
How to Protect Your Reputation Across Every Platform That Matters
Loading summary
A
Hey, Chris Schreier here, CEO of Rankings IO. You're about to hear a replay from one of our live webinars. At Rankings, we go deep on the strategies to help PI firms dominate the most competitive markets. AI is changing how potential clients find you. More and more it's pulling from reviews, profiles and reputation signals. Decide who shows up and who gets skipped. Today, learn how to protect and power up your reputation in the age of AI. Let's get into it.
B
Well, hello everyone and welcome to Rankings live virtual event where we'll be discussing how you can use local AI search to advance your lead generation efforts for your law firm. I'm Ken Maffley, the VP of Marketing here at Rankings and I'll be your host for today. I'd like to introduce to you our speakers. First up, we have Sean Denny. Sean is the Vice President of Digital here at Rankings where he leads the agency's evolution into a generative engine optimization powerhouse beyond just traditional SEO. With over 15 years of marketing experience spanning traditional digital and data driven strategies, he oversees fulfillment across SEO, paid media, content marketing and technology. Sean's expertise includes cross channel strategy, advanced analytics, reporting and innovation, helping law firms maximize visibility and growth in competitive markets. Welcome Shawn. Next we have John Panino. John is the local SEO manager at Rankings, where he optimizes client websites and Google Business profiles. At Rankings, John leads Google Business profile optimization strategies for high impact local rankings, implements advanced local SEO campaigns that generate measurable business growth and monitors and adapts platform changes, algorithm updates and review management trends. He is your go to resource for local SEO strategy. John is passionate about transforming complex SEO challenges into clear actionable solutions, ensuring clients not only rank higher, but win more cases. Welcome John. AI is now being integrated into everything, including local search. Google, for example, has rolled out AI powered features like AI Overviews that summarize local business information. This means that even if users aren't explicitly using AI tools, their search experience is being shaped by AI. Behind the scenes, consumers are also starting to use conversational AI for business recommendations. There is a growing trend of people using AI chatbots to ask for local business recommendations, including lawyers. In fact, a recent poll by utech shows that 27% of Americans they polled have used AI assistance to find local businesses in the past week. Because AI heavily relies on online data to form its recommendations, maintaining an excellent reputation online ensures that it highlights your business in a positive light. If your reputation is less than stellar, however, AI powered tools may buy bypass your business in favor of competitors who have optimized their online presence so how do you make sure that your reputation is solid and that you're showing up in those critical searches when your clients need you most? To answer that, I will pass it to Sean and John. So, Sean, the mic is yours.
A
Thank you.
C
Yep. Like the first one says here, Yelp, Yelp is, in my opinion, it's not something that I use on a personal day to day basis and I know a lot of people don't look at it, but these AI platforms, these large language models, do turn to Yelp as a meaningful source for user generated content, for reviews and for your reputation. So it's really important that you have your brand on Yelp and that you're getting reviews for it. But there's a couple things to remember about Yelp in particular. Number one, Yelp. It can be difficult for reviews to stick. And if you're unfamiliar with Yelp, what that means is once a review has been placed on Yelp for a brand, it goes through a review process where it will either be live and present, or it will be hidden and tucked away and not part of your aggregate score and much more difficult to find. There are a couple things that cause these Yelp reviews to be hidden or to show up. One of them is how many different reviews someone has left. If someone just created an account and you are the first review that they're leaving, that review is unlikely to stick and it's more likely to be hidden. Number two, the volume of reviews that come in in a short burst or frequency. For example, if you had no reviews and then you get 25 reviews over the course of a week, a lot of that's going to appear suspect to Yelp and it's going to make it where more of those are going to be hidden again. And the last one, and this is a frustrating tip to share, but it is what it is. If you are engaged in Yelp's business upgrade program, which is roughly about $6 a day, your reviews are more likely to be shown. I know Yelp's documentation is going to say, no, that's not true. We don't actually play that pay to show and to pay to win type model. We've seen it where when you're paying, more of your reviews are actually going to show up and be present.
A
All right, next we will look at Facebook. Now, Facebook as an aggregator, the way you want to look at this is the reviews that are left on Facebook. Now, it's not generally like a specific star rating, but someone can basically just give like a yes or no, whether they you know, had a positive experience with your profile. Now, where this does get pulled in, where it has, you know, relatively good visibility is Bing places, okay? Along with Yelp reviews as well. They can both get pulled into being places. Now, the benefit here on Facebook is not everybody has a Yelp account to leave Yelp reviews, right? But most of your clients probably do have a Facebook profile, right? So the likelihood of getting them to leave a review, if you ask, is, is. Is. Is fairly high. Now, one of the other big things that's going on with Facebook right Now as of July 10, they are allowing basically, you know, professional businesses, your accounts are. Your pages are able to be indexed and shown in search. So this is a huge boost to the overall visibility. Like, they're basically meta went and did this because they kind of want to keep pace with the overall visibility for their product versus, like, you know, the tiktoks and the Reddits of the world and stuff like that. So now this content that gets posted, so including your review content and then any post content that you might have, that can be indexed pages and that further can boost AI's ability to kind of be used in citation. So it's definitely something that is going to be growing over time, but Facebook is something you definitely don't want to ignore. And again, to reiterate the fact that most of your client base is going to have Facebook, it should be fairly simple to also ask for a review. And the likelihood of getting them to leave one would be very, very good. Now what also goes hand in hand with this is when they do post a review on Facebook, a lot of time they will put that as public themselves and that posts to their profile, right? So now you're getting basically like almost a free ad. Like a free advertising ad. Someone's giving you a recommendation. It posts their feed. Now all of the people in their feed see that they did business with you. It could spark, you know, some kind of, you know, back and forth, which is also good because now that type of content might get indexed as well. And then kind of as a bonus caveat with this is like, you know, you want to kind of reinforce this on your own profile on Facebook now that you have the ability to index your pages. So you could even almost do like a thank you, like, to the people that did. Did leave your reviews and do like a screenshot of the reviews and oh, by the way, thank you and try to get like people to kind of chat on it and thumbs it up because that'll just elevate the ability of that post to to be indexed and search rank in the search and 1.
C
1Chime in on this is it's something to remember. It's not about how many people are constantly using Facebook all day long like this. This isn't about how many people are actively engaged with Facebook as their social platform of choice. Instead, what we're using this for when we're recommending getting these reviews is there are some people that do use it as their platform of Choice, but the AI models, these LLMs are using it as a core aspect and also outside of AI. But just in general for your firm, a lot of people will look to social proof for validation about your brand and what's going on with it. So when someone goes online and they want to see reviews on multiple different platforms, when it's on Facebook, that's an easy one. They understand to still look at and review and see what other people are saying about your firm. Number three Ongoing review campaigns I mentioned earlier some of the challenge where if you get no reviews, for example on Yelp and then you get 25 over the course of the week, that can be confusing to the platform and can raise some flags. That happens not just on Yelp, that's actually across a lot of these platforms. Where if you do review Sprints and you go from getting no reviews to getting a ton of reviews and then back to none of them, that is not as helpful for the AI, the LLMs or the platforms themselves as if you have an ongoing plan to get reviews. And it's a lot easier to do this if you think about it from how do I make this part of my client experience? How do I make this as part of that wrap up experience for my clients to ask for these reviews, that can be an email, that can be in person, a phone call, however you want to do it. If you're doing something like an email, you can actually send links that lead directly to where to leave a review for you to make it easier for your clients. But having a plan in place to get reviews across multiple different platforms in an ongoing basis is essential in today's Marketplace and for AIs to understand you. And on this next slide we've broken down some of the key ones to make sure you are getting reviews for. We have them in different tiers so you can see what's the most important to some of the lesser important ones. Google Business Profile, that's your S tier, that's the most important one that you can get reviews for. But you shouldn't just get Reviews on Google, you need it across multiple. We've already talked about Yelp coming down, Avvo, Justia, Martindale, all of these are important and they can also work, as John said earlier, aggregators or feeders to other platforms that pull the reviews from them and help spread your online reputation. John, did you have anything you wanted to add?
A
Yeah, I mean, definitely what we see, especially in like AI overviews and ChatGPT is AVO, Justia, Martindale definitely being that really solid tier right in the middle at B there that you don't want to neglect. And if you can populate some reviews there because so many of your competitors are going to have like next to nothing in terms of reviews on these platforms, Martindale specifically is great because that's a peer review. So other lawyers reviewing you there, and that one is heavily weighted in the LLM, specifically ChatGPT, but even AI overviews again. But oftentimes, you know, we'll see AVO and Justia as links that are shown in like the AI overviews when you know, people are trying to search for like do research on lawyers near them. So yeah, definitely 100% not to be ignored. You want to look at these other sites and make sure that you have a presence on all of them. Which brings us into our next tip, which is review management platforms. Because this could get a little crazy, right? You have all these different platforms that have, you know, you get reviews on them. Who has the time to actually manage this and like go to these different platforms and respond to it or anything like that. So review management platforms are a great way for you to basically consolidate your feed of reviews so that you're like basically daily getting them, getting notifications to show you, okay, I got new reviews on Google, I got new reviews on Yelp, I got new reviews on Facebook, I have new reviews on these other websites coming in. And then it gives you a central place where you can respond to them as well. So it makes managing your review process totally streamlined and you're going to have just like a much better chance at answering them quickly, which, which is always a positive factor for, for all these search mechanisms showing that you're kind of responding to the reviews and so forth. Now also what Sean was saying on specifically with the campaigns, they review management platform also allows you to do these review campaigns where you're requesting from specific, for reviews for specific sites. So if you want to do a Google specific campaign, you, you know, you have your client list that you can use to basically push out your review request for Google, but then at the same time, like you can get the data from that. So say Google was the one you were going to do first because that's the most important. You get the data and you get how many people actually responded and left reviews. And then you could, you know, as a follow up, maybe a few months later, like send out a request to those people that had already left you review and be like, hey, you left us a review on Google. Would you mind leaving us a review on Yelp or Facebook? And then you can build the reviews up on those sites. That way you're not spamming like all of your client base over and over, but like making sure like that the people that are receptive to these review campaigns, like, are the ones that are kind of like getting more attention in terms of, you know, these requests. So. And they'll be more likely to have success. And, and again, like you don't want to kind of just dump all of the review requests at once, Sean said, but you can schedule it out. So you have like, you know, an email list or, you know, a text based list that you implement to these platforms and you could say, okay, over the next three week period, I want, you know, to send out 100 requests, but space it out over those three weeks and that way you're getting a nice drip feed of requests and that should be a semblance of a more consistent review basis coming in. And that's what we want to see. That's definitely a driving factor for your local visibility.
C
A couple options, these are not the only ones, but just to give you an idea, something like Birdeye or trustpilot are some of these review management platforms that we're referring to humanize brand content. So something that can be very important and valuable is to make it seem like you are a person. These AI platforms, these LLMs, and even users like it when they can interact with someone. You still want to live up to your brand values, you still want to give something meaningful and you want to be a good business when responding. Unlike our example over here where that was not a good response that the owner had given. But it is important that you are responding in a way that makes it seem like you're a person. You're showing empathy, you're showing, you're showing gratitude, you're showing some sort of feeling to let the person who left you a review know whether it was positive and reinforcement or negative and that you're willing to address it.
A
Yeah, definitely. I agree with Sean 100% there. A lot of times, you know, we will Kind of just look when we're, we're getting reviews from, from clients that maybe had first kind of came on and you know, if you didn't have this in place and you had like a back and forth like tit for tat in like the, where the review was left, it just looks bad, right? So it's definitely a negative. And, and this is something you really have to be mindful of and it goes a long way. And I know I said this I think in our, in our last webinar, but you know, when I'm going to choose to do business with, with someone, I'll look at the negative reviews specifically first because I want to, I want to see how they react and you know, what might, what others might have had an issue with, you know, with that company. So again, handling your negative reviews and with an authentic reply is, is the best thing you could do. All right, and here we have standardizing branding across all of search. Now this is really, really important for LLMs. And again, I think we did kind of hit on this point in our last webinar as well. But for your brand you have to have this consistent everywhere. All right, and the point we brought up last time, and I'll bring up again is you have a situation where you have your law firm and then you decide to do a DBA where you, you add like a keyword such as like personal injury or something like that. And you do this on your Google business profile. Now you have to also update this across all of your other profiles. All right, so you have to do your Yelp, your I would do this on LinkedIn, I would do this on Facebook, I would do this everywhere. And on your website too. So many times they don't update the website. You still have your original branding on your website and you just think you never have to change any of. But you know, LLMs, they need to see that this like one entity is one in the same so that they can give you the full equity of like your, you know, your brand sentiment. Right. So that's why it's 100% important to make sure that this is updated. Like, you know, we're doing local audits all the time for our, for our kind of onboardings and stuff. And there's so many listings that are totally inconsistent across the board with different information and stuff like that, from the name to the website. Even that might be an old out of date website. The hours of operation, all of this stuff really needs to be followed. And that's why generally we use things Like Citation Platforms that kind of push out the information that can update these in specific areas. But when needed, you do have to sometimes manually go in and update these things if it's a more obscure site that might not get pushed from Citation Platform.
C
And to give a specific example of what this might look like. So let's say White Duck Taco Shop, which we have up on the screen here. And they said, oh, we wanted to change it and it was White Duck Taco Shop Dash open Late. And that was part of what they wanted to do on their Google business profile. But over on Yelp, they just left it as White Duck Taco shop. What the AI models and these LLMs are going to do is they're going to see there's one called White Duck Taco Shop and one called White Duck Taco Shop Open Late. And they're not going to have the full context to understand it's the same business. So when someone starts looking for it, it's going to have confusion about whether it should show White Duck Taco Shop or White Duck Taco Shop open Late because it thinks they are two separate entities that are competing with each other rather than the same brand or the same company that is moving forward. And number seven, it is very valuable to have narratives inside of your reviews. Now we I'm not saying you have to have these big long, extravagant reviews that go through beginning, middle, end, whole complete story arcs, but the more that you can make it beyond just five star did good service, that's not giving a lot of context around it. And when you can have things like here's service, here's location, here's why I use them, here's something, here's my pain point and here's how they resolve it. When you can get more of a story in that review, not only is it more useful to the AIs and LLMs, it's also more useful to users when they look at that review because they're going to have more context around it and they're going to feel more valued and feel more trusting based off what they're reading and going back to AI models here when that narrative is encouraged. So someone's talking about I got into a car accident and this law firm helped me. AI is going to take that as car accident as an entity, law firm entity, and it's going to strengthen your relationship. For when someone asks for who is a good lawyer for when I'm in a car accident, that's going to help enhance that and it's going to be able to pull more information from your reviews and, and your online reputation because of that link, from what your reviews have said for you. John, anything you wanted to add?
A
Yeah. On top of that, you could say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Right. So asking clients to also lead a picture image on their review goes a long way for one. Just like helping other people to see that it's an authentic review and that wasn't left by like AI or something like that. You know, they see that this is a real person. You know, like maybe they post like a picture next to like if it was a car accident, like they, they show part of their car that they got into an accident or something like that. Like this type of images, like, just help to reinforce the story and, and you know, AI sees all of this and it will just kind of just be more beneficial for your overall visibility for those specific keywords that you really want to rank for.
B
Thank you, Sean and John. We have had a few questions come on in, so I will quickly get to those. The first one is said, what if we have one poor Yelp review dragging us down? The reviewer mistook us for a completely different company. Yelp has also hidden our positive reviews will AIC this and rank us poorly despite our positive reviews on other platforms.
C
For the people that did leave you positive reviews, if they can check in on Yelp with your business at that location, that can help them show up. Another one is if someone mistook your brand, you can talk to Yelp. This is not a guarantee that they're actually going to take it down, but you can talk to Yelp about, here's my proof and validation that this is not actually about me and it's a completely different business. That's possible they will take that bad review down to your question of will they see the bad review and not the good reviews? In this case, yes, because the good reviews are hidden and the bad review is present. That will hinder your reputation in these AI platforms and on these LLMs.
A
Yeah. And that just springs to the point of like, why you want to be requesting reviews to these other platforms. Right. And you know where I was kind of getting from the. The review specific campaign platforms. Again, like when you know you have people that have already left you Google business profile reviews, then like, you know, down the line doing a specific campaign for those people be like, oh, would you mind leaving us the review on Yelp? That way, you know you're going to be getting positive reviews added. And, you know, then it's just, you know, whether or not we jump over that hurdle where Yelp actually decides to publish it and make it visible or not. But if, like, you have several coming in, obviously it's going to kind of do that. And then you can obviously, again in that campaign, ask people, like, okay, please check in with us on Yelp and leave a review. So that'll be visible as, like, part of the instructions or something like that and the campaign request, and it should be easy.
B
Okay, well, oddly enough, the next question is still about Yelp, and the question is, you know, regarding Yelp, do they actually remove reviews that are flagged for review? And John, maybe we'll start. Start with you, if you don't mind.
A
Yeah, I mean, you definitely have the ability to, to flag with Yelp again. I mean, even flagging with Google business profiles is jumping hurdles. It's not. It's not really easy. Like, generally they want to have, like, user sentiment left on these profiles because they believe it's, like, authenticity. So, like, getting reviews removed is, can be difficult. But if, like, someone left a specific review that obviously has totally incorrect information, like, doesn't pertain to your business, like, you definitely flag those and have a decent shot at removing them. Okay.
B
Sean, anything to add there?
C
Nope. Just like John said, is you can put forth the effort, and unless it's obvious and you can prove it's not about you, it's probably going to stay up there. Now, you can try to get rid of them, but these platforms like the authenticity of it, even if it's frustrating from the business's point of view.
B
Yeah. And this next question here is, if you have bad reviews, are there anything that you can do out across the web to help mitigate or help balance that? And Sean, maybe we'll start with you on that one.
C
From an SEO standpoint, your online reputation is important wherever someone's looking at it. So making sure you're getting consistent reviews across different platforms, that you're responding to negative reviews and trying to address them and showing that you're a human being. So if someone had a problem with your service, hey, give us a call. We'd love to talk to you about this more. We want you to have a good experience, however you want to phrase it that's authentic to your brand voice, but making sure that it can be seen and heard that you're not just like, you are a terrible customer. I don't care about you. You suck. Because that's obviously not going to land well for anybody in terms of doing other things off site. On your website, for example, or having a guest contributed article published about your brand, those things can help, but from the reputation standpoint, it's more about the reviews, what they say and how you're responding to them that are going to have the biggest impact.
A
I would probably definitely look at embedding some of your reviews from multiple different platforms. So like your Facebook reviews are fairly easy to get the embed code from and put those on your website. So you can. That way when you're on your kind of core landing pages for even like your Google Business profile or like particular service pages, you have like embedded reviews about that particular service specifically that you are putting on that has like related keywords and, and that will kind of go a long way with boosting your overall visibility on the LLMs and even organically.
B
Yeah. And the good news is good SEO is being a good human out across the web. So exactly what you both were saying, responding, making sure that you show that you're a responsible business owner and human being. That is good SEO. If I already have a lot of reviews on one platform, should I start spreading them out? Should I start exploring other platforms?
A
One of the major ranking factors is the recency of the reviews as well. So even though you have say like 2000 reviews on your Google Business profile, if you suddenly just stopped getting reviews on that Google Business profile, you're going to suddenly fall out of the map pack if your competitors are maintaining a review rate of say like an average of one a day or something like that, which is totally in the realm. Like we have a lot of clients that, that have reviews that come in at that rate. When we also, when we're doing competitive analysis, we see, you know, competitors that have reviews coming in at that rate. So you know, it's very cutthroat in terms of, for Google visibility, maintaining that, that rate of reviews. But also, Dan, this is, this kind of whole webinar is about AI visibility specifically. So again, you have to look beyond Google. So yes, you also can't ignore these other ones. But it's not, it's not a question of that. Like I have enough on Google. I. Google's done. Google always is there and you always have to keep it consistent. But it is the follow up on the Yelp, the Facebook and the AVOs of the world and just these and so forth that you know you also want to get at least some kind of mentions going to gain your overall visibility.
C
Yep, I was going to say it's not one or the other, it's you need all of them and an on an ongoing basis. And that's where that ongoing review plan that we talked about a little bit earlier really comes into play to make sure you have a plan for yourself, for your team members, for your staff, on who you're asking, for what review platform, at what cadence.
B
And I may be reading into this next question a little bit. I'm kind of reading it as a frazzled, a small law firm business owner, you know, a law firm owner or a partner saying, should I respond to every review? Even the short five stars? Thanks. Is there, is there a good rule for, for responding to reviews?
C
You should be responding to all of them. And while that may seem a little redundant, even if someone just only said five stars, thanks. Responding shows you're caring, that you're paying attention to it and that you are attentive. All of which helps the AI LLMs and then just users when they make it there. It's also important to note you want to have some diversity in your responses to reviews. If every 5 star review just has thanks for the kind words or whatever you want to put out there and it just says that over and over and over and over again, that's seen as disingenuous to the AIs and to humans. So you want to mix it up a little bit and you want to respond to what they're saying. So if someone gave you that narrative based review, incorporate some aspect of that into your response back to them to get the most out of it.
A
Yeah. And I'd follow that up with if, if. Here's where. If you wanted to do your SEO, you do your SEO, right? So if you know who left the review and like, you know, you know at least the what type of case it might have been and like, hey, it was a pleasure servicing your, your car accident case. We're so glad everything went well. You know, get those keywords in there, that, that's going to have the element, that's where it's specific, where you can have that diversification that Sean is talking about across all the different review responses. And it's showing people that like, like, oh wow, this is a person's responding specifically to about their case. This is, this is so great. Yeah, I think it's a no brainer.
B
Hey, are there good techniques to, to make sure that the majority of my review requests are, are being, being responded to? They kind of get down to the little nitty gritty of like, you know, which is the best way to send review links, email, text, both. Is, is there a best practice? Are there other Best practices for, for helping the clients leave good reviews. Any, Any thoughts there?
A
Yeah, sure. I mean, particularly with platforms such as, like Birdeye, like, you, you'll have the ability to do requests via email and via text. And in like, the data that they kind of showed us when we were looking at them was generally that the, the texting does have a pretty good response rate when compared to the email. So again, like, you know, I've got a. I've got a whole bunch of email profiles, like an old AOL and stuff. It's got a bajillion emails I've had. I never opened those. Right. But you know, your text number. Like, people are on their phone all the time. So in terms of, like, a specific response rate, text today is probably, you know, overall more responsive, I would think, than email. You could like, build review request page that has like, link, please leave this review on Google and Facebook and Yelp and you'll link all three on the bottom or something like that. You know, that's all part of your overall strategy that you would want to look at.
C
A general consensus around all of this is the easier you make it for someone to leave the review, the more likely they are to do it if it feels like extra work. They have to have had an outstanding experience to want to leave you that review. And so the more that you can keep it with, hey, all you have to do is click this link. It'll take you less than one minute. Like, here's why this is not a big deal for you and you can convey that to them, the more likely they are to actually do it. If you are, hey, I need you to click on this Yelp link. I need you to make a profile. I need you to leave a review for me. And then because this is brand new, I also need you to leave two more Yelp reviews on other businesses. Someone's not going to do that. Like, you are asking way too much and they're going to say no. So the more that you can keep it simple and easy for them, the more likely they're actually going to leave a review.
B
You know, it's funny that you say that because, you know, one of my favorite products of all time is Adobe Creative Cloud, and they routinely will kind of send me, you know, surveys and whatnot. And after about the 12th question, I'm like, nope, done. I can't. I just can't do this with my life, you know, so, you know, even, even stellar companies sometimes get it wrong. And so to your, to your point, Sean, keep it simple. Yeah, no, great point. Okay, well, I think we have sprinted through all the questions. I want to say a big thank you to Sean and John for that presentation and the Q and A time for those keeping track at home. This is the second time that they have been on a webinar with us and this has actually been a little bit of an encore performance because we had so many questions last time from their last webinar and all the information that they brought. We had to do it again just to make sure we covered everything. So a huge thank you to you both. We are going to keep bringing you the freshest insights on how you can continue to be at the top of your marketing game. So please be on the lookout for next month's webinar in your email inbox. As always, finding the right marketing partner to supercharge your AI optimization efforts is essential. They can help you outline your goals, construct the right strategy, build the right content, and make sure you are hitting your intake goals. As always, Rankings is here to help you get the most out of your lead generation efforts. Our expertise and understanding of the legal market puts you, our clients, in a winning position. So contact us today to see how you can get the most out of your marketing campaigns. So please be on the lookout not only for that on demand webinar link, but next month's webinar as well. All right folks, thank you so much for joining. Bye for now.
A
Take care. Hope you got a ton of value out of that conversation. We run these webinars live every month and the easiest way to get the next one straight to your inbox on the day it happens is head to Rankings IO webinars. I'll see you on the next one.
BONUS: AI-Power Your Law Firm’s Reputation on Google, Yelp, AVVO, and more (Webinar Replay)
Host: Chris Dreyer (Rankings.io)
Guests: Sean Denny (VP, Digital, Rankings) & John Panino (Local SEO Manager, Rankings)
Date: October 13, 2025
This episode is a replay of a live webinar focused on how AI-driven changes in local search and reputation management are transforming the way personal injury law firms generate leads and build a dominant local presence. The discussion, led by Sean Denny and John Panino from Rankings.io, delivers actionable strategies on managing reviews, optimizing across platforms, and leveraging review management tools to boost visibility and client trust in an AI-powered search environment.
“AI is now being integrated into everything, including local search... maintaining an excellent reputation online ensures that it highlights your business in a positive light.” – Ken Maffley [03:15]
“If you are engaged in Yelp's business upgrade program... your reviews are more likely to be shown.” – Sean Denny [05:40]
“The likelihood of getting them to leave a review if you ask is fairly high... you basically get a free ad.” – John Panino [06:40]
“Martindale specifically is great because that's a peer review... that one is heavily weighted in the LLM, specifically ChatGPT.” – John Panino [11:15]
“Having a plan in place to get reviews across multiple different platforms in an ongoing basis is essential in today's marketplace and for AIs to understand you.” – Sean Denny [09:50]
“A review management platform lets you consolidate your feed of reviews... making the review process totally streamlined.” – John Panino [13:00]
“Responding shows you’re caring, that you’re paying attention… and that you are attentive. All of which helps the AI LLMs.” – Sean Denny [28:56]
“I look at negative reviews first because I want to see how they react… handling your negative reviews with an authentic reply is the best thing you could do.” – John Panino [16:10]
“LLMs… need to see that this one entity is one in the same so that they can give you the full equity of your brand sentiment.” – John Panino [17:25]
“When you can have things like, here's service, here's location, here's why I used them… that's going to help enhance [AI’s] ability to pull more information from your reviews and online reputation.” – Sean Denny [19:12] “A picture is worth a thousand words... this helps reinforce the story and AI sees all of this.” – John Panino [20:58]
“Unless it's obvious and you can prove it's not about you, it's probably going to stay up… these platforms like the authenticity of it, even if it's frustrating.” – Sean Denny [24:31]
Should you respond to every review?
“You should be responding to all of them… you want to have some diversity in your responses to reviews.” – Sean Denny [28:56]
Is texting better than email for review requests?
“Texting does have a pretty good response rate when compared to the email… people are on their phone all the time.” – John Panino [30:51]
Will a single bad Yelp review hurt our AI visibility?
“Yes, because the good reviews are hidden and the bad review is present. That will hinder your reputation in these AI platforms and on these LLMs.” – Sean Denny [22:18]
If I already have a lot of Google reviews, should I focus elsewhere?
“One of the major ranking factors is the recency of the reviews… for AI visibility specifically, you have to look beyond Google.” – John Panino [26:56]
General best practice:
“The easier you make it for someone to leave the review, the more likely they are to do it… keep it simple.” – Sean Denny [31:45]
Final note: Staying proactive, authentic, and tech-savvy with your law firm’s reputation isn’t just about promotions—it’s about winning trust from both humans and algorithms. Simple, smart review strategies today lay the groundwork for sustainable growth in tomorrow’s AI-driven search world.