Seth and Jay have a conversation with BluShark Digital President, David Brenton, to speak about the shifts in Google and the effect of core website vitals (how your pages perform, based on real-world usage data). They speak about mobile indexing and why it’s integral to be ahead of the rollout. They’re indexing everything on your mobile website because more people are using their mobile devices and this implies that you should have a mobile website that engages users in the same way on both desktop and mobile sites. David also speaks to user experience and how it affects core web vitals by user triggers that are graded differently. Considering the user journey is what is important to the site. Think about how you can improve SEO content regularly on each page of your website when the Google bot hits your site. Jay asks about the reasonable amount of content depending on landing pages, indexing, and aging as well as traffic. Determine if you should update your page to get google to crawl through your site and optimize for best effect on the search engine results page. David also touches on the impact of paid advertising and social media have on rankings.
Hello, hello, and welcome to another edition of Maximum Growth Live. I’m your host, Jay Ruane, CEO of FirmFlex, your Social Media Marketing Agency for Lawyers, as well as managing partner of Ruane Attorneys, a criminal defense and civil rights firm here in Connecticut. And with me, as always, my man, there he is, over there, and I switch it up this week because we’re doing Zoom to accommodate our guests. Seth, how are you doing this week? What’s new?
It’s good. It’s going good. It’s, uh, you know, I feel like, you know, my life is whack-a-mole, as all of ours is. And so, I’m really, really proud of our intake team, and it needed some love, and I’ve had to dive in, and it’s amazing how you can go from a pile of shit to something better, that it’s – you know, again, you work on your fundamentals, and then you turn your IOA, you know, like, “Oh, shit, this is off.” And that I, you know, it’s one of those things I know, I know, systems are everything, but the piece that I, that I’ve struggled with, is when managers don’t follow systems, and that’s been my week. When you know better, you know it’s there, and it’s not followed, and so, I feel like, you know, something I’d love to discuss over weeks is a system of systems because it’s great that those are all there, that Wiki is awesome, but what are the checks and balances, and is there a way to get like, you know, a ping. Like, our kids in school, our kids are slightly older, if they don’t turn in an assignment, we get a ping. If they don’t show to a class or they leave early or get there late, we get a ping. I wish that I had the same setup, and I think that if I were to move, it’s great that I have systems, but I need to start having more personal knowledge and accountability so I know when something so that if, I don’t, “Oh, yeah, we stopped doing that two months ago,” rather than… And again, there are things that get busy, and there are things that may get kicked a week or two, but how do you make sure that somebody is following the systems that have been created by a brilliant mind like Jay.
So this is, this is near and dear to my heart, right? Because this is where you can have all the systems in the world but your business can still fall apart if people don’t follow them. So how I’ve solved the problem, right? This is something that you know, since January, I’ve been looking at more and more deeply, and we onboarded some new attorneys and they were doing their billing right but they weren’t making file notes, and I checked with their trainer that said “Of course, I told them to do file notes,” but there were no checks and balances on that. So, what we’re doing now is we actually have an auditor. We have somebody who was doing some office management and financial stuff for me, sort of like as my assistant, and part of her role now is to randomly audit the actions of our people.
It’s so funny you say that. I’m struggling with the same thing because when I have an outsider who comes in and looks at it, it works, but, I’m doing exactly… It’s funny, too, it’s not coincidental, but that when there’s an outsider for checks and balances, but it’s so freakin frustrating because you’re paying a manager the right amount of money, the whole idea is they should be managing, but it’s like – I can tell from experience that unless I have that outside checks and balances, it’s amazing. Let me ask you a question about that. Do you think it is, if you have somebody where you’ve never seen an issue before, do you think it is more important to put those, do you put extra checks and balances where there’s a weaker manager, or is it just something that in theory should be everywhere, because then you have a bunch of piecemeal people that aren’t your main group.
Yes. This is this is a challenge, right? This is a major challenge as you start to scale your firm and grow is who, putting another body on your payroll to not necessarily produce work but to sort of check work means profit out the door. And so, it’s one of those questions. So, what I have done is I’ve tried to take a little bit of a technological approach to it. So as our viewers might not know, I know you know, I came to running a firm long before any of these Cloud-based products like Filevine, Clio, Smokeball, any of those things existed. And so, I started years ago with actually a server-based product called FileMaker, which is a database software, and we’ve been building on it ever since. I mean, we were on FileMaker 2 or 3, and now they’re up to FileMaker 20, I believe. And so, we’re, now that’s been moved to the Cloud and that type of thing. So, what we’ve decided to do is we went back to our developer and said, “We want to export certain data every week into a Google Sheet so that we can graph it, we can see,” and things like hours billed on hourly clients, number of file notes made, number of To Do’s, which is how we track things, you know, calls in the office created, and marked as done, those types of things. So we can quickly bar graph it and see, and we’re starting to see trend lines where some people are great, and then all of sudden they drop off. And what I found, when we started getting this spreadsheet, is that we had somebody who started, their work product started to dip, and two weeks later they gave notice, so they’d already made the mental decision.
I see that all the time.
Yes. They make mental decisions.
No, no, no, that’s right, if you had that data, you probably would pick up on it earlier. It’s hard to get it in real-time. You know, my current one was one of the things that one of our friends of the show, Gary Falkowitz always told me about I buy into it is listening to recorded calls. We got so busy with LSAs coming in, they stopped recording. I mean I can make it more pretty, but they stopped listening to the recordings, and there are no checks and balances to make sure that happens. And so, the question is, can I trust the team to do it or do I need to bring somebody. I’d love to make a Tuesday show where we bring a bunch of people that have scaled law firms because that’s sort of the dirty secret. It’s one thing to create the systems, it’s the second to enforce it, and how do you make sure nothing breaks off? Again, one of the struggles I’ve had of, always, but of late.
Yeah. So, what we’re going to do today is actually bring somebody in who you know well. I’ve known him for years, I knew him when he was the intern at Price Benowitz.
He showed up over a decade ago and came in from AU, showed up. I remember him sitting at our old dinky office in a chair, waiting for his first day, and he has made his way from intern to marketing manager to marketing director to now the president of BluShark, and it makes going to work every day that much more exciting. And not only on the SEO side, which we’ll talk about today, and, you know, he has figured out in a way I never could the cultural half of the firm, of BluShark. And every time I read a book, we’re gonna have, you know, we have a great guest of the show, Verne Harnish, who did Scaling Up, and his book was influential to Strategic Coach and a bunch of other organizations that are out there, that, you know, every time I look, I’m like, “Man, we’re doing so much of this stuff.” And it’s amazing how somebody who’s homegrown without all of the poisons that sort of come into a legacy organization when you build it right from the ground up, it’s really been an amazing thing to watch. So I’d love to bring him in, so we can talk, geek out on SEO.
Yes, I had some questions. And folks, this came from me reading stuff online, texting Seth saying, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And him saying, “I don’t have an answer, but you know, who would, Brenton would have the answers.” So, that’s why I said, well, we got to get them on the show because there’s some stuff here that I think we need to talk about. Just so lawyers who are trying to scale have an idea of what’s coming down the line. You know, none of us know what’s coming two or three months down the line for the most part. I mean, we are now over a year after COVID hit, but if we could go back to January 2020, I got a feeling all of us would act differently, knowing what was coming in March. Well, we’re at a point now where Google will send out some signals about what they say is coming down the line and it’s important for us to be aware of those things and act appropriately. So, that’s why I wanted to get him on the show. So, what we’re going to do now is we’re going to take a quick break, you’ll hear from our sponsors, and then when we come back, we’re gonna have David Brenton of BluShark to geek out over SEO and talk about some of the things that really matter going forward over the next six months. So, folks hang tight, we’ll be right back with more Maximum Growth Live.
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In this world today, if you want to grow your business, you want to grow your firm, you want to take on more cases make a bigger impact, you have to have a digital blueprint. Statistically, throughout the time that we’ve been working with BluShark Digital, our law firm, the Atlanta Divorce Law Group, grew by over 1400%. They truly understand where we’re headed and how we want to get there. I have a team in BluShark digital that I feel like has my back.
And we’re back, folks, and we’re back with a very special guest. This week, we have David Brenton of BluShark Digital. Now I’ve known David for a long time. In fact, I’ve known him so long that I actually know his first name because everyone just calls him Brenton. But in reality, he is not hidden away in the basement of a Washington, DC Row House where he gets beaten with rubber hoses and waterboarded. Although he looks like he’s been in custody for a long, long time, he’s just been hanging out at home during COVID, focusing on SEO as he does as the president of BluShark Digital. David, thank you so much for being with us here today. And you know, we had you on the show about six months ago and we thought it was time to bring you back on and talk a little bit about some things that have changed recently, things that are becoming more important to people in digital marketing because as we all know, this stuff changes week to week, month to month, you stay abreast of everything and I’ve always loved geeking out with you and talking about this stuff. So welcome to the show.
Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
So let’s talk about the first thing that came up that I actually sent a message to Seth and said, “We need to address this on the show because I think it’s a big deal going forward,” and that is coming in May I believe, you can correct me if I’m wrong, Google is going to mobile. Is it mobile-only indexing? Well, I know mobile has become an important part of how they view websites and that type of thing, but let’s talk a little bit about what mobile means to Google and why it’s so important to be ahead of the curve for this May rollout. Can you tell us about that?
Yes for sure, for sure. So the May rollout is actually a completion of a rollout that’s already been occurring for the past three-ish years or even sometimes longer. And really what it is, it’s the rollout of what they call the mobile-first index. And what that means is that they’re going to index everything on your mobile website before and sometimes instead of everything on your desktop property. So if on my desktop site, I have content that doesn’t translate over to my mobile site, that content isn’t necessarily going to get indexed. And really, the thought process being, here, is everyone’s on a mobile phone. You should have a website that functions both on desktop and mobile relays the same information, engages the user in the same way, and everything else. So really, what it comes down to is making sure that your mobile site, everything you want to be indexed properly on Google, is on that mobile device or mobile site, if you will, and is also on the desktop sites, so there’s no confusion at what we do. Oh, sorry, go ahead.
Well, so I want to take a step back and really unpack this a little because I think it’s important to know. So, like, 15 years ago, mobile sites were irrelevant, right? I mean, nobody really had that, and then people started having a separate mobile version of their website and their regular website, and then came responsive design. Can you kind of walk us through the last decade or so, so people can have a better understanding if they’re not really familiar with this stuff?
Yes, absolutely. So back in the day, you could have an MDot site, and that’s what they were like MDot, whatever your URL was, and it was actually a separate coded property, separate database, everything else. The problem, and some of these still exist, a lot of like big corporate websites, they have separate mobile properties that are completely separate from the desktop sites. But really, with smaller websites what it came down to is indexing is a lot more difficult because you’re indexing two different properties and they sometimes conflict. So really, the evolution then was like, “Well, how can I get my mobile site to be the exact same as my desktop site?” and that’s where the responsive design came in. And responsive designs are essentially designs that respond to whatever device or browser you’re pulling up the site on. So, if it’s on a desktop, they’re going to get it properly on a desktop, it shrinks down to a tablet, it shrinks down to a phone. And that type of website is what we build and what really Google likes because there’s simply– again, it’s the exact same thing. I’m getting them to index the same thing that’s on my desktop site as my mobile site. There’s very, very little room for confusion and kind of that whole thing.
You know, what’s so crazy is as a few years ago, I remember, Google did a roadshow, literally right around the corner from the office, and they were pushing these mobile-only websites. They had a preferred partner that was there being featured by Google. And I think a lot of it had to do with the pre-app world. The apps have taken away some of that, where if you want something that has basic information, and you don’t do anything else, they have an app. But if you’re going to be optimizing a website, you have no choice really today but to create a great website that is, has a responsive design so that it works everywhere. And things that, Brent, we’ve talked about over the years, is making sure that when you go over, now it’s more important than ever, that you’re not sitting down with your team around a desktop-only, but literally have a droid and an iPhone out to see how is this looking, and you know, what issues are we seeing there? What’s the environment on mobile like because that’s where everybody is.
Exactly, exactly. That’s where I think more than 70% of the traffic is coming from at this point, if not higher. And again, it really just translates from a Google and rankings perspective, is making, making sure everything’s consistent. If they’re indexing everything consistently on my mobile phone and on my desktop site, we’re going to be in good shape.
So now – so just to reiterate, it’s not breaking news, this is something that, you know, SEOs have been working on for years, but if you, have you sort of been doing it yourself and you’ve had a separate mobile site, this is the wakeup call saying, “Hey, this is your third, fourth, fifth, you know, final warning, you better make sure that you’re not ignoring the mobile site because you know, the gig is up.”
Yes, definitely. I think that’s something that everyone needs to sort of be aware of make sure that you’re looking on your phone and checking out your site and make sure that things are loading properly. But in addition to this, there is something called core web vitals, I think it was. I read a blog about it, and it talks about like page load speed, waterfall, not Niagra, that type of stuff. And it’s sort of like we’re seeing with the Google screen with the checkmark, I guess Google is going to start telling people if a website has good core web vitals, can you talk a little bit about that, and explain that to us so that we have a better understanding of it?
Yeah, absolutely. And this kind of ties into what the, what a lot of us are thinking the next core algorithm update is going to be about. And whenever they do a core, it’s always fundamentally changing the ranking factors that they consider to be important. And really, with, it really ties into page speed and user experience more than anything else. And these two things have always been intricately twined. If your site is slow, people are going to leave, it’s not going to convert. And Google likes things that are fast, just generally. So the update that we are kind of foreseeing here in the future is more of a looking at not only the vitals of a property, how quickly it loads, if it’s secure, et cetera, et cetera, but also how users are actually interacting with the site, and how they’re interacting with it. Meaning, I don’t – not necessarily how quickly that first load is when someone hits it for the first time, but if they want to navigate to a different page, and I click a menu, and it takes long to load, and they don’t want to go forward anymore, then you know, it took too long, whatever I’m bouncing off and go – you know, leaving the site. If they can’t take that further action, and that, again, the behavioral signals that Google’s always tracked through analytics, but hasn’t necessarily seen as, as important, these things are now going to become very, very important. How deep people are clicking through, how easy it is for them to click through, especially on mobile devices, and not even just that first load. It’s the load throughout the journey, and if those elements that throughout that journey aren’t necessarily, again, up to stuff then it’s, the property isn’t going to rank as well as it should.
Do you think this is close to sort of what we saw with security with the HTTPS, where, you know, you basically – they were saying, “Hey, Google wants this behavior,” for a while they told you to get it, and then they said your site’s not secure. They’re essentially going to say, “You know, we’ve been telling you to get your site speed up, we’ve been telling you to make sure it’s a good user experience, if you don’t, we’re going to sort of have a threshold. And if you don’t pay attention and aren’t curating your site, we’re going to let the public know what experience they should expect.”
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think, also, it’s a more intricate rollout of the algorithmic triggers, if you will, and the user triggers that they’re interpreting, that are going to be weighted differently, meaning that the algorithm is much more advanced than it ever was. And it’s picking up on user behavior and traffic much more than it ever had. Even with all these other updates that have rolled out, everything else that we’ve – you guys have talked about on the show. So really, what this comes down to, is they’re now looking at that journey of the user on a site. We used to look at who’s getting there and how they got there, but now we’re also going to interpret that third, fourth, fifth action. And if it is consistent and good throughout, you’re going to be in a good place, but you also have to give us the opportunity to do that, through linking, you know, everything else. There are different things that you can get them to do to get them deeper onto the property. But to your point that, Seth, yes, in a similar way, they’ve been telling us like, “Hey, these are the vitals, you should care about these a lot,” but what’s going to be a step above those vitals and what’s going to put you ahead of that curve is thinking about that user journey. Because those are the signals that are going to be very, very important that they’re not going to tell us about. They’ll tell us the vitals but again, paying attention to the behavior of the user as they go through the site is what’s going to become really, really important.
You know, do you think that as this rolls out, something we always talked about, and we’ve talked about on the show, the difference between like a 2,500-word page versus a 500-word page? And the idea that now, do you think the idea that bringing people throughout the site and having a journey that takes them into the site, are there certain things that you think that will be, that you might before not have cared about which way it went, but that getting sort of additional touchpoints to Google is going to become more and more important?
Yes, and no, to a certain extent. Really, what it comes down to is like on a 2,500-word page, if that page is static enough and delivering good information, and I’m getting signals from that page, meaning Google is getting signals from that page, that are positive, people are actually going, reading through it, they’re spending a lot of time on it, it’s rational user behavior. That’s not necessarily going to be penalized if you will. That being said, if they’re not spending a whole lot of time on that page, and it makes, it is an opportunity for them to click deeper, yes, you should transition and figure that out. But from an SEO perspective, and what you should be thinking about, is how my content and my pages are really interacting with my users, and how can I make that experience better? If it’s cutting words and making them deeper, if it’s changing around my linking, just making sure you’re looking at, again, how users are really interacting with a specific page. Not just my homepage, but the pages that get traffic.
So, I got a question, since you brought it up. We hear a lot about the Googlebot and how it hits your site and indexes your site and that type of thing. And this is a question, that you often hear “content, content, content” at every digital marketing seminar you go to. What is a reasonable, and I say reasonable because not every lawyer out there has copywriters on staff, but what is a reasonable amount of content that would keep the Googlebot interested and returning to your site and indexing it? I mean, should people be doing a page a day, a page a month, somewhere in between? What do you think is the right amount of content that a lawyer should be creating on a regular basis?
Literally just reminiscing of our coffee yesterday, we just had a big deep dive on that.
Yes, we just talked about it, and I think it depends on what you have. If you have a brand new website, you need to have pages on it, you need to get landing pages. Those pages need to sit there, they need to index, they need age, and Google needs to get familiar with it, and traffic needs to get familiar with it to get them to rank. If I have a 50, 75, 80-page website, and I have my main practice areas and my main locations, there isn’t necessarily a need to add a page a day for the sake of adding a page a day. Where is your time better spent? Is it updating these other landing pages that you have that get traffic, with new informational content? Is it writing new Meta-descriptions and title tags that are going to get people to click through from the SERP? Are those – there are a lot of other things you can do to a page to get Google to crawl it and see that you’re active on it. Adding internal links to new pages that you did. These are all – that’s a user signal, “Hey, click through on this, you know this link to this other page,” and the bots reading it crawling it and getting familiar with the terms around it. So it’s more of an analysis and internal question. Like, what do I have of the content that I have? Do I have practice area pages and landing pages, or do I just have blogs that are regurgitated news? If I have that, that’s not, you know, you need to get the landing pages. That’s the number one thing. But once you have that, how deep do you want to go on a certain topic? If you just want car wrecks, you need to write 20, 30 pages on car wrecks, especially if you’re in a competitive market. If you just want DUIs, same concept. But it’s really again, not necessarily a volume of how much, it’s analyzing what you have, analyzing what the competition has, and thinking about where you want to niche down and spend your time. And if you have a decent library, those updates don’t matter. They matter a lot, and adding 100 words, 150 words to a 500-word page, that’s good stuff. That’s going to, you know, Google is going to crawl it, they’re going to re-index that page, reindex that new content, etcetera.
Would you consider that you keep the page and add the 2021 update at the bottom of the paragraph, so then next year, come back, 2022 update? Or do you reformat the entire text with you know, all new copy, if people are, if there are people who are using that page? What’s a better approach?
Definitely to re-, not necessarily reformat, but insert new language into the existing page without calling it an update. And even thinking about it changing around your headings, putting in questions, the SERP, search engine result page changes a lot. And there are different mechanisms you can use to capture more real estate. Introducing, you know, FAQs on to some of these practice area pages or these landing pages, and marking them up correctly, could result in FAQ markup on the SERP. But the point is that really, it comes down to adding more information that’s going to add value to the page. That shouldn’t be an update about, generally, if there’s an update to the law, absolutely that should be in there, but I’m really thinking about how you can add more substance to a page that already gets traffic that’s going to engage people.
Gotcha. This is all good stuff. For the people out there, you keep saying SERP. What does does SERP mean?
That means search engine result page. What you actually see when you type in a query. And again, those things are changing constantly. Always pay attention to what the SERP looks like because you can think about it and capture a lot more real estate that way.
So I have another question for you, and it may cause you to, I don’t know, it may be controversial in the SEO industry. But I heard at a seminar, probably last year, well, a year before last because I didn’t go anywhere in the last 12 months, but that there really is no more page one. That there are billions and billions of page ones that Google has out there, but every day I seem to get solicitations from SEO vendors saying we guarantee page one placement. So can you talk to me a little bit about what an SEO can do and what they promise but can’t necessarily do? Because I think it’s important for our listeners and our viewers to get an understanding of what the actual science behind SEO is rather than, you know, people who just sell smoke because we’ve all had friends who signed contracts and paid out, you know, tens of thousands of dollars and really achieved nothing.
Yeah, no, for sure. And really, the fundamental thing is that SEO takes time. And you can signal to Google as much as you want but it is something that you’re, thinking of Google almost is something that’s an existential thing. It takes time to get familiar with you. It takes time to understand you. It takes time to trust you. It takes time for it to see you as an authority. So any SEO company that says, “I’m gonna rank you in three to four or five months, even six months,” you’re pushing it a lot because unless you have that – go ahead.
For two reasons, right? There are two reasons why it’s bullshit, right? One is, it probably won’t happen and they’re just a sales technique, or secondly they do, and they’re using techniques that you wouldn’t want that are going to hurt your brand. Assuming it’s not a throwaway site, it’s the URL you want to use for the future, or have used for years, and then somebody takes it. It’s almost like, Jay, if you’re renovating an apartment, and somebody says “I can do it for $2,000.” Well, they’re not calling an electrician, they’re not bringing in a plumber, they’re doing everything themselves. So when there’s a fire in the, and the building burns down, and your apartment is responsible for that, then you know that you’ve caused all that damage because they didn’t go pull the proper permits and get the right person to do it. So there are spammy techniques that can skyrocket something, but they’re not going to last generally, and that’s sort of the pull and tug. So (a) it probably won’t happen but (b) if it does, be careful what you wish for because the whole house of cards could come crumbling down, and it’s gonna take a lot, a lot more to build that back up.
Absolutely. Yep. And going back to it again, a good SEO campaign, like I said, it comes down to time, it comes down to build-out, making sure that you can tell Google this is everything that I do and what I want to be seen to do and getting them to understand that. To Seth’s points, I did an experiment, literally. Where we got a URL, a brand new URL, and I bought, like $1,000 worth of links with the exact match anchor text for the term I wanted to rank for. It ranked within a month or two at most, and then it was gone in the fourth month because it got a penalty and Google ripped it down. So at the end of the day, yes, sure, they might be able to do it but to Seth’s point, it’s going to torpedo your URL and make you start all over again. So anyone who says that they can rank you in a short period of time is probably lying to you, unless you, again have something that’s already established and built, and they’re going to put some extra, extra secret sauce on but that’s probably the biggest thing I would say is to be careful of, just generally from any SEO company. It takes time.
So really, I mean, now that you’ve said that, that gets the wheels spinning. So if there’s all of a sudden, like a pharmaceutical industry drug comes out as being terribly bad, it might be worth putting, spinning up a brand new site, getting a ton of stuff, knowing that you’re looking to grab market share in those first three months, and then it’s going to disappear and that’s okay. I mean, that could be a business tactic. But if you’re going to be practicing law in your community for the next 20 years, doing this is going to crush you, rather than build you up slowly.
Absolutely, yeah. It’s like the Bitcoin example. A lot of Bitcoins, like these other coins that people created, a lot of them are SEO people, and they literally launch websites, get traffic to it, you have a bunch of people buysthese coins that didn’t actually exist, and then sell them and they didn’t actually exist. It was a scam. So absolutely, you can easily rank a property, but to have it stick and to really build a brand, which you’re trying to keep and build over time, it has to be done strategically and smartly. And again, Google is something that is incredibly smart. They are picking up on everything. And the more that we can tell them what we do, again, the better off you’re going to be.
One thing I’d love you to talk about Brenton, because Jay has done a lot with paid search over the years, you know, and we sort of go back and forth because he, I’ve always said, imagine if he had really built out full SEO. But one of the advantages of paid search, which I think has benefited Jay tremendously, has been the fact that there’s this dirty secret, that there is a correlation between paid search and organic results. Can you touch on that a little bit?
Yes, yes, of course, they will, of course, never come out and say that but there is, again, Google is very smart and it’s picking up on traffic and user behavior. That you’re buying the traffic and paid. You’re, they’re seeing exactly what keywords people are searching on, they’re seeing exactly what they click, how long they’re spending on your site, those factors all go into your ads, your ad scores, and things of that nature. And so, to say that they’re not interpreting that behavior and thinking about it, I don’t necessarily buy it. I mean, they gotta be thinking about it.
More than that, like they could. If you go back to the old, Jay is an old news guy, right? You had your news division, and you had your advertising. And in the old days, those two never met. Different floors. If somebody from advertising came to the news, they rang a bell, it was a big, big distinction. The world is blurred, especially on the web but you know. If Google, again, do no evil, they could easily segment out that paid traffic, but we can tell from our testing and our experience that a paid, that a paid campaign into a new site will pop somebody out of the sandbox, sort of the purgatory you’re left in with a new website much, much more quickly than if you just left a site out there, let it index through normal. You know, you’re on page seven, you’re on page five, it would take nine months over-under for something to pop sometimes as much as a year. With a paid campaign, it could go as low as three or four months.
Yes. And again, part of it is that familiarity. Google wants to get familiar with you. And so, if you’re driving good, relevant traffic, and they’re engaging with your site, and they’re calling, and it’s actually good, then yes, it absolutely helps kind of establish that familiarity with your brand because you’re literally buying the traffic and they’re seeing it. So it can expedite the process. Again, they’ll never come out and say it, how much you have to spend, how much traffic, like buying $5000 worth of ads, is that going to move the needle for you in a competitive market? Probably not, but it depends on how much money you actually put into driving the traffic. And yes, theoretically, they would get more familiar with you and be more willing to show you.
Let me ask you this, and you may not have an answer, but I figured since I’m the social guy, I’m going to ask it. Social signals, links, and people coming in from social sites, like Facebook, like TikTok like, you know, like, whatever, do those have any rankings? Do those have any impact on rankings, if a lot of people are coming from these social sites, and not from the Google search bar, you know. What do you think about that? Does that have any impact?
Very good question. I can give you a short answer as well as a future answer. Our future answer, we’re running a test right now, I’m trying to figure out if I drive social traffic through paid ads to a specific practice area page, does it move up in the rankings, and how much do I actually have to spend to do so? So we’ll report back on that later. The answer to the question, though, to start with is traffic, that is relevant traffic, that is good traffic, that is engaging traffic to the property is always positive and Google sees that as positive. Getting social signals like likes and shares on a specific page, that’s where it kind of gets a little bit more gray. I’m not necessarily convinced that that passes link equity through. That being said, if that social post gets a bunch of traffic, and that traffic actually sits on your site, through a scholarship campaign, or even any piece of engaging content for that matter, that’s going to carry some more weight. So I wouldn’t – I don’t necessarily buy it right now, at least, that more likes and shares correlate with higher Google rankings. I do think that there is benefit in making sure you’re on those platforms and that the traffic that you’re getting from those platforms does matter, especially the pages in which it’s resolving on and if you can get them to get even deeper on the site, it’s a home run because that’s even further.
Get you – I mean the key is, it’s great that you have that on their own social platform, but the proof of concept is actually the traffic that makes it to the website.
Yes, in theory.
Awesome. Awesome. Well, David, thank you so much for coming to the show. I really appreciate everything that you give. You know, this knowledge is not something that any lawyer who isn’t deep in on SEO and search can ever get without, you know, spending ungodly amounts of hours that most of our listeners and audience just simply don’t have. So having somebody that we can turn to, to answer these questions, and I’ll be honest, I got a little freaked out about the core web vitals saying, I’m doing speed tests of my sites, and they’re not loading as fast as I would like, and I’m thinking that is that gonna punish me? So you know, we’re working on that. And I’m glad to see that we have a little bit of time and that’s all going to matter. So it’s something that we should be paying attention to. So thanks for your advice today.
Yes, appreciate you guys having me. Thank you so much.
Awesome.
Prison guards following me, I’m going to head out.
Alright, man, thank you so much. We’ll see you again in another six months or so, you can update us on the post-COVID world at that point.
Alright, sounds good.
Take it easy. Bye.
Alright, Seth, I mean, that was some good stuff from Brenton. I know, you have him chained in that basement but he really stays abreast of these things and it’s important, I think, for lawyers that are out there to just have a passing knowledge. I mean, they don’t need to go deep in the weeds like some people do. I mean, I go deep in the weeds because I’m a dork. But it’s just important I think to have a better understanding of how big G (Google) treats our websites so that we know if we’re getting pitch services or if we want to work on our own site, we can do the things that are actually going to move the needle, and not just waste time, waste effort, waste money. What do you think?
Absolutely. The fundamentals have been there for quite a while, right? We talk about it all the time on this show and when I speak publicly. High-quality content, authoritative links, well-coded site, you know, focus on local and reviews, all those things. And what I love is when you do those things, right, and these algorithm updates come, I almost look forward to them. There’s always a fear because you’ll never know, there’s the risk factor. But over time, every time there’s an algorithm update, generally, 98 out of 100 properties are improved who are following these techniques. And if they’re not, it’ll ping back on the next one. And so, I look at this with the things we’re talking about today, almost like, and you’re old enough to remember this and you’ve seen this, was when spammy links were the rage. And Google said don’t do it, don’t do it, and then eventually the hammer came down. Same with secured sites, go get your certificate, right? They said get it, it’s 20 bucks, go do it, and if you didn’t do it, all of a sudden your site said non-secure. I think that’s what we’re seeing right now. It’s like, look, will every site always be super fast or is your site going to drop every once in a while? Don’t freak out. It’s a living, breathing organism. There are going to be moments where the site gets slower, you know. But if you’re not cultivating a good user experience with fast load times, and with all the other things that they’re asking for, it’s… they’re saying it’s no longer okay to ignore mobile. It hasn’t been for a long time but they’re saying, “Hey, the Gig is up. Now it’s going to count.” And I think that frankly, they’ve waited longer than they expected on this, this was dragged out, it’s not for us, SEO geeks, we’ve been doing this for years but they with COVID, they’ve been reticent to do anything major. And at some point, they’re going to be like, “Okay, we’ve gotten ourselves through COVID, we can make it we can make a change without everybody screaming that you’re hurting businesses during COVID.”
Yes, you know, the thing that’s really interesting to me is, and I still see it, I’ll go look for a lawyer who’s called me, and I need to call them back and, or I need to email them something, and I go on their website, and it’s not secure, and I get that this caution, this website might not be secure. And I just think, you know, if you do nothing else, after today’s show, go to your website and make sure that it’s secure because that is – and it’s amazing how many lawyers…
It’s $20.00 and you can install it.
Right.
and if you can’t, call me or text me, I’ll have our team put it in for you. It’s…
Yes, it’s that important.
And it’s $20.00 and it knocks you out if you don’t have it.
Yes. And I mean, you can – you’re just not going to rank it.
Forget about ranking organically. It’s when somebody comes on a referral, and they see that, they may not go to the site. That’s the killer. So not only have you learned you lost your organic potential, and if you don’t have that certificate, you’re probably not playing a big SEO game, but, you know, let’s say you’re doing it by yourself, like, make sure that’s the first checkbox and then even if it isn’t, even if you’re not playing the SEO game at all, you just don’t want the referral’s person to come there and say, “I don’t want to deal with this.” If you can’t do that, right, what else is not going right at your firm?
Exactly, exactly. Alright, folks, so that’s going to do it for us today here at Maximum Growth Live. We want to thank you for being with us. Of course, you can always catch our show live here on Facebook every Tuesday, every Thursday, and if you ever want to catch us, any of our back shows, go to the video section of our Facebook page, facebook.com/maximumgrowthlive and you can watch all of the videos. We’ve got, now I think we’re over 70 or so shows that we have up in our video tab, which is really cool because you can sort of go back and re-watch the things that interests you, every one has a description. So, it’s great. Of course, you can always catch our show syndicated on Maximum Lawyer Media, we’re available as part of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast family, they release our shows every week. So if you’re listening there, please come on over to our Facebook page and you could watch the shows live. Of course, Seth also has, as part of the BluShark Digital page, a series called SEO Insider. And if you like to geek out over this stuff, a great opportunity to check out some of the videos that he does. It’s not legal-specific, he actually does interviews of some of the market leaders and thought leaders in the SEO space, which is really sort of interesting. We’ve actually played a couple of the episodes here on the show, because it matters to the small service business community, but there are some really good nuggets that you can get out of those interviews. And of course, if you want to talk about systems, as you know, I love to do it. Please join our “Systemising Your Law Firm for Growth” Facebook group, where we talk all about different systems that you can add to your practice to make your systems and make your practice function smoother and without your direct involvement. But with that, we’re going to leave you today. Thank you so much for being with us. Seth, any parting words?
No. Have a great week, kick-ass, and we’ll see you next time.
All right, folks. That’s it from Seth. I’m Jay Ruane. He’s Seth Price of BluShark digital. I’m from FirmFlex. If you ever need us, please drop us a line down below or send us a DM. We’re here to help you out. Have a great day. We’ll talk to you soon. Take it easy, bye for now.
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