The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Chris Dreyer, CEO & Founder, Rankings.io

Episode Date: March 27, 2021

Chris Dreyer, President & Founder, Rankings.io Rankings.io Chris Dreyer is the CEO and Founder of Rankings.io, an agency that specializes in personal injury lawyer SEO. His agency ranks personal injury firms for the most lucrative keywords in your industry with end-to-end SEO, from content creation to technical optimization.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube. You can see the video version of this interview at youtube.com for just chris voss it's a goodreads.com for just chris voss and all the groups we have on linkedin facebook instagram follow us on all the different platforms and you can enjoy the show there and make sure you subscribe on itunes that's always important as well but i guess if you are hearing this most likely you have subscribed so i guess there's that but tell a friend anyway guys we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in today we have a most amazing guest the ceo and founder chris dryer of rankings dot io and we're gonna be talking about his company today basically they help elite personal

injury law firms with their seo and they help them do all that good stuff help them get ranked and everything else. And we're going to talk about some of the things he's been doing, how he does it, and of course, how he can make you and your business probably do better. Welcome to the show, Chris. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. I love your background. You've got the whole Star Wars thing going on back there. Those of you who are listening to this on the podcast, you may want to check out the video for sure. You've got a collection going on back there those of you aren't or listening this on the podcast you may want to check out the video for sure you got a collection going on back there definitely a giant

nerd you got the bobafett it looks like you scalped the head of a imperial stormtrooper and stuff like that so are you married does your wife let you collect those things are you single so this is the office so this is where it lives oh so yeah you have these things yet then oh she does so i've tried to play some throughout the house i tried to make the nursery oh really in the start yeah she wasn't having it i love how that always works out so how long ago give us your dot coms of course so people can find you on their webs and learn more about you and we'll get into it yeah i got a kind of a curveball here. So I have a.io. So it's rankings.io is our flagship website. It is, we do elite personal injury SEO. We work with big personal injury firms across the nation. The social media network I'm most active on is

LinkedIn. If anybody wants to connect with me there, I've got Twitter, I've got Instagram, I've got everything, but I'm really active on LinkedIn. There you go. LinkedIn is always a great place for business. We have 130,000 group over there and then we have the company pages. Then we have two other accounts and we're in like 75 groups or some crap over there. Thanks. That site. We just need to get live video rolled out to the site worldwide. That would be great. How long ago did you start Rankings.io? Rankings.io was founded in 2013. It was actually under the name attorneyrankings.org. And after a few years, I picked up the top level domain extension, that.io to just rankings.io. Helped from a branding perspective, just a one word phrase. But the journey to

personal injury SEO has been a long one. At the beginning, we did everything. In fact, when you start an agency, you're looking for anything to generate revenue. You'll take on the worst projects, the worst clients. You're like, bring it on. You need to pay the bills. And we did that for a few years, did PPC design and looked at those P&Ls in our QuickBooks at the end of a few years and found our profit margins were a lot better in SEO, found our results were a lot better in SEO, and went all in there. After a few years, looked at our books again and saw that 70% of our revenue was from less than 40% of our clientele, which was personal injury law firms, and made that decision to specialize with personal injury law firms. There you go. That's really

smart. Figuring a business is always, there's always that 80-20 rule where you make 80% of your money from 20% of your client base and continually tuning that up and dialing it in is really smart. Absolutely. That Pareto principle, not only from a just specialized, it maximizes your marketing dollars. So the Russell Brunson, whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer, we can spend directly to personal injury attorneys. We can spend much more than that broad throw paint against the wall type of strategy. There's efficiencies built into our editorial calendars for content marketing, link building strategies, how we optimize the site. Just everything has so many benefits in specializing.

And personal injury attorneys, that's a good business. They got stuff going on. It seems like there's everyone getting run over by a car nowadays with text messaging. Yeah, it's one of those niches that I think when people think about niching, they get scared. It's like a scarcity mindset where they'll have less opportunities and there's a lot more risk. But fortunately, in the legal vertical, it's been around forever. Personal injury attorneys, there's always going to be someone hurt. Maybe motor vehicle accidents will decline because not as many people drove during COVID last year, but there's still a lot of demand there. Also, there's a ton of competition. If you go to Chicago, there's hundreds of personal injury attorneys. So there's a demand for expertise versus if you were going to work with trademark attorneys or some special area of the law, there may only be one or two in the entire city. So there's not a demand for SEO

there is with personal injury attorneys. Wow. It's huge competition and nailing it down. So you work with people nationwide. You work with everyone across that basis. Do you get into Canada at all or anything? A few years back, we worked with a few Canadian firms and we just made the decision. There's some small nuances that goes with marketing Canada, even the words using the phrase like attorney more prominently than lawyer. And there was, there's other adjustments to spellings like defense with the C and things like that, where we made a decision just to, to focus in the U S but we'd have,

I have worked with a few firms in the past. There you go. Get those connect dollars. I'm not even sure if they're called dollars actually. I don't know. You guys sit down, market to these folks, help them get their stuff together, help them rank as best they can. I noticed here, there was a mention you've been on the 500 list for Inc. Magazine. Is that correct? We've been on the Inc. 5000 list the last three years. We'll be on it again in 2021, four years in a row. And yeah, it's been a good journey. There you go. There you go. So that must speak for something because you know how to rank on

lists. So that makes it a good job. So when you guys, if people are listening in the audience and they're referring this to people that are in the attorney business and stuff like that, what are some of the things that you guys sit down with and do clients without giving away too much of the secret sauce, I guess? Yeah. So we only do SEO and we do a comprehensive approach to that. I'd say that many SEO agencies, they have a department that's SEO and they'll just have SEO managers and SEO specialists. It's more of a generalized type of practice where that SEO specialist is doing link building and content and on-page and technical and local SEO and all these different functions under one individual. So it's a jack of all trades, master of none type of situation.

Because we just do SEO and because our clients are much larger, we can invest into a wider span of control. And by that, we have a content department. That's all they do is content. We have an on-page department. That's all they do is optimize the site. A technical department for accessibility, speed, things like the core vitals updates coming in May. And then we have a local department fighting spam is very prevalent in the legal vertical where individuals are jamming keywords into the entity name and not following guidelines or doing fake reviews so we have a team that actually fights spam for local and even a dedicated link building team so it's a very wide span and control but it lends itself to deep expertise in each of those

areas and it is a much larger investment to carry that amount of employees and staff to do that. But all of that becomes full circle. And I think with SEO, if you get your content strategy and even your onsite strategy and you don't do link building, you're not going to rank. If you do a ton of link building, but you don't have the on page, you're not going to rank. So it requires you to hit all of these areas. And it's just very important to get that right and have experts in those fields. So basically hiring my little 20 year old Johnny to basically do our SEO for my law firm is probably, he's a good kid, but he's, like you say, doing a jacket of all trades. If we work with you guys, you have so many different departments and people that are working. You can nail it all to the wall.

Yeah, at the end of the day, SEO, so many people want to talk about the 200-point checklist for optimizing a site and all these different things. At the end of the day, referencing your Pareto principle, the 80-20, it's a production game, especially in these highly saturated areas. If you're producing four blogs a month, just like all your competitors, you're not creating a gap. Same for backlinks, same for the length of the content, the quality of the content. It's just a production game. It continues to increase. Several years ago, everyone advised you to write 500 word blogs. I'm sure you heard that. And you could write those and have an opportunity to rank. In the legal vertical now, if you're not writing a very high quality practice area page that's 2,000,

3,000 words, it's going to be difficult to rank. Wow. That's a lot of words. That's a lot of typing. And I imagine there's a lot of, I don't know how much podcasts make a difference in this, but content creation with podcasts. Everyone seems to have podcasts nowadays. Not that they're good at it, but many seem to do. I love podcasts, especially when my clients have podcasts, because it's such a great tactic for not only content creation and original thought leadership, but also the attorneys listening. If they're interviewing their peers, they can create a referral type of situation. But then the thing that I like the most about it is the link building. Every, most podcasts will do a transcription and link to the guest. So it's a very easy way for

them to participate in marketing their firm. Yeah. We just finally said, screw it and started posting full transcriptions to all of our posts. We're going back and doing that now that we just recently moved servers and we were going to do the show notes and I'm just like, just print the whole damn thing and put it on there. So we'll see how it goes. I don't know. It might backfire on me. I don't know. We'll see. It gives like the guests like myself a way to link to the transcript and link to the episode as opposed to just referencing Apple. And so it's not only a link building strategy for the host of the guest of the podcast, but also the guest. I love it. Yeah. When you do a 10 hour show, I imagine should a lot of attorney firms be doing more like podcasts? And of course, you're doing content creation, but I imagine some of them have to, I guess what I'm getting to is some of them have to anticipate that there are other companies out there making that kind of content, and it's fairly popular, and I hate to copy Gary Vee exactly, but it's attention arbitrage. So when there's a lot of competition in SEO and the costs go up, maybe you go back to TV or billboards or radio. And when there's less competition, you can get into podcasting at a lower cost and get those eyeballs or those ears on your material. So it's a constant cycle of where

attention goes. So when a law firm's looking at hiring a firm like yours, or they're considering ramping up their spending dollar for SEO and targeting, or they're really not sure whether they should be in that market, what are some of the failures they're making in their decision making? Or what are some of the ways they can be thinking of why they should justify it better? That's a great question. There are many different ways I could go here. I like to refer to SEO as an investment, especially if you're creating content that's evergreen, that can drive traffic, residual traffic for a long period of time. It also is a strategy.

It's a channel that you can utilize for all areas of the funnel, the top for awareness, the middle for engagement, and the bottom, those sales pages to convert users. So you can really create content in all areas there. And there's many applications to it. Still, it's a very low cost for acquisition compared to many other strategies. Now, it depends on the market, your cost for acquisition and what you have to invest in a market like Los Angeles or Atlanta may be substantially higher because in Atlanta,

you got Morgan & Morgan downtown and they're one of the biggest PI firms in the nation. So there are many different aspects. But at the end of the day, it comes to cases. And it's still of lower cost per acquisition than Google Ads and some other forms of marketing. It's pretty interesting. I remember in my day, the way you got huge in any given city is you pretty much owned the back of the phone book. Yeah, the Yellow Pages. And that was really effective.

Yeah. It was like they just bought the back of the yellow pages for the next 50 years. And it was pretty interesting. So personally, law attorneys, will you work with other people that aren't in personal injury? Not at this time. I do have a sister agency. It's esq.marketing that specializes and works with all areas of the law and works with all budgets. It's for a practice at any stage in their development. For rankings, my flagship business where I'm very active as the CEO, we just work with those eight, nine figure firms, mid-market that are typically the larger firms in their city. Now you do mention that you work with elite personal injury firms. Does a firm have to, if

they're watching this, they're listening to this, they're considering, should I be hiring these guys? What is their qualification level that you have? What they need to be at? Yeah, we're really not looking for solo practitioners or startups. Also, I go and look at the reviews of our prospects that come in. And if they have a bad reputation, that's not someone that we want to work with. So you go to the Google My Business and we see a 3.0, it's probably not someone that we want to hang our hat on the wall or shingle whatever you want to say to work with. So if I get a bad rating, I should call you to bail me out, basically. I'm looking at your website here, rankings.io, and I'm seeing that you've got a few different references here. Dolman Law Group, you had a 400% increase in clients year on year.

The Levin Group firm, 3440%. That's 3,440 for those who are doing math. Increase in search engine traffic, 300% increase in cases per month for SJG. That's pretty darn awesome. I like the 3440% figure. That's pretty darn awesome. I like the 34, 3,440% figure. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. So since you took me down this road, I guess we will toot our own horn. Sure. Let's do it. We've got a client. Dolman Law Group's ranking nationwide for car accident lawyer,

probably the most competitive phrase in all of PI. If those individuals listening look at A-Rest, it's a traffic value of over 800,000 for one page. The Levin firm you referenced dominates Philadelphia for every phrase you can think of. Stuart Guss' firm dominates every phrase you can think of in Houston. We do the same in San Diego, the same in Chicago. So these very competitive markets that smaller SEO agencies typically struggle with, we're actually doing really well in them. Nice. And this is pretty interesting from your site. You guys don't lock people in restrictive platform. Tell us about that and what it means. Yeah. Some of the older agencies, the 810 pound gorilla fine law that have been around

forever, they have their own proprietary content management system so they're not using wordpress so companies like scorpion just the fine law and basically what happens is they tell the prospect that they own the site but when they go away they don't own the proprietary code to run the site. So they own it, but it's a handcuff type trap situation. And it's just unreal. Do you rank better with having your own SEO site then? Because Google probably knows that you're attached to that, right? Maybe? I think the nature of good SEO, it really doesn't matter what CMS you're on, as long as you're following best practices, optimizing your metadata, making a site accessible, user-friendly, fast. All of those elements apply to any content management system. The problem is with these others is they typically aren't as intuitive

on the backend. So they're really hard to update. You got to get a developer involved or stay with the agency. That's how they kind of handcuff you. How important is best practices? Familiar, fill in people who aren't familiar with that and give an idea as to why that's important and why you really don't want to muck it up. Yeah, so this is really broad. Let me start from the local aspect. Google looks at relevance, distance, and prominence. Those are the three main top level umbrellas that they look at. When it comes to relevance, that's your content strategy. You want to use the words and phrases that your consumers are typing in. You want to have those on your website.

You want to be known as that quantity in that category. So things like Google My Business, if you're a personal injury attorney, you want to have the personal injury category. I know that sounds very simple, but many times when I look at those profiles, they'll have just the word attorney as their category or lawyer. You need to be very specific. That's all your content strategy. That's optimizing your site. That's relevance. Now, distance. This is one where we push our clients really hard. I like to use this example. Imagine you're on vacation. You're in St. Louis, and you typed in best restaurants near me.

You wouldn't expect to see restaurants in Chicago. You would expect to see the restaurants are within a 10, 5, 10 mile radius close to you for convenience. The same applies for legal. So if you have an office in downtown Chicago or downtown Houston, and someone does a search in the Northwest, then the firms that are in the Northwest are going to have a little bit of a boost in terms of visibility in the local map packs. One of the things I see many firms doing wrong here, and I'm going on a tangent, is they'll have one office and expect to dominate the whole city. Or they'll want to go from Houston to Atlanta or Los Angeles. But a better strategy is actually to expand outwardly and maybe get another city or two

in your location because consumers are lazy for the most part. They want convenience. They don't want to drive an hour to the office. Now, if it's a major injury, someone lost a limb or they're severely hurt, they want to maximize their claim. They may make those trips. But if it's a rear-end collision and are minor issues, soft tissue, they want convenience. And so that's a big one. That's proximity.

That's something that the location of your office matters. And then the last one, and this is the one that's really broad, and I'll try to keep it as condensed as possible, is prominence. So the word prominence itself means being everywhere. How do you be everywhere? You need to make sure you're in the legal directories, your AVO, your Martindale, your fine law for legal relevancy. You need to be in your directories that are geography specific. If you are in Miami, you want to be in your Miami chamber of commerce.

You want to be in those associations to build that geography relevance. And then you just want to be in your top directories. You're ones that have authority, your Yelp, your Yellow Pages, your Google My Business. That's one strategy. Also, it's contributing content to sites that are well-trusted, your Forbes, your Wall Street Journal, any of those top sites that you can contribute to, other relevant sites in your area, contributing content, and then acquiring backlinks like we talked about earlier, podcasting, doing strategies like sponsoring local events,

or essentially just contributing content or making a linkable asset on your site that it can acquire natural media references. It's a big part of saying prominence is doing everything you can to put your name out there digitally yeah we talked before the show you wanted me to i think ask you something about eos traction did i have that term right yeah yeah eos and traction is eos stands for the entrepreneurial operating system and essentially it's just an operating system for small businesses. It's really, the sweet spot is really that 10 employees to 200 employees. It was a book. There was a book, Traction, written by Gino Wickman.

And we implemented this system four years ago. We first self-implemented off the book. And it was just very transformational. So we've been in the Inc ink 5000 four years in a row it just so happens we started eos four years ago and it's it has ties everything to a vision it allows you it talks about strategies for traction for data looking at leading indicators that are predictive as opposed to always looking at lagging indicators that things that have already happened. Leading would be looking at things on

a weekly basis. So for example, at our SEO agency, we look at an ARES traffic value on a weekly basis. And if we see that number decline or increase, it allows us to further investigate as most SEO agencies will just send a monthly keyword ranking report. If you sent that, it's already too late. Everything you did already happened. Maybe an algorithm already happened mid-month, but if you're looking at a weekly basis, you can react more quickly. Talks about measuring your people. Are they, are they on in the right seat? Do they get it? Want to have the capacity, get the right people on the bus,

the wrong people off the bus systems for core value, selecting core value, setting longer term goals, these 90 day rocks. It's a very comprehensive system and it's been very influential on our development. That's awesome sauce. And our development. That's awesome, Sauce. And then you guys also have, I think, an internal coach or a coach that comes by and keeps you guys updated on the latest stuff. Yeah, I would say we were operating at about 70% of EOS. We're really hitting the big picture points, but we felt it was necessary to hire a certified EOS implementer. We hired James Ashcroft and he's tremendous. The reason, one of the main reasons why I love work with James though,

is because we do our chair, he chairs our meetings virtually on zoom. When I looked previously in the past, I could never find anyone that wanted to do that. They always wanted to do the in-person. My entire company's remote. So the logistics of that, the cost of flying everyone in every quarter and doing these continually was just going to be very costly. So I never wanted to do that. And he does it virtually and he's really helped take us from that 70%, let's call it up to 85 or 90%. I still think we have room to grow.

But every little incremental point that you get, those 1% that you're improving in your businesses have very profound impacts. That's awesome. Coaches are really great. Have you guys gotten on Clubhouse yet? Clubhouse the app? So I'm a little behind on that.

I will freely admit that. I was behind on Snapchat too. I haven't, I know what it is. I know it's getting a tremendous amount of attention right now, but I'm a little behind on that one. We'll get you an invite to that so you can check it out and all that good stuff and see if it'll work for you. I know some of my friends that are in the attorney business are on there and they're killing it. They have little rooms that they do and different things and they're just doing so well with it. It's pretty amazing. And going on there and giving knowledge, we've got, there's a lot of coaches that are on

there as well. A lot of SEO people and going on there, establishing rooms and sharing stuff and everything else is pretty amazing because everyone, there's a lot of marketers on there right now. They're looking to market their business, looking to make it better and looking to grow it and looking for tips and trips, ticks. They're looking for ticks. They're looking for tips and tricks on there. And it's a great way to do business because I've gotten so much business on it. We got so many podcasts, listeners off of it. Our Instagram is up thousand people. It's just crazy what's going on over there. So you guys may want to check it out. And if you don't have an invite, I can get you one.

The only downside is you have to use an iPhone with 13 iOS or higher. It doesn't work on Android yet, but they're working on it. They're coming out with the old Android there. So what have we talked about that's important for prospective clients to know about you guys and what you're doing? The biggest thing is if you're a personal injury attorney and you're in a major market where there's tremendous amount of competition, first of all, you should give us a call. That's what we specialize in. And then I am not aware of at this time of another agency

that specializes in just personal injury SEO. And it lends itself to deep level of expertise. All of our clients and case studies, we can utilize what works in a Philadelphia market into a different market because they're not competitors because the nature of legal is it's a fractured environment more so than in other areas of the law because of state bar regulations. There you go. That's pretty interesting. So the best way to onboard with you guys or to get to know you guys better is to reach out, call you guys, or can they take a look at the website or apply at the website? Yeah, we've got some great information on the website. We have an SEO for lawyers guide that's very specific to personal injury attorneys in the footer there. We hired two data scientists. So we did some SEO

specific studies for just personal injury law firms. Most of the studies out there, I use that term loosely. They're typically just surveys where they're asking individuals their opinions. It's not evaluating data. So we've got some data studies. That's all on the website. Of course, I have a podcast, the rankings podcast. And then yeah, I have a podcast, the Rankings Podcast. And then, yeah, you can just reach out at rankings.io. I was going to say, you guys have this podcast here now. You're doing lots of interviews and getting people knowing so they can listen to your podcast, get to know you guys better. It's all about that, getting to know everyone better, getting to find stuff. You've got the newsletter there and everything else. And then you've got videos on YouTube. So you're helping people in that way and sharing that data and

getting people in the knowledge. I think this is great. There's so many attorneys. It is so competitive. I just can't imagine. I remember the old days when they were really locked down, the old Yellow Pages day, they were locked down because especially with the new social media technology and everything, they're like, you can't be ambulance chasers. And they had a lot of these rules that... Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that because on my Facebook ads, I get called the ambulance chaser. Every time I read that, I get a kick out of it.

That's pretty funny. Yeah, I remember when it was social media and stuff was emerging and I was talking to attorneys. I'm like, we really should do this. And like, we can't, the laws and rules and we got this thing. And I'm like, holy crap, you guys are trapped in the phone book. But now there's so much you can do. And then the other thing that about Google search and all these other things with SEO, it's constantly evolving.

You've got to keep up on the latest updates from Google, the different changes and everything else. So you need a good firm like yours who is up on the proper stuff. Because, man, if you get kicked off of Google, you different changes and everything else. So you need a good firm like yours who is up on the proper stuff because man, if you get kicked off of Google, you're screwed. Yeah, we're really dialed in. We've got the entire company rowing in the same direction. If there is any type of announcement, news, blog, article, anything that can apply to our agency, our employees are talking about it, our leadership's talking about it. And so we're way ahead of the game. I referenced early, there's an algorithm coming in May. Google rarely tells you that an algorithm's coming, but they said, Hey, the core vitals algorithms coming in May. We've been on that for the last couple of months. And I think it's not a situation where if the other

individuals don't prepare for that, they could actually decline in rankings where maybe we didn't do anything spectacular, but maybe we gained some additional market share by just being ahead of the game. There you go. You got to be ahead of the game because it's rapidly evolving, rapidly changing and everything else.

Anything more you want to plug before we go out, Chris? No, I think we did a good job plugging it. I would love for anyone that's interested to listen to the rankings podcast, or just visit the website and shoot me an email and ask me any questions. Check it out. Give you guys a call and get it on. I imagine there's going to be a lot of different lawsuits going on. It's been probably quiet with people driving around and there's some manufacturing and different jobs.

We're starting to wake up as an economy. Oh, yeah. Even I'm starting to go, I need to start ramping up and get ready to do shows and events and all the remote touring that we do with the podcast at events like CS and there's NAB show and a bunch of shows. Now's the time to start really thinking about where you're going in the next year. Cause it seems like we're, we're, you know, just moving faster and faster.

I'd put off a lot of stuff till September, the end of the year. I'm like, and it looks like it's going to be weird till the end of the year, but it seems like we're moving to opening full scale here. And you definitely want to be ready because you want to do business. And it's probably going to be, I think divorce lawyers are probably going to clean up the best after we were there. They are definitely going to clean up. Yeah. I was wishing I had studied to be a divorce lawyer these past two years because all my friends, all their wives are telling me, they're like, Chris, there's going to be a lot of divorces.

This is hilarious. Very true. So there you go. Give us your plugs, Chris, one more time before we go out and tell people where they can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, just go to rankings.io. If you want to find me on social, most active on LinkedIn, it's Chris Dreyer. I accept all connection requests there.

And then if you want to check out the podcast, it's the rankings podcast. There you go. Check it out, guys. Refer to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Find your attorney friends. Refer to them as well. Also, you can go to youtube.com. For instance, Chris Voss.

You want to see the video version of this? Go to goodreads.com. For instance, Chris Voss. Go to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. There's a whole mess of accounts over there. You can see all that good stuff on LinkedIn. Thanks for tuning in. Be safe, wear your mask, and we'll see you guys next time.