Well welcome, everyone. And welcome back to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing podcast. We've been off air for a little while, but we are fully rebooted now. And slight rename of the podcast, it's now called the 10. Golden Rules. Internet Marketing for law firms podcast, will still have lots of tips and ideas of value for all industries. But we're mostly specialized in working with law firms. Now, the 10 golden rules. And I want to introduce Jenna and Ike, who are going to join me. And we're going to do these in interview format. We'll have a couple of different types of podcasts going forward. But this one is our post webinar podcast. And what we found is the webinars themselves don't make great audio, because we're often referring to the slides. So today I can Jenna, who were sitting in with me when we did this month's webinar are going to interview me. And then we'll be answering the questions in an audio friendly format. So Jenna, welcome. Say hi to the people.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me.

And Ike works with us on our sales team is really experienced in audio and video. And I thought he'd bring a nice take to this. So like say, say hello.

Yeah, so nice to meet y'all. Let's get going.

All right. Well, without further ado, Jenna, you're gonna kick us off with some questions.

Yeah, I'll get to start it. So Jay, first, I want to say I really enjoy the webinar yesterday about Google's zoo is very fascinating. But before we get into it, I remember the first thing you talked about was the ABCs of SEO. So could you explain that first?

There's a lot of you know, websites I seen, they didn't have a lot of those things, man. So it's not like a lot of people because he's your help.

Thanks. Any you guys have any questions on that? Or any expansion we should do?

I think you covered it.

Alright, sowho's it? Who's got the next question,

too, and I was gonna ask you about the zoo. But now you're talking about insects. So I don't know when y'all got everything in the animal kingdom over there. Just just animals and insects?

Well, tha t lady's first.

I was trying to figure that out, I don't know.

But if you were at Google, and you're trying to figure out like, how do we determine like, which is a quality website, and which is a low quality website?

Absolutely. If I go to the site, and it looks like, you know, a fifth grader made it, I will say, you know, it's kind of low quality. But if I get on the site, it's smooth, and quick stuff and stuff opens up fast. And, and I see get the information, I need a return to the site. That's another beat. Yeah. But yeah,

One of theanimals that stood out to me the most while you were doing your webinar, although I loved the cute little panda was the cute penguin. It was my favorite. So I did want to ask you, I remember you saying that Penguin has to do with links. So how did the Penguin update come about? And where can I get one of those cute little penguins?

and this is all salmon, like, y'all had some kind of Google mafia back and crazy stuff.

Yeah, the truth always comes to light, man.

I was good. You know,

I was just saying, from a user standpoint, I know when someone's looking at like Google Maps, or Google business profile, something that's really important to them is your company's Google reviews. Do you have like a best strategy for someone wanting to get reviews?

Yeah, great question. You know, the first thing is just ask for them. And, you know, we'll go back to the law firm example. Generally, there's three or four times when it's the best time to ask your customers for a review. And if we're talking about, like, you know, we'll use the personal injury example, again, when you know, when the first person first signs up with you, and you, you do the first couple of calls with their insurance company, and they realize, okay, I got the right guy on my side, you know, that's a good time to ask for a Google review. And so make it super easy, you know, send it to them, send them the link, that when they click it, it goes right to the review page, you know, in the old days used to have to say, go to my maps and click on the five stars, and then you'll the review thing will come up, like now you can send them right to that page. So just make it super easy for them. And there's a couple of software's out there that will actually do that. Even better. So if you're a bigger firm, and you're not the lawyer who's gonna be asking the person, you know, it's your paralegal or your legal assistants who have the relationship with the customers. There's a software called BirdEye. It's BirdEye. There's no s. Everyone thinks it's Birdseye. And there's another one called podium, and those are really good at sending links to people to ask for reviews. So that's, that's one strategy and then The second strategy is to actually incentivize your team to get more of those reviews. And so if you have a small program, like we always say, you know, do a gift certificate program, where every four or five star review, the paralegal will get a $25 or $50. Restaurant gift card. That was very important to note, you're not allowed in Google's Terms of Service to give the customer any incentive, you can't pay them for a review. You can't say if you do a review, I'll send a gift card. But if the paralegal gets the gift cards, they'll call them up, like I said, at the right time. So you know, the first time is when you fight the insurance company for them. The second time might be when you get a settlement agreement, and they know what checks coming. And then the third time is, if they come to the office to get the check and sign the paperwork, you know, that's a real good time to just say, can you do us a favor, hop on your cell phone and do a Google review? Ideally, you don't want them hopping on a computer in the office, because then Google is gonna see all the reviews coming from the same IP address. So you want them to actually use their cell phone. And they're probably already logged into one of the Google products, Gmail or, you know, one of the other Google services. So it'll be relatively easy on their cell phone.

Nothing really comes close to Google. And so I don't even think they have competition.

Well, there's a new, there's a new player is a new kid on the block, right? We've probably got to figure out a zoo animal for chat. GPT. Right. Yeah. Actually, Google. Google has a competitor. It's called bark, var D. So I'm sure by the next time we update the Google zoo webinar, we're gonna have to figure out what animal Bart is.

That sounds like a Simpsons character.

Yeah. Maybe that's what we'll call we'll call Simpson. Which, you know, I know Jenna has has a Google character. He was trying to figure out it sounds like Bart, what was the one you're asking me about yesterday?

Yeah, so you're talking about Bert. And he reminds him a character of a show I watched as a kid. But that was one that was really interesting, because the little character just grabbed my attention. So what's the Bert algorithm? And what SEL lessons do we learn from it?

Well, you remember, from yesterday, it's the bi directional encoder representations from transformers update.

How can anybody remember that?

Right. And since you brought it up, Chat GPT, I know it's the hot topic and the new kid on the block. People are talking about if they should use it for blogs using as copy on their website, do you suggest people get copied from chat? GPT?

Awesome. Another thing, the webinar yesterday, after you were talking about all the animals and stuff, and they were also cute, but you did talk about how there's a new restaurant at the Google zoo, which I thought was fun. So what does EA T stands for? And the most important question is can I get nachos there?

Well, I don't know. I don't know how the good how good the nachos are at E A T. But I'm good for a long time Google's you know, a long time three, four or five years. Google has recommended and by the way, there is tremendous information on the Google Search blog. So Google actually writes all this stuff up and explains it now. Now back in the days of Panda and Penguin, we kind of had to make this stuff up as our on our own as, as the search industry in Google, you know, one Google engineer would make one statement in his in a talk at a conference. And that would go all around the industry, you know, as explaining, like what Panda and Penguin were all about, and verifying our suspicions. But now a lot of this great stuffs on Google's blog. So what they've explained is EA T is is a way you should structure your website with expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And so, you know, basically what that means is, you know, if you can demonstrate expertise on a topic, if you can have high quality content, answering people's questions about a topic, and you can have videos, and you can have charts and infographics. And by association, we talked about authentic links from other sites to your website. So like, let's say you write a white paper on a topic, and a lot of people in the industry in a lot of bloggers, link to that white paper, your website's going to have a lot of expertise and authoritativeness, because of the content quality content you created, and the number of other highly ranked websites, that link to your website. And then trustworthiness is, you know, the human nature part of it that I talked about earlier. Where, you know, like you said, like, is this written by a fifth grader? Or was it written by, you know, one of the world's leading experts on, on whatever the topic is. And some of that's just, you know, human perceptiveness. But also, you know, like, if you go to a website, and they've got some trust icons, like they're a member of Super Lawyers, which a lot of people don't know what that is, but Super Lawyers is voted on by your peers. So if a bunch of other lawyers said you're the best lawyer, or one of the best in your area, and if you've got some of the other things like, you know, the Bar Association logo, and you've, some lawyers have achieved different distinction like they've been, they're nationally ranked for different things, or they've had a million dollar verdict or a $10 million verdict, you get all those trust logos on a website. And most of us don't give it a lot of thought. But I think subconsciously, you just see, okay, this guy's got five or six or seven of these important insignias, he must be trustworthy. And another insignia of trust is, if you put the little icons, like the Google reviews icon, or the Facebook, friends likes icon. And if people see oh, you know, this guy's got 175, Google resume reviews, pays 4.9 stars, or even better, maybe 4.8 stars, because nobody believes it, when everybody gives you a five star review. Like no, none of us, if you see a restaurant, it's got 15 five star reviews, you're like, Okay, that's that's this guy's friends and cousins. But you know, you're actually look more legit. And there's a whole other story on 4.8 stars is better than five stars or 4.9 stars. So having the Google stars, you can have the Facebook likes, and sometimes you go to a website, and it's like, you know, two people, you know, like this website, you see that on the Facebook icon. So you can get those little, those little widgets from Facebook and from Google and add them to your website. And that increases trustworthiness. So EA T. Was was around for a long time. And then Google opened their new website called EA T. And they opened it in the google xuer. We, we've we've we've put a graphic in the Google zoom. And the additional E is experience. And this is something Google has been playing around with, again for four or five years. And for a while they were giving you a lot of they had Google Authorship. And if you were an expert author, and you'd authored a lot of articles that Google registered, the authors actually showed up in the search results for topics. And you know, our faces kind of went away. But the algorithms still rewarded us for having that experience factor. Meaning that you know, your articles had been featured on industry sites, they found you as a speaker at industry, trade shows, you did a lot of social media, or you were in communities and forums talking about the topic. You did a lot videos very valuable to represent your experience on the topic. So this is kind of proof positive that Google is reading social media. They are reading communities and forums and Reddit and all the different communities in your industry. So and in fact, there's also been changes to those Google quality rater guidelines. So the human humans are going around and looking at websites have now been asked to include criteria around experience expertise authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Yes, sir. We know was

long, long answer EA t. So far. No nachos. Oh, man. There's the figurative restaurant.

Another animal that I don't think we spoke on. But I know when we were talking about the panda you touched on it a little bit is the cheetah. So what does the cheetah signify?

Well, I'm going to turn this back on you guys. what you both said in the webinar, what? What is the cheetah represent? As it pertains to SEO?

I heard it. Oh, go ahead.

Oh, I was just gonna say how fast is the website? That's my that's my first Yes,

yeah, that's how I remembered it. Because you know, cheetahs are the fastest animal. So when it comes to PageSpeed, that really clicked.

And what is what is fast means to you, as a consumer, when you go to a website,

how fast the page loads, and that it's not lagging, because if something's lagging way too long, then your people or the users are just gonna bounce right out of it,

then what is lagging look like to a consumer.

Anything more than point two milliseconds,

like that's in that circle spinning or the website opens, but there's an image and the circle spinning on the image. And the image doesn't open in the background as an image, or there's a video as the background, it doesn't open. And so all of those things, where I mentioned that briefly earlier, if people go to a website, and the website takes time to load, and they hit the back button and go back to Google, then you get negative points in the algorithm. And so Google actually has a tool called Page Speed Insights. And you can just search Google for PageSpeed Insights, and it has little application, you put the URL, the address of your website, WW dot 10, Golden rules.com. And you'll see how quick your website is. And they'll also give you feedback, like, okay, you know, the initial downloads quick, but the full for every picture on the website to download, takes six seconds, and takes 7.8 seconds for your website to become interactive. And they break it down for mobile, and desktop. So you got to make sure you know you're at least in in like the 50 60%. The past you don't want to be in the red and the fail on PageSpeed Insights. And back to cheetah you know, ideally, if your your website's like getting a 70 or 80%, then it's downloading super quickly. And it's interactive quickly, like meaning someone could actually put the information into a form or click on the links, like sometimes the websites there, but like you're clicking it, it's not doing anything. That's the interactivity portion as well.

Okay, okay. So what can people do to improve their PageSpeed?

Well, the PageSpeed Insights gives you some clues. So like, sometimes, you download an image, and it's like a massive image, it's like, you know, 400 megabyte, and it looks sweet. You know, like, when, when, when your designer designs it, and he's got like a four foot wide Mac computer that looks like a big screen TV, when he puts an image on on on any shows you the website, for the first time at the agency, you're like, oh, man, that's sweet looking. But it's just such a big image that it's very hard for the computer to download. And, you know, and people can't see that level of detail on their iPhone seven. Anyways, you know, so you really just need a compressed image, particularly in the mobile site, you gotta have small images that can download quickly. So there's pretty high quality images that you can download that you can put on the website to download quickly. And particularly if you're not, if you're failing the PageSpeed Insights, you know, your images have to be small. And some of its just like, you know, very extensive code. Like, if you have really simple code that's easy for the the computer icons and spiders and stuff to read, then it'll download quickly. But if you got really long and extensive code, then you got a problem.

You go simple.

Good, good question.

Now that we've talked a lot about the animals in the Google Zoo, and maybe even a restaurant, a question I have for you is how often does Google introduce these zoo characters? And do they ever remove any? Because that would be so sad?

Yeah, so what do we have here about but a dozen major, major updates over 12 years? And some of these updates immediately affect the rankings? And some of them don't. But, you know, I don't think any of these major initiatives have been removed, per se. Right? You know, like if Google introduces we didn't even talk about the are the pirate, you know, who was designed to look for Copyright infringement and people copying and duplicating content from other websites and stealing videos and images from other websites, which is against the law in most cases. And it's also against Google's Terms of Service. So most of these things were designed for a reason, right? Like we've talked about, most of them, were designed to make our user experience better as Google users. And it's in Google's best interest so that you continue to use Google. So you know, when, when panda introduced quality, you know, they've basically continued that theme. Even though some of the major algorithm changes, were given a new a new name, you know, like, Bert, you know, is essentially a panda, you know, 4.0 or 5.0, hummingbird was, you know, 3.0. And those were about, you know, quality. And there was just more specific version, like hummingbird is about matching the query to the content. So, it was a very specific set of algorithmic code written where your search phrase had to match the content that was on the website. And if you had content, the match the search phrase, and the user intent very closely, you know, so it's basically just a more sophisticated version of Panda, you know, upgraded animals, Panda 2.0 3.0, you know, I don't think they've really eliminated any of these these things. You know, like I mentioned, authorship, you know, authorship kind of went away. But it wasn't like a major search update that we called an algorithm. So I don't I don't, I would say, no, no animals have been harmed in the making. To really stretch the metaphor, but or whatever, right. Love that. You know, let me ask you both for like, you know, what's one of the things you learned yesterday, that, you know, we think we can apply for 10 golden rules, customers, or maybe people out there can use in doing their own SEO?

I mean, pretty much everything you said is gems, like, everything, the whole webinar long, I was actually shocked that you were giving away so much game, I was like, Man, this guy given all the other tips. But yeah, essentially, y'all see, this guy's an expert, we're experts. So whoever's listening out there, you have to give us a call yet? What are you waiting for? Simple as that?

Well said, Jenna, what are some of the things you picked up that we can apply for your clients?

I think the most one of the most important things that you touched on was the ABCs of SEO, I think everyone needs to apply all of those tactics to their website and their SEO game, and they'll be well off.

Sweet. All right, well, I think we can wrap there. Hopefully, we kept it under an hour. And it's great. If anyone made it this far, give us a shout out. We'd love you for a five star review on iTunes. We used to have a whole bunch of reviews. But when we moved the podcast platform, we lost a review. So we'd love it. If you enjoyed this, give us a five star review on iTunes, or your favorite podcast network or, you know, come over to 10 golden rules and say, Hey, are all of it we're 10 golden rules on Facebook and Twitter. And it's done? All the social media. So come say hey,

yeah, before we close out, guys, I have a joke for you. Because I always had to include a joke in all of my, you know, either meetings with clients or you know, my Zoom meetings. But why don't monkeys play cards in the zoo? I don't know. Because there's too many cheetahs. Sorry, I had to throw that in here. That's awesome. I gotta do it.

Is that a chat? GPT Joker is?

Sorry, I can't take the credit.

Yeah, we're finding some great stuff on there. Well, thank you both for making the time today. And thank you everyone for listening. And with that, we're out and we'll be back shortly with another 10 Golden Rules Internet Marketing for law firms podcast.

See you later.