Your hosts Jay Berkowitz, Alyssa Myles, and Ike Nwachukwu discuss the secret algorithm to getting in the Top 3 of Google Screened - Local Service Ads (LSAs). Discover what you really need to do to get into the Top 3, what do if you’ve fallen out of the Top 3, the required cadence for Google reviews, and the best bidding strategies for maximum results. 

Timestamps:

• 0:44 - Webinar recap: breaking down LSAs
• 2:20 - Celebrating 20 year of Ten Golden Rules
• 2:40 - Help! I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Back Up Webinar (link)
• 3:23 - Overview of Google Screened: history and the top 3 searches
• 6:03 - The Secret Algorithm to land you in the Top 3 on Google
• 10:26 - The importance and ideal cadence of new reviews
• 11:14 - Garner more reviews: BirdEye, Podium and a VIP Program
• 11:35 - Bidding strategy: maximize leads
• 14:31 - Getting back into the Top 3 after falling out
• 16:58 - Lucrative Niches in Law on Google Screened
• 19:22 - TGR Boomerang: Ten Golden Rules’ software program
• 21:01 - Advanced strategies to land in the Top 3
• 24:37 - The cost of leads verse Pay Per Click
• 27:35 - TGR clients land in the Top 3

Mentioned Resources: 

Google Local Service Ads

YouTube

Webinar

BirdEye

Podium

TenGoldenRules.com



About Jay Berkowitz:

Jay Berkowitz is a digital marketing strategist with decades of experience in the industry. As the CEO of Ten Golden Rules, he has helped countless law firms and businesses harness the power of the internet to achieve remarkable growth and visibility. Jay is also a renowned keynote speaker and author, sharing his expertise at various industry events and in publications worldwide.

Facebook.com/TenGoldenRules

Linkedin.com/in/TenGoldenRules

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 golden rules, Jay Berkowitz.

Well, good morning, good afternoon. Good evening, whatever time you're listening to the 10 Golden Rules podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Today we're going to talk about a webinar we just completed, called help. I've fallen and I can't get back up. And what we're referring to are the local service ads, because a lot of attorneys and professionals and specialists have fallen out of the top two or top three of those local service ads. Google screen, Google verified, we'll talk about what all these things are. But first off, we'll talk about how to get back in the top three. And then we'll talk about our secret algorithm for getting in the top three in the first place. With me today, Alyssa and Ike. Alyssa, why don't you go first, tell everyone a little bit about you, and your time and 10 golden rules.

Thanks for having me. Jay. I am a customer success manager with 10 golden rules. I have been with the company for a couple months now working with clients to ensure everything is rolled out properly and strategies are being enforced. As well as working closely with Jay on the podcast and on webinars.

We make our newbies work on the 10 Golden Rules marketing is kind of a training. So Alyssa, thank you so much for being here. And Mr. Ike.

How you doing? How you doing? I'm appointment setter here at 10 golden rules, aka the sales God, you know, we try to make moves up here and go up. So yeah, I'm glad you know, we're here again for another podcast gonna put you guys down with LSAS that you guys know exactly what to do. Shout out to Jay, let's go.

And this is awesome. I love like sitting in these webinars, because he's talking to our prospects and folks who are interested in doing business with 10 golden rules. And he's learning a lot about the meat and the bones of what we do for our clients once they get on board. Yeah, without further ado, I'm Jay Berkowitz, founder of 10 golden rules, it's actually going to be our 20th anniversary this year. So we're going to celebrate 20 years over the next one year, and just happy to be here. So guys, why don't you start with some questions. We just literally just finished the webinar, I can Alyssa sat through it. So by the way, if you want to see the webinar with the slides, all of our webinars are available on the 10 Golden Rules YouTube channel. And you can find the link if you go to 10 Golden rules.com, the YouTube link is at the bottom of the page without social media. But today, we're gonna just try and describe the slide. So if you want to hear this on your audio, if if you're on the elliptical or you're walking your dog or, you know driving somewhere like I normally am, when I'm listening to podcasts, I want the audio version. So we're going to do the audio version for y'all today. So Alyssa, go ahead, you can kick us off.

So you talk a lot about being in the top three of Google. Can you kind of elaborate what that means and what the program entails?

Yeah, so the the program was introduced five or six years ago for home services, so air conditioners, plumbers locksmith garage door repair. And the original program is called Google guaranteed or Google verified. And Google literally does background checks on all of those employees at the locksmiths and garage door repair. Because those folks have access to your home security systems. But then they expanded it to plumbers and air conditioning and roofers, that all kinds of different home services. Because again, you know, these folks are gonna have access to your home. So they do a background check on all the employees so that you can be assured that if you go with this probe, if you go with someone Google recommended, and Google's verifying them, they actually have verified them. And they actually have a $2,000 guarantee. On that program, something goes wrong. If you hire someone from the Google guaranteed program. And then over the past 16 or 18 months, Google started rolling out this program to professional services. So we started seeing it for law firms, real estate agents, and financial consultants. And they they we call this program Google screen. So today, we were mostly talking about the program for lawyers, because we mostly work with lawyers. And so it's the Google screen program. And Alyssa, you said the top three and you know we always talk about the top three, or the top two for this program. So if you want to see this program right now, just do a search for car accident attorney near me or a car accident attorney and put in the name of your towners. City, and 19 times out of 20, you're going to see on your phone, you're going to see two little boxes with a checkmark that say Google screen. And you're going to see these folks right at the top of your screen. And, you know, by the same token, if you want to search, air conditioning repair near me, you can see the Home Services Program, the Google verify. And by the way, you know, if you're looking for air conditioning repair plumbers, or lawyers, this is a good program, because these people have been vetted, in some way, shape or form by Google. So you know, we love this program, because there's never been away for like 10 years, to get our clients immediately in the top three of Google. And the best part about it is you get phone calls, you know, for the most part, people are searching on their phones these days. And when they see the little click to call button, you're getting direct phone calls from this Google screen program. So it's really, really effective. And we'll talk more about, you know how it works in a minute. But next, I want to go back to Ike with his first question.

Oh, yeah, I got a doozy. One for you. So let's say I'm a new attorney, solo attorney, you know, small office, low budget, I don't really got a lot going from myself, how do I get in the top three to LSAS? When I'm competing with these big guys that got big old marketing teams that know what they're doing?

Hey, that's a great question. And you're one of the nice things about this local service ad program or Google screen. You know, Google calls it local service ads in the back end, we generally call it Google screen, because that's what the consumer sees with the checkmark. So the beauty of this program is it levels the playing field. So a lot of times, you know, you're gonna see Morgan and Morgan, the biggest national personal injury firm. And you're gonna see two other guys. And, you know, a lot of times they're smaller solo attorneys or two, three lawyer, outfits, who are coming up in the local service ads. And so there's five or six different things you can do that, you know, we call our secret algorithm that can get you placed in those in those top, you know, three positions. So I'll just go through the secret algorithm, as we did in the webinar, the first thing is, you've got to answer the phone. And, you know, this is one of those things where every lawyer I talked to, they're like, oh, yeah, we know, we're really good at answering the phone, and we convert all the leads we want. And then the Google screen program, they actually, they record your calls. So a lot of times what happens is people are like, you know, oh, you know, we answer the phone all the time. But once you start hearing the data, and we present the data, in a report that we create for our clients, a lot of clients are missing calls, or they answer calls after the 15 seconds. So you want to make sure you're answering the phone very, very quickly, within three rings within 15 seconds, and never missing any calls. And you know, even the best, most efficient intake departments, you know, a lot of times they'll have two people who take intake, and they're both on a call, or one of them goes to the restroom, the second one's on two calls. And that third call gets missed. So, you know, despite your best efforts, you'll find out you're missing calls. And then the other thing in the in the program is if Google records all the calls, so that's how they get the data about this program. And they listen to the calls with artificial intelligence. So they're actually transcribing all your calls for you. A lot of times, people call and they hear the recording that Google is going to record the call. And then they hang up. So a lot of times think you're answering the phone, but you're not. Or people are hanging up before it hits your switchboard. So there's miss calls in the program no matter what. Second thing, you've got to get in the program and designate leads very, very quickly. Couple times a day, Alisa, you coach our clients on this? What would you say about getting in the program and designating?

Well, it is extremely important to mark your leads. So marking them as booked complete or archived. And adding in the notes to detail these leads so that the algorithm can pick it up and one charge you for the leads that you'll be taking and two, so that they're aware that you are available and ready to take more leads.

That's, that's well put. So there's a back end of the system, like any kind of program, you sign up for, like Google ads, or like your Google Analytics, or, you know, even you know, if you log into your Netflix, you got a Netflix account. So you're logging into the back end of your local service Ads account and Google screen, and you're gonna see all the calls that came in, and the ones that Google says they're charging you for, and then the ones that you disagree with. Like if it It was a robocall, or if it was someone in a practice area that you're not advertising, you tell Google, hey, I want to archive this or dispute it. And then you don't have to pay for it. But the importance is you got to get in there a couple times a day. And then the next thing is you want one to two new reviews per week. I get you familiar with the review program. You've heard me talk about it. Why do you want one to two new reviews per week?

Because it's very important. And it also pushes you up the Google Maps search, I believe. So like, the more reviews you get, the more Google trusts you to push you up in the even free algorithm. So yeah, we want as many reviews as we can get.

And the good news is, is you only need one or two a week. So like in the maps, a lot of times, you'll see, you know, the guy's was 75, or 150, or 300. reviews get listed in the three placements in the map listing on a Google search. But this LSA program is a little more forgiving. You need recency more than you need quantity of reviews. So if you only get one to two new reviews per week, that can work to get you in the top three. And we talked about some different programs like getting a software like bird eye, or podium or VIP program where you can get, we actually send out a gift box on your behalf. We typically send five a week to your past clients, and then we call them up and ask them for a Google review on behalf of our clients. The bidding strategy maximize leads. Alyssa, are you familiar with that one?

Yeah, so it's important to set your budget as high as possible, not too high, because the algorithm will question it. But setting it to maximize leads allows you to get more incoming. And

it's just kind of like the right the right way to work the algorithm today. So there's two options, maximize bids and maximize leads. And Alyssa is right maximize leads, it's the one that's working right now. But no, like we talked about off the top, if you dropped out of the top three, you want to go in and switch up a bunch of things. That's one of the main levers you can pull switch from maximize leads to maximize bids. We talked about the credit card paying as well be one of the things you want to be careful with is in the example we showed in the webinar, these guys were bidding $10,000 a week. If you're bidding 10,000 a week, that's 40,000 a month, you gotta have a pretty big credit card limit. Because Google, they do a silent ping on your credit card. It's like when you sign up for a hotel, the hotel does a silent ping to make sure your credit card is valid. But otherwise, they're gonna give you a heads up and, and they might not take your reservation, it's the same thing here. They're not going to charge your credit card $10,000. But they're going to do a silent paying, they're going to say, hey, these guys say they want 10,000 A week. So they're going to do a silent pink and can your credit card accept 40,000 a month. So that's a subtle thing that people don't know about the program. And then the final thing, just getting in there listening to calls and designating those calls in the program. So those are kind of the factors that we call our secret algorithm that are gonna get you in the top three. And then maybe for the next section, we could go into the help I fallen I can't get up. Tell me what you thought about that part of the program.

You tell you about the help. I can't get up. Good. Yeah, well, yeah, I just remember that one commercial that used to always come on on late night TV, with the old lady that fell down. So I used to feel bad for I'm like, I hope they didn't really hurt that old lady. But yeah, I'm glad you use it.

And I mean, like you're talking to our prospects all the time, you've heard people saying that they used to get a lot of leads, right? And they're not getting those leads anymore.

Absolutely, absolutely. And then I always say, hey, it's time you get on a meeting with us. And you can tell exactly how to fix that. Hopefully, it works.

So we started out the webinar today talking about, you know, if you've fallen out of the top three, so if you're one of those people who used to be getting lots of leads, and I remember when the program just started, we got our New York personal injury lawyer was the fifth one approved for the program. So there's three spots in the top three, and there was five people approved. So we're getting all kinds of leads. And then 10 People were approved and 50 people were approved and 500 people were approved, you know, we started getting a much smaller share of the leads. So if you've fallen out of the top three, here's some of the things you can do to get back up. So number one is just first of all, pretty basic. Check your administration panel. So log into your Google screen, you might find out that it's something simple. Maybe your license expired. So in the program to get approved, you've got to put in your current bar license. And if your annual license expired, some states have an annual expiry some states. You just have to put in a date and then you got to go in and refresh that data every year to prove your license is valid. Google some times were randomly disapproved photos. So they'll approve your headshot for the FLSA program, but they might randomly disapprove. And the third thing your credit card might expire. You know, credit cards expire every two, three years. If your credit cards expired, you know, guess what, Google is not going to shut your ad. And you could have fallen out of the top three. Now, sometimes it's not that simple. And now you've got to really manipulate the program to get back in the top three. So one of the main things you can do is open things up. So we call it like opening up categories, opening up geographies. So let's say you're you know, we use the example in the program. This personal injury lawyer was bidding on bicycle accidents, auto accidents, motorcycle accidents and pedestrian accident. And so you could go in, there's a whole bunch more categories, under PII, assault and battery dog bites med mal motorist insurance claims, pain and suffering, DUIs wrongful death. So you'd go in and open up more categories. And then the ultimate sort of last ditch thing is you'd open up other, which says, Look, I'll take any legal query in any category. And obviously, you don't want to do this. But if you've fallen out of the top three, one of the things you can do is open it up for a couple of weeks. Take those inquiries, refer out to cases in other practice areas that you don't want. But spend 234 $1,000 to get back in the top three, because, you know, being in the top three, a lot of our clients are signing 20 3040 cases a month, mean 40 PII cases, let's say they're worth $20,000 each. That's $80,000. You leave leaving on the table? Or is that wait, that's $800,000?

Yeah, I was about to say, I do. Another quick question. Those because that is made me realize something what is the most lucrative niche of lawyers when it comes to LSA? Like, which type of lawyers does the LSA program help the most?

Well, I mean, generally, it's personal injury. And then there's some niches within personal injury. And the medical malpractice cases can typically be millions of dollars, things like we used to do a lot of work in mesothelioma, for people who contract it a terrible cancer, from exposure to asbestos. And those cases can be millions of dollars. And the courts will push them through very, very quickly, because it's, unfortunately, it's typically a death sentence that comes very quickly. So you know, those niche categories are a little better. But again, they're very few cases very competitive. Typically, motorcycle accidents are worth more than in car accidents. and truck accidents, sadly, have terrible devastating injuries. So auto and motorcycle truck can be better cases than auto, but there's a lot more autos than motorcycle and truck. So, you know, typically, the fewer the cases, there's only about 2500 mesothelioma cases each year. So the fewer the cases, the fewer the truck, and motorcycles, they're worth more, but they're more competitive. When you shake it a couple other things, you know, again, falling into the top three, you got to make sure you're open 24/7. So get an after hours calling service. So again, you're telling Google, hey, I'm gonna open up my categories are going to open up my my geography, maybe go statewide, and basically, you're just going to let her rip for a couple of weeks. And when I say that, and the other thing, you're going to accept every single case. So for a period of time, you can open up your budget, you can open up your categories, you can open up statewide, you're going to take every legal inquiry, and you're going to accept every every lead you get. And now you're telling the the algorithm like hey, you know, whatever we told you before, maybe we disputed too many cases, we're open for business. And so the the algorithm will start sending you a lot of cases, if you get in and and mark your cases, you know, as accepted very, very quickly. You know, now you're telling this mathematical algorithm, hey, we're in the game. In general, you get a lot of calls. And then you can wean things back down a little bit, tighten things up, tighten the categories up a little bit, tighten your budgets up a little bit. Tighten the geography up a little bit. So guys, what do you think that's a good summary of everything we covered in that section?

Absolutely. We'll see if Alyssa has anything.

Did you want to touch on advanced strategies?

Yeah, for sure. What was the coolest thing you guys learned on that webinar today?

That tgr does a program where they will text leads of missed calls or miss forms to clients so that they're aware and can address those calls or forms as soon as possible versus waiting because things like forms will degrade in about five minutes. And if a call is Miss then they'll likely turn to another attorney or look for another answer. So using Boomerang is a great way to keep all those leads in place. Yeah, thanks

for bringing that So we developed a software program, that's proprietary 10 Golden Rules called teacher boomerang. And whenever someone fills out a form on your website, we send a text your intake team, whenever you miss a call, like we said before, it's critical that you call those people right back, and then get in the Google system and tell them, hey, we call these guys right back, we signed this client, this was a great lead, we're gonna pay for it. So TJ, our Boomerang is a software we set up that if you ever miss a call, or get a FORM FILL, we send you a notification. And you can click that right right there in the cell phone, because we texted to you, and call that person right back. So that's pretty cool. Like anything you learned today?

Absolutely, I learned that we're on the winning team, because I've never seen anybody know so much about. Like, I don't even think you can search on Google, how to give better LSAs and get more information than you gave on that webinar. So yeah, we're on the winning team. I'm glad I'm glad to be here.

Thank you, thank you guys know I love i icon. These webinars these positivity easy. Alright, so the advanced strategies, we touched on this a few times, but you want to put lots of notes in when you go into the backend of the system. Like I said, you know, it's like the backend of Netflix or the back end of Google AdWords. Each, you can click on each lead and listen to the call. And then what you want to do is put notes with keywords, because, like I said, you're feeding information back to an artificial intelligence algorithm. This is an example of what our client put in, you know, prospect or client was sitting on a bench at a bus stop waiting for a bus with her infant, four months old, when the bus arrived, she stood holding the baby. And she immediately took a step in the direction of the bus, she fell with her right arm first and the baby fell face down. She has pictures of the bench, it was already faulty and some screws were hanging out. Client is at the hospital and is advised to stay overnight. The baby sustained fractures and she sustained fractures on her wrist. I mean, what a terrible incident. I hope they're there well, but those kinds of details are great because you've got things about injuries and hospitals days of treatment. And you want to put as many keywords as you can into the system. Because like I said before, there's not too many levers, you can pull in Pay Per Click, we've got keywords, we got negative keywords, we've got different keyword match types, we've got bid rates, we've got landing pages, we've got ads, we've got ad creative testing, there's like 50 levers, you can pull in a pay per click campaign. In Google screen, there's only five or six levers. So we want to make sure we're putting lots of copy a lot of notes in every single lead, whether we accept it, or whether we want to reject it as archived or disputed. And then the second thing is you want to get the app so that Google's created an LSA app that you can have on your phone. And then you can get these leads right away. And you can go in and disposition leads. As a matter of fact, a lot of people don't know this, the app has something that the back end, desktop doesn't even have. And that is they transcribe the calls. So you can actually see the transcription in front of your eyes, you don't have to listen to the call and decide whether or not you're booking it or archiving it or decide whether you want to listen to it. The teacher boomerang that Alyssa brought up before is our advanced tool that's going to send you leads and send you notifications of any missed calls, or any form fields. And other advanced strategies are detailed measurement that we create for our clients. So we create detailed spreadsheets. And we had an example in the webinar that track your budget, the number of leads charged the cost per lead the number of leads you disputed, the money we expect back from disputes are actual real cost per lead, and our cost, how many signed clients and our cost per sign client. And in this example, the client was averaging between 153 and $162 per lead. And the cost per sign case they signed 45 clients at an average cost of $1,215. So if we use personally, this is a personal injury claim if you use personal injury as an example, in most markets, $1,200 is going to be pretty good if you sign clients for $1,200. So I think that's a lot of the slides, guys. What other questions came up for you as we're going through this today?

To touch on that a little bit? How do you know how much you're going to be paying for a lead and why does it change?

Well, it's not so much that it changes but it's different per market. You know, I would say like typically once you get in the program, and we've got some clients who are pretty consistently signing about 20 cases a month. So they're getting you know, 60s 7080 leads a month, like we said, they're paying between, you know, 75 and $150, depending on their market. So obviously the people in LA, New York, Miami, Dallas, like in Texas, it's expensive. There's, you know, 500 lawyers trying to get in those top three spots, and a lot of people bidding for those positions. But our clients in Oklahoma City in Indiana, some of the smaller markets, and some of the smaller practice areas, the less competitive practice areas are paying a lot less, they might be paying 50 or $75, for that phone call. And then the math is pretty simple, you know, typically, like NP II stuff. And most categories, you'll generally convert one in four, or one and five calls to a to a client. So if it's $75, a lead, and if you're converting one and four, that means 75 times for $300 per assigned client. in personal injury, those leads, as we said, are maybe 125 to $200, a lead. And if you're converting one and four, you know, that's what's 125 times four is $500, to 200, times four is $800. So 500 800, in the smaller markets, and then we're maybe looking at 1200 to 1500, in the bigger markets. And generally we love the LSA program, because pay per click is generally 250 to $300 a click, but a lot of those people are clicking to your website. And then you know, if your website converts, if it does great, and 10% of those people give you a call from your website, while you you know, you paid $250 to get someone to your website, and only one in 10 people is calling you, you know, it's $2,500 to get a phone call, there's no and you convert one and four, that's $10,000. Now, most pay per clicks not that bad. But a lot of times we see clients come to us or like, hey, we ran $20,000 worth of pay per click with our previous agency. And we only got two or three cases. And that's why it's because you know, it's very, very hard to optimize the Pay Per Click now, when a lot of the best phone calls are going to the LSA. So that's another way of looking at the LLC, like if you're not in that game, if you're not getting your piece of the pie in those top three. And you're relying on pay per click, and you haven't mastered the art of the secret algorithm of the LSAS. You know, you're paying way more than you need to per case. And you're giving a lot of cases to your competitors who are appearing in those top three. Right, agree.

give us one and we'll close it out. And

all right. All right. Well, well, I would I would I would smash that. So how many clients? Have you gotten in the top three that LSAS?

Well, virtually every client? Yeah. Because, you know, and, look, the reality is that, even as good as we are, as much as we know, the secret algorithm, we can't guarantee that will get you in the top three, and you'll stay there forever. But you know, almost every single client, we're able to get them in the top three, and then they'll spend two or three months there, get a ton of leads, then the system, you know, typically Google's going to, you're going to sort of scale you back a little bit and give you fewer leads for a couple months. But then what we're going to do is we're going to tweak it out, we're going to do make the changes we talked about and generally if you're you know you're answering the phone and all our clients, you know we've set up call answering we've set up boomerang. We've got all the pieces in place to make sure they're not missing calls. And God forbid they do. They're calling on my back and they're getting in the system and designating so, you know, for the most part we're able to get back in the back in the mix back in the top three. Awesome.

Well, you guys heard it here first, when I call you. You better get on a meeting with us because we can definitely help you out. These.

Thanks, ke and thanks, Alyssa. Everyone who's listening, you know, feel free to just hop over to 10 golden rules, te N Golden rules.com And you can find all our contact information there. I'm Jay Berkowitz and all the social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, X, whatever we're calling it these days, and you can find I can only say 10 golden rules as well. Thank you all for listening to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast.

Thank you for listening to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 Golden rules.com That is podcast at t e n Golden rules.com