September 29, 2025 • 50 mins
On this episode of Local Marketing Secrets, host Danny Leibrandt sits down with Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io — one of the most dominant SEO agencies in the country, built exclusively to serve personal injury law firms. Chris shares his wild journey, from playing Magic: The Gathering competitively to building an affiliate empire, crushing online poker tournaments, and ultimately launching a powerhouse agency that’s made the Inc. 5000 list eight years in a row.
They dive deep into the importance of niching up, how focus compounds opportunity, and why most agencies still miss the mark on product-market fit. Chris opens up about how he structured his offers, his philosophy on performance-based equity deals, and the exact components that let his team win in one of the most competitive industries in digital marketing. You’ll also hear high-level local SEO insights on LLM rankings, the rising importance of Yelp and superlative directories, how to train clients to write reviews that rank, and what really moves the needle in an AI-first search world.
Whether you’re growing a local business, scaling an agency, or trying to stand out in a saturated niche — this conversation is packed with hard-won lessons and tactical wisdom you won’t find anywhere else.
Let me know if you'd like a condensed version for Spotify or a catchy YouTube thumbnail title to go with it.
Chris Dreyer, Founder of Rankings.io:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrisdreyerco/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chrisdreyerco
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chrisdreyerco/
Agency: https://rankings.io/
Danny Leibrandt, Founder of Pest Control SEO:
Facebook: https://facebook.com/DannyLeibrandt
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dannyleibrandt/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DannyLeibrandt
Website: https://dannyleibrandt.com
Pest Control SEO: https://pestcontrolseo.com/
Local Marketing Secrets Platforms:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LocalMarketingSecrets
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1TCL0LhZbsJS6mzanqnnT1?si=224075c9fbda42f5
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/local-marketing-secrets/id1741176782
Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/e0bb5254-5d6c-4940-8211-085157cc1239/local-marketing-secrets
Podcast Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Chris Dreyer and His Journey
05:32 Lessons from Poker: Focus and Deep Work
08:30 The Concept of Niching Up in Business
15:54 The Art of Choosing a Niche
23:00 Current Trends in Local SEO
26:30 The Landscape of Legal Marketing
32:29 The Importance of Online Reviews
38:22 Leveraging Social Media and Forums
44:23 Branding and Long-Term Strategy
49:31 Final Thoughts and Recommendations
#localseo #chatgpt #localmarketing #localbusiness #homeservicebusiness #homeservicemarketing #homeserviceadvertising #localadvertising #seo #marketing #podcast #business #dannyleibrandt #chirsdreyer #rankingsio #aio #seo #localsearch
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey there, my name is Danny Lebrand and welcome back to
Local Marketing Secrets. Today I'm with Chris Dreyer who
is the founder and CEO of rankings dot IO, one of the top
SEO agencies in the country specializing exclusively and
personally and personal entry law firms.
Chris took a $15,000 loan and turned it into a an 8 year
(00:20):
consecutive Inc 5000 company. I thought it was multi year,
maybe a few years here or there.Eight years.
Chris just corrected me. Helping some of the biggest law
firms in the US dominate Google search.
He's also the host of the Personal Entry Mastermind
podcast and the author of Niching Up and Personal Entry
Lawyer Marketing. Chris has an incredible story
(00:40):
from teaching and playing onlinepoker to running over 100
affiliate sites, to building a powerhouse agency by going all
in on one niche. If you're interested in what it
takes to scale an agency, win inone of the most competitive
markets in SEO, and stay ahead of industry changes, this
episode is 1 you won't want to miss Now.
Without further ado, Chris, welcome to the show.
(01:01):
Danny, thanks for having me. Absolutely.
So like I told you, I I want to jump a little bit more into your
background. You have a really fit and
fascinating 1. I think probably the most
interesting parts that I want todive into is the the poker
aspect. So you're telling me that like a
lot of your, your friends that used to play with have like gone
pro and you were very serious into it.
Just talk to me a little bit like about that, that early, the
(01:24):
early days, that background regarding poker.
Yeah, I think a lot of people. So first of all, my family plays
a lot of cards, so pitch and rummy.
And so it's like kind of the thing that we would do a family
reunion. So my dad is a math genius.
I don't use that term lightly. Like he when we played games
(01:51):
even say Yahtzee, right, he would get on to us as kids if we
rolled the kept the wrong dice or rolled the wrong dice from a
probability perspective. So it was kind of a weird
regular conversation about statistics and probability.
I wouldn't say that I I would say I'm pretty higher end on the
math stuff because of my growingup.
(02:14):
But just like anyone when when it hit the TV World Series of
poker, Chris Moneymaker, Phil hell meets some, you know,
Daniel Negron, you all these stars.
We got hooked and in college a bunch of my buddies, we played
all the time. I mean, it felt like every day
and everybody wanted to beat everybody.
(02:35):
So what do you do? You obsessed.
So I read all the books, Skalanski, Brunson, all of them.
Philhelmuse, VH, like his TV, like VHS, old school.
That makes me sound super old watching him and like obsessed,
right? And we did that for years.
When I started doing affiliate marketing later on down the
(02:56):
road, the guy that I lived with kind of went a different
direction. He went the poker direction even
though he was doing digital marketing and I stayed with
digital marketing. Now some people are like, oh, he
just played like no, he had a mindset coach, he had a tactical
hand coach and he took it was a real job.
Like he treated as a job clockedin hand history where there was
(03:19):
one month where we reviewed I think 30 or 40,000 hands that I
played. So all of my losing sessions we
review like what I could have done, my bet sizing, all the
different things, right? And I equate that to a lifetime
of education because if you playlive table games at a casino,
(03:39):
you might get 40 to 60 hands an hour, right?
And I got was getting 8 to 10 minimum of that per hour,
actually probably closer to 20X 'cause I was doing multi table.
And so I got like a, a lifetime of education versus the lot, the
real players. And so I, I played a bunch of
(04:01):
tournaments and one of them justto kind of go into the story
because I, I think probably saw the history is look, I was
hungover after his birthday and we're sitting around at a coffee
house and he's like, I was like,I'd really like to play this
Sunday millionaire tournament. And it was like a couple 100
bucks, but I was broke, you know, and he's like wall stake.
(04:23):
You give me 50% of the winnings and there's 14,000 players and I
ended up getting 4th for $224,000.
Wow. I the the crazy thing about this
is this was around Black Friday for poker.
Anyone that's a poker play has heard of this?
It was when the federal government seized the money from
Full Tilt Party Poker. So that money I didn't get, so
(04:49):
it was locked up and frozen for like 3 years now, thankfully,
what it was frozen, that was a good thing for me because I was
spending money recklessly and I actually got to use it from a
more beneficial standpoint. I paid off my school loans, gave
my parents some money and, and, but but yeah, that was kind of,
(05:09):
there's a lot of good juicy poker stories, but yeah, that's,
that's a couple to stand out. Interesting.
So tell me then with with now the context and perspective you
have from poker, would you say that you've learned any business
lessons or is anything translated to your life today?
(05:30):
1000% I'm not trying to be cliche here, but when I played
poker I played nine Max no limit.
That's it. I didn't play limit, I didn't
play stud and all the different variations.
The I played nine Max no limit. For people that don't know, what
does that mean? Is that like a risky 1?
(05:50):
Or different there's you could do 6-6 people at a table, you
could do heads up tournaments, you could do pot, you know, pot
limit Omaha. It's a different bedding
structure, different, you know, you got 4 cards instead of two.
I played one version and I knew how to play that version.
So those, you know, 30-40 thousand hands, I played, I
played that for 3040 thousand hands.
(06:13):
Everything I've done, it's part of the niching up and some of
the stories are in the book, buteverything that I've done that
I've been successful at has beenwith focus at deep focus.
So a lot of people don't know this, but I played a collectible
card game, right? You've heard of Pokémon, but I
played Magic the Gathering in a game called Legends of Five
Rings. Legends of Five Rings was very
(06:34):
popular when I was in high school in the first couple years
of college while I was a world ranked poker player or sorry,
collectible card game player in that at one point I had won four
state championships in a two year period and no one had done
that at the time. And, and kind of where I'm going
(06:55):
with the focus is there were, I believe 12 clans that you could
play, but I played one, I learned how to play it very
effectively in sports in high school.
Even going back further, I was look, I was very good at sports,
baseball, all of them, but I wasbetter at basketball like quit
all the other sports and I focused on basketball and was
like held our records at our high school, college recruited.
(07:18):
By the way, my school only had 100 people total.
My graduating class is 28 peopleand we're beating schools much
bigger and getting recruited. It's because of, of my focus on
basketball and playing every Saturday and Sunday.
And so everything comes to this deep focus.
And, and I think when things getdifficult and people don't want
(07:39):
to do that extra little thing necessary.
So it's very intentional, deep work, deep focus.
That's where I've kind of benefited.
It's not, not the smartest, not the whatever, but it's just been
I, I've been so incredibly focused and determined that
it's, it's really helped me be successful.
(08:00):
Yeah, no, I'm a total advocate for that as well.
I think that's the only way you can truly win things.
And it seems like you're a supercompetitive person, so you're
going to do whatever it takes towin.
But what it takes is just choosing that one kind of thing,
just one of the 12 Pokémon leagues or just one of the many
different ways to play poker. So yeah, OK, Yeah, that makes
complete sense. And that's ties directly into
(08:22):
your book, which, First off, I'mjust kind of curious.
Your book is called Niching Up. Why is it not Niching Down?
Yeah, I think just the a lot I'ma half glass full type of
person, right. I think when you think of down
it, you think of constraint and less opportunities.
And I I think I'm more of an abundance to like up.
It's like a lot of times when you go to your when you focus,
(08:45):
you're niching up to go upstreamin a market, right.
So I'll give you if I was a generalist, it'd be very hard
for me to go talk to an Inc 100 company or or go talk to a
Morgan and Morgan who I you know, Dan Morgan, I can text
right now, you know, or a sweet James and Steve Muir, right?
I can text these individuals. It's because I focus and I've
(09:06):
went up in the ladder of relationships and my
relationship equity and trust isis facilitated that.
So that's kind of the name. Also got it from Seth Godin.
So it's it's a little ripped offof Seth.
One of his little thousand word daily blogs talked about niching
up and and I kind of ran with that.
I really liked it. OK, cool.
(09:26):
Yeah, no. And talk to me a little bit more
about the importance of niching up or down, however you want to
put it. I, I feel like most people,
maybe not most people, but a good amount of people don't
understand the the power of this.
Like I just told you, I, I spoken in a local SEO Group A
few days ago and I briefly mentioned niching down because
(09:47):
they, they really wanted me to talk about podcasting because
I'm pretty strong. They're just like how that gets
you clients and networking and all that stuff.
But I mentioned niching down andthen they started all asking me
questions about niching down. I'm like, you guys don't have a
niche agency like that's, I feellike that's kind of step one.
But talk to me about your experience.
Like you talked to me a little bit before the show, niching
(10:08):
down versus generalist, you're kind of in between for a little
bit. Let me ask you a question and,
and I'm going to give you 2 examples for the audience.
But did you ever play the Nintendo game Final Fantasy?
I didn't number one. OK, no.
Well, I'll explain it for our audience.
The, and the gamers that have played Final Fantasy 1, right?
(10:30):
It's the very first like RPG Nintendo game.
You cut, you get out and you getto pick a character to build
your party of four and they havea fighter, a thief, a white
mage, a black mage, and then they have this red mage.
The red mage is the generalist can kind of fight, can kind of
cast the spells. You don't want to be the fucking
(10:51):
red mage, right? You don't want to be the
general. You're just not good at really
anything. You can't demand the So where
I'm going with this is like there's a perception of
expertise. When you declare a niche, it's
(11:11):
you think about it from a physician perspective, like do
you think a a brain surgeon would be better than a general
surgeon for a brain surgery? You would think the brain
surgeon. Guess what, Every brain surgeon
has their first brain surgery, right?
So as a perception of expertise,but also when you do focus you,
(11:33):
you do it, it lifts your ceilings of opportunity where
you understand what's possible and, and what's out there.
Like what first, when I started with legal, like, I didn't know
that personal injury law was like one of the most profitable
biggest advertisers. It makes sense now, right?
Seeing them on the but it's like, is that particular
activating system like seeing the billboards because I'm in
(11:53):
the space like I really didn't know, but then identified that
same for home services. You know, your, your pest
control and you know, for some people in home, maybe it's
roofing, right? And other.
Services isn't enough. Right.
So it's just you get efficiencies, you can productize
(12:14):
your offers, you get better. It lends itself to compounding.
I just join her. Mosey's school group on his book
launch, his workshop, he talked about, you know, you want things
to compound. Well, I've got a podcast about
Pi. I've got a book about Pi.
I've got a conference. We do retreats.
We have a newsletter. We have a magazine that we've
launched all on this one audience.
(12:36):
I mean it compounds and, and then I have different ways to
monetize them versus trying to do that.
And, and by doing that, I also provide more value.
So I can charge higher fees. I'm just the people in the legal
industry cannot compete with that.
I don't even hear if you're in the legal industry.
There's just, there's no chance because I sign a client and I
(12:57):
can give them all these things to extend tenure, provide more
value. And, and, and, and that all
comes from focus. I don't know how you would do
that. And you also speak to the
individual and not the widget. There's just so many advantages.
Can charge more fees because you're worth more.
You can provide for value. All those things kind of.
(13:20):
It just compounds. Everything compounds when you
focus on a niche. Yeah, definitely that what I've
experienced is that as you beginto grow and like you said, now
you have the book, the conference, maybe the community,
you can start to continue to solve more problems for that
group because you know them so well and because you have more
opportunities, you know them all.
(13:40):
So now you can upsell them and they can refer their friends of,
you know, maybe it's pest control and all the pest control
guys know all the other pest control guys.
I've I've found it to be super beneficial for my career as
well. So then I want to ask you.
How did you can jump one? Do one for your audience, the
agents. I don't care what business you
are, the most wildly underestimated thing is product
(14:02):
market fit. Some people are like, well,
people buy a COI, got product market fit.
No, you do not. The price points are different.
The things, the amount of content, the amount of links,
the things that you need to do to get results and product
market fit constantly changes. Imagine trying to rediscover
product market fit for multiple industries.
(14:23):
Look at what's happened right now with AI, right?
And like, OK, so like you take apersonal injury law, right and
how you manipulate discovery. Well, super lawyers, Avo Justia,
it's going to be different for pest control.
So it's like it's constant discovery of product market fit
and like one of the benefits of focus is that too.
And a lot of times people go outand try to market and sell
(14:45):
things when they haven't discovered product market fit or
try to scale a sales team. I'm, I'm countless agency
members so that I'm going on a little rant here, but like, like
I want to build an outbound sales team.
Like, well, what do you sell? Like for who?
Like yeah, they just they haven't got product market fit,
so they can't do it. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Now I I learned Nishin down from
(15:09):
Josh Nelson who who runs A7 figure Agency, you probably know
him. And one, one thing that really
started me, which is the kind ofrelates to what you're saying
here is that for every additional market that you have
that you're, you're serving, that's a multiple of complexity.
So if you have one niche, now you just it's a 1X.
But if you have three to five niches, that's three to five
(15:31):
times more complexity, not like 20% more complex, but now you
have to account for every singleone of those industries.
And same with also the services that you provide.
Ideally, you should have kind ofone general standard package,
which maybe we can jump into that and maybe if you agree with
that or not. But regardless that that's
something that really drives with me of like limiting
complexity because business is already super complex.
(15:53):
Yeah, you also subsidized talentyou don't want, you want your
talent focused on, you know, thethe most valuable activities.
Yeah. So I mean, where, where where is
your follow hit? Hit me with the hit.
Me correct? So then how did you choose your
niche? I, I was, so I did the affiliate
(16:13):
marketing, got hit by that firstPenguin algorithm.
It naked me down to like $2000 amonth income and I wasn't saving
money and I had these bills. So I got on Craigslist because
that's back in the day. There wasn't indeed in these
other places and I fired off my resume.
I just typed in SEO and fired off and I got 3 interviews from
agencies. They're all remote.
(16:33):
All three offered me the job andmost people would say, well,
Chris, which one did you take? I accepted all three.
I worked at all three because I had an affiliate team in the
Philippines back in the day. It was called O Desk.
Now it's up work. And so I went to three agencies
and one of the agencies I workedat the the most successful.
The three worked with a lot of attorneys and I saw the price
(16:55):
points, I saw the value. I I like the relationship.
So when I went out to launch my own, that was the one that I
focused on. Interesting.
And how's that played out for you?
What would you do it any differently in the future?
Would you do the same thing? Well, I mean, I would do the
same, right? It's hard for me to, to think of
(17:16):
a different path. There are some situations like
I, you know, from a performance perspective or value
perspective, there's limitations, right?
Because I can't participate in contingency fees outside of like
Arizona with the alternative business structure, you know,
for like you for pest control orfor plumbing in the I would do
equity deals. I would do performance deals all
(17:36):
day. Once I had the ability and the
trust I would, I would do those types of deals all day.
But it's very challenging to do that for legal because if you're
not an attorney, you can't have ownership in a law firm.
Yeah. Go on that a little bit more.
So you're saying instead of taking a retainer, take equity?
(18:00):
I would, I would do equity, yes and or or profit from OK, look,
I don't, I don't know your niche.
Let's say a roof. OK, so pest control, I
definitely don't know. Let's let's say roofing.
I don't know what's a roof cost 20 grand, right And there
somewhere around there. Yeah, right.
(18:21):
Instead of selling a fixed retainer, I would do the fixed
retainer plus money on the back end, right.
Give me 10%. Yeah.
Right now you got skin in the game, you got you got a, there's
a greater incentive for you to sell this individual more of
these roofs, right? It's a win win.
(18:41):
So I would do deals like that insituations where an individual
couldn't pay. I would do sweat equity deals if
I had capacity to get equity. So not just ownership of the
business. Can't do that.
Legal. OK, I didn't know that.
(19:03):
Yeah. Talk to me about your kind of
agency structure then, which I was mentioning a little bit
earlier. Do you guys do kind of custom
for everyone? This is something I've
definitely been struggling with.Can you be custom or should it
be fairly standardized? And like, are you taking on all
kinds of clients? The benefit of niching is, is
you're solving for one group that can be applied to others
(19:27):
typically now, yeah, you know, as well as I do from a search
for perspective, market of Los Angeles is going to be different
than Carbondale, IL or Marion, IL where I'm at.
So the quantity and the things that you have to do even from a
review perspective might be less.
But but yeah, you can productizethe offer.
(19:49):
Yeah, I, I can't remember where you're going with that.
Got off track again. Yeah.
Essentially like what, what are the agency services that you
provide? Is it 1 standard package?
Is it more custom? I mean, we have a core offer
that has, it's not just a la carte things, it's it's things
that provide value at different based upon the revenue and, and
(20:12):
what they can afford. So like, you know, her Mosey's
new book, the Money Models bookstalks a lot about this.
So we have, you know, a core offer from 10 to $40,000
typically, but then we got some down cells that we take a piece
out of that offer, maybe LSA only or search only, Google ads
(20:33):
only. We can take a piece out of it,
but we don't sub yet. We don't cannibalize those down
cells to our core offer that it's definitely less and you get
the one thing right. And then we'll have continuity
upsell offers. I'll give you a perfect one to
consider is let's say you sign someone on any search based
(20:53):
retainer or paid retainer. Well, they need X amount of
traffic before it makes sense todo CRO.
And so once they hit a certain or, or retargeting certain
amount of traffic, you can say, Hey, it would be beneficial.
You now have enough traffic to where this makes sense, right?
So that's a continuity upsell. There's a lot of things like
(21:16):
that, you know, there's these different, you know, links,
right, or, or citations, right, are, are very important in terms
of search. So it doesn't matter if, if a
client's not getting results, they might and, and you've
structured everything from a technical, SEO and UX
(21:37):
perspective and content perspective, they may need more
links if they're not performing.But if they are performing, they
may need, may need more links. So there's, there's different
continuity offers on the upsellsand that, that it's not from a
negative standpoint to, to actually provide more value.
And, and that's what it comes down to.
Like if I'm doing these links and they're not providing value,
(21:58):
they're going to turn. So there's a lot there.
It could be stuck by Facebook ads, right?
Facebook ads a lot of time it's the creative like you need a
massive amount of creative. And so sometimes you can do, you
(22:19):
know, some media packages and onsite video work and things like
that to get the creative as combination with their core
offer. But you got to be careful
though, because you don't want too many.
You want everything. You don't want these
Frankenstein things, right? You want to, you want to have
natural progression. But those are just some of the
(22:42):
challenges that come with this. Awesome.
Cool. All right, cool.
So we, it feels like we've talked basically solely agency
the first half of the show. Now I really want to dive into
like all the the local SEO stuff, what's been going on in
local and so on. I guess we could start general
here. Where do you think local SEO is
at right now? Like like what's been going
(23:02):
through your head? What?
What have you been thinking about?
Recently, I mean it's now part of the AIO reviews, so it's you
know, Google's AI mode when theymake it default, it's almost a
mirror to the it's current search.
Also, typically all the scrapers, a lot of them,
(23:23):
regardless of you know, who they're paying for their
licensing deal, whether it's Reddit or, or what have you to
get this information, they're still scraping Google somehow.
It's mirroring the local resultsthere.
And even being in Microsoft, typically it's similar, not
always the exact same, but it's very similar.
(23:44):
So I mean, it's people. There's been this evolution of
marketing, right? Like back in the day it was TVTV
and Facebook, right? And radio, well, now you got TV
and streaming, now you got Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn
and this. And now you got programmatic.
(24:04):
And so attention's more fractured.
So you have to be in all these locations.
So omnipresence is more important and you want to go
deep in some areas, but it's it's just changed and.
Is is omnipresence realistic fora smaller business?
(24:29):
No, typically you know zero to 1,000,000.
It's you know one product, 1 channel, you know one to 10.
What they'll tell you is you know 11 product, multiple
channels or multiple channels, one product.
That's Michael Masterson ready fire aim.
I've seen that myself. When you go 10 plus, it's
(24:50):
multiple channels, multiple products.
That's just a general rule. Your thresholds could be
different. A lot of times one of the
biggest issues with marketing isyou're undercapitalized, right?
SEO doesn't work or you're paying 200 bucks a month.
TV advertising didn't work? Well, your personal injury
attorney and the top three people are all spending six
(25:12):
figures and you know you're not saturating enough for
memorability. You, you take someone like
Jennifer, what's her name? Jennifer Lawrence.
Is that her name for Mockingbird?
It's been 50 million. Like no one knew who the hell
she was before that movie. And he spent $50,000,000 to
advertise that movie. And then suddenly people know
(25:34):
her. Everyone knows billion
impressions. So it's like you start small and
you keep compounding and know your metrics and and go from
there. Yeah, got it.
Yeah. Talk to me more about that like
high level SEO game, because usually I'm working with clients
usually somewhere in the seven figure range, maybe low 8
(25:55):
figures. But I'm sure you're working with
these, these law firms that are just monstrous.
And you said that's also more competitive.
They have more money to spend, might be 6 figures a year or
even 7 figures a year. What does that look like?
Like what are there massive teams and how exactly
competitive it is? What?
What does it look like? Well, in the Pi space, it's
(26:17):
there's consolidation occurring kind of like what happened with
dental and the aspens and the, the DS OS.
Now you have something called anMSO.
So what's happening is private equities came in and there's
breaking these law firms up intotwo business units.
So 1 is a legal business that requires the bar card and it and
everything else. The marketing is separate.
(26:38):
So that's how you invest and they shuffle the fees.
Somehow they get it legal. So there's a lot of
consolidation and competition due to the capital.
Well, it's surprising, but most Pi firms don't have a big
marketing department. They'll have like a marketing
(26:59):
manager, maybe Acmo, maybe some support staff, but it's very
rare that it's more than four orfive.
There are some exceptions. Morgan and Morgan's,
everything's in house. They got like 70 people on their
marketing team, but that's, that's a, you know, they spend
$300 million a year in advertising.
(27:19):
To answer your question, look, let's local, let's just stick on
local. You have to get 5 star reviews
on Google. You got to get a bunch of them.
So there's like that's like table stakes, right?
That impacts your local services, ads, local SEO, the
superlatives and the ability there, the words used in the
(27:43):
reviews and around the reviews, and everything impacts your
discovery. I think where there's been a
shift recently is Yelp. So if you think about this,
Microsoft owns Bing, Microsoft license to Reddit.
Microsoft also utilizes are being used as Yelp for their
(28:07):
reviews. It's Apple Maps uses Yelp and
now you have if you do, if you look at the citations on most of
these LLMS, it's going to be Yelp.
You'll even see them popping up for if you do you know who's the
best car accident lawyer in Las Vegas, you'll see a Yelp in the
(28:27):
top five. So because they're being cited
and because where attention is, it's more important to get Yelp
reviews. So Yelp reviews are tough to get
the stick, right? Well, you got to get them to
check in at the location. Like that's the key.
If you don't do the check insurance and you send them the
link, first of all, you're violating their terms service,
(28:49):
their guidelines. But there's a greater emphasis
on Yelp now than there has been in the past.
That no, that's a really good nugget there.
And then any other platforms arejust mainly Yelp.
OK, so Yelp let me let me go a little bit further on Yelp in
order to rank on the 10 best pages like those listicles that
(29:12):
are important now you got to get20 ish reviews in most markets
on Yelp. So that that emphasizes even
another completely of why Yelp Yes.
Now you go over to let's say Facebook, right?
Facebook, you, do you recommend this business, right?
That's the option. You don't get a rating scale.
(29:33):
Well, their reviews are aggregated or are they
aggregated? They're aggregated to
Trustpilot. They're aggregated to
expertise.com. expertise.com hasa, who's the best, has a
listicle. So we're all playing these
superlative listicle games on these LLMS, Two of the most
(29:54):
important directories right now,Super Lawyers and best lawyers.
It's such a joke. It actually frustrates me.
Now you've got Justia, one of the primary legal directories.
You can do a peer endorsement tobe a top rated something lawyer.
And it's one that they've now created this new distinction on
(30:16):
their page. It's so yes, Google, Yelp,
Facebook is probably #3 from a from a legal perspective and
their aggregation that impacts these other results.
But like those, those are some of the deeper things that like,
look, my try not to be negative,my competitors are not thinking
about this. They are not.
(30:38):
There's not, but it's the reality.
You got to pay more importance and closer attention to these
other sites. Yeah, definitely.
So those things that you said, some of them were kind of
annoying, maybe shouldn't be there if like a superlawyer.com,
then being listed there actuallyhelps.
(31:01):
Which of these things, like on amaybe in the next few years,
will actually stick and will youthink will still be relevant in
ranking in LLMS like Chach BT? All of those that I just
mentioned. Oh really?
So all those, all those will still stay.
Yeah, I see the SEO people on X complaining.
Like how long have they been complaining about the keywords
(31:24):
and the name for GVP? Like, yeah, yeah, I'm not going
to change this. It's not going anywhere.
No, like maybe, maybe they stopped licensing Reddit so the
stupid Reddit form stops rankingnumber one and two on all the
queries and that goes down. But like, you know, a lot of
these other things I mentioned, they're not changed.
(31:46):
Yeah. And what about other ways in
breaking LLMS? Is there anything concrete?
Because I've interviewed people on this, but it's a lot of
people are still saying it's kind of too early.
We haven't done any like concrete testing.
But is there anything solid you're seeing?
Yeah, those guys are. Just besides.
Because they don't know what's going on.
Yeah, the so, so some of those listicle things and the
(32:06):
aggregation of some of those sites and importance of those
sites, you know, for lawyers specifically, there's a greater
emphasis of case results. So if you look at if, if you
typed it in, I don't care what market it's going to, it's going
to say they, well, they had thiscase result and that case
result. So now you have to feature those
(32:27):
on the website much more prominently, much more robustly,
robustly. Also most of these sites, the
Justine and Avos, they, they allow you to list case results.
Many of these sites do. So you want to aggregate these
reviews out. There's even there's even, you
know, Reddit based strategies around this too.
(32:48):
But overall, you know that that's a big one from a from a
ranking and discovery perspective.
Is is the proof. The proof component, no matter
what it is, is more important tohave on your BIOS have on your
main landing pages. I know that's been there's been
tie insurance to the eat the EATthing, but I think it's even
(33:11):
more important on the the discovery side from these LMS.
Yeah, let's jump into the forumsthen.
You mentioned like Reddit and there's other ones like, you
know, Cora and so on. Are you guys doing anything
there for your clients or what would you say?
I mean. We have tons of user profiles.
We we take an add value. No negative selling answer
(33:35):
questions first, because if if you're doing any type of
promotion, your accounts are naked, you need a certain amount
of karma points before you can be a moderator and you have the
trust, you know, levels to even get your stuff to stick.
So yeah, we we answer questions,we provide value, simple stuff
(33:57):
that should that. Be under a personal profile or a
company profile. I like the personal profiles.
You can do both. I don't know.
It's I think there's a we do both.
We do both. So we'll have one core, you
know, legal fanatics style username.
(34:18):
That's like a company one or a ranking.
We'll even do it. We even have I think a rankings
one right now. OK, but but we do we do both.
Cool. Yeah, yeah.
Related to the EEAT stuff, a lotof people will mention that
authorship is super important. I mean, Google says that in the
in their guidelines too. Are you guys like, do you do
(34:40):
anything specific with authorship?
Because I see some people that will make sure to cite the
author. Maybe they do it several times.
There's a picture of the author and then they try to build up
that person's entity on Google and setting up all the social
profiles and they have a personal website.
Like do you go deep on that stuff or is that not worth
pursuing? That's a really good question
and I hate this is one of these that so in my Tier 2 of my
(35:03):
offer, we have attorney entity optimization.
We have a specific service that where we expand and make the
attorneys entities and more robust and big component of that
is their bio. So it is, it's not just that
it's we want a 10 out of 10 avo profile for them, Super Lawyer
(35:25):
profile, just the profile. All of those are tied in and
interlinked to the bio and the by lines.
And yeah, so we do that. I think it all kind of ties
together. So yeah, we're doing that and
that's what that's a tier in ours because it's a lot more
work. We do the, you know, the
(35:46):
technical SEO, the scheme of thepersonal scheme, all the stuff
that ever yeah, yeah. But then we we go deeper on a
higher tier. Yeah, well, that's one to touch
on. I've been seeing some
controversy around schema and a lot of people are like, oh, this
is the answer to showing up in LLMS.
But now I've been seeing more and more people say it.
Actually, it still doesn't do much.
What are your thoughts on schema?
Yeah, I saw an individual say that the other day, like this
(36:08):
has been misproven. Like what study are you looking
at? Because it works.
FAQ schema works. I can't remember that person's
name. Probably don't say I like it,
don't pass them. Yeah, yeah, I actually like a
lot of their content, but I was like, no, that it's completely
wrong. And I think a lot of times it's
(36:28):
the like we're doing this from an application perspective.
We have 909 hundred locations. So like I would say that the
amount of content and things that were like, I have anecdotal
proof that it is working. Like maybe I should put a study
out or something. Like the FAQ scheme of stuff
100% works. Structuring your titles from a
discovery perspective also works.
(36:50):
You start putting things in a site wide location in your
footer or in your header that that incorporates these
superlatives also gets referenced.
So yeah, I mean schema 1000% works.
Got you even have a custom GPT that incorporates this.
And when we when we put our content content into it and
(37:12):
structured a certain way, we have seen significantly more AI
overviews. Also kind of related to that, do
you guys have any particular wayto track this?
I know some people have like created their own dashboards.
They'll kind of set up somethingin Google Search Console.
That's a SO. We sorry, I know it's a few
(37:34):
tough questions. Well, I know you're a highlight
guy and you're super deep. This is a.
Challenge right? Like this is 1 we're trying to
solve too, you know, and everybody's got the a refs and
SEM rush stuff on the citations and like what you know, what's
good and what's there. And I know they just dropped
the, the 100 parameter, but we're using some tools.
I think I'm trying to think of the name of the tool profoundly.
(37:56):
There's like two or three AI tools that we're using and like,
none of them are perfect, but atleast gives you some
information. Even Yext has a, an AI audit
score, visibility score. I think those are are good as
like a baseline from like a leadmagnet or a marketing
perspective, more so than existing clientele, but not
(38:21):
enough. If I, if you give me a second,
I'll open my slack and hopefullythis doesn't I'll keep you can
keep hitting me and I'll I'll tell you the one that we're
using right now. Give me just two seconds.
Let's see here me who hit me with a question while you're
(38:41):
doing it all cool. Yeah, yeah, I got you.
So yeah, you mentioned titles a little bit.
I want to ask you on this because I think I've seen some
stuff on this recently, too. So for people that don't know,
title tags are super important. That's like, I'd say, one of the
key aspects of where you need tohave your keywords.
And Kyle Roof talks about that alot.
I interviewed him on my show. So do you think I I saw
(39:05):
something on this recently of people trying to implement EAT
in the title tags? I forget.
I think Jason Hennessy mentionedthis on Joy Hawkins recent
podcast, or maybe I'm pretty sure it was him, but
implementing some kind of more conversion slash EEAT components
to the title tax instead of justalmost like keyword stuffing,
(39:27):
which some people will do. Do you guys mix it up?
Is it not just keywords but alsolike a most trusted of best?
We're absolutely doing that. By the way, the tool that I was
referring to, that we're one of them that we're using is called
Prompt Watch right now. So yes, attorneys have
(39:52):
advertising ethics and restrictions on this, the use of
superlatives. You can't do it from the bar,
but you can say things like, OK,so say you get an award that's a
top rated, you could say top rated by or you know, rated best
(40:13):
lawyer. So then you get the best in the
top and the title tag, which is super annoying that you got to
do that. But those, those are some things
that can make an impact because a lot of times the consumer and
you look at these long tails, they're going to use best.
Who's the best car accident? Like if you're going to, if you
got a car rack, who's the best car accident lawyer near me,
(40:34):
right, you're going to say best.And that's that's why super
Lawyers and Justia and Best lawyers, all these are more
important. And even the words that are used
to like when you're coaching up your your customers to leave
that those phrasing, that phrasing into the reviews
themselves, yes. Incredibly important.
(40:55):
Awesome. And what about like super long
tail searches? So obviously then most people
should know this by now that people are doing more and more
searches by voice and people areusing LLMS more.
I believe the status maybe the, the queries on LLMS are like 2
to three times longer than Google.
(41:15):
And I'm sure that might even be getting longer.
And for myself personally, sometimes I'll have a question
about something or might even berelated to a product or service
and I'll talk to my phone for a few minutes and it'll be a whole
page long. So like, do you think that's
kind of where things are headed and how can you show up if
that's the case? I mean, I, I think you, you
(41:36):
structure your different queriescorrectly.
You know, you're on the, the sites that are cited.
Each section should be, you know, where we're talking about
the tokens of structure, not just the words Google reads the
tokens. So that all plays into this.
I mean, today I was kind of thinking of your example.
They're like, I'm sitting here talking to my phone and it's,
(41:58):
it's so frustrating when you're talking on ChatGPT and, and it
thinks you're done and it startsinterrupting you and like it's
like. Yeah.
Restart. But yeah, I, I mean, if I look
at some of my, especially when I'm talking to it, if I type it,
I'll kind of shorthand it. I'm like, I'm super lazy
sometimes too. I'll like throw an e-mail in
(42:20):
here and I'll be like, fix this.Yeah.
And I'll like, fix the grammar. But like, if I'm going deep,
I'll give it a lot of context. Yeah, yeah.
I think that plays into it. And I mean, some people like
Gary Vee says, at least part of the answer to that is branding.
(42:41):
Do you guys do anything with branding with clients?
Do you like or do you implement anything yourselves?
So I always encourage like if you, if you've got like this is
like different evolutions, right.
If you for personal injury attorneys and this is the space
that I know. So I was given all the examples.
Yeah, if you have them like a minimal budget, a lot of times
(43:02):
it's like 50% or higher, go straight Legion.
You can get ACPL or CPR cost perretainer and it's a way to get
consistent cases immediately. And that other amount typically
goes to either your own performance marketing or brand.
The the issue with brand though,is it takes a lot to saturate,
(43:23):
but you need to start somewhere,right?
And there's kind of this evolution that occurs.
It's like you don't want to deploy dollars outside of your
brand at some point. So in the beginning, maybe you
start heavier on the lead Gen. and then it starts to kind of
shrink and you go more and even maybe it's lead Gen. plus
performance. And then it's like less legion.
(43:45):
And then now you got performanceand brand, but then eventually
it's like brand and then performance is low.
It's kind of an evolution that occurs.
Yeah, I agree with with the market I'm in pest control, I
usually just say, you know, justgo kind of straight lead Gen. up
until $1,000,000 a year. But once we're at $1,000,000 a
year, we kind of have to start investing in brand.
(44:07):
We have to be building somethingthere and ideally it's already
getting built, right. I mean, you know, for pest
control they might be. Who?
Who? Mike Ramsey.
Yeah, Yeah. OK.
I was going to say you should reach out to him.
You might be able to get you some referrals.
OK, Yeah, no, that, that'd be awesome.
OK, cool. So we'll we'll start to wrap up
(44:27):
the show here. I've got one final question for
you, Chris, which is what is your message for local business
owners or for local marketers? What do they need to know?
What? What are they getting wrong and
what do you want to tell them? That's a big one.
(44:48):
I would just say be intentional about improving, consistent
improvement. A lot of you look at a lot of
times individuals self sabotage themselves.
It's you stop, you quit learning, you don't improve,
right. Michael Dell talks about this
after 40 something plus years inbusiness, you'll sell your
(45:12):
business, you won't keep you'll hit these friction points.
But as long as you go through the through the pain, try to fix
your mistakes and and learn fromthem.
That's that's the best advice that I could give you.
I'll give you any perfect example for myself.
Just just one I've been thinkingabout is like we had our first
event last year called Pimcon. I didn't save any money for
(45:36):
this. Like we're going to do it.
Yeah, right. It was like $1.6 million.
I had to just figure out, right?And we had a decent amount of
sponsorships and ticket sales. I had to give a lot of tickets
away to get people there. OK, year one, then it's like,
OK, well, I could have sold the tickets at a little bit more.
(45:56):
I could have added here's three more sponsors.
And now this year it's like 300,000 more.
Well, now next year we've even found how to get another 100 or
$200,000 out of it. And it's just because I stuck
with it, like I didn't make muchmoney.
In fact, I lost money year one. But it's, it's just like
sticking with it and just learning from your, you know,
your mistakes. Love that.
(46:18):
Yeah, that's that ready fire aimconcept.
I believe that that book. And I actually want to give a
quick follow up here because it seems like you're a pretty avid
reader. Do do you have any top books
that you think people should definitely read?
I am definitely an avid reader. Let's call that OK ready fire
and we mentioned it's a really good one if you're an agency
(46:40):
owner, the boutique by Greg Alexander's incredible book.
Incredible. I'm a high D so I like books
like the 10X by Grant Cardone. I like and up, you know,
snowflake like books like that. I like the new there's the
science of scaling. It's a new one that just came
(47:01):
out. It's got a, I think Tony Robbins
has like the intro and I've seensome Facebook ads on it.
You know, there's if you said like marketing or this or that.
I I could tell you like, yeah, marketing, marketing, you know,
you're going to go to Harmozi stuff.
Yeah. You know, your offer for product
(47:22):
market fit your, you know, ultimate sales machine Chat
homes is a good one. Ogilvy's got an excellent book.
I think the understanding the psychology from a Chiel Dani,
you know that his book influenceis incredible.
(47:42):
So there's books like that. I also think that depending upon
where you are as a business, like early on, early revenue,
it's more tactical. You need to understand the
tactics and a lot of the tacticsare missing.
Later on, it's more strategy, what decisions am I going to
make? Like that really impacted the,
the business. It's, it's not, how do I build
(48:04):
an outbound team? How do I do Facebook ads?
Like in there, there's, there's books for all that.
But so it's like, what, where are you at?
You know, if you're sales and you need help from an outbound
perspective, Trish Bertuzzi, youknow, a sales development
playbook. There's, you know, sales gravy.
And there's the, the prospectingbook.
I can't think of the name of it,but Fanatical prospecting.
(48:28):
It just depends. So like, there's books from the
tactics, but then there's books for the strategy too.
Yeah, but it seems like that's at least one of your unlocks.
Like I can tell you're very smart, you're very
knowledgeable. And I really appreciate that
list that that was that was super helpful.
I'll have to go back and read all those books.
I think too, at a certain point,the tactics, they kind of get
(48:50):
regurgitated like from the core main entrepreneurial books.
But then you start looking at, you know, Titan by Rockefeller,
then you go look at Isaacson's book on Elon Musk and, you know,
yeah, Sam Walton's book. And you start going through
those and you can pull out like really good Nuggets and from a
strategy perspective, looking atthings differently.
(49:11):
Love that. So awesome.
Now I'll have to make sure to read all those.
Well, cool, Chris, it's been a great show.
It's been so great having you on.
Where can people find you, connect with you, and learn more
about what you guys do? Yeah, I'm most active on
LinkedIn, so if you shoot me a message probably won't be
immediate. I'm not an inbox 0 message guy
on LinkedIn, but I probably see it.
(49:33):
If you listen to this and you want to e-mail me directly, just
hit me at Chris at rankings dot IO.
Cool, awesome, and anything elseyou'd like to plug or promote.
No, go get it. Appreciate it.
This was a lot of fun. I like the engaging
conversation, gets me thinking and I really enjoyed it.
Yeah, definitely. No, you had you had some great
answers and you had a really unique perspective on all the
(49:54):
the LLM stuff. Like very few people could have
an answer to this. And that's why I wanted to ask
you those questions because it'sit's unique to you.
And also make sure to go buy both of his books if you're a
lawyer, He has a lawyer marketing book and also his
Niching Up book. Definitely read that if you're
maybe an agency or maybe you're just thinking about niching in
whatever industry you're in. So yeah, thank you guys so much
(50:16):
for watching. It's been a great show.
And thank you so much for comingon, Chris.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Hey there, my name is Danny Lebrand and welcome back to
Local Marketing Secrets. Today I'm with Chris Dreyer who
is the founder and CEO of rankings dot IO, one of the top
SEO agencies in the country specializing exclusively and
personally and personal entry law firms.
Chris took a $15,000 loan and turned it into a an 8 year
(00:20):
consecutive Inc 5000 company. I thought it was multi year,
maybe a few years here or there.Eight years.
Chris just corrected me. Helping some of the biggest law
firms in the US dominate Google search.
He's also the host of the Personal Entry Mastermind
podcast and the author of Niching Up and Personal Entry
Lawyer Marketing. Chris has an incredible story
(00:40):
from teaching and playing onlinepoker to running over 100
affiliate sites, to building a powerhouse agency by going all
in on one niche. If you're interested in what it
takes to scale an agency, win inone of the most competitive
markets in SEO, and stay ahead of industry changes, this
episode is 1 you won't want to miss Now.
Without further ado, Chris, welcome to the show.
(01:01):
Danny, thanks for having me. Absolutely.
So like I told you, I I want to jump a little bit more into your
background. You have a really fit and
fascinating 1. I think probably the most
interesting parts that I want todive into is the the poker
aspect. So you're telling me that like a
lot of your, your friends that used to play with have like gone
pro and you were very serious into it.
Just talk to me a little bit like about that, that early, the
(01:24):
early days, that background regarding poker.
Yeah, I think a lot of people. So first of all, my family plays
a lot of cards, so pitch and rummy.
And so it's like kind of the thing that we would do a family
reunion. So my dad is a math genius.
I don't use that term lightly. Like he when we played games
(01:51):
even say Yahtzee, right, he would get on to us as kids if we
rolled the kept the wrong dice or rolled the wrong dice from a
probability perspective. So it was kind of a weird
regular conversation about statistics and probability.
I wouldn't say that I I would say I'm pretty higher end on the
math stuff because of my growingup.
(02:14):
But just like anyone when when it hit the TV World Series of
poker, Chris Moneymaker, Phil hell meets some, you know,
Daniel Negron, you all these stars.
We got hooked and in college a bunch of my buddies, we played
all the time. I mean, it felt like every day
and everybody wanted to beat everybody.
(02:35):
So what do you do? You obsessed.
So I read all the books, Skalanski, Brunson, all of them.
Philhelmuse, VH, like his TV, like VHS, old school.
That makes me sound super old watching him and like obsessed,
right? And we did that for years.
When I started doing affiliate marketing later on down the
(02:56):
road, the guy that I lived with kind of went a different
direction. He went the poker direction even
though he was doing digital marketing and I stayed with
digital marketing. Now some people are like, oh, he
just played like no, he had a mindset coach, he had a tactical
hand coach and he took it was a real job.
Like he treated as a job clockedin hand history where there was
(03:19):
one month where we reviewed I think 30 or 40,000 hands that I
played. So all of my losing sessions we
review like what I could have done, my bet sizing, all the
different things, right? And I equate that to a lifetime
of education because if you playlive table games at a casino,
(03:39):
you might get 40 to 60 hands an hour, right?
And I got was getting 8 to 10 minimum of that per hour,
actually probably closer to 20X 'cause I was doing multi table.
And so I got like a, a lifetime of education versus the lot, the
real players. And so I, I played a bunch of
(04:01):
tournaments and one of them justto kind of go into the story
because I, I think probably saw the history is look, I was
hungover after his birthday and we're sitting around at a coffee
house and he's like, I was like,I'd really like to play this
Sunday millionaire tournament. And it was like a couple 100
bucks, but I was broke, you know, and he's like wall stake.
(04:23):
You give me 50% of the winnings and there's 14,000 players and I
ended up getting 4th for $224,000.
Wow. I the the crazy thing about this
is this was around Black Friday for poker.
Anyone that's a poker play has heard of this?
It was when the federal government seized the money from
Full Tilt Party Poker. So that money I didn't get, so
(04:49):
it was locked up and frozen for like 3 years now, thankfully,
what it was frozen, that was a good thing for me because I was
spending money recklessly and I actually got to use it from a
more beneficial standpoint. I paid off my school loans, gave
my parents some money and, and, but but yeah, that was kind of,
(05:09):
there's a lot of good juicy poker stories, but yeah, that's,
that's a couple to stand out. Interesting.
So tell me then with with now the context and perspective you
have from poker, would you say that you've learned any business
lessons or is anything translated to your life today?
(05:30):
1000% I'm not trying to be cliche here, but when I played
poker I played nine Max no limit.
That's it. I didn't play limit, I didn't
play stud and all the different variations.
The I played nine Max no limit. For people that don't know, what
does that mean? Is that like a risky 1?
(05:50):
Or different there's you could do 6-6 people at a table, you
could do heads up tournaments, you could do pot, you know, pot
limit Omaha. It's a different bedding
structure, different, you know, you got 4 cards instead of two.
I played one version and I knew how to play that version.
So those, you know, 30-40 thousand hands, I played, I
played that for 3040 thousand hands.
(06:13):
Everything I've done, it's part of the niching up and some of
the stories are in the book, buteverything that I've done that
I've been successful at has beenwith focus at deep focus.
So a lot of people don't know this, but I played a collectible
card game, right? You've heard of Pokémon, but I
played Magic the Gathering in a game called Legends of Five
Rings. Legends of Five Rings was very
(06:34):
popular when I was in high school in the first couple years
of college while I was a world ranked poker player or sorry,
collectible card game player in that at one point I had won four
state championships in a two year period and no one had done
that at the time. And, and kind of where I'm going
(06:55):
with the focus is there were, I believe 12 clans that you could
play, but I played one, I learned how to play it very
effectively in sports in high school.
Even going back further, I was look, I was very good at sports,
baseball, all of them, but I wasbetter at basketball like quit
all the other sports and I focused on basketball and was
like held our records at our high school, college recruited.
(07:18):
By the way, my school only had 100 people total.
My graduating class is 28 peopleand we're beating schools much
bigger and getting recruited. It's because of, of my focus on
basketball and playing every Saturday and Sunday.
And so everything comes to this deep focus.
And, and I think when things getdifficult and people don't want
(07:39):
to do that extra little thing necessary.
So it's very intentional, deep work, deep focus.
That's where I've kind of benefited.
It's not, not the smartest, not the whatever, but it's just been
I, I've been so incredibly focused and determined that
it's, it's really helped me be successful.
(08:00):
Yeah, no, I'm a total advocate for that as well.
I think that's the only way you can truly win things.
And it seems like you're a supercompetitive person, so you're
going to do whatever it takes towin.
But what it takes is just choosing that one kind of thing,
just one of the 12 Pokémon leagues or just one of the many
different ways to play poker. So yeah, OK, Yeah, that makes
complete sense. And that's ties directly into
(08:22):
your book, which, First off, I'mjust kind of curious.
Your book is called Niching Up. Why is it not Niching Down?
Yeah, I think just the a lot I'ma half glass full type of
person, right. I think when you think of down
it, you think of constraint and less opportunities.
And I I think I'm more of an abundance to like up.
It's like a lot of times when you go to your when you focus,
(08:45):
you're niching up to go upstreamin a market, right.
So I'll give you if I was a generalist, it'd be very hard
for me to go talk to an Inc 100 company or or go talk to a
Morgan and Morgan who I you know, Dan Morgan, I can text
right now, you know, or a sweet James and Steve Muir, right?
I can text these individuals. It's because I focus and I've
(09:06):
went up in the ladder of relationships and my
relationship equity and trust isis facilitated that.
So that's kind of the name. Also got it from Seth Godin.
So it's it's a little ripped offof Seth.
One of his little thousand word daily blogs talked about niching
up and and I kind of ran with that.
I really liked it. OK, cool.
(09:26):
Yeah, no. And talk to me a little bit more
about the importance of niching up or down, however you want to
put it. I, I feel like most people,
maybe not most people, but a good amount of people don't
understand the the power of this.
Like I just told you, I, I spoken in a local SEO Group A
few days ago and I briefly mentioned niching down because
(09:47):
they, they really wanted me to talk about podcasting because
I'm pretty strong. They're just like how that gets
you clients and networking and all that stuff.
But I mentioned niching down andthen they started all asking me
questions about niching down. I'm like, you guys don't have a
niche agency like that's, I feellike that's kind of step one.
But talk to me about your experience.
Like you talked to me a little bit before the show, niching
(10:08):
down versus generalist, you're kind of in between for a little
bit. Let me ask you a question and,
and I'm going to give you 2 examples for the audience.
But did you ever play the Nintendo game Final Fantasy?
I didn't number one. OK, no.
Well, I'll explain it for our audience.
The, and the gamers that have played Final Fantasy 1, right?
(10:30):
It's the very first like RPG Nintendo game.
You cut, you get out and you getto pick a character to build
your party of four and they havea fighter, a thief, a white
mage, a black mage, and then they have this red mage.
The red mage is the generalist can kind of fight, can kind of
cast the spells. You don't want to be the fucking
(10:51):
red mage, right? You don't want to be the
general. You're just not good at really
anything. You can't demand the So where
I'm going with this is like there's a perception of
expertise. When you declare a niche, it's
(11:11):
you think about it from a physician perspective, like do
you think a a brain surgeon would be better than a general
surgeon for a brain surgery? You would think the brain
surgeon. Guess what, Every brain surgeon
has their first brain surgery, right?
So as a perception of expertise,but also when you do focus you,
(11:33):
you do it, it lifts your ceilings of opportunity where
you understand what's possible and, and what's out there.
Like what first, when I started with legal, like, I didn't know
that personal injury law was like one of the most profitable
biggest advertisers. It makes sense now, right?
Seeing them on the but it's like, is that particular
activating system like seeing the billboards because I'm in
(11:53):
the space like I really didn't know, but then identified that
same for home services. You know, your, your pest
control and you know, for some people in home, maybe it's
roofing, right? And other.
Services isn't enough. Right.
So it's just you get efficiencies, you can productize
(12:14):
your offers, you get better. It lends itself to compounding.
I just join her. Mosey's school group on his book
launch, his workshop, he talked about, you know, you want things
to compound. Well, I've got a podcast about
Pi. I've got a book about Pi.
I've got a conference. We do retreats.
We have a newsletter. We have a magazine that we've
launched all on this one audience.
(12:36):
I mean it compounds and, and then I have different ways to
monetize them versus trying to do that.
And, and by doing that, I also provide more value.
So I can charge higher fees. I'm just the people in the legal
industry cannot compete with that.
I don't even hear if you're in the legal industry.
There's just, there's no chance because I sign a client and I
(12:57):
can give them all these things to extend tenure, provide more
value. And, and, and, and that all
comes from focus. I don't know how you would do
that. And you also speak to the
individual and not the widget. There's just so many advantages.
Can charge more fees because you're worth more.
You can provide for value. All those things kind of.
(13:20):
It just compounds. Everything compounds when you
focus on a niche. Yeah, definitely that what I've
experienced is that as you beginto grow and like you said, now
you have the book, the conference, maybe the community,
you can start to continue to solve more problems for that
group because you know them so well and because you have more
opportunities, you know them all.
(13:40):
So now you can upsell them and they can refer their friends of,
you know, maybe it's pest control and all the pest control
guys know all the other pest control guys.
I've I've found it to be super beneficial for my career as
well. So then I want to ask you.
How did you can jump one? Do one for your audience, the
agents. I don't care what business you
are, the most wildly underestimated thing is product
(14:02):
market fit. Some people are like, well,
people buy a COI, got product market fit.
No, you do not. The price points are different.
The things, the amount of content, the amount of links,
the things that you need to do to get results and product
market fit constantly changes. Imagine trying to rediscover
product market fit for multiple industries.
(14:23):
Look at what's happened right now with AI, right?
And like, OK, so like you take apersonal injury law, right and
how you manipulate discovery. Well, super lawyers, Avo Justia,
it's going to be different for pest control.
So it's like it's constant discovery of product market fit
and like one of the benefits of focus is that too.
And a lot of times people go outand try to market and sell
(14:45):
things when they haven't discovered product market fit or
try to scale a sales team. I'm, I'm countless agency
members so that I'm going on a little rant here, but like, like
I want to build an outbound sales team.
Like, well, what do you sell? Like for who?
Like yeah, they just they haven't got product market fit,
so they can't do it. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Now I I learned Nishin down from
(15:09):
Josh Nelson who who runs A7 figure Agency, you probably know
him. And one, one thing that really
started me, which is the kind ofrelates to what you're saying
here is that for every additional market that you have
that you're, you're serving, that's a multiple of complexity.
So if you have one niche, now you just it's a 1X.
But if you have three to five niches, that's three to five
(15:31):
times more complexity, not like 20% more complex, but now you
have to account for every singleone of those industries.
And same with also the services that you provide.
Ideally, you should have kind ofone general standard package,
which maybe we can jump into that and maybe if you agree with
that or not. But regardless that that's
something that really drives with me of like limiting
complexity because business is already super complex.
(15:53):
Yeah, you also subsidized talentyou don't want, you want your
talent focused on, you know, thethe most valuable activities.
Yeah. So I mean, where, where where is
your follow hit? Hit me with the hit.
Me correct? So then how did you choose your
niche? I, I was, so I did the affiliate
(16:13):
marketing, got hit by that firstPenguin algorithm.
It naked me down to like $2000 amonth income and I wasn't saving
money and I had these bills. So I got on Craigslist because
that's back in the day. There wasn't indeed in these
other places and I fired off my resume.
I just typed in SEO and fired off and I got 3 interviews from
agencies. They're all remote.
(16:33):
All three offered me the job andmost people would say, well,
Chris, which one did you take? I accepted all three.
I worked at all three because I had an affiliate team in the
Philippines back in the day. It was called O Desk.
Now it's up work. And so I went to three agencies
and one of the agencies I workedat the the most successful.
The three worked with a lot of attorneys and I saw the price
(16:55):
points, I saw the value. I I like the relationship.
So when I went out to launch my own, that was the one that I
focused on. Interesting.
And how's that played out for you?
What would you do it any differently in the future?
Would you do the same thing? Well, I mean, I would do the
same, right? It's hard for me to, to think of
(17:16):
a different path. There are some situations like
I, you know, from a performance perspective or value
perspective, there's limitations, right?
Because I can't participate in contingency fees outside of like
Arizona with the alternative business structure, you know,
for like you for pest control orfor plumbing in the I would do
equity deals. I would do performance deals all
(17:36):
day. Once I had the ability and the
trust I would, I would do those types of deals all day.
But it's very challenging to do that for legal because if you're
not an attorney, you can't have ownership in a law firm.
Yeah. Go on that a little bit more.
So you're saying instead of taking a retainer, take equity?
(18:00):
I would, I would do equity, yes and or or profit from OK, look,
I don't, I don't know your niche.
Let's say a roof. OK, so pest control, I
definitely don't know. Let's let's say roofing.
I don't know what's a roof cost 20 grand, right And there
somewhere around there. Yeah, right.
(18:21):
Instead of selling a fixed retainer, I would do the fixed
retainer plus money on the back end, right.
Give me 10%. Yeah.
Right now you got skin in the game, you got you got a, there's
a greater incentive for you to sell this individual more of
these roofs, right? It's a win win.
(18:41):
So I would do deals like that insituations where an individual
couldn't pay. I would do sweat equity deals if
I had capacity to get equity. So not just ownership of the
business. Can't do that.
Legal. OK, I didn't know that.
(19:03):
Yeah. Talk to me about your kind of
agency structure then, which I was mentioning a little bit
earlier. Do you guys do kind of custom
for everyone? This is something I've
definitely been struggling with.Can you be custom or should it
be fairly standardized? And like, are you taking on all
kinds of clients? The benefit of niching is, is
you're solving for one group that can be applied to others
(19:27):
typically now, yeah, you know, as well as I do from a search
for perspective, market of Los Angeles is going to be different
than Carbondale, IL or Marion, IL where I'm at.
So the quantity and the things that you have to do even from a
review perspective might be less.
But but yeah, you can productizethe offer.
(19:49):
Yeah, I, I can't remember where you're going with that.
Got off track again. Yeah.
Essentially like what, what are the agency services that you
provide? Is it 1 standard package?
Is it more custom? I mean, we have a core offer
that has, it's not just a la carte things, it's it's things
that provide value at different based upon the revenue and, and
(20:12):
what they can afford. So like, you know, her Mosey's
new book, the Money Models bookstalks a lot about this.
So we have, you know, a core offer from 10 to $40,000
typically, but then we got some down cells that we take a piece
out of that offer, maybe LSA only or search only, Google ads
(20:33):
only. We can take a piece out of it,
but we don't sub yet. We don't cannibalize those down
cells to our core offer that it's definitely less and you get
the one thing right. And then we'll have continuity
upsell offers. I'll give you a perfect one to
consider is let's say you sign someone on any search based
(20:53):
retainer or paid retainer. Well, they need X amount of
traffic before it makes sense todo CRO.
And so once they hit a certain or, or retargeting certain
amount of traffic, you can say, Hey, it would be beneficial.
You now have enough traffic to where this makes sense, right?
So that's a continuity upsell. There's a lot of things like
(21:16):
that, you know, there's these different, you know, links,
right, or, or citations, right, are, are very important in terms
of search. So it doesn't matter if, if a
client's not getting results, they might and, and you've
structured everything from a technical, SEO and UX
(21:37):
perspective and content perspective, they may need more
links if they're not performing.But if they are performing, they
may need, may need more links. So there's, there's different
continuity offers on the upsellsand that, that it's not from a
negative standpoint to, to actually provide more value.
And, and that's what it comes down to.
Like if I'm doing these links and they're not providing value,
(21:58):
they're going to turn. So there's a lot there.
It could be stuck by Facebook ads, right?
Facebook ads a lot of time it's the creative like you need a
massive amount of creative. And so sometimes you can do, you
(22:19):
know, some media packages and onsite video work and things like
that to get the creative as combination with their core
offer. But you got to be careful
though, because you don't want too many.
You want everything. You don't want these
Frankenstein things, right? You want to, you want to have
natural progression. But those are just some of the
(22:42):
challenges that come with this. Awesome.
Cool. All right, cool.
So we, it feels like we've talked basically solely agency
the first half of the show. Now I really want to dive into
like all the the local SEO stuff, what's been going on in
local and so on. I guess we could start general
here. Where do you think local SEO is
at right now? Like like what's been going
(23:02):
through your head? What?
What have you been thinking about?
Recently, I mean it's now part of the AIO reviews, so it's you
know, Google's AI mode when theymake it default, it's almost a
mirror to the it's current search.
Also, typically all the scrapers, a lot of them,
(23:23):
regardless of you know, who they're paying for their
licensing deal, whether it's Reddit or, or what have you to
get this information, they're still scraping Google somehow.
It's mirroring the local resultsthere.
And even being in Microsoft, typically it's similar, not
always the exact same, but it's very similar.
(23:44):
So I mean, it's people. There's been this evolution of
marketing, right? Like back in the day it was TVTV
and Facebook, right? And radio, well, now you got TV
and streaming, now you got Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn
and this. And now you got programmatic.
(24:04):
And so attention's more fractured.
So you have to be in all these locations.
So omnipresence is more important and you want to go
deep in some areas, but it's it's just changed and.
Is is omnipresence realistic fora smaller business?
(24:29):
No, typically you know zero to 1,000,000.
It's you know one product, 1 channel, you know one to 10.
What they'll tell you is you know 11 product, multiple
channels or multiple channels, one product.
That's Michael Masterson ready fire aim.
I've seen that myself. When you go 10 plus, it's
(24:50):
multiple channels, multiple products.
That's just a general rule. Your thresholds could be
different. A lot of times one of the
biggest issues with marketing isyou're undercapitalized, right?
SEO doesn't work or you're paying 200 bucks a month.
TV advertising didn't work? Well, your personal injury
attorney and the top three people are all spending six
(25:12):
figures and you know you're not saturating enough for
memorability. You, you take someone like
Jennifer, what's her name? Jennifer Lawrence.
Is that her name for Mockingbird?
It's been 50 million. Like no one knew who the hell
she was before that movie. And he spent $50,000,000 to
advertise that movie. And then suddenly people know
(25:34):
her. Everyone knows billion
impressions. So it's like you start small and
you keep compounding and know your metrics and and go from
there. Yeah, got it.
Yeah. Talk to me more about that like
high level SEO game, because usually I'm working with clients
usually somewhere in the seven figure range, maybe low 8
(25:55):
figures. But I'm sure you're working with
these, these law firms that are just monstrous.
And you said that's also more competitive.
They have more money to spend, might be 6 figures a year or
even 7 figures a year. What does that look like?
Like what are there massive teams and how exactly
competitive it is? What?
What does it look like? Well, in the Pi space, it's
(26:17):
there's consolidation occurring kind of like what happened with
dental and the aspens and the, the DS OS.
Now you have something called anMSO.
So what's happening is private equities came in and there's
breaking these law firms up intotwo business units.
So 1 is a legal business that requires the bar card and it and
everything else. The marketing is separate.
(26:38):
So that's how you invest and they shuffle the fees.
Somehow they get it legal. So there's a lot of
consolidation and competition due to the capital.
Well, it's surprising, but most Pi firms don't have a big
marketing department. They'll have like a marketing
(26:59):
manager, maybe Acmo, maybe some support staff, but it's very
rare that it's more than four orfive.
There are some exceptions. Morgan and Morgan's,
everything's in house. They got like 70 people on their
marketing team, but that's, that's a, you know, they spend
$300 million a year in advertising.
(27:19):
To answer your question, look, let's local, let's just stick on
local. You have to get 5 star reviews
on Google. You got to get a bunch of them.
So there's like that's like table stakes, right?
That impacts your local services, ads, local SEO, the
superlatives and the ability there, the words used in the
(27:43):
reviews and around the reviews, and everything impacts your
discovery. I think where there's been a
shift recently is Yelp. So if you think about this,
Microsoft owns Bing, Microsoft license to Reddit.
Microsoft also utilizes are being used as Yelp for their
(28:07):
reviews. It's Apple Maps uses Yelp and
now you have if you do, if you look at the citations on most of
these LLMS, it's going to be Yelp.
You'll even see them popping up for if you do you know who's the
best car accident lawyer in Las Vegas, you'll see a Yelp in the
(28:27):
top five. So because they're being cited
and because where attention is, it's more important to get Yelp
reviews. So Yelp reviews are tough to get
the stick, right? Well, you got to get them to
check in at the location. Like that's the key.
If you don't do the check insurance and you send them the
link, first of all, you're violating their terms service,
(28:49):
their guidelines. But there's a greater emphasis
on Yelp now than there has been in the past.
That no, that's a really good nugget there.
And then any other platforms arejust mainly Yelp.
OK, so Yelp let me let me go a little bit further on Yelp in
order to rank on the 10 best pages like those listicles that
(29:12):
are important now you got to get20 ish reviews in most markets
on Yelp. So that that emphasizes even
another completely of why Yelp Yes.
Now you go over to let's say Facebook, right?
Facebook, you, do you recommend this business, right?
That's the option. You don't get a rating scale.
(29:33):
Well, their reviews are aggregated or are they
aggregated? They're aggregated to
Trustpilot. They're aggregated to
expertise.com. expertise.com hasa, who's the best, has a
listicle. So we're all playing these
superlative listicle games on these LLMS, Two of the most
(29:54):
important directories right now,Super Lawyers and best lawyers.
It's such a joke. It actually frustrates me.
Now you've got Justia, one of the primary legal directories.
You can do a peer endorsement tobe a top rated something lawyer.
And it's one that they've now created this new distinction on
(30:16):
their page. It's so yes, Google, Yelp,
Facebook is probably #3 from a from a legal perspective and
their aggregation that impacts these other results.
But like those, those are some of the deeper things that like,
look, my try not to be negative,my competitors are not thinking
about this. They are not.
(30:38):
There's not, but it's the reality.
You got to pay more importance and closer attention to these
other sites. Yeah, definitely.
So those things that you said, some of them were kind of
annoying, maybe shouldn't be there if like a superlawyer.com,
then being listed there actuallyhelps.
(31:01):
Which of these things, like on amaybe in the next few years,
will actually stick and will youthink will still be relevant in
ranking in LLMS like Chach BT? All of those that I just
mentioned. Oh really?
So all those, all those will still stay.
Yeah, I see the SEO people on X complaining.
Like how long have they been complaining about the keywords
(31:24):
and the name for GVP? Like, yeah, yeah, I'm not going
to change this. It's not going anywhere.
No, like maybe, maybe they stopped licensing Reddit so the
stupid Reddit form stops rankingnumber one and two on all the
queries and that goes down. But like, you know, a lot of
these other things I mentioned, they're not changed.
(31:46):
Yeah. And what about other ways in
breaking LLMS? Is there anything concrete?
Because I've interviewed people on this, but it's a lot of
people are still saying it's kind of too early.
We haven't done any like concrete testing.
But is there anything solid you're seeing?
Yeah, those guys are. Just besides.
Because they don't know what's going on.
Yeah, the so, so some of those listicle things and the
(32:06):
aggregation of some of those sites and importance of those
sites, you know, for lawyers specifically, there's a greater
emphasis of case results. So if you look at if, if you
typed it in, I don't care what market it's going to, it's going
to say they, well, they had thiscase result and that case
result. So now you have to feature those
(32:27):
on the website much more prominently, much more robustly,
robustly. Also most of these sites, the
Justine and Avos, they, they allow you to list case results.
Many of these sites do. So you want to aggregate these
reviews out. There's even there's even, you
know, Reddit based strategies around this too.
(32:48):
But overall, you know that that's a big one from a from a
ranking and discovery perspective.
Is is the proof. The proof component, no matter
what it is, is more important tohave on your BIOS have on your
main landing pages. I know that's been there's been
tie insurance to the eat the EATthing, but I think it's even
(33:11):
more important on the the discovery side from these LMS.
Yeah, let's jump into the forumsthen.
You mentioned like Reddit and there's other ones like, you
know, Cora and so on. Are you guys doing anything
there for your clients or what would you say?
I mean. We have tons of user profiles.
We we take an add value. No negative selling answer
(33:35):
questions first, because if if you're doing any type of
promotion, your accounts are naked, you need a certain amount
of karma points before you can be a moderator and you have the
trust, you know, levels to even get your stuff to stick.
So yeah, we we answer questions,we provide value, simple stuff
(33:57):
that should that. Be under a personal profile or a
company profile. I like the personal profiles.
You can do both. I don't know.
It's I think there's a we do both.
We do both. So we'll have one core, you
know, legal fanatics style username.
(34:18):
That's like a company one or a ranking.
We'll even do it. We even have I think a rankings
one right now. OK, but but we do we do both.
Cool. Yeah, yeah.
Related to the EEAT stuff, a lotof people will mention that
authorship is super important. I mean, Google says that in the
in their guidelines too. Are you guys like, do you do
(34:40):
anything specific with authorship?
Because I see some people that will make sure to cite the
author. Maybe they do it several times.
There's a picture of the author and then they try to build up
that person's entity on Google and setting up all the social
profiles and they have a personal website.
Like do you go deep on that stuff or is that not worth
pursuing? That's a really good question
and I hate this is one of these that so in my Tier 2 of my
(35:03):
offer, we have attorney entity optimization.
We have a specific service that where we expand and make the
attorneys entities and more robust and big component of that
is their bio. So it is, it's not just that
it's we want a 10 out of 10 avo profile for them, Super Lawyer
(35:25):
profile, just the profile. All of those are tied in and
interlinked to the bio and the by lines.
And yeah, so we do that. I think it all kind of ties
together. So yeah, we're doing that and
that's what that's a tier in ours because it's a lot more
work. We do the, you know, the
(35:46):
technical SEO, the scheme of thepersonal scheme, all the stuff
that ever yeah, yeah. But then we we go deeper on a
higher tier. Yeah, well, that's one to touch
on. I've been seeing some
controversy around schema and a lot of people are like, oh, this
is the answer to showing up in LLMS.
But now I've been seeing more and more people say it.
Actually, it still doesn't do much.
What are your thoughts on schema?
Yeah, I saw an individual say that the other day, like this
(36:08):
has been misproven. Like what study are you looking
at? Because it works.
FAQ schema works. I can't remember that person's
name. Probably don't say I like it,
don't pass them. Yeah, yeah, I actually like a
lot of their content, but I was like, no, that it's completely
wrong. And I think a lot of times it's
(36:28):
the like we're doing this from an application perspective.
We have 909 hundred locations. So like I would say that the
amount of content and things that were like, I have anecdotal
proof that it is working. Like maybe I should put a study
out or something. Like the FAQ scheme of stuff
100% works. Structuring your titles from a
discovery perspective also works.
(36:50):
You start putting things in a site wide location in your
footer or in your header that that incorporates these
superlatives also gets referenced.
So yeah, I mean schema 1000% works.
Got you even have a custom GPT that incorporates this.
And when we when we put our content content into it and
(37:12):
structured a certain way, we have seen significantly more AI
overviews. Also kind of related to that, do
you guys have any particular wayto track this?
I know some people have like created their own dashboards.
They'll kind of set up somethingin Google Search Console.
That's a SO. We sorry, I know it's a few
(37:34):
tough questions. Well, I know you're a highlight
guy and you're super deep. This is a.
Challenge right? Like this is 1 we're trying to
solve too, you know, and everybody's got the a refs and
SEM rush stuff on the citations and like what you know, what's
good and what's there. And I know they just dropped
the, the 100 parameter, but we're using some tools.
I think I'm trying to think of the name of the tool profoundly.
(37:56):
There's like two or three AI tools that we're using and like,
none of them are perfect, but atleast gives you some
information. Even Yext has a, an AI audit
score, visibility score. I think those are are good as
like a baseline from like a leadmagnet or a marketing
perspective, more so than existing clientele, but not
(38:21):
enough. If I, if you give me a second,
I'll open my slack and hopefullythis doesn't I'll keep you can
keep hitting me and I'll I'll tell you the one that we're
using right now. Give me just two seconds.
Let's see here me who hit me with a question while you're
(38:41):
doing it all cool. Yeah, yeah, I got you.
So yeah, you mentioned titles a little bit.
I want to ask you on this because I think I've seen some
stuff on this recently, too. So for people that don't know,
title tags are super important. That's like, I'd say, one of the
key aspects of where you need tohave your keywords.
And Kyle Roof talks about that alot.
I interviewed him on my show. So do you think I I saw
(39:05):
something on this recently of people trying to implement EAT
in the title tags? I forget.
I think Jason Hennessy mentionedthis on Joy Hawkins recent
podcast, or maybe I'm pretty sure it was him, but
implementing some kind of more conversion slash EEAT components
to the title tax instead of justalmost like keyword stuffing,
(39:27):
which some people will do. Do you guys mix it up?
Is it not just keywords but alsolike a most trusted of best?
We're absolutely doing that. By the way, the tool that I was
referring to, that we're one of them that we're using is called
Prompt Watch right now. So yes, attorneys have
(39:52):
advertising ethics and restrictions on this, the use of
superlatives. You can't do it from the bar,
but you can say things like, OK,so say you get an award that's a
top rated, you could say top rated by or you know, rated best
(40:13):
lawyer. So then you get the best in the
top and the title tag, which is super annoying that you got to
do that. But those, those are some things
that can make an impact because a lot of times the consumer and
you look at these long tails, they're going to use best.
Who's the best car accident? Like if you're going to, if you
got a car rack, who's the best car accident lawyer near me,
(40:34):
right, you're going to say best.And that's that's why super
Lawyers and Justia and Best lawyers, all these are more
important. And even the words that are used
to like when you're coaching up your your customers to leave
that those phrasing, that phrasing into the reviews
themselves, yes. Incredibly important.
(40:55):
Awesome. And what about like super long
tail searches? So obviously then most people
should know this by now that people are doing more and more
searches by voice and people areusing LLMS more.
I believe the status maybe the, the queries on LLMS are like 2
to three times longer than Google.
(41:15):
And I'm sure that might even be getting longer.
And for myself personally, sometimes I'll have a question
about something or might even berelated to a product or service
and I'll talk to my phone for a few minutes and it'll be a whole
page long. So like, do you think that's
kind of where things are headed and how can you show up if
that's the case? I mean, I, I think you, you
(41:36):
structure your different queriescorrectly.
You know, you're on the, the sites that are cited.
Each section should be, you know, where we're talking about
the tokens of structure, not just the words Google reads the
tokens. So that all plays into this.
I mean, today I was kind of thinking of your example.
They're like, I'm sitting here talking to my phone and it's,
(41:58):
it's so frustrating when you're talking on ChatGPT and, and it
thinks you're done and it startsinterrupting you and like it's
like. Yeah.
Restart. But yeah, I, I mean, if I look
at some of my, especially when I'm talking to it, if I type it,
I'll kind of shorthand it. I'm like, I'm super lazy
sometimes too. I'll like throw an e-mail in
(42:20):
here and I'll be like, fix this.Yeah.
And I'll like, fix the grammar. But like, if I'm going deep,
I'll give it a lot of context. Yeah, yeah.
I think that plays into it. And I mean, some people like
Gary Vee says, at least part of the answer to that is branding.
(42:41):
Do you guys do anything with branding with clients?
Do you like or do you implement anything yourselves?
So I always encourage like if you, if you've got like this is
like different evolutions, right.
If you for personal injury attorneys and this is the space
that I know. So I was given all the examples.
Yeah, if you have them like a minimal budget, a lot of times
(43:02):
it's like 50% or higher, go straight Legion.
You can get ACPL or CPR cost perretainer and it's a way to get
consistent cases immediately. And that other amount typically
goes to either your own performance marketing or brand.
The the issue with brand though,is it takes a lot to saturate,
(43:23):
but you need to start somewhere,right?
And there's kind of this evolution that occurs.
It's like you don't want to deploy dollars outside of your
brand at some point. So in the beginning, maybe you
start heavier on the lead Gen. and then it starts to kind of
shrink and you go more and even maybe it's lead Gen. plus
performance. And then it's like less legion.
(43:45):
And then now you got performanceand brand, but then eventually
it's like brand and then performance is low.
It's kind of an evolution that occurs.
Yeah, I agree with with the market I'm in pest control, I
usually just say, you know, justgo kind of straight lead Gen. up
until $1,000,000 a year. But once we're at $1,000,000 a
year, we kind of have to start investing in brand.
(44:07):
We have to be building somethingthere and ideally it's already
getting built, right. I mean, you know, for pest
control they might be. Who?
Who? Mike Ramsey.
Yeah, Yeah. OK.
I was going to say you should reach out to him.
You might be able to get you some referrals.
OK, Yeah, no, that, that'd be awesome.
OK, cool. So we'll we'll start to wrap up
(44:27):
the show here. I've got one final question for
you, Chris, which is what is your message for local business
owners or for local marketers? What do they need to know?
What? What are they getting wrong and
what do you want to tell them? That's a big one.
(44:48):
I would just say be intentional about improving, consistent
improvement. A lot of you look at a lot of
times individuals self sabotage themselves.
It's you stop, you quit learning, you don't improve,
right. Michael Dell talks about this
after 40 something plus years inbusiness, you'll sell your
(45:12):
business, you won't keep you'll hit these friction points.
But as long as you go through the through the pain, try to fix
your mistakes and and learn fromthem.
That's that's the best advice that I could give you.
I'll give you any perfect example for myself.
Just just one I've been thinkingabout is like we had our first
event last year called Pimcon. I didn't save any money for
(45:36):
this. Like we're going to do it.
Yeah, right. It was like $1.6 million.
I had to just figure out, right?And we had a decent amount of
sponsorships and ticket sales. I had to give a lot of tickets
away to get people there. OK, year one, then it's like,
OK, well, I could have sold the tickets at a little bit more.
(45:56):
I could have added here's three more sponsors.
And now this year it's like 300,000 more.
Well, now next year we've even found how to get another 100 or
$200,000 out of it. And it's just because I stuck
with it, like I didn't make muchmoney.
In fact, I lost money year one. But it's, it's just like
sticking with it and just learning from your, you know,
your mistakes. Love that.
(46:18):
Yeah, that's that ready fire aimconcept.
I believe that that book. And I actually want to give a
quick follow up here because it seems like you're a pretty avid
reader. Do do you have any top books
that you think people should definitely read?
I am definitely an avid reader. Let's call that OK ready fire
and we mentioned it's a really good one if you're an agency
(46:40):
owner, the boutique by Greg Alexander's incredible book.
Incredible. I'm a high D so I like books
like the 10X by Grant Cardone. I like and up, you know,
snowflake like books like that. I like the new there's the
science of scaling. It's a new one that just came
(47:01):
out. It's got a, I think Tony Robbins
has like the intro and I've seensome Facebook ads on it.
You know, there's if you said like marketing or this or that.
I I could tell you like, yeah, marketing, marketing, you know,
you're going to go to Harmozi stuff.
Yeah. You know, your offer for product
(47:22):
market fit your, you know, ultimate sales machine Chat
homes is a good one. Ogilvy's got an excellent book.
I think the understanding the psychology from a Chiel Dani,
you know that his book influenceis incredible.
(47:42):
So there's books like that. I also think that depending upon
where you are as a business, like early on, early revenue,
it's more tactical. You need to understand the
tactics and a lot of the tacticsare missing.
Later on, it's more strategy, what decisions am I going to
make? Like that really impacted the,
the business. It's, it's not, how do I build
(48:04):
an outbound team? How do I do Facebook ads?
Like in there, there's, there's books for all that.
But so it's like, what, where are you at?
You know, if you're sales and you need help from an outbound
perspective, Trish Bertuzzi, youknow, a sales development
playbook. There's, you know, sales gravy.
And there's the, the prospectingbook.
I can't think of the name of it,but Fanatical prospecting.
(48:28):
It just depends. So like, there's books from the
tactics, but then there's books for the strategy too.
Yeah, but it seems like that's at least one of your unlocks.
Like I can tell you're very smart, you're very
knowledgeable. And I really appreciate that
list that that was that was super helpful.
I'll have to go back and read all those books.
I think too, at a certain point,the tactics, they kind of get
(48:50):
regurgitated like from the core main entrepreneurial books.
But then you start looking at, you know, Titan by Rockefeller,
then you go look at Isaacson's book on Elon Musk and, you know,
yeah, Sam Walton's book. And you start going through
those and you can pull out like really good Nuggets and from a
strategy perspective, looking atthings differently.
(49:11):
Love that. So awesome.
Now I'll have to make sure to read all those.
Well, cool, Chris, it's been a great show.
It's been so great having you on.
Where can people find you, connect with you, and learn more
about what you guys do? Yeah, I'm most active on
LinkedIn, so if you shoot me a message probably won't be
immediate. I'm not an inbox 0 message guy
on LinkedIn, but I probably see it.
(49:33):
If you listen to this and you want to e-mail me directly, just
hit me at Chris at rankings dot IO.
Cool, awesome, and anything elseyou'd like to plug or promote.
No, go get it. Appreciate it.
This was a lot of fun. I like the engaging
conversation, gets me thinking and I really enjoyed it.
Yeah, definitely. No, you had you had some great
answers and you had a really unique perspective on all the
(49:54):
the LLM stuff. Like very few people could have
an answer to this. And that's why I wanted to ask
you those questions because it'sit's unique to you.
And also make sure to go buy both of his books if you're a
lawyer, He has a lawyer marketing book and also his
Niching Up book. Definitely read that if you're
maybe an agency or maybe you're just thinking about niching in
whatever industry you're in. So yeah, thank you guys so much
(50:16):
for watching. It's been a great show.
And thank you so much for comingon, Chris.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Host
Danny Leibrandt
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