140: The Texas Showdown Debate with Attorney Angel Reyes – Does Brand matter in Digital?

I never said brands were worthless, but they're luxury. Okay, let's face it, Jay, I mean 10s of millions of dollars over 25 years, you might have a well known name, maybe even a famous name. So let me just be clear that I never said that. I will say that Jay is absolutely right. Your click through rate matters, your Quality Score matters, however, when it comes to paid search, that is less important than organic search, you will, if you pay the most in the auction, you will appear above everybody with a kick ass CTR click through rate and quality score, and that's sort of where. Okay. How do you balance that, right? Should you build a brand? Sure, but I mean, look, let me ask you a question. Jay, all right, I'm a potential new client. I have a small law firm, 10 people, two lawyers. We've been doing auto and truck stuff for five years. And I come to you and I say, Listen, I would like your firm to help us expand our practice, get new and more clients, and I have $100,000 I want to give you. Would you prepare for them a five year branding study? Or would you tell them, get your butts on digital and learn it? What would you do if I was that potential new client of yours. I

mean, the good news is, if you come to an agency like 10 golden rules, I'm not going to tell you to learn it. I'm going to tell you, we're going to tell you, first thing I'm going to do is get your Google screen and I'm going to we're going to train your team to answer the phones, disposition the calls, quickly. We're going to help you set up a review incentive program for your paralegals, so you're getting those one to two Google reviews every week. We also have a program where we send out a VIP box or a thank you box after the case, and then we call the folks up and ask them to do a Google review. So we ensure getting those one to two Google reviews,

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, at least, that's what I always say to the recorded audience. But to those of you in North America, good morning. Angel Reyes, welcome to the 10 Golden Rules monthly webinar. Today's Texas showdown.

Jay, thank you so much for having me. And I gotta tell you, I see that you've got a derby on. It's close to a cowboy hat. I myself have never actually put a cowboy hat on. I didn't grow up in Texas. I'm not really from here, but I've been here long enough that quasi Texan now, but the avatar that you've got me wearing a cowboy hat on, it makes me think I need to try one on. It makes me look cool and a little bit younger than I really am. So thanks for putting that cowboy hat on me and putting our avatars up there to promote the event. I'm super happy to be here and again. Thank you very much for inviting me. I hope we'll have an interesting and robust conversation around some things that are very important to law firms, especially personal injury law firms. So

there's a history to this, the reason why we're here and Angel I were invited to speak at National Trial Lawyers, and I made a statement about brand and I'm going to get into that in a minute. And Angel countered what I said he disagreed with. And we basically just started going back and forth on stage, and the moderator tried to reel us in. And we were, like, both fired up about this topic, so I wrote him a little note. We were sitting side by side on this panel, and I said, Why don't we take this offline and we'll bring it to a live debate? So I promise you, we're friends now, but we're going to get in. Yeah,

yeah, no, it was all in good fun and good spirits at that time. We just had a little difference of opinion about some things, and we'll explore that a little bit

more today. Here's our outline. We probably should have had a debate moderator in case, but I don't think it will. So I'll go with my opening statement, and then angel will counter with his disagreement, and then we'll have a round table discussions on four topics. What I led with was the Google's LSAs, the local service ads Google screened, if you will. And then we'll talk about pay per click and the brand influence SEO or Search Engine Optimization, and how brand weighs in or doesn't weigh in, depending which side of the argument. But then we'll talk about the human factor and trust. We've got a few additional topics we may or may not get into, depending on time, branding, investment, things like that. And then we'll each have a closing statement, and we'll ask the audience to weigh in. Please hold your questions to the end, but you can put your questions in the Q, a in the chat and for the live audience on LinkedIn, Elizabeth is with us from my team, and she'll be grabbing the questions from LinkedIn and sharing them with us here. Oh, one other thing I just wanted to do quickly is just talk about what we mean by these different things. So here's just a straight Google search. How do I choose a car accident attorney? And these are the Google screen local. Service ads. You see the little check mark, probably hard to see depending on the size of your screen, but Google's got a green check mark here. And Google's vetted or approved or screen these two folks who are right at the top of the search. Then the sponsored is the old fashioned Google Pay per click. The Google paid ads. These used to be appear on the right hand side, and the SEO was on the left. This is a brand new portion of Google, the AI overviews, or Google's artificial intelligence, and maybe we'll spend a little time on that in the Q and A and talk about this brand new thing that we're seeing on Google search results. These are the Google Maps. We'll talk a little bit about this. And finally, the SEO, the Google search engine optimization. If we scrolled further down here, this is just a screenshot, but if we scrolled further down on the screen, we'd see 10 of these SEO results. So Angel, that's the framework. Is that everything makes sense for you in terms of what we'll get into?

Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to discuss all of the topics you just raised.

Okay, great. So I'm going to go with my opening statement at this time, and then we'll let you do your three minute opening statement, and we'll go from there. So thank you. I'm excited to be here today, and here's what I've been seeing again and again across multiple markets in particularly in the Google screen local service apps. I started seeing Morgan and Morgan appearing side by side with our clients, with local attorneys. So in Philadelphia, I'd see Morgan and Morgan. In Arizona, I'd see Morgan and Morgan. So why is that like? You can't bid your way to the top. You can't just pay the most amount of money. If you put a million dollars in your weekly budget, that actually sets the algorithm off, and Google now has an AI algorithm, so it's actually a negative to put that much money in. So why is Morgan Morgan constantly coming up? I asked myself, what would be the factor, and I so I came up with this conclusion, that it's branding. Because when Morgan, Morgan spends $400 million across the country. Now, if you don't know Morgan and Morgan, it just means he's not in your market. But he's in about 21 of the 50 states with significant local advertise, TV, billboards, the whole shooting match, right? So when people see a brand they recognize, they're more likely to click. If people have a higher click through rate on those local service ads, Google will likely show that advertiser more frequently, because they're going to make money, the consumer is going to click Morgan answers the phone like a demon and answers these leads like a demon, so they're going to get a great result. I also believe this applies to SEO search engine optimization. There was a Google leak last year, and Google basically confirm that brand is going to influence search. So couple quick examples, if I may, to show what I'm talking about. And here's a search result for personal injury. Laura Phoenix, and this is my friend and client, Jeff Phillips and Morgan. And Morgan, here's a search for in Miami, Morgan and Morgan and Rubenstein. And this was the one that really tipped me off. My friend Scott Lisa, is a solo attorney, and he got to come up against the biggest attorney in the country, one on one, one attorney named Amanda. Amanda even changed her name to influence her brand. So the next step is, what can you do about it? And what you can do is be very consistent with your branding. Because you don't have a $400 million budget, but you can write your brand plan and then be super consistent. Amanda shows up always looking the same on brand, on social media and even in a live presentation. So without further ado, I'll yield my time to the honorable Mr. Reyes or his Fauci statement. Thank

you for those kind words. I don't have any slides to show of the audience, but let me just start by saying that, look, branding has always, traditionally played a role in legal marketing. In fact, go back to the 70s, when we finally were able to, from the Bates decision to do legal marketing and advertising started in newspapers, and then it went to Yellow Pages, and then from Yellow Pages, it went to radio and then television, and in the 2000 teens, I believe, it moved to the digital space. So again, branding has always been important, but a little less so today, and I'll explain why, because in today's digital environment, I think it's fundamentally changed how clients find and choose their lawyers. That's just my opinion. Because of the rise of search based advertising, the comparison shopping and digital disintermediation, I think it means that brand loyalty matters a lot less than the lawyers whose egos are so invested in it, and I think that's especially true in competitive urban markets. Think Dallas, South Florida, Houston, Los Angeles, those are the kind of places where there are a lot of lawyers and law firms that do personally. Rework, especially auto and truck stuff. And while Morgan is here, and he's in many, many markets, but I'm not going to really focus my discussion around that firm. I think there's plenty of other content we can talk about. And so I also believe that clients, they're not choosing lawyers based on on jingles or familiarity or bus wraps or billboards anymore. I think they're Googling and they're clicking the top one of the top three results. And if you're in the top three results, it doesn't matter whether you've got a well known brand or you're an unknown brand, you got a one in three shot at picking that case up. And I think that that's what law firm owners really want to know, and I want them to take away from this, that you don't have to have a $400 million budget to compete with those kind of brands. And I'm going to show you why, as Jay and I get into this conversation a little bit deeper. So with tools like Google ads and LSA, which Jay just showed you a little bit about, even a brand new law firm can appear above a legacy name or brand if they're effectively bidding. And there's a lot of ways to do that. We'll talk more about that as we get through this as we get through this podcast. So I believe what ultimately matters is the cost per lead. But even more important, how much does it cost not just to sign a lead, but then to keep the case? Because I don't know about the rest of law firms and law firm leaders that might be listening here, but just because you signed a case doesn't mean you keep it. There could be a lot of reasons for that, no insurance, bad facts, etc. So you're going to drop, we drop anywhere from 25 to 30% of the cases that we thought we'd be able to help with, and so in many of those cases, branding really just becomes like a expensive distraction. I don't think it's any longer the moat that it once was. In just as many cases, it's it's just not necessarily going to beat data driven client acquisition strategies that are full digital, which is where my firm is now, and we used to do a lot of legacy media too. I spent a few 100 million dollars on legacy TV, and don't do it anymore. And we'll explain, I'll explain why, as we, as we get through this. But branding is is a legacy concept, but today is a data driven first digital world. And so what wins today, really is data, targeting, speed conversion, your intake processes, not jingles, logos, bus wraps, billboards. That's not what's doing it today. You can't attribute that anyway. So Google doesn't reward brand equity. I think I disagree with what Jay said. It really rewards user behavior and platform rules, because it's a rules based platform, and I don't believe that it does favor brands at all. He doesn't know what a brand is.

So let's give everyone a little bit of context. Our company 10 golden rules. We're an internet marketing agency. We're looking at about 150 Google Local Service ads, Google business profiles, Google Maps, managing those locations for our clients. So every month, I'm getting the data on what's working in the local service, ads, Google Maps, Google, SEO, Google Pay per click. And so that's my area of expertise that I'm bringing to the table today. Please give everyone an idea of the scope of your firm, very big firm in Dallas, Texas, right?

Yeah. We're based in Dallas, Texas. We have an office in Houston and an office in Austin. So we really consider ourselves a Texas wide practice. But HQ is right here in Dallas, Texas. We have a lot of employees, hundreds and about 30 some lawyers. We have a lot more staff to lawyers than other firms. We like the lawyers that only do legal stuff. We don't want them doing any admin stuff. So we've got a huge staff. Every lawyer has about 12 or so people deep to handle their dockets. We've been in business for almost 32 years. We have tried over 450 cases to a jury verdict. We sign up and retain anywhere from 12 to 1400 new cases a month statewide, and once in a while outside of Texas, but generally speaking, statewide. And as a result, we're really busy, and we're not perfect. We're always learning. We're always iterating, but so we've been around a long time. We've tried a lot of cases. We file anywhere from 400 to 600 lawsuits every month. So we're a lawsuit. First firm, not a not a settle. First firm. If you become a client of our firm, we, from day one, believe that eventually you will be a you will have a cause number attached to your name and or whoever else was in the cars name, and it'll be a lawsuit, and we will pursue it to get you the maximum recovery that we possibly can. So that's a little bit about my firm. We're really, really heavy in the in the Spanish speaking community. I'm Puerto Rican, and I left the island when I was 11 years old, and so I speak Spanish, and so do at least 350 other people at work here. So really good at that. Yeah, we're really proud about that. That's how we kind of it's how we made our bones. But now Spanish speakers. About a third of our clients and the rest are English speakers, but the firm has grown with the city of Dallas and the city of Houston. 30 years ago, each of those metropolitan areas were exactly half the size they are today, and now Dallas is 8.3 Houston is seven, nine, and Central Texas is five, five. So these are three big, big, big urban markets.

So can I counter your point with this argument that sure, you spend a couple 100 million dollars in advertising, you've got a huge client base, a huge success track record, lot of folks who know your brand, and probably you get a ton of referrals from those past clients. So I would argue that today, even if you turned off TV branding, and today you're just looking at the data, I would argue that you're getting a higher click rate than that new firm that just left another firm and sets up a shingle end or their own brand name, that the angel Reyes law firm brand is going to be very recognized in the marketplace. You're going to get a higher click rate on those local service ads or pay per click ads due to your historical branding. What say you I'm

not sure that's true, and I'll tell you why our last like television commercial, for instance, was in 2021 but we really started paring back in 2018 and moving most of our money to digital, and frankly, doing a lot of legacy media, radio broadcast, TV is a brute force way of branding yourself, and I don't know if that's really important. Now, when you go to our LSAS. We haven't been on TV for years, but when we pop up, we have just as good a shot as anybody. In all kinds of unknown firms are always in that, always fighting to get in those LSAs, and that's a bit of a black box with Google. They don't exactly tell you how to really rank, other than your reviews, the speed at which you respond, and whether you respond to a lead that comes in and tell Google, yeah, we like it or not, those are very simple things that every firm should be doing. But I don't think the brand is why you're going to be at the top of an LSA search. I think that plenty of firms I've never heard of often are right there in the three pack, and I'm like, oh, okay, cool. They must be doing something right, because I haven't heard of them. That doesn't mean they're not good at what they do. It just means that their brand hasn't filtered into my brain yet, and they're here. They are over some of the biggest name firms in Texas, and so I don't know if I can agree. I can tell you this much, but when the firms advertise a lot on legacy media, and I'm talking legacy like NBC, Fox, CW, the normal cable channels and all that, and maybe even some radio stations, maybe some billboards the minute, the minute they stop using that brute force. No one remembers their brand. It's this is not a business of like loyalty. This is a very transactional situation. When somebody gets hurt, it's a transaction. It's not engaging with the brand, no, it's urgency. And believe me, when urgency is in front of you, brand memory and brand recognition just goes out, out of your brain. You just need help. You search, you see those top three, you pick one or all of them, and you call them, and you go with who you like the most, and that goes for LSAs, regular search, or any other digital platform. I believe that's how today's consumer is finding and hiring a law firm to help them with an auto truck accident.

Would you agree with this theory that, and it's great, because you get a lot of clicks and calls every day, and you speak to a lot of consumers. I have a theory that if it's a smaller accident, and it's maybe soft tissue, maybe you went to the chiropractor, as opposed to a bigger accident, like a major time in the hospital or a death case. For those smaller cases, people are clicking the first person they see. They're not doing a ton of research in a call, and they're signing with the first lawyer they talked to on a more serious case. They're maybe doing a little bit more research. Would you agree with that basic supposition

to a degree? I think that you're right. I will also, though, add some things that many of the lawyers and law firm owners that might be listening are well aware of, and that is very big, like catastrophic either death or catastrophic injury cases rarely find themselves coming to you straight from an ad or a presence or your brand. They're almost always soaked up by lawyers on the ground who then refer the cases. And I'm not. To suggest that they've been run or capped, I am going to say, though, that those kind of cases, Jay, they don't walk in off the street. Somebody brings them to you, because when there's that much value, people will go out and bend the rules, even break them, to get them under contract so that they can refer the case to someone who will pay them a referral fee. So I think that, just

to clarify for the non lawyers in the group, and I've heard a lot about this, but I don't know in detail, but you're saying that the old fashioned ambulance chaser moniker that some lawyers have, literally there's a serious accident, there's folks doing research, finding out about that, getting tipped off from hospitals, going to the hospitals, reaching out to the family, and signing those cases proactively, even though it's against bar regulations. Is that what's

on every case? No, but on many Yes. And let me also tell you a little bit some let's, let's back up to the case that like, you know no one. They don't even know they're hurt, yet, you'd be very surprised that many of those cases, while they haven't done much research and they didn't even know if they were hurt, they end up with a positive MRI, and all of a sudden, six eight months later, they're doing some pain management, and from there, you end up with a surgery, and all of a sudden, there's a million dollar policy. That's what looked like a small case that came in ended up being a big case, because you help the client medically manage things after the fact. So like, I tell everyone who's been in a car wreck, no MRI, no case, right? And so with a positive MRI, we can help a client make sure that they're not going to have a forever injury, that they're only going to have a for now injury, and if they have a forever injury, we're going to make sure we maximize that claim. Now, it's always dependent on how much insurance coverage there is for sure. But when you never know when a case comes in, if it's going to be a big case or a small case, plenty of death cases have walked in the door with no insurance on either party. Many death cases that walk in the door here, $30,000 that's all there is. And so when it, when it comes to an at Wheeler and all that kind of stuff, Jay, I dare say, those cases, lawyers find those cases faster than the potential client finds of where, if that makes sense,

makes a lot of sense, and a lot of lawyers have explained to me that when it's a serious case like the family's dealing with serious things, they're in the hospital, they're dealing with their loved one, or whatever responsibilities that person had, whether it's work or within the family there, they got to fill those gaps, and the last thing on their mind is finding a lawyer. So just generally, a period of time before they do some research. So let's talk specifically about the LSAs, the local service ads, the Google screen. So obviously, it's our experience that there's a lot of inconsistency in the market. Basically, let's say so two, two and a half years ago, when these first came out, we got a bunch of our clients screen. There was only half 510, 1520, attorneys in each market. Screen, everybody's getting a ton of leads, ton of calls, and in particular, the Super Value of these is we're looking, obviously at my desktop and on a phone, and we see, like about 70% of the traffic going to personal injury firms coming from a mobile phone. So

ours is about 85 85%

unbelievable. So this is a click to call, and that's the beauty of the local service ads, and that's why we started our conversation with the local service ads, because I believe every firm has to try and get their piece of the pie the local service ads, because it's right at the top of Google. It's click to call you, it's date for lead you're getting for the most part. Again, remember, most of these are on a phone. You're getting phone calls, and those phone calls generally convert at a much higher rate than form fills on your website. So super valuable. And there's also message leads available. You can opt in to have the messages or not, but you got to go back to people like lightning fast. So yeah, your experience as well with the local service ads, this is you got to be there. You got to be at the top of the page.

I couldn't agree more. And I've got a funny story. We were, as far as I know, we were the first Dallas firm to get LSA approved. This was years ago, and man, we were, we got, like the first couple months, each month, we were getting north of 250 cases for $600 in spend per case, which is unheard of. Now we've got them, dozens and dozens of competitors. We still get our share, but it's a black box. We never know, what the hell and why? Why this person all of a sudden popping up and we're not but if you're not doing LSAs, you better, and because you you've got to be in the digital space, you've got to be in the mix. You. Because even people that are Googling brands, when they see those LSAs, they forget the brand, and they hit one of them, and that means you've got a at least a one in three shot of picking up that client. So I'm with you, man, LSAS are critical. They're actually cheaper still. They're not that cheap, like they're not 600 bucks anymore, but they're cheaper than our paid search cases. So to the extent that you want to economize, LSA is definitely a place where you're going to find leads coming in at a better price, and not just leads conversions cases you convert, they're better price than paid search and part

of the frustration that folks have had with the LSAS is that in in October, November of last year, Gov moved the ability to dispute cases. So used to go in and say, This is not a car accident that you know these people are looking for a criminal attorney, and I will repeat it, now allowed the artificial intelligence their own system that they've trained over hundreds and millions of these calls to make the determination on whether or not it was a good deal. So what we saw is that upset the apple cart and a lot of folks who've been cruising along, getting their 50 leads a month, signing 10% of those, 20% of those signing five or 10 cases a month, depending on their budget and the size of the market. So they're cruising along, and all of a sudden they're getting zero. Now the counter argument is some folks who were getting only two or three cases a month, sometimes some were getting 10 or 12. So basically, the AI taking over the algorithm seemed to upset the apple cart. What we've seen, we're in, if you're watching this, sometime in the future, when April of 2025, what we've seen in the first quarter of 2025, is back to a little bit more of what I would call stability, where the firms that do the right things on the LSA, I can talk about that in a minute. The firms that manage the program correctly are getting more a decent share of the marketplace. What have you seen in your case? Example? Again,

wow, we're in complete agreement there. Look, at the end of the day, Google makes money. I will say, though, that they're not the enemy, and they will try. They'll give you all the tools and all the information you need to comply with their rules based system. And yeah, that happened. We are very capable of managing an LSA account. We have them in at least five different places, and they get deliver results. But you do need people. You can't do this by yourself. You're going to need somebody that that's their main focus, that that's their channel. Let them focus on it. Let them make sure that you are complying with Google's rules, because when you do, you will start appearing with regularity, and that'll bring you cases.

So we talk about our secret algorithm for the local service ads. It's less of a secret than when I first called it that, but a year and a half, two years ago, and started talking about it on stages at these conferences. But here's some of the basics, because I teased that a minute ago, you got to answer the phone. I want you to comment on this when I'm done. Angel, please. You got to answer the phone, because Google is actually telling you how long it takes you to answer the phone. They're tracking it. All the calls are recorded, so there's no discrepancy there. You got to have the calls recorded. Number, you can't miss any calls. Number three, you've got to disposition the calls and Google system. So there's a back end of of the LSAS or Google screen. You've got to log in a couple times a day at a minimum and tell Google can't dispute the cases anymore. But there's a place where you can put notes and then you tell Google, we book this meeting, or we archive this lead. So it's, it's a little bit of irrelevant terminology for attorneys, but this system was built for plumbers and air conditioning guys, so, but all means we're going out, we're going to look at at the air conditioning, we're going to give a quote to the consumer archive. Means we didn't reach these folks, or we didn't book a meeting. So in attorney world, you still want to treat it, treat algorithmically, with that same mindset, because that the system still works the same. So it's actually very beneficial to book a call for a good case and then put in a time when the person's ostensibly going to meet the attorney. So just say three o'clock tomorrow, they're going to meet attorney Reyes here at our Dallas office. Now that's a little bit of a white lie, but it seems to help the system a lot. If you book a call, the next thing we see is you need Google reviews. You need one to two Google reviews per location per week. Seems to be the magic in the algorithm there. If we go back to that search, I think the top person page had 565, reviews. It's no longer the case that you have to have the most reviews, and you can be competitive in the LSAS with just one to two reviews per week per location. So those are kind of the quick outline off top my head of our secret algorithm. What do you all see in making the LSA? Things worked in your market.

Now, I agree. So a couple things. We track this with our voice over IP telephony, and that is, you have to answer the call. We just, for instance, last week, I know that our missed call rate for our sales floor, the people that take calls and try to try to get get clients to get comfortable and sign a contract, was 5.6% I also know that it took 8.6 seconds for our sales floor to answer an incoming call. So those two things absolutely help with LSAs, okay, because we don't know necessarily when the call comes in, or at least the agent does whether or not it's an LSA call. Now our system will attribute it to LSAS via the Google Tag managers and the UTMs and everything else, but the person answering the call doesn't need to sweat it. That's all happening in the background, but the faster you answer, we try to sign a contract while the person just called. We believe that once you've hung up, it's really hard to go get that contract later, they might be they'll go shopping, maybe they'll forget, maybe they'll just stop answering our calls. So our goal is to close on the first call, and that means we text them or email them a DocuSign, and we fully expect our clients to sign right then on the very first call, because that is what's most impactful. And so instead of saying we're going to this client's going to meet us, we say we close the client. That's what we tell Google. And then on the ones we don't close or that weren't like practice areas that we wanted, we do exactly what you what you've been doing. We archive that, just so that the algorithm knows, oh, some of these aren't, aren't working, and you don't get, I don't believe you get charged for those either. I'm pretty sure, Jay, that you only get charged for the ones you say, Yes, we're going to do something. In our case, we sign. We don't, we don't make a point that hell, we'll lose that client.

Yeah, a lot of the archives, Google's not going to charge you for someone trying to sell you something, or someone looking for a divorce lawyer. Completely wrong. Yeah, this area that you're not ever but a couple key points that angel made there that are very valuable. Number one, they're hardly missing any calls. How many people do you have in your intake department answering? We

have, we have 75 but 10 of those people are leads. They don't actually receive calls. So 65 people receive calls, and for every six people, they have a lead that kind of helps them and manages their day.

So there's probably even five or 10 people after hours, 24/7

so we've managed to do 24/7 and we have, I think, half a dozen that do from 808, to 6am yeah. So

here's the pro tip. This is obviously a real significant law firm, really awesome intake department. Angels, doing everything right. He's managing every he knows his numbers right, 5.6% missed calls, 8.6 seconds to answer the phone. And by the way, that's well within Google's guidelines. The reps have told us, so maybe off the record, that you have 15 seconds more or less. I was about to say,

if you can just get to 15 seconds or less, you're in great shape. Yeah, I we got there, and I just kept going, alright, we can do better. We can do better, and so can everybody listening here. Look, you don't do this in a day. All right, I've been doing this work for 32 years. That's 32 year overnight success, right? So, but those are important things to remember. And Jay, I'm glad you mentioned 15 seconds, because that's the ceiling. You need to be under it, as long as you can get pick that call out in 15 seconds, you're going to be in good shape, both with Google and the and the potential client isn't going to hang up, because that's generally when they start hanging up if it takes too much, too much time for someone to answer, yeah.

You might not know this. You probably do, but you missed 5.6% of calls. How in God's green area, you've got 65 people. You round the clock 24/7 you're teaching your team answer the phone. Answer the phone. It's like the red phone in the old the Reagan White House with iPhone when the Kremlin calls the bat phone, right? You do know, how did you all miss 5.6% of

the call? Yeah, you know, I asked my team that all the time, and I'm going to tell you what they tell me, all right, and I believe it, but if someone proves me wrong, I will. I can change my mind. I'm I'm not dogmatic about these things, new information. I can change my mind. But my team tells me that that's approximately how many calls that they consider spam, meaning that they were shit calls to begin with, and they weren't potential new clients. They were just spam calls. Now, if I have a better answer for you, somebody out there can tell me that they're wrong, then I'll go, I'll go dig around a little bit more, but that's the answer, right? Yeah. So

what we've learned is that a high percentage of folks hear the Google recording. So Google's recording. The calls and they this call is recorded by Google insurance, and they hang up. Google still marks that as a missed call. You don't pay. Yeah, but here's, here's the good, proud about that if you train your team to be immediately on top of those calls. And we built a software for our clients. It's called 10 golden rules, tgr Boomerang, like the Australian toy, that you throw it out and it comes back. We have a software that immediately texts the intake team that you missed a call. Now you didn't do anything wrong your team. You can't beat your team up anymore on that 5.6% but those folks hung up. Now, some of them are spam. Your team's right, if it's a bot, and here's the recording or something, it's going to hang up. But some of those are people. They honestly do have a an accident or or they search for a person, or they clicked and called, but they're afraid of the recording. They hung up. Yeah, that's still elite, right? That's still some searched your term. They clicked on the ad, they clicked and called your they picked your firm, they picked your good looking face, they clicked, they called. And it's still an opportunity. So you want to train the team, and there's probably a software solution, by the way, with your your case management system or your telephone equity system, to send a text to your team and immediately call those folks back. We

have some of those tools, and I just need to see if we're actually using them as well as as well as Jay thinks we should be. So I'll definitely check on that. Thank you.

There's your first to do for your marketing team. I'll go over there operation. I'm glad I after this, I'm gonna go over there

and tell them, Hey, Jay says you guys are full of

it. We as an industry have built a lot of knowledge on these local service set, but we're still so we'll get off this topic in one more minute. But there's another thing that we came to blows with on the stage at National Trial Lawyers. And you made a point that there's so many firms coming in non branded, and I agree at that point, they're lead gen folks, yeah, particular, we're seeing a huge wave. Now you can own a law firm in Arizona without being a lawyer. You got VC money coming in. You've got all these national lead gen providers. But that case, I would argue, on the local service ads, is you have to have a Google business profile. You have to have a Google Maps address to your local service ads. So these national lead providers cannot have a law firm location in a local market. So I would argue that the one place that that argument doesn't hold any ground is in LSAs, probably in Google Maps too. Obviously,

that's hard to say, but with LSAs, I would agree with you, Jay, that's a safe space for lawyers and law firms still, but LSAS are just a small piece of our omni channel approach. And so on any given month, we're looking for 100 or so from LSA. And while that sounds robust, it's still less than 10% of what we're really looking for in any given 30 day period. So look, it is a strategy that every law firm should, should learn and use, but it won't scale you. If that's what you're looking for, you're going to have to get out there and get your elbows into the knife fight of paid search and and look, we can. I'd like to talk more about lead gens and competitor keyword bidding and some other things that are impacting why? Sometimes having a big brand just means everybody in their and their sister is bidding on your name, because the fifth and the Ninth Circuit have blessed it. The Texas ethics board has blessed it. Only a few states don't allow it, but essentially, in Texas, you're allowed to bid on the biggest, big law firm brand name, and you can bid on their name, all right, as a keyword, and you'll pop up as a sponsored app now.

So you're saying here, we could do another search this. I did this search using a location service, so it's as if I was in Dallas, right? Yeah. And then, so these are the the local service ads. But you're saying that I could do another search, and search for your law firm, and somebody else can advertise on your brand

name. It'll be a sponsored ad now, yeah, for anybody out there that doesn't understand it, I'm happy to explain it a little more. That depends on whether Jay is going to let me, but it's really important that you bid on your own name. If you bid on your own name, you will appear at the very top, because a branded search. As long as you're bidding on your own name, your brand will come up top, but there'll be sponsored ads that are also bidding on your name, but you want to be at the top, so bid on your own name. Yes, it costs a little bit of money, but it's a lot cheaper to bid on your own name than it is to competitor keyword bid because you're bidding on their brand or their trademark, and they're going to appear above you, so long as they are also bidding on their name, and most of the people with brands are savvy enough to bid on their own names, but not always. Hard enough to understand that the ninth and Fifth Circuit have blessed it. A lot of big brands have gotten really sideways and brow beaten many small competitors into agreeing not to bid on their name, even though the law is clearly in favor of 80 of that happening. Look, bidding on a competitor's name happens in every industry. Google solved this in 2012 every whether it's rental car companies, hotel companies, the travel site companies, any vertical that there's search on Google, everybody is bidding on everybody's trademark, everybody's brand name, and hoping that you just are one of those three up top. And if you're a sponsored ad and it looks like, Oh, let me try it. Even if someone went looking for a brand, they see, ah, click. Let's see. You gotta open

up the phone now. Positive, right? Yeah, here's a search for your angel Reyes law firm. And again, I did it as if I was searching in Dallas, but I it's so

damn small I can't see it. So you have to read it to me. Oh, too small. It's small. I can't see it, yeah, because I'm gonna have you across my whole screen. Man, I got you right in front of me. So like

getting around for those who can see the screen. But anyways, so it's Google search, as if I was in Dallas for Angel Reyes law firm. And there's the big 800 pound gorilla. The favorite paid ad is Morgan and Morgan, ah, that means they're bidding on my name, yeah. Or a lot of people get up really upset, and they're, they're Oh, it's, it's Oh, Morgan, Morgan's bidding on my name. But there is a positive business. I'm not, I'm not letting them off the hook. But my search was for Angel Reyes law firm. They could have been searching. They could just have advertising anytime anyone puts in law firm. So it could be a broad match on the keyword law firm. So, and here's another thing, a lot of people get really upset. We just had a client really upset that a bunch of people are advertising on their brand and their TV lawyers and their there's these ads coming up. A lot of times. Google's now doing sort of searches based on what other people previously searched. Yeah, they're if they previously searched for law firm, and now they search your brand. Google's still going to show paid ads, because, again, it's in Google's interest. If you look at the structure of this search result, you're 100 paid ad, paid at you said, you said you're bidding on your own paid app, Google. Yeah. Look, there's a highlight. A lot of folks are going to click here. They're going to call your maps location, right? There's a click, yeah, yeah. Well, there's, there's a small likelihood that they might get, oh, more. Oh, I saw him on TV, even though they were referred to you, and he just grabbed a lead advertising on your brand.

I got, if you don't mind, let me give you an example that has nothing to do with law firms that I think might resonate with some of the folks that are listening or what, or both watching and listening this. Alright, so here's an example. You are are hungry, and you're hungry for cereal, and you say to yourself, I'm going to go up to whatever your local store, let's say Albertsons. I hopefully everybody knows that's a big, giant grocery chain all across the country. Say, I'm going to run over to Albertsons. I'm going to, I'm really interested in, I'm going to get some corn flakes Kellogg's, man, Kellogg's makes corn flakes. That brand is really well known. And you walk into the store and you go, Hey, where's the cereal aisle? You find it, and you start looking, and you say, Whoa, you look, and there's Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Then right next to it is another corn flake box that's blue and cool color, and it says, triple the fiber, every multivitamin that you need, all in one bowl. And you're like, Oh, let me try that. Even though you went into the store thinking you were going to walk out with Kellogg's Corn Flakes, you took the one right next to it. That is exactly what's happening with competitor keyword bidding. Somebody might just go, Well, okay, click, and they hit Morgan and and even if they're looking for me, if there's people answer and they do a good job, they're going to end up with that case. And so we do competitor keyword bidding, and in fact, I've written law review articles about it. And now that the ninth and Fifth Circuit closed the door on, on, lawyers. Look, lots of lawyers got mad. They sued, generally, because their their egos are involved, and many of them hadn't read the law or the law wasn't as settled as it is now, but it's super settled now, and I hope that sort of non law related example of corn flakes and Kellogg's versus the boxes next door to it are no different than the ads, the sponsored ads no different, right? Oh, click that one. Why not? Because the urgency is what matters, and it's not the brand man. Brands get forgotten when people are in a hurry or there's urgency, believe

so I want to come back to this result again, because we jumped into talking about paid and that's cool. That's It's next on the list. So we, I think we covered the Google screen local service. Ads in depth. Again, this is a search for car accident attorney Dallas. It's a search result as if it was based in Dallas. The next we see one paid ad. These are the pay per click, or PPC, they're called. And these are sponsored ads we were just talking about. This is a Google Maps result. The it's location based, proximity based, and then here's the SEO typically, there'll be 10 SEO results. There's Jim Adler, the Texas Hammer, big advertised brand. This is a version of those AI results we talked about earlier. We can talk some more about that at the end. So there's typically 10 SEO results, like, if we counted these out, 123456789, probably 10. And then a couple more paid ads, pay per click. Google's giving you a couple more options, and then we're into page two. So we typically say there's 10 SEO results on page one. And these are SEO these are free search engine optimization results Google Maps are also free. These are paid. These are paid. So why don't you talk a little bit about the pay per click and let's stick to the topic. At the start, you talked about people advertising on your brand. But who do you think gets more clicks in the Pay Per Click position, a brand or a non brand?

I actually believe that whatever the top three results are on your telephone, one of those firms is going to get the call. That's what I think happens with Hey, whether you Google a brand or just car accident, or Texas, Dallas, whatever, I think that for most consumers, when they're looking at that all powerful phone, smartphone, they pick one of the top three results. That's what I think happens. I don't think it has anything to do with brand.

So I'm going to argue slightly differently again. And I do believe that brand weighs in on performance and pay per click, both how many times you're going to show up and how your campaign is going to perform. Because what we've seen is that a recognizable brand usually has higher click through rates, part of Google's algorithm when they go to choose who's going to be at the top and who's going to be lower down on the pay per click Results is click through rates, and there's a thing Google has called quality score. And quality score includes your click through rates, includes the performance of your ad. So Google's actually tracking if people click, they go to your website or your landing page and they pull out the form or they call you. That's a conversion. We're very attuned to our conversions naturally, like you want your ads to get clicks and calls and signed cases, right? But Google's tracking it because they also want people to have a good experience on Google. They absolutely Google to work. Think of it broadly. Google has a product. Product is called answering people's search queries. Yeah, if somebody sees Morgan and Morgan and Angel Reyes and Jim Adler the Texas Hammer, those the top three results, if the one they click on, and then they go to the website and they call and they do a conversion action, or if the one click on in the LSAs, like Angel explained, they sign them up, they quickly in the system. They tell Google, hey, this was a good lead. We signed these folks up. There are new clients. We booked them, and they're very responsive, right that they're telling Google that you are a win for Google and you're a win for the consumer, and so you're going to show up more frequently. So my argument is that click through rate, and by association or recognized brand that gets a higher click through rate is going to have a higher quality score. Google has stated in their patents and in their training for Pay Per Click management that a higher quality score you will show up higher in the ads. So I would argue, again, brand impacts pay per click as it impacts LSAs, and that's why I take that side of the argument.

Listen, I never said brands were worthless, but they're a luxury. Okay, let's face it, Jay, 10s of millions of dollars over 25 years, you might have a well known name, maybe even a famous name, so let me just be clear that I never said that. I will say that Jay is absolutely right. Your click through rate matters, your Quality Score matters. However, when it comes to paid search, that is less important than organic search, you will if you pay the most in the auction, you will appear above everybody with a kick ass CTR click through rate and quality score, and that's where, okay, how do you how do you balance that? Or should you build a brand? Sure, but look, let me ask you a question. Chair, all right, I'm a I'm a potential new client. I have a small law firm, 10 people, two lawyers. We've been doing auto and truck stuff for five years. And I come to you and I. Say, Listen, I would like your firm to help us expand our practice, get new and more clients, and I have $100,000 I want to give you. Would you prepare for them a five year branding study? Or would you tell them, get your butts on digital and learn it? What would you do if I was that potential new client of yours?

The good news is, if you come to an agency like tango and rules, I'm not going to tell you to learn it. I'm going to tell you, we're going to tell you, I'll do it right. First thing I'm going to do is get your Google screen and I'm going to we're going to train your team to answer the phones, disposition the calls, quickly, we're going to help you set up a review incentive program for your paralegals, so you're getting those one to two Google reviews every week. We also have a program where we send out a VIP box or a thank you box after the case, and then we call the folks up and ask them to do a Google review. So we ensure getting those one to two Google reviews. So first and foremost, I would coach them on getting the LSAS to work for them. Second thing, we're going to work very, very hard on their local Google Maps. We're going to do, there's about 1520, things we can do for local SEO to come up in the Google Maps the proximity, so within that five to 10 mile radius of your office, we've got to be as effective as possible in SEO, because the big SEO when you're competing with the Texan hammer and Morgan and Morgan and Angel Reyes, if you're starting out in Texas, good luck to you. But in the 10 mile proximity of your office, we got a pretty good chance of ranking in Google Maps. So the first thing I'm going to spend $100,000 with the client on is local service as many as we can. So so it sounds like as much as we

so it sounds like you're in agreement with me. You would go all digital, and with that 100 grand, you wouldn't try to create a brand strategy around that. With that 100 grand, you'd go all Google, they're all digital, which is my position. Let's face it, he asked me on here to to help be the foil. And you yourself agree that a new firm would be well advised to look brands matter, but it takes decades and hundreds of millions. Now you'd be better off doing exactly what Jay said, and that's the advice that I would give you as

well. I made a point very quickly, but I want to touch on it again and show this slide, because I love this slide from Amanda. And the point I was making was that we don't have $400 million like Morgan and Morgan and even angels firms spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the years on advertising. And so I wouldn't recommend the first $100,000 go to brand, but I would recommend that you figure out your brand message. And we're going through this exercise with all of our clients. And so what the point I was making with this is Amanda demanda working assume with their agency. First of all, she changed her name, so her last name was not demanda, based in Miami, and Amanda means legal demand or lawsuit. So she actually, she's all in. She changed her name and the name of her Amanda, She's demanding so. And then the second thing she did with her her marketing team or or her agency, she built up a brand kit. And this is her logo. This is how you use design. This is what we stand for. This is the brand typography. This is the color palette. And as I mentioned, even the color palettes delivered in live when she goes in public and we look at all her social media, always on brand. So my point is that you can still do branding, and you should do branding, but you don't have to spend your first $100,000 on TV. What you should do is figure out what you stand for. Are you the we fight the insurance company's brand? Are you the we get a big check brand? Are you the we're the most loyal in the community brand? Figure that out. Put it in your slogan, put it on your website, and everywhere your brand appears on your website, on your social media, on your signatures of all your staff, be super consistent with your brand message. So that chance you get to make a brand impact in your marketplace, you pay off with the consistency of branding, even if you don't have $100,000 to spend on TV.

Great advice. And yes, you should, you should do that. But I will tell you that, man, 32 years in, we've changed our messaging. We have iterated a few times. It's pretty hard to pick a brand palette like Miss de manda did in Miami and stick to it forever, and you can stick to it for a while, but you might change. I know that ours has changed absolutely, yeah, yeah. And so look, it's all good stuff. So I hope that, Hope everybody watching and listening has taken a few like, really a. Little actionable items away from what they've heard. Because Jay and I aren't really arguing. I'm just suggesting that brand is is no longer. So brand, to me now, is like the cherry on the Sunday, but it's not the Sunday, right? The Sunday is all the other stuff that we're talking about. And if you've got the luxury or putting the cherry on your Sunday, do it? It's a super comprehensive strategy that everybody ought to follow. But if you've got a budget that's not that it's somewhat limited, then you really need to follow the strategies that Jay has been talking about, that I've been talking about, and learn digital because that's really game changing. And I will tell you that I believe that most of our clients are highly transactional. So if we meet them, when they call, we sign them, it's over. They're not looking, they're not shopping, and those that are, maybe they're the minority. They're not the majority of our new clients. You guys

have a nice, consistent brand. I took the liberty of grabbing a couple screenshots, and I'll flip through them, and maybe you can talk about your brand messaging from a strategic and market delivery standpoint. So there's the the website that the first thing we see on the homepage, a YouTube a color scheme. And

let me just be real clear, I have the good fortune of having a chief marketing officer who has 11 people that report to him, and that team does all this. Now I have a sort of weird oversight role. If there's if I really don't like it, I'll say I don't like it, but generally speaking, I think it's my job to get out of the way of talented people. And so a lot of talented people were involved in fussing around with this stuff. So I don't want to take the credit for it, because the credit really is to the people that have been working on this for us for quite a while.

Great. So I'll just flip through. This is the website. This is the YouTube, and you've got some branding and graphics. Yeah, there's a video that runs. But nice, consistent branding. Again, you got a video in, locked in the I guess you can paper clip it here to the top Instagram page. Again, very consistent branding here on Facebook, yeah, slightly different on LinkedIn, which, maybe it's a business messaging a little bit more, yeah, but pretty consistent branding overall. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about your brand and okay, how you roll that out to some of the socials? Okay,

so I think I want to take one little half step back, because I'm not sure it was clear to even you, Jay, but when I was talking about branding. I wasn't suggesting not doing stuff, like what Jay is showing you that we are doing. I think I was, and I hope I wasn't too far off base. I was assuming that what you were talking about was like legacy media, stuff, like broadcast television, radio stations, bus wraps, bus stop, benches, billboards. So that, to me, is what I was thinking was branding and whether you should spend money on it. And I don't think you should. I don't think any of that stuff matters. I don't think anyone remembers it. And I'll actually just indulge me for one more second. Let me tell you a funny story that I think everyone will relate to, and that is it. Everybody that's watching, close your eyes just for a second. Just close your eyes with me. Now I'm going to open mine, but you keep yours closed. And if you're over 40, keep them closed. I want you to think back 15 years with me, back to 2010 and I want you to imagine you're driving in your city. Now I'm talking urban cities, not small towns, and you're driving in your city, and you're, you're cruising along, you're, maybe you're going to work, maybe you're going to have some fun, whatever. And you're passing billboard after billboard after billboard. And if your eyes are still closed, I want you to remember what was on those billboards? Do you remember? All right, you can open your eyes, because I'm going to tell you what you should have remembered, and that is every one of them in every major urban area was a local car dealer or a national or international car manufacturer. That was 90% of billboards 15 years ago, by 2012 the local franchise car dealerships and their parent manufacturing companies, if you will, had determined that it was a waste of money and that everything they did needed to be on the internet. And oddly enough, who backfilled all of the billboards in every big city. Lawyers. Now, if many of you are like me, you've heard this over the years, are lawyers always the smartest when it comes to picking where to put their money, how to put their money, I would say. Not always, but you don't come out of law school being a business person. You got to learn that on your own. And so I think it's remarkable that car dealerships and car manufacturers completely left the space. You won't find one in a big urban market. All you'll see is a whole bunch of noisy lawyer Personal Injury folks with their pictures on the billboards might be a little ego driven, not sure, but I don't think it works at all. So that was what I was talking about, when I thought, when I was really engaging about, like, why I thought digital was so critical now that Jay is showing you some of the stuff we do, absolutely this is branding, but it's really digital branding. It's YouTube. It's all that we don't bother with legacy broadcast, TV, we don't bother with billboards, we don't bother with bus wraps, all that's bullshit. We do it all digital. And so yes, go ahead now, now that I've gotten my piece of resistance off my chest, I'm happy to engage a little bit about how we do this and why. Talk to us

a little bit about your brand message and what you've learned through the years, and what you find resonates with consumers.

I'll be candid, it is sometimes impossible to know what's really resonating. We always try to show people, and actually, those are our people. These are not stock photos. That is probably half of a little, little less than half the lawyers. It's kind of hard to get everybody together. Sometimes we think that reviews really make a difference. And I think Jay hit on that a number of times. If you can lay down even two good reviews every week, that's better than a brand because people are now are looking at reviews as more critical, in my opinion, than whether they've heard of you. And so if you want to spend some energy, spend it on Google reviews. We have, we have 10,000 although we got a rough week last week, we we did not. Our client satisfaction dipped, and we got, we got a few one stars that are right up top right now. And look, that happens, going to happen to everybody, but so we like to put our people out front. We also, you can turn this into a Spanish resource if you want. Like I said, about a third of our clients are still Spanish speaking dominant. But we like to keep it simple. If Jay were to flip through our first five or six pages on our website, you'll see that it's not like busy. There's not a lot of text. It's simple, direct and clean. So we think that that's the best way to brand and for better, for worse, I had done a lot of television advertising a couple 100 million up until 2018 ish, and so it's always been Angel Reyes and Associates. Does that mean everybody knows my name? No. Does that mean some people might, maybe, but we no longer advertise on TV, so who knows? I don't know how, how my name recognition would play these days, but just be, be who you are and and I think be approachable. And I think that's part of what you're seeing in this this screenshot, anyway, is just who we are. We're a whole bunch of people. As you can see, it's a pretty, pretty diverse group of folks. We've got lots of ethnicities and lots of religions. Here we are the workforce of tomorrow that half the country is terrified now,

a lot of things that we like in website designs, when we do a new website design for clients is here, logos in the top left, that's the right position. Phone numbers in the top right, again, that's the top right position. And hopefully that phone number is fixed on the page, on the mobile

it's actually dynamic, so the next person that visits will will get a different number. That way we know that you came to the website and call rail or another phone number? No, we, we use in Boca to attribute our cases. Yeah,

great. And again, get your free case review. You've got the Google stars here like that, and you've mentioned people, people like to see people, and people hire and people. And I think you did a great job with that. The you got the Google claim here, over 15,005 star reviews. That's awesome. No fee, unless you win millions recovered, nationally recognized, award winning. I like it. I like it from some of the basics we're looking for. So some of the questions people ask, right? Do we need a Spanish site? And you've got, you've got a an opportunity for folks to find the Spanish site. It depends on your market. Probably, I don't know if you need it today, because Google trans will translate sites. Oh, you're absolutely right. 90% of people who are first language Spanish speaking have barely probably just have that translator on. It's not bad option to have there, yeah. So some basic things. Why don't I flip through some of the other so you got a slightly different lead on the YouTube and some of the socials. Award winning personal injury law firm serving all Texas primary office. Why don't you talk to us about some of that messaging? Nah,

I really want to go grab Elliot and I I can tell you. This much video is important. And not just video on on YouTube, but really video on all your digital properties, right? Your website, your ads, certainly the social platforms without videos. Video is critical for like Instagram, Facebook, even Tiktok, for crying out loud, we don't spend a lot of money there. We spend a little. And so for this was somebody in my office's attempt at branding our YouTube channel. As you can see, we've got 10s of 1000s of subscribers. I'm kidding, we don't have that many. But this video content, it gets repurposed all the way across our digital platforms all the time. And so I'm looking at it. I haven't looked at it forever. Jam, this is kind of like, oh, man, he's got me on the spot. I think it's okay. It's not exactly like the website, and I think that's probably where you're going. Is this really consistent brandy? Maybe not. But now that I've seen it, I'll go check in with my people and find out what's

up. Again, I'm not, I wasn't, I wasn't picking on anyone. No, I know. Apologize to your team if you but the only thing I would argue perhaps that I suggested before, and particularly for a smaller firm like Angel, has a huge brand reputation in his marketplace, even if he doesn't recognize it. But I think the consistency would be the point I would make for the smaller firms in particular, and then pick one message and stick with it. And perhaps you could argue that this award winning is a less compelling brand positioning your team might know in theory again, and just talking in theory from advertising theory have been doing this like 2530 years, is you want to have a benefit that's a little bit more consumer oriented. And so award winning is kind of like, Hey, aren't we great? But it does have a compelling consumer point, right? What awards like? A lot of people probably want an award winning firm. So Texas, again, good messaging, but perhaps there's something you would test that would be more of a consumer benefit. What's about me that you won an award? What's a benefit for me that that y'all serve all of Texas?

I am, believe it or not, Jay, thank you. I'm sending an email right now. Oh, no, I got someone in trouble. No, no, I'm super glad. My hope is that anybody that spent the last hour and 15 minutes with us has some takeaways as well. And so I am, boom, email sent, and the question was to my CMO, is award winning really? How we want to lead with our YouTube channel? So we'll see what it says here a little bit. I'm blaming you. If anybody comes back and says, Hey, man, what's up? What do you what do you bugging me about the YouTube channel for him, say, Hey, man, yeah, I said

webinar. All right. Last thing I want to spend a little bit of time on is the SEO, the search engine optimization. So, yeah, my screen again, I don't know if you're small, but doesn't matter. You know what I'm talking about. So this is for car accident attorney Dallas. It's a search as if it was done in Dallas. We looked at the LSAs, the pay per click. We we talked a little bit about maps, so the old fashioned SEO, search engine optimization, again, I would argue it's impacted by Brad. But I'll let you go first and maybe talk about SEO from your perspective, and then I'll chime

in. I'm of the opinion that Google doesn't rank on the SEO stuff for brands at all. They do rank for relevance, Page Speed. They rank for utility, user experience. All that is definitely part of the foundational SEO stuff we constantly are working to be part of the the group that is going to show up with a general search, like you just said, it's a very, very broad search, but it's we're bidding on those exact keywords. We didn't make that option for whatever reason, but an hour from now, you probably, you're probably going to see us, because that's we're spending a lot of money on exactly the terms you just searched. My happen to all three firms that popped up, and they must be doing the exact same thing. So a lot of people, I think, have decided that SEO isn't, like as important as it used to be, but I would argue that is, I would say that SEO is really foundationally where you really have to start now. You don't have to rank for everything, but I think you better have damn good SEO foundation for all of your other stuff to work well for you. And so for me, it's not something that you could just skip over and say, Oh, we just need a couple landing pages. Who gives a damn? No one really cares. No one really looks I think you should care. And I think you should keep it's like a coral reef. Every little bit that gets dropped starts to accrete. And I think that websites and your SEO strategy is still important.

Yeah, great points. And I'll just chip in with a couple of my thoughts on SEO, because you did talk about the website speed. And things like that. So a lot of times people ask me, like, what is SEO like? How does it work? And over the years, I've come up with a very simple description, which I call the ABCs of SEO, because verified in their documents, there's about 6000 different factors now that they're weighing instantly, right? ABC, when we did the search before for Dallas car accident, Troy and based in Dallas, there's 6000 things that Google's either instantly measuring or has historically measured and put into an index so that they can draw on that data very, very quickly. But to simplify those 6000 things, they're loosely gripped into three categories, A, B and C. A is architecture. And you hinted at that. It's the speed of your website. It's the structure of your website. There's some very sophisticated things, like schema code. Schema code, it's code that Google and Bing and Microsoft and Yahoo. Everybody got together and they said, look, let's agree on a few basic principles that if somebody's looking for a location, let's write some code that we can all understand that is location schema code. Or now there's Google review schemas, and there's all stars schemas for the Google stars, there's now over, like 100 200 schema codes. So some of those that is a more sophisticated type of SEO that hopefully your agency is doing for you, that we I group under a architecture of the website. Essentially, is your website easy for the Google robot to read? Is your website architecturally easy for the consumer to navigate? And if there's 6000 factors, about 2000 of them are architectural. A architecture, it's critical. B is backlinks. Get that right. And again, simplifying this way down, B is backlinks. Some people say backlinks don't matter. And over and over again, that a great backlink, or a series of great backlinks, definitely boosts the client's SEO performance.

But what is authority is based on backlinks? Basically, what is

a backlink? A backlink is a link from another site to your site. So almost everybody has a backlink from the Bar Association, if you're an attorney, right? But you want to continue to find high authority, important and relevant websites to link to your website, but we do things like getting links from the alma mater of the law school. Some people say that's not really relevant, but I would argue that Google still values a legitimate backlink from a.edu it's hard to get from a law.edu from a law school, from a city, from we have a strategy where we can get articles from USA Today, CNN, high profile media outlets. And I would argue that a link from the high profile media outlets super, super valuable. So you want to get high quality backlinks, local backlinks, relevant backlinks to your site. And then the final one, A is architecture, B is backlink, and C is content. Content is still king, and you want to, if you if you want to rank for a niche phrase, like one of the ones I always use as an example is, what do I do if I get hit by an Uber who's going to pay for my car repairs? And people more and more searching things about Uber and Lyft and ride shares, right? And five, six years ago, there was hardly any Ubers, Lyfts, ride shares, right? So this is a new SEO term, so if you didn't write a new article or blog post about Uber and Lyft, there's zero chance you're going to rank for Uber and Lyft accidents in Dallas, Texas. So you've got to constantly be adding new and relevant content for a couple reasons. One, to take advantage of a new keyword phrase that you know you didn't have on your website. You're not going to rank for something. You don't have motorcycle accidents. If you have nothing about motorcycle accidents, you could write all you want about car accidents. You're just not going to get those motorcycle cases. And then the other thing is, you've got to keep your website fresh. So you've got to be constantly telling Google this is not a stale old website, because we used to go to old, stale websites like five years ago. Now, you almost never go to a website that's not fresh, current and updated, and that's because Google's valuing in the algorithm, new content, fresh content, relevant content, people spend a lot of time reading. So that's my quick version of The ABCs of SEO. Another quick thought I just want to touch on regarding brand because that was our theory today going in. And I mentioned very briefly at the start Google, there were some leaked documents that were supposed to Google's patents and algorithms for the SEO and these brand documents underscored that branded searches and the company's name pay a substantial weighting in the rank and the higher frequency of branded searches and branded results, in addition to authority and trust, trustworthiness establishing the brand is authoritative and again, consistently the. Producing high quality content. And one other sort of geeky SEO thing that we in the industry call E, A, T, and Google sort of validated this for us is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. So you've got to demonstrate first hand knowledge and experience. So think about producing some content on your on your website to talk about your expertise, maybe a little bit more technically, and maybe someone else will link to that technical information to validate your experience and your expertise, which is the second E, so your depth of knowledge, your qualifications, your subject matter expertise, and then the A is authoritativeness, sometimes confused with authorship, but, but maybe closely linked, because we, I recently got, wrote an article for pilma, the personal injury lawyer, mastermind Marketing Association, and they linked to my website. How fantastic that an industry association linked to my website, and I was, and I have an article on their website, and I've listed as somewhat of authority because they took my content and put it on their website and in their magazine. Final one, transparency. Transparency, honesty. I think trust. Sorry. Trustworthiness is the T and a lot of that, a lot of all of this is going to come, obviously, from your Google reviews that angel talked so accurately about. So we'll sum up last point on on SEO, because we briefly talked about Google Maps. Google Maps and SEO are co joined twins. And when what we've seen over and over and over, when the SEO is going up, we get to the reporting we go through every month with our customers, their Google Maps is going up, meaning they're found for certain direct searches, indirect searches. They got more phone calls from the Google Maps. More people asked for directions from the Google Maps. Essentially, they came up more and more in the Maps section. So what does that tell me? It tells me, if your SEO is up, your maps is up. Oh, and by the way, the corollaries for if your SEO is down, maps is typically down. So you want to work very, very hard at your local SEO. You want to work very hard at your SEO, but they're, they're still very valid. And a lot of people say it's Seo really valid. It's down the page, but I would argue that you can't do SEO without doing local SEO. And the s local SEO is right at the top, and both of them are going to deliver a ton of great opportunities for your firm. With that, I will yield the soapbox to you, sir for your arguments.

I first, first and foremost, that was really, really terrific. Remember the acronyms, ABC, E, A, T, that is SEO. But don't ever forget your Google Map Pack, your GBP profiles. Those are all really SEO. Those aren't paid. You don't, you don't do that. You're not, you're not paying for that. You just gotta, gotta get it right. And so that was super, super good content. I'm glad that you didn't, didn't forget to talk a little bit about SEO. But look, in conclusion, all I can say is this, we are in one of the most competitive verticals on Google. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, the most expensive keywords in search, so Google, being whatever, are all related to personal injury. So I believe the most expensive word that you can bet on is mesothelioma. But I don't do that work, but auto, truck, 18 wheeler, all that is super, super competitive. And so I think that the competition now has moved digital. I think it's moved to search. I think that it's a very transactional situation, and that just because, you know, a brand doesn't mean you're going to use it like the Kellogg scorn flex versus the cool new the multi fiber. All the vitamins are in this one, when you walk in, you see a different option, you might choose it, right? So you gotta be in that digital space, and you've got to build your foundation with SEO. Be in the digital space, and if you have the luxury of branding, do it. But that, that's where I really come down on this is it. Lots of new firms have started in the last five years, and they have come on gangbusters. And the way they did it was not by building a brand, the way they did it was by meeting clients where they were search. I can tell you that we get hundreds of law firm referrals from law firms that haven't been open three years. They're not in Texas, but they get cases here because they're advertising digitally and they want a firm to work them, so we'll do it. And there are that alone tells me that brands aren't critical, because if that was the case, these people wouldn't have hundreds of cases to refer and lead generators white label folks that are just selling auto and truck leads to firms like mine and and whoever else might be listening, I don't think they would be able to so actively impact the market if they were losing to brands every time. Because they're not. They're not losing to brands. They don't even have a brand, and they're still getting leads sometimes cheaper than we are internally getting them, which is just. Exasperating, but I'm of the opinion, if you can't beat them, join you. So we use lead Gens. We're agnostic. As long as they can beat our price or beat it, we're good,

awesome. I'll just give my closing argument, argument quickly, but I'm going to sum up some of the things I think we learned today is, number one, know your numbers. Angel does great job. He knows his numbers to the second on answering the phone number two, I would say, answer the phone. We talked a lot about that. It's mission critical, and it's no longer optional, because Google's measuring it. And if they're measuring it in the LSAs, and we know they are, they've told us that, I would argue that they're also measuring it in your GBP and your Google Maps and your general SEO. So even if you're not running your LSAs, you got to make sure you're answering the phone within 15 seconds and no missed calls. Number three, I would say intake. Like, you've got a high focus on intake. So many times we hear from firms like, hey, the leads aren't great. The leads aren't so good. And we listen to some calls, they've got missed calls. They put people on hold for three minutes, they hang up. You've got to study your intake. You got to get graded intake. There's only so much that your internal marketing team or your agency can do. Number four, the last point I'll make, and I agree with you on this. We both agreed spend your first $100,000 on digital and get your brand message right? And every opportunity you get on your website, on your social media, any community activities, the signature on all your employees emails, be super consistent with that brand message. Figure out what you stand for as a firm, write a really good headliner slogan, and then just deliver that in your digital and that's enough for branding now we both went super long, and I forgot about some Q and A, but let's definitely try and grab a couple questions from the audience. Elizabeth sent me a couple from the LinkedIn as well. So if anyone has any questions, just feel to drop a question in the chat. We've got one from Frank on LinkedIn. Can good branding lower your marketing costs. And does branding give you an edge over other firms? Sir, please go ahead.

I would argue that it no longer will lower your marketing this is a hyper competitive space. We're all paying a premium. Brands pay a premium too. If you've got a great brand, you still gotta bid on your own name, you are going to be spending even more money. And if you've got a few decades behind you, and you've spent a couple 100 million bucks, and you think you've got a great brand, great stay with it. But if you're not there, be mindful of all the things that we've talked about today. And

again, I'm going to argue that branding will decrease your costs if the face of Angel Reyes or John Morgan comes up on the LSAs, it's going to get more clicks, because

more clicks than his face, I'm just sure.

And then the second part of that we just mentioned again, which is you don't have to spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars on your branding, but whatever you do spend, get your brand message figured out. Get a real nice headshot. Be super consistent with that, show your people on your website. A lot of things we talked about here today. Question from Jeffrey Melton, Hey, Jeff, great to see you on today. He's a big attorney in the north of Orlando area, and he's the official law firm of the Florida Gators. Oh, hey, Angel, why don't you take that one? What percentage of your team members are intake? So

our let's see, we've got about 75 that would be a little less than 15%

Awesome. All right. Well, I don't see any more questions coming in, and we're right at time, so I'm like, Alright, cool. So much for being here. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate it. No fisticuffs, no blood was spilled, but I think people a lot of value today. I

hope so. I hope so. Well, thank you again for having me, Jay. Really appreciate it.