BluShark Digital 0:00
Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price 0:11
Welcome everybody. We are very excited to be here today with Neil Patel. You know somebody who many of you know from online, somebody who is, I think, done a better job of breaking down the complicated pieces of digital marketing, SEO specifically, and bringing it to the masses. So it’s wonderful to have you here today.
Unknown Speaker 0:30
Neil, thanks for having me.
Seth Price 0:32
So look, I come from the legal space. It seems that you, at least from my point of view, have done something that nobody else has really cracked the coat on, which is to take, you know, a world that is, you know, you know, obtuse to many people, and really bring it, bring it home in a very, you know, meaningful and interesting way. Talk to me about your journey. How did you get to the point where you were the man of breaking down these problems for the masses?
Speaker 1 1:00
Yes, I don’t know if I’m the man, but I appreciate the kind words. The way I look at marketing in general is, how can you just explain it to someone, as you know, a teacher would to you. The reason I started doing this years and years ago is I couldn’t afford to spend money on marketing like paid ads or sponsoring conferences. So what I did was I just educated, released a lot of information in hopes that one day maybe I’ll pick up some business, or maybe I’ll get some speaking spots from it, and then eventually, maybe that’ll generate some revenue, you know, down the road. Now imagine doing that for not five years or 10 years, but imagining that for 20 plus years, eventually it creates some goodwill and some revenue.
Seth Price 1:46
That’s awesome. So like Gary Vee with wine, you took the SEO world. Correct?
Speaker 1 1:51
I focus more so on marketing than anything outside everyone. So I’ll talk about entrepreneurship, or some topics not related to marketing, but they tend not to do well, I keep telling my team, I’m like, we should just stick with marketing, ignore everything else.
Seth Price 2:06
Well, you see, it seems to be working so far. What you know, talk to me over this, over this, 20-year period, 20-year plus period, some of the things that you’ve picked up on, as far as at least, you know, from an information marketing point of view, what have you seen work? And what are things that you thought would work that just happened the way you thought they would
Speaker 1 2:25
so the first thing I thought would work was creating content around your vertical, you know? So mine would be marketing would generate you customers. And it was a big misconception, and I’ll explain it, but let’s dive in a little bit, right? And there’s a nuance here. So my ad agency, np digital, helps companies with marketing. We tend to focus on mid-market and enterprise more than anything else. So if I create content on topics like how to get more Instagram followers, the chances are the person who’s looking at reading that, even though that was one of my most popular posts, is an individual who’s looking to become more popular on Instagram. So even though that content is related to marketing, because marketing on Instagram is, you know, agencies can help corporations market themselves on Instagram, the problem you have is when you create content that is not around your ideal customer, even though it’s around the same subject that they’re interested it doesn’t drive revenue. It doesn’t drive much brand awareness. But what we found is when you get really specific with the content that you create, you don’t get the traffic, but you get more customers, at least in B to B. An example of this is when we picked up Adobe because they first landed on our website for how to structure their blog for multiple languages in multiple countries. All right, very specific problem, but it’s an enterprise problem, right? And then we closed the contract with them, helping them first structure their blog, and then from there, it grew into many other things over the years. You
Seth Price 4:07
know, I’ve seen this. I’ve been playing the LinkedIn game recently and I see the same thing, something general, will go viral. But the stuff that my core audience is legal in the legal digital space is very, very specific, less sexy. How did you go when you started? Were you just building a brand? And then over time, realized that you have to layer these in. Was it intentional, or did you sort of just, did it come organically?
Speaker 1 4:31
No, it was intentional. But I spent so many years building a brand, it was like the last five that I learned this. Keep in mind, I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years now, but it was only the last five so I’m in it on my 24th year, and you’re talking about in year 19, that I learned that, hey, I need to be more intentional with my content if I expect my personal brand to drive real revenue. And when I say real revenue, yeah, I was making money from speaking. I can make over a million bucks a year. Speaking, I wanted to build a bigger business, and it wasn’t converting directly. What I found is I needed to really focus on being more intentional if I wanted to pick up my ideal customers.
Seth Price 5:13
So it is sort of because if you weren’t Neil Patel and you put that thing out on how to structure a blog, it might resonate with Adobe, but it might not. So it’s like if you didn’t pay your dues in the first place, then that piece of content might not have the same ramifications as it did given the dues you had already paid.
Speaker 1 5:31
I think it would have worked either way, because when we work with brands like Adobe, they’re nice people, but our clients don’t care if the Neil Patel or My name is Joe Smith, or whatever my name could be, they just are looking to hire someone who can solve a specific problem.
Seth Price 5:47
That’s what I would say. If you solve the problem, they’re going to pay you.
Speaker 1 5:51
Uh-huh. And the same with if you have case studies and you work with other large organizations, they prefer that to hiring a Neil Patel, because they look at that as less risky. Gotcha. You
Seth Price 5:59
know, you’ve been putting out a lot online about the trials and tribulations of working with paid Google right now that it’s getting more and more expensive. Particularly see this in the legal space, where there are markets where clicks are just prohibitive, almost always LSAS are still working. Maybe they’re not. Talk to me a little bit about that, because you’ve been very vocal on making sure that you don’t sort of you know that it is not that this is not a free lunch, and that you’re seeing things evolve to the point where you may need to find other avenues in order to be able to get paid media to work.
Speaker 1 6:33
I see a lot of legal people doing well with social media content. I see a lot of legal people still spending an arm and a leg on Google ads or directories like the fine laws of the world, and there’s no right or wrong approach. You have to just optimize for ROI. The law firms that tend to do the best, don’t just spend the money. They focus on conversion optimization as well, because the costs are just continually rising. So if you can optimize your conversions, and you can get more of those clicks to turn into leads, it makes the numbers pan out. And I think that’s a big mistake that people make if they know marketing is getting expensive. They’re not continually trying to improve their flow and the experience so that way they can maximize conversions. Are
Seth Price 7:16
there are things that you are seeing within the Google environment that give that you’re excited about, as far as so stay with paid search for a moment where you are seeing continued positive ROI, whereas others are not.
Speaker 1 7:32
So some things that we’re excited about, it within the Google realm, you’re saying, starting with Google, we’re seeing a huge, huge positive ROI from being mentioned in the AI overviews if you can get mentioned in there, we’re seeing it drive traffic, brand awareness. We’re seeing speaking AI. We’re also seeing huge ROI from being mentioned in chat, and GPT, and then recommending a product or service or a company. We’re seeing that solely starting to drive more and more revenue. The other thing that we’re seeing a massive ROI with is when you’re doing marketing, whether it’s paid or organic, some sort of freemium model, what can you give away for free that can get your brand out there? Because when you have built a decent brand, a corporate brand, you find that you tend to get better. Click-through rates with your ads, whether it’s Facebook or Google, the conversions tend to be higher. The economics are much better as well.
Seth Price 8:28
You brought up AI, obviously, it’s everything, and you’ve talked a lot about how it’s no longer SEO or Search Engine Optimization for Google, it’s for, you know, all sorts of platforms. It’s become exponential. We thought that we had it hard before, just with one algorithm. And yeah, we got to see the file. But, you know, that only got us so far. But talk to me a little bit about your perspective on, you know, I agree with you that as you know, clients see their names in chat GBT, they’re, they’re, they’re very excited illegal. We haven’t seen ROI as much, but want to get your thoughts on the transformation of SEO from just Google to other platforms.
Speaker 1 9:05
Yeah, so when you look at from just Google to other platforms, we see tons and tons of potential for a lot of other platforms out there. You know, there are 6.5 billion searches a day on Instagram, over 3 billion on Amazon, and even if you go to the Apple App Store, over 500 million searches. Search is no longer just on Google. It’s everywhere. Google owns less than 30% of the market share when it comes to just general searches on the internet. Baidu is really popular. Bing, you know, is getting traction. YouTube, I understand, is owned by Google, but still is popular. Pinterest has billions of searches a day. You have to optimize everywhere. And if you’re not, you’re missing out on a ton of revenue. So
Seth Price 9:45
as as as we sort of look at this world, one of the things that we’ve noticed has been search traffic, generally organic traffic, has certainly decreased for many clients as these AI results are there. You know? Instances, they’re attributable, so you’re sort of getting credit for it. But it seems that more and more local has become a central conversion place and that Google sees that as protected territory. They’re going to fight it out, Gemini versus chat, GBT, and Lord knows what else is coming from China, but all these different platforms are there, but Google has this local environment they’ve invested in. Want to get your thoughts on what is the you know for in our case, you know attorneys. How do you see AI search results both either benefiting as well as hurting the operations or, I’d say, the marketing plan set forth for most law firms,
Speaker 1 10:42
yeah, and I’m assuming you’re specifically, again, in this context, you know, talking about local search as well. But for a law firm, AI will eventually impact local searches if they already haven’t. I don’t think it’s going to impact as much as the informational but I do think they’re going to adjust local search and figure out better ways to monetize it. How I don’t know yet, but you bet they’re going to start playing in this area. And the reason being is one of the steps I saw is 40 ish percent of the searches on Google or local searches. Imagine figuring out how to monetize better on that right, Google has to continually throw out more experiments, and with AI, they can figure out how to better understand what someone’s looking for, maybe adjust the local results in a way that’s more relevant to the searcher based on their history or all the data they have, and maybe figure out a way to monetize better as well at the same time, how time will tell. But overall, I think local businesses, at least in the next year, I think they’re going to be fine with AI, and even in the long run, they can do okay. Even if you’re not a local business, you can still do okay with AI. You just have to adapt to all the changes that are happening. And I think that’s the biggest problem with traditional SEOs. They play the same game that they did four or five years ago, when search is no longer just a Google game, and you have to adapt to all channels. You know, I know a lot of people who are in the law firm space, like personal injury lawyers, who are making a killing from billboards, you know, the bunch bench seats for the busses, and they’re also making a killing from the social media content, right?
Seth Price 12:22
It’s there. One of the hottest topics in my space has been, you know, with AI and AI content, figuring out that balance. Google made it pretty clear early on that they didn’t want to see it. Then it was sort of like, we don’t care where the content came from. Most recently, in recent weeks, they’ve been like, oh, yeah, we don’t want to see AI content. How are you reading that? Obviously, you want to stay competitive. Want to be able to churn out high-quality content, you know, ripping stuff off of chat? GBT, Google can clearly tell that’s, you know, AI chat content that’s being created. How do you personally balance the wish to use AI technology while at the same time not upsetting Google and its algorithm as far as what they perceive as thin or not great content?
Speaker 1 13:12
So you’re saying, how to use AI to create content when you have to worry about thin content or
Seth Price 13:17
everything looks like Google, is it the same for the time being, still 90% of our game, and yeah, we want to make sure that we’re not doing something that’s not going to be perceived by the Google algorithm as positive. You know, I look at it as a business person, knowing that Google has to be careful that if AI eats too much, as you alluded to a moment ago, into its revenue. If a certain amount of search traffic is going into an answer that’s not even going to be to a paid search page, you don’t even have the opportunity to put your ads on there. They’re like, Okay, we got to be careful. How do you think as either an agency or as an end user, you should be evaluating the integration of AI content with the Google algorithm?
Speaker 1 14:04
Honestly, I wouldn’t integrate much AI content with your own website. I find that you just get more traffic when you don’t use AI content. We’ve tested tons and tons of times on this. We created 744, articles, half AI, half human, written on 68 different websites. But just in general, the way I look at things is AI content just doesn’t do as well. Are you using
Seth Price 14:31
as a tool to help supplement or edit the human content?
Speaker 1 14:37
Sure, we use AI for, like, a lot of translation, and transcriptions, but still have humans involved in ideation, helping with tonality, helping with expanding, helping with updating content. But we still the majority of the time, like when I say majority, I’m talking about over 90% of the time use humans more than AI for content. It just performs better. I’m not saying that’s gonna be the case five years from now. I’m just saying that’s the case right now with the technology that exists in today’s world, someone wants to use AI, I say, great, go and do it. Why? Because it makes it easier for me to outrank them, at least for the content creation side.
Seth Price 15:12
That’s awesome. So talk to me, sort of like looking ahead. You spend a lot of time thinking about what comes next. You’ve alluded to a number of these things, different channels. What are you excited about and what sort of scares you? As far as making sure that your clients keep up and don’t allow AI to upset the apple cart, as far as them being able to have a sustainable way of bringing in revenue,
Speaker 1 15:38
the easiest way we stay up to date is we just can do it. We test and run experiments, and then with our clients, a lot of them don’t stay up to date, but we help them stay up today, and we just update them on everything that’s working and not, and just, you know, do it for them. Most companies pay us because they just want it done for them. They don’t want to learn marketing, or if they have internal marketing departments, as the majority of our clients do, they’re just looking for someone to help them execute and get things done faster and help them hit goals. Big
Seth Price 16:04
picture with AI. What excites you about what’s coming down the pike?
Speaker 1 16:11
What excites me about coming down is more real-world stuff. As marketers and digital marketers specifically, we look at marketing as Google, Facebook, Instagram and platforms like that. I saw a company a little bit ago that was using AI and fridges. Okay, imagine opening up a fridge. They know what you’re buying. They can recommend food that you’ll like. And this can create a whole new platform for you to monetize and advertise on, like, imagine a LCD screen or LED screen on a fridge, and it can detect everything that you eat or consume. You can then advertise on their other related products. People can click a button and or talk using their voice, and then boom, within minutes, something’s delivered. Now imagine this for a lot of the physical world, when you start integrating AI, it allows you to better adapt to people, it allows you to compute data faster, and it opens up many new platforms and categories for marketers to start loving you when it comes to advertising, assuming people want it, it’s
Seth Price 17:23
an exciting time, and I think that you’re exactly right. It’s figuring it out and delivering it to the clients. What are some of the things that you see people positioning where you’re like, Is there stuff that you’re watching and you sort of, you know, like, you never know, but you’re sort of, you see people going down rabbit holes that you don’t think will be particularly
Speaker 1 17:43
fruitful. Yeah, I see a lot of people using AI to create content. I know we discussed that a little bit and it’s just cranking out a ton of regurgitated information. Unless you’re talking about new stuff, it doesn’t do that. Well, there was a stat, I believe, on Search Engine Journal, around 4.6 billion pieces of content are created daily. People don’t need more content. What they need is more new content. And when I say new, I’m not talking about you publishing a new article video, or image. I’m talking about you publishing a new article, video, and image, and and is very important to keep in mind that you’re talking about something very new that they haven’t heard about before, without the part right talking about something new that they haven’t heard about before, your content is not going to do that well in today’s world,
Seth Price 18:27
that’s awesome. You know, as you reflect back on your journey, one of the things I love asking people is about mistakes or missteps over the years that you’ve learned from because I find that just always, very often, for things that you thought were going to work, but didn’t love to get your perspectives, because I find that somebody like yourself who’s tried so many different things has had probably some great war stories.
Speaker 1 18:50
Yeah, I’ve tried so many things that I thought would have worked, like for app marketing, like applications like SaaS apps, you know, removing registration and just letting them use the app and then getting them into the system would work better. But most of the time, when I ran those tests, it’s actually hurt or, you know, when I’ve tried running conversion tests where people can just click one button, like with LinkedIn or Google, and submit all their information and give authorization you get access to the information faster, and you would assume it would boost conversions. But people these days are concerned a lot about privacy. Having that option is great, but you also have to give them the option of manually putting in the information, because some people want to do it manually. Some people don’t want to type in anything, and they don’t care about you having access to well, you don’t really always have access to tons of personal information perception Exactly. So then, by having multiple options like that, it tends to increase conversions versus just sending people, hey, just click a button. Everything’s filled out for you. I remember when we ran that test originally, maybe 10 ish years ago. So we saw a little bit less than a 100% increase in conversion by just forcing people to register through, you know, Google auth. The same does not happen in today’s world,
Seth Price 20:10
absolutely as we go beyond Google. So as a guy who’s been in legal space and Google has been everything, talk to me a little bit about the areas that you’re now starting to poke at that you think that you know over the next few years, you know. You know, whether it be, through Bing because of their chat GBT tie-in, whether it be through some of these other privacy-sensitive search engines, whether it be through social where, what do you know? What do you like out there, and where do you think people should be allocating some resources?
Speaker 1 20:44
I don’t think there’s one specific area or channel. I think you have to take an omnichannel approach. You got to be everywhere. In today’s world, the average person needs around 11 touch points before they sign up with the company or by product or service. So you have to hit them from multiple channels. You got to do consistently with the amazing information and value to do well in today’s world, sucks as a marketer, but it’s the reality, and you got to really put people first, you know? I think you probably, I think in the long run, that’s a good thing, right? Like, I prefer that to people just creating crap and expecting others to convert. The reason I say it sucks as a marketer is because it’s more work, but it is what it is. I remember
Seth Price 21:21
being a Google conference, like 1213, years ago. I was talking about attribution. I remember talking about, like a Royal Caribbean cruise, and what you might go through, but between the first ad that you might see, clicks that you might give, and then eventually taking the cruise. And I was, I was sort of scoffing at, oh, the one’s not like that in legal, and today, I genuinely feel like it is. You talked about billboards, bus stop benches, you know, clicks, social as you do that has, have you moved away at all from hyper-focus on attribution to understanding that there’s going to be a certain amount that the resources needed to get to that attribution is the juice worth the squeeze. Want to get your thoughts just a little bit on your thoughts on attribution and how far down the rabbit hole you take that.
Speaker 1 22:11
We take it all the way down the rabbit hole. We think data and analytics are very important as a division of our ad agency. Attribution is tougher than it has been in the past, and that’s okay, you have to figure out the formula that works for you. Is it first touch, last touch, or multi-touch? For most businesses, it tends to be somewhere around multi, but then some of the channels, you won’t be able to track the attribution correctly, and you have to be okay with that. And some channels won’t drive sales, even if you can track them, but you know that they’re building up your brand, and it’s creating a lot of goodwill in the long run, kind of like what Nike’s done or Apple’s done, and you have to be okay with that as well. No. And
Seth Price 22:52
that’s you know, we see that with TV advertisers that come to our digital agency. We don’t do TV, we do the digital side. And so people are building brands. And you know, as an SEO, I always feel that we need to be balanced between not taking credit for a brand that’s out there at the same time. You know, it’s clear that the traffic and you alluded to this earlier traffic coming through your site, whether it be social or paid search or, you know, an offline like a TV or billboard, that those things do affect your digital outplay. And so a client that has an offline brand versus a client that comes to you with none very different in how you both approach and level the attribution.
Speaker 1 23:39
Yeah, and at the end of the day, if, if you’re a law firm, I think what is going to end up happening is, is see, like we’ve talked and worked with a lot of law firms, they tend to end up wanting to do what a lot of their competitors do, and they think, when it comes to attribution or marketing, hey, so and so is doing really well. Let’s just copy them, and copying doesn’t work as well as it used to. You have to figure out new angles and reasons why people should sign up with you versus someone else. It doesn’t mean that you can’t use some of the same channels, but copying your competitors doesn’t always work because they may have been earlier to market, so maybe their conversion numbers are better, or maybe they have a bigger brand. There are always some things that help them that may not help you. So you have to figure out your own path. And a lot of marketing has to do with experimentation, whether it’s experimentation with AI or conversions on your website or social content, you know like I was found following a legal accountant, so she’s a lawyer, but also an accountant. I see her content on Instagram, and she does the videos that debunk everyone else’s like, No, you cannot write off your Rolex. I don’t have a watch. I’m glad somebody’s
Speaker 2 24:54
finally doing that, because I go to so many seminars where they give me, hey, you can write off this and that I’m like. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 25:02
yeah. She’s like, you cannot write off a Rolex. If you’re an influencer, you cannot write off your Lamborghini. If you’re an influencer, I have a Honda Odyssey. I don’t have the Lamborghini, but you get the point, and it works well for her. And she doesn’t dress up in like Chanel or Louis Vuitton or anything fancy. She’s just herself telling the truth. She’s a, I think a tax attorney is what they’re called, or something like that. And you know, her content is great, and it goes viral just by telling the truth. Well,
Seth Price 25:30
I’ve learned something today. We also have this Honda Odyssey, so I feel like I’ve been channeling my inner Neil Patel for many years. Hopefully, with the kids grow out of it, we can get something nice and fun, but the sort of bring, bring this around, you had sort of started off with the idea of social and that being a channel that you know, you did very well for you. And you’re seeing people in the legal space do that, talk to me a little bit about how you think it should be leveraged versus not. You see people working at the top of the funnel, which is extremely hard to do but is working successfully for some people in the legal space, versus a brand building on a local level. Talk to me a little bit just in general, about how you view social for professional service clients.
Speaker 1 26:16
I think it’s amazing to build a brand. If you’re not on there, you’re missing out. If you look at the average time spent on social media per day, I believe it’s well over two hours. I forgot the last step that I saw, but I’m pretty sure it was in the two-hour range. And if I’m wrong, I know it’s well above hour, but if you’re not on there, you’re just missing out. You look at the average time someone spends on a Google search, I don’t recall what the exact time was, but I know it was sub 20 minutes. I think it goes like eight minutes or 15 or so per day search, yeah, but at the end of the day, people are consuming social content all day long. If you’re not on there, you’re just missing out.
Seth Price 26:54
That’s great. Well, any any final words for our audience, it’s been great to have you here for this conversation. One
Speaker 1 27:00
channel is not better than the other. Even if people spend more time on social media than, let’s say, Google Search, it doesn’t mean Google Search sucks, because it’s very intent-based. So you have to be on Google. But even though social media is not intent-based, you have to be there because everyone’s on it as well. Think omnichannel marketing. Try to touch people 11-plus times, and then the long run, you’ll pick up a lot of business. Be patient. Create new content that talks about stuff other people aren’t, and you should do well,
Seth Price 27:24
that’s great. Thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed having you here today.
BluShark Digital 27:28
Yeah, thanks for having me. Thank you for tuning in to the SEO Insider with Seth’s price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand’s online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital’s website. Beth.
