LEVERAGING INFORMATIONAL QUERIES FOR AI AND GOOGLE SEARCH WITH VICTOR PEREZ

Seize the Power of AI and Google Search Today

AI and Google Search are forging a new path for local businesses, and Victor Perez lights the way in this episode! Discover how AI and Google Search converge to prioritize informational queries, offering a blueprint to stand out. Write blog posts that solve specific problems, monitor AI traffic with Google Analytics, and unify your marketing across platforms. From social media to your Google Business Profile, every touchpoint strengthens your presence. Whether you’re a lawyer or a shop owner, these strategies unlock qualified leads ready to convert. Jump into AI and Google Search now, and watch your business thrive as you lead the charge in a search-driven world, connecting with customers through authentic, answer-focused content that resonates!

EPISODE NOTES & RESOURCES:

• Free SEO Audit Tool: Evaluate your website’s SEO performance with our free tool
• TrackRight: trackright.com
• J.R. Oakes Study
• Victor Perez LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/victor014/

Episode Transcript – Leveraging Informational Queries for AI and Google Search With Victor Perez

Jesse Dolan (00:19)
Everyone, welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan as always. And I’m here to help local business owners get found, convert leads, stay ahead in the ever changing world of digital marketing search and all that. Speaking of change today, we are diving into one of the hottest and I guess confusing topics too, which hopefully Victor here is going to shed some light on it for all of us, but one of the topics in the marketplace right now, which is.

AI and search. We’re all familiar with Google, Google search. Maybe using AI to search, but these are kind of converging in a sense, but also there’s some areas where they are divergent and different from each other. And Victor’s going to help us break a lot of that down. There’s been a massive surge of platforms offering AI abilities to use, but also for search and for finding things. We’ve got what? Google AI, Google search.

ChatGPT, Grok, there’s a bunch of them. It’s pretty fragmented and, Victor, I’ve kind of been telling people, I feel like this is almost years ago in SEO when there was more than just Google, right? There was other search engines even go back to early 2000s, Lycos, Excite. You couldn’t just focus on Google and we’re kind of back in that a little bit, but for entirely different reason. So, to help us navigate this and we’ll get into some good questions here.

We are talking with Victor Perez. Victor is the SEO director at OnTheMap personally managed what probably well over a thousand, legal SEO campaigns. Now at that point, I don’t know. That’s like a good tagline. That’s always, fun to hang on your hat or your head. So, yeah, also we’ll talk a little bit here, Victor coming up, I think maybe a little bit later. It makes more sense, but TrackRight, which is a rank tracking and GeoGrid product, that you’re behind to him.

Super excited to kind of explore that and pick your brain a little bit there on why that’s unique and you everybody. But yeah, we’ve crossed paths at conferences before you were on an episode of a previous podcast that I hosted, which was awesome. So I’m very happy to have you here today. let’s start. What are you, what are you hearing lately from clients when it comes to AI and search? What’s kind of the, what’s kind of the vibe you’re getting and maybe the confusion they’re in.

Victor Perez (02:12)
Sure.

Sure. Yeah.

So thanks for bringing me on again. so I guess that’s a good place to start because that’s kind of where it really matters to us, at least as marketers where it’s what are the clients worried about right now? So the biggest thing, the biggest worry is, are we going to lose any market share or any visibility? I guess, if you think about like the entire,

Jesse Dolan (02:50)
Yeah.

Victor Perez (03:02)
Audience that you can capture organically. They’re worried because they’re spending so much money every month to make sure that they’re very visible on at least Google search primarily, depending, you know, depending on the focus, maybe you’re also tracking the other platforms, but they, for them, it’s really simple to just worry about Google. And like you said in the past, there’s been competition that’s came at them before, but now they’re worried that the amount of money that they’re spending for visibility, might start to dwindle away if people start to shift to a different platform.

Jesse Dolan (03:35)
Yeah.

Victor Perez (03:35)
So I guess going into that, you know, I guess it’s like a scary thought, but it is, like you said, it’s something that’s happened before. know when Bing started their big advertising for their search platform and you know, there were big lawsuits that Google had to face as far as being the default search engine for various devices. but you know, I guess Bing has its market share.

Typically, I remind people about how the people that are using windows some sort of a windows computer and they’re not very tech savvy They’ll go ahead and jump on just the first browser or the first search engine on the default browser, which is going to be Bing So just because of that they’ve been able to gain a really good amount of market share But I guess the first point I make from this is you want to pay attention to the actual Share that they’re taking from commercial searches commercial or informational that can lead to a conversion. And then so I guess I’m wondering have you have you heard yourself about different studies that have been done on this because I know I can point out at least one that was recently done just to kind of shed some light on this.

Jesse Dolan (04:56)
I’ve definitely read a few different articles, but I the one you shared in advance of this recording I thought was really good a Lot of great graphics will post it in the show notes for everybody to go check it out If you want to dive into anything on that, but I’ve got another question for you, maybe before we get super deep into the guts Everybody listening or watching, you know, it’s gonna be marketing managers business owners, know working on their their visibility.

Victor Perez (05:16)
Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (05:25)
You know, trying to get found locally. Maybe if you could help us break down quick in your, you know, your summarization here. What is for how, not how these business owners and managers are using it, but how their prospects and their clients are using these. We talked about Bing there a little bit, but what do you see a big difference, again, in your mind for how the end user’s using Google, Google with the AI, you know, information embedded into it.

Or just going straight to a ChatGPT for search, whether it be through the app or things like this. Is there any insights you can share with the business owners and marketing managers on how their clients and prospects seem to be using these tools? And if there’s any idiosyncrasies and differences, kind of like the Bing example that you gave there, which I thought was really good.

Victor Perez (06:12)
Yeah, so just a few days before we recorded this, Google gave their I.O. presentation where they revealed AI mode. And already, I think that’s one of the things I told you before this is all these different things that are coming out also make it really difficult to kind of keep up unless you’re somebody like us that has to be messing around with these tools every day. But before I go into AI mode, which is like the newest that’s come out, I guess I could say as to where we are right now or the whole previous year leading up to this point, there has been a shift in specifically informational queries.

Um, it appears, so I guess for context right now I oversee data for maybe I want to say like up to 300 different law firms right now across the U S so from this data, obviously we have to report on conversions and we have to look at also if any traffic or any conversions are coming through from ChatGPT. So what I can tell you is, um, it can vary, but for smaller law firms, maybe like a solo attorney, somebody that’s just focusing and is getting traffic from one city, I’m seeing up to like 30 to 40 % of the informational traffic coming through. sorry, so I guess I’m seeing 30 to 40% of that the leads that are being converted are coming from informational queries. So I want to start there, right? So out of all the leads that I see from the smaller law firms, there’s a pretty significant portion. You could say at least like a quarter of your traffic, as long as you’re putting up blog posts, informational content on your website.

You’re going to get a pretty significant portion of people converting from just an informational query. Okay. So why is that important? Because you want to divide your attention across people directly looking for a service, and people that are just researching first. So that’s a really big one to pay attention to because I know a lot of business owners and definitely a lot of lawyers that just don’t care about the blog post because it doesn’t seem like something that’s going to convert, and give them an ROI.

But, okay, so once you get that understanding of how important the informational queries are, out of the people, the very, very few people that are converted from ChatGPT across my clients, those are converting not off of somebody directly asking them for a lawyer, but it’s people that are doing research.

So that’s kind of like the best insight I can give as to how it breaks down because for one, if you look at the actual market share of like commercial searches from ChatGPT, it’s still like estimated to be like less than 1%. So even that is a fraction of what Bing produces right now. So that puts it into context, but also it means

Jesse Dolan (09:32)
Sure.

Victor Perez (09:36)
Hey, you should not be ignoring it because there are just enough users now on ChatGPT that you should be paying attention to what queries you’re showing up for and the rest. Going now into, you know, AI mode is coming out. So now the big question is, and this is a big question for Google too, as a giant corporation here or segments of corporations, however they’re split up now. But the big question is,

What are users going to gravitate to? Because Google’s job is to be on top of the change. They don’t want to be behind it because if they lag behind what users prefer, then people like ChatGPT can end up taking over. So that’s where the real danger is to Google and Google search and people like us that do organic marketing. So.

Jesse Dolan (10:23)
Alright.

Victor Perez (10:34)
Now that, okay, so that brings us to what users prefer. So from what I can see, I would say, okay, probably nobody is being silly enough to just let AI decide who their lawyer should be, but there is a shift happening towards people getting used to these tools. So I guess I can leave it because a lot of this is now speculation. So bringing us now to this timeline and answering your question, finally, I think we have to just be very on top of

Jesse Dolan (10:59)
Yeah.

Victor Perez (11:03)
where people are starting to gravitate towards what people are starting to prefer. And the best insight I can give to that right now is it’s definitely definitely not going to be overnight. People tend to have a like a little bit of a progress of getting used to new ways to experience things. It’s never very fast or at least historically.

It’s never been just suddenly people are just going to let AI decide everything. So yeah, but I feel like that’s kind of like where we’re at as far as our audiences that we have to be paying attention to.

Jesse Dolan (11:41)
Makes sense. Let me try to pick apart two things there from what you were saying. So if I’m hearing you correctly, or maybe I misinterpreted a little bit, but do you feel that, you know, again, you’re speaking kind of through the lens of legal, you know, analytics and legal leads here, which, you know, is a good indicator, but you know, there may be some niches out there that are different. But if a, you know, a conversion happens through somebody who came from ChatGPT,

Right now at least versus just a regular Google search. Do you feel like they’re, they are researching more, they’re trying to learn more instead of just pop up who’s near me or whatever, right? Like the volume maybe isn’t there, but maybe a little more educated, a little bit more ready to make that decision a little bit, a little bit further downstream. Is that, does that seem accurate for what you’re saying?

Victor Perez (12:32)
Yeah, so I definitely heard a lot of people that are marketers but are more so on the side of like understanding psychology or focusing on the psychology of things.

One of the recent events I was at was SEO week, which was in New York. And there was a lot of internal marketers, not just like agency owners, but internal marketers that have to think about these things and conversions and all of that for their large websites. Um, the best thing that I’m picking up from everybody there, all of these experts that actually think about these things is that if anything, like, um, you might start to see traffic go down for informational queries.

And that might, okay, so just let’s focus on just Google search. Even if people stay on Google search, you might still see people or you might see less clicks coming through from informational queries. But if people are clicking less because they’re using the AI overviews more.

That would mean that the fewer clicks that you do have would have a higher conversion rate than what you’ve experienced in the past. So just off of that, definitely don’t panic if you get less traffic. Obviously you want to start monitoring your ranks. We monitor even some informational queries, only the ones that are like higher intent than others.

But we do want to monitor ranks because you want to make sure, am I losing traffic because I lost a rank that was valuable or is it, we starting to see some of that shift, which I don’t think you’ll see month to month, but maybe year to year, we start to slowly see that little drain of traffic. And then obviously if you’re doing something like maybe e-commerce, you might start to experience that a little bit faster than somebody like local business.

Jesse Dolan (14:31)
Makes sense. Makes total sense. And so.

Victor Perez (14:34)
And then I would say the same thing even if you go to ChatGPT now if you’re researching if you’re spending a lot of your time making the decision then that click should be more valuable than not.

Jesse Dolan (14:47)
Right. Yeah, you’re ready. You’re more in that place to make that decision. Again, you’re talking very informational query based, right? There’s research. There’s fact finding. You’re not just looking for the local coffee shop here. Do you think, or I shouldn’t say do you think, just to explain to everybody, like you’re saying, you may not get that click in that traffic. You’re getting that AI overview or some version of it.

People are still, in that sense, people are still reading your content, consuming your information you’re providing, right? Even if they’re not clicking to your website, if it’s just presented in Google AI overview, let’s say, right? You’re still seeing this information. Hopefully your brand is mentioned. Hopefully there’s some kind of tie-ins there. Whereas before, they would have clicked on your website from that link in Google and then read that blog, right? Or read that information. Now they’re maybe still seeing all that, but they’re just not visiting your website. Is that accurately what you’re saying? Just so everybody can really parse that out?

Victor Perez (15:41)
Right exactly and I would imagine that as far as the factors that are used to weigh the quality of your page, obviously it matters a lot if you’re ranking on page one, especially towards the top of it, it matters a lot if people are bouncing off or ending or it matters if Google can tell that they weren’t satisfied with your page, that they had to go to a different one before they ended their session. So if you think about how this could affect things at a large scale.

If the clicks are more valuable and show in our better picture of intent because they’re only arriving once they’re ready to make a transaction or reach out, then it would only be better information for Google to have in their machine learning algorithm for weighing out quality. So it’s really and that’s really why you know you might get people especially people that have been doing SEO for longer that would say you know it’s it’s not too much of a change it’s still going in the same direction that we’ve been going it’s just the way that it looks is a little bit different and we have to pay attention to if people end up changing along with these you know innovations because obviously there’s a level of, these giant companies have to experiment. They have to see. It might not work. AI mode might not be good. We might hate it, but it doesn’t matter for their investors. They have to be trying because if they discover a better way to search, then that’s obviously, you know, that’s how you maintain your value or grow it. If you’re a large company like Google or ChatGPT, who’s obviously trying to innovate as much as they can.

Jesse Dolan (17:05)
Right?

Yeah, they’re not going to just sit on their heels and let the trillions of dollars escape them, right? So, all right, one more thing I want to circle back to this the same topic here still again for everybody out there, managers, owners running their business, whether it be in legal or otherwise, how can they identify? Maybe it’s just Google Analytics and you can help people see how to tag and stuff here. But how do they know where this traffic is coming from? How do they know that this is ChatGPT traffic to their website, right?

Not how much is shown in the AI overviews and things like this, right? But the actual clicks from said platform to their site, how can they know?

Victor Perez (18:41)
Right, right. And that’s a good point where you should probably focus more on if you got clicks, then trying to figure out rankings for the new AI platforms, because I know AI overviews, at least AHrefs is getting pretty good at showing you when you show up for one of those. But anything else as far as AI rank tracking is just there’s, there’s, there’s not very good data. So yeah, definitely focus on did I actually get a click that somebody come over and convert? So for sure, if you haven’t already set up Google Analytics. So simply tagging your website and connecting Google Analytics without any other setup, at least you can already go back and see referral sources and see if ChatGPT provided you some traffic.

So the very least set that up just connect it just enable it. But I would say even if you know you’re just a business owner you’re trying to figure it out yourself I would say at least try searching on YouTube maybe examples of how to do custom conversion tracking custom conversions using Google Tag Manager because then not only do you see what traffic you got, but you also want to try and set it up to where it starts counting conversions. If somebody submits a contact form, submits like a chat widget lead or they click to call on any phone number that you have anywhere on the website. That’s the other one. That’s like the minimum that you should do and that at least sets you up to if not now later you can bring somebody on to help you analyze your information your data.

Jesse Dolan (20:21)
100 no, that’s perfect. And I think it’s important for everybody to know, right? Like this isn’t just you’re going out and testing it yourself to see if you’re showing up and you know, would you click whatever you look at the actual data? What are the patterns? Because I think something else you said that people shouldn’t shouldn’t miss as this is evolving and it won’t be fast. You’re not going to be able to pull up said report and be like, wow, wow. Look what happened last month. This will continue to erode. Maybe just say from overall, maybe Google traffic on your site and start to separate out, we keep talking ChatGPT as an example, right? But there’s a handful of good AI platforms that are out there right now today. Who knows a year from now if there’s gonna be anybody new in the mix, right? Or any consolidation, but yeah, the time is now to start tracking and looking at this stuff. People get a handle on it, because it is changing. They think there’s no denying that, right? It’s not an if, it’s a now or a when, if you will.

I don’t know you have anything else to add on that as we’re thinking through it. Otherwise, this might be a great time to switch over to the study by J.R. Oakes we’re talking about, if breaking down some insights there.

Victor Perez (21:30)
I think this, no, I think I, I, I guess that was like my next thought is, you know, it sounds really scary because in a way, you know, I guess it is, you know, change is always scary, but right now it’s like, you know, definitely take action to track. Definitely try to get your own data. If you have to pay somebody, hire somebody just to get that set up for you. Definitely do that.

Because it’s a good time to do that, but don’t freak out just yet, right? We’re still trying to see how things are gonna change and even if they do change That doesn’t mean that Google is gonna scrap the algorithm. They’re like multi billion algorithm they put together. So along those lines, I guess it gets into one study that I saw. So there was a JR Oakes, and I know he said he had it fact-checked by Patrick Stacks from AHrefs. And he presented a whole bunch of data at SEO Week. So I had reached out to them just to get the slides. So I know I linked that to you in case anybody wants to look at the full thing.

Jesse Dolan (22:12)
Right. Right.

Victor Perez (22:39)
But basically, they did a study, pretty large study too, very large sample size, trying to look at essentially, should we be worried? Are we moving into a ChatGPT type of platform where all of a sudden things are harder to discover? It’s harder to discover small businesses. Is that gonna happen? That’s kind of one of the biggest worries. But so far,

If anything, looks like ChatGPT has a very good amount of, I can’t remember how they phrased it, but the, the, the discovery, the amount of different types of queries and the amount of businesses in total that it would show off to people is still something really, if not better than Google at being able to kind of showcase a wider variety of different brands. So on that note, at least so far with their development, don’t be scared that all of a sudden it’s only going to be the giant conglomerates or just the giant players in your industry that are going to be shown because that appears to be kind of like a big focus from those developers that are building these platforms. And I mean, it makes sense. You’re not going to win over market share from Google search if you’re not trying to do something better than Google search. But for now, honestly, if you take a look at the study, but it doesn’t look like there’s much of a difference between the types of rankings that you would be getting on Google than you would be getting on ChatGPT. And you can try to check yourself with your specific business. This is how I would check anything that you’re top ranking for on Google. See if that’s already showing up within the top positions on ChatGPT, because for me, when I went through all the different informational queries that I’ve been stuck on, like number one for many months, those tend to also be within the top three of what ChatGPT is trying to suggest. So already, there is a difference, obviously, there’s an added amount of logic placed into the rankings before it serves it to you. So there is a difference, but at its core, it’s still following the same thing. If not, it’s just kind of using Google search results for now.

Jesse Dolan (24:55)
Yeah.

Victor Perez (24:56)
I mean, if you, if you had to really quickly build this platform, wouldn’t it be really easy to just pull from Google and just leverage what they’ve done? for now.

Jesse Dolan (25:05)
Yeah. I’d like that because I’ve talked to plenty of people, Victor. Sorry to interrupt you there, but I think it’s worth highlighting that Google indexes your website, right? It literally scans it, if you will, saves a copy. It doesn’t save a copyright. It digests the information, saves that to be served back up in results later. Not that ChatGPT or anybody else doesn’t have the capacity to maybe start indexing and everything else, but.

Victor Perez (25:11)
No, no.

Jesse Dolan (25:33)
Effectively and I’m being super simplistic here for any data scientists listening here, but it’s doing the research for you, right? It’s not coming, it’s not pulling from its own index database of results and rankings. It’s going to Google, maybe Google Bing and Yelp, whatever, and doing three different searches and then giving you these results. So yeah, if you want to rank high, quote unquote, air quotes here in ChatGPT, make sure you’re ranking high in Google, right? And I think your study kind of corroborates a lot of those important, not your study, I’m sorry, the one that you shared with me that we’re gonna link in the show page, corroborates a lot of that. If you really look at the metrics and dive into it, not without some differences to your point, it’s not just pulling straight off Google, off the SERP, know, but obviously it’s a research tool for it to give you the answer that you’re looking for, So, good for the…

Victor Perez (26:20)
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, if it was your job to build it, I mean, I would think it’s probably a whole lot cheaper to just pull via API on every search platform and then just add your logic to make it better. But, okay. But anyways, there’s definitely, you know, people are saying, you know, look at within ChatGPT, you’ll start to notice there are local pack results that look very much like the map pack. So it looks like it is at least primarily and that doesn’t mean that it puts all its weight on it but primarily it looks like it would pull from big places, to serve your map, your local pack type of listing. But, but that also doesn’t mean that if you’re not on Bing, you don’t show up because I do have clients that we did not put them on Bing. They still rank or we also have clients that are on Bing, but what ChatGPT is pulling from their local pack is different, because just like data aggregators and citations, guess what? It will pull from other sources and if it’s a very high traffic site that has your name wrong on it, it might just overwrite what you just put in from Bing. So you can see how different platform, but almost the same type of situation with how third party data is handled, where you have to have it kind of accurate everywhere if you want the best effect and you don’t want anything to conflict. So I would say definitely focus on Bing. And like you said, if they are just pulling Google API, Bing API, Yahoo, whatever.

Jesse Dolan (27:50)
Right.

Victor Perez (27:59)
Then hey, make sure you’re setting up at the very minimum, like go on Bing, set up Webmaster Tools, whatever SEO plugin you use on your website, they all should have the feature to connect to index now, which will index all your pages immediately over on Bing. So definitely, you know, make use of that. But yeah, for now, that’s kind of what the rankings look like. There’s just a little bit of logic that’s placed in.

And of course, depending on what you’re putting in as your query, it’s going to deviate from what you might see on Google if you’re just putting in a few keywords for your search.

Jesse Dolan (28:38)
Right. And very, we should say at least it’s suspected it’s, highly unique to every person searching. Not that Google is not different for you and me, right? If we did the same search right now, two different places, two different histories, we’re going to get some differences, but also a lot of similarities with ChatGPT or AI too. It’s even more so tailored to you. Correct. Or that’s what we do.

Victor Perez (29:01)
It is biased.

So yes, so at least right now, because they try to apply patches when things go a little bit too far in one way. But right now it is super biased in that

If you sign up with an account on ChatGPT and let’s say you’re doing some sort of work, you’re trying to, I don’t know, summarize things or change things on a spreadsheet and bulk or something. If it picks up that you own a business and you’re the business owner, and then later you try to do a search within the same account and you try to see where you rank, it will rank you above everybody else. So don’t get confused. You’re going to have to use like a separate account or no account to try to run some rankings.

Jesse Dolan (29:47)
And I think that’s where people in that scenario, that’s where people can really understand these are two different things, right? Google is a search engine. I go there to find things where ChatGPT does, it does anything, I guess, to an extent, right? But that doesn’t mean it’s super good and specialized at something like search. Not, it can do research and give you information, but it’s different from a search engine, right? There’s different factors at play. And like you said, some logic that’s introduced there and that logic is evolving and maybe not, you know, PhD level logic in some cases. It could be very elementary or just grabbing some of the supplemental stuff and thinking it’s more important than it is, right? In your example of this is my business, so I should be number one. Well, not what I’m looking for. So I think in this study that we’re talking about, something for me that jumped out pretty easy is not that there’s a direct correlation here or a guarantee, but being active on all these different platforms, social media, YouTube, again, like Yelp, not just putting your website out there, not just getting your GBP and having your content index, like you said, but also being in the spots that a legitimate and authoritative business would be in, right? Having a social media account, throwing some YouTube videos up. it doesn’t guarantee results, but it seems like the companies that are in those places also are the ones that are winning. that kind of makes sense from a logic standpoint, right?

Victor Perez (31:16)
Yeah, so this is a good point. And honestly, if you have like a holistic approach to SEO, it would still be something that you would have picked up as far as ranking factors on Google already. Now, maybe it was really only seen in the last year or two, but definitely, I have a few clients, I know one in particular that I always think about, but as SEOs, a lot of times we look at, maybe we get a new injury lawyer in a big city like Miami, and we have to give them some type of a projection. Typically, know, agencies, the way you do it is you look at the difference in content. You look at the difference in backlinks, what type of mentions they’ve gotten in the news or just online anywhere.

And you try to estimate like how long it might take, how much money it might take to recreate that. I have a few clients where they don’t just like the help that we provide is not the only thing that’s in play with their campaign. Some of these clients, they do a lot in the community. They participate in, you know, philanthropic events to get their name out there. They use that to take pictures to fuel their then social media, which they handle at a pretty high quality. They’re not just, do you need an injury lawyer calling out? No, like they’re putting something out there that will at least get fed into different community feeds and maybe they get interaction. They’re spending money on ads, what maybe not TV ads, some of them, yes, but maybe they go, they get creative, they pay people to vinyl wrap their cars, they do all these things that now create a big presence where there’s people searching them, there’s people clicking through social media that’s associated. And ultimately, Google can see your website doesn’t just get traffic from like SEO, like it’s not just organic. So I guess my big point is, even over the last few years, the more you’re doing as far as marketing as far as your brand presence that gives you a huge leg above everybody else and then now it looks like on these big platforms it’s almost going to be like a requirement at this point to have a little bit more going on than just somebody putting content and ranking in on your website so that’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s getting tougher, I guess, and you can’t just be an SEO or if you are, you have to have, I guess, a pretty good team. but yeah, there are some clients that I’ve worked with that if you do analysis, any of the basic analysis, it does not make sense because they’re, they’ll have like a fraction of as much, it looks like there’s a fraction of as much being done, but they just rank above everybody because they’re doing so much work outside of it.

Jesse Dolan (34:17)
Yeah.

Well, if you think about it, we, think sometimes as SEO professionals, if you will, have the curse of knowledge that like marketing and doing well in search is just all about your website and those digital, digital things. Forgetting that these businesses that are in Google and ranking are actual brick and mortar businesses, real people interacting with other real people doing things locally. And if we think about it now today, if we’re doing a search for something, trying to find the best blank in blank city. Well, that’s more than just how are you ranking in Google, right? That is, yeah. Are you, are you part of the community or do you have people that like you? Are you getting mentions? it’s not the exact same here, but we always tell people if you want five star reviews, right? Just talking about getting reviews in a GBP, you got to be a five star business. And I think in a, in a parallel way, this is true here. If you want to be ranking and being found going forward digitally and these, all these different search platforms or AI tools.

It just got to be a kick-ass business. got to be out there. You got to be engaged doing things and you can’t just focus on manipulating a rank. All those is important, right? You have to be strategic and optimize to battle against everybody else who is, but doing these things above and beyond that, just running a good business and being out there, talking for people locally. Yeah, it’s, makes a difference. And I think that translates into again, in the study, big brands, well-known brands get a lot of exposure. And if you just think about it out in the ether that exists for them already. They’re just so well known from their brand legacy or in all the different assets that are out there. Bring that down to a small local level. We have to recreate that, you know, as business owners and marketers, we have to try to get ourselves as important locally as those big brand like Coca Cola, and we just know it, you know, it’s just there. How can we do that for our brands, whether it in legal, right, or the phone repair shop or the flower shop or whatever. yeah, what’s old is new again in some ways, but then also.

It’s not the hot trick, right, or the way to manipulate a certain thing. It’s just doing good in all those areas.

Victor Perez (36:26)
Right, right.

What, what was a trick last year’s now becoming a requirement. and I don’t know if trick is the right word because ultimately you don’t want to just kind of patchwork it. You don’t want to, I don’t know, hire the cheapest freelancer you can. Cause again, it’s not about, I posting, free estimates call now. Like that’s the, know, you gotta put some effort into it too. But, what was I going to say about that? No, yeah, yeah. right. So as far as what last year was something to take advantage of now is a requirement. I keep losing my train of thought. right, indexing, indexation, indexation. So.

Jesse Dolan (37:12)
Happens to me all the time. There you go.

Victor Perez (37:18)
Throughout time, Google has always increased the scrutiny, made it harder to keep all of your content indexed. It’s always gone tougher and tougher and tougher. You used to be able to throw up anything at all and multiply it by hundreds, thousands, and it would index. That’s obviously started to change way, way long ago, but it’s almost like it’s starting to speed up now. And maybe part of it to blame could be AI being introduced because like I mean it’s almost like too difficult to understand the scale of how much content is being dumped and pushed into Google every like minute that

All of a sudden like those are it costs a lot of money to go through this. It’s very expensive You know, you need like massive data centers everywhere just to get through all this content Like no wonder they’re they’re just trying to save their costs on indexation that they tighten up the rules Hey, it’s not it’s not good enough anymore. We’re just not gonna crawl your entire website. We we’re just gonna make inferences We might crawl some pages not index them. We might know that your page exists because it’s on your site map but we’re not going to go through it we’re just going to make an assumption as to hey I think I know what’s there and it’s not good enough so we’re just not going to put it on Google so that it’s getting tougher again there’s another wave of this being tightened up so if you haven’t already you know it’s a good time to go through crawl get use something like screaming frog or some sort of tool to crawl your whole website. Go through all your content start if you have to hire somebody you know if it’s a big enough website to start going through the content maybe use AI for some of it too to crawl through and give you a judgment. If you have pages that the topics are so loose and relevance that you’re noticing that type of content is no longer indexed start getting rid of stuff that you know is not good enough another is if you were one of those people that would think that you just need to make a giant very lengthy page to outrank people obviously in the past way back in the past that would work if you have pages that are super lengthy or if you’ve ordered content from writers where you force them to meet a big word count start going through your site if you have to programmatically figure it out but start all these massive pages, bring them down to just the actual answer, just the helpful, real good content and cut out everything else. Because at least if you do that across your whole website, you’re ensuring that you’re maintaining just like the best quality across the board.

Jesse Dolan (39:54)
Yeah.

Yeah. So author, I refer to a lot. Steven Krug, he has a book, his couple of books. One of them is don’t make me think. And I took a workshop of his years ago and the exercise he had us do, which it’s, it’s hitting me as you’re saying this, and, try to practice it a lot is you write something or maybe you’re looking at your blog post from last year, right? Cut it in half without losing the guts, right? Cut it in half, read it.

And try to cut it in half again, right? Go through that exercise of getting rid of the fluff, the extra words. It may be, maybe you feel like you still need a long blog post or whatever. Okay. Maybe the first, the first third of the page, at least do this. So people are, whether it be a Google bot and AI agent or, know, Victor or Jesse reading it, give us what we’re looking for right away. Don’t make us think, just communicate clearly. And then you got me. I’m not bouncing out. I’m not going somewhere else. might or might not read the rest of it here, but.

Let’s get to the point, right? think you’re very…

Victor Perez (41:07)
Don’t be obscure and ambiguous. I know there’s got to be lots of websites that are purposely ambiguous because they don’t want to give you the info. They want to just get you to call. You don’t want that because if your whole website is ambiguous, that’s a very easy way to just show to any search engine. Our content is not that good. You don’t need to use this for your machine.

Jesse Dolan (41:32)
We are not an authority for actual information here. Please move on. So you don’t want to be in that bucket.

Victor Perez (41:36)
Right. Yeah.

And then, yeah, it also comes back to also like the writing team or whoever’s writing the content, because, you know, you can’t have the tightest, most rigid rules. I imagine by now people are really loosening up the rules as far as how writers are supposed to write.

There still is a world obviously of using tools that can tell you based on competitors, what type of phrases or at least what type of subheadings you should probably put in there. That also helps you with keyword grouping so that you know if you need to split into another page or if you’re good combining a bunch of topics into one.

But I imagine the rest of it as far as word count, that probably starts to go out the window right now where you have to leverage the actual skill of the writer to determine that on their own. I know a few English professors that I had where, you know, when they assign the essays, everybody’s quick to ask what the word count is. And they would get really upset because it’s like, all right, you’re already going to produce something bad if you’re worried about meeting the word count and not thinking about how long it really should be. So that’s what I kind of, I resort to as far as when we do the writer briefings for anything that we’re ordering.

Jesse Dolan (43:00)
Well, I think like you talked earlier here is, you know, like the informational, you know, blog posts or whatever. and that just hits on like, what’s the intent? Like, why does this page or post exist? Is it answering a question? Is it providing some research information? Forget about the word count. Like just make sure the information is there. It’s on point for the intent. You’re matching up what they’re looking for with what you’re, what you’re providing, get to that, you know, and, and let them know they’re in the right place, whether they’re reading that AI overview, just kind of not visiting your website yet, but just reading this and like, yeah, that’s the, that’s the stuff right there. I need to go to that company or if they are on your page or your social media, even quite frankly, if we’re pulling out snippets and sharing them on social, let’s not bury the lead. Let’s, let’s get people what they’re looking for. If I think there’s an asterisk here, if you’re interested in getting traffic from people searching from being found, right? If you’re a business where maybe you’re pushing out TV commercials and yeah, you want somebody to go to your website, find the ambiguous information and then take an action. Okay. That’s a different model, but everybody listening and watching here. We’re local businesses.

Victor Perez (44:10)
Well, I mean, you could do that on paid traffic. That still makes sense on paid traffic.

Jesse Dolan (44:13)
True, right.

Yeah. Yeah. Whether it be a TV commercial or paid social ad, whatever, you’re right. That’s, there may be a model that works for you, but I think everybody tuning into us here right now today is trying to get found in search, right? And I think there’s some great, some great pointers there. I’m curious right now. I’ve got a few more questions here for you if, if, if you don’t mind. What would you recommend everybody, whether again, you’re in legal or not, what should they do right now to stay visible?

As AI search evolves. I know this may be a different answer next month, next week, or next year, but right now, just from general businesses knowing what they are and aren’t doing, is there a single thing, not that it’s gonna rocket them to the moon, but is there a big thing you’re seeing that they’re not doing any number one tip you wanna share?

Victor Perez (45:01)
I guess. So the first I have two things I would point out the first one I would say, you know, you should have started your blogs years ago, you know, so if you so if you have it, you probably should but at least now if you start it now you can do it right you can do it a quality way versus before where it’s kind of spammy or the longer back you go. But if you have to do one thing across the board,

Jesse Dolan (45:23)
throwing it up there.

Victor Perez (45:31)
If you don’t already have somebody to coordinate the marketing, you gotta have somebody. So now if you’re still a pretty small business, you can still rely on an agency to do this for you, especially if they have somebody internal that you can use for social media, for paid ads, for anything else that you might, any design needs, any in-person flyers, all that stuff. But if you’re starting to grow to, I don’t know, uh, eight figures by that point, you should be whether you’re a law, I guess, especially for a law firm, but you need to have somebody internal. That’s at least coordinating the marketing. And I say coordinate because maybe, you know, you don’t need an actual manager per se internal. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to get an internal SEO. Some of these people are very expensive PR. All that stuff is super expensive, but you do probably want to have somebody internal in your office that’s coordinating them and also helping guide you with the in-person efforts. Telling you, well, for example, at the very least is, okay, we do really well for these queries on Google search. We already get tons of traffic for this particular service.

If you’re going to do your social meet, if we’re going to hire somebody to come in and record us doing videos that are a little bit nicer for social media, for an ad that we push out on TV or whatever, maybe don’t do it on the same category that we already spent a bunch of money on. already performing really well. Let’s go for another one because then any presence, any searches that come from that effort now boost the ones that you’re doing poorly on for organic. And there’s a lot of tie-ins and crossovers that ultimately it’s really nice to have somebody in person that can, the thing is the business owners, by that point, you’re really busy. You’re probably, you you probably shouldn’t spend too much time on the marketing or jumping into meetings every month with your marketing team, your agency that you’ve hired. That point, you need somebody else to be focused on that because you as the business owner or you as one of the partners of the law firm, you’ve got other things to focus on and you, you probably should be focused on those on.

Like you said, having an actual superstar business, making sure you’re, you’re going after every last person for reviews and getting your feedback so that the sales, the intake is all perfect and not to par. But yeah, consider somebody to help you coordinate this marketing, especially if you’re not a marketer yourself, don’t try to do the job. You know, you, you’re an expert in something else. Do you, should work on that.

Jesse Dolan (47:56)
Right.

Yep. think it’s great advice. We run into clients all the time for decades now where as they scale up, they just do more, right? Or learn these things. And it’s like, Hey, you weren’t before we engage with you. Let’s just say as an SEO, you weren’t doing all these things. Why are you now? And you don’t want to throw good money after bad. You want to, you know, be strategic and efficient, right? Like you’re saying, if there’s a certain campaign you’re going to do in one direction, does it make sense to mesh it with another one and collaborate? Are these two different buckets completely isolated? and then inversely, are you doing something? Whether let’s say a paid social ad, like, there’s, there’s nothing on our website. If somebody were, this is a great video. This is really sexy looking. It’s getting a lot of attention. But if we’re having them go to our website as the next step from that ad and there’s nothing on the website that ties it in or whatever.

It’s amazing how unaware some organizations can be when they’re not really coordinating the overall marketing, like you’re saying. That doesn’t mean you have to push all the buttons and do all the work, but just thinking about where are you putting your budget and your energy, where are you getting your leads from, and how is this pumping the same flywheel? Instead of just being disjointed and inefficient in a lot of ways, I think as we were talking to earlier, so much of this is connected now out there in the ether of digital search and things like this.

Yeah, you’re bringing up a great, I was expecting some hack or some trick, whatever, but you’re just hitting like business basics. Like make sure somebody is on top of this crap for you. And I mean, that’s like the A1 answer, I guess, if we really, if we really do think about it.

Victor Perez (49:54)
Well, as far as like actual fulfillment, I guess it’s it’s the blogs, I guess, because it’s it’s it’s easy. Well, it should be I guess it’s the easiest thing I can think of. Everything else is, you know, you can try to do your own outreach and get a link or two, but you’re not going to be the person that every single month is being able to push out links. So that’s yeah, that’s my best advice.

Jesse Dolan (50:21)
Why do you like, you’ve mentioned it a few times in this case, blog posts versus just a page on your website, like an inner page about a service or product you’re selling, just for everybody listening and watching, right? We’re talking two different things here, even though they’re both content on your website, you’re preferring blog posts as some kind of a regular content generation versus inner pages? Or am I just hearing that?

Victor Perez (50:44)
So yeah, so it is, I guess I was assuming it would be under the assumption of you probably already have pages to cover all your services, but that’s a good point. If you maybe put your own website together or hired like a really cheap freelancer to just throw something up really quickly.

Then you might be actually missing service pages. definitely, yeah. So, and this is where if you have maybe like a franchise type of business or if you’re like multi-state, then it can come into strategy now where it’s like how many, okay, in one month, how many service pages do we add? How many blog posts? Cause it’s, it’s, there’s no, you don’t want to go only service page. You don’t want to go only blog posts at that point. There’s a kind of like a healthy mix. So you might want to see how many service pages are we missing? How many should we have? And then kind of work your priority that way. Cause the larger the website also, I guess this is kind of insight from how we’ve built out a bunch of like, multistate type of law firms or even contractors like home improvement and stuff like that It’s if you go too fast with the service pages. So i’m talking about like you can for most cities, at least any city with a good amount of population, you might have to spin out a separate, unique page, service page, just for that city. So you can see how you’re, if you’re multi-state all of a sudden, it takes quite a lot of time to even organize which cities do we actually need to cover, which ones could be grouped into one, so on and so forth. But if you go too fast with producing all the service pages, you might run into that problem with indexation, which, know, if, you’re doing it yourself, maybe it doesn’t matter too much because you can just kind of wait for Google to catch up and start liking what you put out. But if you’re on a time crunch, if you’re trying to rank now, or if you’re a marketing agency like us, and we have the clock running, now we have to be monitoring, okay, did we go too fast on content that’s maybe not that valuable? Because what ends up happening if you go way too much on service pages and not enough informational to support that? So the information, it ranks easier more often than not, it depends on your topics, but it ranks easier. So.

Jesse Dolan (53:04)
it.

Victor Perez (53:17)
You can imagine you do both at the same time. The traffic that’s coming in from the blog post is slowly adding to the authority, which is really important because links are very expensive. So even adding link building into the mix, you don’t only do links. You got it. You know, you got to push out the content. There’s the different angles you got to do, but

Jesse Dolan (53:24)
Right.

Victor Perez (53:37)
If you do too much of just service pages, you end up at some point, you’ll notice Google starts to ignore the new pages that you put out. So there’s a little bit of a take and give you have to do if you’re increasing your authority and you’re starting from very little. If you’re starting from a lot of authority, you can go way more aggressive on the content build out.

Jesse Dolan (54:00)
Right. Makes a lot of sense. hope everybody was kind of keeping up with that. depending on where they’re at, I guess, in the evolution of their business and their website, like to your point, maybe a need to have a mixed back to your, where you originally were when I asked you, assuming somebody is built out in their services and locations, like all that’s out there, then back to what you’re saying. If there’s a number one recommendation here outside of having somebody in charge of your marketing in the high on the ball is put out great blog posts, right? Just keep putting out good content and using that however you can.

Victor Perez (54:35)
I have another point because I feel like a lot of people also would suggest just kind of blog posting and it kind of leads. And then you might be misled into asking ChatGPT for your topics, which maybe for your first dozen or so topics, you might find some good ones, but that’s not really the point. but you want to use at least competitor research, right? So if you’re an SEO, you don’t know at all, anything about a niche that you have to work on. It’s pretty easy with competitor analysis and even if you do if you are an expert at you know or if you’re licensed in a type of law practice of law you yourself even then you should probably use competitive research first because you’ll at least know which topics are for sure going to bring you traffic right but you don’t want to stop there

Jesse Dolan (55:31)
Yeah.

Victor Perez (55:34)
So if you’re doing your own blog posting, don’t just stop there. Don’t just use tools. If I look at all the law firms we work with, they’re converting cases from queries that don’t show up on any search tool, ahrefs, SEMrush. Why? Because, I mean, they don’t see everything. see as much as people, however many users they have that are integrating their data. That’s where, you know, they can pull more and more data and get all this great info that we can see on the platform. But there are questions that your clients are asking you in the middle of the service, throughout the service.

So if you’re really at, at least those are your best things that lead to conversions because if people are searching for them, that’s can you get visibility on. But wait, yeah.

Wait, but yeah, it’s the authenticity of the topics you pick, and especially with legal like you can land the big case. It’s like it’s very surprising when I see this guy converted from I was I wasn’t sure if this was a valuable blog post like I I didn’t know anybody would ask such a specific question But if people are starting to use AI more they’re going to be asking more specific questions So there’s only gonna be more opportunities for you if you get that.

Jesse Dolan (57:35)
I think we can all raise our hand to this too, like as a searcher, the person looking for something, whether it be Google, ChatGPT, whatever, when you do have that specific question and you’re like, I can’t find this answer, I can’t find my help, when you come upon it and find it, you’re like, holy sweetness, this is the place, I trust these guys and gals, whatever, right? Like the equity that you then get as the company that provided that super niche answer or seemingly irrelevant tidbit.

When the people come across that, that’s great, right? It’s great. You become not just a general authoritative entity on that topic. Like you’re an expert now, because you answered this question that nobody else was having. That’s huge. That’s huge. Even if it doesn’t show up next week as giant traffic on your website, right? That’s back to like you’re talking earlier, more qualified. Like when people do come to you through these channels, this type of information, they’re going to be hopefully your ideal prospects and client targets. So, do you have anything else to add on that Victor? Otherwise I got one more question here for you.

Victor Perez (58:41)
Not really. amongst all my clients, everybody loves the organic leads the best. Obviously we’re, we’re a little bit biased, but you just kind of pointed out, yeah, if you just kind of like, if you naturally were positioned in front of that person that needed the service, it’s a little bit more valuable or well, I guess the salespeople have an easier time converting.

Jesse Dolan (58:47)
Right?

Yeah, it’s a different relationship. You know what mean? Like how the end user enters into it, you know, the questions they have, the confidence they have. Yeah, it’s a better model, which better, which is why we say, I mean, again, being biased, but organic search traffic, maybe outside of like a super warm referral, you know, if your buddy just walks you into the door, you can’t be that organic. Okay, kind of last question here for you, then we can start to wrap it up.

With the shift towards AI, AI search, right? Not talking about AI for using it as a tool for our business, for creating content, for research, but more of like as a parallel to Google search, right? In that sense. Is there something positive that businesses can look forward to as it becomes more integrated, something you’re mainly excited about as this evolves?

Victor Perez (59:59)
So excited about, I think the disc, no, no, no, no, no, I, so I guess I’m not scared because I like what the developers are trying to build. so I would say what’s exciting is we still see that focus from these developers on

Jesse Dolan (1:00:03)
Maybe that’s wrong word.

Okay.

Victor Perez (1:00:24)
Making sure that small brands can be discovered in some type of way. Maybe you can’t afford link building, maybe you can’t afford public relations work, maybe you can’t afford the best writers to produce content really quick, but if you can leverage authenticity, uniqueness, anything I guess that makes your brand look better, maybe you can succeed in social media, maybe you can succeed getting mentioned that way and then all of a sudden you’re at least getting fed into these platforms where Sure, maybe the most commercial searches you won’t show up But there is an expansion in the way people are searching So there should still be plenty of opportunities if not more for you to still be seen You’ll just have to get a little bit more knowledgeable about the different avenues that there are Don’t be too quick to decide I gotta put out ads, you know, a lot of lawyers that go straight for what about TV ads? What about this one? Radio? Don’t be too quick. Get knowledgeable about all the avenues before you make your decision. But I think it’s exciting again to just see that internally they do have a focus on making sure that users can still connect to the businesses and the local services that are actually doing a good job in their local area.

Jesse Dolan (1:01:05)
That, that’s, mean, that’s, their MO is that they always try to make sure the best results are provided for what people are searching for to connect them. We love to get pissed when a tactic or a trick doesn’t work anymore and they clean up the SERP, you know.

Victor Perez (1:02)

That, yeah, that, affiliate marketing ranking pages is kind of, you know, I mean, it’s already been decimated before.

Jesse Dolan (1:02:14)
Ain’t like it was that’s for dang sure. But anybody who’s that’s, guess where that is working is there, they’re, they’re spoofing or creating legitimate business too, right? Like they, it’s a different version of what it was. And I don’t know. It’s, it’s a whole different creature, but yeah, I think it’s.

Victor Perez (1:02:29)
Right, you could have done a very fake looking business just to convert leads, now you have to get a legitimate business, get your paperwork in place, so on and so forth.

Jesse Dolan (1:02:40)
Which from an end user standpoint, like, okay, that’s good. Right. I don’t think anybody’s upset about that. If you’re actually looking to patronize a business. So, I think it was a ton of great stuff. very valuable. Valuable think that you’re

Yes, think it was a ton of great things. But anybody listening. Okay. We mentioned this earlier, but if you want to start tracking what really matters, your ranking search trends, visibility, let’s talk about real quick or real long too. I don’t mean to say like we don’t have time, but for your is TrackRight.

Victor Perez (1:02:44)
Yeah.

I won’t ramble.

Jesse Dolan (1:03:11)
I love to ramble too. Don’t worry. I haven’t personally used it yet. I’m definitely going to check it out. was reading on it before we recording here. I’d love for you to give everybody a quick overview of what it is. I’m particularly curious about the feature to where, maybe people are familiar with like a bright local or other, other search grids that have been out for a while. Correct me if I’m wrong on your product here though, you can change. It doesn’t have to be just this whatever nine by nine square that I’m trying to see what my local rankings are. Maybe two things to kick it off. If you could tell people what I even mean when I talk about a nine by nine square, my local rankings, just what like a geogrid is, and then how you can, I guess, manipulate the shape is maybe the right way to say it for the rankings.

Victor Perez (1:03:58)
Sure, yeah. there’s, if you’re doing any sort of research on local rank tracking, I think you would have already by now seen or heard of something called the GeoGrid, which is just like a map grid, a heat map type of thing. And different tools have tried to do different shapes also just to kind of stick out a little bit, especially because some people like to share screenshots. So they want to look a little bit unique, but

Regardless, you should have some level, even if it’s just once a month. I do once a week, obviously, for any service queries, but I track the local rankings. one of the, if you’re a local business, it can vary, but definitely with lawyers and most home service contractors, it can be up to 50 % or more of the leads that you’re converting. So let’s say you’re top ranked with your web pages and with your Google listing. 50 % or more of the leads that you get from that visibility would come from just the listing itself. So definitely if you’re a local business, even if you’re already doing very well, maybe you don’t have to track as frequently, but you should be tracking how you rank across the map.

Because it varies significantly every what every I would say even every like a hundred feet you’re looking at a different position and if your authority is low if you’re not that if you’re a newer business your visibility you can at least measure it and see how big it is which it might not be.

As big as if you’re getting a lot of traffic and you’ve built a lot of authority online so Even if you’re a big business you want to make sure that it’s not dropping But if you are working on increasing your SEO like your performance right now if you’re with an agency or you’re doing it yourself Definitely track the progress that you’re making in visibility with geogrids So that’s something that we can do on TrackRight? And that’s like the primary feature the one that’s most built out right now but we offer very affordable I think it’s like maybe 50 % of the cost as other vendors that do the same thing other SaaS companies

But we provide the automated geogrid tracking that way you can have an accurate look of what you actually look like and you can see how far you rank. And of course, yeah, you can do different shapes or you can do different sizes. But yeah, I guess the rest of it kind of depends on what type of business you’re working on as far as how much tracking you would do. But again, you can kind of maintain a good look because one of the biggest things that might drop your rankings is if you’re losing traction on your website or if you go too long without new reviews, you’ll start to see that ranking go down. So if you want to see how it plays out for your specific business, and if you want to see how well every other business around you ranks, can

Jesse Dolan (1:06:54)
Sure.

Victor Perez (1:07:19)
Use geogrids to do that and you can run your own studies to see did our new social media campaign influence our rankings and all that kind of stuff.

Jesse Dolan (1:07:27)
Right.

Is it working? The big question always. I do like on your website, you guys made an inference to this as well. And you just mentioned it kind of with not just your rankings, but looking at what the competition is doing.

Victor Perez (1:07:31)
Yeah.

Jesse Dolan (1:07:42)
Talk to people all the time, whatever, like, so I’m up in the Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Maybe somebody is based in St. Paul and they’re like, I want to rank in Minneapolis too. It’s like, okay, that’s going to be almost impossible with, unless you have a lot of authority and everything else here. So maybe you look at a second location. Let’s, let’s see what it’s going to cost. Can you open up shop in Minneapolis as well? you guys mentioned in your website and I tell people this all the time to see where a good spot would be. And also inversely a bad spot. If there’s 13 lawyers and that one shared office, you know,

Get a few miles down the road from them, you know, open up shops. That’s a great use.

Victor Perez (1:08:15)
So yeah, that’s a really good point because all of the other uses that come to mind are very specific like, checking for the possum filter. Like you said, am I not showing because of my performance and my work online? Or is it because I accidentally set up shop in the same business as another business?

Jesse Dolan (1:08:35)
Right.

Victor Perez (1:08:37)
But like you said, so that’s another really huge point where we start to really look at the geogrids is whenever we are opening up a new location, so if you look at how far your rankings go out, you can then make sure that you’re not just getting a location where you’re already visible because that would kind of be a waste of time, huge waste of money at that point, especially if you’re signing like a year long lease. So for, many reasons, at least the clients that we work with, we always tell them you have to get your new office location approved by us. You do not want to make the mistake of just choosing a bad location, whether it’s not properly labeled in Google or there’s other people there or an old business still appears online with that address, so on and so forth. But you can accurately then see, let’s go. We got to go farther away from where the visibility is. And then depending on the competition, depending on how quick you can be with reviews and gaining traffic in that city, then you might want to go a little bit farther out because you’re anticipating, okay, well, if we can grow the radius this big, then let’s push way farther out to that huge city out there so that we don’t overlap and we’re perfectly covering ground.

And with TrackRight, can, every geogrid that you pull, so the credits that you use for just one pull of a geogrid for one query, you can also select a different competitor that’s ranking there and completely switch to view their rankings across a timeline. So I told you it’s automated, so.

Jesse Dolan (1:10:16)
Awesome.

Victor Perez (1:10:19)
For me, I have everything every week. if I, if sometimes my clients are like, Hey, what are they doing? Or I think they’re outranking us. They must have, their reviews must have been doing something or whatnot. They’re like, can you look into it? I’m like, all right, perfect. I look at the timeline of when they started a new marketing effort and I switched my geo grid configuration to that competitor. And I scroll through the timeline and see if it actually made an effect or not.

So you can see how, yeah, and the more clients you have that are paying you to run the credits, you can imagine even if you don’t use the data right now out of any major city for almost any legal practice type of case, I can go back like a few years into the past and see how everybody moved because I’ve been tracking all the clients. So you can actually harvest that data for yourself.

Jesse Dolan (1:10:49)
That’s awesome.

Victor Perez (1:11:17)
Across all your competitors if you’re doing that too.

Jesse Dolan (1:11:20)
Yeah. That’s a, everybody listen to watching to hope to pay attention on that. That’s a whole different way to use it than just how am I ranking? and really at the end of the day, ranking visibility, everything else, it’s not just our efforts we’re doing for our brand and our entity, but what’s our competition doing? Are they trying to outflank us?

If somebody was number one and dominant and here comes Victor, now he’s crushing it. and like, yeah, this is amazing. You know, living in the lap of luxury, we’re crushing it. This is great for our business. the guy or gal that was up there last month is not saying those things and is definitely working to come get you right now. Outflank us? So if they do what worked right. Like that, that insight, that level of competitive insight and matching up those timelines, it’s pretty slick. That’s pretty slick.

For everybody.

Victor Perez (1:12:12)
But yeah, if you, guess if you’re interested, check it out, you know, it’s trackright.com. You can do a free trial and it does preload geogrids credit for you. So not only can you just go in, run geo grid credits to see how you rank, but you have a good month or so that it allows you to use the rest of the platform.

Jesse Dolan (1:12:22)
Nice.

Victor Perez (1:12:33)
So if you’re an agency and you’re trying to connect, you can even connect your APIs to it so that you can manage your GBPs from it. You can connect tracking APIs so that you can use it as a hub for your tracking. We’ve even got AI transcriptions if you connect something like Call Rail for your phone calls so that you can get short descriptions and not have to play through all your calls if you’re going back and listening.

Jesse Dolan (1:13:02)
Slick.

Victor Perez (1:13:03)
And labeling your leads. But you can do that. We label leads and then you get exports out of there. So tons of other features, but definitely check it out for GeoGrid, if not anything else.

Jesse Dolan (1:13:05)
That’s really slick.

Fantastic. And we’ll link to that in the show notes, everybody too, but it’s trackright.com. You can go find it yourself. Otherwise we’ll put a link here on the page as well. So it’s been fantastic, Victor. Is there anything else you want to impart on everybody or should we wrap it up?

Victor Perez (1:13:30)
I think the takeaway would be one thing we mentioned was if you haven’t already, because it might be difficult for you if you’re not savvy or maybe you’re not using WordPress, so it’s not as clear cut, but definitely worth investing right now into somebody that can come in and help you at least track everything that you’re doing and gain good visibility or gain, sorry, gain good visibility on your internal performance.

If not anything else. It’s very important. You want to have internal data. You don’t want to just rely on external data from SEO tools. You want to make sure that you know what’s going on with your business. So if you haven’t already hired somebody that can help you out, at least at a contractor level, definitely worth hiring an expert to help you with these things.

Jesse Dolan (1:14:22)
The best part of digital marketing is the trackability, the analytics, and being able to look at these things, connect them all together. But there’s no one magical thing to do to that, right? You’re going to have to bring in some talent and pull it together and then leverage it. So, well.

Victor Perez (1:14:37)
And stay on top of the news for development for all these tools because any any of this can change. So.

Jesse Dolan (1:14:43)
It’s changing, not can change it is, and it’s gonna, right? So there’s always, always that evolution. Well, thanks again for your time, Victor, everybody listening and watching. Hopefully you took some notes on this. not, start over. there’s a lot of great nuggets in here and, Victor will look forward to having you on the show again at some point to drop even more knowledge for everybody. So appreciate it.

Victor Perez (1:14:47)
Yeah.

For sure,

I’d love to. Have a good one everybody.

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