alex Valencia of WDW discusses Google’s 3-Pack and NAP (name, address phone number) with Seth Price, owner of BluShark Digital. 

 

Does Google know where your law office is? What happens to your law firm SEO rankings when you change your law firm’s address, phone number, or name? What if you are competing against big-name firms in competitive locations? Alex and Seth discuss how to get into the habit of checking your digital presence and explore where else you can make your firm’s digital presence known. Hint: Localization is key, especially for small businesses. 

 

Finally, the skinny on Google’s 3-pack and the one thing you can always control—content. Good content with strong links and localization never goes out of style. 

Transcript:​

Alex Valencia:

Hey, folks. We’re shooting from PLMMA in Utah at the Summit of 2016. I’m sitting here next to Seth Price, who is a great friend of mine. He’s an attorney in Washington DC and also a legal marketer. Seth Price has had awesome success online with his law firm and has recently launched his new venture, an awesome new company called BluShark, where he’s helping attorneys and small law firms get noticed and get found online. Seth, tell us a little bit about your project. Actually, Seth, you were telling us and you were teaching everyone about the Google 3-pack today.

Seth Price:

Well, thank you for having me, Alex. It is awesome to be here. It’s great to be at PLMA. What we did is took the success of our in-house digital team and created BluShark Digital. It’s a digital agency that has worked with lawyers around the country. And one of the benefits of being a single event local player is that you can take advantage of what Google allows, which is to be found locally. Historically, a player who had the resources could win organically and you couldn’t do anything about it, and Google has usurped that by really focusing on finding the best local results for people, both in the organic, as well as in the 3-Pack. It had been a 7-pack. There are three local results. You see them all the time in ABC. It’s really important to be there.

It’s getting more and more competitive moving those announcements, testing them out, and putting an ad as one of those three local results, so it’s even more competitive and may become a 2-pack essentially for organic and what we talked about today were the factors that go into giving yourself the best chance of being in that 3-pack. And it’s a combination of traditional SEO, which at its core is contents and links combined with local processes dealing with your NAP, your name, address, and phone number, combined with reviews and a number of other factors.

But the idea is that unless you take control of your NAP, your local listing, you’re not going to be able to give Google that clear understanding of where you are and who you are. The key that we focus on is not confusing Google. We want to give Google a clear understanding as to who we are and where we are. So your name, your address, and your phone number are very basic things, but looking in a room with a couple of hundred people in it, we were faced with people who have changed the name of their firm, have changed their address, and/or changed their phone numbers.

And at each time you do those things, there’s a massive amount of cleanup that has to be done behind the scenes because when Google sees this history with all these different places and your competitors if you’re in a competitive market, they’re cleaned up, and you need to make sure that you have a consistent name. If the name is changed, make sure that you remove the other names or suppress them, that the phone number is consistent, and that you’re careful not to have other phone numbers as part of that app. The tracking number is a whole nother conversation, and making sure that for the address itself, even if you have your new address added, that you have the old addresses removed.

What is the nomenclature? Are you using “street?” Are you using “st?” Are you using “Suite?” Are you using a pound sign? How can you give a clear and consistent universal over and over again to attempt to show Google this is where we are and there’s no confusion? When you do all of that combined with traditional SEO, that’s the magic that gets you up there.

Alex Valencia:

Awesome. And we had tons of questions during the conference. Seth had a great, great presentation, and one of the questions was what do I do if I have multiple locations? Why don’t you tell everyone how they would handle multiple locations with the 3-pack?

Seth Price:

Sure. I think there are two questions, two ways that question can go. One is if you have multiple locations that each one has to be claimed and that once it’s claimed, it needs to be built out.

You want to make sure you take advantage of the information in each of these locations that represents a claimed profile and you’re treating it as you know, this is your business. Are your hours listed there? Are your photos of the office there? Are you getting reviews? Making sure that each and every one of those is there gives a full picture as to what is going on there. Combining that with a link to a location page on your website brings in that organic piece and the combination of the organic and getting the offices claimed and optimized locally. When those come together, then you have the chance of having your satellite offices or tertiary offices showing just like you have your main office.

Alex Valencia:

Awesome. And then how important are reviews in the 3-pack?

Seth Price:

It is an evolving piece. I don’t believe the algorithm is set yet. It is clearly a factor for conversion. It is unclear whether this is a magic bullet that will get you shown, but generally I can tell you that the people that are shown have reviewers. When you look at a market, it also may be the people who have reviews are taking care of their listings, so it may be self-fulfilling. At one point, Google was claiming that was not a factor. It appears whether it’s somewhat of a factor, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how much the answer is. Regardless, it’s super important and is becoming more so, and anybody who bets against that being a factor in the future, I would not agree with.

Alex Valencia:

How difficult is it for a small to medium firm to compete with one of the big players in the market on the 3-pack? What would you recommend?

Seth Price:

What I would recommend is looking to find your niche. For example, if you are in a major market and you have players that are really dominant in the SEO space, that’s such a large factor and it’s going to be hard, but if there is a suburb or a county that allows you to own local for that area with meaningful population, even though you may not hit the 3-pack for the main town, if you can own that separate county, that’s where I’ve seen success, particularly in some of the big Florida cities with massive players that we’ve seen people being able to get success with offices not in the main money name county. But the counties around have huge populations and very often are ignored by the bigger players.

Alex Valencia:

Would they have to have a brick-and-mortar to compete in that smaller market?

Seth Price:

Yes. I mean very often for a big firm, they may have their main office downtown and two or three satellite offices. Having a presence that complies with the Google guidelines that allows you to have that office there can be huge.

Again, if you’re a referral practice downtown, you’re probably not going to take this advice, but if you’re somebody who’s trying to maximize, fish where other people are fishing, and if you can find a way that geographically places your office in a place that comports with or where there’s not a plethora of other players, that would probably be for somebody who did not have a sophisticated SEO presence the only way they compete there.

Alex Valencia:

You keep referencing satellite offices. Another question came up with satellite offices where typically in a building when they’re set in like offices, there’s additional businesses and offices, and in some cases, there might be other attorney offices. What’s the importance there as far as suite number or differentiation?

Seth Price:

Well, right, and again I’m using satellite office as a general term. There are people that may have four offices that are all with partners and are all used. There are times when people will have a secondary office where they can see clients. The key is if you are in an office building, whether it’s your primary office or a secondary office, if you’re in an office building, making sure there’s a distinct suite number is key, and if you’re in a building, you see this with realtors a lot where there’s a Remax office, and all these people are there. If you can’t differentiate from the other people in the office, you’re not going to be found. So I think it’s very important to include in your lease the fact that you have an independent suite number that differentiates yourself and that if you don’t do that you really are in jeopardy of not being able to be found. And that is one of the basic things. It may not cost you anything, but having a distinct address from the other people in the building is really important.

Alex Valencia:

So a question came up. If you are an attorney in an office building with multiple offices, how do you differentiate?

Seth Price:

And right now with the update from a few weeks ago, it’s scary. The answer is go big or get a new home. I mean, you could either become the top player and get shown, or it appears right now you need a different piece of real estate. And it’s sad because there are a lot of buildings across the courthouse that have the best lawyers in the city or in that building and you’d like to see the best results, which is what Google is aiming for to have A, B, and C all be lawyers from that building.  Just because Joe Blow down the block has an office there doesn’t mean that that diversity of choice is good for the user. The user really does want to see any of those three people in the building right now, but for the time being, that doesn’t happen, so you either have to get on top, or you have to get out.

Alex Valencia:

Yeah, we see it a lot in Fort Lauderdale where all the law firms are around the office.

Seth Price:

Which is what you want. That’s who you’d want somebody to be. It’s where there’s camaraderie, there’s definitely value add. And so the question is what do you do about it? I think it’s too early to tell. We’re two weeks into the update. Very often, Google will make a proclamation and then come back. One was, if you remember, for exact match domains that took place a number of years back. There was a point where they said that’s bad. And we had some that were variation on exact match and they moved down for a few days and then they said, oh whoa, we were trying to get rid of people with exact match domains that had no content on it that might be selling AdWords.

And so they went back to saying, “Hey, if you have legitimate content with exact match, then we’re going to reward you.” It’s great content, and you’re saying this is what we’re about. So I’m hoping that this update somehow recalibrates that they were trying to eliminate fraud issues and that hopefully what they’re going to do is say, “Hey, we went too far in this direction” and swing back because I think it’s a shame most people are not as crazy as me that would actually get up and move…but if you’re playing the digital game, they’ve just taken somebody who had a regular place and got rid of it, and unfortunately for them, unfortunately for us, that’s a way of forcing ad sales. I just don’t like it. I’d like to see the best people show regardless of where they’re located.

Alex Valencia:

Yeah, that’s fair. Is there a service out there that you would recommend if someone was trying to do it on their own? What services would you recommend for them to at least get their feet wet and get things going? I know it’s technical.

Seth Price:

Right, that’s technical. Look, there are a bunch of them from [inaudible 00:11:12] that are out there. Those are good places to start. If you have staff, there is nothing better than cleaning up the load citations yourself. But for these other ones, and I mentioned this during the presentation, if you’re paying a suppression service like Yex, you’re stuck for life there; you stop using it…

Alex Valencia:

Yeah, I think double suppressions, like 500 for the year.

Seth Price:

And it’s less with more addresses, et cetera. But the idea being that it’s great, but it’s like a drug, and just like Uber, we’re stuck with it.

And now, when you see a 4x surge, your local presence is now controlled by them, and if they disappear or you’re not using it, we use it. But I’m just saying that to understand what you’re dealing with and that it’s not… If you stop paying it back.

Alex Valencia:

What are three tips you would give everyone in our list right now? What are three takeaways that you think would be helpful? Something that they should start doing right away?

Seth Price:

Well, making sure we talked about, okay, it’s obvious you need to claim your profile. Great. Everybody says that. If you have multiple offices, yes, I’m sure your first one is claimed, but have you claimed the other ones? It’s very basic; just double-check it. Looking to see whether or not your old addresses and phone numbers are still out there. Many people have changed, and partners changed addresses.

Really having somebody on your staff who can Google your old address and Google your old phone number to see what’s out there? If it’s out there, you need to do something about it. And then I would say just being aware of what’s going on around you, like what are the assets you have? If you have the ability to just work with SEO, that’s great. If you don’t, then you don’t have that firepower. Maybe try looking at the less competitive markets that we looked at because that will give you a better shot at success. If you don’t have an SEO presence and you’re trying to play in a major market that’s probably not going to work for local. But it may allow you, if you’re an outlying area, to still have success because there’s lack of competition. That’s where just having a local presence can get you by.

Alex Valencia:

Awesome. Well thanks so much.

Seth Price:

It was great being here.

Alex Valencia:

Appreciate it. So folks, if it’s something that you don’t want to do on your own, I highly recommend contacting Seth with BluShark. He’s there to help you. It’s not the easiest thing to do. It’s very technical. If you’re going to go out and do it on your own, I highly recommend contacting him. If you’re working with an SEO, make sure you’re checking it. You know, you really never know what anyone’s doing, and you want to make sure you’re getting accountability for everyone’s efforts.

Seth Price:

And I would say that one of those things, and it’s really basic, is that you work with a great SEO as well and have a set of reports run. It’s transparent. If you get reports of links and pages and local, there are tools that very quickly and that a good SEO will run for you for free to say, “Hey, this is what’s actually there.”

You can’t hide as an SEO anymore. You either build links or you don’t. You either create content or you don’t. You Either have NAP listings, or you don’t. And if you can actually quantify that, you could begin to actually fix the problem.

Alex Valencia:

Great. And you mentioned something great there. You mentioned content. And maybe to digress off of the NAP and the 3-pack real quick, how important has content been to the success of your firm?

Seth Price:

I mean it’s huge. And I know you were a pioneer in the legal content space, and we’ve emulated it and followed your success. Look, Google has made it very clear, even in recent weeks, content and links, those move the dial.

Alex Valencia:

That’s it.

Seth Price:

And getting links is so challenging and so difficult, that content is the one thing that you can control. Whether the New York Times gives you a link I can’t control. We can be quoted in there, and they still tell us, “Piss off, we’re not going to give you a link.”

But content is something that you control a hundred percent yourself. You don’t need a favor from somebody else. And because of that, I find it incredibly empowering because whether it’s a person doing it themselves (because lawyers who are good writers don’t even need to pay somebody) or if you have the money and you don’t have the time bringing on somebody like We Do Web Content or others to create that content. But the ability to have high-quality content merge with the links, that’s digital marketing.

Alex Valencia:

It is.

Seth Price:

And if you can do that, it’s how you do it that’s important. But that is the roadmap.

Alex Valencia:

Yep. You heard it here. I mean, having a content and link-building strategy, a total digital marketing strategy with the right agency or if you have someone in-house is totally important. But again, it goes back to having that quality content and those links. I mean content alone can do it, but you really can’t push the dial without those links. It’s going to take forever with content alone. But if you’re going to do anything, like Seth said, you have the opportunity to do content. It is something you can control if you can’t afford to work with an agency.

Seth Price:

Great.

Alex Valencia:

All right Seth, thanks so much man.