BluShark Digital
Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price
Welcome to the SEO Insider. My name is Seth Price with BluShark and we have Gyi from Attorneysync today. Welcome, Gyi.
Gyi Tsakalakis
Seth, so great to see you. Thanks for having me.
Seth Price
You know you and I spend hours offline discussing the minutiae of SEO and what works and what doesn't work, and what sort of people tell you works and doesn't work. You know, one of the things that we have bemoaned over the years is the sort of minimization, that's a word, of search. You know, it started, we had three ads, and then we, you know, the three-pack with a map. So now we have an LSA, we have pay-per-click ads, we have a map to get to organic, you know, what gives? How do you get through the day these days?
Gyi Tsakalakis
Well, I remind myself that Google is a publicly-traded company and is essentially a one-trick pony in terms of revenue from ads. But seriously, that, you know, the thing and you know, you know, we've talked about this over the years. The stat that always comes to my mind is, and this is still, they just, Danny Sullivan just recently confirmed that this is still their number now, you know, 15% of the searches every single day have never been typed into Google ever before. And so, you know, everybody's chomping at the bit for these lower funnel non-brand head terms, spending $100, $200, $300 a click. And that's not to say that there's, that you got to keep those in mind, but there's still a lot of searches, SERPs that are, organic still has a lot of visibility on.
Seth Price
No, I see that more and more. That, you know, again, LSA is not fully matured. But it's not in every search paid ads are not in research. Right. And so, you know, it is interesting to sort of see that. And when I see our stats, again, part of it is making sure and it's a pull and tug, right? Because part of the reason you want all that search traffic is to get to those money terms because a lot of good revenue does come from them. You know, and it's unclear, ironically, breaking news, as we're taping this, you know, with justice, looking at Google and antitrust matters, something we have sort of, you know, dreamed about for years, maybe just a settlement that limits the number of paid spots at the top two, not infinite, which it seems like we're going towards right now, giving you more of a focus. But I think one of the things we've seen inside the LSA rollout has been how rudimentary we think of Google is this juggernaut that is it's worth gazillions, and it controls the market, but that they're human, when you look at how clunky that this rollout has been, it gives you a little bit of insight, as far as like, what's on the other side of the curtain?
Gyi Tsakalakis
Right, exactly. You know, and we even know that even as on their core product being searched that, you know, we've talked about this ad nauseam over the years, but spam still works, right? And so as sophisticated and as better as they try to evolve. It's still a machine, it's still software, and it's still susceptible to manipulation. But yeah, I mean, I think the other thing too, that I think it's worth folks that are watching this to or listening to this to be thinking about, as, you know, business, you should diversify your sources of new business. So I would never advocate anybody just to be like, go all in on just organic or paid, or social or email. In fact, as you know, all the channels work better in concert, right? So if you earn a visit for one thing, and then you can retarget them for something else, or, you know, show a targeted ad on social, all that stuff works a lot better when it's all working harmoniously than if you're just like, Oh, I'm just going to be the organic search person.
Seth Price
Right? No, absolutely. And it's something we've talked about offline that doesn't get a lot of talks. It is the power of a paid search campaign, combined to sort of push or jolt an organic campaign, your experiences with that we're seeing it with a reason algorithm updates, the TV advertisers getting a huge bump that we never saw before. But I feel like some of that can be simulated through paid search as far as pushing eyeballs through to sort of tweak the algorithm.
Gyi Tsakalakis
Yeah and I know that there's a split of authority, so to speak, on the impact of brand, but you know, I kind of go back to Eric Schmidt years ago, you know, brands sort out the cesspool, right? They want to reward brands because brands are where you can build trust. And so you know, it's not surprising when we see things like big TV spenders, who are getting generating a lot of brand demand. That impacts their ability to rank locally. We see that all the time, big a new TV spender, comes into town, in legal. And all of a sudden, without a lot of the traditional SEO signaling to their page, they start ranking and you're like, how that happened? It's like, well, there's a lot of brand traffic, and Google's rewarding that.
Seth Price
Right. And, you know, along those lines, when you're looking at clients, people coming to you and sort of struggling with how do you compete against the bigger guys, you know, you have your famous catchphrase with links. But, you know, how do you go about, you know, going up against the juggernauts?
Gyi Tsakalakis
Yeah, you better be prepared. So, you know, I kind of, you know, to use the military analogy, like, you're not going to do a land warfare campaign on a small budget against some of these businesses or law firms, we're talking legal, that are just in so heavily invested, right. I mean, you know, we get we talk about it all the time, people will say, Oh, yeah, how would I compete with the Juggernaut on Google ads? Well, they're spending $350,000. I just made that number up. I don't know why that came into my head.
Seth Price
It's no different from a TV advertiser. If you say, Hey, I have $2,000 a month, and they're spending, you know, 100,000, they're gonna get more eyeballs.
Gyi Tsakalakis
It's strategic in my response to that. Right. So you know, the buzz term there from organic is the long tail. But you know, really think about the thing that I was trying to say to folks, because, you know, lawyers talk a lot about going niche. And they think practice area with respect to niche, but you can also think of niche as geographically specific, and so hyperlocal, right, so people that target people that are searching on neighborhood terms, streets, terms, local community terms, I think that's another good point that I know you and I talked about a lot, too, is spend more time on doing the research, you know, everybody wants to go out there and like publish content and more blog posts. And, you know, gi says Get links, but I think so many people don't spend the time to really think about who they want as a client, where those people are, what keeps them up at night, what questions they're asking, that should really inform your strategy. And the good news is, is that there's not as much competition there. Oftentimes, you know, I know, in Chicago, we would see local neighborhood terms and the competition level, there was a lot less negligible.
Seth Price
Here's right, right now. terracing Lee, for some of my legacy sites that do super well, you know, we, you know, I looked down, I'm like, Dude, we don't have these pages. Now. We have an internal debate, because a statewide page is getting the love no matter what, and Google knows you're there. It may be doing some of that work for you. And the question is, do you then spend a huge budget building out these micro-neighborhood pages? I guess it's a dance with what you got. If you don't have the statewide page ranking? You damn well better do something. Otherwise, you're going to be sitting there with not a lot. What are your thoughts on building out hyperlocal content, versus going after the larger, more searched areas with a library of information for that?
Gyi Tsakalakis
So you know, sadly, it depends, but you know, because I think to look like you had mentioned, you're a smaller shop, you got a smaller budget. You know, maybe you have a long-term strategy to rank those statewide pages. But I would go really deep hyperlocal. Now, if you have some authority built up, like Yeah, I mean, we talked about this all the time, how Google talks about how doorway pages aren't supposed to work, but at the same time, local content, the local content page that contains geographic information, the page title URL and on the page, and it's actually a legitimate local resource, those pages kill, as you know.
Seth Price
Right. So so basically, is that a doorway? Page? Are you talking about just finding ways to bring meaningful traffic through the site to give it a trust point locally?
Gyi Tsakalakis
Well, so there, there was some guidance from Google, that we shouldn't create doorway pages, and we asked Google, you know, what's a doorway?
Seth Price
What is a doorway page?
Gyi Tsakalakis
And then they would say, if you know, say you're a Chicago personal injury law firm, and then you create a page for every county city permutation in the state of Illinois, for a personal injury lawyer, so you've got, you know, a rora personal injury lawyer and you know, I don't know what to call personal injury lawyer and Will County personal injury lawyer. They would there's a line there where they say, you know, look, you're crossing this doorway pages, but I'll tell you right now, they say that and this is another thing that I think is useful people keep in mind, you know, Google's PR team on webspam is a lot different fighting web spam than their actual search quality team.
Seth Price
And also they may say things that they're aspirational of that may not be, you know, if you give somebody an answer for Aurora, personal injury lawyer, and that answers their question, you know, it's kind of like so weird is that to me, I've always thought is the doorway pages are that are more dubious where they take you in and then pivot you to something else. But in this case, to me, I would question whether or not that's a doorway page, or whether they don't want hyperlocal content where the difference between Calvin and Aurora is not that's the issue we all run into, right? In the legal vertical, we have the same law statewide, and you really need to mince things, pretty finite ly to get a distinction so that you could have unique content. The first thing people come to me and say is, Why are you spending all this time just changing the name of the top of the page? Obviously, you can't do that. But the idea being that they want hyperlocal content at the same time, it sounds you know, that? I struggle, because to me, intuitively, that's not. But that always brings me back to your favorite topic of links, that, you know, we've seen a bunch of stuff. Remember, back in the day when, you know, guest blogging was all the rage, and then our Google spam, you know, the face of the year? You know, I think it was cut said, it's not that it's bad. You can they said don't do it. It's not that guest blogging is bad, you know, bad guest blogging is bad, which makes sense. What I'm seeing is, you know, what's new is old and old as new is you can't go on LinkedIn without getting 10 requests from people who want to sell you these placements. You know, clearly that, you know, whenever you see something in this volume, Google's not stupid. It's on Gmail, they know what's going on. They know before I know, so there's clearly this current trend of massive sales, not that there haven't always been links for sale. But now it's sort of like a complete, you know, open market. Do you see this getting to a critical point where Google is going to do something? Or is this too inside baseball, and they'll just figure out which sites they don't like, and when a private blog networks?
Gyi Tsakalakis
Yeah, probably a little bit of both, you know, if you're buying, so my kind of thing on links, is, especially if you're a local business might be different, you could argue about this different type of publisher site, but local business, all that stuff, forget about it, focus on relevant links, both in terms of location, and topic, right. So for a personal injury law firm in Chicago, getting links from even local, like rehabilitation centers, like where your clients might be some think of put yourself in the shoes of somebody who might be your client, what kind of business services they need, go to those businesses and try to find ways to earn links from them, versus, you know, these emails that come in, I get them too. So like, you may, you know, 50, pa, 90 links, P or da, 90 links, whatever it is, you can pretty much ignore all that stuff. I think Google's gotten a lot better at that part of it. But at the end of the day, you know, to people that try to talk about the dial being turned back on links, you know, at the bot at the core of the search engine, it's still a link-based search engine. And so, you know, I think, you know, to your point about aspirationally, they might want to switch over to this entity-based engine and Knowledge Graph and, you know, really understand how the world works, and, you know, neural nets and all this stuff. But you know, right now, go show me a competitive search engine result page that has a site that doesn't have a lot of links that's ranking for these really competitive terms, because I haven't seen many.
Seth Price
And look along those lines when you're thinking of it, because look, I agree we are two peas in a pod on local links, God bless. It's awesome. But you're also acknowledging that if you don't have some high-domain authority links coming in, it's going to be hard to compete. That's one of those places where you know, where you start to, you know, start to question not that you're likely to just take an email blindly. But do you think that you know, one of the things that I've thought about as Google wants to de-emphasize links, as they gave everybody, there's no index, no follow concept? Or, you know, the no follow the link, you know, and things like Wikipedia and a lot of the big business periodicals that used to be wild west that you could get stuff on or that way, but as they've done that, they've been the span out spam out because of that, to me, if I'm Google, one of the first places I would look are if people aren't spamming them anymore, because they are no-follow links is this where they're going to be able to sort of at some point circle back and get a more trusted authoritative link because people think that it's not there it means that my crazy to think that the Wikipedia is in like Forbes in places that said you know what, we're not playing this game are actually going to be the new trusted authority.
Gyi Tsakalakis
No, you're not crazy at all. I mean, I say the same thing is you can nor domain authority. You can also ignore no follow in terms of your prospect. So my viewpoint is this and I think I might misquote this. So, people that are keeping score at home, you can go ahead and call me out on it on Twitter. But, you know, Google recently updated its guidance around no follow. And in fact, I think their new terminologies are like no follows, like a hint or something. But you know, come on, they're keeping track, you know, remember Google? They're a big data company, they're collecting, capturing all this data. Why wouldn't they if they're keeping it and it's taking up server space, and they're taping update database space? And they think that it's relevant, why wouldn't they be including that in their mix?
Seth Price
Well, right. And I feel that some of them really did that pretty well, some became pay-to-play. But the ones that didn't, are you know, Wikipedia is a pain to get on.
Gyi Tsakalakis
Yeah. And again, you know, you go read the prominence documentation on a local search from Google. And they talk about things, you know, that I don't think they named Wikipedia, but they talk about are you listed in some of these sites that are, you know, everybody recognizes, and, you know, to me, if you're gonna make a shift away from like, traditional notions of like, PageRank, and actual link equity in terms of like, you know, I don't know, anchor text and domain authority and really focus on like, Is this a real business that actually has real-world prominence, that's a place that you would go to to look.
Seth Price
So if we go back at a time machine a couple of years back, you would always look at anchor text and the density of anchor text, right, I remember, you know, some friends of the West Coast, it's like, just keep it under 5%, you'll be good. We might early sites were embarrassing, you know, then how they were written. And then we had the 5% rule for a while the 2%. You know, I now just generically talk about once per paragraph, which may even be too much in some areas. But one of the things you mentioned earlier, spam still works. And so I look at my sites, and I look at anchor texts coming in inbound anchor text. And unlike some of these upstarts that never really like learn that they shouldn't be doing this stuff, you know, use these techniques. And all of a sudden, you got SOPs that are now being used for some of this stuff, you know, the authority may be there. And something we saw was like criminal terms will be in place, but DUI terms where somebody is getting those exact match anchor texts, have you, you know, what are your thoughts on going back and saying, Look, we're not going to, you know, go back to the point where we're doing Chicago DUI lawyer at 5%. But if you want to compete for something, what is your thought on making sure that there are some non-cringe-worthy, nonsense, zero-level anchor texts, which, you know, isn't what you should be fighting for? At the same time, if you're, you know, not hitting certain things in the algorithm, those things just don't pop.
Gyi Tsakalakis
100%? I mean, again, it's back to what Google aspirationally wants to be. It's not the same as what ranks and that's another thing I always tell people to is, trust your own data, right? Because what works for me, or what works for another firm or a competitor might not have the same impact. And people find that really odd? Because they're like, isn't it doesn't isn't the same algorithm everywhere at all times? And it's like, no, it's not. There are different data centers, that will treat different categories, keyword categories, and classes differently. You've got a search quality rating that plays some factor and all that. And so, you know, I always say, go back, you know, like you were just talking about go do a competitive analysis on your SERPs. You know, take the keywords, the local keywords that you want to rank for, go through pull those competitors' sites that are ranking, see how many pages they have an index, do a Screaming Frog crawl, see how they're optimized, pull their backlinks, and then get a sense of, you know, look, in some places, the keyword heavy anchor tags, keyword, heavy backlink anchor texts, works really well. In other places, it tends not to, and you still gotta watch out, you can see over your shoulder, and you got to worry about manual action. And so it's like having that balance. But, you know, the smart aleck thing for me to say is just to change your business name to include keywords, because now your brand queries are your anchor text-optimized keywords.
Seth Price
Amazing. I've seen that. In some markets, it works really nicely. You know, along those lines, we're always trying to balance those things out. I'll ask you something as an agency owner, how, you know, how do you respond to people because, you know, we all are dealing with situations you will allude to this before somebody who has a budget that is below the optimum budget for a market. The analogy that I've often used would be if ask people if they've ever renovated like a rental property, and there may be a shortcut that you're willing to take as far as permitting that. You know what Gonna put drywall up without the drywall permit. But you know, when it comes to electric, yeah, I'm gonna pull a permit on that to make sure that place doesn't burn down. And that when you're doing things for yourself, there's one level of risk. But if a neighbor asks you to do something for them, you have no incentive not to pull every permit, because that great friend from down the street you barbecue with if something goes wrong, and is Oh, stop work order, you know, all of a sudden, they're not your friend, and you're being sued. So what, you know, how do you balance the, what you know, you know how to go, you know, in one direction and be very aggressive, which there are a number of people out there that will do it, particularly, you don't see it as much, but there's gonna be a lot of, I'll guarantee you this in six months, or in four months, don't pay till you're there, versus what you know, is tried and true for my legacy stuff. I want to be as clean as possible, I'll take a dip, may not be happy about it. But I'll take a dip in order to sort of wade out that that thing, when you're dealing with the psychology, and full disclosure, which I know it's easy to say, but we know that you can say something to a client, they may or may not, you know when the chips are up, it's great. But when the chips are down, I don't remember that. It's almost like you need a contract where you initial each page to show that there's full disclosure, how do you deal with that struggle?
Gyi Tsakalakis
So you know, a lot of the things that you said, you know, one use, we spent a lot of time educating, you know, out of all the lawyers. And it's funny, too, because, you know, it's, I've had the dubious distinction of wearing the titles of personal injury lawyer and SEO, like, it doesn't get any worse than that. And I can tell you that a lot of the lawyers like, especially now if you're doing this over the last decade, they're coming to me and being like, hey, I want to see what you can do to push the envelope. And I'm like, Look, I'm like, here's what we can do. But guess what I'm making no guarantee. And like you said, I'm putting it in writing, that your site's not going to be d indexed in three months, because it might work awesome for a certain amount of time. But we don't know how long and so my thing is, I think over the years, it's more for me, it's more about like, Who do I want to align myself with, and I want to align myself with lawyers that are in it for the long haul, are investing in their business, don't want to take the shortcuts. And but But again, as you mentioned, some of this is a bit of a gray area, right? And so I try to do the best I can to give some to help them make come to a decision of informed consent. But it's not always as clear. And it's back to the conversation we had before. Everyone's so frustrated, because they're like, you know, Google's saying this, but you see what you're saying does not line up with what's actually happening in the search results. And so like, Who do I trust? And I'm like, I know, believe me, it's frustrating for me too, because I can tell you, here's what Google says, Here's what my experience tells me. And here's what the search results tell me. So take your pick and I but it's education. It's finding alignment on business objectives, right? So you know, we get firms that come to us, and they're like, I don't care if we bring this domain down. It's not our main site, you know, blah, blah, I don't even know if my practice is going to be a practice area in five years. So get after it. And then we have firms that are like, Yeah, I've been doing this a long time. I just, you know, I'm in a competitive marketplace. I want someone looking over our shoulders. And so it's really, I mean, there's at the risk of not trying to dodge but there's not there's no better cure than education.
Seth Price
Agreed, I think is why you and I have been buddies for a long time.
Gyi Tsakalakis
I miss you. We can't even hang out anymore.
Seth Price
Yeah, it's been too long in person. So you know, I'll wrap up with one, uh, you know, sort of the ultimate sort of question. Google's smart, they got a lot of funds, yet local spam is still a massive problem. Let's try to unpack this, you know, peel this onion a little bit. You know, we're sitting here brand works. Reviews are now a thing. I feel like that New York Times Expo, say about the eyeglass store, set it back a while, but they're now back to a number of reviews. You know, you see some guy in Atlanta, I just read it 6000 reviews, you know, and they're there's very little policing on the upside of spam there. And then name, that the name, you know that the names still work? How is it possible that in 2020, we can't get clarity, where on any given day, I'll see two of the three listings in a major search term with spam listings that haven't, you know, almost want to say unless they're 10 reviews, that shouldn't even pop, but there's somewhat they could do it what is going on, in your opinion?
Gyi Tsakalakis
I'll tell you my viewpoint on it goes back to what we talked about at the start. They make no money on people clicking on a local map pack unless it's an ad. And so the incentive just isn't there. So they're there. You know, we know a lot of the people found the Google local team They're good people. They're trying their best. They're understaffed. It's a big problem. And yeah, I just don't think that they have the corporate will. For non, you know, the only and it's, it's interesting too because you could argue the same thing about search, right? Because search doesn't make them any money. It made his money to become Google right now that Google is a verb. Where's the incentive to police search results?
Seth Price
You know, it's funny, do you remember back when ABA started to monetize its listings, and they would bring people up the salespeople get a list of who's up, presumably, they would then call the sell you because like, it's like a drug dealer like, Oh, I love this, I want more of it. And what I am seeing in the organic is something that we have noticed in some money searches that have been there for years. And we're actually for the last two to three months, seeing a rotation, where Monday through Wednesday gets one result and Wednesday through Sunday gets another and it's consistent. It's um, it's like the stuff that you the money stuff that you personally search yourself. You're like, This is bizarre.
Gyi Tsakalakis
I remember you telling me about that. It is it is wild. You know, I hope you're right, that I hope we get some more transparency through this antitrust law.
Seth Price
I'm not even pulling, let's not hold our breath on that. We look at what we look at local, you, if I follow your argument out, it's, Hey, if I put some spam listings in that are not going to resonate. It's knocking people out who are established players who liked that drug who liked the volume, they can't get, you know, the organic is pushed down the map pack, they're now allowing spam and they're allowing it in, they know what to do to get it out clearly. And you know, when you see somebody who's brand new from a Russian domain, or somebody who was like a, you know, nonsense, but, you know, in theory, to get most things in the map pack takes aid, we are in the conversation for another day. The Sandbox seems to be a GMB effect now, where you can't just yet somehow these exact matches pull right in, is there an egalitarian sort of ethos that Google is using in order to squeeze out established players to force more into the paid area? Am I too cynical? Or is there a piece of that going on?
Gyi Tsakalakis
Oh, I consider myself pretty cynical. I don't think that there. I'm not that cynical. But I'm pretty close. There's no question that there. And I think that part of this is to it goes back to your point about the spam that once the spam comes in, I think it kind of fries the system, I think that a lot of the signaling that they use, it just doesn't get weighted, you know, and I'm sure to talk to Joe about this too. And it's something that Joe and I talk a lot about is, you know, it's not a one-to-one, if you nuke a spam listing, they like reshuffles, the deck. And so if you've got 1000s of spam listings coming in and several 100 at least trying to be nuked every day, the deck is just getting so shuffled. Now, the interesting thing about your case is consistency, right? So like it's happening at the same time. So it's hard not to start to think about like is advertising impacting his offline advertising impacting it, but in order to really draw that conclusion, we'd also have to see holistically like, what the input of Spam is, like, maybe it's also that those are the those are just hot spam days. I don't know. It's a weird thing. But, you know, again, I think for me, like you do what you can do you push the envelope where you can push it, but you know, we until we have a little bit more accountability from the platform you know, same thing with reviews. I mean, you know, the thing I would argue is consumer harm, you know, we saw this argument made in the, you know, this opioid clinic and rehab clinic, you know, there's probably all the spam in there just lead gen. You know, imagine getting on the phone thinking you're talking to a lawyer, you're talking to some lead gen site. Imagine calling I know there's an I don't know what the maybe you know about the update on this but I know in Pennsylvania there's a case where someone's suing the lawyer because they said they were misled by the fake reviews in their Google My Business pack in retaining them. So you know, there's I think there are some legitimate cases of like, questions consumer harm, and like, who's actually responsible, but you know, section 230, pretty big insulation for all the platforms. I'm not saying I think that section 230 also provides a lot of benefits to the web. But there seems like there should be some accountability by from Google to be like, you know, you're, you're providing this platform great, but at the same time, you're publishing the stuff that like there's a real chance of consumer harm here.
Seth Price
My rant is frustrating at the same time, it is our chosen lot. Any final words for our audience?
Gyi Tsakalakis
Build links, Vokes relevant local links, you know, change your firm name if you can change your firm name to something with your practice area and location in IT stuff. works, you know, get people talking, you know, find ways to build that brand up. You know, it's a long-term play if you're in a competitive spot, you know, find different channels for advertising. There are lots of different ways to advertise your practice, not just you know, as much as Seth and I love organic and local packs, diversify those business development activities. Stay safe and healthy. And Seth, thanks again for having me I can't wait to see you face to face. Absolutely.
Seth Price
This is great. Thanks so much for being here.
Gyi Tsakalakis
My pleasure.
BluShark Digital
Thank you for tuning in to the SEO insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand's online presence. episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital's website.
