I recently wrote a post discussing the importance of having a system for getting online reviews. In one section, I broke down different review sites and which ones are most important to ask for reviews on. The top two, in my opinion, are Google+ Local and Yelp.
While there are other sites, such as Avvo, that are relevant for the legal industry, Yelp and Google both play important roles in the local search ecosystem and should be prioritized in your efforts. The importance of getting reviews on your Google profile should be obvious as it impacts your local visibility in search. Yelp's importance got a boost with the release of Apple's iOS 6 and the integration of Yelp into Apple Maps.
However, a comment left on my post about online reviews made a good point about the Yelp review filter that many attorneys may not be aware of:
....For your next post you should consider talking about Yelp and their filter. It’s often not enough to get satisfied clients to post a review on Yelp because if it is their only review it WILL be filtered. You almost have to ask them to review up to 10 other businesses (restaurants, spa, health club, etc.) in order for the review to stick.
While I don't think it's a good practice to ask someone to leave a testimonial for 10 other businesses besides your own, the larger point here is to understand that legitimate reviews are susceptible to Yelp's review filter.
In the following post, Yelp explains what their review filter is and how it works.
To summarize, I've pulled a few over-arching concepts about how the filter works directly from the article:
This means that while you need to be conscientious about getting reviews on Yelp, you might want to be strategic about asking people if they use Yelp frequently to review businesses. If they don't then perhaps it makes more sense to direct them to your Avvo or Google+ Local profile (Although Google recently implemented a similar type of review filter) if they have more active review accounts there. If however, they are a frequent Yelp user/reviewer they are more likely to be considered an "established" user and their reviews are more likely to remain visible and active.
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]