Transcription
There are eight million people who live in the Houston metro area, and right now dozens of them are waiting on the shoulder of Interstate 10, looking for a tow truck and typing "personal injury lawyer Houston" into their phone with a shaking hand. This is a $10,000 per case market. Most of these firms are going to spend $800 just to show up on the first page one time. And while the SEO gurus are telling you to post three blogs a week and wait for Google to notice, the firms that are winning this search have already spent a decade building what I'm about to show you.
If you aren't in the map pack when that accident happens, you may as well not exist. Period. So today, I'm breaking down one of the most competitive local search results in the United States. I'm going to show you exactly what the top three firms are doing that no one else is. And then I'm going to scroll down to page two and give you a history lesson on firms that were dominant 15 years ago and got left behind by the same exact mistakes you're probably making on your website right now.
I run a 7-figure local SEO agency. We manage hundreds of local businesses across the country, and everything I'm about to show you is what we do for real clients every single day. Let's go ahead and get started.
So, here we are on Google and of course, "personal injury lawyer Houston." Excellent. I'm going to hide the sponsored results. I'm not interested in looking at who's paying the most. And let's dive right in. So, we have these top three results. I'm going to do something that no one ever does. I'm going to hit "more businesses." I want to see more than just these top three. I want to see a lot more of these firms so we can get a good analysis of it.
So, I'm going to start by opening the first result. We can see five perfect stars, 1.3,000 reviews. We got 4.9 and 1700, and 4.9 and 3,300. All quite solid. But if you notice, the number one ranked has the fewest reviews. And the number four ranked actually has more reviews than the number one or number two. I bet if we scroll down, we can find some others that have even more reviews. 2600 all the way down there. Again, 1,600 even lower, 1,000 and 1,200 at the bottom of the first page. So a lot of very high review counts not showing up in the top three.
But let's take a look at Zel and Associates. They are almost certainly paying a lot of money for SEO. Let's see what they're doing right. Probably a lot, because they're ranked number one in such a competitive environment. All right, so the first thing I'm going to look at, I want to see that their title tag is using their primary category and city name. So, I want to see "personal injury attorney" and "Houston" in their title tag. And we have "Houston personal injury lawyer." Perfect. The only other word they've decided to put in their title tag is "undefeated." Excellent choice, I must say.
Then, uh, we of course have, uh, the chat open. We'll close that. When we think about the H1, that is the primary heading on the page. When we're doing the H1, we need it to talk to Google. We need it to talk to AI systems. And we need it to talk to searchers who have landed on this page. That's a lot to ask for just a heading. So in order to do that, we want to use again the primary category. We want to use the city name. And we want to use a reason why the user should convert. Why this is the right firm. And if we look, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, we have seven words. "Houston Personal Injury Lawyers." That is the primary category and city name. Spot on. That's four of the seven words. The next three words, "undefeated billions won." I think 10 out of 10. No notes. Great job with the H1 tag. Very clearly, this is the number one ranked law firm in one of the most competitive environments, right? This does a great job. If I need a personal injury lawyer, "undefeated billions won." Boy, that's really convincing to me. And if I've asked ChatGPT to help me find a personal injury lawyer, "undefeated billions won," really convincing to ChatGPT.
Then right below that, "Why hire our personal injury lawyers?" This is fabulous. So many local businesses start with a history lesson. They're starting by talking directly to the searcher, directly to the LLM, who then is going to take this and tell the searcher, "This is fabulous. This is what you should model your local business website after." Okay. "Billions won," "number one largest accident recoveries," "undefeated," "you only pay us if you win." Okay. The only slight complaint I would have is this last one. Pretty much every personal injury lawyer works like this. Even in that case, I'm okay with this because a lot of people who are looking for a personal injury lawyer might not know that you only pay the law firm if you win. The rest of these, these are true unique selling propositions. "Undefeated," "largest accident recoveries in Texas," "billions won." Fabulous. Really good to convince me to convince an LLM that they're the ones I should call.
We keep coming down and we get yet more social proof in the form of all of these awards. I mean, this is great. Scroll down and then straight into social proof, straight into testimonials. It's almost like whoever did this website has gone through my school community. This is basically exactly how I say that one should design a local business GBP landing page. This is honestly fabulous. Okay.
And now we go into, uh, some additional content. Again, talking straight to the user through the LLM or a user who's actually reading this. We're not doing a boring history lesson. And finally, we talk about who the actual attorneys are, but we're still not really talking about them. No history lesson. I don't know how old this firm is. I don't know what their family values are. I don't know who they're married to. And frankly, I don't care. I'm looking for a personal injury lawyer, right? And now we're going to give some more information on why "committed to our clients." This is where we start to get into some generic stuff. But look, we're halfway down the page. The way most users interact with the local business website is they're going to start at the top. They're going to scroll down a little bit. Then they scroll all the way to the bottom and start scrolling up. So, what's interesting is the material in the center of the page will often get the least amount of attention. That's just how users interact with local websites. We've seen this over many, many years with a lot of the, you know, Hot Jar or similar interactivity type trackers installed. And what's fabulous, even with that, they have designed this page well because if I start at the bottom and scroll up, I get to yet more social proof that I didn't see at the top. I mean, this is fabulous. This is this is really good. It's laid out very well.
We can see that they have a GVP embed. We like to see that. We have a a video embed. Uh, we know that Google loves if you embed videos on your homepage. And even more important to really think about creating YouTube videos for your business, for your clients, and embedding those YouTube videos on your pages because Gemini, which is Google's AI system, pays a lot of attention to YouTube. Of course, it does, right? Google owns YouTube. So, Google's AI was trained on YouTube. This is important because Google very recently introduced the Ask Maps feature, which is Gemini recommending local businesses. Okay. So, creating YouTube videos, embedding them on your page, a very clear signal to Gemini that those videos are yours, that channel is yours. And then when Gemini looks at those YouTube videos and watches them, it gives it yet more information, more reasons to recommend your business to users who are on Ask Maps. And yes, you might be saying, "Well, Caleb, no one's using Ask Maps right now." And you're correct. But usually, when Google rolls out new features like that, they eventually come to take over. And honestly, I think the traditional three-pack, this view, I think its days are numbered. I think the Ask Maps feature, Gemini recommending local businesses is going to be what happens in the future. So, start preparing yourself now, especially YouTube content embedded on pages, an excellent way to start training Gemini on who you are, who your business is. Fabulous.
Okay. Now, a couple of other checks that I just want to do out of curiosity. I'm going to pull open the structured data testing tool and let's see what kind of structured data they have. I'm guessing they have very good structured data. But let's take a look. "Legal service," "web page," "creative work series," "organization," and an "FAQ page." Yes, as expected, they have fabulous structured data. Schema. Schema is very important. The LLMs read it. Google reads it. It's more important for the AI systems than it is for Google, but it's very easy to do. You definitely want to do it. And we can see, uh, they're identifying themselves as a "legal service." "Houston personal injury attorney" has a map. They're giving all of their social media profiles, including their YouTube channel. This is fabulous. I just talked about the YouTube channel importance. I'm betting if we went to these different platforms, we would see that they are active. That's important. We know the LLMs. We know Google cares about your activity on your social media profiles. So, call them out in your schema. Then, make sure they're active. Okay. Beyond just this legal service, we can see the FAQ. This FAQ section is great. It is a way that you can almost literally feed word-for-word content to ChatGPT. Okay, like this text with this answer, if someone is asking questions like that, ChatGPT is going to read this text and then it might regurgitate this back to the user almost word for word. FAQ schema, fabulous. Love what they're doing.
Now, the next check, just out of curiosity, I want to see how big this website is. Big, what I mean is how many indexed pages do they have? We have 2500. This is a massive, massive website. You will not see very many local business websites that are 2500 URLs. Yet another reason why they're ranking so, so well. Okay, enough of me talking about how fabulous Zel's SEO firm has done with their website.
Let me show you the alternate case. A lawyer's website who isn't doing quite as well as Zel and Associates. So, I'm going to come on down here and let's check out Arnold and Kken. And I'm choosing them for a couple of reasons. They have 1,200 reviews. It's typically very hard to get reviews. Uh, but they have 1,200. So that's a lot of reviews, but they're still ranked in this 20th position, bottom of the first page. Uh, let's take a look at what their website looks like.
Now, as before, starting with the title tag, "Houston Personal Injury Attorneys, 25 billion 1." A pretty good start. Title tag matches. Then we're going to go right into that H1, and their H1 is "Houston personal injury lawyers." Okay, so we got Houston, we got personal injury lawyers, but we're missing what Zel had. "Undefeated Billions won," a fabulous tagline under the H1. Here we have "record setting trial results." But honestly, in this blue color is very misleading to me because this blue color is what pretty much everyone on the internet associates with links. And you can actually see it matches the link color right down here. I think this is a very bad decision to use a link-matching color for a subheading under their H1. Overall, they've used this shade of blue all over the place. It makes the site just look very dated. I don't know. I don't like it.
Okay, they've gone for their hero image. Someone looking at radiology films. Okay, I'm not sure I understand why this is the hero image of a personal injury lawyer. I mean, sure, the lawyer is looking at radiology films, but like that does I don't know. That doesn't feel like it makes sense. Like look at this. It's a very fancy, nice-looking office that's got their sign on it versus this dude looking at images. I don't know. This is also a really weird. This looks like an artifact for whatever platform the website is living on. It looks kind of weird. I'm not a big fan of that. But okay, then right off the top we get "from our Houston headquarters." So, we're talking about the business. Now, again, compared to here, "Why should you hire us?" Uh, "we're undefeated." "Here's what our clients have to say about working with us." "Do you have a case?" Compare that to these guys, "from our Houston head." So immediately they start talking about themselves. Okay?
When someone lands on a website and that someone could be an LLM, right? When when a person or an AI bot lands on a website, they're landing there to answer whatever question they have. And the sooner you answer that question for them, the better. And I can promise that very, very few people are landing on your website wondering about the history of your business. Okay. So, why that is the first thing that so many local business owners or SEO agencies decide to put on their website is completely beyond me. Okay. No one is landing on their website wondering, "Boy, I wonder where their headquarters in Houston is." Yet, that is the first piece of information that they decide to share. Okay. Not relevant. No one landing here cares about their Houston headquarters at a Memorial Drive. That's not why they're coming here. I'll calm down. I'll keep going through it. And yeah, this is just all very platitudes. Okay, this feels like it was written by a high school intern before ChatGPT came out. This is not good. I don't like this language at all. This is not bad, but "no fee" and "free consultation" is redundant. They should replace one of these with something that actually means something different.
"What to do after a serious accident." So, we haven't really talked about me yet. Okay, we haven't shown much social proof. You know, we have the "25 billion 1." Maybe the "record setting case," but we don't really talk. And then we go, "we live and work in Hu." I mean, this is just this is platitudes. This is not very interesting. It's not convincing me to to convert. "Why personal law injurious?" This is too detailed. "2-year filing," "51% fault bar." Why is this so high? "Local med." I mean, then just a list of cases. Okay. Come all all the way to the bottom and we just have a bunch of office locations down there. Fine. And if we, we have some a very short FAQ section with only three questions and that's it.
So, what are we missing on this page? We don't have a GBP embed. Uh, we don't have any video content. We don't have any real social proof, right? I mean, we have how much they've won, but that's it. Kind of disappointing. Let me see. This is obviously a franchise. So, let me see how large the site is. 10 results. Okay. Now, I did search specifically for the Houston subfolder. This isn't the full domain, but that tells me that they have 10 results under this Houston subfolder. Let me take care of the, let me get rid of the Houston subfolder and just look at the full domain and see what we have. 1,700. So, it's still a large site. It's smaller than Zel here. And right, they're not just trying to rank in Houston. They're trying to rank in all of these places. And I like how this one is "Louisiana" and not "Baton Rouge." Right? So, we got Houston, Midland, not Albuquerque. So like Louisiana and New Mexico, do they think those are cities? Kind of weird, right? Anyway, whatever. Kind of whatever. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right.
The way we do multi-location websites. So, let me pull up this this slash again. Multi-location websites, especially for highly competitive spaces like personal injury. So, we're going to build out the core 30. And the core 30, what that means is we're going to look at the Google Business Profile and build a single page for every category, for every service on that Google Business Profile. Now, for a multi-location business, each GBP landing page is going to function as a pseudo homepage. You can see I landed on this pseudo homepage. This sort of looks and feels like a homepage. It would be better if we got rid of this, but it's not the homepage. It's the Houston landing page. Okay. So, you build your GBP landing page like a pseudo homepage. Then, you're going to build your core 30 underneath that. That's one page for every category, one page for every service. You're going to do that for every single location. So yes, if you have a 10-location business and you have 10 GBPs and you're going to do your core 30 for each one of them, that's 300 pages. Luckily, AI exists. So you don't really need to worry about writing 300 pages. AI will knock it out pretty quick. And then you just need to review the content and you're good to go.
Okay, so the reason that's so important is because we need to establish geographical and topical relevance for every single one of these business entities, right? The way Google search works, the way AI systems work is your business is seen as an entity. And your GBP is the heart of that business entity. Then all the services you do are entities. The city you're in is also an entity. So what we need to do with this content is link your business entity with your service entity with your city entity. Okay? And the easiest, fastest, most effective way to do that is the core 30 because now we have a website structure that exactly matches your GBP and it talks about the city you're in and the services that you offer. And that is what they are exactly not doing by only having 10 results on the Houston subpage. Right? Come back site. Was it 12 results? 10 results. So they only have 10. This is not enough for the full core 30.
So, if Arnold and Itken came to me and said, "We would like to rank higher in Houston. What should we do?" We would fine-tune this GVP landing page to make it look more like a homepage. We'd do a single hero image. We would get rid of this weird thing. We'd rewrite a lot of this content to be talking to the user instead of giving a history lesson about the firm. Most importantly, we'd build out the core 30 underneath this Houston section. We'd then do the same thing for all of the other ones. We'd build a core 30 for Midland. We'd build one for Louisiana, for New Mexico, well, for Baton Rouge and Albuquerque. We'd build one for Dallas, for San Antonio.
Now, I'm kind of curious as to how these are doing on ChatGPT. So, if I say, "I was in a truck accident in Houston, Texas. Who is the best personal injury attorney I should call?" Of course, now going forward, every time I talk to ChatGPT, it's going to ask about my uh truck accident. Uh, that is the downside of these uh sample runs, but we'll see what it says. And ah, so ChatGPT is looking for actual truck crash. He's not looking just for the best personal injury firm generally. They're looking for the best truck accident. Did you see Zel Law there? So ChatGPT found Zel Law as I would have expected it to. There's a pretty good correlation between high ranking on Google's map algorithm and what ChatGPT recommends. The correlation is close to 50%. Uh, meaning half of the businesses that rank in the top three are also being recommended by AI. Now this is important especially as Gemini gets introduced more and more in Google local search because that means half of the businesses currently ranking in the maps aren't ranking in AI. This is a problem. If you're ranking in maps, that doesn't mean you're ranking in AI.
The biggest difference, right? Ranking in maps, one of the key rank factors is proximity. Okay? To rank in maps, the algorithm cares about proximity, trust, and authority. AI doesn't really care about proximity. So proximity basically goes away. So if you're ranking because you happen to be close to someone searching, that goes away. As Gemini becomes more and more important in local search, instead of proximity, the AIs care about trust and authority and attributes. So we care a lot more about attributes on AI search than we do in the maps algorithm. That's how we find that ChatGPT looks for very, very specific law firms that specialize in truck accidents. So when I ask, "Hey, I was in a truck accident," ChatGPT is going to go and read all the reviews. The reviews on Bing first because ChatGPT uses Bing's index. It might read the reviews on the GBP and then it's going to go and read other reviews about these different firms, maybe on Reddit, Facebook, Trustpilot, wherever else, Yelp, wherever else it can find reviews and look for a review that talks about truck accidents. Which is why when we're working with clients who need more reviews, we don't tell them, "Hey, go to your customers and say, hey, give me more Google reviews, please." We ask them, "Go to your prior customers, ask for diverse reviews, right? Cycle which platforms you're asking for reviews on, not all on the GBP." And instead of just saying, "Hey, can you give us a review?" You should be asking, "Hey, can you tell us what happened? Can you write about what happened?" That's a good way to get very specific reviews without breaking any of Google's rules.
Okay, let's see what ChatGPT says. Uh, Steve Lair, Zelan Associates is the number two recommendation. I'm not surprised. Again, they did a great job with their website. And we don't see what was the name of this one? We don't see Arnold and Kken. Arnold and Kken. No, we don't see Arnold and Kken anywhere. Okay, so question, Steve Leard and McCloski. So that's the single best first call. Now, where is Leard and McCloski? So isn't that interesting? Not on the first page of results. So Leairard and Makowski is not listed on this first page of results, yet ChatGPT's number one recommendation. Very interesting to see this. What that means is that this law firm has heavily focused on establishing themselves as a truck accident expert. So, I wonder if I did, um, "truck accident lawyer Houston." Okay, I still see Zel and I see an EMT nurse attorney, but that's strange. Okay, I don't see Leairard. Now, I'm just interested like, where's this Steve Leair in Houston? "Leairard McCloskkey, renowned trial attorney." So, it's interesting, right? So, I search for "Steve Leard Houston." I get like 2 million results. Let me put it in quotes. 15,000 results. So, 15,000 results for Steve Leard, but he doesn't seem to have a website. Okay. 15,000 followers. Oh, Fort Worth, it says. Maybe maybe that's the issue. Is he in Fort Worth? There's their website, "Law Offices of Lared McCcluskey." So, it's just textawyers.com. Okay. So they clearly heavily focus on trucks. Okay, but look at this. So this is really interesting. So we talk about all these practice areas, trucking accidents. This video of the truck is horrible. But look, did you guys noticed? I was looking in Houston. Where are they located? Have you figured it out yet? Have you figured out? Does it not say? I thought I saw. There it is. Principal office, Fort Worth, Texas. Fort Worth is about 3 hours away from Houston. I said AI doesn't really care about proximity. So, I said, "I need the best possible truck accident in Houston, Texas." And ChatGPT's number one recommendation was that I call an attorney in Dallas. Okay? Isn't that wild? Like, that would never happen with Google Maps because Google Maps cares so much about proximity. Just wild that the number one recommendation is actually in Dallas, and the number two recommendation is the same business that was ranked number one on Google Maps. Fascinating.
And like I said, this is the type of stuff that we break down every single week inside AI SEO Mastery. Real firms like this, real search results, real markets, not talking about theory. So if you want to learn more, especially about the multi-location stuff I talked about, how to optimize your homepage, how to optimize about your GBP, there's a link in the description so that you can check out the AI SEO Mastery School group.
Now, if you think personal injury Houston is brutal, wait until you see what happens when the search is seasonal, the clock is ticking, and every tourist in the city is making the same search at the same time. A few months back, I was looking for ski gear in Denver. This is a market where local shops are fighting national retailers and Amazon for the same customers, and the winners are doing something that almost no one else was. Go check that one out next. I'll see you in the next.