[Music] Hey everybody, welcome back to the near memo. Today with Greg and Mike and our super special exciting guest, Greg Gford. Greg with two G's, as opposed to my Greg with one G. Is that correct?

>> Only two G's if you count my last initial. Like, Greg is just Greg, same as Greg. So we have two Gregs.

>> Well, I thought you were G-R-E-G.

>> No, a lot of people think that because when you say Greg G, as in Gford, it ends up looking like Greg G.

>> Okay. My, my, my mistake. My bad.

>> So, Greg G versus Greg S, just for clarity.

>> That's right. In case anybody misunderstood that.

>> Yes. And today, we will be talking about a whole bunch of stuff, but specifically a personal injury law report, SEO report, best practices, etc., etc., that has a lot of data that Greg just published, and some of his other work in the auto vertical and in cannabis. Later on, we'll be talking about SEO best practices and what he learned, what was surprising. And then at the end, we'll be talking about the future of the SER. We, we had quite a long and lively conversation in the virtual green room about such things, and we'll try and recreate that. We will not be talking about billionaire sociopaths, which is another engaging conversation we had. But we will save you, shield you from that.

So, Greg, Search Lab Digital is your agency. Is there anything you want to say about your background? You've been around a very long time, a beloved conference presenter and movie maven.

>> Yeah, that's pretty much it. You know, I, I think most people out there probably heard of me because I've been in local about 20 years now and speak at all the conferences and do all the things.

>> Yeah. I mean, there's there's nothing else to add to.

>> What would you, what would you include in that list of "do all the things"? What does that mean?

>> Actually, I'm on podcasts. I write on websites.

>> You're just very visible.

>> You're, you're out there.

>> Okay. All right. So, why don't you tell us about this report and what the kind of high-level findings are, and we'll, we'll drill into them.

>> Sure. Why did you do it? What, what was its methodology and all that?

>> So, yeah, we really center a lot of our marketing around educating people, both potential clients and other marketers. And so what we wanted to do was draw a line in the sand because there's so many options out there if you're a personal injury attorney. There are a ton of options of agencies that you can work with. And we work with a lot of car dealers. There's even more agencies that you can work with as car dealers. And while most people talk about the same best practices, you do have these random people that are like, "Oh, no, you should do it this way, or ignore what this person says. They're wrong. We're, we're right. We've figured it out." And so you also have all these people at conferences preaching about best practices and telling attendees, "Go do this, go do this, go do this," without really giving the backup of, "Here's why this is important," or "This is what's proven."

So we set out to do a research project. And we didn't want to try to assess weight to a ranking factor and say that this ranking factor is better than another, because statistically, that's effectively impossible at this point in time. So what we wanted to do was, let's just gather all of this data and then crunch the numbers and see, do the commonly shared best practices line up with what we're seeing out in the wild? So we, we have industry averages for three different verticals, and then we compared position one in the map pack to position 10 in the map pack to then see, okay, do the guys at number one follow best practices more closely than the guys at number 10?

So we, for, for each of the data points in the study, we have an average for everyone in the study, and then a comparison from 1 to 10. And then methodology is important. So methodology-wise, for the legal study, we ran the keywords: accident lawyer, auto accident lawyer, car accident lawyer, car crash lawyer, dog bite lawyer, personal injury attorney, personal injury lawyer, and truck accident lawyer. So we ran those eight phrases in the 20 largest US cities. And then used Placescout to, to download all the data of the GBPs. So we went position one through position 20 in the local finder, as long as there were 20, because in some of the markets, there might have only been 17 or 18. And then we end up with a total of 3,000 some odd GBPs that we can then get all of this data from. And Placescout also does some analysis on the GBP landing page. So, if it's a single location business, it's going to be the homepage. If it's a firm with multiple locations in a single website, it's going to pull the location landing page that the GBP website button linked to. And then we also used Ahrefs to analyze some of the link data related, since links do still have some influence. And then we got some other cool data about the value of ranking, uh, and we can talk about that in a minute from Ahrefs as well. So it's like a big study across three different verticals because those, those of us that know SEO well enough to understand verticals are different. We wanted to share that knowledge with the rest of the world, because so much of the information that comes out nowadays is, "Do this for local SEO."

>> Right. Sort of generic. Doesn't necessarily work the same from one industry to another. Methodology question, Greg.

>> Yeah. I was gonna respond to you, Mike. Yeah, this, this isn't going to be confusing at all.

>> On the keywords that you used, in the, uh, the keywords, did you include geom modifiers, or did you just set the center of the city?

>> We did them as implicit searches, not explicit. So, we did not have the geom modifier, but we had the location set to that particular city.

>> I see. So, basically Google's, how are Google defined the centroid in that city or whatever?

>> Correct. And for the people that are wondering, we'll link to your to your report so they can take a look at that themselves.

>> Okay, great. So, thank you for that explanation. Very thorough. And so, what did you, what did you determine? You know, there are the generic best practices, local SEO recommendations that people talk about a lot. What did you see? What did you actually see?

>> We saw tons of stuff, and honestly, not really that much was surprising. One of the things that we did is, so each data point is kind of in a box because, you know, if we're looking at how many reviews are we seeing, there's an average for all of the thousands of of profiles that were in the study, and then there's an average for position one and an average for position 10. And then there's a color on there. If the color is blue, then that is a factor that is commonly agreed to be a factor that influences ranking and visibility. If the color is green, it is commonly agreed that it doesn't influence ranking, but it does influence conversions. Like photos, as an example, would be a green box instead of a blue box. And then we also introduced red as a color because the expectation is that if you are following best practices and doing better optimization than your competition, you're going to rank higher. And for a couple of the data points, we actually saw that position 10 was doing something better than position one. So, in that case, the data would be red.

Also, interestingly enough, Morgan and Morgan was in here. No surprise to anyone that knows personal injury. They're a beast. We actually had to pull them out when we were doing the calculations because they went so far beyond everyone else, especially with when we're talking about the links.

>> So they skewed, skewed the averages.

>> Yeah, it completely skewed the averages. So, we had to just remove them. And that was one of the reasons too that when we were comparing position one to position 10, looking at links, we had to pull them out because they never rank number one. They always get outranked, which, interestingly enough, for them being so aggressive with what they do in their marketing, they kind of aren't very good at SEO, even though they do a lot of SEO activities, they're not doing the right things. So they had millions and millions of links, and it just completely skewed everything because then position 10 had a much higher average number of links than position one, just because of Morgan and Morgan. So we pulled them out and made things a little bit more realistic.

>> Although you could also explain that ranking in your study by the fact that maybe they got an office on the outskirts of town as opposed to the center of town or whatever, right? Or maybe they chose it off as someplace else, 'cause your study really reflects the reality of the centroid, not the reality.

>> No. Yeah, 'cause that was one of the data points is how far from the centroid is the business. And so, you know, we have an average distance from the centroid for everyone in the study, and then an average distance at position one and an average distance at position 10. And hold on, I can pull it up and tell you where is the centroid. Um, okay. It was like 3,600 profiles in the study. The average distance was 3.9 miles. But remember, we're pulling everything in all of the 20.

>> But that's all, that's all geographies.

>> So then if I'm looking only at position one, the average distance is only 7/10 of a mile.

>> And then if we look at position 10, it's 1.6 miles. If I'm looking for a car crash attorney and my location is set to some city that is not a sprawling metropolis like Chicago or LA or Dallas or Houston, then pretty quickly you're going to start getting these guys in the suburbs that are 20, 30 minutes away, and that's going to be a much bigger distance. It draws down your average. But just looking at position one versus position 10, it's the position 10 guys are averaging twice as far from the centroid as position one. So clearly that still has some sort of influence or effect.

>> Well, it speaks to the, the algorithm's focus on location and distance from a location for ranking. And so, but the, the variable is that on a phone, the user is the centroid, not the city, right, in that search. And so if, if a business is in a more lively area, that's going to get more PI searches for whatever reason, it wouldn't matter if they're in the centroid of the city or not.

>> Well, and, you know, the other thing too is you tend to see most businesses or most attorneys tend to be in the downtown section, right? In the big tall office buildings downtown.

>> In the old days, that was about proximity to the courthouse to some degree.

>> But, but nowadays they tend to be downtown. And if I come and look at the car dealer stuff instead, it was something like the, a, like, you know, the, the average for attorneys was less than a mile from the centroid. The average for dealers was like four or five miles from the centroid at position one, because dealers don't aren't downtown. Dealers are further out from that cent.

>> Right. I mean, it's.

>> In every market anyway.

>> They, the downtown corridors don't have the space for a dealer lot and so on and so forth. There's some very practical.

>> And there aren't as many. There's, there's so many lawyers in a downtown area that it's kind of like pizza shops, right? So, you don't need to go as far to get three of them or whatever.

>> I, I don't know the answer to this, but I would have expected at this point, you know, we're 25 years in, 20, 20 years from Google Maps. I would have expected Google to make more subtle discriminations between verticals, right? So, for, for, for certain kinds of things with physical locations like restaurants or cannabis stores, it's going to matter more than for an attorney. In our research, we've seen that people do care about local attorneys. You know, the idea of that more than the physical difficulty of getting to somebody. But for an attorney, you can do most of your consultations on video or over a phone. You don't really need to be in their office. You might go in for an initial intake, but after that, it's all going to be electronic or, you know, court appearance or something. And, and I would expect Google, that's, that's a kind of a crude, that's a kind of a crude metric for them to use. And I would expect them to say, "In this vertical, it matters more. In this vertical, it matters less." Service area businesses, it doesn't matter at all.

>> Well, they do do that, Greg. They do it based on where they think the searcher is. And with a phone, with mobile, sure. And they also do it based on the density of the business in which you're searching. If there's a lot, they're going to draw a narrower thing. There's fewer. But you're right, it's a very brittle algorithm that is scaled across the world. And what will change it is integration of Gemini with local search, as we're seeing on a map announcement yesterday, where people can say, or like I can say, they can give them more information. That's the difference, right? And Gemini is capable of parsing that where, "I want the search radius to be 80 miles instead of 2 miles," will drive out of town, half an hour, whatever, whatever. So that, that's changing with AI. It is brittle, but it is, it is still pretty functional. It's not as, it's not as bad as it used to be. It used to be the city center was the thing. Now the phone is the thing, right?

>> It's one factor among many. So let's, let's talk about some of those other things. What did you see with reviews, for example?

>> Okay. So the average review count for PI attorneys was only 362 reviews. Now I say "only" because the average for auto was significantly higher.

>> Thousands.

>> I wish I could like have both of them scroll together at the same time.

>> You mentioned it was in the 2000s.

>> Yeah. So, the average review count for car dealers was 2,195. And the average review count for car dealers ranking position one was 3,386 versus the average position one for personal injury attorneys at 555. So, you know, it just highlights how, how different it is between different verticals. But yeah, so the average for, for PI attorneys, 362. The average at position one was 555. The average at position 10, 395. So then it, you know, if the average is 362, that's a lower average than position 10, which means all the guys that aren't ranking in the top 10 are just not getting enough reviews. Again, because we're not trying to assign weight to any particular element. We all agree that reviews have some influence, but we're not trying to say that you need to get this many reviews. What we're trying to prove is that having more reviews than your competitors is beneficial, which this definitely aligns with.

>> In our, in our research in the personal injury subvertical specifically, you know, we, we get users and we watch them search. We record them searching and then we analyze those videos. We see the reactions. You really, unless you're in that top, top group, you're, you're within striking distance of the, of the top, which is 4.9 or five in some cases, you're not going to be considered. You have to be both within a narrow range of your star or star rating and the volume has to be somewhere in some range that's close-ish. If it's like, if it's like 4.88 and, uh, uh, you know, 15 reviews you had versus.

>> Yeah. But I mean, people will do that. We see people do that calculation. They're like, "Oh, this one has 4.7, but this many reviews," and "This one has 4.6, but a lot more." And so they, they weigh these two things in their mind: the score and the volume of reviews. And you have to be in that top group, especially in such an aggressively competitive category, or people will disqualify you unless, unless they know your brand, right? But review recency matters, too. And I think that's something Darren's been talking about that a lot lately. Joyy's been talking about that a lot lately. We've been talking about it a lot lately. If you have more reviews than your competitors and a much better score than your competitors, it doesn't necessarily mean you're automatically going to rank number one because obviously there's a lot of other factors at play too. But specifically from the review element, we've seen a lot of people that have just kind of stagnated and not gotten many reviews. And there's a competitor that will have, you know, 50% of the review count, but they're getting steady reviews on a regular basis, and they'll outrank that competitor because of that.

>> Right. Right. Right. That's, I mean, I think that that's all, that's all right. It's, it's recency, star rating, and volume. And, but I would say that in PI, if you're not 4.8, if you're not several hundreds of reviews, that's where you need to be. You need 400 reviews, you need 4.8. And if you're not there, and you need to look at your competitors and be in that, in that range. I mean, it's a, it's a fairly high bar. And one of the things we saw though was that so many lawyers are in that range. Consumers sometimes then can't use their favorite metric, which is review counts and star ratings, and have to use some other means of making a quick decision, which I found interesting in, in the behavior research.

>> I think that the category findings were kind of interesting as well. So we did those eight keywords, but realistically, we're looking at PI attorneys. So, you would expect that that is the primary category, but we saw 10 different unique primary categories across all of the 3,000 attorneys that were in the study. That's the number for the whole group. If I look at just the position one guys, there were only two different categories. At position 10, there were three different categories. But the thing that was crazy was seeing some of the things that people were picking across the whole corpus of all the categories. So not primary categories, but just if I look at every category of every profile in the study, throw it all in and deduplicate to get just one solid list of all the categories. There were attorneys that listed aviation consultant as a GBP category, which makes.

>> As a second, as a, as a secondary category, I would say.

>> As a secondary category. There were, there were quite a few that listed service establishment as a secondary category.

>> Well, they might, they might do, they might do litigation somehow tied into aviation or airlines, right? But that doesn't mean that you're an aviation consultant. You're.

>> They're mis, they're misinterpreting what that means, I guess.

>> It could also with, with nursing home, we saw nursing home in there a lot. And clearly the assumption is you're, you're going to with senior healthcare issues, but that doesn't mean you're a, you can't, it's physically impossible to be an attorney and a nursing home. So the, the magical thinking around that is people are going to do these searches. "I'm going to show up because I've got this category that, you know, they're going to do some other search about finding nursing homes or whatever, and here I will appear because I've chosen this category and people will find me in that way." And people, I suspect they see it as some sort of competitive, you know, advantage or something when it's misguided.

>> It could also be, though, that Google automates category collection across the internet and often aggregates their own categories that are not from within the category list within Google and sticks them on a listing automatically. So some of this variation could be due to.

>> That the vagaries of Google's collection of this data rather than the business actually trying to game the system. Google adds categories that they find across the internet, and some of those categories are not in the list that they give a business.

>> Right. You, you can't physically select those categories.

>> Select those, right. So they come from the Yellow Pages or wherever Google is scraping categories.

>> All right. So let's, let's talk about anything else you want to say about reviews. Oh, let's talk about review response for a second. So there, there, you know, for a while there.

>> Review response stuff was kind of interesting. So we looked at the, the percentage of reviews that were not responded to. So of all the reviews that were in the study, how many of them just did not have a response from the business? The average is 35%. So more than a third of the reviews just get no response whatsoever. But then at position one, it's 27% versus 37% at position 10. So the people at position one are much better at responding to reviews than the people at lower positions. Now, again, that's not something that influences ranking, but it could definitely influence your conversions.

>> Yeah. I mean, we see, we see people who, you know, in our studies, roughly speaking, and it varies from category, you know, somewhere between 25 and 33% more in Europe are reading are actually reading review texts as opposed to just looking for review volume and star ratings. And those people will look at recent reviews and they also look at negative reviews as a crude generalization. And they will look at many times they will look at what the business owner said or what the business representative said and try and assess if it was a reasonable response or how crazy the person making the complaint is, visa v the response. And so that does matter in certain cases where somebody has said something really bad. And, you know, and I've heard people say there's like, you know, "Lunatics out there," or "Here's that person is probably an outlier," and discount it.

>> Mike.

>> But if it's egregious enough, even if it's only one negative review out of 500, it can queer the deal. I mean, if it is a sexism or ableism or whatever, some sort of cross-the-line kind of negative review, doesn't matter. People will reject that business.

>> Well, so let's, let's talk about, uh, images and video. I don't know if you track.

>> Also, one more thing about review responses. The average response time to reviews is 14 days. So people are waiting two weeks on average to answer their reviews.

>> Which I thought was interesting because again, comparing to the automotive section of this study, the average was half that at just 7 days. And the, the guys at position one in automotive were answering reviews on average within 6 days of the review, versus in the attorney version of the study, position one is averaging 13 days.

>> So it's like car dealers are answering reviews twice as fast as attorneys are for some reason.

>> In, in a question with some color here about review responses. If we're seeing, like Greg said, a third of users actually reading reviews and reading, looking for responses to reviews, which one presumes increases engagement with a profile, and that engagement is likely somehow factored into Google's view of popularity and rank. So, is there a knock-on effect of responding, not just in a pro-forma way, but in a meaningful way that users actually read the responses and spend more time with them? Could there, would there, should there, might there be a knock-on effect that impacts visibility?

>> Yeah, I, I think so. I think two. And then you have to look at too, is we're not saying with this study that the guys at position one that have more reviews are actively asking clients for reviews more often than the guys at position 10. You could also have just the effect of the fact that if you're in the top three in the map pack, you're likely getting more clients than the people that aren't showing in the top three, which leads to naturally more reviews. So it may not be a strategy that they're pursuing. It might just be due to the fact that because they rank at the top of the map pack, they're just getting more business.

>> Can I add to your worklist? I have a suggestion for the next part of this study, which is to partner with Curtis Boyd and see how many of of these reviews he thinks are fake.

>> I actually talked to him about this at Local U in Nashville. And I was like, "Hey man, we just did this study and I would love to give you the list of all the guys next time around and see that exactly that." He was like, "Oh, yeah, that'd be so cool to do and it'd be really easy 'cause I just give him the GBPs." And.

>> I, I mean, what, what we, what we saw in our most recent study suggests, I mean, we didn't do any analysis of the authenticity of the reviews, but given the, the inflation, the volume, the 4.9, 5.0, a lot of these guys have 5.0 ratings, there's rampant fraud. Uh, I think I've worked with enough lawyers to know that some of them actually call the client and offer them money to take the review down, Greg, which is illegal, but they do it anyways. I mean, I've worked with enough lawyers to know that goes on amongst other, who knows what tactics.

>> Yes, for sure.

>> So, um, let's talk about, let's talk about images and video. What did you, what did you see there? Is there anything interesting there?

>> Very good job bringing us back into the.

>> Yeah, keep us, keep the cats herded.

>> I'm trying. I'm trying. Doing my best. Doing my best.

>> So yeah, I mean, nothing really surprising on the photos. Average number of photos for a profile was 60. Uh, average for position one was 84. Average for position 10 was 74. Again, a conversion factor, not an a ranking factor, but you would assume that the people that are more actively doing SEO are going to have more photos because either their internal team or their marketing partner knows that, "We need to do everything we can to optimize the user experience on the GBP." So, let's get a lot of awesome photos. So, like, nothing surprising there. What was a little bit more surprising was the average age of the most recently uploaded photo. So, how old is the newest photo in the gallery? So, the newest photo from the public, so not uploaded by the business, but photo uploaded by the public, which could be a photo that they tagged as being at the location or a photo that they uploaded along with the review. The average age, 272 days.

>> Wow. Even more concerning to me was the average most recent owner uploaded photo, which.

>> Exactly. The most recent uploaded photo over a year, a year and a half actually, because 513 days.

>> Well, people probably have a kind of set it and forget it attitude about photos, right? I've got my, I've got my 25 photos and I don't need to do anymore or something like that.

>> And that was though, you know, I told you we compare position one to position 10, and you're assuming position one guys are doing SEO better than the guys at position 10. But when we're looking at photos, the average age of the most recent owner uploaded photo, 513 days. The average age of the most recent owner uploaded photo for the position one firms was 581 days. So a longer period of time. And then the average age for the most recent owner photo at position 10 was 494 days. So almost 100 days more recent. But it's probably due to the guys at number 10 just trying everything they can to try to show up better. So they're just trying things a little bit harder. And like you said a minute ago, people are going for the things that are accessible to them. They're not going for the super techy things like, "Let's upload some more photos." That's easy. Anybody can do that, whether they're working with an SEO partner or not.

>> All right. So let's talk about the super techy stuff because I think.

>> Before you go, I just want to talk about our research a little bit with photos. What we saw with photos is that users rely on them very heavily, which is one of the reasons why Alice are so popular. But they use them in two ways. One is they look for a gestalt of a photo. They look for sort of the overarching theme of a photo and will sometimes reject a firm if the photo demonstrates some value that they don't agree with. Let's say, for example, three big white dudes standing in front and all the secretaries standing in back. We've seen that cause rejections of a listing where they are not as.

>> Women, women who want to see some female attorneys at a firm that gives them confidence, right?

>> Or somebody somebody who's color, or all sorts of things. I mean, so people one need to be sensitive to what their images are projecting. Two is back to the same thing about reviews. When I was working with a photo company, we learned that engagement with with photos did in fact increase rank. And so the only way to get engagement is to keep putting photos of it.

>> Yeah.

>> That we actually saw an effect of of engagement that was quite large.

>> Another thing that I that I found in this that was pretty interesting was looking at hours of operation.

>> Yes.

>> So between cannabis dispensaries and car dealerships, nothing surprising. You come look at attorneys, 95% of the attorneys at position number one are open 24/7. The average is 76% of all of the firms are open 24/7. Now, I am not saying this to support the commonly misunderstood conclusion from Joyy's research. Joy did the whole thing about the openness update that if you are searching after normal business hours, your rankings will be different between business hours when you're open and business hours when you're not. That is not to say that hours are a ranking factor. That is, in my opinion, the algorithm working as intended. If I'm looking for a dentist at 2 AM, I probably have some sort of dental emergency. So, it should show me the people that are open, not the people that are closed and better optimized during business hours. But people have taken this to mean that if you say you're open 24 hours, you rank better all the time. So, of course, all the PI attorneys, they're open 24/7.

>> And there's a problem with Google's algorithm. I mean, they should make a distinction between emergency services and legal services. Now, maybe criminal law, you know, when you're thrown in jail at 2 AM, you do need a lawyer that's open, you know.

>> Yeah, I disagree though because if I get in an accident and it's 3:00 AM and I'm at the hospital with my spouse who almost died in a drunk driving accident and I need an attorney, makes sense. I might want to see some preference to somebody that's actually open that I can talk to an attorney at 3:00 AM. Although none of these guys have that because all these guys have done is just get call answering services so that they can say, "Look, it's not just you're calling and leaving a message. You can call and actually get booked as a client. You just don't get to talk to an attorney till the next morning when the attorney gets to the office."

>> All right. So, let's talk about, uh, the technical stuff because that was that was an area that you were a little bit surprised by. A lot of a lot of folks following these SEO best practices around reviews and photos and categories and the like, but many people sort of dropping the ball on some basic technical stuff. Tell us about that.

>> Um, yeah, like the site speed stuff, the average is 3.2 seconds, so nothing really surprising there. The guys at position 10 tended to have slightly faster sites by like less than a little bit less than a second. There were still 5% overall that were not responsive websites. There were 8% of the sites of the 3,000 that don't have HTTPS, which was kind of surprising 'cause that's been a factor for forever. Emma markup was also interesting. 36% of profile or of the attorneys that were in the study, 36%. So more than a third don't have any local business schema markup.

>> And did that impact their ranking at all? I mean, it's not a ranking factor, but.

>> Well, when I'm looking at the average across everyone, it doesn't matter where they rank. This is everybody position one through 20 and what they had it. When I actually break it down between position one and position 10, position one, 33% didn't have schema. Position 10, 32% didn't have schema.

>> So it's a non-factor. It.

>> It's kind of a non-factor. It didn't really make a difference. Although position 10 had a slight edge, but like schema is not a ranking factor really anyway.

>> Yeah.

>> We, another thing that that was interesting is so, you know, you shouldn't mix multiple types of local business schema on the same website because you're saying with local business schema, "This is my business. This is my location. This is when I'm open. This is the type of business that I am." So you shouldn't have like three or four different types of competing local business schema on the same page. 21% of the pro, the sites in the study had conflicting local business schema, and shockingly at position one, that number was 40%. So 40% of your position.

>> Have, yeah, 'cause they're just throwing everything at Google and they're trying to put a million things there and because schema is not really, it's not going to penalize you if you do that. It's just not the right way to do it. So I thought that was kind of interesting. The content optimization stuff. I was really actually one of the most shocking things. If we're looking at word count, we saw an average word count of 2283 words, which is, you know, personal injury guys have really taken it like, "Let's just go more, more, and more." So.

>> These are blogs or what? Where is that appearing?

>> No, this is the, this is looking at the GBP landing page. So, either the homepage for a single location firm or the location landing page of a multi-location, single website firm. So 2283 words. Um, then we can, we can then look at the searched for keyword. So like, "personal injury attorney," if that's the search phrase, is that phrase used in the various page elements that you're going to optimize on that page? So typically, this is mostly homepage because there are a couple of Morgan and Morgans in there and other firms that are a master monster conglomerate with one website in multiple locations. Most were just single location firms. So of the people that have the searched for keyword in the title tag of that GBP landing page, only 12% on average had the keyword in the title tag versus 99% of the firms in the study had the keyword in the H1 heading. So it's like they'll optimize the H1 heading but not the title.

>> Not the title tag. And like if you look at position one versus position 10, 22% of position one had it in the title tag versus 14% having it in the title tag at position 10 versus 100% of the position one guys had it in the heading and 99% of position 10 had it in the heading. And then we looked at keyword in the meta description. Obviously doesn't play for ranking, but can influence conversions. 19% at position one had it in the meta tag or in the meta description versus 8% at position 10. And then image alt tags. Commonly, you're supposed to put the same keyword in the alt tags. 26% did it at position one versus only 14% at position 10. Then we also looked at are they including the city? And Placescout only looks at the title tag city, but 88% of the position one guys had the city that they're located in in the title tag versus 75% at position 10 had it. So, content optimization a little bit all over the place because they're clearly paying attention to their H1s, but they're not paying attention to title tags and alt text. So, I thought that was a little bit weird, too.

>> Well, we, what we saw in a category like self-storage is that title tags really matter. "Coupon," "discount," "first month free" in that, in that category. And they, they may not matter as much from a click perspective for other categories like legal. Although, although people, "free consultation," "no fee unless we win," whatever, that kind of stuff would matter potentially, right? Although one of the things we saw in an earlier legal study in employment law was the fact that title tags all look the same and users were unable to distinguish one from another because the title tags all looked exactly the same.

>> Yeah.

>> Which caused other problems. I mean, that's that's a that's a problem that doesn't show up in the Placescout data, but it's a real problem that we saw in our most recent study where it was very hard for these firms to differentiate because they all had, you know, 1500 reviews and they were all 4.8 or 4.9 and it's always a white middle-aged guy. You know, they say a lot of the same stuff and the websites all look the same. And so again, back to brand, back to sort of traditional media and other awareness, that's a differentiator that shows up in click behavior that you don't see from these optimization factors where everybody's doing this the exact same thing. And they all.

>> Although we did see one that stood out, a silver bullet, and that was using product schema for reviews, product review schema on your organic pages to get your organic pages to show up more.

>> Yeah. And that works. That's that you do stand out because everybody else isn't doing that.

>> Yep. Another interesting thing we saw, kind of more related to to data tracking was, you know, for years everyone has said you should put UTM tracking on your website link because if no referral data gets passed, which happens a lot on mobile, that traffic gets classified as direct in analytics instead of organic. 48% of the firms in the study did not have UTM tracking on their website link. Of the, of the 52% so the remaining basically half of the firms in the study that did have UTMs, 33% of them didn't have the medium set to be organic, they had it set to be social or something else that was incorrect. So half of the people aren't tracking it correctly and about half of the ones that are tracking it or attempting to track it are tracking it wrong and screwing up their data in Google Analytics, which I thought that was interesting. Interesting. And then when we get to the link stuff, I thought the link stuff was pretty cool. So, this is where we, we got some help from, uh, Ahrefs. So, the average number of links is 16,648 links, but that's only from an average of 562 unique websites because, as you guys know, you get diminishing returns in getting multiple links from the same URL. So, it's more important to get links from a diverse set of websites. And so we saw a kind of a big gap there. In fact, the biggest gap that we saw in the study, if we look at the number of links versus the number of domains, there was one firm that had a gap of 860,000, which means they had, if you look at the number of links that they had versus the number of sites that those links came from, they had a gap of 860,000, which was nuts. And then we actually had a call out there about the whole Morgan and Morgan thing. So remember, if I pull Morgan and Morgan from the study, I said, mention, I mentioned earlier that I pulled it because it skewed the numbers. So if the average number in the study without Morgan and Morgan is 16,000 links, Morgan and Morgan's website has 105 million links pointed at it from 6,000 different domains.

>> But yet they don't, they don't rank number one in many.

>> They don't rank number one because they're doing garbage SEO. They're getting a bunch of links from just crappy websites that Google's not going to assign any value to.

>> And is that, and, and are all those links, I mean, you didn't sort of track where those links go to?

>> No. Like at this point, I was like, "All right, let me just go run them through Ahrefs just to see." And, and you just start looking at the, the URLs and they're just all spammy things that are not going to be valuable. Then the other thing that was really cool is Ahrefs. You know, a lot, hopefully people watching or listening have used Ahrefs before, but it's not just a link tool, it's also a keyword research tool and a visibility uh tracker and all kinds of other things. So, one of the things that the, the Ahrefs API allowed us to do was to look at the average number of keywords that each firm ranked for. So, we take a URL and according to the Ahrefs crawling data, here's the number of keywords that that site ranks for. So then we can break down the overall average and then we can break down the average of like, the overall average was the average firm ranks for 4,700 keywords, 4717. But then the average position one is 6134 versus the average position 10 at 4389. But then we can look at how many of those keywords rank in the top three, and then how many in 4 to 10, and how many in 11 to 20. So all that's in there. It's cool. You can go look at it if you're interested and, and you're watching or listening. The coolest part about this though is Ahrefs then calculates what your organic traffic is worth. So basically they say, "All right, if you rank for 17 keywords," they know what each of those keywords are, and then they can come back and use the Google Ads API to say, "Okay, if you rank number one for 'dog bite lawyer'," then that click probably would cost $150 if you were buying that click with an ad. So then it can say, "All right, you are this position and you rank number one, so you get whatever percentage they've decided," you know, usually people are like, "You get 18% of the clicks if you're number one." So they can figure out how much traffic you are getting. So they say, "For this keyword, you rank number whatever, which means at that percentage, you're getting X amount of traffic. We multiply that by what the paid search click would cost, and you get an overall cost of what your traffic would cost, right?" You following me?

>> Yep, yep. For the average cost or the.

>> No. No.

>> Greg, could you tell us again?

>> What?

>> You want me to clarify it?

>> No.

>> So, basically what this number is telling you is here's how much traffic you're getting. And if you were going to buy this, if you're an advertiser search, you pay this much money. The average firm would have to spend almost $8.5 million a month in paid search to get the same amount of traffic that they're getting organically.

>> Well, so that, that whole thing strikes me as like an SEO selling tool, you know.

>> And it gets even better because we can compare what's the average cost for the guys at number one versus the average cost for the guys at number 10 to then say, "If you're ranking number 10, you would have to spend this much money in paid search to get the same amount of traffic you'd be getting for free if you rank number one." So that's kind of giving you the value of of good SEO means you don't have to spend this much money in paid search. And that number was $245,187 a month is what it's worth. Number one over number 10.

>> Quite a bit larger than most SEO budgets. And.

>> And, you know, what's really interesting too is if I look at the car dealer version of the study, it's almost exactly the same number.

>> That suggests that the number is meaningless if it's identical. I mean, it's not perfectly identical, but it was, it was like 240 car dealers. So, it's just, it's just showing that there is significant value in ranking number one versus ranking number 10, which none of us are surprised about, right? Like, wow, big surprise there. Thanks, Greg.

>> So, is there anything, anything else of a technical nature that's sort of worth calling out right now? There doesn't have to be, but I.

>> I don't think. I mean, like we had site speed and stuff in there, but like none of that was.

>> You talked about that.

>> That shocking or that interesting.

>> You talked about then.

>> Uh, we looked at, yeah, I mean, nothing that I didn't really have mentioned quickly.

>> I used to be a lawyer years ago. I was a lawyer for about 10 years. I did litigation and, you know.

When I asked these questions, I feel like I'm in a deposition. Is there anything else that you haven't told us that you that's relevant to this question? But anyway, okay, so let's move on because we're, I mean, we could keep going for another extended period of time, but we we've been talking for a while and I want to get to a couple other things. So there's a bunch of inferences and recommendations that come out of this obviously that are sort of supportive of some of the best practices advice and maybe some that kind of add some nuance to to it.

I, let's pretend I'm a young SEO and I read this report. It's really cool. Gives me a lot of insight, or there are other reports that have similar kinds of findings. How much can I then take what's in here and generalize across categories, across verticals? Can I just say, here's a template for all SEO best practices regardless of the category? What, what do I need to understand about the differences between categories?

That would be a bit of a leap to then say this works for every vertical, but that's why we did three different verticals. So, anybody reading this, I would encourage them to get the auto version and then the cannabis version. The cannabis version we're releasing in January, just because it's about to be holidays and we don't want to get lost in the noise. But when you look at all three together, that's when you can really start to make the conclusions of, okay, this thing clearly matters because I can see across all three verticals, the averages are wildly different between the three. But you can still see the story that comes out that the guys at position one are always doing more of or better of whatever tactic it is than the guys at position 10. It's not to say that reviews are more important than schema, which is more important than photos, which is more important than Google posts. We're not trying to do any of that. We're just trying to say, do the guys at position one do it better than the guys at position 10? And in nearly every case, they do. So then I think you can make the conclusion that this particular tactic or activity should have some positive influence, assuming I'm doing all of it. Because I think one of the things that I've run into a lot speaking at all the conferences that I do is I'll I'll, you know, list out all the best practices in my 40-minute session. Here's all the things you need to do that are the going to be the most influential. And then a year later, I'll see somebody that'll be like, "Man, I did it and it didn't make a difference." And I'm like, "Really?" And they're like, "Yeah, I followed the thing that you said about reviews." Okay, cool. Did you do the other stuff, too? Well, well, no, I just did reviews because those are the easiest. Kind of like we were talking about earlier, people are going to use the things that are most generally accessible and they don't get into the technical nerdy stuff. And I think the real story here is the the numbers are different between each vertical, but the general idea of you need to have the right categories, you need to have the right hours, you need to have schema, you need to optimize your title tags and meta descriptions, like all of that messaging is that really does matter. It's just how far you take it depends on the vertical that you're in.

Well, what?

I would add, Greg, that those things are table stakes in a sense.

Exactly. And that the only way to determine what the differentiators are is to do the kind of research we're doing where we understand that in storage, here's what people are looking for, and in legal, here's what people are looking for. So that understanding that differentiator allows them to do all the basics that Greg's talking about, all the table stakes, but then whatever it needs to be 5% more attractive or 10% more attractive.

Yeah. You know, um, user. So, you guys obviously know that Yex bought Places Scout and they're doing some cool stuff with the Places Scout functionality and one of the data things that they were talking to me about the other day is they're looking at reviews at just as one element and how people kind of kind of the angle that you guys are taking, what what resonates the most with potential customers in each vertical. And in some verticals, it's the review count, like do you have more reviews than everybody else? In others, it's do you have a higher score? I don't care what your count is. I want a higher score. In other ones, it's people are going in and reading the reviews, and they don't care about how many reviews you have or what your review score is. They want to see what people are saying in the reviews. And, you know, do pictures matter. So, they're starting to do this kind of research like you guys where it's not what matters to Google, but what matters to the customers? Cuz I think that's an element that a lot of people tend to forget. We're all chasing the algorithm. We're all doing the things that we're doing for SEO, but we're not paying attention to what the customer experience is and what matters to the customer.

Is that using the Places Scout tool or is that some other methodology that they're doing?

It's been a couple of weeks since I talked to him about it. I I don't want to say the wrong thing, but I know that it involves the Places Scout technology. I know part of it is they've got all the people that are on Yex and they can access all those profiles, but for the user like what resonates the most and what matters most, I don't I don't remember what their methodology was.

You've got the three verticals, auto dealers, cannabis, and PI attorneys. Just from your recollection, was there anything that sort of jumped out where there was a big difference in any any given vertical or a meaningful difference from one to another or just within a?

Well, like in this in this uh in this area, this element was more influential than than this. It didn't really matter over here or people were or the the the impact of something was different in one of the verticals. Is there anything like that?

Or we didn't we didn't really have anything in there to assess the the weight of one element over another. So, it was more the the differences that we saw were like what we talked about with the review count. Like car dealers have significantly more reviews than attorneys. And cannabis dispensaries are more than attorneys, but still significantly less than car dealers. Car dealers answer their reviews more quickly. Car dealers have way more photos than either of the other verticals have. Car dealers websites were significantly longer loading time than dispensaries or attorneys, but car dealers need bigger pictures because you're trying to sell a thousand dollar plus car. You're not going to do it with a small photo. So, there's things that that are different, but not really that different. It's more just the idiosyncrasies of each vertical.

Well, what's right? I mean, what's meaningful is that you're competing within a vertical. You're not competing between verticals. I mean, car dealers don't compete with cannabis dispensaries. And so it's you're you're being judged by Google and by users on the terms maybe should I buy should I get a new reef should I get a reefer or should I buy a new car you know this it's kind of the consumer makes a decision.

Do people use that language reefer?

Is that? I don't know.

Reefer Madness?

I don't think since that movie people have called it reefer.

Well, how about blunt or you know?

I think that's language from the 70s.

Well, just shows you last time I smoked. What can I say?

50. That's like 50 years ago. So, yeah.

That was the last time.

I mean, we're we're we're bumping up against time, but let's talk real quickly about if we can do this quickly about the sort of the future of the SER because I think behind all of this is this looming this the search results pages changing with all the modules and AI and everything, you know, and and ads everywhere and deceptive, you know, labeling of ads versus organic. What are your what are your thoughts about where the SER is going and how that is impacting user behavior or ranking visibility? I mean, we talked about organic being going way down below the fold. You know, you also spoke about how if you rank in number one, that's worth X amount of money versus what you would have to pay to buy that ad. Google is making it harder to be visible as an organic marketer and forcing more and more people, especially in local, into sort of local services ads because there's so much attention paid to those. So, what what do you think is going on? Make some make some bold statements about and how marketers should respond.

I would caution everyone jumping on the AI train to not make bold claims that are untrue. There's so many people out there saying they've cracked the code on AI and how to get you to show up in AI and it's just all BS.

You're talking about AI overviews or ChatGPT?

Both, like either. Either or. I also hate that people are trying to make geo be the term for that because geo already means other things in local and other things outside of of marketings. Like let's let's pick a if we want to call it something different. I'm not I'm not one of those guys saying it's just SEO. Let's call it SEO. Like I'm cool with it if we want to call it something different because it's kind of expanded. But let's not call it something that gets confusing. Kind of like Google calling Google My Business Google Business Profile. Not thinking of the fact that GBP as the abbreviation is also the abbreviation for money in the UK, which is like dumb. But yeah.

I got it. I got it. New new acronym, BO, business optimization.

I would love that. That would be that would be so fun for jokes forever.

You know, there's there's AEO, AI, OO, SXO, SBO, SEO. Yesterday, another one occurred to me that I had not seen. And I just want to flood flood the zone with acronyms. What is it? DEEO, decision engine optimization. And see, the problem is it's all of us marketers trying to call it something new and they don't realize they're just confusing the hell out of all the businesses out there because now you've got some people calling it AIO, which is also the abbreviation for AIO reviews. And then you've now got people calling it DEEO and GEO and all of these other. Think I just introduced that. I mean, if it I am truly the one who co-coined that. I don't necessarily think I am. I just introduced that into the world yesterday. So, we'll see, right? But even still, my point is if we can't even agree on what to call it, how are our customers supposed to buy it from us? Because now you're going to have somebody that's like, I want to show up in ChatGPT, and one agency's going to be selling them GEO and another one's going to be selling them AIO, and they're both going to be saying it's different stuff when really it's the same thing. So, there's all that, but I think really just about any SER that you look at nowadays, desktop-wise, at least because obviously on mobile, there's no organic above the fold because you get a couple of listings, but even on desktop, organic almost doesn't exist above the fold. It's just ads and LSAs and everything pushing it all down.

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What #1-Ranking Personal Injury Lawyers Are Doing Right With GBP— Greg Gifford’s Local Ranking Study

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