Gyi Tsakalakis Warns Law Firms Not To Be Overly Reliant On Google

Welcome to episode 53 of The Earley Show podcast, hosted by personal injury attorney Christopher Earley! For this conversation, Chris is joined by Gyi Tsakalakis, Founder of AttorneySync.

Check out the episode below. You can also enjoy it on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.

In this episode, Gyi and Chris discuss why trust and authenticity continue to drive successful law firm marketing, how lawyers can strengthen their visibility through community involvement and why firms should avoid becoming overly dependent on any single marketing channel. The conversation also explores the growing impact of AI on search, the importance of client experience and how building a recognizable brand can help law firms compete in an increasingly crowded digital landscape.

About our guest:

For over 15 years, Gyi Tsakalakis has been helping attorneys understand how people really find and hire lawyers online without the jargon, gimmicks, or empty promises that too often define the SEO and digital marketing industry.

As co-founder of AttorneySync, Gyi works at the intersection of legal marketing, technology, and trust. His focus is on empowering lawyers to take ownership of their online presence, build authentic authority, and attract clients the right way.

Learn more about AttorneySync here!

Get full details on the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit here!

About The Earley Show:

For nearly 20 years, Christopher Earley has successfully led a personal injury law firm in Boston. On the Earley Show, a new podcast launched in the summer of 2023, Christopher and other standout attorneys will be sharing their secrets to success, and discussing the law office management habits that have allowed their practice to thrive. If you’re looking to make better use of your time, increase daily productivity or even just spend less time answering emails, you’ll definitely want to tune in to The Earley Show.

Learn more about the Earley Law Group here!

Check out the previous episode of The Earley Show here!

The Earley Show is a part of The Answering Legal Podcast Network.

Interested in learning more about Answering Legal? Click here to learn more about 400 minute free trial!

This podcast is produced and edited by Joe Galotti. You can reach Joe via email at [email protected].

Episode Transcript:

Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of The Earley Show, sponsored by our friends over at Answering Legal. I'm your host, Chris Earley, and as you know, on this show, we always bring you the very best and very brightest in the legal industry.

Today we have a real treat, Mr. Gyi Tsakalakis. He's a rock star in the space, he's a good person. He is putting a lot of good into this industry, which we always need more of. So Gyi is a positive force for good.

I wanted to have him on the show, because he's, in addition to being a good person, he gives a lot of value to lawyers, so we can get more cases and market ourselves digitally more effectively. So Gyi, what's up, my friend? How are you?

Chris, that was a great intro. I'm honored and humbled, and great to see you on this beautiful Friday, although we're not doing this live, so I don't know if it'll be out on Friday when you publish this.

Well, maybe it will be a Friday, but we're getting together today. It's mid-April. I saw you, we had a nice conversation at the Great League of Marketing Summit back in October, and I was on your podcast, which I want to talk about.

We'll talk about your upcoming conference, Conrad. But I want to start from the beginning. Obviously, you're a licensed attorney.

I'd like to just, if you could start at the beginning, where you grew up, what mom and dad did, influences on you that led you on this path to work out here today.

Sure. I'll give you my short-ish origin story. So I grew up in southeast Michigan. I'm actually back and moved.

I was living in Chicago for a long time. A lot of people that know me professionally always mistakenly put me in Chicago. But I was there for 15 years, but I'm back in my hometown, yada yada family.

Yeah, my mom's here. And talk about a big part of my origin story is my mom. I was raised by a single mom.

My parents divorced when I was five, and that certainly shaped me. I was the oldest of three.

And so I had to step up and step into some leadership roles at an early age, which probably shaped me in some ways in taking that entrepreneurial leap at some point. But yeah, I never thought that, you mentioned I'm a lawyer.

I never really grew up thinking I was going to be a lawyer. I actually, by the time I got to college, I thought I was going to be a computer science major. This was like 1997.

But back then, coding, what's funny, serendipitously maybe, I didn't choose that path.

And there was a lot different back then, though.

It's funny, I've kind of seen the full circle of, from the front, at least it was the front, my first experiences with it early on, we had, it was like bubble search and things like that.

And then all the way to now, the search engines are creating themselves. Like, wow, maybe we can talk a little bit about that. But my mom is my hero.

Can't say enough positive things. She was a huge shaping force in my life. And I, after I graduated, I was a philosophy major eventually, because like I said, I didn't want to be a coder.

Wouldn't trade my philosophy education for anything. Super valuable. And went to law school, kind of on a, what am I going to do?

Because I didn't want to go into academia, and there wasn't a huge demand for philosophers at the time. And loved law school. Probably was a little bit overly romantic about the practice of law.

I graduated from Wayne State, and I was very grateful that I got to work the, I was a, I played football in high school. I was a super meathead. And I went to work for my offensive coordinator at his family's law firm.

Super grateful for that experience. The baptism by fire was in multiple, and not by myself, but participated in multiple trials and motion call. Like I thought it was, I was like living my law and order dreams.

But as you know, there's a lot more practicing law than just being in court. And as a young lawyer, they were like, what should we do for marketing? And I was like, all right, I'm going to go figure this out.

So this is like 2007. When asked around, I thought, gosh, I feel like we could do better than what's available. So my business partner, Jeff, and I founded AttorneySync in 2008.

We originally were pay per lead. This is back in the days of total attorneys. And whether there was a big question of whether lawyers could even do pay per lead marketing, because a lot of people thought it was fee sharing with non-lawyers.

But we were a scrappy startup and didn't think we could fight that fight fortunately, I think fortunately, most of the state bars came down on the side of like, yes, lawyers can do pay per lead.

But at that time, we'd already pivoted to agency model, which we can talk about a lot, because that's been my big experience and all the issues and challenges that lawyers have in deciding whether to hire an agency and what to look for in agencies

and whether to build their in house teams and all that kind of stuff. I've lived that for the last almost 20 years. And I do some speculative, novice legal tech investing.

Folks might know that I'm, I always disclose this, I'm an investor and advisor to Lawmatics. A couple other legal tech companies as well.

And yeah, I've just lived at this intersection of law practice, marketing and technology now for almost 20 years.

Can we go back to mom for a second?

I too was raised by a single, just my mom, and my mom, and she raised me, really did a lot of good things for me. What were some big lessons you learned from mom? Because obviously it's tough. Let me ask you, was dad around or no?

No. So my dad was straight off the boat from Greece, working in the kitchens of many restaurants, came over when he was 17.

And for the reasons a lot of marriages don't work out, I think there were some concerns about the impact of some of the lifestyle choices and things like that that were going on. Not to dismerge poor dad, but no, he was not part of my life.

I mean, I saw him probably four or five times post-divorce. At least in my recollection, I could be getting that wrong, but he was not around. It was all mom all the time.

And she was my, really my guiding everything.

And I was, you know, aside from just being a great mom, and you asked me what she taught me, I think the two things, and then I try to pay this forward to my own kids now, but one is really just unconditional love, which I think is so, so important

for this human condition. Yeah, everything's built on that. And I'm fortunate that she gave me that. And it's been a solid bedrock for me.

It's the source of a lot of my confidence, but maybe overly confident sometimes.

And I would say the second thing, and it's funny because, and getting into my philosophy a little bit here, but I identify as a Stoic, even though I know that that's like the super bro Stoic world happening right now.

But I truly, Stoicism has been so impactful. But anyway, the lesson that I learned, and really from both my parents, but even from my dad in his absence was forgiveness. And I think that forgiveness is such an important part of my journey.

And I was fortunate that I was able to forgive my dad, because I think he had harbored a lot of just regrets. But it was for me. I mean, having the opportunity to forgive him was really, really valuable for me.

And so I would say, that was a very long-winded way of saying, unconditional love and forgiveness were two of the values. But really, so many. I mean, we could sit here and talk about the values my mom taught me all day.

Yeah.

I'm interested. I always ask about this at the start, because those stamps that were put on us, a lot of times they are imprinted, and it becomes who we are. I just was raised by my mom.

There's no male influence. I don't know if that's good or bad, but I had to witness her deal with adversity, right? And I'm sure you did too, because it's like they're doing two jobs at once.

I'll probably tend to have to five jobs at once, how hard it is to raise a child, let alone multiple kids, right? So I think clearly you and I have that in common, witnessing strong women raise strong kids.

Absolutely. We had not embarrassed or ashamed to say, we had Abraham Lincoln nights, as my mom called them, but couldn't pay the power bill. So power goes off, and you're living like Abraham Lincoln did.

Yeah. So, but again, I think, and again, just my experience, everybody's got their own journey. I know we've talked about this in the past.

Totally.

I look at it like, and fortunately, I think, I look at it as fortunately, but it's all about how you respond, right?

It's all about, you go through this stuff, and I, again, gratitude is the thing. Like, even though we had these times that, I think, even going through them, I'm sure that there were nights of a lot of fear and potential anxiety.

For my mom, I'm raising three kids by herself, but gosh, I am so grateful for that part of my journey. I mean, it has shaped me so much.

You know, even a lot of our company values, like when I read one of our values is integrity, which I think is like a table stakes value, but like that's my mom. Like, so thanks, mom.

No, no. Good job, mom. No, no question.

I was, you know, a guy named John Fisher?

Yes.

Okay. So I was in New York City exactly one week ago, literally last Friday, and I gave the opening remarks to this mastermind. And the beginning of the night before my hotel room, I'm like, what am I going to talk about?

What am I going to say to these people who flew across the country, took buses, planes, trains, and automobiles to get to this conference or this mastermind group?

And I thought, I'm going to share that all this stuff that happened to me, the tough things were actually things that happened for me, not to me.

And so I encourage these attorney entrepreneurs, like when you go into your mastermind room in five minutes, it's not the bad shit, it's the tough stuff you're going through that's actually an advantage for you, that you just have to figure out a

path through. But these things that are hard in life, I'm grateful for the tough.

I don't think we're in this place right now, this path, but I think it's more important than anything, because it's like our why and influences the parents we are, right? All these things.

A hundred percent. I tell people all the time, it's funny because I'll be at a conference, I'll be talking about digital marketing or whatever, and someone will ask, what's the most important thing that you can tell us today?

And I'm like, gratitude mindset. I mean, if you can flip the switch to what you said from what's happening to you to, you know, you get to, for you and you get to, and not that I have to, but I get to. Gosh, it changes everything.

I mean, I'll tell the story too, and for listeners, my benefit from it, we do a gratitude acknowledgement at dinner with my family. I got kids seven and nine years old.

And I will tell you, just going around the table and be like, just name one thing you're grateful for from the day. It changes everything.

And kids, because people say all the time, it's like you ask your kids how their day was, and they're like, roll their eyes, and I can't remember anything.

You ask for one thing that they're grateful for, and they get in the habit of it, and you see it impact everything. And so grateful for that.

Well, that's imprinting on them gratitude. Their minds are being wired positively to look for the good, to see what's happening for them, because they'll have challenges like my kids.

But I love that you and I talked about Stoicism in DC together on your podcast. Stoicism has got me through adversity as a law firm owner. And just to go back a second, anyone listening to this has a lot to be grateful for.

We have first world problems here, right? Almost everyone listening is in a term of the thriving law practice. Life could be a lot tougher, so I just encourage the audience to keep things in perspective, right?

As you get punched in the face, that's how you look at those. I'm tougher because that punch in the face. It's actually happened for me.

So just wanted to share that.

Love it.

Because you and I, as business owners, we go through hard times. Resilience is a table state. You must be resilient, right?

You have to be to get to get through. So I didn't expect that, but I think if we stop requirement now, we just give you audience a whole lot of value. We're going to give even more value with, I want to hear from you.

I'm interested. I was just writing notes when you were talking before. You've been doing this for a while, and we've never seen such change.

What hasn't changed in the marketing game, the digital game? What is still the same that we need to be mindful about so we don't get this whiplash shiny object-chasing syndrome with all this stuff happening? What hasn't changed?

Yeah. For me, I think one is, this is maybe like a caveat or an asterisk before, but there's a lot of different ways to build a law firm. But the thing that to me, I think is a constant, is trust.

And so, and I say that because at the end, right now there's this big, talking about chasing things, erasing, chasing generative optimization and ranking an AI search, and that's like the hot shiny thing that everybody's selling.

But I encourage people not to trade trust for visibility. And like specifically, what I mean by that is like, there's a lot of things you can do to get attention. There's a lot of things you can do.

You can jump up and down. You know, PT. Barnum, Edward Bernays, there's all sorts of things you can do to get attention.

And the digital world will reward you for the look at me, look at me.

But when someone, especially in the context of like personal injury, when someone has to make a decision to hire you for potentially like the worst thing that's ever happened to them, I would just encourage you to remember that you have to earn that

trust. And earning that trust, like that's the thing that's never going to change.

You know, until we get to agents, hiring agents, and it's like there's no people involved, if there's people involved, it's all about trust, and that's never going to change. I don't care about the platform. I don't care about the strategy.

I don't care if you're doing billboards or if you're a scrappy startup. You have to build trust with people. That's where I would say hasn't changed.

I would say fanatically be obsessed with that, because they're looking for reasons not to trust you.

You're going to take all my money, all my settlement, and we're always working against that. So that's the table stake right there, just reinforcing trust as much as you can. I've learned this from Ben Glass and Dan Kennedy, trust clues.

On my website, I'm very mindful, I have trust clues, like, okay, maybe this guy really isn't sleazebag war like I thought most lawyers are. I'm sorry, but there's a perception, right? And so we're trying to really establish trust clues.

So I encourage the practitioner, make sure your website also, make sure your website doesn't say the word I, I, I everywhere, it should be about you, you.

We're talking to Gyi and his legal situation, whatever it is, because he's checking me out online. Establishing that it's about you, the other person who's in need and how I'm trustworthy.

Without saying like I'm most trustworthy lawyer, like you can just see there's reviews, there's social proof, social credibility, just really reinforcing that. And you can go to million ways in establishing trust, but I love that.

I think that's fantastic. I think it's really an exciting time to be a business owner, to be an entrepreneur, trying to navigate getting cases in today's day and age. I was talking to a group, the Massachusetts Bar Association.

It wasn't really a digital crowd, more just like a white shoe law firm, ivory tower kind of crowd. They don't really have to worry about generating business.

But I said, listen, whoever here is trying to generate business, there's something I just read about called Zero Search, which is where people are Googling but not clicking on anything.

So I just wanted to share that because I think that was fascinating because you obviously want to appear. All right, so we're focusing on trust, but we also need to be found.

All right, so a lot of attorneys on this, some are broke and some are freaking filthy riffs, some are in the middle, we all have different levels of resources.

What are some things we should all be mindful about to be visible on search and how it's evolving? What are you seeing?

Sure, so again, the funny thing is that these lines are all getting blurred.

Like what you do, it's kind of like gladiator, like what you do in life echoes into eternity, but what you do in your practice before you even get online has a direct impact online. So right, and we can go dig deep on this, but we talk about trust.

You already mentioned it. One of the things, one of the signals for trust is people expect to see your happy clients singing your praises online, period. And if you're brand new or you're very selective about clients, you're right off the bat.

In this particular context, you're at a huge competitive disadvantage because you're not doing the volume. You've got people down the street that maybe they're, you know, I hope this is, they use this term.

So if you're listening to this and you identify as this, like I apologize, I don't mean to be derogatory and know it probably will come across that way.

If you're a mill that's doing volume, settlement mill doing volume, you have a huge advantage because you've got more bites at the apple to get these reviews.

And so what I would tell people though is, is that focus on the experience of everybody who touches your brand.

Of course have systems and processes to guide people, but you've got to find ways to inspire people to leave reviews, leave, as you use your word, trust glues, around the web.

And right now, like it and not like it, there's reasons to hate this is the way that it is. It's a mostly Google world. So if you're listening to this, you want some tactical advice and you're brand new to this, you never use the internet.

And even if you're not, you don't plan to use the internet for case generation, at table stakes is Google Business Profile. It's free. You go to google.com/business, just search for Google's Business Profiles.

Fill out all the information you possibly can in your profile, claim your profile.

And when someone has a good experience with you, make sure you make it easy for them to know, like, hey, our business relies on referrals and testimonials and reviews, and if you have something nice to say, we'd love to have a review.

So to me, and that's all free. I say it's free, but it's actually really hard. And it takes a lot of work because you got to deliver that experience.

But that's where I would start. And then another thing that's completely free, and again, it goes to this very point of trust and trust clues, is social media. This is an opportunity for it.

This is not, again, a lot of different ways to do this. But if you're brand new and you don't have a lot of budget, I tell people, carve out an hour a month, sit down and record, and you want to use AI to interview you, get interviewed.

Interview style works well for people. And take that recording, talk about the things we're talking about. Why do you do what you do?

Who do you help? How do you help them? Why are you uniquely qualified to help?

Why should someone choose you versus maybe a billboard lawyer in town? Or why should they choose you versus somebody else? Talk about how you do things. Talk about your why and all this kind of stuff. Clip those up and distribute them everywhere.

And again, that stuff is...

So the reviews, your social clips, if you're a writer, go write. You know, hop on Substack and go publish. These LLMs, these machines, they're sucking all this stuff up, and then they're trying to make sense out of it.

And the more that people are talking positively about you, the more that your expertise is unlocked in all of these different places, the more likely you are to show up.

All right. So we've been talking about table stakes, right? Getting your Google My Business in order, right? Getting the reviews, trust clues we've talked about, you know, just establishing authority, trust, legitimacy, no matter where you are in your journey.

I want to ask you, what are some mistakes you see us lawyers make a lot that you wish you could just weave your magic wand and make it go away? Like, what are some things that we do and we should stop doing if we want to succeed in this new frontier?

Oh, man, I love this question. There's so many ways to answer it. The first thing, and this picks up kind of like what we were talking about a little bit earlier, which is trading trust for visibility.

You know, we feel all this, and again, like you mentioned, everybody's at different stages.

I don't know if your listeners are in different practices, but as you know, PI competitive, man, whether it's national players, private equity, cost per acquisition of clients, cost per case.

It's going through the roof, especially in these, what we would call a category non-brand context. So like, you know, in Google, that's like searches for car accident lawyers.

And so, you know, you think about SEO, and now GEO, we can talk a little bit about that, or ads.

You know, if a national law firm comes in and calls up out front media and is like, hey, I'm willing to pay twice as much as the local law firm for that billboard, it's going to drive the price up.

And so, and so there's this feeling that you're like, should I compete with that? Like, I feel like I got to compete with that. I've got to spend more money.

And maybe that, you know, depending on where you are in your journey and your growth objectives and the market that you're trying to capture, like maybe those are things that are on the table for you to make a bigger investment, which coincides with

my second biggest issue. So I guess my first one is you don't have to compete with those folks if you don't want to. And I'll talk about that in a second. The second thing is that if you're going to compete, you've got to capitalize your business.

I mean, so many firms, they don't, like I'll say like, well, what's your marketing budget?

And I'll be like, marketing budget? What are you talking about?

Yeah. And I'm like, well, what are your growth goals? And they're like, what are you talking about?

You know, we just do good, we're just great lawyers. We do good work, head down.

Happy clients sing our praises and refer us business.

And I always say this, I'm empathetic. I'm like, look, I'm like, if that's working for you, great.

However, what I've seen over almost doing this 20 years, if you think like that, what happens is, is like, you don't even, you're not even maintaining it, you're going to contract. Right.

You're not nurturing those relationships, you're not staying in touch with former clients. People need nudges, they need reminders, everybody's attentions on other things.

And so if you're not showing up in your community, if you're not showing up in their feeds, if you're not showing up in their inboxes, if you're not showing up in text messages, they forget about you.

And so undercapitalization, I would say, is the second biggest thing. And then the third, and this has been my, you know, this is my soapbox right now. And I'll admit, you know, we started out, we were an SEO only agency when we started.

And my message to everybody right now is diversify as fast as you can.

And if you're over reliant on Google, if you're over reliant on ads, if you're over reliant on any single channel, now is the time, I mean, the time, real honest, just to be completely frank, and not to, I hate trying to fear monger here, I really do. But, you know, yesterday was the best time, today is the second best time.

We partner with Near Media, they do this market research. They do consumer surveys, and they do user behavior testing.

They watch people act, you know, people opt in to like participate in the behavior test, and they observe like hundreds of people, you know, doing a search, like they're prompted with like, hey, if you were in a car accident, and you needed to find a

lawyer, like what would you do? And, you know, you get to see them, like you get to see what they type into Google, you get to see what they type into chat, GPT.

And again, I feel like I'm pretty competent at this, but the biggest surprise for me is to see the impact of brand even in the non-brand context.

And so what I mean by that is like even people who are like, all right, I'm going to go to Google and do a search for car accident lawyer near me.

And, you know, as part of the testing, you hear them talk about like what they're looking for and what they see, and they choose, regardless of who shows up, they choose firms that they know.

And they'll say like, oh, I know this guy, he's in the community, he's doing, I've seen him at this thing, or I remember he did this charity work, or he has this sponsorship, or, you know, whatever it is.

And the impact of brand on that non-brand thing, I think that's been a missing piece for a lot of firms. Because again, everybody's like this, I need cases tomorrow. So, and the marketing people, what do they tell you if you need cases tomorrow? You gotta run ads.

And it's like, you're already at a competitive disadvantage because these firms that already have brand position, they're getting chosen, even though you're in the mix, you're paying a premium, and you're gonna pay a premium on those cases that you

Yeah, brand takes unending money, unending time.

So, so it's worth it. No, no, and I'm all about, I'm literally wearing a branded sweatshirt. Like I love, but you have, and I'm with you.

I just, if you're starting from scratch, it's like, you better get rolling because brand is all the more important in today's climate, right? Now more than ever, I feel like brand.

More, you know, I, yes. And again, I go back to the same thing. I'm like, if you're, if you're, so let's talk to the brand newer than newish firm that's trying to get off the ground here.

Start up, you're in startup mode. One, probably you've got time, right? If you don't have a large case volume, then you've got time.

Yeah.

So you got to get out there.

And I would say, and the same thing that I said before, this idea of diversification is true in startup mode. So I wouldn't, people will say, well, oh yeah, if you got time, you just go out and do networking. I'm like, yeah, you do.

You do networking, but you got to break your day. Just like we talked about, you got to prioritize a bunch of different activities and you should be planting seeds. So I'd be like,

I'm doing some brand work now.

I'm doing some networking. I'm doing referral relationships. I'm participating in the organizations that I'm passionate about.

But I'm also like, I'm not waiting for the several years for all that to kick in. I'm probably experimenting with some advertising. I'm probably experimenting with some things that are going to drive cases and referrals in the shorter term.

And I just recognize I'm going to pay a premium on those things, but I'm not putting all of my eggs in one or two baskets. I'm spreading them out. Because again, it's just portfolio theory, right?

It's just like investing in stocks, why people buy ETFs because they're like, I can't pick winners and losers in their stocks. Well, you can't pick winners and losers in your advertising and marketing.

Like diversify it, and then you're weather the storm, no matter what changes Google makes or whatever.

I like that a lot. I was taking note as you were talking, I wrote down portfolio, diverse portfolio, right? To weather the storm.

We don't really know where things are going. It's just wild. But I think we do know brand, like you said, is more and more important.

So I always preach, use what you got. I use my last name, call it early before it's too late. That's what I got.

Trademark. But use what you got. And what you said earlier was really powerful.

Don't compete. You're competing with yourself, and that's it. It's so easy to get caught in comparison, right?

It's the thief of joy. Comparison is the thief of joy. And I'm finally, I'm really making that make sense to me as I'm really old.

Because I used to do it a lot. I used to compare. He must be crushing it.

She must be a gazillionaire. You never know what is going on with anybody. What was on you, and you grow so much fast that way, I feel like.

I know you talk about this, and this is why I love you so much. You got to lean into who you are.

Yeah.

What makes you you? Put that out in the world, and it's going to attract people that resonates with, that story resonates with, that brand positioning resonates with, that those unique things that you do about your business doubled.

Again, not for everybody, but doubled.

I've encouraged people doubled down on client experience, because that's, you know, you talk about, and then the thing that people don't realize is, all of this stuff that we're talking about, positive sentiment, good experiences, supporting local

communities, that's what people want to talk about. And when they talk about that stuff online, they post it on their social handles, they write about it on Reddit, they leave your reviews on Google Business Profiles, guess what happens?

You start showing up for those non-brand queries. And so it all works together. People think it's like this like, bottom of the funnel direct response versus brand.

I'm like, no, it all works together. And we see the opposite.

We see folks that they're spending so much money on TV and radio and billboards, then you search on their name and they got three stars because they're like, firm doesn't answer my calls, like drop me in the middle of my case, like blah, blah, blah,

I agree with that.

And so, we talked earlier, the theme of our discussion is really trust, right?

And that doesn't really trust.

It's all about that, like no matter who you're hiring, a dentist, a mechanic, like, can I trust this person? And let's not like conflate, let's not make this complicated. That's all it comes down to.

So I wanna share with you sort of like what I'm doing. I would like to get your take because you're kind of talking about this, I think. But so my, I think the barrier, we talked earlier, case are getting more expensive.

But the barrier to entry to be a player, get cases is low as relates to social. I'm leaning into this, I like to know your thoughts. You kind of mentioned, talking about this board, mentions.

Like I am producing just a shit ton of content. Now, on LinkedIn, I'll drop my name, like in my post, because these mentions, these breadcrumbs, right?

Because I look at Google like this hub and spoke, like I think Google is still in the center, but everything sort of channels to and out of Google, right? And so really trying to lean into LinkedIn. Everyone on this call, you should be on LinkedIn.

You should be posting a few times a week. Company page, individual page. But like these mentions, I stole this from you.

I heard this talk about this on a podcast. Alert Mouse helps you find mentions of Gyi and Chris online, right? And so I love that.

So if I see something, it's so obscure, but it's kind of cool. Like, so anyway, like, be known. Your known-ness quotient is a big deal today, I feel like.

How known can you be? Sponsor the Little League team. I was talking about that, you know, get on LinkedIn, go on Instagram, post YouTube shorts, tag.

I tag my slogan. Could you talk about how you look at social and what we can do to really leverage our known-ness and get on Google more and more?

Distribution is the game.

And so again, you know, you talk about folks that are in startup mode. You got time. Sit down, record yourself, clip it.

You know, I like to screen like a tactical, I like to script for video editing, but you know, Riverside, a lot of these.

This is one of the, because we haven't really dove into like how to use AI here, but this is one of the contexts that AI is great. Video editing, adding captions.

Right.

I mean, you take video, we used to spend so much time and money editing videos. And now, like to be able to sit down and spend, you know, I tell, this is just one way to think about it.

You only got to figure out what resource you want to deploy against it. But I would say at a minimum, I'd be like once a month, sit down for an hour, and record.

And you know what, if you've got, if you're having, if this is uncomfortable for you, you know, maybe you've got, you just have a friend interview you, or maybe you use, you can even use AI to like, you know, what kind of questions, blah, blah, you

can do all that kind of stuff. Record for an hour, drop it into Descript or StreamYard or Riverside, and push the, the AI generates some clips for me, put captions on them, and distribute them everywhere you possibly can.

A couple, couple points on distribution. And this is, this is kind of like how I think about the AI thing. So I love AI.

I use it all the time. I do not copy and paste responses from prompts right into AI. What am I trying to do?

I'm trying to find out, like, what is, what is it about this thing that we're talking about, or I'm talking about in the clip that's unique to me, that I can share something from my experience, from my person, and nobody else can share, because that

is, that's what the search people will call information gain, right? It's stuff that, because everybody can write 10 things to do after a car, there are 17 million pages about 10 things to do after a car accident.

Everybody is, that's just noise, and it's noise. Yeah, there might be more. There's more as we speak.

There's some getting turned out right now. But what they can't do is they can't share your story. If you've got a specific story, a specific experience.

Again, we're lawyers. We know, we got client confidentiality things. Don't let that be an obstacle for you.

You can tell a story and protect confidence. But the more unique experience that you can add. And the other thing too is leverage your relationship.

Leverage is even the wrong word. Include other people that are part of the story in your posting. So after we do this, this is an example.

This is a real world example. You and I are having this conversation on The Earley Show. I'm going to take these clips and I'm going to tag you, and I'm going to tag your firm when I go and post about this online.

And so the people that follow me, they're going to see you. You're going to get notified on LinkedIn that I tag you. And you're going to be like, oh, Gyi is talking about me over here.

I'm going to go over there and be like, hey, Gyi, great conversation. Great to see you. Do that in your local community, not necessarily with your clients.

Maybe it's other business leaders. Maybe it's other small business owners. Maybe it's other people that support your local community.

Maybe you're passionate about some cause, and so you're tagging the people and the organizations that you support in your local community. That's a really important thing.

And as we sit here and talk about it, I think a lot of people would be like, well, duh, of course. But the problem is that everybody's trying to race for efficiency.

So they're like, oh, I'm going to use Buffer, and I'm going to cross post this on all these platforms. But guess what happens? Nobody gets tagged.

The hashtags are broken. No one's getting notified. So you're turning into this more noise.

You're adding to the noise just like everybody else.

I like that a lot. I'm thinking, I'm writing down distribution optimization, if you will, just like full attack, just optimize, right? Because I'm going to do the same thing for you.

I'm going to tag AttorneySync, tag Gyi, right? And so I'm a big believer in getting in front of other people's people. Now you're cross pollinating because you and I have big ass networks.

So you put those together, and it's like the mathematics are very favorable for us, right? Because it just hits so many freaking people. And then we meet new people through that, and they get to meet us.

So I think it's wonderful. Just curious, I think we've touched upon it, but we all want to be found now in the AI search results, right? The things, have we not covered all the things we should be doing?

Is there anything else comes to mind to increase that visibility? Or is it just like you mentioned, even the AVO, Yelp, all that stuff?

Yeah, I'll give you my 30 seconds on the SEO, GEO, AIO, AEO world. I've been framing it like this. It's really just a reprioritization.

So first, because if anybody's listening, and they're a digital marketing person, they're like, he's full of it, he's wrong, it's all different. And I'm like, look, there are some fun, there are some essential differences, right?

This technology is essentially different, fundamentally different than traditional search, 100%.

However, most of the research, and not my research, but the people who do this for enterprise and major publishers and people that are spending billions on this stuff, they come away with a couple of the same things.

The first thing to keep in mind about it is that there's a huge overlap between all of the things that we've traditionally thought about from an SEO perspective that apply to quote unquote GEO.

When I say GEO for folks who have no idea what I'm talking about, it's Generative Engine Optimization or Agentic Engine Optimization as we move into like agent world. And there are some things that I think they're worth calling out.

Let's call this out. And there's Andrej Karpathy, who used to work at OpenAI. I don't remember where he is now, but he's like one of the people that helped create this stuff.

And he has this three-hour video deep dive on YouTube. It's been viewed by several million people about like how the LLMs work. And so if you want like a foundational understanding, go watch that video.

But essentially, you know, these machines have this training data, and the training data is the web. And so they're going out, and they're looking for all... You mentioned mentions.

And they're looking for, you know, Chris Earley and Gyi Tsakalakis and our business names. And like, where are they showing up? And what's the context in which they're showing up?

Are people talking about them? Well, guess what? That's the same digital PR we've talked about in SEO for time out of mind.

Now, and I'm the Mel Links guy, so like I might have over focused on links, which I think still play a role, but like not the same way in this technology. But it's digital PR. It's those mentions getting talked about.

Now, I think the major difference that we might think about here is, one, and you alluded to this, you might re-prioritize some platforms that you might not have thought about before.

So if you see like, and I would encourage you, you can do this for free. You don't have to go pay several thousand dollars a month to do prompt tracking.

You can go in, log in to an incognito browser and go see, do the typical searches that you would do in an SEO context, and see what citation sources the AI platforms cite.

And I'm going to tell you what you're going to find.

You're going to find a lot of legal directories. It's like the revenge of the legal directories. You're going to find a lot of these social publishing sites.

You mentioned AVO. You're going to see Quora. You're going to see Reddit.

You're probably going to see some of these lawyer recognition sites like bestlawyerexpertise.com. And look, SEO people, back in the day, we used to be like, oh yeah, NAP consistency and directory listings and all this stuff. And it worked.

And then traditional search kind of dialed the signal back on those. They're back.

They're back in a big way.

That doesn't mean you need to even pay for them. But if you haven't looked, if you haven't dusted off your old AVO profile in a while, go look at it. Make sure your information's accurate there.

Sometimes these platforms add additional fields, so make sure you've filled out every possible field.

And really, the big one here that I've been preaching, I was just talking about this the other day, and I'm going to continue to talk about it, get your unique competitive differentiators into those profiles.

If you do something at your firm that your competition can't do, get that language into the profiles because that's what's going to stand out. You know, again, national players, they don't live in your communities.

They're not doing the youth softball thing. So you might put proud sponsor of such-and-such little league team in your Justia profile. That kind of stuff, I think, is really important.

On page, you know, things you can do to your site, the buzzword here is retrievability.

You can go search about retrievability in this context and do some more research. But the short version is that you want to have explicit answers early on.

There's Earley again. Early on your pages. And so, if you had a practice area page, you got a long form practice area page, a lot of rich content, make sure you've got some, you'll start to see it too.

You're going to start to see some of these people are doing summaries or like, kind of like more explicit one, two sentence answers at the top of pages. I think that can't hurt.

People talk about LLM TXT files, which is supposed to be like the file for the machine to read. I think that's a nice to have.

Again, unfortunately, people are taking advantage of the information gap, and so they're charging people thousands of dollars to create these LLM TXT files. You can go to Claude and be like, go create me an LLM TXT file, get a sense of it.

I think it's a nice to have. I don't think it's essential. I don't think it's moving the dial all that much.

What moves the dial? Reviews, mentions, positive sentiments. Remember to, on Google at least, Google, even though they do have an AI component, it's still grounded in search results.

ChatGPT is still grounded in search as well. And so you see a lot of overlap. So the reason I say that is because there's been this whole thing like links are dead and blah, blah, and I'm like, not what I'm seeing.

And so where you can get links, I think it's still valuable, but I'm always focused on local. I mean, that's a lot of our clients. That's why I keep coming back to this.

You know, they're local businesses. They serve the local community. So you do a sponsorship for a local baseball team, and like that little league team's got a website.

If they have a sponsor area, or if you build relationships with local journalists, the journalists have all been trained now not to link out because all the SEO people have told them don't link out, so that's a tougher sell.

Another one that comes to mind on page, if you haven't done this already, make sure you've got a bio page, your attorney bio page, and make sure that when you write stuff, you're linking back to your attorney bio page.

I mean, so many law firm websites, they create a WordPress website and the default user is admin, and so you go to that page and it's written by admin. Well, that's not telling the machines anything about who wrote this.

All that good sentiment and mentioning of your name as an author, as an expert, like you had mentioned it on LinkedIn, do that on your website too. Make sure you've got bylines, bylines that link back to author pages.

Google's got all sorts of documentation about how to mark this kind of stuff up too. But they recommend it. For listeners that this is new to, go search for what's called the helpful content guidelines on Google.

Google gives you a whole content self-assessment. You can drop, you can give, take your favorite LLM, create a custom GPT or Gemin Gemini or Claude, and train it on the Google self-assessment.

And then when you're going to go post something, load that up and be like, hey, run this against the Google self-assessment and see what the machine tells you is missing.

Because it'll say things like, do you have any original research or analysis you can add? Is it clear who the author is? Is it clear why this piece is written and all this kind of stuff?

And that can really enrich your content. So those are some of the things that I guess are quote unquote newer, but those were all good ideas back when we just had regular SEO too.

I love dropping these bombs of knowledge. I love it.

You're getting me ranting, Chris.

No, it's a good thing. Tell me about Atterney's thing. Who do you work with? Who are your ideal clients?

So we run on EOS, so we've got our target list, but it tends to be mostly direct to consumer and mostly it's personal injury.

I think because the advantage that a lot of personal injury firms have, because cases can be worth so much, the investments they can make on a cost per case and the data that we get, our biggest issue is data scarcity, right?

A firm comes in, they're a startup firm, we can give them some advice.

But for what we do, where we're really doing omni-channel campaigns, measuring cost per client by channel, making strategic media deployment decisions, you've got to have some meat on the bone in order to do that.

And so we talk about firms that they have to have desire to grow.

We talked about the beginning, if you're a firm who's happy, you're doing great work, you can handle some of the stuff on, you can do some of the marketing yourself, or maybe you've got an in-house person who's hitting your growth goals, we're not

for you. We're for the people that aren't hitting their growth goals. And really, I always think about this, too, is that most of our clients, they have in-house marketing resources.

That's why Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, one of the things that we're trying to build, foster this community and nurture these relationships with the in-house people, because the in-house people, they're our front lines people.

We do better when you've got a strong in-house, either marketing director or CMO. It's funny, because a lot of agencies, they position themselves as adversarial to those folks. I'm like, no, those are your friends.

Those are the people that, they're doing the stuff the agencies can't do. I can't be on the ground there every single day with the firm and tell them the firm's story. Anyway, so it tends to be PI, it tends to be multi-office location.

You know, folks that have, we always say, like, they've got the basic business acumen, because, you know, a lot of folks, if I come in and I've got to explain, if we're like P&L, I'm like, you need a coach, like, coach is going to be more valuable

for you. Like, we're strategic, we're execution, we're accountable every single month for, like, what did we do? Why do we do it? How is it improving the firm?

And we have to be able to communicate that every month. So we need, we need clients that can understand how that language goes.

I want to go back, so years ago, it was the pandemic, there was no one on Boston Highway, so I was just cruising into the office, and I find your podcast, Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. And is that when you started?

Because that's when I kind of learned about, like, 2020, 2021.

When did it start? So I actually inherited, so Lunch Hour Legal Marketing is on the Legal Talk Network.

Yes.

And Jared Correia. Yes, Massachusetts. Up the road.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Jared, actually, it was like, it was his brainchild long, long time ago.

And then he moved on to other things. And so he's like, you know, Gyi, you want to do this? And so I took over as a host of it with someone that worked at AttorneySync, Kelly Street, a long time ago.

She moved on. And then one day I was like, and I'm not even, they're always asking me like, what year this was. I want to say it was like, it was before 2020, maybe 2018.

Yeah. In any event, they're like, you know, we need a new co-host. I'm like, I got the perfect guy.

And so Conrad Saam from Mockingbird, who's a competitor, you know. I met him back when he was CMO at AVO, you know, 2009, 10, somewhere back then.

Old school.

And we've developed a great rapport. And like, you know, I think some people like they're there, and we do give us a little bit of credit. We do talk about some technical marketing things.

But you know, my thing is, I just want lawyers to know what they're getting themselves into when they start entering into this marketing world, because you know, no one goes to law school with marketing background most of the time.

And there's folks getting taken advantage of, and we're just trying to bring more transparency, more education, and have some fun while we do it. Well, cool.

You guys are having fun. Even like the intro, the hip hop kind of intro, just different. But like, you're two authentic guys actually trying to help people.

And that jumps off the page.

We're trying. Some days, man, I feel like we're at the losing battle. Because again, we still get these calls where it's like, you know, people don't own their assets, they don't own their websites, they don't own their content.

How could you get in that position?

But anyway, I'm like, you know, and again, they say it like, you're a lawyer, read your contract. And it's like, I'm busy, man, I'm busy.

Anytime you're going to work with anybody, define what success is going to look like in advance in business terms, not in like marketing gobbledygook. You know, full transparency, they had to have full transparency of what they're doing.

You know, remember, I mean, you know, lawyers should know rules of professional conduct, you're on the hook. If they do stuff that violates the rules, you're on the hook for that. So full transparency.

I want to know who you're working with, right? Are you working with the firm down the street? I mean, again, there's big fights about this because like some of my worthy rivals will say like, oh, exclusivity doesn't matter.

I'm like, well, hold on a second. If you find that this firm, you're working with both firms in your area, and you find that this one firm is doing something and it's harming your other client, that's called a conflict of interest.

That's why there's plaintiffs' attorneys and defense attorneys. You can't be on both sides of the V.

I love that.

All right.

I am honored and humbled. I'm going to be speaking at your upcoming Launch Our Leader Marketing Summit in August in Nashville. Talk to us about why you put it on, who's a good ava chart ND that would really get benefit from the conference.

I'm really excited.

First of all, thank you so much. Thank you so much for doing it. We're so pumped.

I mean, as you're getting a sense and you're listening to getting a sense, I'm very long-winded. But the conference ecosystem is totally broken. It's pay for play.

I mean, Conrad just sent me this thing. It was like $50,000 to speak for 30 minutes or something. 50?

50, 50 grand. Because again, we're dealing, my friend, we are dealing with the same issue. We got private equity coming into the digital space here.

You got all these little tech companies. Like they're willing to drop the money on it. Like, yeah, they'll pay 50 grand.

But anyway, my issue with, I don't even care. Look, sponsorships, people got to make money, no problem. One, disclose it, tell people, because think about this, you're a lawyer, you hear about this conference.

You're like, oh, I assume these people are the experts because they're up on stage. No, they're there because they're dropping the most money.

Yeah, yeah.

So we wanted to create something different. And so, you know, and we want to cure, so we respect what we call the conference ecosystem. It's got to be a great experience for attendees.

It's got to be a great experience for speakers. It's going to be a great experience for exhibitors and sponsors.

And so, what we're really trying to do is to create a space where the in-house legal marketers, the CMOs, the marketing directors, but we welcome law firm owners.

We welcome law firm owners too, because sometimes, you know, a small firm, you're the law firm owner, you're also the CMO, you're the marketing director, you're wearing a lot of hats, so we want to exclude those folks.

But we're all about, it's just marketing, and we're trying to amplify voices that you don't see on all these other stages that aren't able to pay.

You know, they're very tactical, they're very example driven, so these folks are very generous with sharing what's working at their firms.

And then the other thing that we keep thinking about is like, you know, a lot of this stuff, you can get it from YouTube, you can get it from ChatGPT, why do you go to an in-person event? It's for the relationships.

And so we want to nurture those relationships of people that are in this community so that they can lean on each other when they're having a hard time, or they got an issue they're trying to solve.

They're like, oh yeah, I met so and so at LHLM Summit. That's someone that's a new connection for me. And we want to keep that those relationships in that community growing even outside the context of the show. That's our real objective.

How can people get tickets? lunchourlegalmarketing.com?

Dot com.

Okay, sweet.

lunchourlegalmarketing.com. So grateful that you're contributing to it. So grateful to everybody.

That's the one thing, we are so humbled and grateful for the people that want to participate. And I think it's a testament to, there's not a great space for this.

People know, they know they're going to these shows and they're like, I'm getting pitched.

Yeah, man.

And these tickets, some of these places, they're charging $5,000, $10,000 just to go to the show.

That's a little expensive.

To each their own, to each their own.

It's definitely getting really expensive. I'm getting fatigued.

That's why I'm excited for your conference. I just know, and this is the second one, I am excited because it's going to be just a fun experience. I don't like all the sizzle sometimes, these conferences, sizzle.

That doesn't help me and my family grow. It's like good relationships, tactical, you know, table stakes like we talked about, right? Just like a good vibe, a good place to go.

I'm really excited. I'm humbled to speak. I'm definitely going to bring it.

I'm really excited for that. So please, I encourage everyone. I wouldn't be going if it wasn't the real deal.

I encourage you to sign up, register, get an airplane, grow at this conference, come back better for your company, for your family.

I promise you will learn one thing new that you will take back to your firm, that you will be like, wow, that was really helpful. I promise.

Gyi, thank you very much for your friendship, for coming on the show. We had technical issues, but we handled them with great panache and class, as we always do. Thank you very much.

I'm excited to see you at the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit. Thank you so much for everything, man.

It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much.

All right, that's it for this episode of The Earley Show. Be sure to check out more episodes of our show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and the Answer Legal YouTube channel.