← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
290. Toolkit: Law Firm SEO Strategy Guide 2025 — Insights from Legal Marketing Veterans
00:31:04
Jason Hennessey, CEO of Hennessey Digital, shares cutting-edge SEO strategies for personal injury law firms, AI content optimization techniques, and proven methods for dominating local search results.
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- [00:01]
Jason Hennessy
I never thought I would be asking my SEO guy, like, what I should name my firm, because I'm thinking about SEO first before I've actually slapped this name on my building. You know what I mean? And that's how powerful what you and I are talking about is right now.
- [00:23]
Chris Dreyer
SEO is an asset that you own. It compounds over time, every piece of content, every backlink, every optimization. It's all building your digital real estate. In a world where a single high value case can mean millions, the ROI is off the charts. Without SEO, your firm might as well not exist. Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind, the show where ambitious attorneys come to learn, implement, and get results. On these special toolkit episodes, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO and Elite Personal injury lawyer marketing Agency. In this episode, we dive deep into cutting edge SEO strategies tailored for personal injury law firms. With a man who's been in the game as long as I have, Jason Hennessy. In today's episode, we cover the value of AI with human oversight and content creation. Technical SEO, like how and when to prune content while maintaining traffic, and why getting reviews will directly affect your rankings on Google. All right, let's get on with the show.
- [01:21]
Jason Hennessy
My story kind of dates back to 2001 is when I kind of accidentally stumbled upon this thing called SEO. I built a website and I didn't know anything about driving traffic to it, and the developer is like, oh, you need to learn this SEO thing. And I'm like, oh, shit. I just started tinkering with the stuff that I was learning in the book and then practicing, and then I became really passionate about that, and I started getting early results. And the next thing you know, like, I'm studying for the lsat. I'm like, screw this law stuff. I'm just going to become an SEO, you know what I mean? And so here I am now, kind of married to both worlds. I did not become a lawyer, but for 24 years, I've been doing this SEO stuff.
- [02:03]
Unknown
You actually got in the game a little bit before me. So you are definitely familiar with the easing article mugs, the. Oh, my God, all that kind of stuff.
- [02:12]
Jason Hennessy
Squiddoo lenses. You name it, man.
- [02:14]
Unknown
Yeah, yeah. Hub pages. Yeah. So take me to the starting of Everspark Interactive. To Hennessy. Take me through that journey.
- [02:24]
Jason Hennessy
Everspark Interactive was really founded upon me doing one presentation in Atlanta to a group of DUI lawyers. I was asked to speak about SEO. I told the person that was hosting the conference that I knew nothing about legal marketing. I had websites ranking number one and number two on Google for online poker. So I was very transparent. I gave a presentation, and by the time I was done with that presentation, there's 50 lawyers, but seven that came up to me and said, do you do this, like, for consulting basis? And I'm like, not really. And one of those was our friend Seth Price of Blue Shark, another friendly competitor of ours, right? He was one of my first clients at the time, and he'll tell you the same story, but he was in the room when I gave that presentation. And then basically, that was the genesis of me starting Everspark Interactive. And how I got into the whole legal world was just from one presentation and seven clients, which then became many others. And then in 2015, my business partner and I, who had a great friendship, we were thinking about taking the company in two different directions at the time, and he offered to buy me out. And so he bought my interest in Everspark Interactive. I moved out west, and it's been nine years, I guess, since we've been out here, so pretty long time. And I got bored, and I started another agency. I took all the lessons and mistakes that I learned from my first agency and, you know, applied them to this one, and now I'm making new mistakes, you know what I mean? Like, as we do, right?
- [03:58]
Unknown
That's the game, right? A lot. A lot of punches. But then coming back from it, I was working for a few agencies, and then I started my own. So kind of a similar path in the agency space. Tell me, big picture, what. What does Hennessy Digital do? And then the fun part is, how are you different from those other legal SEO agencies?
- [04:19]
Jason Hennessy
But usually if I get on a call with somebody and it's like, hey, listen, it's between you guys and rankings. And I'm like, if you've narrowed it down to those five, I'm like, you've done a pretty good job of due diligence. Now it really comes down to preference, personality. And so what makes us different? I think it's very similar to probably the stuff that makes you guys different. You know, we learn from our mistakes. The mistakes that you guys make, you know, might be a little different from the mistakes that I've made. The clients that sign up with us today really benefit from 24 years of me doing SEO and knowing what not to do, most importantly, and then knowing what to do as kind of like a second advantage, you know, that's the same, you know, From a pay per click perspective. Right. It's one thing if you just hire somebody that's never been in legal and you're running a pay per click budget with them, you're going to spend a lot of money to learn which negative keywords that you need to add. Right. Versus like if you've been running millions and millions of dollars in pay per click and you're taking all of those negative keywords and the advantages and you're applying it to a new client, boy, are they going to save a lot of money. Right. That's really it. You know, I mean, you know, we got great people, we've got good systems and processes, you know, and we get, you know, we get pretty good results. You know, we're not perfect. Right. But as long as we're honest and we have integrity, you know, and that's another thing too. I know you don't go to a lot of the conferences like, you know, like I used to do. I don't go as much as more, you know, these days. But like I can confidently walk around a conference and not have to hide behind like a wall because this person's coming and I ripped this person off. Right. You know, there's, I don't think there's one thing about me online, you know, I mean, and I take great pride in my character and my reputation.
- [06:09]
Unknown
You know, there's so many nuances to SEO and just search engine marketing. And I appreciate you, what you said about the negative keywords, but it's also just what keywords to bid on too that, you know, convert right after you have so much economies of scale. Let's just kind of, let's have a little fun. Let's, let's go through some of these. You know, it's, it's not a Venn diagram style for me here with the three circles, but, you know, I've got a handful of categories. Let's just start with content. The first part, AI. It's easier to produce content. Where's the content strategy lie with AI? Kind of eating up top of the funnel. Just, just overall thoughts on the, on what's good content.
- [06:48]
Jason Hennessy
There's still so many people that's scared of AI. I'm not. I don't think you are either. I think if it, if it helps satisfy the intent of a search and it could be written in a little bit more sophisticated manner using real data, I don't think it's a bad thing. We're doing a lot of experimentation with AI. I wouldn't say like we're 100% AI. I think it's important to make sure that human beings are kind of doing a lot of the editing. But we are certainly using AI to try to get competitive advantages. And AI is not like a new thing. I mean, you've got tools like surfer SEO and stuff that's kind of been using AI for a long time. I think I'm pretty shocked at the results of the, of the experimentation that we're doing. I'll just say, like I have a site called motorcycleaccidentlawyer.com that is 100% AI. Now I hope nobody from Google watches this and like goes in and slaps that site. It's, we're building out a massive website that's going to have a motorcycle accident lawyer page for every small city in America. And we're going to drive strong links to it. And it's 100% AI, right. So like, I'll just kind of put that out there, you know. But then I wouldn't be so bold to do that for all of my clients, you know what I mean? I wouldn't just kind of take that approach like our clients. I think we doing a little bit of AI. It just depends on the comfort level of clients too, you know, I mean, AI is a good tool. When you have keywords that are not that, not that competitive and there's not that much search volume and you just want to kind of scatter a lot of content, I think that's a good strategy. But if you're really going after like an Atlanta car accident lawyer phrase, I think that's little different, you know.
- [08:25]
Unknown
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think it's, it can be a great tool for efficiency and enhancing your leverage, your utilization. Let's take a different approach. Something that's not talked about a lot is you know, when to prune content, right. An article may have been written, it's an evergreen topic and. But maybe the website's been around for several years and it's, it's not getting traffic or it doesn't have links. Like what's the balancing act of when to prune, when to refresh? Like how do you approach that conversation?
- [08:58]
Jason Hennessy
It's all kind of like a unique case by case basis because typically like you, when we inherit a website, a lot of times there's a lot of content that we just inherit, right? And it could be random blog posts about all kinds of random things based on the strategy of the previous agency. And then as you come in and you do things the way you do it like, you start building strong links to it, you start fixing the technical aspects of it, you start building out the internal links and the silos. Right. Well, guess up, you know, all of the pages start to rise. Right. And so that happened with us recently where all of a sudden like, you know, a client was getting all these random calls about something that I think it was like, what to do if a tree falls down and hits your car. You know what I mean? And it's like their clients getting mad at us because like they're getting all these calls right. For that. And I'm like, we didn't write this content. It's just because we're doing SEO. Well now, like all these legacy pages are starting to rank and you're getting these calls. And so then we have to go through and start to prune it and see like, which, you know, so it really, you know, I think there's informational pages. Right. You know, and there's transactional pages. Right. Sometimes you need those informational pages to kind of boost and support the transactional pages. Right. So it is a very delicate balance. And sometimes you just have to get the client to see that you need some of these FAQ pages that are real top of the funnel, that will probably never convert just to support the transactional pages. But we definitely go through and we prune content all the time. You know what I mean? But it's just a case by case basis. Yeah, yeah.
- [10:34]
Unknown
And you know, I've seen, you know, back in the day when scholarship campaigns, not to say there isn't a place for them if you do them right, but like back in the day, they were way more effective and you could generate a substantial amount of traffic. You know, all those lazy college students coming in at the last minute to put it, submit their essays and you get all this traffic. And what I saw was the traffic itself, even though it wasn't quote unquote, relevant to law, it had a very positive impact on the site and its rankings.
- [11:01]
Jason Hennessy
Sure.
- [11:02]
Unknown
So it's like, I think the challenge and one of the reasons why I asked the question is you get a, you know, tree falling on a car and the question is, geez, I like the traffic. I like people interacting with my website versus nuking that traffic. Or, you know, and people could have said this from a tort that goes dead. Now I know Zantac Sana, you know, reemergence. But you know, what do you think about that balancing act?
- [11:29]
Jason Hennessy
Yeah. So that kind of stuff, what I like to do, I always tell My clients, I'm like, I hate to lose the traffic. And so what we'll do is we'll put like a disclaimer at the top of the page saying that we are not. We are no longer taking these cases anymore unless it really starts. And then we'll maybe even pull the phone number from that page or whatever. Right, but to your point, yeah, because the traffic is kind of a signal, right. And all of a sudden, if you, like, start pruning a lot of content and all of a sudden you're losing a lot of this traffic, maybe Google dings you, and maybe you're, you know, you're the pages that are really driving the money. Right. And leads start to fall, too, as a result. Right. So it is definitely a balancing act that you have to do. But, like, I like to take the approach of, like, let's just put a disclaimer there. Let's keep the traffic, let's remove the phone number. Unless it's really kind of like creating a mess with intake, and then we'll kind of take the page down.
- [12:22]
Unknown
Yeah, I kind of want to hit like technical SEO just a little bit, to be honest. I'm really curious here, because on this and all this prefaces and I don't know, and I think in some scenarios, when I ask this question, I think it is, and it depends or it's not always is like URL taxonomy, right? You'll get a Nathan Gotch or a Brian Dean that talks about, you know, flat architecture and being as close to the domain, to the left, to the root as possible. And then you have other scenarios where you've got these massive sites. When does it make sense to use flat. When does it make sense to, you know, do the subfolders and kind of, you know, or what's just your general thoughts there?
- [13:04]
Jason Hennessy
It's really a preference, you know, like, usually like back in the day, like, you know, the closer it is to the root, the more of a priority page it is. Right. And so that was the way that, you know, and Bruce Clay has been talking about this for 25 years about building silos, you know, and so it's not like it's a new thing, right? But usually, like, if you. If you have something that's part of the route, then you're basically saying, hey, listen, now it's after the root. Here's another folder. I'm going to put less emphasis on this. Right. And so you're able to tell Google kind of like the importance of these pages, right? So if you have A personal injury page. Right. That may be closest to the root, but then afterwards maybe have a slip and fall page that's part of the personal injury silo. Right. So that's one way you can kind of do that. But you can also kind of trump all that with just the way in which you kind of internally link things, too. At this point, I wouldn't say it's really like, you know, you have to do it this way, you have to do it that way. It really is a preference. But making sure that the entire website is kind of consistent based on kind of what you decide to kind of go with. I would say.
- [14:10]
Unknown
Yeah, I would completely agree with that. And I've had. I've seen success for our clients. I know you have two with both structures. And I will say, you know, sometimes they have the proper internal linking, sometimes they don't, whether it's breadcrumbs or whatever.
- [14:22]
Jason Hennessy
But I will say this, Chris, though, like, sometimes by having that. So, like, if you have, like a blog and you're just keeping your blog, like, closest to the root, where every single URL is just like URL, and then it's just the title of the blog post, that's where you can get into trouble. Because now you're saying that this page is kind of has the same emphasis as, like, your main transactional pages. And so if somebody posts. If somebody posts like a blog post about Atlanta, you know what to do if you're in an Atlanta car accident. Right. And that page could start to cannibalize your page if they're both closest to the root. So anytime you have like, a blog, I would definitely always put, like, a blog in that. In that folder. You know what I mean? Yeah.
- [15:03]
Unknown
Yeah, I think that's definitely fair. And then I'll say one other thing, too, and just the thing I've seen on subfolders for cities, like, say you take a multistate firm and you take St. Louis, right. Where you have site.com St. Louis. And sometimes it won't say St. Louis personal injury. Right. And it'll just. The Google destination page will be it. And, you know, I know Seth Price over Blue Shark. And, you know, they do St. Louis injury to work in that word, injury.
- [15:31]
Jason Hennessy
We can totally tell. Yeah, I know. When it's a Blue Shark website. Yep.
- [15:35]
Unknown
Yeah. So, you know, thoughts about, like, maybe those keywords or those. Those transactional phrases like lawyer, attorney being in the URL.
- [15:44]
Jason Hennessy
I'm a fan, you know, I mean, most of the sites that we work on, you're probably going to see it that way just because, like, the link building that you do to those pages will have those keywords in it. It's also another thing that gets bolded on Google when you start doing searches, you know what I mean? So, like, Google is very telling. When you just start doing Google searches, you can see, like, what's getting bolded and where they're putting more emphasis. And I want to have, I want to have as much advantage as I can. And if I could put the word lawyer in there, I'm going to do it.
- [16:16]
Chris Dreyer
Let's face it, being a great lawyer isn't enough to succeed, you need to generate consistent leads. Personal injury is the most saturated niche, competition is fierce, and differentiation is everything. When the deck is stacked against you, you need a comprehensive resource to beat the competition. My latest book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing, is your roadmap to consistent leads and exponential growth. It is a masterclass on marketing for personal injury firms. It's packed with actionable strategies on where to invest your marketing dollars for maximum impact. No more guesswork, no more wasted ad spend, just clear, proven methods to transform your firm from good to go. Grab your copy of Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing on Amazon. Link is in the show notes.
- [16:58]
Unknown
So I want to make a fun transition that's driving, I think, most of the SEO community nuts on the local side, you know, you got these DBAs and fictitious names where now every single law firm entity is something injury lawyers or something accident injury lawyers. You know, it hits the relevancy component, but it stood, it stood the test of time for two years. You look at Gerson and Michigan with Michigan Auto Law, you type in Los Angeles personal injury lawyer, you're going to see something injury lawyer.
- [17:31]
Chris Dreyer
Like, when's this going to stop?
- [17:33]
Unknown
Like, like, what's your thoughts on this?
- [17:35]
Jason Hennessy
I don't think it's going to stop. You know, I think I hope it stops, you know, I mean, because it is kind of creating a really weird world. You know, I even have like a very prominent firm, right, that makes a lot of money and they probably have 200 in staff. They bought a building. They need to know what they're going to put the name on the building. Like, he's like, I never thought I would be asking you, Jason, my SEO guy, like, what I should name my firm? Because I'm thinking about SEO first before I've actually slapped this name on my building. You know what I mean? And that's how powerful what you and I are talking about is right now. You know, it really is.
- [18:14]
Unknown
Morgan And Morgan, like, they, they do incredibly well in local services, ads, in organic, but I think one of the reasons it's hurting them on, on the map side is because they don't incorporate those, those keywords and transactional phrases in their name, but they're such a big entity that they just can't do that.
- [18:31]
Jason Hennessy
Yeah, they're not going to make a change like that, but it does, it does hurt them. Yeah, for sure. Yep, I agree with that.
- [18:38]
Unknown
Let's switch over to just briefly on link building. Just kind of your philosophy. You know, the SEO community loves to church up some tactics. You know, whether it's. It's not guest posting, it's blogger outreach, it's not this, it's that, you know. So, like, what's your thoughts on, like, what makes a good link in terms of how you guys evaluate links?
- [18:57]
Jason Hennessy
Link building has gotten a little bit more complex, but at the same time it's gotten a little easier to. I would say that the biggest thing is just to do things that real businesses do and to incorporate everything that you do as a business or a firm and to think about it from a link building perspective. How can I get an SEO benefit from what I'm doing right now? You know, how do you incorporate your HR team to be a link building team? You know what I mean? Like, meaning, hey, let's, you know, we need to hire somebody. Okay, great. Instead of just publishing it on. Indeed, let's all publish it on monster.com, let's find 20 other websites that we can publish this job opportunity on because we're going to get strong links as a result of our HR team. Right? So, you know, that's one of the things that I do now is like, whenever we get a new client, like, we spend a couple hours training them on how they and their team can also contribute to the success of their SEO. You know as well as I do how powerful like a Better Business Bureau link is, Right? You know what I mean? Like, stuff like that. So a lot of times clients don't realize that, right? And so the more that you can kind of train them and that they contribute to the success of your SEO campaign and they're not just pointing fingers at you is like, why are you not, like, what you do is part of SEO, right? And you have to get them to.
- [20:16]
Unknown
See that for our audience, right? Like, we want to provide value, we want to generate more business, right? So there are joint accountabilities and it gets awkward sometimes to talk about them. So let's talk about One of the big ones that would help an SEO agency succeed because of its impact on local services, ads, and Google Maps. Let's talk about reviews. Top of the dome. Some of the things that you think really have an impact when it comes to review acquisition.
- [20:47]
Jason Hennessy
What gets measured gets improved. And I think the firms that actually take that more seriously and they incentivize their teams to try to get more reviews are the firms that usually do better from a local perspective. I know that we probably can't say this publicly, but you know, like incentivizing your team with Starbuck gift cards for every review that they're able to generate, you know, it's against the Google guidelines. Right, but is it really? No. I mean, you're just trying to kind of incentivize your team to, you know, make sure that they're following up with their clients and they. And the other side too is, I don't think, I think people wait. You know, you think you have to wait until the end after you've settled a, you know, a case and they hand them a check that you get a review. Heck, man, start at the beginning. You know, I mean, if somebody, like actually if you, somebody calls up and you sign them up and they got a great experience, say, hey, by the way, if the experience so far has been great, do you mind if I just send you a clink to my review and you know, start at the beginning instead of waiting to the end, you know?
- [21:49]
Unknown
Yeah, I completely agree with any point of delight. Right. It's an opportunity to get that review because they may have had a good experience with that individual with the correct incentives, gets the correct behaviors and all of that. You know the other one that I've always wondered about and I'll get your take on this is throughout time we've heard, oh, no remote workstations in the firm to get reviews. And to me that's always been really weird. And I'll explain why, like if I go to a restaurant and I eat at the restaurant, I would think that the person leaving a review at the restaurant is more legitimate than someone in a different state. Where, where is the line of, you know, that individual, like setting up, establishing, you know, you, you could do it via mobile, different IP address. Like, yeah, what's your thoughts on that? Because that's like an age old thing that's been said.
- [22:42]
Jason Hennessy
Yeah, I think that the thing is, is if you just have an iPad that, you know is connected to the WiFi that's on the IP address of that firm and you like Constantly leaving reviews. Like that's the stuff that can actually see. Seen as Google being manipulated. Right. You know what I mean? Right. However, if somebody's in a restaurant and they have a great meal and they're on their own phone and maybe they're not connected to wifi of that restaurant, you know what I mean? And they leave a review, that seems a little bit more natural. Right. So I think the big thing is don't just set up an iPad at the firm and make everybody use that same iPad that's connected to your wifi to leave a review. Review, right.
- [23:21]
Chris Dreyer
Yeah.
- [23:22]
Unknown
Good, good feedback. Yeah, I agree with that. Reddit is now the fifth most visited website and you've heard the saying, you know, anytime, anywhere people congregate is an opportunity to advertise. Are you guys thinking about a Reddit strategy? Where does that fit in for attorneys? Like, is this something exploring what's just your general thoughts on that?
- [23:42]
Jason Hennessy
Yeah. And we know what's happening, right? So there's a partnership with Google and they're using that data to train AI. Right. So there's a whole behind the scenes stuff that kind of surface. Right. But we didn't know that until they kind of told us that. We kind of just thought so, you know, and it's funny because Google is saying, hey, helpful content update, making sure that there's a lot of trust and that, you know, the content is really truly satisfying the intent of like what people are searching for and it's coming from a trusted source. Right. But who is to believe a 17 year old kid that posts a comment on Reddit that's also ranking now and now is that the default answer to this just because it's Reddit, you know what I mean? So like there is that kind of catch to this. I wouldn't say we have a Reddit strategy per se, but if we see Reddit ranking on like the first page of Google for some of the terms that we're trying to compete for, you bet your butt. We're going to go in there and comment and leave a link for our client.
- [24:39]
Chris Dreyer
There were a lot of solid insights in today's episode. Let's review the takeaways. It's time for the pinpoints. Pin point number one, prune content. Content with a scalpel. Don't just axe pages because they're off topic. Before you hit delete, ask, is it bringing traffic? Are people engaging? Sometimes that random article is doing more heavy lifting than you think. Slap a disclaimer on top, maybe ditch the phone number, but keep the content. It's about smart pruning, not scorched earth.
- [25:03]
Jason Hennessy
Do you, like, start pruning a lot of content and all of a sudden you're losing a lot of this traffic? Maybe Google dings you, and maybe you're, you know, you're the pages that are really driving the money. Right. And leads start to fall, too, as a result. Right. So it is definitely a balancing act that you have to do.
- [25:21]
Chris Dreyer
Pinpoint number two. What's in a name? Everything when it comes to URL structure is not one size fits all. Flat architecture works for some, but for others, not so much. The key is consistency and hierarchy. Your URL structure could scream, this is important to Google, making every character count.
- [25:39]
Jason Hennessy
So if you have a personal injury page, right, that may be closest to the root, but then afterwards, maybe you have a slip and fall page that's part of the personal injury silo, right? So that's one way you can kind of do that, but you can also kind of trump all of that with just the way in which you kind of internally link things too, but making sure that the entire website is kind of consistent based on kind of what you decide to kind of go with.
- [26:02]
Chris Dreyer
I would say pinpoint number three. SEO isn't just another marketing channel. It's the lifeblood of your firm's growth. It's the bottom of the funnel. At rankings, we're seeing firms massively increase their caseloads through strategic SEO. Why? Because when someone's injured, they're not flipping through the yellow pages. And despite what you hear, they're not using TikTok as a search engine. They're googling best injury lawyer near me. And if you're not at the top of those results, you might as well be invisible.
- [26:29]
Jason Hennessy
I never thought I would be asking my SEO guy, like, what I should name my firm, because I'm thinking about SEO first before I actually slap this name on my building. You know what I mean? And that's how powerful what you and I are talking about is right now.
- [26:46]
Chris Dreyer
That wraps up this episode of PEM with Jason Hennessy. As our conversation revealed, there's a lot that goes into a winning SEO strategy. Most agencies talk a big game about the latest SEO trends. But at rankings, we're actually implementing these strategies, testing them, and refining them. Specifically for PI firms, we're not guessing. We know what works because we're doing it every day. You can learn more about rankings and the resources mentioned today in the show Notes. While you're there, pick up a copy of my new book, Personal injury lawyer Marketing from Good to Go. It's available at Amazon. And if you like what you hear, leave me a five star review. All right, everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I'm out.