Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Jason Hennessey Shares SEO Mastery for Attorneys
Today’s episode delves into the powerful journey of transforming a law firm website into a revenue-generating asset through SEO. With actionable insights from Jason Hennessey, we explore core strategies, challenges, and the patience required for success.
• Discussion of essential SEO components: relevancy, popularity, integrity
• Highlights initial low performance and gradual improvement of birthinjurylawyer.com
• Insights into the critical role of content quality and keyword alignment
• Understanding the importance of a well-planned link-building strategy
• Digital PR campaigns as a successful strategy for gaining media attention
• Encouragement for listeners to take actionable steps in their SEO efforts
• Emphasis on the power of persistence and continuous learning in SEO
If you're keen to change your digital marketing game, follow the strategies outlined in this episode!
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Welcome back to another episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and create law practices that they don't hate showing up to work at. I'm your host, Brian Glass. I have a car crash practice in Northern Virginia and I help run a company called Great Legal Marketing where we teach owners of solo and small law practices exactly that how do you create and run and manage and lead the type of law firm that you want to show up at on Monday. Now, one of the things that I've noticed over the years is the people who are the best of the best of the best will tell you exactly what they're doing, because they know that you can't replicate that because you are not the best of the best of the best, and I love hanging out in rooms and having these discussions with people that just give you the entire roadmap.
Speaker 1:And so today's episode is with my friend, Jason Hennessey, who is laying out his entire roadmap for SEO and how he took birthinjurylawyercom from zero visitors to six figure referral fee checks through an Arizona based alternative business structure set up that he has with Bob Goldwater. Now, in this episode, Jason is going to tell you exactly what tools he uses, exactly how long it took him to build this website and how he thought about structuring the site so that he could get there as fast as he can. Now you will be shocked by how long it took him to get this site to rank and for him to turn it into money. As they say, the best time to start a website and start this project was five years ago and actually by the time this will release, six years ago. The next best time is today. So if you listen carefully, you will find something in this episode that you can take and put into practice in your law firm that will pay benefits and hopefully for you sooner than 2031.
Speaker 2:How many people in this room have hired an SEO company, a person, an agency Perfect. How many people have been disappointed by an seo agency, a company or a person? Okay, it's not uncommon. I think the problem is that most people aren't necessarily educated in seo, right, and you probably shouldn't be educated in seo. However, the more educated that you are, the more informed you are, then, the more empowered you are to make better decisions for your firm. So when I come and do presentations like this, I promise myself that if I'm going to get on a plane and travel in this case it was a quick flight, I live in Los Angeles but if I'm going to make a trip and get on a plane and stay in a hotel for a couple of days, I want to make sure that I can deliver enough value from stage where I can pay for your whole trip, so you and your seats. So that's my promise to you is to come up here and deliver a presentation that hopefully can pay for your entire trip coming here, maybe even pay for your entire fee for coaching and masterminds with Ben and his organization right, with Ben and his organization, right. However, that's only 10% of what I can deliver. The other 90% is guess what. You going home and taking action. That's the key here.
Speaker 2:This is my book. It's called Law Firm SEO. Does anybody have it? Has anybody read it already? Awesome, hopefully you got value from it.
Speaker 2:I wrote it just because of that main reason. I got so sick and tired of people labeling me as the car salesman SEO person. So I said you know what? I'm just going to write a book. I'm just going to add as much value that I can in the book and I'm going to give them away for free. In fact, we send, I want to say, 500 books away for free every single month, where I even pay for the cost of shipping and handling. So that's how much I really want to educate and empower people to do this.
Speaker 2:So SEO, is it black magic? When I first got into this industry, it was in 2001. And when I told people that I did SEO, you thought I was like a small God. Right, they're like what, like you do SEO? Isn't that like black magic? And and at the time it was it's because there wasn't a lot of books, it wasn't a lot of information on it. But at the end of the day, seo is not all that complicated? It really isn't.
Speaker 2:It comes down to three key principles. The first one is relevancy. Relevancy is the content that you publish on your website. What's different from your Dallas car accident lawyer page, from everybody else's Dallas car accident lawyer page? There's nearly not much, right.
Speaker 2:At the end of the day, you're really just trying to satisfy the intent of what people are searching for online. Second one is the popularity right, and the popularity is really what makes your website rank higher, right, and you talk about link building, right. So that's basically what is important. That's the stuff that you need to be doing in order to boost the popularity of your website so that your content, the relevant content, satisfies the intent of the person's search. And then the third piece is the integrity the intent of the person's search. And then the third piece is the integrity. And so the integrity is really the technical stuff that kind of makes up your website, right, and that's where it gets a little bit more complicated, and probably everybody in this room you probably should have somebody that knows that better than you do. That's the integrity. The sites that are top ranking for major keywords, like some of the most important money keywords that you aspire to rank for, are most likely getting all three of those correctly.
Speaker 2:All right, so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell a story here, because there's theoretical SEO and then there's practical SEO. There's stuff that you can read, there's stuff that you can watch videos on, there's stuff that people can talk about that has worked. I'm going to just share a story of basically a practical story of what we did to rank a website number one on Google for one of the most competitive keywords and probably one of the most profitable keywords for a law firm to want to rank for. So this is my friend, bob Goldwater. That was a much heavier Jason, by the way.
Speaker 2:So this is my buddy, bob Goldwater, whom a lot of Arizona is named after. Actually, his grandfather was Barry Goldwater, and so Bob has been in the legal marketing industry forever. He was one of the first guys on TV, and so I didn't know Bob. I know he had a reputation, and so I met Bob at a Litify I think it was called Litiquest conference, and this was back in 2019. That was the first time that we had met so similar to Ben. I'm like got to get a picture of Ben this guy's an icon, right and so that was Bob, and so we got to know each other. And then Bob said hey, jason, I've heard of you. I'd love to work together in some capacity. Can maybe we jump on a call next week? I'd love to pick your brain. And so fast forward.
Speaker 2:You know, many years later, this was the result of that conversation, and he had this idea to build out a website called birthinjurylawyercom, and he told me a lot of the reasons why he wanted to build out this website, and today it ranks number one for birth injury lawyer. Right, and every time that phone rings it's a potential seven or eight figure case. The problem, though, is that these cases take two to four, five years to settle right. So it's a. It's definitely a long-term play with these type of cases, but anyway, short story is, last month, I was driving in my car. I'm just driving and I get a text message from Bob, and he said hey, jason, I've got a check. I got to send you a check and I'm like what for? And he said it's a. I got this $370,000 check and I got to send you half of that. And I'm like okay, and so I think the best text message that you ever received.
Speaker 2:And it turns out that a website that we had developed together back again in 2019 had just settled our first case at $4.7 million right, and so this is basically what my good friend, ryan McKean, for me calls mailbox money. Right, because I didn't expect it, it didn't really come in. So when we first started this project I'm not a lawyer, by the way right, so I couldn't legally share in like fee sharing. But now, through Arizona ABS it's called the Alternative Business Structure I can now participate in legal fee sharing, and so this was actually the first fee sharing that I was able to participate in. But we didn't just get here right, and this took five years and a lot of patience and a lot of strategy. So I'm going to walk you through the journey of what did we do in order to generate that case? Right, because back in November of 2019, the website didn't have anything. It was just a brand new domain name. It was getting one person per month coming to the website, right, so why did he want to build this website in the first place?
Speaker 2:So, bob, when he had his family, his wife gave birth to triplets and two of his children were born with cerebral palsy right, and so this became a very near and dear subject to him, and he was a lawyer. He's a personal injury lawyer, he's a tv guy. So what did bob do, as most savvy people would do back in the early 90s buy as many great domains as you can buy. I like to tell myself like I really missed out in life, because I was in kindergarten while most people were buying domain names and so that was really. That was really the truth. So I missed out on that one. But he didn't, and so he bought every great domain name. He bought birth injury, con, birth injury lawyer, birth injury attorney, business injury law firm. He owns them all right. And he did it because it was a subject that was near and dear to his heart. So he sent me these. He sent me these domains.
Speaker 2:He's like all right, I really want to build a website, I want to go all in. I know that this is going to take three months. Can you take a look and give me your thoughts? I said, sure, send it over, bob. So he sent it over and I looked at birth injury. I'm like that one's really good. I'd rather have the word lawyer in there, because there's something called exact match domains and so an exact match is where you can get the major keyword that you want, like in the actual domain, because when people link to it, they're linking to the exact match keyword, and so I'm like let's go with birthinjurylawyercom. I think that's probably the best one that we'll use.
Speaker 2:So what I did was I looked at that domain name and I seen that it was first registered in 2001, which was one of the reasons why I picked that one. If you're ever in the market and you want to launch a new website or a new law firm, I would highly recommend you don't just buy a domain name for GoDaddy for $8, because Google looks at domain names like a fine wine, right. The longer it ages, the more value it has, right. I would always look in the aftermarket and see if you can find a domain name that might have some age, might have some links, might have some currency. So I looked at this and I figured okay, so 2001 is when the domain was launched. It's an exact match. We're going to build this website out.
Speaker 2:But then I said let me make sure I manage Bob's expectations because, like, we're going to be competing with some monsters in the industry and this is not going to happen overnight. So I started doing searches birth injury lawyer and Morgans of the world ranking there and I'm like, like man, this is going to be a tough challenge but I'm up for it. I used to compete in a much competitive space in in seo. Before legal. I used to do seo for like casinos and stuff like ranking number one for like online poker and stuff like that and I got my start in much more competitive spaces than birth injury lawyer and I'm like, I'm up for the challenge. So I just wanted to manage the expectations.
Speaker 2:So I looked at John Morgan's website. It was registered in 1996. So the age of that domain was a couple of years earlier. He had a domain rating of 70. Domain rating is basically the strength of your website. This is a tool that we use is called Ahrefs, so it's A-H-R-E-F-S. If there's one tool that I think everybody in this room should subscribe to, it's probably Ahrefs, because it allows you to see not only your website, but also it gives you a glimpse at some of your competitors. You can use this tool to study some of your competition as well. In fact, I'm going to Singapore in 15 days to speak at their conference as well at the end of this month. So the domain rating of this website was a 71. He had 6,200 referring domains that are linking back to it. So that's what's boosting the popularity of this website.
Speaker 2:And John Morgan tried to make marijuana legal in Florida, and so by him doing that, he was able to get a lot of really strong links that are not easy to clone, right? Anyway, I just wanted to manage Bob's expectations and say, look, this is what we're up against. We're up against this site, we're up against some other big players, but it is what it is. His website had 2,175 pages that were driving traffic to his site and he was getting, at the time, about 126,000 visits to the website as well. So this is basically how I start to diagnose just what I'm getting into before I enter a market, because, again, I don't want to be that person that mismanages expectations. And we do four months in and they're wondering why aren't we not ranking yet? So I'm just showing what you in this audience, what you guys should also be looking at with your competition and who you're up against and the keywords that you're trying to target as well. So what did we do? He said let's do it, let's move forward. I'm like okay, bob, it's going to be probably 18 months before we probably even see our first lead from this website. That's what we're up against here. We said let's do it. We built the website. This was like the skeleton of the website.
Speaker 2:I went back to Internet Archive just to see what the website first looked like. Somebody asked me in this room about scholarships. Are they still important? Why you see scholarship up there is because that was a link building strategy and it still is a link building strategy. You know you go out and you give away like a thousand dollars to a deserving student, but then you can use that to basically get a bunch of colleges to link back to your website and so now you're getting all of these EDU links pointing back to your website. So that is still an effective strategy. I recommend people do that as well. Is that scholarship? So that's why you see that up there.
Speaker 2:So after just about a month now we're getting six. We got six pages of content indexed and we're getting two people per month right To the website. What do you do? We're just getting started, but again it goes back down to the three core components of SEO relevancy, popularity, integrity, right. So what we did was. We started to double down on the relevancy, right? We started to write content. We started to write a lot of content. We wrote pages for Colorado cerebral palsy lawyer. Colorado cerebral palsy lawyer lawyer. Pittsburgh cerebral palsy lawyer. All the birth injury phrases. We wrote faqs. But the thing about this is we had a plan, we had a strategy, right, I knew what the strategy was going to look like in year five, based on which content that we're going to be writing, which pages are going to link to what. The whole strategy was built out in an Excel spreadsheet in advance, right?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people that make the mistake is you go to a conference like this and you hear from stage that we need to be writing content for our website, right, content is an important component of website. So what do you do? You go and you try to find somebody to write content for you and then they start writing the content, they publish the content and you have no idea why they're writing the content, what they're writing about. And that creates problems, right, because you might be publishing pages that are cannibalizing each other. You might be publishing pages that are linking to certain keywords that shouldn't be linking. So sometimes, if you don't have a strategy, you're creating a mess for yourself and you're actually paying for these people to create a mess. So it's really important to make sure that you have a strategy that you're going to be implementing in advance of just getting started.
Speaker 2:So we started writing even more content, right, and this is how we write our content. Like you can see here, we know exactly what the URL structure is going to be. We know what the title tag of the page is going to be. We know what the meta description is. We know what the H1 tag is. So that's where it says North Carolina birth injury lawyer. We knew how we're going to link to certain things. We knew which photo that we're going to use, so it's all planned out in advance.
Speaker 2:So then, fast forward. So now it's a year later, right? So we've been making a pretty significant investment into this website. It's a year later and guess what? All we got to show is 200 visits per month, right? This is where a lot of people get very frustrated. If you're sitting in this room, you're probably like what the heck? This has been a year celebrated. If you're sitting in this room, you're probably like what the heck? This has been a year. I know he managed my expectations, but it's been a year and I'm spending so much money on seo. And are you kidding me? We're getting 900 people coming into the website.
Speaker 2:Okay, it was 203 pages, I misread that, but still it's not that much, right? And but anyway, that's just how it works, right? And a lot of times you think about maybe like getting a different agency or firing the company, right? Seo is just like anything else, right? They say the best time to plant, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, right? Or today, right. And so this is just like my weight loss journey, like I lost 70 pounds in two and a half years. I didn't just show up to the gym on day one and lose 70 pounds. It's like progressive, right? It just happens Back to the three main components of the site.
Speaker 2:So we're publishing a lot of content, but the website is not going to rank for anything if we don't have popularity. So we need a link building strategy, right, and we've been building links, but I just want to highlight the links that we were building as part of the strategy. So what did we do? The first thing is we reverse engineered every major competitor that was ranking for the birth injury phrases, whether it was nationally or locally. Were they ranking for birth injury lawyer? Were they ranking for cerebral palsy lawyer? Were they ranking for birth injury lawyer? Were they ranking cerebral palsy lawyer? Were they ranking for Denver birth injury lawyer? What we did was we just spent a lot of time and a lot of resources and I just started to reverse engineer this law firm.
Speaker 2:Right, and why do I do this? It's because I want to look at the patterns. I want to be able to see what are the patterns here? Right, google is very transparent. There's reasons and there's signals on why a website is ranking higher than another. You just have to know how to look for it. You have to know how to understand the patterns. And so that's really what I was doing here.
Speaker 2:And in fact, if anybody has my book, in chapter eight of my book, I spent probably four or five months reverse engineering, like most of the biggest law firms in the country, to understand what are their top legal directories that every law firm has, right, and I've got, and I listed them. There's the 25 top legal directories that every major law firm that's ranking for, like money keywords. What are they ranked for? And then boom, like the directories, right? What are all the foundational links that all of the major law firms have Better Business Bureau, glassdoorcom, linkedin right? So these are the foundational links that every law firm, like has that we needed to have, right? But then this allowed me again to build out their strategy. Right, I know that, like, these are the links that they have and these are the links that we need to get. These are clonable links, right, and I know that a competitor that's going to try to knock me down now from the number one position is reverse engineering my strategy as we sit here. Right, this is just like a game of whack-a-mole, right? They're looking at my links. I'm looking at their links. They come up with a new strategy. I see it. I implement their strategy. Right, but this is what it takes. If I didn't do this, I would never have the chance of ranking in the first place. All right, so at this point, our domain rating was a 12 and we only had 59 referring domains linking back to the website. Right, we needed to continue to grow the domain authority of the site.
Speaker 2:This is just some of the strategies that we deployed, right, so you can see, there's some scholarship stuff up there. You can see that US News or US Attorneys is a site that you can publish guest blog posts on. One of the competitors might have had that link. So that's basically a big part of the strategy is doing outreach and seeing opportunities and then auditing the opportunities to make sure it's a good link and not a bad link and so anyway, but the biggest thing is the domain rating there, which you can see is 65 at the top. 64 just goes down right. That shows me how much popularity that I'm going to get from some of these links. So every time somebody links to you, you're either going to get a popularity signal or a relevant signal, or both. So the site, like US Attorneys, I'm getting a popularity signal because it's a domain rating of 64, but it's also legal websites, so I'm also getting relevance as well. So I'm getting that combination.
Speaker 2:This is the actual article that we published. In the article there's a link that's the blue underline link right there that says best legal help for cerebral palsy, and when you click on that it takes you to the website. A lot of times this content isn't necessarily written to be a best-selling article or anything like that. You're really doing this to drive links and boost the popularity of the website. This was another one. This is a mommy blog website. It's called momblogsocietycom. Just through our research, we figured, hey, this is an opportunity. We might've had to pay them a hundred bucks for this link. I don't know what the cost is right, or maybe they just wanted content. So you just are negotiating ways to get link opportunities, and so we might've paid this mommy blogger. Boom, we give her the article, she publishes it. On the article there's a link it says type of birth injury and then, boom, it goes back to the site.
Speaker 2:As you start to do this and you start to manipulate Google, what happens is your content starts to surface more and then you start building natural links. Right, that's the key here is, as you start to rank higher, people will just start linking to you more naturally. But in the front, nobody knows about your website. So you have to manipulate it a bit. So now we're talking 2023. So this is three years later. And so now the website is actually getting 3,200 visits per month. We're ranking in. We have 379 referring domains that are linking back to us. That domain rating is about a 31 at the time. Right? So all of the metrics are going in the right direction, but again, it's just taking time.
Speaker 2:That's part of the strategies. Patience is a virtue. They say right Now we're looking at okay, we've got all this content, we got the strategy. Is it working? I know we're getting traffic, but are we getting the right traffic? And so we started to look at okay, where do we rank now, okay, we're boosting our popularity, the domain rating. It's like we're in position 24 for birth injury lawyers right, we're in position 15 for birth injury law firm.
Speaker 2:So what happens is, if you execute the right strategy, like one, one page will rank for in this case it's 23 money keywords. Sometimes, like a page of content will rank for 2000 money keywords Right. And so it's just, it's going to randomly start showing you this. And so now we're like okay, we need to, we need to move this to the next level, right. So we need to figure out how can we boost this from position 24, because there's 2,400 people searching for that keyword every month. Birth injury lawyer there's 7,800 people searching for that keyword every month. Nobody's seeing us in position 17. We need to move that from position 17 to position 3 or position 2 or position 1. So now we need to elevate our strategy, right, because what got us here is not going to get us where we need to be.
Speaker 2:So what we did was we continued to write more content, but we got a little bit more sophisticated with our content approach, right? So instead of just publishing more content, which is part of the strategy, you always want to be publishing new pages. What we did was we had to go back and we had to see the content that we had already published to see how is it ranking? What can we do to make those pages rank a little bit higher? Can we basically use some different strategies to try to boost this keywords a little bit higher for certain pages that we had already published? And so that's why, when you're looking, this is actually our platform at Hennessy Digital, so that all of our clients can see and be transparent just what we're doing for them.
Speaker 2:So, on the right hand side, it says it's an FAQ page or this is a practice area page, but the key one that I want you to tune in on is a reassessment, right, and what we do is we basically will look at a page and we'll be like, okay, this page is ranking in position number three on page number one, right? What can we do to push this from position three to position one? Right, and we go in and we basically will. So we'll do a search for Colorado cerebral palsy lawyer, right, and then we'll start to look at some signals from Google, right? So one of the signals is you can see that Google will basically highlight, they'll make certain keywords on the page bold. Do you see that there? So that's basically Google giving us some insights to what is important, right, and so we basically built a tool that we can basically just extract all of the bolded keywords that we see there, and then what we'll do is we'll try to incorporate those bolded keywords not all of them. Some of them might be competitors and stuff like that but we'll basically rewrite the page to try to incorporate some of those bolded keywords into the article a little bit more. Maybe we'll rewrite some subheadings, maybe we'll rewrite the header tag, but we just want to get a little bit more sophisticated in the way in which we write our content.
Speaker 2:Another thing that we do is we leverage some of our proprietary tools as well as some third-party tools as well, and these tools do things like where it looks at, like the top three ranking websites and it tries to tell you, like, which keywords do they have that you don't? It gives you a score, right? So this is where it gets really sophisticated, right, and so you have to have writers that are going to go in there and modify stuff to try to bring the score from a 66 up to an 80, right, but again, if this is all new to you, I hope, hopefully I'm making you aware of this so that you can go back, because you probably have some competitors that are doing this, right, and this is all new to you. You should probably be looking at doing this in your respective markets as well, because you don't just publish a piece of content and, all of a sudden, it's just going to rank magically. That's just not how Google works. Unfortunately, as much as we'd like that to happen, it just doesn't happen like that. Right, there's advanced people that are like looking at this stuff all day, every day. So this is basically like an example right, create a list of keywords, right, and then boom, now they're using AI to incorporate things a little bit better, right, so it's even getting more advanced as well.
Speaker 2:All right, so now fast forward to June of 2023. Now the website's getting 7,500 visits per month. We have 588 pages of content that's indexed. Now we're in the game. We're in the big leagues, guys. It took us four years to get here with a very specific strategy and a pretty decent budget, but again, to build an asset in four years that now has the potential to throw off seven and eight figure cases every single month. It was definitely worth the wait, right? You know what I mean. That's the key here. So now we're in the big leagues. We're ranking in position number three for birth injury lawyer, ranking in position number five for birth injury attorney, ranking in position number two for birth injury lawyers right, stuff like that.
Speaker 2:So what do I got to do now? I got to think differently. What can I do that is different from my competitors? How can I push this higher? Because everything that I do, my competitors are going to do, and I want to be able to differentiate myself.
Speaker 2:So then, introduce a concept called digital PR. So what did anybody heard the term digital PR? Okay, I know, you know it. So digital PR is amazing, right, and the reason why this is amazing is because this is a strategy that your competitors could never clone. They could never clone the links that we build here. And let me explain what we do. Right, this was in April. This is a new digital PR campaign that we just launched in April, but I'm just showing you this for the concept here.
Speaker 2:So what we did was we did a study, right, where we looked at the states with the highest fertility rates and so, as you can see, we were able to generate what looks like 16 links, 10 of which have a domain rating of 70 or greater. We got links from MSN, which is a domain rating of 92. We've got Coach Valley Daily. We've got links from the Times of San Diego, right. So there's a lot of media and news outlets that are actually linking to us, right? What did it take to get these links? It took a lot of work. Let me just tell you that, right, Usually, the stuff that takes a lot of work gets the best results.
Speaker 2:In fact, talking about a lot of work, I'm just going to pivot for a second. Does anybody know about our study that we do every year, where we reach out to 1500 law firms and we call you? Anybody heard of that? So that's a lot of work. We actually, every year, we basically send a email. We basically are ghost inspecting your intake, right? We'll basically plant a lead in your intake and then wait to see how long you call us. And we do that for over 1,500 law firms every year. And we put together this study and we're able to see, ok, there's firms that are actually calling in one minute and there's firms that don't ever call us back.
Speaker 2:And we put together this big study. But, again, it takes a lot of time, it's a lot of resources, but I was in this conference and I heard three people talking about that study from stage. Right, you know what I mean, but it's because it takes so much time to put that together. That's the stuff people want to talk about. Right, if it's really hard, it's really easy. Everybody would do it right? The hard stuff is the stuff that's really powerful. This is the hard stuff. This digital PR, right? So how did we do this? I'm going to reveal the secret, right, it's not rocket science.
Speaker 2:What we did was we basically used reliable sources and we looked at data. We wanted to see what does the data tell us? What states have the highest fertility rate, right? Why, in 2017, 18, 19,. We collected all of this data and then what we did was we basically put together press releases, right? So we would write maybe six different press releases and the press release would be targeted to whatever it is state that you know ranked number three, or if the state ranked number one, right? And so then what we would do is we would basically we use a service there's different services. You can use a service called Muckrat, you can use a service called Sij it's basically like journalist databases and we basically pull all of the journalists that are, in this case, south Dakota. So who are the journalists in South Dakota that might cover stuff related to families or birth or what have you right?
Speaker 2:And then this is very relevant and it doesn't matter. We're a national website, so it doesn't matter where the links are coming from. We just want to get people to talk about and link it to us. And then what we'll do is we'll put together a list of journalists. So we might have 2000 journalists here, another 2000 journalists here, another 2000 journalists. So we might send 8,000 emails right To try to get this picked up by different journalists. And then we look at the open rates, we look at the response rates. We actually respond to the emails and the goal is to basically get them to talk about the release, and a lot of times, journalists are just sitting there and they want to know what can I report on today, because they have deadlines and you're just landing this in their lap with a story that they can basically talk about. That's important.
Speaker 2:And so this was an example, right, where we're able to get a link on a website that is probably like a DR79. Again, my competitors could never clone this link, right? This is one link that they could not clone because it's related to a story that's tied to a journalist which we have a relationship with, so it just goes back further there. This was another study that we did the most expensive States to give birth. In right now, you can see, we've got links from a lot of the news websites too. There's news break. We've got what is that? Klfycom in Louisiana. These are like stories that are amazing. These are links that are amazing. We've got 11 links as a result of this campaign.
Speaker 2:Again, reverse engineering the strategy, we put together the data we're able to see which are the states where it's most expensive to have a baby, and then from there, this is the press release that went out. Again, we say, if you use this research just link back to us. Sometimes people will basically run the story and not link back to us, so then our team will then go out and try to track down the link so that we can actually get the link. But even though it doesn't link to us, there's actually a way that you can make the association so that you're still getting value to, and that's called a co-occurrence and a co-citation. But anyway, you really want to get the link, occurrence and a co-citation, but anyway, you really want to get the link. That's the goal here.
Speaker 2:And what happens is this is the KLFY right, I don't live in Louisiana, but I suspect that this is a popular station, maybe. And what did they do? Not only did they link to us, but they ran it on their local news, right? So this was a story that was run on their local news and it's just as a result of us, like with this crazy link building strategy, right, that we wanted to do. This is another one here states where cesarean delivery is most likely, and this one did really well as well. We got a bunch of DR90s, dr80s, dr70s Anytime. You see that little media link right there. That's why I pulled this one up, where there's like that little video icon that means that those stations ran it as a news segment in their market. So this is a very wild and successful one that we got as a result of us doing that same thing. We pull the data, we do the press release and then there it is right. There's the actual story where it's mixed in with the local weather. It looks like right. Oh's the actual story where it's mixed in with the local weather. It looks like right. All I really cared about was that link.
Speaker 2:What happens is we continue to do this Every month. We're doing this like for a birth injury lawyer. Every month we're doing like a new campaign, right. And I just wanna be light years ahead, like of my competition. That's the key. I'm building a mode between anybody that ever wants to try to compete with me in this space. Some of my clients that I work with they're doing four or five of these campaigns a month and these aren't cheap. We charge $8,500 per month just to do one campaign, right. So we've got certain clients that are spending $30,000, $40,000 a month just doing this if they want to rank in a very competitive market, like in Atlanta or Miami right. But anybody that hires an SEO company that's going to pay them $5,000 a month to try to compete in Miami, when you have the big boys that are doing this. They're running five campaigns where they're spending $40,000 a month and we're building links that have DRs 80s and 90s. Good luck, good luck. That's why they say, like Hennessy digital, we're very expensive, but it's because quality takes money and it takes strategy, right, and so that's just what we do, right.
Speaker 2:Anyway, now the website fast forward. Today it has a DR43. We have 756 referring domains that are linking back to us. The site gets about 15,000 visits per month to the website, every single month. It's all very targeted traffic, right, it's not just traffic that's like a bunch of stuff that doesn't really make sense to the site and, as a result, the it's all very targeted traffic, right, it's not just traffic that's like a bunch of stuff that's doesn't really make sense to the site. And, as a result, the phone rings and we sign multiple every single month.
Speaker 2:We reject a lot of cases too, because birth injury cases are really tough and they have to meet certain requirements and stuff like that, and then sometimes we sign the cases only for the case to get rejected later by some of our partners. We refer the cases out to the trial lawyers that are some of the best in the business, and so sometimes we'll sign the case and then we reject it later. But anyway, that's the story. With that, we have 629 pages of content that's indexed on the site. And then, boom, now you can see here, we ranked number one for just about all of the money keywords, right? So birth injury attorney, birth injury lawyer, birth injury attorney, birth injury law. And now there's let's see here oh, it doesn't show. Oh, it's 627 pages. Yeah, so there's 268 keywords. So, anyway, this is just an example of how the strategy works.
Speaker 2:But specifically looking at this tool, this is why I recommend that everybody have a license or subscription to Ahrefs, because this is not even from my analytics, like, I'm just pulling this from this tool, right? And then this tool you can see on your website which pages are driving the most traffic, right? Where do you get most of your traffic from? What keywords are you ranking for per page, right? So this basically exactly how it will show it here. And then, anytime you're actually ranking in position four for a keyword that looks like it could be a money keyword for you, there's strategies that you can deploy to push that to position one, right, but first you have to be able to see it and track it. Let's see here.
Speaker 2:Okay, so now these are just like. These are basically all of the referring domains that are linking back to the website. So you can see, we got links from Yahoo, we got links from Entrepreneur, we got links from US News these are all DR91s. We got a link from foxnewscom right, so not even the local affiliate, but actual foxnewscom. We've got links from some colleges, from some of the EDU stuff that we've done, and then just natural links that kind of come in as a result of that. Now, when I click on new links, so this is just in September and some in October. But look at all these media websites and news websites that we got as a result of ABC and KTUL and all the bottom ones there, kxe right, these are all media websites that are linking to us just in September. Right, these are really hard links to get, really hard links to get there.
Speaker 2:It is right, ranks number one for birth injury lawyer. That's the website I told Bob. I'm like, hey, what started out as just a regular website but it's not going to convert as well, I'm like we really need to tell your story a little bit better. Um, because that's what's really going to resonate with people. And so Michael Mogul is a friend of mine. He actually wrote the forward to my book. He owns the company crisp, so Bob flew out there and they did this amazing video and it really tells Bob's story on why he decided to get into this space. Right, because it affected his lifestyle. Right, it impacted his family. So when people see that not only are we driving them to a website using advanced SEO strategies, but the story really resonates with people, right, because he was in their shoes, and so that kind of again just left led to after many years like a big case. But now we have these cases in the pipeline, right, so every couple of months we're going to get a new case that just pops All right.
Speaker 2:So that's the story of birth injury lawyer, which I wanted to highlight. That because that's a very competitive keyword. A lot of the keywords that you guys are targeting is probably not as competitive as ranking for a national keyword like that, but the same strategies that we deployed can be very much applicable to everybody in this room, right, you don't need to hire Hennessy Digital to do this. You can do it yourself. You just need to take action right. You don't need to hire Hennessy Digital to do this. You can do it yourself. You just need to take action right. I revealed the strategy. It's very it's not as hard as it looks, right Content links and then basically making sure that the technical aspects of the website is correct. But wait, there's more. So let me give you guys with just a couple other nuggets that I think you can go back to implement on your websites.
Speaker 2:So, if I'm ever going to compete in a market, one of the first things that I like to look at is I like to do the search for whatever it is keyword that you're trying to rank for. So, in this case, if I was trying to rank for Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer, I just study the SERPs, right, so I will look at, like, the number one result. I'll look at the number two result. I'll look at what are they doing in terms of link building. What are they doing in terms of content strategy? Like, I've got systems where I can actually see all of the competitors which content that they're publishing in real time right, because I'll crawl their sitemap and so that kind of feeds it into my system. And so if I know that whoa this, this competitor knows something that we don't know about this, we should probably whip up a page too. Right, like, I'm like ahead of my competition, right, the moment that they do something, I'm on it.
Speaker 2:But what I like to do here is I like to look at what are some of the opportunities that already exist on the first 50 results of Google that can help me. Right, because if Google's ranking Alvo in position six for Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer and Google's ranking Forbes in position seven and Google's ranking Finelaw in position nine, I like to say that I am the best salesperson for Alvo and Finelaw because I will tell my clients that they need to be on these directories as much as I hate giving them money, I will manage the expectation and I'll say if you advertise on fine law, there's a very high likelihood chance that you probably might not get any business from advertising on fine law, and I know it's hard to swallow paying 300 bucks a month to advertise on a directory that isn't going to generate leads. However, knowing what I know about SEO and knowing what I know about reverse engineering the Google algorithm for now 25 years. I know that because Google is associating that page as a very legally relevant and a very popular page, that if I get all of these websites to link back to me, these are all ranking in the top 50 of Google. What is that going to do to my website? Because it's all of these signals to Google saying, hey, we all think this person should be ranking for this keyword, right? And so I'm going to go to my clients. I'm going to say we need to be on OVO. I don't care what it costs, right? Sometimes we just need the basic listing with a link. Right? They're always going to try to upsell you. We can give you the premium spots for a thousand bucks a month. We don't need any of that. We just need to be on the directory with your name, address and phone number and a link back to your website. One thing that's important. In fact, when I was coaching Ben and Brian and Lauren, which they take action boy, do they take action. I'll get off a call with them and 70% of this stuff is already done. It's like they're just taking immediate action. But one of the things that I noticed with them is they had recently I don't know, maybe a year ago they relaunched like a new website and somebody accidentally, or I don't know maybe a year ago they relaunched like a new website and somebody accidentally, or I don't know if it was intentionally or not but they made the decision to.
Speaker 2:There's a difference between a WWW version of your website and a non-WWW version of your website, right? So if you go to your website right now, you want to see how does it propagate. Does your website propagate without the WWW before it or does it propagate? Does your website propagate without the www before it or does it propagate with the www, right? Sometimes it might be a difference between having a link that has HTTPS versus non-HTPS, right, there's a difference, right? So there's all the.
Speaker 2:They call this a canonical URL, right? You can only pick one canonical URL. So for years and years, if you went to Ben Glass their canonical URL I can't remember if it was www, was it with the www? Okay, so it was with the www, right? But they made the change to implement the website without the www, right? So the whole website, even though that it got implemented and executed correctly, all of their links were still pointing to the wrong version of the URL.
Speaker 2:So we could either do one of two things. We can try to log in to 600 links and directories to try to change the link, or we can just basically just point the link so that it propagates correctly, so that all of the links, because what happens is anytime somebody goes to that link, even though that it redirects to the right place, you lose 10% of the link equity. So they lost a lot of link equity as a result of doing that incorrectly. Right? So it just took one phone call. I recognized it. I'm like we need to fix this. And so that's just now. You won't see the results of that Like overnight. You'll see it in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days days, but eventually it'll actually kick in. All right, anybody getting value from this. So far, hopefully, you guys are getting value awesome.
Speaker 2:So again, we looked at fine law. Then I looked at super lawyer. You should all be doing this, like you should be looking at your serp for your money keyword and highlighting every site that's not a competitor that you can possibly be on right. Justia, yelp Everybody hates playing Yelp games. I get it. I hate playing that game too, but you need to be on it.
Speaker 2:Expertisecom is another popular one. Oh, oh, this is the other thing. I thought I lost my train of thought. Okay, I got six more minutes. This is actually important as well.
Speaker 2:So when I was in Thailand last year, I was sitting with a good friend of mine and his name is Cyrus Shepard. Cyrus was the head of SEO for Moz, which is a popular SEO tool still is for 15 years, right. And so now Cyrus, he does some consulting, and so, in a private mastermind, he told me that he is also a Google quality rater. And so I'm like, okay, that's cool. So what do Google quality raters look for? And he's like all right, I'll fill you in on one thing that we look at. First, google quality raters only use mobile devices to look at websites, so they're not even looking at desktop version of your website, right? So that's the first thing. Second thing is that they algorithmically are able to understand something called your EEAT has anybody heard that acronym before? Your expertise, your experience, your authority and your trust, right? So how can Google algorithmically understand your expertise, authority and trust?
Speaker 2:If you click on this little, did you see the little three dots next to this firm right here? It's very hidden. Nobody even knows it's there. But if you click on that, google's going to reveal this, right. This is just a glimpse of what they look at for your ee, your expertise, authority and trust. So the first thing I see is that fine laws listed there. I can see that the website. It says about the source. But the next step for you to do is to click on more about this page, and so when you click more about this page now, google is going to take you to this page.
Speaker 2:So now imagine, the left side is just the top and the right side the bottom right it's that's. I just wanted to fit it all on one screen. So there's basically like this slider there right, and so these are what I am calling. I'm proclaiming this. It's not a real term in Google, but I'm calling these merit links, right? So let it be known that I was the first person to call this a merit link. So these are links that Google is looking at in terms of trying to understand your merit, and so you can see here you've got FineLaw. You've got Lawyerscom. You've got a press release website. They're understanding your reviews so they can see all the reviews 4.9 rating. Then you see Yelp They've got 5 Star. They've got five star. You've got lawyerscom 5.0. You've got Avvo 5.0. Remember, this is the number one website. That's ranking. It's no coincidence that they're ranking number one and they have a 4.9 rating and all five stars 4.7 on Yelp, 5.0 on lawyerscom, they got a better business bureau, a point rating right. They're the number one website, right.
Speaker 2:I saw a Google update that took place. I think it was like the helpful content update that took place. One of my clients that I work with and I still work with today was like what the heck? Like Jason, like your team needs to pick it up. Man, I know that there's a Google algorithm update that took place, but, man, we got hit with this one and I'm like, okay, let me go and take a look at this, let me diagnose it. So what did I do? Was I did the same exercise, right? I clicked on it and I seen that their Yelp rating was like a 2.1. I seen that their better business bureau was like a B rating.
Speaker 2:I seen that they had some negative glass door reviews about their firm as far as, like working at the firm, and I'm like this is your problem. I'm like Google, even though that your website is great and you've got all this amazing SEO strategy. You have a trust problem with Google, right, and that makes sense, right? Because why should Google reward people that don't treat their right? Because why should Google reward people that don't treat their employees right? Or why should Google reward people that don't treat their clients right? And I know we all hate the algorithms of Yelp and Google and all these other places, but Google's an algorithm, right? It's not human beings that are making decisions in a boardroom on whether or not you should be ranking right. They look at all these signals, and so I just tell you that you should analyze this stuff and if you've got bad Yelp reviews, if you've got some glass doors that are bringing your score down, get some people in your company to leave better reviews for you, because you'll notice that your actual Google rankings will help as well. All right, that's it.
Speaker 2:If anybody would like a copy of my book, rob is in the back there. Raise your hand, rob. He has books, so we don't want to take him with us. So if you want to take one to a friend or a marketing director at your firm, by all means please grab that. Can I stick around for a couple of questions?
Speaker 4:Yeah, you didn't ask for this, but do you have any more of those coaching slots available?
Speaker 2:I do, and it's funny how I came up with this coaching product. I wasn't going to offer coaching, that wasn't really my thing. Friend of mine introduced me to somebody and said hey, would you do me a favor? This is a buddy of mine. He just graduated law school. He's really hungry. He wants to open up his own firm. Can you just tell him what to do? You know, because he's got a lot of time but it doesn't have a lot of money and I'm like sure I'll do that.
Speaker 2:So I get on a call with him and this guy's ambitious. He's read this blog post, he's watched this video and he's about to execute all this strategy. He's going to spend so much time doing all these great ideas that he had in his mind and I'm just sitting there I'm like don't do that, be careful, don't do that Right. And man, I just can't let this guy, in my good conscious kind of go and do all this stuff and spend all this time and it's not going to get the same result that he's looking for. So I'm like, maybe I'll coach you, maybe I'll coach you and we can jump on a call for 90 minutes once a month and I'll actually coach you and you can do the things that I tell you to do, and so it's been probably like seven months Now.
Speaker 2:He like ranks number one in his local little market. He's generating cases, he's loving life. So, yes, I do have a coaching product. My agency does services for you. If you don't want to do it, if you have more money and not enough time, that's like the agency. But if you have a team of people that can do the work and you just want the right strategy, yes, be sure to contact Rob at our booth and we do 90-minute calls. It's pretty reasonably priced, but, yes, we can do some coaching too. Who? Has a question?
Speaker 2:Yes, sir.
Speaker 4:Brandon, you know the drill You've got to turn around and catch the microphone. Boom. I just want to point out for a second. You've asked so many questions. Brandon plays full in like the whole weekend, just like he does in the mastermind group. If you will leave this conference with something unanswered, shame on you. Good for you, sir.
Speaker 5:Thank you, Thank you so this is maybe an easy question. You mentioned AH refs. I've been using Mozcom for a long time. Can you compare the two? Are they different? Is one better than the other? Do they do the same thing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's Mozcom, there's Ahrefs, there's SEMrush, which is another one. Some people call it SEMrush, so SEMrush is a publicly traded company. Now they went public and so usually when you go public there's a lot more restrictions and being agile with kind of new improvements to their tools and stuff like that. Moz is good, but ever since Rand Fishkin left Moz, there really hasn't been much innovation. Rand is a friend of mine, so it's just more of a for-profit company and I haven't really seen a whole lot of innovation there.
Speaker 2:However, tim Solo, who's at Ahrefs, who he and I have a selfie battle. If you want to see something really funny, go to SEO selfie battle, come. It's a battle between me and Tim Solo. He took a photo of himself once and then I took a photo of me with him in the background and then he took a photo of me with me in the background, and it's just a recursive selfie battle that has blown up so much that their conference in Singapore. There's a big balloon that went up in Singapore and on the front of the balloon is Ahrefs the logo talking about on the conference. On the back of the balloon is a picture of me right With the recursive selfie battle with a picture of him and a picture of me, and a picture of him and a picture of me. Anyway, I'm a big fan of Ahrefs. They're very innovative and they've got probably by far the best product on the market. Thank you, anybody else before we let Jason go, mcbilly?
Speaker 5:If I can, if you have four hours a week to do this stuff, what are you focusing on?
Speaker 2:Content and links. I say that write content that truly satisfies the intent of people searching. Then create a video, like a short video, explaining that content that you publish on the page. Don't ever embed videos with YouTube. I think that's a critical mistake that people make with their websites. Don't get me wrong. You take a video and you publish it on YouTube because that's the second largest search engine, but you never want to take that video and embed it on your website. Right, and I know it's free and it's great and all.
Speaker 2:But the reason is because when somebody comes to your website and they accidentally click on the video, if they click on the top instead of the play button, guess what? They're off your website and they're on YouTube now. So you're working really hard to get people to your website and just with one click of a little button, by accident, they're off your website Now they're watching videos on YouTube. So instead, use like a service like Wistia. It's like a paid version of a YouTube embed player, but the person could never leave your website. Once they click on the video, they can open it, make it bigger, make it smaller. They'll never leave your website.
Speaker 2:The other mistake that I see a lot of people make is they put their social media icons at the top of their website. So people come to their website and you've got the phone number in the right hand side and they got the social media icons there. That's the last thing you want people doing is coming to your website and clicking over to like your Facebook page or something like that. Keep them on your website for as long as you can. Maybe put the social media stuff on, like the contact us or the thank you page after they submitted the form, but I wouldn't just keep that at the top there, so I'm back here.
Speaker 3:Jason, first of all, very impressed. I would consider myself very knowledgeable in SEO, but I learned new stuff here, so very impressed. Thank you for sharing. I love the PR strategy. So I have one question, but I also have a side comment on the YouTube stuff, because that's also our expertise. There, you go.
Speaker 3:I 100% agree with the YouTube. You do not want to embed the YouTube video for pages that you want to rank for SEO, because 100% Google looks at the time on page, so if they accidentally click outside, then now you're sending a bad signal to Google, correct. However, for your landing pages that you are driving traffic to, that's not for SEO. You absolutely want to embed the YouTube video because when they watch the YouTube video, you're going to be able to. Once you post a new YouTube video, you're going to get free retargeting, because when Google sees that they watched new YouTube video, you're going to get free retargeting. Because when Google sees that they watch the YouTube video now, when they go to YouTube and you post a new video, you're going to get a free retargeting for them.
Speaker 2:There you go. So if you have maybe like a YouTube strategy and stuff like that, I just selfishly hate to spend money like a couple hundred dollars, a click for somebody to come to a page and then boom, now they're off the page.
Speaker 3:But yeah, you do have a point yeah, my question is so you basically do the study, right? That way you're able to attract links. And so you do the study. And then so you mentioned the pr strategy so you put up the press release their press release is in a blog on your website and then you do the reach out, so that you reach out to all the journalists so they write about it and then they link it to your blog article. Is that right?
Speaker 2:So there's two ways to do this yes and no. So that's one strategy. So sometimes, like, we'll take like on birthinjurycom birthinjurylawyercom If you go to resources, there'll be like maybe three studies where we basically did this and we got nice visuals and illustrations and infographics right, and it talks about that. So that's one way of doing it. All of the examples that I posted here, we didn't actually link, we didn't put the study on our website. We basically are just basically pitching the press release and then basically we're just generating the link to the homepage right, because the homepage is what's optimized for birth injury lawyer, the link to the homepage, right, because the homepage is what's optimized for birth injury lawyer, and so I'm trying to push the homepage to rank higher rather than linking to the study.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you create an actual asset, like a PDF study. Yes, you give it to them and just say hey, this was done by the homepage.
Speaker 2:Link back to birth and calm If you use this. That is a great strategy, man. Thank you. Yeah. Alrighty Jason, Thank you so much, sir.
