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"To effectively leverage GEO, law firms should create high-quality content that directly addresses your audience’s questions and is optimized for AI processing," writes 9Sail founder Joseph Giovannoli.
November 01, 2024 at 10:03 AM
7 minute read
The online search environment is changing rapidly, fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence-driven search engines like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity. This means that traditional search engine optimization (SEO) techniques alone are no longer sufficient to ensure that your law firm appears in all relevant search results. To stay competitive, law firms must embrace the next evolution in search marketing: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
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Gyi Tsakalakis founded AttorneySync because lawyers deserve better from their marketing people. As a non-practicing lawyer, Gyi…
After leading marketing efforts for Avvo, Conrad Saam left and founded Mockingbird Marketing, an online marketing agency…
Conrad and Gyi take an early look at Clio’s foray into website design and the connection between lawyers and ramen noodles. Plus, some quick takeaways from the brand new 2022 Clio Legal Trends Report.
Continuing its effort to be your law firm’s one-stop shop, Clio is now entering the website design and hosting arena. Is Clio’s new offering, which specializes in sites for lawyers and seamlessly integrates with the Clio universe, going to be the answer to getting your firm out there on the web? Will all its bells and whistles get you noticed, get you to the top of SEO rankings, and bring in clients? The guys share their appreciations and hesitations on Clio’s new service, and how it compares to website builders in general.
And then, it’s time to get Econ nerdy. We all see what’s going on with the markets these days, and all feel the rising costs. Maybe you haven’t quite yet started swapping out your nice flank steak for a can of Spam and your linguine alle vongole for a bowl of ramen, but you’re feeling that grocery bill just a bit more. The guys get into how lawyers should be thinking about their pricing as buying power goes down and the demand for legal services, counterintuitively, goes up.
Plus, important insights from the new, 2022, Clio Legal Trends report. What are the most important things to a potential client? Survey says: you’ll have to listen to find out!
The News:
Special thanks to our sponsors CallRail and Clio.
Intro:  Before we get started, we want to thank our sponsors.  Clio, Laya, Posh Virtual Receptionist and NODA.
Conrad Saam:  Hey Gyi, how was Nashville man?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Amazing.
Conrad Saam:  All right.  Can you tell our good listeners what you’re doing in the City of Bachelorette Parties?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  I was at the Magnificent Clio Cloud Conference 2022.  One of my not-to-be-missed conferences at the Gaylord Opryland Resort.  You ever been there?
Conrad Saam:  I have not.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  It’s hard to describe.  Bob Ambrose does a nice job of trying to articulate it at LawNext.  So, check out his review, but it is quite a spectacle.  Indoor water parks, they got a river, a boat.
Conrad Saam:  You’ve got a river?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Inside a river.  It’s kind of like if Disney World was all inside.
Conrad Saam:  And country.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  And Country and Vegas Hotel kind of, I don’t know.  There’s a lot going on in there.  It’s a heck of a thing.
Conrad Saam:  What was your favorite part of ClioCon?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  You know, I always say this, but man, they have an amazing community at Clio and you can just tell.  It’s like the energy when you go to ClioCon, it’s something you really have to see all the way from the Clions, these are the people that work at Clio, their entrance, the support they provide attendees, the people who are there in terms of expertise and it’s just very like forward-thinking innovative people in legal.  Whether it’s lawyers, whether it’s consultants whether its technology, people, it’s is just — it’s quite a thing.  I highly recommend ClioCon to everybody.
Conrad Saam:  Next year, we expect to see all of you at ClioCon.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  I already bought my ticket — they give you a big discount if you buy it before.  Well, we’re recording this after October 15, so you must have missed it.
Conrad Saam:  Yup, too late.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Prices are only going up, they’re not going down, right?  You snooze you lose everyone, snooze you lose.  Inflation is here.  In addition to the Gaylord Opryland Resort, what are we talking about today?
Conrad Saam:  Well as usual, we’re going to start with the news.  Lots of interesting news coming out, including a big announcement that came from the Gaylord Opryland Resort ClioCon.  So stay tuned for that.   And we’re going to go back.  One of the things that we’ve talked a lot about regularly and this is hot off the press now, is takeaways from the 2022 Clio Legal trends report, and now time for some music.
[Music]
Conrad Saam:  Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, it is time for the news.  Well continuing on our theme of Clio.  Clio now has bunch of updates.  We had websites, which we’re going to come back around to, later on this segment.  Texting and better integration.  So, we’re all of the announcements out of Clio what you expected, Gyi?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  I’ll be honest, I didn’t see websites coming, I’m not surprised texting, some of the better integration stuff, I mean look, the vision here is to make the operating system the platform, the only software you need stay inside Clio for Lawyers.  So, they made some great strides in realizing that vision from my perspective.  And you know, they want to support lawyers, helping their clients all the way through the Clio Service Consumer journey.  I think that they’ve made some strides on that for sure.
Conrad Saam:  Great.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah.
Conrad Saam:  Next in the news, Gonzalez versus Google.  Give us the top-level don’t read.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  You know, I’m certainly not a Section 230 expert and you know, we’ve had Professor Goldman on.  I know you recently chatted with a Section 230 expert, short version is this, both sides of the political spectrum seemed to be questioning whether or not the internet should be this liability free zone for users and platforms.  Will put a link to the box article but, looks like the Supreme Court’s going to take a look.  Oh, maybe, I don’t know, we’ll see what the Supreme Court does with this one, be interesting.  But you know, in the context of we’ve talked about this many, many times, you know, it’s fake reviews.  It’s misinformation, you know, there’s all this stuff going on out there and it’s like, is that just for better and worse, buyer beware, or should there be some accountability and liability for either the platforms or perhaps the people.  You know, certainly my view is this, it’s pretty easy from a fake review standpoint, and I think the FTC is probably going to start.  I think they’re already cracking down on this a bit more, but if you buy fake reviews, if you’re publishing fake reviews, it’s very easy to fall under violations of your rules professional conduct, and I think also running afoul of the FTC’s rules.
(00:05:13)
Conrad Saam:  So, all right, Section 230 change is coming, we’ll break the internet as we know it.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Maybe —
Conrad Saam:  I’m a big Section 230 fan.  Okay, Google Business Profile.  Now this is not news.  The only news is that nothing has changed.  If you are a regular listener to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, you will have heard us last session and possibly even the session before that, talking about the problems with Google Business Profiles.  Gyi, what are the problems with Google Business Profiles and why are, at least I am continuing to recommend to people, play MC Hammer and don’t touch this?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  The root problem is that Google doesn’t make any money off of Google Business Profiles.
Conrad Saam:  You cynic.  Okay, for those of you who had the over-under of four minutes before Gyi got cynical about Google, you are now winning.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  The short version is that people are getting suspended for all sorts of things that they shouldn’t be getting suspended for.  And so, you know, if Google Business Profile, Local Pack Visibility makes up a big percentage of your lead generation or your reputation validation when people searches on your name, which it does for most of you that have it.  I guess the way I would respond to Conrad’s like “don’t touch this” is, don’t touch this unless you absolutely, absolutely have to.  So, put it that way.
Conrad Saam:  Or don’t touch this unless there’s nothing to lose, right?  If you’re not winning right now —
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah, if you’re not getting phone calls, if you don’t have any reviews on your profile, great time to experiment.
Conrad Saam:  And if you don’t know, if you’re not getting any phone calls from Google Business Profile, you might want to update your internet tracking.  Anyway, that’s a different —
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Don’t know Google Business Profile, you better go learn right now because where have you been?  You obviously never listened to us.
Conrad Saam:  Pay Gyi hundreds of dollars to learn about what that is.  Okay, a bunch of good conferences coming up, Gyi.  We’ve got, (00:06:59) the Great Legal Marketing is set to kick off.  You just had Clio.  This seems to be the very, very heavy conference season.  Any others that you wish you could go to?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Not just wish, but I may be attending the AAJ Winter Convention, that is not until February though.  Of course, got a plug Tech Show in March.
Conrad Saam:  Tech Show, March.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah.  But you know, I mean again, if you’ve been feeling like you’re kind of on an island managing your firm, get to one of these great shows because, you know, as much as I ranted against conferences before and in fact, Bob actually, Ambrose at LawNext, he  actually made a critique that it was the first time he felt like ClioCon was a little more pitchy than usual.  But, you know, I think some of that’s — maybe I’m hedging a little bit from my last rant about this.  Think some of it is the nature of the beast, you know, these conferences are for vendors, they’re vendor funded.  But there’s so much to learn.  I mean, I can’t tell you just being around people that are like thinking differently about law practice, it’s so valuable.
Conrad Saam:  Get out of your box.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Get out of your box.
Conrad Saam:  And finally, in full disclosure, I’m an investor in this company so I am happy to bring this to you, but just know where I’m coming from.  Justice For Me those of you who have heard me talk about Justice For Me in the past.  This is a company that will offer financing directly to a consumer and their need for legal services.  So instead of you running the risk of that consumer not paying you, they will actually take that risk for you and guarantee that payment to you. They just raised 10 million dollars in debt funding.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Good for them.
Conrad Saam:  I’m super psyched about this.  I really, you know, I got into the legal market back in 2006.  I talked to Mark Britton at the time and he talked to me about how technology was going to make the legal service world much more accessible to lots of people.  It feels like that is moving very, very slowly but services like this make that available.  And so, I was really excited for them to make that debt funding race.  We’ve already talked about money, let’s have some ads and then we’re going to get back into this.  Talking about what Clio launched at their conference, the Legal Trends Report.  We’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time and here it is.
Female Speaker:  As a lawyer, ever wish you could be in two places at once?  You can take a call while you’re in court, capture a lead during a meeting, that’s where Posh comes in.  We’re live virtual receptionist who answer and transfer your calls so you’ll never miss an opportunity.  And the Posh app lets you control when your receptionist steps in.  So if you can’t answer, Posh can.  And if you’ve got, Posh is just a tap away.  With Posh, you can save as much as 40% off your current service provider’s rates.  Start your free trial today at posh.com.
Male Speaker:  76% of lawyers say they are overworked and part of the problem is tedious tasks like manually retyping information when drafting.  Lawyaw’ s document automation enables law firms to fill sets of word-based documents in court forms cutting legal drafting time by 80%.
(00:10:07)
Use intuitive features like conditional logic and e-sign to simplify drafting and improve client experience.  Learn more at lawyaw.com.  That’s L-A-W-Y-A-W.com.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  And now it’s time for the Legal Trends Report minute brought to you by Clio hot off the presses.  It’s the 2022 Legal Trends Report minute.  Here’s a fact about lawyers who switched jobs in the last 12 months.  37% of them move firms in pursuit of better work-life balance.  Given the irregular schedules, and long hours that lawyers often dedicate to their clients, it’s no surprise that many are willing to leave in pursuit of a more manageable work life.  The unfortunate result is that staff turnover can be incredibly disruptive for both you and your clients.  You know, this is an interesting one.  Again, so grateful for the Legal Trends Report in general, new edition.  I think we’ll even go deeper and have some more segments about it.  There’s so much good stuff in there, so go get it.  But, yeah, lawyers are like a lot of other industries, folks moving jobs and reprioritizing what’s important to them.  Late nights and long hours are not as important to folks as they maybe they once were.
Conrad Saam:  You know, I don’t know if you saw this post and I’m blanking on the name of the firm.  This was a corporate marketing department that switched firms, not just a person, but the entire department switched firms in —
Gyi Tsakalakis:  I saw that headline, I’m blanking out too.
Conrad Saam:  I’m blanking on the names but, and, and it really was around work-life balance, right?  And so it was just a — that was surprising for me to see a team of people deciding to get up and switch.  That must have been a really interesting negotiation and a bit of a shock, right?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Totally.
Conrad Saam:   So work-life balance is important.  We talk about this probably not enough.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  For more information on what law firms can do to keep good people, download Clio’s Legal Trends Report for free at clio.com/trends.  All right.  Well as Conrad mentioned, one of the announcements from ClioCon was that Clio is entering the website builder game and as I fish seriously joked on Twitter, the SEO game.  So Conrad, you were still learning about Clio’s product and we don’t want to just go deep, we will put a link to Clio’s product page.  But you know, we’ve talked about website builders.  What are some things that lawyers that might be considering Clio’s website builder to be thinking about in asking about in the context of website builders?
Conrad Saam:  Well, you know, I have been — I will go on the record as saying I was completely wrong in thinking that Clio would never do this.  Mainly because from an executive respective, I know some people have a lot of influence there who are really, really reticent about launching websites for Avo.  And then when they did that, it was frankly, a flaming disaster.  The Avo websites were terrible and it was a bad experience for customers and it was a bad experience for Avo internally.  So I was really surprised to see this and the the answer to your question is built into the history there.  A business that is funded by venture capital is looking to scale, right?  So you need to understand that as the background and so the only way — and the problem with doing websites as Gyi and I know, absolutely painfully well, is that there is a subjective side to the design of a site.  There is a subjectivity to it that is by definition not scalable.  And so I think when you are thinking about Clio specifically, you need to have that as a background understanding of you’re probably going to get what is a well-done, but very, very templated approach to a site.  Now, Gyi, the sites that we’ve looked at so far.  And I want to talk about generic, about some of the other non-WordPress sites and we talked about WordPress Builders as well.  But the sites that we’ve seen from Clio so far, they I think fair to say are somewhat simplistic.  The ones we’ve seen live are single page, right?  So you can navigate two sections within a page.  They do have real time booking functionality that I think is really fascinating, that is going to probably dovetailed directly into Clio Grow.  But speaking of Clio Grow, this is built as out of the box as being a subdomain of Clio Grow right, which I would see as a more problematic.  If I recall correctly, you can actually move that to your own domain, is that correct?
(00:15:06)
Gyi Tsakalakis:  And so, you know, like many of the proprietary website builders, you know, they’re giving you the product, they’re giving the platform.  You always talk about, they’re giving you the car, not the gas.  And so, you know, the idea here is its low cost, do it yourself but if you don’t know about creating a custom domain, if you don’t know about things like robots.txt file, if you don’t know about things like HTX access files and 301 redirects, we have no idea how Clio is going to support the product, right?  It’s very, very new, that’s why we give them the benefit of the doubt.  But as we notice, there are Clio Grow websites that are currently indexed in Google that are on the cliogrow.com subdomain, which is not optimal from an SEO perspective.  And you know, as we’ve talked about many, times it’s like whether it’s GoDaddy or Wix or Linux or whatever I mean even WordPress out of the box they don’t always do work the way that you think that they should work.  I look at this as like in the conversation of the proprietary versus WordPress thing, you know plus side, keep it simple, do-it-yourself, low-cost.  I think one of the coolest things that they’re doing is they’re actually using some of your Clio data to populate some of the stuff on the site.  Which I think is a really, really cool idea, right?  So like, you know, if you have an — I’m just making something about, I’m not going to do this.  But if you have an average response time to matters in Clio, maybe they published your response time, which is obviously very important to potential clients on your website.  That’s a very cool thing in my opinion.  But that being said it’s like it’s this classic lineup — is the same thing where it’s like oh out-of-the-box your SEO friendly or SEO optimized like, you know, your (00:16:57) start searching lawyers near me and your website is going to pop up.  It’s like well, not necessarily.
Conrad Saam:  So my take is I feel like they may have taken the shroud off the sculpture before it was completed.  And I think there’s a lot of opportunity.  I’d like to see more of this.  If I was advising you on this kind of low-cost do-it-yourself approach, my advice would be I think it’s going to get better and this is probably not the example where you want to be an early adopter, right?  I think we’re going to see some better examples.  I think we’re going to see things built out a little bit better, but this might not be one where — this is where the cutting edge may become the bleeding edge, right?  And it’s probably going to get better.  I just want to see that before you decide to jump into this.  The other thing Gyi, just as we’re talking about this, I think in the back of this from you and me, we have this, maybe it’s a level of arrogance although it’s probably built on experience here that WordPress is the answer, right?  If it’s not WordPress, it’s garbage.  That is also not necessarily true, and I think that you run the risk of having just as many problems with WordPress if it’s not done well either, right?  So it’s not like —
Gyi Tsakalakis:  That’s right.
Conrad Saam:  Oh, I’ve got WordPress and now I have an SEO optimized site which I often hear from people.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Well, that’s what I tell people too is like, because I’m always like, let’s just use WordPress even though I agree with you, WordPress can create the same issues and in fact WordPress, probably, you know, WordPress is like the “Salesforce” of website builders, right?  So it does ton of things very configurable.  I mean, it’s not open source so that’s maybe not a good combination with — maybe like more like Zoho.  That’s probably too inside baseball for people.  But the point is, is that I don’t really care what platform you’re on.  You know what I care about does it load fast?  Does it look great on mobile?  Is it reducing the friction between someone who’s searching for information about you or your firm and getting to signing up for a consultation or a contact to you?  Like, that’s what I care about.  And I think of the Seth Godin pretty websites, like it doesn’t really — I don’t care how pretty it is.  I don’t care about the subjectivity part.  Is it converting or not and are we able to configure it in a way that optimizes it for the experience of those potential clients?  Because otherwise, who cares, I don’t care.
Conrad Saam:  Hold on, let me — I need to get a push back on that because —
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Go ahead.  Push away.
Conrad Saam:  And I think you’re going to agree with me.  I think you do care if a law firm is beholden to a proprietary platform that they can’t get away from without either great expense, technical effort or starting over, right?  That is problematic, that’s massively problematic.  So, I do think that is one of those cases where you find yourself on a platform that no one else can work on.  You’re stuck, right.  Your vendor now owns your relationship and owns the site.  And if you want to do things on that site that they’re not interested in like — go pounce in, buddy.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Oh that’s why I always say just use WordPress but I was trying not to.  In fact I was trying to give the others but — I mean look, you got to balance, right?  This is like everything else.
(00:20:02)
There’s no silver bullet for everything, Squarespace and Wix has done a really good job of moving forward from an SEO perspective and giving some more configuration options.  It’s a balance between time, the cost that you’re going to put in and your experience working with some of these platforms.  But yes, like you don’t want to be beholden but if it’s you know, I’m just making something up.  But if your platform is a dollar a month and it does all the things that you needed to do, and it’s converting like I don’t care.  But your point, if you ever want to switch, that’s where the issue comes in.  And guess what, by the way, for the most part, most of the proprietary, CMS solutions that you see especially in legal, they’re not the most affordable option anyway.  They’re not very configurable.
Conrad Saam:  That’s true.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  They don’t have all of the advantages of like the Wix and Squarespace has.  They don’t have.
Conrad Saam:  That is a great caution, right?  The funny thing is, the more expensive the platforms are, you’re often giving up that flexibility, right?  I think that is a very salient point.  And with that, we’re going to come back in a moment.  But we’re going to take a little break right now and we’re going to speak later on about Spam, Ramen and Lawyers.
And I don’t mean spam as in stuff you get in your inbox you don’t want.  I mean the stuff that you get out of a can in an economic downturn.
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Gyi Tsakalakis:  So to the five people who are listening to this podcast, you didn’t leave us any reviews from the last episode.  And so this is my reminder, to give us some feedback.  Tell us what you want to hear about.  Leave us a review.  If you just landed here, subscribe, we’re on Apple podcast and Spotify and tell a friend, you know, hey check out Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, share the episode.  We’d love to hear from you and for those that do listen frequently, we do appreciate it.  Let us know what you think.  Thanks so much.
Conrad Saam:  And please, if you are a website product manager, at Clio, do not, leave us a review.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  No, leave us a review.
Conrad Saam:  We would love — actually, you know what?  We would love to have you come on the show and talk about the product.  How’s that for an invite?  Now, I talked about Spam and ramen and lawyers and the reason we talk about this, one of the things that came out of the Clio Legal Trends Report, it kind of the top level on this was that lawyers are not keeping.  Lawyers’ pricing and business models are not keeping up with changes in inflation.  Meaning basically, you are discounting your services over time and we talked about this last week.  We presciently saw this coming, Gyi, and then, boom!  It shows up in the Clio Legal Trends Report.  Bob Ambrose did an interesting cover on this one.  Make sure that that goes in the show notes.  But the reason I talk about Spam and ramen, there’s a macroeconomic theory of the counter-cyclical demand product.  What the heck does that mean? For those of you —
Gyi Tsakalakis:  That’s MBA talk right there.
Conrad Saam:  No that’s econ.  That even nerdier than MBA talk.  That is —
Gyi Tsakalakis:  They don’t teach that in law school.
Conrad Saam:  Microeconomics and it basically talks about there are some products out there that the worst the economy is, the greater the demand for that product and Spam is an obvious one because as your micro econ teacher will tell you, people will start replacing their strip steak with canned Spam, right?  So they’re still getting meat but it’s not high-end.  And it’s an interesting perspective.  You know, when we dealt with the economic downturn brought about by COVID, there was a downturn for legal because people weren’t driving and getting in wrecks, people weren’t driving drunk, the courts were close, like nothing was happening.  And so there was kind of this reduction.  But Gyi, can you talk about how in an economic downturn, we actually may see an increase in the demand for Legal Services.  And therefore no reason to keep your pricing as it were.
(00:25:03)
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah.  And so again go check out the Legal Trends Report but one of the big headlines was kind of this interesting situation where demand for lawyers is up and if you’re wondering about (00:25:14), I don’t understand.  It’s like, well think about it, economic hardship times create more stress, more anxiety can put stress on families, put stress on personal finance.  So, you think bankruptcy, family law —
Conrad Saam:  Crime?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Crimes.  Sadly crime, that’s where I was going.
Conrad Saam:  Oh, sorry.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Said all those, right?  Those are all — but you know this is what a lot of consumer facing lawyers.  Help people navigate is some of these tougher issues and so, Legal Trends Report demand for legal services up and we don’t know the — unfortunately they don’t segment it by practice or at least that I didn’t see.  So, we don’t know specifically which segments are particularly up but the pricing is not keeping pace.  So, lawyers are — they’re not raising their hourly rates there to a large extent still even though legal service and consumers want this.  They’re not changing their pricing models.  And the short answer is that the way I look at it is this, look things get more expensive if you don’t address the pricing issue.  At best, it’s cutting a little bit into your margin but eventually, there’s an inflection point where like you’re not keeping up with being able to like pay your bills, right?
Conrad Saam:  Or do a great job for your clients, right?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Right.  And again, this is nothing to and we talked about this in the context of like the wellness stuff but like, if your pricing is causing you to have financial strain and hardship and stress and anxiety, to Conrad’s point, this is the thing I think a lot of lawyers don’t connect is that you’re not doing the best you possibly can for your clients.  And I would talk to lawyers all the time, they’re like, lawyers are outside of this, like we just do great for clients no matter what.  And I’m like, you know what — and then you wonder why the lawyers index high for substance abuse issues and all of the family issues that we talked about, you got to take care of yourself and part of taking care of yourself and taking care of your business, because it is a business not just a hobby for many of you, is to understand your pricing in a time of historic inflation growth.
Conrad Saam:  All right, so change of pricing to queue for its great time to up your rates, even for existing clients who have been sticking with you, they’re happy with you.  Great time to up your rates Q4, okay.  The other things that came out of the Legal Trends Report from Clio that I was really excited because I guaranteed, I made a promise during the last podcast that in the top three things that people care about when they are hiring a lawyer was going to be responsiveness.  The responsiveness of the lawyer being in the top three, Gyi, was I right?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  You were, number three responsiveness.  And again, you know, we covered responsiveness, the expectations around speed and responsiveness are only getting higher.
Conrad Saam:  So, go back and listen to our conversation on Sales Velocity if you’re wondering what we mean by responsiveness, but that’s the last podcast episode, go back and listen to that.  What was number one, and two, Gyi?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Number one was reviews, which I think that — yeah I’m not really surprised by that one, right?  I mean, I stare at way too many local packs every day and I will tell you, even when it’s like local pack of lawyers that I know, even though I know that the “best lawyer” of the three, the reviews jump out.  I mean, we are trained by Amazon to shop on reviews.  Now, again, the cynical downside Section 230 problem is that there’s a ton of fake reviews in there and people shouldn’t rely just on reviews, but let me tell you, they do.  Every study Google does every study Amazon does it always comes back, people are using reviews as a big part of the equation in making these decisions.
Conrad Saam:  Yeah.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Even professional services I mean it’s just it is, it is what it is.
Conrad Saam:  Hate it, you might tell me that you’re a better lawyer than all the people with all the great reviews and no one knows it because of the reviews.  Alright what was number two, Gyi?
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Two is proximity.  We’ve actually — yeah we talked about this one before especially in the context of like ads and conversion rates but you know, I’ll set it up, personal injury lawyers always say, you know, who’s your target audience, who’s your target market?  Oh well, you know, for the right injury case —
Conrad Saam:  I will go across Texas, baby.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah, I’ll go anywhere.  But again, for the legal services consumer, locality matters, and this was interesting even in the context of they don’t care if you’re not at your office.  They don’t care if you’re working from home, they don’t care if they’re having virtual meetings with you but they want to know you’re nearby.  And so, things like your area code and your phone number, where you actually keep your address, your familiarity with local stuff going on, it matters a lot to legal services consumers.
00:30:12
Conrad Saam:  That for me, was a very pleasant surprise because, you know, I wrote the book On the Map, it went out to the ABA right before COVID happened, where we literally are not dealing with the office, right? Where you’re literally not thinking about the office.  And the whole premise of my book was that proximity matter.  So it was interesting to see that this still has persisted.  There’s a great quote out of the Legal Trends Report that says, despite client’s preferring virtual meetings, so they do not want to come into your office, they do care that you are local.  That was a really big insight for me.  And yet you know, some of the things that we’ve talked about regularly, Gyi, are things around, you know, being involved in the community, right?  Actually, having a presence, that localized recognition.  It is a Really important thing and the extent to which — and this has been — I think the ugly flip side of this is, you know, it’s really easy to create that new office, you know, an hour and a half away from me, that’s never staffed and throw up a GBP profile and all of a sudden you now have a competitor there.  What can you do as the real local business to insulate yourself from losing clients to those offices that really are just the skeletons?  I think that is the flipside of this.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah.  And again, not for every practice area not for every type of client but I will tell you location, local community, it’s an affinity people.  Like to know, I mean we talked about this with like you know, the Chicago guys.  Like they want to know.  Oh yeah.  You know Chicago or you know Detroiter and really those are big markets but like in my local suburban community. people want to know that stuff.  Like are you from the area?  Do you know the area?  Are you familiar with it?  And and it’s not even a logic thing, it’s much you know, talking about the Aristotelian modes of persuasion, it’s much more pathos than it is logos —
Conrad Saam:  I love it.  Yeah, Gyi’s philosophy degree, making an entrance at Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  It’s an emotional connection that — and again lawyers don’t think about this, right?  It’s like well, I have the most experience, I’m the only lawyer who does this.  I’m the hardest fighter but again, it can just be like, it’s someone from my community.  You know, we go to the same whatever it is, whether it’s, you know, the elementary school, my kids go to the same school, that stuff matters a ton for legal services, consumers.  And so what do you do, well, you’ve got to do content marketing include location as part of your affinity in your content marketing, talk about what you’re doing in the community, talk about the places you like to eat, talk about the events that are going on because that’s going to resonate with those local consumers.
Conrad Saam:  Yeah, they absolutely. Number four was interesting to me, we’re going to talk to number four because I feel like there’s a lot of resistance to this and we talked about, you know, upping your hourly rates.  But number four was billing type.  What the business model you are employing?  Are you charging hourly clients really seem to want and expect options beyond that hourly rate?  And yet there has been a digging in of the heels among legal committee to do that.  So, I think the demand that you’re seeing from clients what they’re valuing is a different model by and large of what many of you are serving up.
Gyi Tsakalakis:  Yeah, I think that might be an opportunity for a future episode on different business models.  We’ve touched down in the past but it’s obviously a big thing.  And then number five, scheduling availability.  We talk about this all the time, even in the context of search.  But like if you’re showing that, you’re not open afterhours, I mean, people are working during the day and so if they can only get ahold of — if you’re going to schedule on your own terms, you’re going to lose out.  I mean, it’s just is what it is.  Or if you send them an account link, and your next available appointment is three weeks from now, get ready for them to move on.
Conrad Saam:  Yup, that’s how you should be talking about consultations instead of leads.  We can come back to that theory over and over again.  All right.  Well, Gyi, it’s been two weeks Since we’ve talked, Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.  It’ll be another two weeks before we talk again.  Hopefully, some time you and I can actually have a beer at one of these many conferences that are coming up because it’s been far too long.  Until then, we will hope for Michigan to continue on their amazing football journey.  We will see you all in two weeks.
[Music]
Male Speaker:  Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.  If you would like more information about what you heard today, please visit legaltalknetwork.com.  Subscribe via Apple podcasts and RSS.  Follow Legal Talk network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
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The good thing about music podcasts? There are so many of them. The bad thing about music podcasts? There are soooo many of them. But that’s also secretly back to good news, because it means whatever kind of music you’re into, there’s probably a podcast for it.

Pop music is a particularly juicy subject—it’s so reflective of its time, so relevant and telling about culture as a whole, and so open to feisty debates. These 12 podcasts will explain pop charts, deliver you the intimate pop artist interviews you’re craving, and fill you in on the history and context of pop. Add them all to your playlist to become a more informed listener and a better fan.
On Switched on Pop, Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding dissect pop songs with a scalpel, examining their historical and cultural context, and shining a light on the musical concepts that make a hit a hit. This isn’t “Nate & Charlie’s Favorite Pop Songs,” but an academic consideration of the songs that are topping the charts, so even when they’re covering something you’re not a fan of, you’ll appreciate their ability to tell the artist or song’s story and explain what a hit bop can tell you about the world we live in. (You might even just become a fan by the end of the episode.) Nate and Charlie bring different things to the table—Nate’s a musicologist and Charlie is a songwriter. Whether they’re focused on a big album drop (like Taylor Swift’s Midnights). diving into an emerging genre (heard any Sapphic music lately?), or investigating a musical mystery (like why so many songs sound the same), you’ll remove your earbuds feeling you like you learned something—and then add a few new songs to your playlist.

Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard love music, and on Every Single Album, they dive headfirst into the complete discographies of artists like Adele, Harry Styles, and Taylor Swift. It’s a balanced mix of education and chat show—you tune in for the music discussion, and also to spend time with Nora and Nathan. They’re entertaining and opinionated (Nora comes at things from more of the fangirl side, and Nathan—a one-time Nashville recording artist and the former CEO of Ticketmaster—fills in things with industry knowledge). Their enthusiasm is contagious, and the fact that episodes are similarly structured—ranking best collaborators, the tracks that could be dropped, charting an artist’s evolution, and more—makes them go down easy. Each mini-series will leave you with a deeper understanding of a singular artist’s work.
On Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs, longtime friends, pop culture writers, and veteran podcasters Mark Blankenship and Sarah D. Bunting (one of the co-founders of the revolutionary cultural criticism site Television Without Pity) use individual songs to launch into detailed discussions rife with musical theory, music history, and generally entertaining back-and-forth banter. More recent “seasons” of the show have delved into March madness-style brackets ranking songs in a particular genre, including ‘90s rap and Lilith Fair hits. Fun tangents abound—songs with ‘song’ in the title, ranked; songs you can’t possibly sing along to. Can’t get enough of Mark and Sarah? Check out their book and join their livestream happy hours. Become a Patron and you can even request a song to be analyzed, or a pop chart astrology reading.
The B-Sides is home to the pop-culture obsessed who also care about progressive issues. Each week, Becky, Hannah, and Mimi cover album drops, the power of Christian rock, the history of protest songs, women in country, artist feuds, and some of the most interesting niche topics pop music has to offer. They have their finger on the pulse and talk about big moments in pop with a feminist, liberal twist. Hanging out with these women will deepen your knowledge of all things Taylor Swift, Carly Rae, and Katy Perry, who are being talked about in ways I guarantee you won’t find anywhere else.
Each week on Punch Up the Jam, Andrew and Evan Gregory and a guest unpack a song, listening to it together second-by-second, jumping in to point out ridiculous lyrics and fun facts, make jokes, and share interesting insights into the music. (Andrew and Evan are famous for their viral musical videos, including the Songify the News series, and the “Bed Intruder Song” that received over 141 million YouTube views and entered the Billboard Hot 100.) At the end, they rewrite the song in order to try to improve it. If that sounds too snooty, know that this is a comedy show, so the punch-ups are focused on being funny rather than artistically perfect. They round out episodes with one of my favorite segments of all time, asking guests to choose their “walk-in song,” i.e. the song they would like to have playing as they enter a room full of people. Earlier episodes, hosted by Miel Bredouw and Demi Adejuyigbe, were also pretty sharp (listen to Amy Miller talk about “Love Shack” or Nicole Byer’s episode about Cher’s “Believe.”)
If ‘90s music have defined you in any way, 60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s will be both your nostalgic playlist and your new favorite show. Dust off your CD player and listen to tracks from Fiona Apple, Counting Crows, DMX, and others that were inescapable during the decade. Episodes go deep, providing history, context, storytelling, and interesting commentary from host Rob Harvilla about how these songs were products of their time, and why the ‘90s was a pivotal time in music.
Todd Nathanson (YouTuber Todd in the Shadows) and Alina Morgan host Song vs. Song, which pits two similar songs of a given musical era against one another. So if you’re into music history and arguing, this one is for you. Todd and Alina pit “Mr. Brightside” against “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” “Fly” takes on “What I Got,” and “Low” challenges “Get Low,” and the hosts determine which one reigns supreme. They might not agree, and you might not, either. But you’ll enjoy Todd and Alina’s chemistry, the interesting way they tie songs together, and the history and context they provide.
Though Unflopped has released its series finale, its celebration of forgotten pop flops will never go out of style. In each episode, pop enthusiasts Stuart and Sean choose a flop single that they think should have been a hit. Judge Joe (a “bona fide musical genius”) analyzes each song, and the subsequent discussion determines whether the song deserves to be officially “unflopped.” Stuart, Sean, and Joe are a fun bunch, and episodes will leave you in a happy mood. Pop-music banter, chart trivia, and segments like “close brackets” and “banger” kept fans coming back for 100 episodes, proving that Unflopped was anything but a flop.
There’s this sexist notion that women are incapable of being true music fans, when in reality, it is often the fangirls who are powering the music industry and forecasting the future of sound. Name 3 Songs sprang from the idea that a woman might be asked the insulting question, “you like music? Name three songs.” On their show, co-hosts Sara Feigin and Jenna Million discuss feminist issues in music and pop culture, taking a critical lens to the music industry, artists’ careers, the media’s contribution to controversy and sexism, and industry’s role in creating and upholding sexist archetypes. It’s a celebration of pop and the women who love it. Filled with interviews and smart commentary about why gay men stan divas to reject the patriarchy, why we love to hate on girl groups, the cultural impact of celebrity abuse cases, and so much more, Sara and Jenna will give you a greater appreciation for the cultural value of pop.
On Billboard’s Pop Shop Podcast, senior director of Billboard charts Keith Caulfield and Billboard executive digital director Katie Atkinson break down the weekly Billboard chart, provide lively coverage of news, and preview (or recap) big musical happenings. Data nerds will enjoy delving into the numbers, and casual pop fans will dig the deep-dive discussions. Stay up to date with the charts and dip back into the archives to see what was trending years ago. Keith and Katie are in the know, and share insider info and personal stories they pick up working at Billboard. Missed the latest Gaga concert? Katie’s review will make you feel like you were there. Pop stars check in every so often too, talking about their hits, collabs, and tours, and giving Keith and Katie the occasional exclusive scoop.
The story of Britney Spears is far more interesting than any podcast that might unpack all of her songs (though we’d listen to that too). Toxic is a limited series hosted by comedians Tess Barker and Babs Gray that outlines the messy story of the late ‘90s/early aughts icon, from her country bumpkin beginnings to her mental breaks and absolutely everything you need to know about Britney’s conservatorship, which put her father Jamie Spears in charge of all of her finances and made her a (working) prisoner in her own mansion. Tess and Babs were the ones who sparked the #FreeBritney movement—their first podcast, Britney’s Gram, was initially a funny look at Britney’s deeply odd Instagram account (where she put on fashion shows, threw everybody off with unhinged videos of herself portrait painting, posted cryptic messages, and alluded to her unhappiness). But when they got an anonymous call from someone on Britneys team that things were darker than they appeared on the surface, Tess and Babs worked tirelessly to #FreeBritney and Toxic is the story of how they did it.
Though not solely focused on pop music, I would be remiss not to mention the most venerable of all music podcasts. Song Exploder covers songs of all genres, including lots of pop. Host Hrishikesh Hirway sits down with artists to dismantle their work note by note, so we can understand a song done to its bones—how it went from a spark in the artist’s mind to a final track. Enormous stars like Madonna (“Hung Up”), Rick Astley (“Never Gonna Give You Up”), and Franz Ferdinand (“Take Me Out”) get vulnerable with Hrishikesh about their tracks and revel never-before-heard details about what inspired them to make their biggest hits, share the highs and lows of being a musician and a person, and share how sometimes they surprise even themselves when a song unexpectedly resonates with listeners. Episodes are beautifully produced, and will reshape you as a consumer of music. Hrishikesh has also started a spinoff, Book Exploder, in which he gives authors the Song Exploder treatment too. (I eagerly await the day he launches Podcast Exploder.)
Lauren is the founder of Tink Media and writes two podcast newsletters: Podcast the Newsletter & Podcast Marketing Magic. Her podcast discovery podcast is called Feed the Queue.
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This article is at least a year old
Today, podcast discovery relies on two pillars: in-app discovery and social media. In-app discovery happens when users browse their favorite listening apps like Apple Podcasts or Spotify or searches for specific content via the search bar.
Voxalyze is the company behind “Podcast Visibility Optimization”, a craft similar to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but applied to podcasts. The company offers keyword ranking for podcasts across millions of keywords in 14 different languages. They are also launching a new analytics solution, which will allow podcast publishers to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns in attracting new listeners via social media.
Podcasts are thriving. According to the recent Online Audio Monitor study, more than 20 million Germans aged 14+ listened to at least one podcast per month with a staggering 41% of the population aged 14 to 29 years doing so. Advertisers view this as a massive opportunity and the IAB is forecasting advertising revenues of podcasts to triple by 2024.
This has opened up possibilities for podcast publishers. In 2021 alone, more than 725,000 shows were launched, and there are now more than 3 million podcasts available. But how do listeners discover a show? And how could publishers increase their audience? This is exactly the problem Voxalyze is solving by providing visibility analytics and soon audience and attribution analytics.
“The market is literally booming,” says Alexis Hue, co-founder and managing director, “and podcast publishers are becoming more demanding regarding analytics: they now expect a similar level of data and insights as in the web and mobile spaces. That’s what we are building.”
The Voxalyze team, vision and early customer traction has picked the interest of investors: Capnamic Ventures, seed+speed Ventures, and renowned business angels have invested a total of EUR 1.2 million in the company. With the capital, the podcast analytics provider plans on accelerating its technology deployment and go-to-market.
Alexis Hue continues, “The trust of such investors makes us proud. With the capital and the investor support, we are ready to bring our solution to the next level and become the analytics partner of choice for podcast publishers”.
Olaf Jacobi, Managing Partner of Capnamic says: “The focus on market and pattern recognition of target groups will be vital for the future of podcast publishing – this is such an exciting field and reminds us of the beginning of mobile ad tech and the need for analystics tools.”
Alexander Kölpin, Managing Director, seed + speed Ventures, commented “the podcast market is growing steadily and there is no sign of this trend reversing. Voxalyze is the missing link for the podcast industry and provides a platform-independent tool for publishers to measure, understand and grow audience and revenue. We are delighted to be on board with seed+speed Ventures as investors.”
Voxalyze is a leading provider of podcast analytics and is pioneering the listener acquisition analytics space with solutions like Podcast Visibility Optimization and Social Media Attribution. The company supports podcast publishers of all sizes, from the smallest creator to large media companies with hundreds of shows with data and insights enabling them to grow their audience.
Capnamic is a leading European early-stage Venture Capital firm, with offices in Cologne, Berlin and Munich. The VC invests in outstanding teams from the German-speaking regions from Pre-Seed up to Series A. Capnamic’s investments include companies such as LeanIX, Staffbase, Adjust (exit to Applovin) parcelLab or Capmo, amongst others. All portfolio companies can rely on Capnamic’s unique network of global investors and industry partners as well as hands-on support, mentoring and knowledge exchange. The vast expertise of the Capnamic team includes more than 100 investments, a high turnover of successful trade sales and IPOs, as well as a strong entrepreneurial track record within the investment team. The general partners are Christian Knott, Christian Siegele, Jörg Binnenbrücker and Olaf Jacobi.
seed + speed Ventures is a pre-seed and seed VC focussing on B2B and enterprise software startups in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. As a lead- or co-investor, the firm initially invests up to €500k in promising young startups and supports the development of sustainable, successful sales structures through tailored sales coaching by its in-house sales trainers. Thus seed + speed actively adds value to the operational business of its portfolio companies to enable faster growth.
This is a press release which we link to from Podnews, our daily newsletter about podcasting and on-demand. We may make small edits for editorial reasons.
Companies mentioned above:
AppleApple PodcastsIABSpotifyVoxalyze

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Check out the highlights from Google’s latest Search Off The Record podcast discussing website launches, preventing staging site indexing, and domain name choices.
The latest episode of Google’s Search Off The Record podcast discusses the challenges of launching websites and preventing staging sites from being indexed by search engines.
Staging sites used for testing and development should ideally not be indexed, and Google highlights password protection as one method of preventing accidental indexing.
Hosts John Mueller, Gary Illyes, and Lizzy Sassman delve into the significance of clicking the “launch” button on different platforms and how site launches and migrations are connected.
The discussion emphasizes the importance of balancing launching a large number of pages, maintaining content quality, and selecting an appropriate domain name for branding and visibility purposes.
Here are the highlights from Google’s recent podcast about staging and launching websites.
Mueller and Illyes discuss keeping staging sites hidden from search engines and share anecdotes of accidental leaks from Google’s past.
They speak to the launch of Google’s search status dashboard and strategies to conceal it before its official release.
Illyes says they did “literally nothing” to keep the dashboard a secret before announcing it to everyone.
It was live for months, and no one noticed because no links were pointing to it.
Illyes states:
“If you are not linking to something on the internet then it’s very hard to notice it, or you’re not mentioning it anywhere, and that’s what we were doing. Not mentioning it anywhere, not linking to it, not having it in random JavaScript files. And by the way, this is one more reason not to do JavaScript. And it just worked, it was risky, I would say.”
Sassman adds that there was no sitemap for the new Google dashboard, which made it even more challenging to find.
The conversation also touches on the critical role of DNS setup and the distinction between using a subdomain and a new domain.
Despite the risks associated with their launch strategy, the hosts agree that potential consequences were minimal.
Takeaway: A viable, yet risky, way to keep a staging site from leaking it to not mention or link to it from anywhere.
Illyes explains that robots.txt is typically sufficient for blocking search engines from crawling staging sites.
When asked about alternative methods for keeping a site hidden before launch, Illyes suggests using a noindex tag on each page.
You could also utilize password protection or IP-allow lists for staging sites.
This led to a story from Mueller about using static IP addresses for server backend access, which led to a loss of access when his IP address changed.
The discussion moves on to launching many pages simultaneously and the importance of selecting the right domain name.
Illyes believes that if a server has sufficient resources, launching 7,000 articles simultaneously should not be an issue, although quality assurance might be challenging.
Quality, rather than quantity, is emphasized when discussing the prospect of publishing a million pages at once.
The hosts also discuss using free hostnames provided by hosting providers, compared to custom domain names.
Illyes says the choice depends on the business’s needs and branding objectives, with custom domain names being more suitable for a long-term online presence.
For more insights from Google’s Search Relations team, listen to the full podcast.
Featured Image: sacitarios/Shutterstock
Source: Search Off The Record
Matt G. Southern, Senior News Writer, has been with Search Engine Journal since 2013. With a bachelor’s degree in communications, …
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