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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…
“Rank Number One!”—an all too easy promise made by SEO agencies, but probably only deliverable while they’re standing in your lobby. What happens when you walk down the block? The guys talk about real, meaningful ranking results with Local Falcon. 
How is your law firm showing up in local search? Gyi and Conrad give an extensive explanation of Local Falcon, their go-to data visualization tool for seeing how your firm shows up in the local map pack (those three neatly featured business profiles you see at the top of your search results). You’ll learn how to figure out who your main competitors are, how to use Local Falcon metrics to make ranking improvements over time, and insights into the many effects of proximity and your area’s geography on ranking factors.
Later, the guys dig in even deeper to explain how Local Falcon can be used to help you figure out whether you ought to open another office, or, perhaps, close one down. They hash out how to assess your metrics to determine the success (or lack thereof) of your investments. 
The News:
 
Mentioned in this Episode:
Local Falcon
Does My Website Suck? | Law Firm Website Teardown – LHLM Episode
The Bite – Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Newsletter!
Leave Us an Apple Review 
Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on YouTube 
Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on TikTok
Special thanks to our sponsors Clio and CallRail.
Conrad Saam:
Hey Gyi, I am super disappointed. We’re not going to be doing bedlam together. This will be the first time we’ve done bedlam without you. You fired everybody. You kicked everybody out of bedlam, but the invite remained open for you.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
Well, that was very generous of you.
Conrad Saam:
Why don’t
Gyi Tsakalakis :
You tell everybody what Bedlam is?
Conrad Saam:
Fair enough. So this is like six or seven years ago. Gyi, I think we put on a conference with a bunch of competitors. It was you and me and a bunch of other people, some of whom we are still really good friends with, and we did our own kind of conference. We did it virtually once. We’ve done it a bunch in person and this latest round, sadly, we’re not going to have you. I would’ve loved to have have you come along. Your objection was that we were making this really a client-centric conference, right?
Gyi Tsakalakis :
Yeah. I loved the original Bedlam. I loved competitor agencies coming together.
Drove us to put on our best stuff. I think not anything bad about it. I mean, this time you’re giving away a car, right?
Conrad Saam:
We’ll be giving away a Matchbox car,
Gyi Tsakalakis :
A matchbox, sorry, but you are doing car something, right?
Conrad Saam:
Yeah, we’re doing it. The Miami Speedway. I’m a big fan of exotic cars, so we’re doing it the Miami Speedway and we’re, our brakes are going to include driving Lamborghinis and Ferrari and stuff like that. So I don’t want to sound this too pitchy. It’s really a client conference for us. We do have a couple non-clients coming, but it is really focused around having fun and learning more about how we approach business and benchmarks across our client list. So I’m looking forward
Gyi Tsakalakis :
To, can people still sign up? Can people register to
Conrad Saam:
Go? You can register if you feel like you would be a great fit for us and we feel like you would be a great fit for us and you would like to get to know what it’s like to work with us. That’s a good example, but I’m not going to give you a 90% sold out catch your tickets now kind of thing. That’s not what this is all about. It’s more about working with us and seeing if it works,
Gyi Tsakalakis :
But time is running out at least on this segment of our show
Conrad Saam:
On this segment. We’ve gone too long on the banter.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
What else have we got?
Conrad Saam:
Alright, as usual, we’re going to talk about the news and then we’re going to do a deep dive on Local Falcon, a great tool that you and I use on the regular. We’re going to go into how we use local Falcon, what all the things in local Falcon mean, and then after the break we’re going to use local Falcon, how we use local Falcon to think about strategically and mathematically understanding what I call the Centipede strategy, which is really about office expansion or contraction, and that is adding or subtracting offices from your marketing mix. Lockwood, let’s do it.
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Conrad Saam:
Alright everyone, welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. As we always do, we are going to start off with the news. Hey Gyi, we talked about this on the last segment, major Google algorithm update in process. It was a long Google algo, updated is now done, and the SEO nerds who track all sorts of things tell me that I should think that this is a big algo update. Would you like to do your public service reminder about not panicking?
Gyi Tsakalakis :
Yeah, I don’t do the big algo update shtick, so I don’t really care. Although I will say this one interesting thing that came out of this from a news standpoint is that Google’s John Mueller did confirm that aios the AI overviews would be impacted by core updates.
Conrad Saam:
Alright, moving to the theme of businesses that don’t matter anymore, Yelp jumped on the Google is a monopoly bandwagon and filed a lawsuit, antitrust lawsuit against Google last week alleging that Google uses its monopoly to dominate local search and advertising markets and specifically to promote its own reviews.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
Well, that’s not fair to Yelp. Yelp started this bandwagon, right? Yelp’s been complaining about Google showing local PACS and Google business profiles and Google Local or whatever it was called back when they were first arguing about this giving Google Map products priority listings in the organic results. And so in light of the recent antitrust ruling, I think it’s natural that Yelp’s like, Hey, yeah, that’s right. We’ve been arguing about this for a long time. So now that we’ve got some ammo to come to court with in terms of this latest ruling,
Conrad Saam:
If you didn’t see this coming, you haven’t been paying attention. Yeah,
Gyi Tsakalakis :
And it’s going to be interesting. I mean one of Google’s arguments, at least this is really creative in my opinion, is that the Google business profiles is core search different from other services. So they’re basically going to try to distinguish like, hey, we’re not actually driving a higher visibility for a Google Service. I don’t know how they’re going to make that distinction, but I can’t wait to see,
Conrad Saam:
Well, the lawyers in California are going to do well this year. Alright, and finally, Gyi, I knew we wouldn’t be able to get through an episode without talking about a IO and tracking what’s going on in the news with a IO tracking.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
So August 15th we start seeing these AI overviews and search results for logged out users. And so then the rank tracking tools had to figure out how are we going to actually going to track these aios differently. There’s nothing in search console that helps you know that. And so you’re left with kind of trying to trigger these results. But once you get a picture from a rank tracking tool like Somer is doing it, zip tie search analytics has got it, there’s a bunch of ’em. SE rankings got it now. So they’re in this arms race to get these aios, but it gives you a much different picture if you’re trying to future proof. I don’t know how you cannot be on this a IO stuff because it’s showing up for so many different queries that people aren’t even thinking about. So in my opinion, next year, two years, you’re going to be throwing all of your SEO knowledge almost out the window, not all of it because it’s all still based on the same fundamentals, but it’s going to be a different ball game, especially even in local
Conrad Saam:
Different ball game, different reporting, really importantly, really different reporting. And if you are tracking your channels as you should, you should start to be seeing that as terrible English. You probably have started to see chat, GBT, et cetera showing up as a source. We are definitely seeing that coming in for some of our clients. So understanding how AI A IO is actually feeding into your reporting infrastructure becomes really, really important because as Gyisaid, all us SEOs are going to be learning a new dance over the next 12 to 18 months. Let’s take a
Gyi Tsakalakis :
Break. So one thing that came up in our last episode when Conrad and I were doing the kind of assessment of the law firm website, you can check that out, we’ll put it link in the show notes is understanding how your firm shows up in local search. And today we wanted to dive into one of the tools that we use. We mentioned it in the last episode too, we want to take a little bit deeper dive, but Conrad, what are some of the major issues you see with respect to law firms, their agencies and reporting and local search?
Conrad Saam:
I love when GE sets me up with, this isn’t even slow pitch baseball. This is like T-ball. So we see this all the time and you hear this all the time and it is agencies or cold calls talking about how we can get you to rank number one, rank number one, the Google local pack guaranteed. And what they really mean by that is that if I’m standing in your lobby, I will make sure that you rank number one for, it might even be your own business name. That can be as bad as you can get, but it’s more typically like I’m looking for divorce lawyer Atlanta and I’m in divorce law firm Atlanta in their lobby and I’m doing a query and I’m ranking number one. Proximity is so very, very important for local search that you could choose to be able to rank number one from almost any office.
Now interestingly, this doesn’t always happen and I have certainly, and Gyi, I’m sure you’ve seen this as well. It doesn’t necessarily mean that just because you have an office, you’re going to rank number one in that office. So even getting to ranking number one in that office, if you’re not doing things correctly, we looked at a prospect just the other day who has an office and they were ranking number 20 from their own office. So these problems can happen, but it’s pretty easy to fix these problems. We actually fixed that during the pitch. We got in real time and figured out why they were doing so poorly in ranking and it’s an easy fix.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
Was it Miscategorizing by chance?
Conrad Saam:
No, it wasn’t. Interestingly, we were trying to figure it out and they’re like, oh, well our office used to be just across the street and they hadn’t updated their address. And so Google didn’t know what it was and so they couldn’t understand because it was such a small geographic move why it was a problem. And the problem gets into the foundations of how local search works, but it’s very easy for agencies to get you to rank number one from their office. And so they often make that promise what they don’t take into account, Gyi. And where we’re going with this is that if you move 400 yards away from your office, you may disappear off the digital map entirely. And so the tool that we like to use when looking at proximity related queries, which is local search, is local falcon.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
So we thought, and in fact one of our dear LinkedIn audience members requested that we do a review of this site and so we’re not going to do a review of this site, but we thought, hey, let’s do a review of their local PAC visibility. So this is a scan report for the query divorce lawyer, and I apologize if I’m mispronouncing the name, but Heme Law Group in Seattle. It’s a family law firm and a couple things about local Falcon that I think are cool and Conrad, you can feel free to interrupt and chime in at any time. But one, you get to set a grid size. So how big of an area, how big of a mile radius do you want to look at from the business’s location? And then it drops these little pins within that radius and you can pick how many different data points you want.
But so in this case I did a 20 by 21 grid with a five mile radius. Now a couple of things about local Falcon. One for all of the local Falcon product people that are listening, I wish they would make it easier to turn pins off because Seattle, there’s a lot of water around Seattle. Well, I don’t care how I’m ranking in the water. So folks that are looking at this on YouTube, I’ve adjusted it so that there’s these chunks cut out for where the water is. But ultimately what we’re looking at here is a map grid of Hemet law group’s visibility. Its rankings in the local PAC for the term divorce lawyer. And it’s extremely valuable to see they’re actually doing pretty good. And in fact there’s three local Falcon metrics that we tend to look at. Conrad, do you want to talk about those?
Conrad Saam:
So there’s ARP a P and solve. Okay? And so ARP is basically the average ranking position, which is fairly easy to understand what it means, but A TRP basically is the average total rank position, which takes into account all those positions in which your firm doesn’t rank at all. It doesn’t show up at all. And so that is always worse than your average ranking position if you are showing up. There’s actually a data point, and by the way, these metrics are really helpful to look at over time in a vacuum. Looking at it at today, it doesn’t matter. But this is a really good way overall if you want to have a KPI for your local performance, this is a really good one. The next one is search of local voice, which is the percentage of time that you’re showing up in the top three.
And the reason that search of local voice is so relevant is because if you’re not showing up in the top three, you’re not showing up. And so I like search of local voice personally as something to look at as something to track over time. The key here, and this is super tactical roll up your sleeves on this, is you need to make sure that you’re using the same grid parameters When you are looking at these improvements over time, which is blindingly obvious and yet frequently done poorly or done by a different agency, they’ll come in and they’ll show you how poorly you’re doing on one of these metrics and then they’ll take that 20 mile radius and they’ll drop it down to two miles and tell you how they’ve made these massive improvements, which is disgusting.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
The other report that you can look at is a competitor report. The competitor report’s really cool because now you can actually see, and I have it sorted by a share of local voice, which Conrad mentioned. You can look at these grids across competition and see who your actual local PAC competitors are, which are often when we talk to firms they’ll say, oh, the biggest player in town is so-and-so or my biggest competitor is a billboard lawyer, a TV lawyer. And it’s a totally different set of competitors in regular traditional search and then another set of competitors when you get into the local pack. And so I think this is a great tool for looking, doing competitive analysis. And another thing that I really like about it, and I’m going to click on this compare locations button, but you can basically take like, hey, you can take the firm you did the report for and compare it to one of your competitors and you’ll get a side-by-side breakdown with all the data that Local Falcon has. So you can see things like the review comparison, it shows URLs, phone numbers, the coordinates, it shows all of the local Falcon metrics. And so that gives you a really good like, Hey, what’s this firm doing that I might not be doing? Are they’re using categories that I’m not using? How are my reviews competitive? So I really like it for that purpose. What else do you like to do with local Falcon Conrad?
Conrad Saam:
So when I’m looking at, and we’re going to get into figuring out how to open up and where to open up another office and if to open up another office after the break, but one of the things that I like to do is when you’re looking at a specific building, this is an address I’m looking at moving into Northern Cleveland and we’ve got these four different offices that we’re thinking about doing. Just because it’s not a law firm doesn’t mean you can’t use that address. So find the business that currently is or was in that office. Let’s say it’s Mary’s florist and you can do a query for Mary’s florist, but look for car accident lawyer, right? And you’re really asking local Falcon to show whether or not Mary’s florist works for car accident lawyer. But what you really get out of that data is from that location of her current of Mary’s florist office, what does the competitive set look like?
And so it’s a way to evaluate individual offices using local Falcon data. And I think people get tripped up because it’s like, oh, well there’s not a law firm in there. I don’t know. There’s not a competitor there for me to look at. What you really want to isolate down is an individual building and how that performs for the queries for which you want to be found. And that I’ve found to be extremely helpful as a workaround because this is really centered. The orientation around this is how are you performing relative to competitors? Well, if there’s no one in that office, is that a good office or not? This is a good way to do that. It’s simplistic, but it works.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
Another thing to be mindful of when you’re using local Falcon is firms that, and I think Conrad might have some more insight on this when he does his assessment in terms of do you need another office location? If you’re just looking at the scan report or a competitor report, it might not be obvious to you that the same firm has multiple locations. And so really what you need to do for that is create one of these locations reports so that you’ve got, you’re representing all of the different firms and even for your own intelligence on your own visibility. If you have multiple office locations
In a competitive environment, different locations are going to rank. And so to see them all on a map, you might look at one of these maps and say, well, it’s weird, why am I only ranking in the upper left hand corner? Or why am I only ranking in the southeast corner? It might be because you have another location that’s outranking you somewhere else. And so you really want to make sure that you’re taking that into consideration both for your own firm as well as competitive reports or else you’re going to make a false assumption about the visibility.
Conrad Saam:
Before we hit the break, I want to make one more kind of 1 0 1 concept around local Falcon. This is based around proximity, and proximity is very different by geography. Downtown Chicago, proximity from a pure, what does proximity mean in terms of distance? Downtown Chicago looks very different than Los Angeles for example, or somewhere that’s much more rural. So the proximity is heavily defined by the competitive set and how concentrated the competitive set is. So you need to think about what your geography looks like and how close are competitors. If there’s 27 competitors clustered around a downtown, the proximity is going to be much more narrow and shorter than if you were in a very large spread out city, for example, like Atlanta. And I think you need to think about that when you are looking to set your grid size. Don’t set your grid size, lemme put it this differently.
Don’t set your grid size to cover all of Seattle or all of Atlanta, right? Atlanta is actually a great example because it is such a spread out distributed city, the Google proximity flag is going to decrease on different radiuses and you need to start to understand what that looks like for your individual market, if that makes sense. We’re going to take a break when we come back, we’re going to answer a question from our last website tear down and then move into a discussion about the centipede strategy, how to expand or contract your geographic reach through new offices. Alright everyone. Question coming in from our listener, John Cumber Worth, and he throws a plotted in here so I can’t help but read that as well. Conrad and Gyi, great episode. I’m curious about one thing you mentioned the number of index pages on that site was large and y’all said, I like the y’all by the way said it was likely unhelpful or useless content if they’re early on in the game. How should a firm plan to create and share content regularly but avoid the mistake of creating for creation sake? Also, should they be adding sub pages or editing and updating existing ones rather than doing more blog posts? More blog posts? Gyi, thanks again for what y’all are putting out on this podcast. So Gyi, how do you strategically and mathematically determine what you should do with your content strategy?
Gyi Tsakalakis :
Well, he’s asking a very specific question. He’s asking about your brand new, he’s like, you guys showed me a site that had a bunch of pages that were useless and not very helpful. What do you tell a firm that’s just getting started? So my view of the starting place for brand new is to outline your practice. That’s what I would say. So the practice areas, just like you might outline from law school, start there and outline the topics and the subtopics and get things organized before you write the first thing. The problem is, is that if you’re brand new, if you’re starting yourself, there’s two kind of big things you’re going to do. You’re going to create practice area pages, and then you’re going to start writing blog posts. And the issue is that that’s how this happens, right? Because you wake up and you’re like, oh, I need to write a blog post. Or if you’re working with somebody that’s helping you, you’re measuring input in terms of page numbers and you got to get out of that mindset, you got to switch, you got to flip it on its head and say, Hey, what can we actually write about that people might be asking about? If I was going to describe our firm, what we do, how we do it to somebody, how would I organize that information? And I would just start, that’s where I would start.
Conrad Saam:
So I’m going to build off of Gyi’s, answer the nuance here. And I think this is really important, especially if you’re new and starting out, you need to consider the competitive environment. It may take a long time for you to rank and build traffic and generate business through organic traffic or not depending on your competitive set. And I think one of the big failings that happens is agencies like to deliver up into the right. We talk about this all the time and one of the things that we see tactically done incorrectly by many agencies is they want to show you up into the right and so they deliver up into the right on page count and they may even be able to deliver up into the right on traffic by adding more and more content, but that doesn’t necessarily make the phone ring. And I think if you are spending a lot of time on content and you’re just starting out, you’re probably pulling the wrong tactical lever for the wrong reason.
Your efforts should be put into getting what you do have to rank as opposed to putting more blather out there that is not going to turn into business anyway. And so I think that is a really important distinction to note because agencies we like to make ourselves look good, and we often tell you, and I’m saying the bigger we, not the Gyiand Conrad that the first step is getting a whole bunch of traffic. Well, if it’s traffic that’s never going to call you, it doesn’t really matter. And so I would think about those things and I would be looking when you are adding content, I was talking about traffic, we’ve talked about the useless content ratio on occasion, if you’re writing about of content and no one ever reads it, you are absolutely wasting your time and money generating more of that content. So that’s another good way to quickly assess that.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
If you want to hear more of this, we’re tossing around the idea of doing more website and web presence teardowns. If you like that idea, hit us up on LinkedIn and let us know if you’ve got a website you’d like us to look at or a competitor that you’d like us to look at really anything’s fair game from a digital standpoint. So we’d love to hear from it. Hope to get some more teardowns. Okay, and now we want to take a closer look at how to use local Falcon to see if you should open a new office or if it’s going to be unlikely that some of your existing offices, whether or not they’re worth investing in local SEO resources. Conrad. Let’s talk about how you use local Falcon to make a decision about how to open a new office.
Conrad Saam:
So this is beautiful, it’s strategic and it’s analytical and I think too few firms are thinking about their expansion in this fashion. We really advocate what I refer to as the centipede strategy, which is biting off one piece at a time and growing incrementally. So we’re going to do this office and then that’s going to win and then we’re going to the next office and that’s going to win. A lot of firms have gotten into this, oh, we need more offices because that’s actually how Google is. The proximity thing is so important. Proximity local is so valuable. Proximity is the thing where I’m going to open eight offices or 12 offices, and I’ve definitely talked to law firms like that. What typically happens when you do that is you are trying to boil the ocean. Your reviews, your assets get scattered ineffectively across multiple different places and you win nothing except for searches from within your lobby maybe.
So you can look at local Falcon to determine and it’s really clear, throw your office in there, look at the competitive set, look at where you’re ranking and also look at your inbound traffic from local and ideally if these are again localized offices, you’ve got things like inbound leads, et cetera. If you have a whole bunch of offices and there’s nothing happening, it’s not generating traffic, they’re not generating phone calls. And when you run a local Falcon scan, it’s clear that you might be green from your lobby, but as soon as you move 400 meters outside of your lobby, you’re off the map, it’s probably because the assets that you have aren’t enough to get Google to have you showing up. So, and by assets, we’ve talked about backlinks before, we’ve talked about review count. Those are really, really important things to determine whether or not you should add an office.
On the other end of that extreme, Gyi, you often have that law firm that’s been at 12 Main Street for the last 25 years. They’ve gotten really big on local, they’ve got a ton of reviews, they’ve been around for a long time, so their backlink profile is strong. Getting an incremental review for that firm that has a single location is going to do nothing. It’s not going to extend the radius by which you rank from local. When you run that local Falcon scan, that’s not moving all that much because frankly you’re trying to push the edges so far out and as you get further away from an office, you have to push those edges even further. And so that is a firm where it’s like, listen, you’re wasting the assets, the reviews that you’re generating aren’t generating more business for you because they’re not improving your local Falcon ranking, which is again, this is another reason to have these benchmarks.
If you can see movement or you can see the kind of cessation of movement as you continue to get reviews. Now it says to me that this is a great time for you to open the next office. And that’s kind of the bigger framework of how to think about do I have too many or do I have too few from an office perspective? And then what I like to do is look at different locations, look at different cities, where are the different suburbs that you could move into? And what you’re really looking for, Gyi, is a beautiful Venn diagram overlap of low competition. As local falcon tells you, and this can be reviews. You can then double this up with things like backlink profiles, low competition, high population. That’s the Venn diagram that you’re looking to open in because that’s the lowest hanging fruit that you can find.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
That’s the thing that I think is the real takeaway here is layering in other data sources with the competitive local Falcon position. So as Conrad mentioned, just to kind of spell it out here, because you said a lot of great stuff in there. The first thing is is that you want to compare your local Falcon report with population centers, right? Ranking number one in a highly dense population grid has a different value than ranking in the middle of nowhere where there’s nobody around to do the searches.
Conrad Saam:
Well, you did this really well with your initial screen share. You showed how you’ve taken the data out of lakes and rivers and oceans ranking number one in ocean Merry Christmas. It’ll make your search look pretty good, except there’s literally no one there,
Gyi Tsakalakis :
Right? That’s my thing about it is that that’s, yes, don’t include oceans, but even seeing how agencies will send these grids out and they’ll be like, you’re number one, and let’s not even take the water away because that’s really bad, but they’ll say, look, on this grid, you’re number one for everywhere. And it’s like, well, that’s fine. Nobody lives there. I’m a divorce lawyer. That’s all industrial campus. No. Now, could people be searching at work? Sure, but it’s the desert or it’s the mountains. No,
That’s not valuable. The other thing that you said that I think is really, really important, the value of links in the local pack, but to your point, if you’ve got a competitor who’s got 5,000 reviews and 2000 linking route domains and you’ve got a hundred reviews and you’re a hundred linking route domains, I wouldn’t try to go full bore into that location. I’d want to see what Conrad said. I want to see a part where there’s that high demographic data. It’s a population center, and ideally you can even start layering some audience things like maybe because again, in the divorce context, we talk about this all the time, I want to be showing up in these affluent communities because they’re high net worth individuals for maximizing the audience value, the lifetime value of a client, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, that’s a really important thing to look at because we talk about how not all the queries are created equally. Well, not all locations are created equally either. And I think what we just talked about there is really a valuable way to look at your local Falcon data across different dimensions of competitive data.
Conrad Saam:
So you can do visualization with this. There’s so much data, we always know, there’s so much data, and the visualization that I like to do is you can do a map and you can overlay population centers. That data set exists out there, and then you can overlay on top of that map the geographic location of the offices, of the competitor’s offices. So now I’ve got a pinpoint on an address, and then you can draw a circle around that pinpoint based on, we do this with the number of reviews and that number of reviews you can use to define the diameter of the circle. So it’s not just a pinpoint, it’s actually a circle. And then what you see when you do that is you have all these intersecting circles overlaid on top of a population density, and then you’re like, aha, this spot doesn’t have a circle near it, and that’s where I should open up.
And it’s not that hard. This, by the way, this is not a local Falcon report. This is taking data out of local Falcon. It’s a little bit painstaking, but can use, we specifically use Sigma for this, but it’s a really good way to build a map for where should we place an next office? And I want to hit this again, don’t do that until you’ve seen the growth from your current office max out, right? If you’re still building really well in your current office, when you open a second office and you’re struggling to stay in the top three, you’re now splitting a really important asset, which is your reviews across two offices, and that can sink your ship. You need to make sure that you can maintain your position and your success and you’ve kind of maxed that out. Maybe not maxed it out, but the incremental value of more reviews is going to be minimal compared to what you can get by opening the next office. And I do think this needs to be sequential. It’s one after another after another. It’s not, let’s open seven offices next year and hope that this is a rising tide that lifts all boats because that’s not how it works.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
Couple other highlights for local Falcon here. One, they do have a Looker Studio connector. So if you’re one of the marketers or tech people who are listening to the show, that’s a convenient way to get data out of local Falcon and being able to visualize it across other data sources. They also do Apple map scanning, so we really focus on Google. I wouldn’t count out Apple Maps, and I think as Conrad mentioned, the trend reports, I think that’s really where the value comes in because all the stuff we’re talking about in a snapshot you can view over time. And again, you’re looking because people that are listening to this and you’re like, oh, well, I’m not getting the same result when I do it, and when I search on my phone, we recognize our limitations of the tools. You’ll have to go research what some are, but directionally, over time, there’s no doubt that when you see your showing up in local packs in these areas and the scans are surfacing that your phone rings more and you’re getting new business and your search console, you can cross reference against search console data. That’s another thing to validate against your Google Business profile URLs for impressions and average positions and search cons and validate that against that. So pricing wise, it’s only a nickel per pin drop. So that’s why I like it for this idea of this quick, quick and dirty tool, quick
Conrad Saam:
And duty.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
It’s only a nickel per pin drop, so if you’re like, Hey, look, I’m going to do it yourselfer and I’m really not going to track big sections, but I would like to see if directionally what I’m doing is actually helping me. You can do a bunch of pin drops and run it periodically for a couple bucks a month. A very affordable way to do this.
Conrad Saam:
At the risk of we talking about price and at the risk of pitching local Falcon who is not a sponsor of this show, but maybe they should be. Gyi, I’m imagining that you do this all the time. This is a regular part of your every day for all of your clients, every prospect. This is a must have tool, correct?
Gyi Tsakalakis :
Well, no, because not all of my clients pay me for running nationwide grids every day. But yeah, I think it’s a very valuable tool. There are some situations where there’s another tool that might be we’ll give Bright Local a shout out. There are good local tool if you want some of their competitors look at Places Scout. Some of our clients are in Places Scout. But again, for me, it’s just a tool. It’s like this is the tool that I use when I want Quick Grid. I want to do quick competitive analysis, but I’m very much validated across different data points. All right. They also have an AI analysis component. We didn’t even talk about this, but the ai, the built-in AI will try to tell you what it thinks, the reasons that certain competitors are outranking, and that’s an interesting feature as well. Anything else about local Falcon?
Conrad Saam:
I’m trying to get you to pick the wrap up up because I always bung it, and we always have to rerecord when we end segment B with great insight from, Gyi, I sit here with trepidation because those of you who have listened to the pod will know that we always close. Well, what you don’t know is that every time I try and close, it sounds like crap, and we have to rerecord it,
Gyi Tsakalakis :
And it’s such a tradition now that we do this. It is that I wait for you to do it, and so hence the awkward pause in between. But we are so grateful that you all joined us for this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you just landed on this, have no clue what we’re all about. Check us out on YouTube and Spotify and Apple Podcasts and subscribe and find us on social media. We’ve been very active, especially the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing page on LinkedIn. If you’ve got sites you’d like us to take a look at, you got questions or topics you’d like covered, please do let us know there. Until next time, Conrad and GE saying Farewell from Lunch. Hour Legal Marketing.
Announcer:
Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legal talk network.com, subscribe via Apple Podcasts and RSS Follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Conrad Saam:
That was supposed to be a fancy segue for you to pick up and me to stop talking.
Gyi Tsakalakis :
No. Okay, so didn’t pick up on that subtlety.
Conrad Saam:
I did this, I was kind of doing it subtly, like, sorry, and I tried to end it with a, this is Sheena Wilde reporting from Dallas, Sheena Wilde. Okay, here we go.
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Are SEO Myths Finally Busted by Google Leak?  CMSWire
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The New York Times is to make its premium, paid podcasts available for NYT subscribers on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Spotify and Apple Podcasts listeners can connect their subscriptions wherever they bought NYT access. It’s in addition to the NYT Audio app – you can subscribe separately to just the podcasts if you’d like. It’s reported that most archive editions of the podcasts will go behind the paywall. We corrected an earlier version of this story about connecting your subscriptions within Apple Podcasts. It works however you purchased your NYT subscription.
Spotify are releasing updates today to the way the app displays paid podcasts. Non-subscribers will now see all free episodes and locked bonus episodes in one spot — so they know exactly what they’re missing out on. Subscribers will see all premium versions of the episodes, all bonus subscriber episodes, plus any free episodes that weren’t also published to the subscriber feed. It should streamline the experience for listeners.
A year on from Spotify’s integration with Patreon, Spotify tells us that nearly half the podcasters earning money on Patreon are using the Spotify Open Access integration: and on average, those creators have seen 15% of their Spotify listeners who visited their Patreon page go on to sign up for a paid membership. (Podnews is on Patreon).
📈 Boost Your Reach with Podcards! — Share your show with the smartest link for podcasters and decode the secrets of listener discovery and conversion. Start marketing smarter for free at Podcards.
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Paramount are reported to be making a new set of layoffs. It’s the second of three layoff announcements this year.
Podcast app Castro has published a new blog, covering changes in the app, and explaining the philosophy for new app features.
Version 3.5 of podcast app AntennaPod now displays Podcasting 2.0 transcripts, joining Pocket Casts and Apple Podcasts.
OPML exports are coming back to Overcast in the next update.
Need to find a decent podcast studio? Studio Mullet (“the name splits opinion”, we’re told) enables podcasters to easily search and book the best studios on the planet. It’s built by David McGuire, who wants to hear about your podcast studio, too.
Radiotopia has announced a set of new shows. Sponsorship and ad-sales are handled by Soundrise.
First released in 2018, the BBC Sound Effects website has been updated. Sound effects can be used free (with credit) for non-commercial projects. However, “if you monetise [your project], sell it, or charge for access to it, or if it is advertising-funded or commercially sponsored” then you’ll need to buy access.
Podcast studio Treefort Media has released StoryRabbit, a location-aware story-telling app using AI. The app lets you uncover stories in your own neighborhood or anywhere in the world, around things like true crime, the paranormal, the outdoors, sports, food, music, art, and architecture.

You can grab a free year of Pocket Casts Plus, if you want to try a different, more powerful, podcast app.
The Podcast Host look at How Successful Creators Build Loyal Communities

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Future Back Drinking with Dr. Athina Kanioura is new this week, hosted by PepsiCo’s first Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, Dr. Athina Kanioura. The show talks with industry pioneers, illuminating the technologies and trends that will redefine our tomorrow.

How To Destroy Everything was launched last year; but only with two episodes. The full show is now available. The show is the true story of Richard Jacobs – a narcissist who destroyed a childhood, a marriage, a family, and a community. He stole notary stamps, hacked emails, forged signatures… and won a U.S. Supreme Court case. It’s co-presented by his son.

In 1999, five-year-old Elián González was rescued near the Florida coast after his mother and others drowned in the Florida straits after fleeing Cuba. The question of whether Elián should stay with Florida relatives or return to his father in Cuba ignited a media firestorm, placing Elián at the center of a high-stakes political conflict between Cuba and the US. Chess Piece: The Elián González Story was launched yesterday.

Curious Tourism: Responsible Travel Podcast has returned with a new sound and a new release schedule. Hosted by Kattie Laur and Erin Hynes, guest experts not only share their insights on important topics like the reality Press Trips, poverty tourism and more, and they unpack the latest travel news stories so you’re always in the know.

Companies mentioned above:
AppleApple PodcastsCastroPocket CastsRadiotopiaSpotifyThe New York Times
#1 in Apple Podcasts
60 Minutes: A Second Look (CBS News)
Criminal Attorney (Wondery)
#1 in Spotify
The Joe Rogan Experience (Joe Rogan)
The Joe Rogan Experience (Joe Rogan)
Over the last week, 196,544 podcasts published at least one new episode (up 0.0%). source


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Digital marketing agency Tug Sydney has been selected by Suzanne Grae to manage the Australian retailer's SEO, paid search, and paid media activities.
Initially engaged to enhance Suzanne Grae's organic search capabilities, Tug Sydney's remit has now expanded to include increasing the brand's share of voice and driving audience traffic across digital platforms through both search and paid media efforts.
Suzanne Grae operates as part of the Sussan Group (ARJ Holdings), alongside the Sussan and Sportsgirl brands. Known for its inclusive fashion offerings, the company celebrates women of diverse sizes, shapes, and ages. Since its foundation in 1968, Suzanne Grae has grown to over 150 physical stores throughout Australia, complemented by a robust eCommerce presence.
Tug operates internationally with offices located in Sydney, Singapore, London, Toronto, and Berlin. The agency specialises in integrating data, media, content, and technology to optimise digital marketing strategies and improve return on investment for its clients.
Charlie Bacon, Managing Director at Tug Sydney, commented, "We are thrilled to partner with Suzanne Grae, a brand with a rich heritage and strong connection to Australian women. The team will leverage our expertise in SEO, paid search, and performance media to drive visibility and growth for Suzanne Grae, helping them reach even more women across the country. This collaboration is an opportunity to bring fresh digital strategies to a trusted brand that continues to evolve in the modern retail space."
Echoing these sentiments, Lisa Yanto, Digital Manager at Suzanne Grae, stated, "As a fashion brand that has been connecting with Australian women for over five decades, it's crucial we continue to innovate and engage with our customers across all digital platforms. Tug's data-driven approach and deep understanding of performance media will be key in helping us reach more women and continue to provide them with the easy, stylish, and uplifting fashion experiences they expect from Suzanne Grae."
Among Tug Sydney's varied portfolio are clients such as Merlin Entertainment, Budget Direct SG, Heinemann, and Bluebeam, showcasing the agency's broad range of expertise in the digital marketing sector.

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Google discusses how it decides to publicly disclose search incidents that affect search, crawling and indexing
Google’s latest Search Off The Record podcast discussed examples of disruptive incidents that can affect crawling and indexing and discuss the criteria for deciding whether or not to disclose the details of what happened.
Complicating the issue of making a statement is that there are times when SEOs and publishers report that Search is broken when from Google’s point of view they’re working the way they’re supposed to.
The interesting part of the podcast began with the observation that Google Search (the home page with the search box) itself has an “extremely” high uptime and rarely ever goes down and become unreachable. Most of the reported issues were due to network routing issues from the Internet itself than a failure from within Google’s infrastructure.
Gary Illyes commented:
“Yeah. The service that hosts the homepage is the same thing that hosts the status dashboard, the Google Search Status Dashboard, and it has like an insane uptime number. …the number is like 99.999 whatever.”
John Mueller jokingly responded with the word “nein” (pronounced like the number nine), which means “no” in German:
“Nein. It’s never down. Nein.”
The Googlers admit that the rest of Google Search on the backend does experience outages and they explain how that’s dealt with.
Google’s ability to crawl and index web pages is critical for SEO and earnings. Disruption can lead to catastrophic consequences particularly for time-sensitive content like announcements, news and sales events (to name a few).
Gary Illyes explained that there’s a team within Google called Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) that’s responsible for making sure that the public-facing systems are running smoothly. There’s an entire Google subdomain devoted to the site reliability where they explain that they approach the task of keeping systems operational similar to how software issues are. They watch over services like Google Search, Ads, Gmail, and YouTube.
The SRE page explains the complexity of their mission as being very granular (fixing individual things) to fixing larger scale problems that affect “continental-level service capacity” for users that measure in the billions.
Gary Ilyes explains (at the 3:18 minute mark):
“Site Reliability Engineering org publishes their playbook on how they manage incidents. And a lot of the incidents are caught by incidents being issues with whatever systems. They catch them with automated processes, meaning that there are probers, for example, or there are certain rules that are set on monitoring software that looks at numbers.
And then, if the number exceeds whatever value, then it triggers an alert that is then captured by a software like an incident management software.”
Gary next explains how the February 2024 indexing problem is an example of how Google monitors and responds to incidents that could impact users in search. Part of the response is figuring out if it’s an actual problem or a false positive.
He explains:
“That’s what happened on February 1st as well. Basically some number went haywire, and then that opened an incident automatically internally. Then we have to decide whether that’s a false positive or it’s something that we need to actually look into, as in like we, the SRE folk.
And, in this case, they decided that, yeah, this is a valid thing. And then they raised the priority of the incident to one step higher from whatever it was.
I think it was a minor incident initially and then they raised it to medium. And then, when it becomes medium, then it ends up in our inbox. So we have a threshold for medium or higher. Yeah.”
Gary Ilyes next explained that they don’t communicate every little incident that happens because most of the times it won’t even be noticed by users. The most important consideration is whether the incident affects users, which will automatically receive an upgraded priority level.
An interesting fact about how Google decides what’s important is that problems that affect users are automatically boosted to a higher priority  level. Gary said he didn’t work in SRE so he was unable to comment on the exact number of users that need to be affected before Google decides to make a public announcement.
Gary explained:
“SRE would investigate everything. If they get a prober alert, for example, or an alert based on whatever numbers, they will look into it and will try to explain that to themselves.
And, if it’s something that is affecting users, then it almost automatically means that they need to raise the priority because users are actually affected.”
Gary shared another example of an incident, this time it was about images that weren’t showing up for users. It was decided that although the user experience was affected it was not affected to the point that it was keeping users from finding what they were searching for, the user experience was degraded but not to the point where Google became unusable. Thus, it’s not just whether users are affected by an incident that will cause an escalation in priority but also how badly the user experience is affected.
The case of the images not displaying was a situation in which they decided to not make a public statement because users could still be able to find the information they needed. Although Gary didn’t mention it, it does sound like an issue that recipe bloggers have encountered in the past where images stopped showing.
He explained:
“Like, for example, recently there was an incident where some images were missing. If I remember correctly, then I stepped in and I said like, “This is stupid, and we should not externalize it because the user impact is actually not bad,” right? Users will literally just not get the images. It’s not like something is broken. They will just not see certain images on the search result pages.
And, to me, that’s just, well, back to 1990 or back to 2008 or something. It’s like it’s still usable and still everything is dandy except some images.”
Google’s John Mueller asked Gary if the threshold for making a public announcement was if the user’s experience was degraded or if it was the case that the experience of publishers and SEOs were also considered.
Gary answered (at about the 8 minute mark):
“So it’s Search Relations, not Site Owners Relations, from Search perspective.
But by extension, like the site owners, they would also care about their users. So, if we care about their users, it’s the same group of people, right? Or is that too positive?”
Gary apparently sees his role as primarily as Search Relations in a general sense of their users. That may come as a surprise to many in the SEO community because Google’s own documentation for their Search Off The Record podcast explains the role of the Search Relations team differently:
“As the Search Relations team at Google, we’re here to help site owners be successful with their websites in Google Search.”
Listening to the entire podcast, it’s clear that Googlers John Mueller and Lizzi Sassman are strongly focused on engaging with the search community. So maybe there’s a language issue that’s causing his remark to be interpretable differently than he intended?
Google explained that they have a process for deciding what to disclose about disruptions in search and it is a 100% sensible approach. But something to consider is that the definition of “relations” is that it’s about a connection between two or more people.
Search is a relation(ship). It is an ecosystem where two partners, the creators (SEOs and site owners) create content and Google makes it available to their users.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Khosro
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