If times were not challenging enough, Google surprised us all Monday, May 4th, in the afternoon with a core update that since it initiated has shaken the world of law firms and the SEOs behind their strategies alike.
Grace and Liel review what impact Google’s May 2020 Core Update has had on the legal industry in its first week. They talk about where law firms are gaining and losing visibility in relation to directories and how search results are being enhanced to give users more information on the search results page.
In the second part of the episode, Liel shares updated search volumes according to Google’s keyword planner for high intent search terms across multiple practice areas throughout the nation. So whether your Google strategy is paid, organic, or both, this episode proves why continuing to invest in Google is a safe bet. Well, as long as there is not a lot of turbulence in its algorithm.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Google’s Core Update Guide
- MOZcast – Google algorithm’s volatility tracker
- SEMrush Sensor
- 2021 JUUL Risk PSA Scholarship
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Transcript
Liel: [00:00:00] I’m down 60 percent since midnight. I started seeing massive declines about two hours ago. I can’t find my site for any of the keywords. I was tracking that. We’re doing well. This is really bad. It could have not come at a worse time. These are some of the reactions SEOs across the world are having to Google’s May 2020 core update. I’m Liel Levy, co-founder of Nanato Media. And this is In Camera Podcast where we keep calm and carry on through Google’s stormy weather.
Liel: [00:00:58] Welcome to the podcast, Private Legal Marketing Conversations. Thank you for being here. How are you today?
Grace: [00:01:05] Good. How are you, Liel?
Liel: [00:01:07] Good, Grace. I’m doing fine. And Grace this week, we have a lot of to cover. I know we wanted it to follow up to our Mass Torts conversation. And I think we will be jumping in and out of this conversation over the next few episodes. But the reality, Grace, is that we cannot ignore really what happened this week, which really has a lot of us digital marketing professionals kind of like at times panicking and at times just being extremely happy and pleased. And that’s Google’s latest core update, which, as you know, Grace initiated this Monday. And Grace, let me tell you something. This update has already been called by some in the community as an absolute monster. So that already speaks tons about the impact that it has. So, Grace, are you ready for us to first deep dive into what do we know about these core updates so far?
Grace: [00:02:11] Certainly.
Liel: [00:02:12] OK. Excellent. And so, Grace, let’s start by explaining those who have not yet followed very thoroughly how core updates were. Let’s just start by defining that. Right. So Google rolls out these updates. And for the most of times, these are general. So they’re impacting, every single region, every single language, every single component of Google in the way that they are rolled out is that the last four weeks, like the implementation of it, goes for something over around two weeks. Right. And so during these two weeks, there’s a lot of fluctuation things, you know, at times can look extremely bad at times, can look, can stabilize and at times can start shifting to a complete different kind of result page than what we were used to in start becoming more permanent. Right. And so with that being said, actually, yesterday afternoon at some point, Barry Schwartz through Search Engine Journal already started sharing some first insights that he collected from talking to SEOs and platform that manage SEO traffic tracking and so forth and so on. What are their impressions so far? So here’s the facts. Let’s start with that. So May 4th at 3:50 p.m.. Okay. Eastern Time. The core update initiated. Right.
Liel: [00:03:32] So…
Grace: [00:03:33] Initiated, so it just started.
Liel: [00:03:35] Exactly. And that’s the moment like like the storm just unleashed. Right. And so, as we’ve said, this is a global update. Like most of them are OK or all of them are. And it means that it affects every single region, every language and in any category of Web sites. Right. So some will get more impacted than others, yet everyone gets impacted by this. OK. Now, it’s also being called a broad core update. So this is basically what Google does every few months. So as you’ve mentioned before, Grace this year, we already had one in January.
Liel: [00:04:15] But putting it into perspective, like how intense or how volatile this core update has been compared to the one of January. This has been relatively more impactful than January.
Liel: [00:04:31] And some are even saying that this in particular is being one of the biggest and most impactful core updates that there has been since twenty eighteen. Right. So that’s quite a bit. Now, Grace, another thing to keep here in mind is like there has been speculation as to whether a core update was going to come sometime soon. But a lot of people assume that because of the pandemic, that Google was going to hold back at it. Right, because a lot of people, the last thing that they need right now is their web traffic destabilized and oh, boy, this core update has this novelized some businesses. We’re going to looking to it right now. But it’s been tremendous, Grace. And I must say legal industry is not exempt. I’ll tell you about what we’ve seen and what we’ve identified so far. And so it’s it’s very unique. So let’s start first with the data that SEM Rush shared. Right. So they have a sensor tracking tool. And basically what it does is it kind of like rates, how volatile things have been on a scale from zero to 10. And so right now, these core update is showing a general score of nine point four, whereas if we compare it to the one in January, it had a score of eight. So you can already there see that this one, if we were talking percentages, is, you know, anywhere between 15, 20 percent more volatile. And heere is, you know, probably something information. Most of our listeners want to know.
Liel: [00:06:01] Well, we chardy industries that got the most impact by this so far. These this is it, Grace travel, real estate, health care, pets and animals and people in society. What does this mean is that these ones are the ones that are getting hit the most consistently every single day. Right. But that doesn’t mean that other verticals are not seeing a lot of fluctuation and changes and stormy weather in their rankings. When I look particularly Grace in to law. OK. You know, we’ve had quite a few days like the first day. The volatility was just kind of like right on the four, looking back at the scale from one to 10. But when you start looking at days like Tuesday, so Tuesday, were we, you know, legal jumped all the way to seven point six, Wednesday, nine point three yesterday, eight point five. Right. And so that’s quite a bit. And again, we’re going to go through some other metrics and how other platforms are measuring here, the impact that this has had. And then we’re going to look at some examples we’ve been able to gather. But it’s you know, there’s been a lot of impact on these. Right. So let’s look now at MOZ you’re familiar with MOZ, right, Grace?
Grace: [00:07:24] Yes. Definitely.
Liel: [00:07:25] Excellent. So most has this tool that they call it the Moz cast tool. And it basically tracks the updates and assigns it a temperature. Right. And so…
Grace: [00:07:37] The heat mapping that we usually talk about sometimes.
Liel: [00:07:39] Yeah. Exactly. Right. And so they actually have a rating system that can go beyond the 100. But it’s rare. It’s rare. And so over the last few days, we’ve seen these Moz cast tool jump all the way up to numbers like one hundred and twelve degrees. Right. Which is remarkable. Outstanding.
Grace: [00:08:02] Unheard of.
Liel: [00:08:03] Yes. Kind of hasn’t been seen, as I’ve said, since 2018. So that’s how much of an impact and how remarkable this is. And so Grace, you know, at a high level, this has been volatile for Google Organic. What does this really mean? I mean, for those who have been listening up until now, eight minutes into the conversation and still haven’t been able to understand. What did that, what does these core updates mean and what do they do to businesses? Well, what do they do is that they can completely wipe you out of the first page of results if you’ve been someone ranking on the first page of results and make you not visible at all. Like we are hearing of people that actually have lost up to 90 percent of their organic traffic. OK. Over the last period of days. Right. And it’s…
Grace: [00:08:56] It’s the majority of them.
Liel: [00:08:57] Many people are right. But with that being said, here’s a tweet from another marketing expert that does law firm marketing. And here’s what he tweeted. Crazy Shifts is right. I just had a client skyrocket to number one for practically every personal injury term we’ve been targeting for him for the last five years. You go Google, right? So that’s that’s a happy story. That’s someone who’s actually been able to benefit or leverage so far. What the core update has done to their base.
Grace: [00:09:30] Not to interrupt your flow. But I want to bring in sort of our marketing tools. Do you remember the marketing tools that we did at the beginning of 2020? Yes. So that marketing tools that we implement and Gacovino and Lake Lake. So we actually had been producing content that’s relevant. All the things that we talked about that you need to rank well, not because you’re just trying to rank, but because you’re actually trying to serve the user. Right. So we actually had that same exact experience with this Google update as of this last week. In the last two weeks in particular, we started seeing some very interesting movement on our organic pages. And then just yesterday, I had a meeting with the Hennesy Consulting people. They managed some of our content and they were showing me the metrics. And the numbers have definitely gotten better for us at Gacovino and Lake. So it’s all about right, producing the right content for the people. And, you know, I’ll let you keep going with what you were saying. What does it mean for us? Right.
Liel: [00:10:35] Grace, I’m really happy to hear that you guys are actually looking good. And again, what these core update is doing is it doesn’t necessarily like the results. What we’re seeing right now. Right. Even if you are losing on ranking, even if you’re, if your listing has been removed from where it was usually sitting. Particularly if you’re one of those who used to be in position number one or page number one. And then you’re kind of like no longer there. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there is something wrong on your page. Right. But it’s still something that could maybe restabilizing get you back to somewhere close to where you were. Or or maybe not. Right. Or maybe not. Why? Because Google makes changes and gives different attributes, different priorities to ranking factors. And so the more we get to experience the core update and the more familiar we become with it. Which only is going to happen over time. The better we’re going to understand what needs to be done in order to get us back to where we where if we’re talking about a law firm who lost on ranking or how to retain where you have to actually end up landing after the core update, if that’s something that’s been beneficial for you. So what can you do to kind of like stay there?
Liel: [00:11:52] So, Grace, let me tell you, what are some of the things that we’ve been seeing on some of the markets that we do monitor war organic ranking. And to be very honest with you, it’s you know, it’s really some crazy stuff. So what we’ve seen, OK, in the best case scenario is just like a shuffle in positioning from the usual suspects who sits on the first page of search results. Right. That’s something that, you know, can happen also without a core update. But still, right now, it’s more visible. The guy who was in position number three, now he’s in position number one. And the one that was in one, now is in four. And so some sort of shuffling around those lines. Now, but here’s the interesting part, right? When we are looking in certain markets, what we are seeing, OK, is that when we are searching in mobile, what we’re seeing in some markets is that just under the local pack, the first three top organic results are being dominated by directories. Right. So, again, the usual suspects here. But what we are seeing in desktop is that the first three organic spots under the local pack are actual law firms. Right. So that’s something that we’ve seen happen in a few markets.
Liel: [00:13:16] And it’s interesting to see whether law firms will be able to make their, themselves a way to the first positions on organic search results under the local pack over directories. OK, now, Grace, here’s another thing that we’ve seen, because, as you know, we do a lot of Spanish marketing for law firms. And so what we’ve seen for Spanish terms is that law firms continue to retain in mobile that top organic spots right under the local pack, there can be one of the treetop spots gone to a directory. But usually, the first two or at least two out of the three are going to be actual law firms. Right. Which is a good thing.
Liel: [00:14:00] Now, Grace, here’s another thing that we’ve seen. We’ve really seen law firms who were ranking on position number one consistently and this has been applicable for both Spanish and English. We’ve seen them not just get wiped out of the first page of organic search results, but they’re not ranking, not even on page number three, four or five. Right. And so at this point, I’m not going to comment really about whether they be doing things that could be suspicious in the way that you could make you wonder whether they’re doing some kind of black hat SEO. But I can tell you that when you go to these SEO roundtable chats and forums, and all of these conversations, everyone across the board is complaining.
Liel: [00:14:49] But you can kind of see that those that follow black hat practices are the ones who are potentially seeing the worst of these happening on their sites. Right.
Grace: [00:15:02] Well, we kind of warned everybody about that, honestly, on just about every single one of our podcasts that you cannot do black hat. You cannot do gray hat. It will always come back to bite you, because guess what? Google does core updates and it has AI. So it’s constantly trying to learn natural language and why people sit on a page. So it’s a combination of things in SEO as we both know. Right. It’s the content, the user. It’s the reviews. It’s, there’s so many variables involved in making sure that you stay top of mind and useful that if you didn’t do that and you hadn’t been doing that, you’re going to fall off the rankings. It’s just a matter of fact, there’s no allowed gray hat. Do you remember the metta stuffing? I know we talked about that a long time ago.
Liel: [00:15:52] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Grace: [00:15:52] To me, it’s the same thing.
Liel: [00:15:54] Yeah. And so, I mean, I guess, Grace, you know, I don’t want to call the shots at this point. We don’t necessarily know whether these things are going to stay this way. I mean, we’ve only experienced this so far for really three and a half days, right? So we’re gonna have to wait and see how these end up consolidating into something more permanent. Now, Grace, here’s another thing that it’s been very interesting to see in some of the markets as well when it comes down to organic search results in desktop. And again, I’m looking here at what’s been happening under the local pack. And what’s really impressive, Grace is that now the first three or four organic results on the first page are actually being given to law firms who have frequently asked questions, structured the data in their Web site. And they’re actually listing three or four questions appearing kind of like as drop-down questions and answers on each one of these listings. And under the questions, there is also the review snippet, right. Which shows a star rating. And Grace it’s so prominent like it’s so prominent. It takes basically the entire top of the page or maybe even more of it when you’re actually experiencing it on desktop.
Liel: [00:17:23] And I think from the user experience, Grace, this is really, really good. Now we see these happen when people are searching for practice areas and not just general law firm businesses. Right. So let me give you an example. If I search for a personal injury lawyer, I’m not necessarily going to see this Q&A sort of listing, you know, with a snippet and all that stuff. I’m just going to see the regular listings. But if I were to search for a practice area plus lawyer like car accident lawyer, then I would see these actual search results that have the frequently asked questions snippets there and or review snippets. And I’m telling you from the user’s standpoint, it basically gives them a lot of information that almost kind of like makes it unnecessary for them having to go to the page and almost be able to make a decision right there from the search results page and looking at the listing. So Grace very, very powerful, very, very powerful. And as a matter of fact. In one of them, because, you know, I’m kind of like keeping this anonymous like I’m not trying out names or so forth and so on.
Liel: [00:18:36] But actually one friend of ours is actually benefiting and actually getting this in hands frequently asked questions, results showing very nicely for their Web site. So, yeah, I’ll tell you offline exactly who that is. But it’s really nice to see that, you know, some of our friends from In Camera podcast are actually benefiting from the car update now.
Liel: [00:18:59] Grace. Now, let’s talk about, you know, what happens when you’re not one of those people who are actually seeing good things coming out of this, so what? What should you do? Well, the reality is, as we were just saying like there’s nothing you can do other than just take a moment to review your Web site and just check that you’re following best practices. And another thing that we can actually include in the episode notes is a list of questions that you should review for yourself in case your website is being hit. So some considerations that you should have. And this comes directly out of Google, right? So we just gonna put a link to that in our episode notes. So go and have a look at it. But the reality is there’s not much that you can do right now because there are no specific guidelines as to what is it that you need to do in order to prevent these or who can you complain about it because you just cannot complain. That’s the that’s. And so, you know, it kind of puts into perspective like that’s what an SEO is. That’s what you get when you are introducing this kind of strategy into your mix, you’re kind of being left at the mercy of Google up to a certain not up to a certain extent entirely. Like you said. Yeah. This is Google and this is how they doing this, how they behave. And that’s what they’ve always done.
Liel: [00:20:20] So going back brace to what you and I have been saying over and over and over again, you can not just have one single strategy in place and just build your entire marketing around.
Liel: [00:20:33] Right. Because when this happens and when you get hit by these, these can have devastating effects on your business.
Liel: [00:20:42] But when you are actually having multiple strategies in place and you’re also being paid advertisings, whether that’s through Google, whether that’s through Facebook, whether that’s true or other media channels, then you have a mix of things that are going to keep you afloat. Right.
Liel: [00:20:57] And so that’s…
Grace: [00:20:59] Like we always say, that omnichannel marketing. Diversify your marketing channels, just put it in where you can in different places and you should always be testing that too.
Liel: [00:21:08] Yeah.
Grace: [00:21:08] To make sure you’re getting the best return on investment.
Liel: [00:21:11] Absolutely. Great. And so this is a good, kind of like a reminder to all of us as to you cannot just be playing the game of wanting to get to the first spot on Google because the reality is that that’s not permanent. You know, these things happen every, you know, several times a year. You know, they can be several of these updates, major updates every single year. And sometimes they’re minor and sometimes, like last year, as the last quarter of last year. There were several of them and some of them had some impact on local pack and stuff, but.
Liel: [00:21:47] Right. Nothing too crazy. This is massive. OK?
Grace: [00:21:50] This is massive.
Liel: [00:21:51] And so that’s why we want to make sure that everyone who is out there thinking, considering in the process, investing heavily on SEO keeps in mind that the diversification of their strategy is going to be fundamental to be protected when these things happen. OK, Grace. Now, there is another thing that I want us to talk about, because it’s the beginning of me, right? And we finally have some search volume numbers from keyword planner information taken out of Google Ads. Right. And so we did this last week, sorry, last month for those who listen. Basically, what we do Grace, we just put some general search queries that are high intent for different kinds of law firms and see how much volume was there in terms of searches are being searched in Google, particularly in the month of April. Right. And we compare it. How does that look against the previous month or the first few months of the year or even all the way back to 12 months, twelve months ago? Right, Grace?
Liel: [00:22:55] Because I’m going to tell you something before we even dive into these. It’s very impressive what you see like we’re in the middle of a pandemic. And when you look at the numbers like the search volumes, you wouldn’t be able to tell like. You wouldn’t be able to tell, like, if you like, let’s just set up a scene here. If the only thing that you would do as a person, OK, is.
Liel: [00:23:25] Hear the news . And that’s it. You would think that we are in a very, very, very, very, very bad place in the world about to end.
Liel: [00:23:35] And everything’s lost. Now, when you look at numbers like the ones I’m going to present to you now. You’re not going to necessarily be able to tell. So let me start Grace OK?
Grace: [00:23:50] OK.
Liel: [00:23:51] First ,ok. And so some things that are general for everything, because, of course, you know, as we’ve mentioned last month, we could spend weeks talking about search volume for different practice areas, in particular markets. But just for these one Grace, we’re going to keep it the very general we’re looking at the entire United States. OK. And so that’s basically what we’re doing. So we these extremely general. But at the end of the day, it’s a good way just to get a high-level overview of how to search volumes being looking like. So accident attorney. Grace, let me tell you something right. During April. We’ve had more search volume than we’ve had or comparable search volume than what we have in March. But here’s the thing. Both in March and April, we had higher search volume than there was in February and January of this year and substantially higher than what we saw in other months, like May, June, July of twenty nineteen. Right. And so here’s the one thing that we know for sure. People haven’t stopped searching and they haven’t stopped having the need for an attorney. Now, this is only telling us search volume. There’s another component here that it’s very important that we take into consideration, which is conversions. Right. Is how many of these people actually click, go visit a Web site or get or click on an ad and then converts? That’s a different story and that we really need to look on a case by case scenario. Right. It’s gonna be a little bit hard to generalize. I can tell you, Grace, from the data that we have, is that we’ll see a lot of people being interested. A lot of people researching. A lot of people wanting to find help. But just being a little bit more conservative when it comes down to the actual conversion.
Grace: [00:25:35] They’re taking more time in their journey.
Liel: [00:25:36] Correct.
Liel: [00:25:37] Because they’re not necessarily ready in some cases to take action because they may be concerned about what are the implications of initiating a claim at this point. Right. And so we cannot speak generalities here. There’s going to be circumstance where this is going to be applicable. There’s going to be scenarios where conversions rates have kept on par levels. But right now, what I’m telling you is just about search volume, OK?
Grace: [00:26:04] As a whole.
Liel: [00:26:05] As a whole. Let’s look at another search term that we looked last month, which is defense attorney, criminal defense attorney. OK, Grace? So on March, we saw that there was a small drop compared to February and January. In April, there was a tiny drop compared to March. But I like to zoom out further and not just look at this year and look at what happened last year as well. And I can tell you grades that the search volumes of April of 2020 are higher than the ones in May or June or even July of twenty nineteen. Okay. And so looking at it from that perspective, what we are learning is that people are still in need of help and representation as much as they needed it last year. OK. The only thing in what’s really been kind of like a trend for many practice areas is that this year started extremely strong in search volumes for many practice areas. So the numbers that were seen during the months of January and February at moments look like record high for some particular areas. Right.
Liel: [00:27:13] I mean, when we look at personal injury and stuff, it certainly looks like it. And so when you compare it against those first two months, yeah, it looks bad. But when you’re looking at the whole of Twenty, nineteen; these numbers are pretty standard and at times above what 2019 had. Right now, another one that we’ve included in the research we did last month, Grace is a divorce lawyer. So when we look at an update there, March, we saw that there was a slight drop from what we saw in February and January. Again, coming back to what we were just saying. January really high, kind of like had really high numbers. I don’t want to say record highs were certainly the highest for the last 12 months. But again, April numbers, Grace, are comparable to the numbers that we’ve seen in months, like November, October, September. I can go in June from last year. So nothing outrageous like, it’s that’s why I’m saying, like, if you think about what we are hearing in terms of what’s happening in the world right now, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying and I’m not downplaying the gravity of these circumstances in which we are.
Grace: [00:28:20] Not of course not.
Liel: [00:28:20] But if you were only basing your cell phone that data, you wouldn’t probably think that there would be much of interest on these other things. But the reality is that user behavior is showing us that there is as much interest as there was any other time of the past 12 months, with some exceptions.
Grace: [00:28:40] Well, you know you know how I like to relate everything to kind of consumer behavior, right? Because it’s not just law firms, but everybody. Right. How we behave in certain situations and how we buy or acquire things. And that includes, you know, they have time right now. A lot of people have more time than they ever had. So they have more time to actually research, look for and truly understand what it is that they’re buying. Right. In this case, they’re retaining an attorney. So they have the time to go see who this guy is, who he or she is, what their firm represents, what their social media looks like, you know, so they’ll take the time to go through that whole customer journey in a day in whereas before maybe they didn’t have as much time. So they’ll go through maybe two or three different locations to go find out about that specific firm, whereas now it’s OK. Now I have a little more time. Let me go see who they are and truly understand. OK. This is somebody that I want to represent me in my time of need. So as you and I were talking about the beginning, this is the time to take to assess your content, to look at it, to make sure that it’s speaking to people. As the search volumes are showing because they haven’t changed that much. Right. I mean, obviously, car accidents have gone down. I mean, people are less on the road. So, I mean, just think about those things in terms of the strategy and your practice areas. And there are still plenty of places for wins for these people, for the firms right now. There’s places for an opportunity to grow and adjust if you haven’t already done so, based on our podcasts from with the tools we gave you from the beginning of the year. Now’s the time. Now, still the time.
Liel: [00:30:21] Yeah. Grace. And so we have two more here. Search queries to look at. OK. And also following the same search queries that we’ve completed last month, estate planning attorney. Right. And so when we look at these particular search queries, we see that the number of queries is pretty similar to the one that we saw in March. So not a dramatic drop there at all. It’s actually very stable. And again, I mean, it’s not as high as, for instance, we saw in February, in January, which, again, you know, another example of a particular practice area that so really the highest number of searches coming through over the past 12 months on the first two months of this year. But I feel really good compared to other months in the past year, be that June or May of last year. So, again, people are searching now, Grace, you know, I always want to bring the Hispanic part into the conversation. And so I keep these very general as well. So in the United States, how many times the keyword abogado was searched in general and in relation to all kinds of practice areas. And so how does that compare to other months? And what I can feel, Your Grace, is that in April there were as many searches as they were in March.
Liel: [00:31:47] A little bit more. Okay. More than there were, for instance, in months like May and June of last year again. Right and other months, like November of last year. And so my takeaway here is that none of these numbers are giving your reasons to back down from your digital presence.
Grace: [00:32:09] Right.
Liel: [00:32:10] If anything, these numbers are telling you is that there is still a lot of interest and a lot of people who are researching and going, and some of them taking action and starting their claims and hiring attorneys today. Right. And so, again, these are not information that we’re pulling out from random sources. This is all information that you can go to and look at it yourself. If you have access to a keyword planner tool from Google, which you can get access to easily by opening a Google Ads account and just look at it yourself. And you know what? If you, if you don’t know how to do it yourself. Shoot does an e-mail and we’ll be more than happy to look at specific search queries that are important to your law firm in your particular market. And we’ll tell you we’ll show you black and white what’s actually happening. OK?
Grace: [00:32:58] Right, it’s in the numbers guys, it’s, there’s no guesswork really involved. Truly, there’s no guesswork. It is a strategy. It is science. And that’s what Liel does for a living. So, you know, what we’re talking about here is not something that we just decided or figured out on our own. It’s mathematical science behind how this works. And we can help with that. And Liel can help with that. So I really just wanted to mention something and kind of tie in the search and digital marketing, because I know obviously with the pandemic, a lot of people are having, are struggling. You know, they’re struggling with money for even just their employees. So I think it’s super important to note here, guys, that. There are still things that you can do in the digital marketing presence that I have seen other firms do. And we are doing, as a matter of fact, we are still continuing. In a word, we are lucky in that we’ve been able to maintain the employees we have. We haven’t had, you know, too much of any kind of a drop-in, you know, certain campaigns and things like that because we run mass torts primarily. So for us, it’s been, you know, a good time that we can still continue to give back to the community. You know, we’re running a scholarship program that expires in July.
Grace: [00:34:09] It’s for special needs. Those with autism and any special needs can apply.
Liel: [00:34:15] Very cool.
Grace: [00:34:15] I’m mentioning this so that you can, you know, other firms that are listening. You know, if you want to please send it out to, you know, those who might be interested in your group or your clients, you know, please offer it up to them as well. So what I’m saying, the reason I’m mentioning that is that there are still things that they can do as a firm to help their own community, their own employees, even. And they can put a digital marketing presence to it and still give back and still be seen. Right. And we talked about this before. Liel actually mentioned that in a previous podcast where they put out an ad that all it said was thank you. Right. One of those firms that you mentioned before.
Liel: [00:34:57] Yeah. We had a conversation last week with Jenny and Donna. Right? Amongst the different things that law firms have gone to give back to the community to switch. And actually, Grace, thank you for bringing that up. But I was yesterday talking with one of the radio stations that we work within New York, New Jersey, the Tri-State area. And so, you know, we were just having a general conversation of how everyone, every single person that’s doing media advertising right now shifted their message in a way or another for it to be of support towards the community, for it to be more of community outreach. And it is just, you know, it’s the appropriate thing to do. Any other thing, honestly, can be perceived and could have a tone-deaf effect at the end of the day. So I think, yes, across the board, you know, you need to be sensitive to the times and give priorities where you should be given Grace. The only thing before we jump into our next conversation here is that I just want to go back and talk a little bit about, you know, where is the search coming from? Because device use is just super important when you’re looking to certain strategies.
Liel: [00:36:08] And so when we’re looking primarily at all of the English search terms, most of the search queries, of course, are coming through desktops. We’ve seen a tremendous increase in high intent search queries coming now from desktop devices. We obviously attribute these to the fact that people are now at home and they’re using their own computers and they don’t have to rely on their mobile phones as much as they do when they’re out and about in their normal lives. Right. And so that’s why this abuse, which has gone up the only market segment where we continue to see that most of the search queries are coming from mobile is the Spanish speaking market. Right. And so that’s remained consistent. I didn’t go. I didn’t make a differentiation on that one on one as we went through them, because on all of them consistently, desktop has been increasing and mobile has either retained were it was or dropped a little bit, as I said, with exception of the Spanish speaking market. Okay Grace.
Grace: [00:37:12] It’s funny. I want to mention something to that. Exactly. Because, you know, we’re both Hispanic. So I could talk about it. You know, my mom, my dad. It’s funny that you say that because my mom doesn’t like using a desktop and never has. We do have one at home. And my you know, my dad uses it and always has. Whereas my mom, because she’s you know, she goes out, my dad is disabled. So he stays at home and my mom goes out and, you know, she works retail. So she’s always used her mobile device and she still continues to use her mobile device for everything she does. So it’s funny that you said that, that in the Spanish market, my mom is, you know, primarily Spanish speaking. She prefers the Spanish language. And so she just uses her mobile device. She won’t go on the desktop. And she doesn’t like going on a desktop because she’s used to her mobile device. So it’s very interesting to tie that, you know, personal experience that I see why that’s happening.
Liel: [00:38:03] Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely, Grace. And that’s you know, there are several reasons behind why Hispanics are power mobile users.
Grace: [00:38:12] Yes.
Liel: [00:38:12] But it’s something that we’ve pretty much known.
Grace: [00:38:16] We’ve known.
Liel: [00:38:16] Since 2014, right?
Grace: [00:38:18] Yes.
Liel: [00:38:19] That Hispanics have been at a lead of mobile use in it’s…
Grace: [00:38:23] Forever. And WhatsApp. Right. And yeah…
Liel: [00:38:25] And it’s obviously very advantageous when it comes down for marketing to law firms, because if you’re a preferred method of conversion is a phone call. Well, what a better way to achieve that, than by driving mobile traffic to your website…
Grace: [00:38:43] Click the call.
Liel: [00:38:43] or to your landing pages, correct.
Grace: [00:38:46] Right, reduce the cost. Yeah.
Liel: [00:38:47] Yeah. So anyhow, with that being said, Grace, I know you know, we wanted it also to be able to do even if it’s a little bit of Mass Torts in this episode. But can you just give us kind of like a little bit of a teaser as to what we can expect next week when we jump into to talking about automation and data mining?
Grace: [00:39:10] Certainly. So for those of you that do know me and those of you that don’t know, I’m the V.P. of marketing for not just Gacovino and Lake but also persist communications. And so it’s an automation software. It integrates with the CRM and it automatically calls, emails and text messages, prospects or clients that are already in your CRM in your firm’s case management software or CRM. So with regards to automation, it’s beyond important to have the entire process as much as possible automated. What do I mean by that? Literally, from the moment that you, that person either calls, emails, texts to you, whatever mode of communication that they prefer. You need to be there to receive it. One. Two, actually take it into your case management software or your lead management software like Lead Docket as an example. Once it comes in, you need to have some kind of a process that they get called within the first five minutes, if that’s possible, if that’s their requested method of communication. Now, if they sent you an email said, please e-mail me back or they said a chat, you know, or text, please text me back. You were going to respond in that same method. So you need a process and automation involved so that they can get responded to in the way that they requested.
Liel: [00:40:29] Ok. Grace, so you’re going to explain those a little bit as to how you can implement something like that for your law firm. Right?
Grace: [00:40:36] Yes.
Liel: [00:40:36] And also, you will talk to us a little bit as to how to find potential leads within your database of clients for Mass Torts. Is that correct?
Grace: [00:40:50] That is correct. So that’s what I refer to as data mining.
Liel: [00:40:53] Ok, excellent, Grace. So thank you very much for that. And again, like, you know, we’ve been trying to get back to Mass Torts like for the last two weeks, but things just have been kind of like happening and just putting themselves in front of the Mass Torts conversation. But because, you know, we want to make sure that we set expectations and people can know what to expect when it comes down to our next topic on data mining and automation. That’s a little teaser. Grace, thank you so much for that. And we’ll get to that next week. In the meantime, have a great rest of your week. Stay safe and talk to you soon. OK
Grace: [00:41:30] You too Liel.
Liel: [00:41:31] All right. Take care. Great. Thanks. Bye bye.
Liel: [00:41:37] If you like our show, make sure you subscribe. Tell your co-workers. Leave us a review and send us your questions at ask@incamerapodcast.com We’ll see you next week.
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