Karin Conroy (00:02.673)
By the time a potential client reaches out to your law firm, they’ve already made most of their decision. They’ve read posts, watched the videos, scanned discussions, maybe even asked AI tools for recommendations. And in many cases, they already have a short list in mind before they ever land on your website. So if your firm isn’t part of that early decision-making process, you’re not really competing.

So today’s conversation is with one of our Council Cast collaborators. I’m stumbling all over myself this morning. But we have a great list of guests that we just keep bringing back over and over because the conversations are that good. So we want to keep the conversation updated and talk about what’s new. And so we’re talking with Gert Melick today and we’re breaking down what actually

Gert Mellak (00:35.982)
Ha ha.

Karin Conroy (00:55.427)
It means to show up everywhere and not just everywhere in the entire world, but everywhere your buyers are looking, everywhere your clients are looking for you to be and be part of that conversation. So the title for today’s show is Search Everywhere Optimization for Law Firms. I felt like that was kind of covered it in a nutshell. And thank you for being here, Gert.

Gert Mellak (01:17.39)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me back, Kevin. It’s always such a pleasure to talk to you.

Karin Conroy (01:21.43)
I know, we were saying, I feel like I talk to you every few months, but then I look back and it’s like, no, it’s been a year and a half. So, you know, time flies.

Gert Mellak (01:27.79)
Time flies, but kudos to you for keeping the show up. It’s a great podcast.

Karin Conroy (01:32.679)
Thank you. Thank you. Well, you I’ve had so many good guests and I feel like when we come back to these conversations over and over, and when we’re talking about these things, then I feel like we’re always a little bit ahead. And then the next, I’d say six to nine months, these are the conversations that keep repeating. So I want to talk about, you had this great email newsletter and you’re talking about how firms are kind of

approaching their strategy upside down. And you have this, what do call your, it’s a pyramid. What do you, you have a title for it, right?

Gert Mellak (02:09.484)
Yeah, there’s search everywhere optimization pyramids.

Karin Conroy (02:14.319)
There we go, perfect. That ties in perfectly with my show title.

Gert Mellak (02:17.42)
Yeah, I spend hours thinking about it.

Karin Conroy (02:20.765)
Okay, so in this pyramid, let’s kind of talk about, first of all, what are people doing wrong? Before we get into kind of what the pyramid is and how it works, what are people imagining when they sit down to kind of make their content plan and what are they doing wrong?

Gert Mellak (02:39.426)
Yeah, I think it’s a great entry into this topic. I think there are certain things happening in the market that take a while to digest. And one of those things is that there are a lot of other platforms right now where people spend a lot of their time. And at the same time, it’s not as easy to rank any article on Google anymore. Those two things come together on the one end.

Karin Conroy (03:02.94)
Right.

Gert Mellak (03:05.716)
User behavior these days is that we spend hours on our devices watching videos, consuming content, images, et cetera, very, very visual. And this is the main discovery channel right now. What did we do in the past? In the past, especially the SEO leverage as an SEO agency, we tried to create really good content, better than the competitors based on what was ranking out there, tried to make it better.

got the page ranking, got traffic, visitors to the website of a firm, for example, and then they would either reach out or sign up for their mailing list, but there would be some sort of contact. So the customer journey was very clear. People would start on Google, have no idea where to go, and then they would find our clients, would go to their website, would reach out for a quote or for a diagnostic or whatever it is, or sign up for their email list, and then this firm would make a sale.

Today, we have the situation that people are very, very well informed even before they know that they want something. And when the time is right, then they already know pretty much who to look for or where to search for. So the entire behavior has changed. However, people still produce a weekly blog post. People still try to trick Google into ranking it.

But what we see is that even if you’re ranking number one, there might now be an AI overview on top and you’re still not getting any clicks to your website. You might not even be mentioned.

Karin Conroy (04:37.115)
Yeah, right. And I just want to encourage people to think about how you even make decisions about, let’s just say, you know, a restaurant you want to pick to go eat for dinner. You’re not Googling Chinese restaurant near me anymore. You are thinking, I saw this video of this person eating the thing, this thing that looked so delicious. Now, what was that video that I saw and did I save it? And let me go back to that.

and then I’ll find it. And so your decision is already, like the way you’re describing it, the decision is already halfway made. The decision or more than halfway. It’s you’ve already decided, I wanna go to that place. Let me now remember what that place was and go find it. And so the decision was made when you saw that video and then you filed it away and maybe that’s gonna happen tonight or sometime in the future. But the convincing and the selling and the decision process

did not happen on the restaurant’s website. The decision process happened on TikTok or Instagram or wherever you saw that video. So this is the shift that I want to kind of underline and reinforce for people in their thought process in terms of where are people being influenced and where is that decision happening as opposed to like what.

what’s happening to my blog posts? Because I think that’s where your email newsletter started. People are contacting you and saying, why aren’t my blog posts working anymore? And so now you kind of took this idea of the content and flipped it upside down. And it’s not that content isn’t working, it’s just it’s working differently.

Gert Mellak (06:04.416)
Exactly.

Gert Mellak (06:15.502)
Exactly.

Gert Mellak (06:28.206)
It is working differently and we also need to approach it very, very differently. And one thing we want to face here as well is that Google just made a shift in the last month, making it hard to almost impossible to rank for informational content and actually get traffic from it. You might still rank, but you’re still not getting traffic. What does this mean? It means that paying someone to write a weekly blog post right now and publish it on your website might not be the best investment.

Karin Conroy (06:45.244)
Okay.

Gert Mellak (06:58.93)
unless you can make this such high quality, give it proprietary information, insights from your years of working in the firm, actual case studies, etc. that’s not out there on the web, then you have something that might actually really attract traffic and rank for something that’s not easily being summarized in AI. However, at the same time as

it’s that your own blog is going to drive less traffic. We see that whatever content is published on the web actually starts to have a lot more impact than it used to have. I give you an example. I reached out to a firm the other day and asked him to publish on a Facebook group because there was a thread that was ranking well on Google. There was a question nobody could answer. Everybody was just like, I don’t know, don’t know. Ask a lawyer.

And then I asked my client and said, just spend two minutes answer this question because it’s ranking well. It’s not on your website, but it’s ranking well. And it just gets the attention right now. So we need to find out where the attention is. And this is where we actually try to flip it around rather than starting with the content and now finding who can actually come to me and Google and try to rank it higher. We try to flip it around and say, okay, let’s first get to know our audience very, very, very well.

And once we are there, we can then build this pyramid up. This is like the ground floor of my pyramid system. We want to research the audience and want to research the platforms they are on.

Karin Conroy (08:27.718)
Right. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (08:32.935)
So, you know, I’ve made this argument in most of my recent AI, and not argument, but sort of philosophy in most of the recent AI episodes. And I really don’t believe that at the core, this is really that significantly different from just broad scale marketing theory. So back in grad school, my grad school marketing professor said, you need to start by being where your customers or clients are. And that meant

So for my example for that is I started 15 plus years ago writing for this website called Lawyerist. And at the time it was kind of a collaborator blog and that was what worked back then. And so there was this great audience of solo small firm lawyers that were going to this blog for advice on how to start and run their firm. And I was just writing about marketing.

And so it wasn’t that I was writing blogs on my own website. I was there borrowing their platform, borrowing their audience and providing expertise. That’s not significantly different from what we’re saying today. We’re adding some technology and fine-tuned adjustments, but that’s where your pyramid starts is figuring out. So let’s spend a few minutes at that first bottom layer of your pyramid.

and explain what it is. It’s find out where your audience is and then be there. So similar to what my marketing professor was saying. Where is your audience? And it’s not your website. Don’t start there. Yeah.

Gert Mellak (10:10.606)
It’s definitely not your website. It’s probably also not your competitors’ websites, although you might think that. It’s really also looking at it holistically because we are pretty much really going cross channel. We go to offline channels and online channels. I remember years ago, I was in a bookshop and an elder woman would come in with a piece of paper where she noted down three books. It was her shortlist. Whenever I talk about shortlist, this is what I have in mind. And she said, look, there was a talk show yesterday.

Karin Conroy (10:15.974)
Right.

Gert Mellak (10:40.49)
on tv and these are the three books they mentioned to be more happy be happier or have life fulfillment i don’t know what it was right i want these three books so she had a channel she spent time on tv on this talk show there was a channel they recommended a product this was her discovery she had no idea about the authors she had no idea about the books she just felt this was what she needed we do this every single day we watch a video

I’m a woodworker, I watch hours of woodworking videos a month and I know exactly which tools I want just because I see them all the time and the algorithm, as kind as it is, just gives me the same material until I finally buy it and move on with my life. But it says get this pushed all the time.

Karin Conroy (11:21.137)
Yeah, and your customer journey is not gonna be this like, know, click from here to here to here, like the woman in the bookstore. Her customer journey is literally opening up her door, walking down the street to the bookstore, writing it down on a piece of paper. So, you know, I also talk a lot about how underrated the traditional marketing offline pieces are, you know, doing speaking engagements, getting into the community.

doing things that are actually human to human type of the things that we’ve been talking about for decades before even the internet. So how do you figure this out? So I know we’re kind of joking about this idea, but how do you figure out, going to the online side of where your audience is, how do you find them?

Gert Mellak (11:53.71)
Right. Yeah.

Gert Mellak (12:09.23)
So definitely we are obviously as an SEO agency are used to doing research on all kinds of platforms. Specifically, we definitely address the top platforms and guarantee that whatever you’re setting on YouTube, you’re going to find your audience. No question there. I’ve analyzed so many businesses. YouTube is always among the top 10 at least very often top five platforms.

Depending on your demographic you might find your people on Facebook or a younger generation rather on TikTok or Instagram But then it also goes a little bit broader but because there might be people listening to a particular podcast All right, and you want to know about that because you might do a sponsorship you might get invited as a guest You might be able to contribute to an online magazine and you really want to also know

Who are they actually following? What kind of newsletters do they subscribe to? Because you might just be able to collaborate with them. So it’s really all about this thought of how can I get in front of my audience first and note down where this might be the case. There are obviously audience research tools, but a lot you can just achieve with really strategic Google searches. Whereas, what are the topics my audience is probably talking about and where do they talk about?

Karin Conroy (13:07.515)
Yeah, yeah.

Karin Conroy (13:21.691)
Yeah. Yeah. So we’re not talking.

Gert Mellak (13:23.436)
And if you move yourself inside the industry, definitely figure this out.

Karin Conroy (13:27.323)
Right. And we’re not talking about, once again, we’re not talking about your website and we’re also not talking about social media in terms of your social media accounts. It would be more like how, you know, what you were saying a minute ago, how do you get in front of them? So how can you be, it’s kind of going back to this old idea of PR. How can you be on a certain network? How can you be present, you know, how can you be on a podcast? How could you be, get some kind of media?

appearances or write an article for an existing website that already has that audience. And so you’re not necessarily looking for legal websites, like speaking to other lawyers, unless maybe that’s your audience. Maybe you get a lot of referrals from other lawyers, but the audience you’re looking for is the audience that is going to bring you business, not just an echo chamber.

Gert Mellak (14:26.358)
Exactly. And this is the audience that actually discusses the problems that usually are mentioned on the first phone call, right? Where they call and say, look, I have this issue. had this accident. I have this issue with my competitor. don’t know whatever it is, but this is the conversation they are going to have online with other peers in the, in different groups. And this is also the conversation they’re going to have with them with a chat GPT or Claude or perplexity chat or AI mode where they just describe their situation. And this is going to.

prescribe what to do next. And this is very often where also big misconception happens, where it’s like, can we trick, can we pay in order to be there? The conversations are just so random that tracking AI and predicting like we did with rankings, anybody who has ever done SEO or also Google ads knows it’s about how far up you are on this list. This works very, very differently. And this

hard to almost would say probably impossible but we try to predict it somehow or track how visible you are on these channels.

Karin Conroy (15:31.749)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so speaking of the channels, the three that come up the most often for me and what I’ve been seeing lately are LinkedIn, YouTube, and Reddit. So would you agree, and especially I think maybe in the legal world for law firms that for what I’m seeing, those are the three.

that I just see all day, every day. And I’m sure there’s other platforms that people are finding some success in, but those were the three that I really wanted to talk to you mostly about today. Can you give me some kind of tips and also things where you see people making, I see a lot of mistakes on Reddit, especially. People don’t know what to do there. And I think LinkedIn, people kind of understand it very broadly. But what do you, do you have any tips and also like,

things not to do.

Gert Mellak (16:25.218)
Yeah. I think, I think one thing that not to do is definitely very severe on Reddit. You can’t just go out and start promoting. You can’t just go and we test, we try this a lot. Okay. We got a lot of users banned in the beginning test users just because we tried different approaches and Reddit is like its own, its own micro universe. Right. And then inside Reddit, you have different sub reddits.

Karin Conroy (16:35.386)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (16:49.809)
world. Yes. Yeah. And you will get banned. Yes.

Gert Mellak (16:54.988)
where very powerful or self-proclaimed powerful moderators are deciding what’s right and what’s wrong. And you need, if you want to participate, you need to adhere to certain standards. So on Reddit, think the first mistake I see, and we’ve made this in the past as well, and learned about it is that you go to Reddit, you create yourself a nice branded account, like your firm is called, put your URL in the bio and start posting 20 times a day.

Karin Conroy (17:07.004)
Right.

Gert Mellak (17:24.706)
This just gets you banned. It’s not even going getting your band, it’s getting your shadow band, which even it’s even worse. So you don’t even know you’re banned. You just say, Hey, weird. I don’t get any upwards. I’ve upvotes anymore because nobody actually sees what you contribute. You continue contributing and nobody sees it. So Reddit is really something where you have to be social and you wouldn’t go to an, to an event and starting to hand out business cards to everybody without talking to anybody.

Karin Conroy (17:26.577)
Banned.

Karin Conroy (17:29.999)
is worse. Yeah. yeah.

Karin Conroy (17:51.357)
Right.

Gert Mellak (17:53.122)
But this is exactly what people do on the socials now, right? Because they heard, hey, Reddit is interesting, Reddit is great. And I totally agree. It’s really, really powerful. People are making a lot of money just by being really strategic on Reddit. You need to be social and you need to give this not weeks, but a few months. So this is why it’s really hard to do this in-house and say, hey, we build this up and we do this consistently because every firm has other things to do.

Karin Conroy (17:55.964)
Yeah, yeah.

Karin Conroy (18:10.023)
Right.

Karin Conroy (18:18.183)
Well, and a challenge that I’ve seen a lot with Reddit is that you really cannot schedule or automate your content. You have to be very human about it. And you will get banned not just by like a human moderator, but they have these automatic AI moderators and it happens instantly. so you just don’t wanna, you wanna be very careful, I think. But when you’re careful and you’re doing it right and you’re being human there,

the results can be amazing. I mean, you can really get some great traffic. And part of it is because it’s where AI is going to kind of see what people are asking and what the conversations are. And so AI is using it as it’s sort of data for what the search answers they’re using it for the answers that they’re providing. Okay, so.

Going from those kind of three platforms that a lot of people are focusing on, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, and that’s kind of where you’re gonna do some audience research and that’s that kind of bottom of that pyramid. Then can you kind of take us through the rest of the pyramid and then how it’s upside down from what most other people are doing wrong? And I’ll do a little spoiler, the top of the pyramid, meaning the end point, the last thing you should be doing.

is your blog. of reverse your thinking on all of that and recognize that in the past, we would be starting by talking about, talk about your blog content strategy and what the things you should have in your blog posts are. We’re not doing that at all. We’re talking about that last.

Gert Mellak (20:03.734)
Exactly. And I think it’s interesting you took it away, but it helps me explain the rest as well. Because right now, why did this work in the past that we started with the blog? We didn’t have so much competition. It cost us a lot to write a blog post resource wise, money wise as well. It wasn’t commodity like today with AI where you put up a draft and in 10 minutes you have your blog post. Blog posts right now are very commoditized until unless you

Karin Conroy (20:08.572)
Okay.

Gert Mellak (20:32.526)
invest a lot of effort into them, which is really what nobody wants to do and hardly anybody can do. Hardly anybody can do because they don’t have the access maybe to run large scale campaigns unless you’re like a big SaaS firm or whatever. And you might also not have the creative talent in the team to actually run those campaigns. But it was easy because you could just publish a blog post and would get the distribution. We call this so we would get

Karin Conroy (20:38.609)
Yeah. Right.

Gert Mellak (21:01.374)
access to an audience that would consume the blog post. Today we have commoditized blog posts. It costs next to nothing to publish. We have a lot of competition because everybody can start a law firm blog post tomorrow without even being a law firm. We have really to confirm that we have credibility to actually talk about this topic, especially if it’s a critical topic like the legal topics we have there.

Karin Conroy (21:16.613)
Right. Right.

Gert Mellak (21:32.118)
And all this requires that we build this pyramid from another way, because first of all, we establish where our audience is, but then we want to start participating in their conversations. And participating in a conversation means knowing when conversations happen where I can actually participate. Right? So if I go to a network, I remember the last networking event years ago, I went here in Madrid.

Karin Conroy (21:45.701)
Yeah. Yeah.

Gert Mellak (22:00.162)
and I heard a group over there talking about SEO. I was like, I should be in this group. So I tried to of come to an end with my current conversation and kind of slowly move there. And then, they talk about SEO. I think I have something to contribute after 20 years. I want to do this online as well. So how am I going to, if I’m a lawyer, corporate law, I don’t know.

I need to figure out where are people talking about what I’m interested in and what I know to how, what to contribute. So I need alert systems. Alert systems are systems that track the web and say, where is a conversation happening that actually is in this area on a platform that makes sense. Let’s send an alert to this person signed up, signing up for this and notify them and say, Hey, there is this conversation over there. You probably want.

Karin Conroy (22:30.543)
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

Gert Mellak (22:56.664)
to know about it and then you decide if you want to contribute. You don’t go to Reddit every single day and search for your topics and figure out if something is there and spend 10 minutes just looking at stuff. You set up a strategic, intelligent alert system and then this information comes to you every day. And what we have…

Karin Conroy (23:02.994)
Right.

Karin Conroy (23:07.772)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (23:16.411)
Okay, so what do you do? How are you doing that? What are you using for that?

Gert Mellak (23:20.12)
So we have tried a few different tools. The standard tool out there is Google Alerts. This is like the standard tool everybody mentions. I have to smile because whenever I put this in front of any marketer, everybody’s cringes and so on. I try to just, exactly, exactly, right? So this one, it’s very, very limited. Let’s put it this way, right? It’s free. You can put it up and you put up your name and you put in corporate law and I don’t know what case is.

Karin Conroy (23:27.91)
Yeah, yeah.

Karin Conroy (23:34.287)
Yuck.

Karin Conroy (23:42.972)
Right.

Gert Mellak (23:49.088)
And when Google indexes a page, they are going to send you an alert. So it doesn’t not work at all. It works somewhat and it’s better than nothing probably, but it’s not fast. not, it’s tracking a lot of platforms. Many platforms are not indexable. So directly they are not going to come through Google alerts anyway. So this is like the very, very basic version. Rand Fishkin from a famous marketer.

joined another person, I think they brought up a tool that’s called Alert Mouse. Alert Mouse is a tool like Google Alerts, very, very similar, but much better. So this one is a really good tip. Somebody who’s, now it’s a really solid tool, they are developing it as well, and it’s very easy to use. You just say, look, I want to know about pages that do include these words and don’t include those words, right? So it’s very, very simple. It works very well.

Karin Conroy (24:21.979)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (24:28.637)
Okay, the bar is pretty low.

Okay.

Okay.

Gert Mellak (24:46.29)
I’m still a user of the alert mouse as well, but we did actually.

Karin Conroy (24:49.373)
And it’s able to kind of go into social media like LinkedIn and Reddit and whatever and search through those conversations.

Gert Mellak (24:56.534)
It goes into more platforms exactly. So it actually does go, doesn’t depend on Google’s index like Google Alerts would. When we signed up for that, I started building our own platform because there is an API from Ahrefs. Ahrefs is an SEO tool that crawls the entire web. And they brought up a tool that’s still in test, but it works really well. And it’s, this is called Firehose. And we build a tool around Firehose.

Karin Conroy (24:59.601)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (25:04.399)
Nice. Okay.

Karin Conroy (25:15.815)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (25:22.885)
Okay. Okay.

Gert Mellak (25:25.9)
Why did we build a tool for it? Because you can get inundated with updates. And if you get 50 alerts from 50 different conversations, it’s going to be really hard to figure out which one actually deserves your attention to even consider contributing. So what we did essentially for our clients is that we have this alert set up, but on top of it, we have an AI layer that analyzes the conversations.

Karin Conroy (25:50.755)
Nice. And filters it. Okay. that’s fantastic. Yeah.

Gert Mellak (25:52.962)
based on SEO potential? Is this ranking for anything? Does this usually rank for anything? And how close is this to actual decision making? Or is this just randomly, I don’t know what SEO is. I don’t want to contribute to a thread like that. I want to contribute to a thread that says, hey, I’m not getting SEO results because I’m publishing a blog post every week. This is where I want to talk about search everywhere optimization. So I get the alerts I get are pre-filtered today.

Karin Conroy (26:04.665)
Okay. Yes.

Karin Conroy (26:16.186)
Yes, okay.

Gert Mellak (26:19.906)
In the last half hour, there were two possible alerts and the system just told me that there are two, but they don’t qualify. So don’t bother. Right. So I only get what actually makes sense for me. And I might even cap it inside on Santa Claus more than five a day. Because it’s because it’s not, it’s not going to be worth the time anyway, but whatever we send through, I know is worth the time. And they might contribute to one or two.

Karin Conroy (26:26.074)
that’s fantastic.

Karin Conroy (26:33.467)
Yeah, that’s great.

Karin Conroy (26:37.831)
Right.

Karin Conroy (26:42.557)
Okay, perfect. All right, so we’ll link to that in the show notes. that’s called Firehose.

Gert Mellak (26:49.11)
It’s called firehose.com. It’s a new tool. I think it’s even in beta test right now, but it’s really, it’s like YouTube, but for content, right? So there’s content streamed coming in and you can configure how you want to essentially analyze it. But really I think that when the magic happens is where you actually decide what not to look at. And you can do this partly with filters. Firehose is not easy as alert mouse to set up, but once you have set it up,

Karin Conroy (26:57.733)
Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (27:09.147)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (27:14.342)
Okay.

Gert Mellak (27:16.012)
you can actually exclude a lot of things directly and then put another additional layer on top of it.

Karin Conroy (27:20.337)
I think that’s really an important part of the overall conversation though. so this is yours. If we’re starting from the bottom of the, of your pyramid, this is the second layer and the idea of setting up alerts so that you are not going out and wasting all this time on these platforms. And because there’s a balance there we were talking about with Reddit where you do have to be human and you do have to kind of get in there and not automate too many things because you’ll be banned.

But on the other side, like you have a job to do. We don’t want to be doing this all day long, right? And we want to be able to set up a system where first of all, it’s strategic and thoughtful and systematic, but that allows us to be consistent with it.

Gert Mellak (28:03.552)
Exactly, I pretty much built this what my assistant and myself built manually before we had Google Alert set up and she would go through the Google Alerts and pass on three or four to me and say I believe these are the ones that make sense for you to look at and then I would go in and decide that one probably was worth contributing to or two so we pretty much now build this with technology with better alert systems with an AI layer that makes the decisions

Karin Conroy (28:11.335)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (28:20.656)
Right.

Karin Conroy (28:29.105)
Nice.

Karin Conroy (28:32.55)
Yeah.

Gert Mellak (28:32.568)
So we don’t have to bother anybody else and I can just open my Slack and look at the last alerts and see which ones I want to look at.

Karin Conroy (28:37.052)
Right.

Okay, so that’s awesome. So bottom layer, find your audience. Second layer, set up some kind of alerts. We’ll link to the different software that we’re talking about in the show notes. And then the third layer is… Okay.

Gert Mellak (28:51.742)
Third layer is industry publications, right? So this comes back to what you already took away We can’t publish a blog post because we don’t have credibility even though we have been

Karin Conroy (28:59.312)
Yes.

Karin Conroy (29:05.071)
Yeah, I think this is such a super important part of the differentiation. When you were talking earlier about in the past, anyone could open up a website and start writing about their, you know, whatever legal blog they wanted to. And I think this is actually really good news for the firms who first of all have experience and authority and they’ve been doing great work and they have things to talk about.

as opposed to these brand new firms that are trying to just sort of like paste it together, but they actually haven’t done anything. So this is where, this is good. This is where the AI is actually gonna filter out the sort of low lying garbage. And if you are a good lawyer and you do great work and you have things to talk about, this is going to add this layer of authority that the other guys can’t compete with.

Gert Mellak (29:57.184)
Exactly. And it’s also when you look at it, it’s actually a good movement, right? So in the past, I’m an SEO agency, I could have created an ultimate guide to corporate law, could get it ranking. And I could actually have attracted buyers, right? I really have no idea about corporate law. So I really should not be able to do that. So what we have seen that there was like a transition period where

Karin Conroy (30:01.031)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (30:13.884)
Right.

Right.

Right.

Gert Mellak (30:25.408)
I could get away talking lots about email marketing, for example, because I’m somewhat in this industry, but it’s no longer the case for me to get a high ranking, high traffic, high volume email marketing article going. It would take a lot of effort and I might not succeed. So Google essentially was shrinking down and it just did a forensic audit on a site that completely crashed because they were talking about so many things that are

Karin Conroy (30:29.053)
Sure. Yeah.

Gert Mellak (30:52.66)
somewhat related to what they’re doing just to attract the traffic, but they’re not the core of their business. It’s like me talking about email marketing and flyers and paper flyers or whatever. It would be somewhat marketing, but not SEO. I should really talk about SEO or what I believe SEO is these days. And this is where law firms might have been talking about all kinds of law, even the things that are not part of the practice area.

Karin Conroy (31:02.341)
Yes. Right.

Karin Conroy (31:18.075)
Right, in a lot of cases, people were being told to do that for SEO purposes, just to pull in all that traffic. But you sent, I think it was today, an email about this specifically. I think it may have been this case study. And the description and the analogy, I think, is really good, because I’m a visual person. And when you described it, it was talking about imagine you’re in kind of a theater, and there’s one big spotlight. And you’ve got the spotlight on that main

a person up on the stage, but now imagine there’s like 50 spotlights and they’re all over the room and you don’t know where to look, right? And this is what we’re talking about. This is what Google is saying. Like if Google’s coming to your site and you’re talking about family law and you’re talking about criminal defense and now you’re talking about, hey, maybe I’ll do a little bit of estate planning and you know, I’ll just do whatever people will pay me for. Google’s be like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s too much. It’s messy.

And I’m gonna go to this guy over here who is very clearly only doing this one thing really well. And he’s talking about it, he’s an expert. Other people are saying he’s an expert. So I’m gonna, it’s clear what he’s saying. And there’s one spotlight and I’m gonna boost that higher because of that.

Gert Mellak (32:34.382)
Exactly. Another example that I often use that really gets it to click for people is to join the dots game my kids play. You have 15 dots and they connect dot number one to dot number two, dot number three and suddenly this is a cat. If I put 500 dots on the map, it’s going to be really, really hard to figure out where the cat is. And Google is trying the same thing. They know, okay, this is the law firm. This is the founder.

Karin Conroy (32:40.806)
Okay, what’s that?

Gert Mellak (33:02.978)
The lawyer, this is the staff, they are all related to law and connecting all those dots, right? There is another association of the lawyers in this state that refers to this. So apparently there is a connection. So this all builds an image. I can understand there is the law firm, there is the people, there is the association, there are industry journals. And this is why on this layer on the pyramid, I insist so much because this is what gives you the credibility. You on your website can talk about whatever you want. I can be a cancer treatment expert tomorrow on my website, right?

Hopefully nobody’s going to rank me and send me traffic. But I could try. I could try. But it’s not only going to be something that doesn’t have success. It’s also going to dilute everything else I’m doing. I had a consultant now. We stripped away probably 80 % of her top navigation. She’s been in business for 35 years. She didn’t rank for anything related to what she was doing because she just put every info product, every single consulting service you could think of over the years.

Karin Conroy (33:36.411)
Yeah, sure.

Gert Mellak (34:03.01)
She just kept adding to this website. So she had 50 something top navigation elements. And now I think she has 15 or 13. And now two weeks later, she starts ranking for her core terms again, because finally Google knows it’s like a handbrake that’s loosened, right? So Google wanted to rank her, but there’s just no way because it’s just too crowded. It’s a mess and you need to take stuff away.

Karin Conroy (34:12.379)
Yeah, yeah.

Karin Conroy (34:17.447)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (34:27.613)
It’s a mess. Yeah.

Gert Mellak (34:31.274)
And you need to make sure that what you say on your website is corroborated on other sites. And the easiest way for someone with experience and years in the business to corroborate what they’re saying is through third parties. can be a podcast. This can be an industry journal. This can, in our case, I write for search engine land, which was great for my personal brand, for example, because Google finally understood who I was. I wasn’t the developer anymore that used to write code 20 years ago. I was finally a marketer because

Karin Conroy (34:52.081)
Yeah. Right.

Gert Mellak (34:59.51)
I was participating in this marketing on Land Magazine.

Karin Conroy (35:02.459)
Right, right. Yeah, so this is where, so earlier I said don’t be like writing articles only speaking to other lawyers, but this is where that kind of thing would be a good idea. You wanna be talking about your practice area obviously, and let’s say you get a publication with the ABA or some other well-ranked, well-respected platform or organization or business or media or whatever it is,

that is basically voting and validating your expertise. Yeah, so this is where, you know, when you picture a website and you’ve got those kind of that bar where you’ve got all the little logos, whatever that would be, sometimes that’s a bunch of like media companies, sometimes that’s, you know, awards and accolades, whatever that might be, it’s things that are validating the work that you say that you do and that you’ve, you know, kind of done in the past.

Gert Mellak (35:59.766)
Exactly. Do you really want to look for ways how can you contribute on their website? Right. It’s one thing that you get an award. It’s another thing that they actually interview you and publish an article about you. Why, how you won this award, what was the case, et cetera, just to make sure that you’re really covered on those areas. Right. But there’s one more reason why industry journals are really, really good or other people’s audiences for that matter is because they already have distribution.

And distribution again, as a reminder means they get this content in front of an audience, which you don’t have as a blog and let alone a business blog. Right. You don’t have an audience that keeps reading your blog and keeps receiving and reading your articles. Usually you don’t have that, but they do. So you already have a way when you are a contributor to at least one or two, you don’t need 10 of them. Right. One or two respected industry journals.

You contribute regularly. It doesn’t have to be every week. can be every three months. It works perfectly. The first one is already going to move the needle for you. But once you have this, you already have a way and say, okay, I just submitted my pyramid related article to search engine land. Right? Because I know this is now part of my distribution. I use their distribution channel to get my message across because they are bigger than my blog can be. But this also means that once I have this layer, I want to prepare for the next one, which is actually

to build my own distribution system. This is now the next layer. If I have something interesting, very often my clients might say, hey, we are now part of this association or look, we have this study or look, we just did this survey or look, we have this really great case study. What should we do with it? Literally yesterday I had a vegan pet food brand ask me, I didn’t know this existed a few months ago.

Karin Conroy (37:26.471)
Okay.

Gert Mellak (37:52.534)
I learn a lot with clients. They just hit me up and say, look, we are now part of this association of animal protection and I don’t know what, what can we do with it? Right. And then a lawyer told me, look, we have made great progress on this class action. What should we do? Right. The world needs to know, the world needs to know. Right. So there are, there’s the default way is we run ads. Okay. Definitely a big part of the distribution channel. We run ads as well.

Karin Conroy (37:53.885)
Ha

Karin Conroy (38:00.925)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (38:09.905)
What’s the best way to distribute it? Yes, right.

Karin Conroy (38:22.289)
Okay.

Gert Mellak (38:22.35)
And if there is something interesting, like a podcast appearance, for example, we are going to run ads to this podcast appearance and going to make sure that people understand. This is the concept we talked about this pyramid concept with Kieran, and we are going to make sure more people see it. But part of this distribution network can also be your email list. This can be an, partner firms email list. This can be, like your industry journal, you go back and repurpose this content and present it specifically for the industry journals where you can actually participate.

This can be running ads to people searching for those channels online and we run ads to them. This can be creating five videos for YouTube and Reels and LinkedIn. And you just make sure that this goes out. The important thing is that you have, if you look at this like a conveyor belt, you put this content at the beginning and you have a process set up that’s just going to work afterwards. And in my case, this process is called Christina and Tricia, thankfully.

Karin Conroy (39:16.028)
Right.

Karin Conroy (39:19.805)
Yeah.

Gert Mellak (39:20.11)
with some AI help more and more. But as I look, I created it, I think it’s not bad. Let’s put it out. Okay, so between Christina and Tricia, they’re going to do the magic to make sure that this gets published and they run ads to it and repurpose it and so on. But we want to establish, and this is what we have clients as well, say, okay, what is there right now? What resources do we have? And then say, okay, maybe we can add some resources to also make sure on YouTube people see this, if they are in your audience.

And we also make sure that people search for your competitors, come across these articles somewhere. This is where we essentially define our own distribution process. So we don’t rely on third parties anymore.

Karin Conroy (40:02.887)
Well, and what’s interesting is in both of these last two layers, both the industry publications and the distribution, this once again is not significantly different from what we were doing in the past. So the industry publications, that would have been the conversation about backlinks that you were having in the kind of the old world of SEO. And it would have been in a different sequence and we would have been talking about it slightly different because now we’re talking about these kinds of industry publications in

it does feel like it’s a more human kind of approach. Backlinks used to be super kind of, just kind of gross. You you’re asking, I get, I still to this day get so many requests for backlinks on my website. But the idea is you want to show up and have these like high level websites linking to you. You know, so the idea of backlinks is there.

in that industry publications, we’re just doing it better and a little bit differently than what we used to do. And the distribution idea is that ad approach or the promotion, once again, in a different sequence than what we would have done in the past, in the past SEO and pay-per-click approach, that would have been first. That would have been kind of that first top of the funnel, know, step one idea, like throw out the ads, put a bunch of money there.

And then like, we’ll figure out what to do with them once they kind of land in, you know, our email inbox or whatever. Now we’re putting the ads in a different sequence and they’re going to be much more strategic and thoughtful and aligned with this kind of path of the client journey that makes so much more sense. you know, I would even argue that your ad spend is going to be better and more effective when you do it in this sequence than

if you just kind of throw a whole bunch of ad money at it in the beginning.

Gert Mellak (42:00.022)
Exactly, because you have done your audience platform research at the beginning, you know your audience, you have probably defined your ICP, your ideal client profiles, you really know what are the jobs to be done, the things they have in mind, what they actually want to achieve before they hire you. So you have all this information and you can go directly into this area and if there is a piece of content that doesn’t relate to it, you might just decide not to run ads to this one, put it out organically but not run ads to it.

Karin Conroy (42:02.973)
Yeah.

Gert Mellak (42:28.258)
But if you know how this matches exactly to our study that we did initially, what people want to figure out all the time, by all means, anything that relates to this, let’s make sure we get as many relevant eyeballs to this as possible.

Karin Conroy (42:40.901)
Okay, so then the last, the top of the pyramid, the last layer is your, I mean, I don’t want to call it your blog post because this is more like your actual content. And it could be something like a YouTube video or, you know, whatever piece of content you’re, could be a Reddit post, but it’s a thoughtful strategic piece of content. So what are we doing differently there as opposed to where we would have started?

Gert Mellak (42:53.496)
Mm-hmm.

Karin Conroy (43:09.777)
with that blog post in the past. And now this being the final step of your kind of sequence, how is it different?

Gert Mellak (43:18.2)
It’s different in a sense that first of all you have higher chances of success because you already have a distribution network and the audience research done before. So if you create content based for example on the alert system that tells you what people are talking about right now, which very often is impacted by macro politics and economic scenarios and wars and I don’t know what, it is going to change. So when you take this into account because you get those alerts all the time,

Karin Conroy (43:41.978)
Yeah.

Gert Mellak (43:47.438)
You can say, hey, this is actually a good topic I could talk about on the YouTube video, or I should actually probably talk about five things you need to take into account in this situation, referring directly to the oil prices and I don’t know what. Now, suddenly this is much more interesting and relevant than a topic we would come up with without this research, right? And then you just make up and say, it’s probably it’s evergreen. Whenever you think something is evergreen, you’re probably wrong anyway.

Karin Conroy (43:51.442)
right.

Karin Conroy (44:05.009)
Yeah. That you just, yeah, that you just pull out of the air. Yeah.

Gert Mellak (44:15.778)
But this is probably a topic for another podcast, but really this was how it was done. Right. So I would go to clients literally and ask them for the 2030 dumb questions they get asked all the time. And then we would create content about them and they would drive. We have articles that still drive traffic and leads after 15 years. We didn’t change it because everybody wants to know how much an office refurbishment is. Right. And nobody knows the price, but the article is good. And it speaks to an audience. Right.

Karin Conroy (44:15.837)
You

Karin Conroy (44:33.437)
Sure, of course.

Karin Conroy (44:39.579)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Gert Mellak (44:45.134)
But yeah, now we publish a piece of content based on the research. We have distribution. We can actually use industry publications to help us a little bit bring this topic across. We might not be able to link to our blog maybe, but we can essentially also talk there about this topic and we talk about this topic. So if somebody reads this, are on their publication, they go to our website, see this here again. It all is more connected again.

Karin Conroy (44:58.333)
Mm-hmm.

Gert Mellak (45:12.846)
And we have our own distribution process and we know if I put this article or this video on the conveyor belt, it is going to be repurposed and we are going to launch, don’t know, five to 15 LinkedIn posts in the next three months using this article and bringing it across the audience in different ways from different angles and make just to give it just a chance to actually do something. The funny thing I always hear when people talk about startups and

in videos, they say, okay, whenever you publish a video on YouTube, it to your mailing list. These guys have 36 people on their mailing list and half of them is their family, right? How is this a distribution channel? It’s not because they have no research, they have no audience, they have no distribution channel. They just create content and rely on the algorithm, which more and more seems to be enough to start off. It wasn’t in the past. In the past, you would send out this email and have 15 views on your video.

Karin Conroy (45:48.999)
Right?

right? Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (46:09.243)
Right,

Gert Mellak (46:09.934)
And five would be from my mother-in-law, was really supportive. So it just doesn’t work this way. But now you create this article based on the research and put it into the distribution mechanism.

Karin Conroy (46:23.357)
And is it always an article or should we be considering this content piece, that top of the, I was gonna say funnel, but now we’re talking about a pyramid. Should we be considering a handful of different possibilities? Like it could be a YouTube video or a variety of different types of content. And then in that case,

should it always come to your blog or should it just go to various areas of your website? Like are we doing a whole different goal here?

Gert Mellak (46:56.502)
Absolutely, it very often should probably be a video. Very often should be a video because this is just how everybody these days consumes content. But if I think about how many things I learned from other SEOs on LinkedIn, just with a written post in my industry, a LinkedIn post goes a long way. And I wouldn’t have watched so many videos, but I can quickly copy and paste a LinkedIn post into some sort of summarizer or whatever.

and just take the main ideas away and I might take the brand as well. So it really depends on the industry and also depends on what kind of article list is right or what kind of piece of content is this. You might also do both and say, okay, I always start with a YouTube video, for example, but then decide what makes sense. Is this material for a blog post or is this just something where I want to have a long video and then cut it up and publish the short versions on Instagram and my YouTube shorts or whatever?

Karin Conroy (47:35.963)
Yeah. Sure.

Karin Conroy (47:54.107)
Yeah, sure.

Gert Mellak (47:54.198)
It depends, right? I do believe more and more, we just have to accept video is the first format. A video is the way we didn’t, you might like it. I’d much rather create a lot of articles than create a lot of videos. But once you, you just set up the system exactly and they get cited, you go to AI, they might cite a video. Right? You go to a lot of searches. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, right? People don’t know that, but many people start their searches on YouTube.

Karin Conroy (47:59.025)
That is the way. Yeah, 100%.

Karin Conroy (48:06.843)
Yeah, but it’s just not what people want anymore. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Karin Conroy (48:18.363)
Yeah. Yeah.

Gert Mellak (48:22.796)
And they might find your video searching on Google. They might still go to YouTube and watch your video. But very often a good strategy that we have found is to start with a, with a social media video. And you can even, if you publish a lot, we have a lawyer, for example, as a client who does a lot of TikTok. And we do adjust select from his TikTok videos, the ones that have the most success and start the content journey there. And so it does this relate to our audience research. Does this relate to what we have seen in the alerts? Does this actually make sense?

Now we can build the entire distribution system across about this video and might even ask him for five more about this topic so we can can double down on this what we have seen that already is working.

Karin Conroy (48:58.311)
Sure.

Karin Conroy (49:03.109)
Awesome. Okay. So very briefly, what is the book review that we’re going to, I know you have a really good one that ties it all together, but what is the book that you’re going to recommend for this episode? Cause I know in the past you also had some other good ones, but today’s book is, amazing. So you’ve got the visual. That’s awesome. Yeah.

Gert Mellak (49:17.826)
Yeah, I even prepared it for you. It’s a paper version. It’s called What’s in it for them from Joe Polish from Teenage Network. This goes, yeah, what’s good about it is it just forces you to frame everything around the pain somebody’s trying to solve. And it’s easier said than done because very, very quickly,

Karin Conroy (49:27.74)
Okay.

Karin Conroy (49:31.099)
And what’s good about this? Sorry.

Karin Conroy (49:44.327)
Yeah.

Gert Mellak (49:46.368)
In my conversations, I might just say, yeah, okay, your rankings dropped. Hey, we have this really cool strategy and pyramid, cetera. And, and again, I talk about what I want to talk about, right? But this person only wants more leads. So it’s like a reminder that we always start there and try to actually build the entire system from their pain and make sure that they understand what actually this is, why, this matters for them, what’s in it for them, right?

Karin Conroy (49:51.759)
Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got your answer. I’ve got your answer. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Karin Conroy (50:05.435)
Yeah. Yep.

Karin Conroy (50:15.484)
Yeah.

Gert Mellak (50:15.726)
So this is, I have it here just to rest in a reminder, right? It’s a reminder here, I see this book and say, yeah, okay, we need to, let’s focus back on where this all starts.

Karin Conroy (50:18.341)
Yeah, that’s good.

Karin Conroy (50:24.049)
I think it’s a good reminder too, because there’s times when we’ll have those conversations and I have the answer and I know I can see it so clearly, but at the same time, they’re wanting something entirely different. And sometimes that means we’re not a good fit. know, sometimes that means that’s, that’s great. And I can hear what you’re saying, but you really should go work with someone who does that thing because I have a different plan for that. And, you know, so, so there’s times in those initial conversations

where it’s really important to hear that because if you’re not listening, it’s gonna come up painfully later at some point when you kind of regret it you’re like, they said that and I should have been listening. so there is that side of it too. Like you need to listen for both of your benefits.

Gert Mellak (51:13.334)
Exactly. And also, especially when you’re, when you have like an ongoing relationship with your clients that have been with us for eight, 10 years, month after month renewing and just continuing the process. But they know that when I feel it’s not a fit anymore, I’m going to tell them. And I just, I just, we were still doing social media updates for a client from years ago. And we are really good friends right now. It’s just ranking up and say, look, I know you pay me still probably $1,000, $500.

Karin Conroy (51:35.089)
Yeah.

Gert Mellak (51:42.382)
dollars per month for this. I’m going to stop doing this because if you, if you, your nephew, I have seen what he’s doing, he’s doing a much better job at this, hire him, give him the $500. And I’m going to do what I do best, which is the SEO and marketing part. And I’m just going to watch what he’s doing and how it’s performing and step in when I think it makes sense. So it is this, this, this, situation where you’re just really willing to say, Hey, you came for

Karin Conroy (51:51.357)
Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Gert Mellak (52:10.146)
this service and it was good until now, but now either you redefine it if I can provide it or just say, hey, this is no longer a fit for you. You should really go over there to this other firm.

Karin Conroy (52:22.235)
I really think that goes back to that whole idea of the establishing the authority and the credibility though too, because even just within that client relationship, all of a sudden they’re thinking, you’re not just here to get my 500 bucks. You really are gonna do what you’re good at and I can count on that as opposed to just being after the money. And so it kind of all of sudden establishes a tighter relationship with your clients as well.

Gert Mellak (52:50.176)
Exactly. So I think it’s just always important to keep this in mind. Always important to think back on why did they actually come to me? Why did they book in? What was the first situation? We even right now, we very often transcribe with Google Meet, we transcribe the calls, et cetera. We very often refer back to the first call because this is the reminder of why they came. Everything else is then a conversation about the tactical things and what do you need? What do I need? But the first conversation is the honest one.

Karin Conroy (53:08.829)
Yes, 100%. Exactly.

Right, the execution of it. Yes. Yes, 100%. Okay, so that is what’s in it for them. I don’t know if it’s Joe Polish or Joe Polish, but we will link to that on the show page as well. I’m not sure how you pronounce it, but either way it’s P-O-L-I-S-H. So girl, what is the big takeaway? I feel like this was such a good actionable conversation in just visualizing your strategy and your approach.

Gert Mellak (53:27.15)
probably, yeah.

Gert Mellak (53:31.234)
There you go.

Karin Conroy (53:42.127)
and how things have changed in this world of AI. But what’s the big takeaway that you’d like people to get from this episode today?

Gert Mellak (53:49.262)
That’s good question. think the biggest takeaway is that if your marketing hasn’t changed in the last four to six months, you are not getting results. Or at least don’t be surprised if you’re not getting results because there was so much change going on. I didn’t have a weekend in the last four to six months because it was only pivoting every single thing we do in the agency.

in order to make sure that we have something that actually makes sense now, because a lot of what we did before has just absolutely no place anymore from strategy, from tactics, et cetera. And I see so many firms still do the same they did five years ago, and they’re still paying for this weekly blog post and three social media updates on Facebook. But nobody thinks, does this still make sense? Is this based on today’s user behavior? So marketing has just…

Karin Conroy (54:22.599)
Yeah.

Karin Conroy (54:28.551)
Yeah.

Gert Mellak (54:43.798)
shift it very very severely and this just means that you need to adapt or at least save the money and stop what you’re doing right now because it’s not going to do anything until you can.

Karin Conroy (54:53.125)
Until you can. Yeah. Awesome. Kurt Melick is the founder and CEO of SEO Leverage. Thank you once again for being here and being part of our Council Cast Collaborators where we’ll have on the page all of our previous episodes too, where we were talking way back in the beginning about how to, one of our first episodes was how, whether your content can compete with AI’s content. And I feel like it would be interesting to even go back and look at what we were saying there because

That has changed so much. That was probably at least two, maybe three years ago. that, you know, maybe most of what we said in that episode is either entirely or partially changed at this point. But either way, we’ve been talking about AI over and over and over for all these years and we’ll keep doing that. And I feel like this framework is the core of it. And this, don’t see this changing because this is…

Gert Mellak (55:26.68)
Hopefully.

Karin Conroy (55:49.373)
Like I said earlier, this is also just kind of at the heart of most marketing theory. We’re just kind of adding an AI lens that we’re looking through all of these and how to think about kind of getting out there. But there is a human element to all of this and making sure that you are that authority and you’re showing up as a human and making sure that you’re not losing that piece of it because nobody wants to see that if it’s just all like, you know, AI looking slop. So anyway.

Thank you so much for being here. This was a great episode.

Gert Mellak (56:21.432)
Thank you so much for having me back.