In this episode, Seth and Jay interview Sean Domnick about creating a firm with others when you already have an established practice and the role of vision for both business and personal life in the creation of the new firm. Also, David Brenton of BluShark talks “near me” on digital search.
Hello, hello and welcome to Maximum Growth Live. My name is Jay Ruane, I am your host, I am the CEO of Firm Flex, which is social media marketing for lawyers, as well as the managing partner of Ruane Attorneys in Connecticut. And with me, as always is my good friend down in DC, the CEO of BluShark Digital, which is an SEO firm for lawyers, as well as Price Benowitz Managing Partner. Seth, there he is over there. How are you doing today, Seth?
Doing? Well, we live in interesting times. Jay, we live in interesting times.
We are you know; we’re still sort of reeling from a couple of days ago from that, from that debate debacle. And we were talking about it before we came on air. We’re not going to bore you guys with our perspective on it. But you know, something else happened this week. Seth, I want to talk to you a little bit about it, because we talked about it on the Tuesday show. I’m having some trouble with this Google Local Services. And I want to explain what happened because for many of our viewers and listeners out there, this could be something that happens to them. So, as you know, I got in early, you know, back in August, as soon as they open it up for lawyers, I said, hey, let me let me get my stuff. And I was on top of it. It took me a while to go through the background check and all that stuff. And then we’re cranking we’re getting we’re getting leads, they’re converting, I’m loving it, everything’s great. And then about five days ago, silence. And I’m like, well, that’s strange. What happened there. So, I try to log into the dashboard to see what’s going on my phone. I’m logging in just fine. There are just no new leads. So, I’m like, something does feel right, you know, there’s something going on. So, I tried to log in on desktop. And when I will try to log in on desktop, I get kicked back out to the verification stage. I’m like, whoa, I’ve passed verification here.
And that was not an easy thing. Right? No, no. Shell role or client getting people through you’re lucky got through early. It is a lot of it takes a lot of elbow grease to get yourself through.
Yeah, exactly. And I jumped through all the hoops. You know, I’ve got a lot of lawyers, I know you’ve got a lot of lawyers. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re just the solo, right? It’s just you lot more riding on it if you’re just a solo, but you know, I had to go through, I’ve got lawyers in different states, I have to figure all that stuff out. So, I finally I’m like, okay, I got to get on the phone with them. Because it’s something doesn’t make sense. So, I call them up, I get told, hey, the guy you need to talk to he’s left for the day, which blows my mind that there’s maybe one guy for me to talk to. So, they’re like, so we see some notes here in the file, by the way, you told us in 2005, not to call you for anything. So, you’re on our Do Not Call list. Do you want to take that off? So, then I have to go through this whole rigmarole of getting off of do not call this for Google. I don’t remember ever signing up for that I get calls from their vendors all the time. The people who try to up your juice your pay per click campaign. So, I don’t get it. And so, they’re like, okay, fine, leave him a message, we’ll call you back. I get nothing. 24 hours pass. I’m like, I got to get on the phone with these people. I don’t know what’s going on. Sure enough, I get on the phone. They’re like, oh, we were just sending you an email, the person who needs to talk to his left for the day again. But he emails you check your email. I checked my email. And there’s an email from him saying, yes, we see that you made it through all the steps. However, we were unable to validate any of the law licenses of any of your lawyers, because we looked on this website and none of you guys are on this website. And I look, and the website they’re pointing to me is a Bar Association website. It’s not the state of Connecticut. It’s not the licensing authority in the state of Connecticut. It has nothing to do it’s a fraternal organization. Right big organization.
You are summing up in a nutshell, the utter frustration, you know, with COVID, GMB support shut down. Now it’s on life support, you know, they’re doing this this is clearly a money grab, right. Lawyers already are verified by the bar. Like it isn’t not the same thing as Locksmiths or Home Improvements where there’s like a bunch of rogue people out there. And the fact that you’re seeing this shows you how rinky dink it is Google which controls all of our business lives to a certain extent is basically does not even understand what is real and what is voluntary. And it just it’s utterly frustrating. We’ve seen it over and over people that should be in aren’t in yet. You know the background check kicking things back for nonsensical reason. The background checks in general are a pain, but the idea that they’re doing this in mass and giving people an unfair advantage who get in early. I mean, again, it’s not going to make or break anybody it’s four or five extra cases you got God bless you, but that but that’d be said it is a process. And it look at some point this is the thing, Google have an antitrust issue. You know, there’s really no that the issue has been under Trump that’s not going to be there and or Obama, it was all Google money supporting it, you know, Obama there, all they have to do is what their old model used to be, which is don’t do any evil, right? You know, and that when you’re doing this, and you’re making people jump through absurd hoops, it’s just completely infuriating. And when you when you know full well, that what you’re trying to do is get yourself in position to take more advertising dollars per search. Is that much more frustrating?
Yeah. And you know, what’s interesting is that, you know, a couple of days ago, before I ran into this problem, it’s like, my year of problems with Google services, right? The only thing that seems to work without a problem is pay per click where I’m giving them, you know, $20,000 to $35,000 a month in Pay Per Click, that works swimmingly, right, that’s no problem. But it’s interesting, I ran some searches for practice areas where I’m not advertising and local services. And I saw one law firm, have all three slots. And I’m thinking, wow! That’s kind of a bold move, you know, at least with pay per click, like, you got one slot, and maybe somebody else gets the other. But for these local services, the way they have it set up right now.
It’s very, it’s clunky, and it’s not, it’ll get there Google, you know, they’ll spend the money to get it there. But living through it not not a lot of fun. But I think we’ve just put in perspective that those that got in, they’re getting, a handful of cases, that’s awesome. Happy for them, but it’s not going to make or break your year, you’ll get in Google has the incentive, because remember, once they get everybody in, that’s then a second stream of revenue beyond pay per click for them in the legal space. And that’s what they’re trying to do. Like everything they’ve done is trying to get people not to leave their screen, meaning whether it’s the GMB now, it’s preferred ads, they are playing hardball and the lead gen people, you know getting
They definitely are. And that that brings me up to a good topic and something that I want you to think about. So, we could talk about it next Tuesday. Because I think it’s something that we all have to sort of wrap our heads around. Now, our competitors aren’t necessarily the law firm down the street. Now, our competitor is Google. And that’s really who we’re competing with. Because they own the real estate.
You see it in the hotel space, right? That the hotel, rather than going directly to the hotel, you now have all these different third parties. And then Google is basically putting people up there in a marketplace where they are getting cuts, it is unbelievable. So yes, we have that. And then, you know, if you want to really have your head hurt, you have the influx of outside money into states like Arizona, and Utah, and possibly furthers to come like California, that is going to be an additional front. So, it is never boring in our game. And that I think staying alert, awake, and continuing to be able to pivot very, very important.
All right, awesome. So what we’re going to do now is we’re going to actually tee up our interview, because we’ve got a great one today. Set tell us who we have with us today, and a little bit about some background so our viewers can be ready to go.
Sure, Sean Domnick, awesome lawyer have known him for years, he put together not only is he Secretary of AAJ, and will, God Willing someday be president in a couple years. But he has put together a really powerhouse firm in the Palm Beach area with three dynamic partners. And what I’m excited to hear about today is how he pulled that off, they had three people who were each rockstars in their own right and were able to bring them together to create something where the I believe we’re going to find out that the actual creation is much greater than the sum of each of those guys individually. So excited. Let’s get Sean brought in so we can maximize our time with him.
Awesome. Let’s do that. So, we’ll go right to our sponsors. Couple quick messages. I’ll bring up Sean, and then we’ll be able to take it from there. So, hang tight, folks, we’ll be right back with this edition of the Maximum Growth Live interview.
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Sean, great to have you here. Not only is Sean, one of my favorite lawyers, AAJ leadership, future president of AAJ. But the reason we wanted you here today, Sean, was we wanted to talk to you about how you pulled off what I think is just incredible, where you took three amazing talents in your region, and brought them together to create one powerhouse firm.
Hi, Seth. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you know, trying to merge together to existing firms is actually harder than starting something from scratch. And looking forward to talking to you about because I’ve done both in my career.
We’ll start with that, because you know, it’s pretty cool. What you’ve created what you have right now, I’m sure other earlier formations were very fulfilling. But for a lot of our listeners, they’re sitting there many solos, maybe with a partner, but how did you know three distinct personalities bring that together is not nothing, especially when they’re playing at the level that you guys play at? Walk me through? Is this sort of, did you do this consciously? Was this an opportunity to fell in your lap? How did you go about creating dominant Cunningham & Whalenn.
All three of us have known each other for many years and had talked about the ability to work together over time, but the moment just had never been right. And finally, that opportunity came. And, you know, when we knew each other’s work ethic, we knew each other’s reputation, we knew each other’s ethics, which is so important. We knew each other’s priorities and our commitment. For example, one of the important things was that we were all committed to organizations like AAJ and FJA because those things take a lot of time and a lot of resources. So, if everybody’s not on the same page with fundamental things like that, then you really can’t move forward. So, you know, the first thing is to sit down and have a discussion about what are your goals? What are your hopes? What are your dreams? What do you want to accomplish? As you go forward, over the next phase of your legal career is. So, we sat down and probably had three or four conversations that were really these general conversations about what it was that we were looking to get out of the law, what we were looking to get out of practice, individually, why it is that we wanted to work together, what was it that was motivating each of us to take this step? So, we had those types of conversations at the very beginning.
What you know, each of you guys are known as great practitioners’ trailers in your own right. How did you decide how to divide up all that other work, which has to go on, you know, and make sure that nothing went without, you know, a partner overseeing it?
Well, each of us have different strengths. And each of us have different weaknesses. And so, it was a matter of identifying people’s different strengths and different weaknesses, and then sort of assigning that area of responsibility to that person. And then the other thing that we did that was that was so important, is that we’re about a ten lawyer firm is that we hired a person that we all had great confidence in to be our strategic planner, and help us make sure that we were doing the things that we needed to do in order to move forward and making sure that we had a structure that we needed to have, making sure that we created a firm ethos that everybody from the person that when you walked in the door, all through all of the staff and through all of the lawyers that we all shared that same commitment. It was there, so, it was really a lot of discussion about those types of concepts that then okay, now how are we going to put this into reality in an act off of it?
Did you have an outside consultant or is this an in house person who worked on the strategic planning with you?
That was in-house on the strategic planning. What we did at the beginning of the outside consultant phase is we’re all friends, but this is business, and we’re lawyers get themselves in trouble on business when they’re working with friends, is to forget that there’s the business side of it, and that you just blindly think that everything is going to work out. That’s how we end up with some of these terrible breakups that happen, where people on the front end aren’t planning the business side of it. So, what’s the first thing that you want to do? To me in that circumstance, once you decide that you have this philosophy that works together, personalities that mesh, and all of those sorts of fundamentals that you have to have before you move to the next step, then what we did was we hired an outside consultant to look at the last, I think it was we did five years of firm receipts for each one of the firms. And what we wanted to do was confirm that everybody was carrying their own weight, that the cost structure was relatively the same. That is of running the firm and then enabled us to sit down and talk about where there were differences. And how it was that we were going to handle them. So, the outside consultant that we used was more of a financial outside consultant, but somebody that was experienced in law firm practition to make sure that the numbers matched up to what we thought they were because a lot of times lawyers think that something is happening. And it may not be happening because there’s no class that we go to in law school that says, here’s how to run a business. So, it’s a lot of trial and error. And when you go to work at a big firm, nobody’s sitting there trying to teach you how to run the business. So, we, you know, we learn by our mistakes often or by hopefully by other mistakes. And so, we spend a lot of time on making sure that the financial aspect of what it was that we were all bringing matched up to the expectations and hopes that we had.
You know, right now you’re thought of as a national powerhouse, as a firm, what are the things that as you look back, you know, you came together? And, you know, right now it looks pretty good. Looking from the outside? What are the things you wish you knew that you talked about mistakes? What are the things that our listeners should probably if they are thinking about putting together affirm and bringing people together? What are the things you wish you knew, then that you now know?
Ah, you know, we’ve been fortunate because it seems to have gone with the way that we had hoped that it would go. And I think that’s a testament to the time and energy and effort that we put in before we decided to sign off on a partnership agreement. And the other aspect of it was, of course, hiring people to sit down with us who are experts in creating a partnership agreement. And one of the hardest things that everybody comes to deal with is how is compensation going to work. Are you going to be eating what you kill? Are you going to just throw everything into a pot and share it, some modification of that? So, in different things work for different people. So, you have to figure that out. And then, you have to make sure that you have a document that reflects exactly that. So, we spent time doing that. And so, I think that, because we spent so much time on the front end, in preparing to come together, that it wasn’t just let’s show up Monday morning, in hanging out a shingle that we haven’t had a lot of surprises for that moment, man, I didn’t think about that, or that type of thing that was there.
On there could be small things, that, you know, obviously you guys have, you know, hit it, you good culture, good business model. But were there any things that like, you know, you can plan all you want, but they’re things like, you know, I this is one of those things that, you know, should seem obvious, but it wasn’t again, it wasn’t even smaller items, just curious to see what type of takeaways we can get for people?
Sure. Gosh, like I said, I think that the things that you look at is making sure that you have the right people in the right place. And that you I think the one of the hard parts is you have people that are working for you. And you want to give them an opportunity to move forward. But we ended up in the Peter Principle where you have somebody who is great at one level, great at the next level, and then you promote them to a level where they’re no longer performing well. And all of a sudden, it’s like, oh, this is a lousy employee. No, they’re not allows the employee, they’re a great employee. We just didn’t put them in a position to succeed. And so I think that what I’ve what I learned is you really have to put people in a position to succeed and then empower them to succeed, but, you know, I think I can talk about the things that you don’t know from a business point of view, but all of us have had businesses before, you know, this was not any of our first come to law firms. And so, I like I said that the preparation, they really haven’t been, oh, we didn’t think about this on the front end, from a business point of view, we really did that. So, but the things that you have to be really think about is, so you start off with things like line of credit, are you going to get money? borrow money from a bank? Are you going to fund it yourself? Because somebody has to fund the cost of running a plaintiff’s personal injury practice, and you have sort of two different sets of costs, you have the cost of running the business that is paying your rent, keeping the lights on doing all of those types of things. And then you also have the case costs. And what do we know about case costs, case cost aren’t deductible as you go along? So that’s a problem for you. And then the question becomes, you know, in our practices, who’s going to finance that, or the partner is going to invest in it? Or are you going to borrow that money from someone else, we made the decision, because money is so cheap, right now that it makes sense for us to have a line of credit. Some folks, just it’s more difficult for them to borrow money at bank rates of that are so low today. And so, the thought process might be a little different. And what I look at with regard to our line of credit, I really don’t care at any one moment, how much is out on the line of credit, as long as the amount of detail on the line of credit does not exceed the amount of case cost that we have out on the street? And why is it that I look at it like that? I think that if you looked at most plaintiff’s personal injury firms, they probably recover 95% to 97% of the cost that they invest in their cases. Sometimes you might lose a trial, or you look at a case, and it turns out not to be a case and you’ve spent some money on it. So, if you know that that’s true, if you keep your line of credit, at 85 cents, you know, at 85% of your case costs, you know, that you are always going to be able to pay off that line of credit with those case costs, when they come back in, what you don’t want to do is get yourself in a position where your line of credit exceeds your case costs. Because now you’re going to have to pay back your line of credit with fees that are taxable. So, every dollar that you’re going to pay off to the line of credit, let’s say you have to pay 30 cents, well, you’ve already paid 40 cents on your taxes. So now you’re paying, you’re not getting 70 cents on that dollar anymore. So that’s to me, a danger zone place for a plaintiff’s personal injury firm, when their line of credit exceeds the amount of cost that they have out on the street. So that for me is a big one. That’s great.
Jay. Thanks, Ruane. So, I have a little question about, you know, the precursor to setting up this firm with your partners. You know, you talk a little bit about sitting down and having these conversations about where you know how your practice is, and where you think you’re going to grow. Did you guys ever have any conversations about lifestyle vision that each one of you want to have? Because as you age into this practice, some people say, hey, you know what, I gave up having kids earlier in life, I want to spend more time with my kids or I want to, you know, travel the world on a boat three months a year, did you have those types of conversations to avoid the oil and water sort of problems, you know, as a firm could be at 15 years or 20 years into it?
Yeah, well, all three of us were in our dash, you know, I just turned 50. So, we were all in our young, right at 50, or a year or two past 50 when we came together. And so absolutely, we talked about, you know, how much longer you look into practice law, what is it that your goals are with regard to this five years, 10 years, 15 years? Where do you see yourself? Do you still see yourself coming in and working? My practice it each of us have such a, our own practices are different. They’re complementary, but they’re very different. And for me, for example, I’m on the road, constantly. There is not a week that goes by that I’m not on a plane flying somewhere around the country. And so that’s different than some of their practices. So I’ve had to learn over the course of my career, how to both do management from afar, be available to my staff and to the lawyers that work on my cases from afar and do that type of thing I can tell you the last eight months of, or however long we are now six, seven months of being locked in, is not what I signed up for, right? I hate sitting at a desk for eight or 10 hours a day. You know, this is about, to me, our business is about relationships. And as much as we can see each other in this sort of two-dimensional Skype or Zoom world, we want to be having dinner with our friends and developing the friendships more. So that part of it has been difficult. But absolutely, we talked about what those things are that we want to accomplish where it is that we want to be. And you have to do that. Because part of that is, what’s our exit plan? What is what is the continuation plan? For the firm? Do we want a firm that exists beyond us? Do we want something that when we’re done just kind of folds up? So absolutely, we talked about all of those things.
You know, you mentioned talking and learning from other people’s mistakes. Obviously, there’s a big thing going on in New York with the Cellino and Barnes disillusion. But did you have concrete discussions about exit plans and wrapping up the firm, before you even started is that something that you think is wise for people who are bringing on a partner or emerging practices, that’s something that they should be talking about early on?
Absolutely, you need to have it, you need to have a plan in place, how to deal with that, and very few of us are with the first firm that we ever started with. And we go into things hoping that it’s going to last forever. But all of our life circumstances, they change. I know that I, 10 years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer and had to go through the treatment for that. And then I had a recurrence for that. And so, you know, you learn that whatever plans that we think that we have for life, life tends to laugh in our face about it. And so, you have to recognize that truth. And I go back to it is not enough to rely on and say these are my friends. You have to have it in writing. And you have to be willing to talk about it on the front end. And some people are afraid to have those hard discussions. But if you can’t have a hard discussion about these important issues, on the front end, what do you think is going to happen if something you know, if there’s a split. And I see the biggest problems that happen in law firms is that when the split happens, or somebody decides that they’re going to go in, in a different direction, that they have contracts, or they have no contract that deals with the situations that they need to deal with. And that’s where people end up hating each other. That’s where the battles come in. And so, who wants that?
You know, pivot for a little bit here. You know, there a lot of our listeners here have, you know, do a lot of different things to build their practice. And one of the things I think you’ve done particularly well is build deep roots within AAJ. Could you sort of share with our audience here, a little bit about sort of, you know, what some of those opportunities may be for people who don’t know about that AAJ, you know, people may know their state or local trial groups, but that AAJ has a bunch of resources out there. And as a guy who’s going to be running this in a couple of years, would love to sort of have you share with them some of the things that might be out there for them?
No, absolutely. It has been such an instrumental part of the growth of my practice, and AAJ is about education, advocacy, and community and AAJ’s education is the best education that is out there. And the bang for the buck that you did, is incredible, whether it’s deposition colleges, or what they’re doing on jury research in they’re going out into the communities and bringing that education to two people. So that’s a tremendous asset that we have, obviously, the advocacy part about it of it, where somebody’s got to fight for us to make sure that Congress doesn’t put us out of business. You know, being a plaintiff’s personal Injury Lawyer is the only business that I can think of where we wake up every day, concerned about the fact that a legislature in some state Capitol, or the legislature in Washington D.C can enact a law that can put us out of business. And look at you know, I do a lot of medical malpractice cases, there was a bill that was put into the Senate two weeks ago, related to the COVID immunity, that would have essentially immunized all medical cases for the next five years. Wow. And if you don’t have so many that’s there with an eye on that and the ability to fight that. You can have all the great plans that you want, but you don’t have a practice anymore.
It’s so funny, it’s sort of when you think about the President, you know, in theory, like, you know, hearing about all these extra these threats to our national security that you go to sleep at night, and in theory, their joint chiefs are the ones that stop worrying about it. I kind of feel like AAJ has that responsibility for trial lawyers in the sense that, you know, all these things are going on, and somebody has to, Linda and her team are there to make sure that there’s at least somebody shining light on them so that we don’t have those, those threats.
Oh, that’s absolutely true, Seth, and it’s incredible how hard they work. And you know, if, and it’s not just looking at bills, it’s also the administrative rules that are out there, which actually dwarf the amount of stuff that happens in Congress. And our people have to read every single one of those administrative things because you know, if you’re missing it, Oxford, comma can change the whole meaning of something in our staff just does an incredible job. You know, the metaphor that I always use is that we are a small band of David’s against an army of Goliaths. But we always, you know, we’re able to, to win the battles, because one, we’re right, are, we’re right on the issues. And number two, our people are just better than there are people. And when you combine those two things together, you can do great things. And Linda and her team, do great things for us every day. So that’s, that’s there. But then it’s the community of AAJ. And it has enabled me to develop relationships with lawyers across the country, not just across the country, really across the world. And it allows me to generate more work, it allows me no matter where it is that I might have a case, that I’ve got a law office that I can walk into and settle into and somebody there that will take my call at any time, they will do whatever it is that they can do to help us. So, you’ve got this sort of supercharged law firm that is unified across the country, where everybody realizes that your success is my success, your failure is my failure. And that it is truly the rising tide lifts all of our boats. I want you know, when another lawyer gets a $30 million verdict, I don’t sit there and say, well, you know, grumble about it and say that should be me. I say, “that is incredible!” Because now for my clients, I get to go and advocate and tell the people that are making money decisions that this is a $30 million case, look at what happened over here on a similar type of case. So, it looks so that community all fits in with education and advocacy, coming together under that relationship thing that AAJ brings to us that is so unique out there. And I, you know, I know that there are other trial lawyer organizations that may have education, but they don’t have as much community or advocacy, or that some that may have education in community but don’t have the advocacy part of it. AAJ brings it all together and is truly representative of us. And it’s been an incredible experience for me to be a member of it to grow within it. And now to become a leader in the organization.
Awesome. Well, that’s great. Thank you, Sean. We want to appreciate your time and your insights, and you know, really appreciate you making time for us this morning.
Thank you guys. Great. Yeah,
Thank you so much. Have a great day.
You too be well, bye.
Hello, hello. And we’re back here live again and coming out of that interview with Sean, boy some really some nuggets there, Seth, but we’ve got somebody else appear on the screen somebody who you spend a lot of time with. I haven’t been able to see in a couple of months because we’ve been stuck in our homes respectively because of Coronavirus. Normally this time of year. We’re hanging out in Las Vegas at PubCon. David, I’ve got David Brenton here on the line. David, how are you doing today?
I’m doing great doing great, Jay. Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. So here’s the question I have for you. Because it’s something that we started debating in our office and I figure if anybody knows this and knows how to handle it, it would be you. And the question is this concept of near me, right. And there was a debate in our office if we should be adding the phrase “near me” to basically all of our pages on our website, or if we should actually make a silo on our website that includes in the URL structure the words, “near me”, because so many people are typing into their search “Lawyer near me”, “State Lawyer near me”, “Divorce Lawyer near me.” And so, I’m wondering if that’s something that has value. And I couldn’t get an honest answer by looking online and all the different forums and stuff. But I know one person who actually geeks out over this stuff more than I do. And that’s you. So, let’s talk about it and tell me what your thoughts are.
Yeah, yeah, great question. And our clients are always coming to us and asking us, you know, I want to rank higher for “near me” searches, what do I need to do? What do I need to do? And really the best way to think about it and is to kind of take a step back and understand how Google is really interpreting a “near me” query. When someone’s literally typing in “Lawyer near me”, what factors and signals are they taking into consideration to, again, display search results. So, when you think about it, and especially with near me searches, you end up with a lot more behavioral signals that Google is interpreting as a means for displaying search results. And what I mean by that, specifically, is location is paramount. If I search, there’s a lawyer, literally every other block in the city, if I search, “Lawyer near me”, I’m going to pull up results usually, that are within, you know, two to three blocks in my apartment. If I were to get in the car and drive across the city, run that exact same query, I would typically pull up results that are again within that pocket of the city. Now, Google’s also interpreting behavior. They know where I live, they know I saw Google using Google Maps to get across the city and everything else. And because of that, you may also have a result that shows from again, where I originally searched for my apartment, really long-winded way of saying that at the end of the day, the behavior of the searcher, the location of the searcher, what they’ve been doing, where they go, all this, all these signals are getting interpreted by Google. And with “near me” searches, in particular, those signals outweigh a lot of the traditional SEO things that you’d be able to do to again, achieve a good search result. That’s not to say that having a robust local SEO strategy is not going to help you. Meaning if you have localized content, if you have local links and local signals that Google’s interpreting, when they’re crawling the property, a robust GMB with reviews, etc. All those things are going to help you show when someone is in an area or when their behavior indicates that you should be shown for their query. But it’s a lot different than your traditional search terms. Lawyer, Injury Lawyer, Divorce Lawyer, those queries are usually going to take into consideration a lot more of those traditional SEO things that we can signals that we have to signal to the bot that we should be shown. But with near me queries, in particular, again, the behavior of the searcher and where they are and how they’re searching are much more important in Google’s eyes. And that’s why to answer your question, should you put it in the URL, you know, at the end of the day, it’s not. And it may help you rank local or rank organically for near me searches, it would probably, in my opinion, kind of confuse more than help. Really, what you should do is be optimizing your landing page or whatever page you want to rank as much as possible with those local signals with local links. With, again, different local queries are terms that you can include in the content. But at the end of the day, including it in the URL is not going to help you rank locally. And again, that’s part of the biggest thing to distinguish, too is there’s local results and there’s organic.
I have a follow up to that. And it’s something that we talk a little bit about just started talking about the last time I saw you, and that was local content. Would you recommend, instead of using stock imagery to have a local photographer or local picture with the proper longitude and latitude tags in it be placed on that page or those pages rather than used to stock photography or do you think that is not necessarily a signal that the bot might want to see?
Well, it absolutely can’t hurt, and it is going to be taken into consideration as a signal. More importantly though, is how is your markup is your markup all in place properly. Are you telling the bot when it crawls the property where you are and where you should be found, and do you have the content around it to be found for those terms? We can send again as many signals as possible. Again, imagery is great. Even you know geo-tagging photos like you said these are all little things that are going to help but again for “near me” searches particular, that user behavior is going to become the most important.
Yeah, I was gonna say, Jay, let’s take this question a step back, right? Because “near me”, like, what we’re looking for is when somebody searches, right? So there are different ways people can search. They might just say, “Connecticut DUI lawyer”, they might say, “Connecticut DUI Lawyer near me”, or they might just see “DUI Lawyer”. And I think Brenton, if you could sort of spend a little bit of time talking about how Google is sort of showing each of those different variations and what sort of you have X amount of resources? How do you want to spend your time? And I think some of it like most of our answers always deal with depends on what your competition is, depends, you know, what the search volume is, but Brenton, could you speak a little bit to that? Because I think a lot of people struggle with, you know, how do you come up for each of those different ones? Or how do you prioritize which ones to focus on?
Yeah, absolutely. And, again, really, what it comes down to was trying to show up for again, “Connecticut DUI Lawyer”, DUI Lawyer while you’re in Connecticut.” And when you’re in, you know, Stanford, and you’re searching DUI lawyer, whether or not near me whether or not you’re going to show up. All of it comes down to the core fundamentals, though, at the end of the day. If you have localized content, like I said, with those terms, specifically in it, “Connecticut DUI Lawyer,” um, you’re going to inherently have DUI Lawyer in there. Do you need to incorporate the “near me” term in there? We are currently toying with this. We have put in “local” we put “nearby” we’ve put a lot of different terms into our content to see if it’s actually going to move near me rankings, organically, it’s helped a little bit locally, it hasn’t helped at all, because again, at the end of the day, those behavioral signals are what’s moving those local results. But to Seth’s question, how can you show up for all of these different things? If I have a DUI lawyer page, if I have that with robust localized content for Connecticut, or whatever city that I’m in, if I’m building local backlinks to it, and by that, I mean local chambers on local sponsorships, or getting local restaurants to link back to you. Having local meetups link back to you all of these different signals, those are inherently more valuable than you know, again, Jay, going back to taking a photo or whatever it may be, because it’s picking up on all this all the network, if you will, of a local neighborhood. And as it relates to its online presence, if it’s crawling the pizza shop, and it’s crawling the local baseball team, the high school, all these different things, it’s going to put together that you are where you say you are more or less. And so again, if you really want to show for all those different terms, it’s building in all the local signals possible through link building, through content and again, most importantly, and really importantly, is the markup. Making sure your data markup is as it needs to be. If it’s not marked up properly. If you don’t have if you’re not telling the bot where you are before it crawls the property, then what is what are you doing?
Okay, so I know what markup is, Seth knows what markup is. But many in our audience don’t know what markup is. And we’ve talked about a little time. So, can you give us sort of a Layman’s explanation of what markup is and why it matters so much?
Absolutely, yes. And Seth, you can chime in if I’m getting too technical. But really what it comes down to is markup and structured data is a language and a form of code that you can put into a property that the bot will crawl before it crawls the rest of your site. And there’s different forms of markup that you can have. And most importantly, you should have lawyer markup, because you guys are all lawyers, you can have geo markup for where your office location is with coordinates. You can Review markup, FAQ markup, all these different things, but really at the core and in Layman’s terms, what you’re trying to accomplish with markup is providing the bot with more information about a web page or about a company. And if you have all these different things, all these different forms of markup working together, before the bot actually crawls the site it gets all this information and knows what it’s about to see and read. And as we’ve talked about before, the search bot is incredibly smart. It’s picking up on even more signals than we ever thought it could. And by just giving it this information, it can help interpret the rest of the property. And that really, again, is when things start to jam more or less.
You know, look, at it this way. We could have Brenton come back and do an entire sort of like fundamentals class on markup, you know, for a future episode. But I would say that like one of the analogies we use a lot at BluShark is the difference between if you’re looking for pizza near me, right where Google says hey, you don’t really want one from 30 minutes away, most likely you’re looking for the fastest place they’ll get you a hot piece of pizza versus, you know, in certain other areas like lawyers, whether or not somebody is within a half mile of you may be less relevant because the courthouse is somewhere else. And the fact is you’re willing to drive a little bit further for that. And I think that is where and Brenton, I’d love you to chime in a little bit on this to sort of conclude the “near me” concept is almost signaling Google. While normally they’re going to show you a search with an expanded radius. Brenton, do you find that the “near me is giving a lesser radius, which could be for some people if my theory is correct? And what love your thoughts on it, that for a newbie who’s trying to break in, and there’s a juggernaut in the market that owns Connecticut DUI, for example, that this gives you an opportunity to get some real estate, because it’s giving the ability for people to get close more localized searches, what do you think about that as a, you know, a differentiator?
Yeah, absolutely. I’m really the concentration of lawyers is going to greatly impact the near me results. And when you think of near me results, and just Google generally they’re trying to deliver the best user experience possible. If I like you said, if I searched Chinese food, where I am, again, like 12, Chinese restaurants are within two blocks here. So they’re all going to show up, versus one that’s, you know, halfway across the city is going to take 45 minutes to get there, I’m never going to actually go there trying to deliver a good positive user experience. And by doing so, again, they’re going to get more engagement with the actual platform. But to your question, if you’re trying to get away from a juggernaut, or a high concentration of lawyers, you should be looking at where people are, first and foremost, where are they actually searching from? And also kind of, again, like you said, separating yourself from a location perspective to grab that real estate that, you know, again, you otherwise wouldn’t be able to necessarily get.
Cool. Well, that’s a lot, a lot of technical stuff. But I think it sort of helps us understand the value of near me, the role of near me and how it could play in your digital marketing. But, David, I definitely want to have your back. Because I think schema is something that I understand a little not as much as I would like, you know, and I think it’s something that I think maybe our viewers would like to sort of know and understand better. So maybe in the next couple of weeks, we can get you back on and that we can get you out of that terrorist’s dungeon that looks like Seth’s got you. I mean, there’s no art on the walls is a single window. It looks like sense just as you chained to a radiator with a laptop nerding out on code, but maybe we can get you out of there, get your cleaned up a little and get you in front of the cameras. That might be a way to go forward. What do you think Seth, we could get him back on the show?
I think he’s happy in his layer. What was the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him is he doesn’t have to leave his place and he doesn’t have to deal with people.
It is for me too, I mean you know people exhaust me I can be extroverted, but I truly am an introvert. So, it’s awesome to be able to sit at home and do all this stuff. I’m kind of happy right now. I know, Brenton, you are too. So, this has been good for me. But Brenton, thank you so much for coming on the show. You really sort of helped us sort of frame an issue there. And I definitely want to have you back to talk a little bit of more of this because I think it’s something that our people can definitely learn from.
Awesome, awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Alright, so we’re going to be right back after a few words from our sponsors wrap up the show and talk to you about what we have coming up next week. We’ll see you soon here on this edition of Maximum Growth Live.
Well Seth, that was great. Brenton is so knowledgeable in this area. I do think you should sort of take off the handcuffs. Get them away from that radiator, get them out of there, get them some sunlight maybe. But, you know, although it seems to be working, he’s very knowledgeable in this area by just keeping them chained in that basement.
Hockey is only on TV. He’ll remain there when you know when they actually start playing with fans, we might see him leave the basement.
Excellent. So, we’ve had a great show today. I mean, first off, starting with Sean got some really interesting things. And I think that’s something that some of the people in our audience, you know, a lot of people, you know, they, they have a friend, they decide to hang a shingle, but when you’ve been in the practice for a little while, and you’re, you’re merging practices of people who’ve got gravitas already, there’s a lot of conversations you need to have. And I’m not saying that you don’t need to have those conversations, when it’s just you and your buddy. But I guarantee you, I guarantee you, that you and David did not have the “How Does this End”, conversation when you guys are you’re single because you didn’t have anything to worry about.
Exactly. And look this is something we talk about all the time, how much do you want to paper upfront, because then you’d never do anything you want. I go back and forth with ideas. You know, you’re like, hey, I’m going to create a whole plan and system before I launch an idea. And I’m like, hey, we’ll throw spaghetti at the wall. If it sticks, we’ll do a plan later. Right? I feel like to a certain extent that mirrors, you know, the sort of how we started the firm. And I think that for other people, it’s really tough, because, you know, this isn’t just a business idea when you’re merging two things together. And I think we touched on it with Sean, the thought is what will happen, and he’s been around the block enough to know that law firms don’t always survive forever. And that if you do have some sort of an exit out there, that it’s going to give you a fighting chance, you referenced a very high profile in New York breakup right now, which is, you know, legendary. And that, you know, some, like any advanced planning would be great at the same time, would they have had a firm if they sat down and hash that out? Because half the time, you know, you the thing that I again, you touched on during the shot interview was, what do you want, and what you think you want at 50? When you start a firm, or at 40, or 35, may not be the same that kids come they have different, you know, ages, you have little kids now, you know, shots down empty nester, you know, does that change what you want? Does it change your outlook when you hit certain economic milestones? And so, you know, while it’s great to put all of that in writing, A) it can prevent you from moving forward and B) things may change so dramatically. So, I it is one of those great questions. And I feel like the further you are, in your career with the more data points, the more of a fighting chance, you have to actually help come together well, and figure out what would be the exit strategy at the other end. Whereas when you’re starting with nothing, it’s much harder to conceive of that.
Yeah, it’s interesting, because this is actually going to be this is my homework assignment for John Fisher’s mastermind tomorrow, that you and I are going to be participating in is that, you know, as my firm sort of is in a transition phase, as you know, my father is leaving the practice to some extent, and I’m now with other. I don’t want to have junior lawyers, but people I’ve brought on in the last couple of years, I’ve been with it for 20 years, I have to sort of define my next stage. And it’s not troubling. It’s just challenging. And I want to get it right. So that if I do say, hey, I want to walk away in 10 years, there’s a plan in place for me to be able to do that.
A whole another concept. I feel like that isn’t the cause with Sean. The question is, hey, you have partners, how do you do right by them? And if you decide you don’t want to be with them, how do you divorce peacefully, like a prenup versus? Well, you’re talking about as a whole another segment for another show, which is how do you make this an asset that is has value that you can either minimize your own labor in or be able to spit off etc. And those that some of those different pieces, we’ve touched on it a little bit without even I think knowing it talking with Sarah Khaki about branding a firm, and the idea that you’re taking yourself out of it. But right now, we’re weighing attorneys is you like, you know, Joe Biden said the other night, you know, the Democratic Party is me, you are ruining attorney. So, the value of the firm without you does that. Does that change dramatically? It does. And so, the question is, you know, there’s still value, but the question is, what are the steps? If you if you’re looking for an exit plan down the road, are there things you would do differently? And are some of those things you might do differently? Because it’s Ruane Attorneys and you have a brand that’s probably done very well. So, you’ve made money along the way, are you? You know, you know, curtailing what a potential exit would be because you’re, you’re feeding your family along the way.
Yeah, it’s there’s so many things to consider. It’s, I mean, we could talk for days on these things. And I’m sure we will over the next over the next years as we get into this. And like you said, things are gonna change my you know, my position within my firm within my family, within my goals, all those things change. And so you need to be nimble enough to be able to do that but we’re going to end the show is coming up I want to talk about a few things Is that we’ve got going on, of course, October 15. We have our 2021 growth hacks the 10 growth hacks for the next year. So I want everybody to make sure that they put on their calendar to be able to attend that show live because there’s going to be some great things we’ll probably have some special guests that we’ve been talking to, to come on in to talk about their hacks. So I really think that’s something that’s going to be awfully special. And of course, we’ve got our Tuesday show coming up. We’ve got a new segment that’s going to be starting soon, with Kelsey Bratcher about Automation, of course, Ryan, with all his books, so we’re throwing a lot of content at you folks. And you know, Seth, I got to say, I, you know, I’m really happy with where this this program is going. Because I think there’s a lot of takeaways that anybody can get out of every show, you’re getting 2,3,4 takeaways and stuff that you can construct. What’s your thoughts on that?
No, I’m enjoying it. It’s we’ve been again; I feel like a decade in the in the making. It’s our late-night conversations, put and scene. And the idea that we can bring all of our friends with these different expertise and passions into the mix has made for just a lot of fun content.
Yeah, and I’m we’re working on ready, folks, we got a bunch of DMs of people that are interested in a whiteboarding session with us sort of a hot seat whiteboarding session. So, if you’re interested, make sure down below, you leave your name, shoot us a DM so that we can get in touch with you. Because we’d love to have you on the program. Love to work through your problems, whiteboard it with you, sort of figure out how you can get to the next level, and we’ll be able to help you to grow your firm. So, with that said, we’re going to sign off I am Jay Ruane with the Firm Flex, Ruane Attorneys he is Seth Price on make sure it looks good. Seth Price over here. And Seth is with BluShark Digital as well as Price battle. It’s down in Maryland, Washington, DC and Virginia. And we are your hosts. So, thank you so much for being with us. With that. We’ll leave you now. We’ll see on Tuesday. 2pm Eastern for another edition of Maximum Growth Live. Bye for now, folks!
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