← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
363. BONUS: The AI Feedback Loop: How Search Engines Learn Who You Are (Webinar Replay)
00:42:43
Schema, speed, and site structure are the data AI uses to decide whether your firm gets seen—or skipped.
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- [00:00]
A
Everyone wants to show up. In ChatGPT, getting recommended is not luck or magic. AI doesn't guess who you are, it learns what you give it every day. I'm Chris Dreyer, CEO of Rankings IO. In this webinar replay, the AI feedback loop breaks down how technical SEO schema, site speed and structure train search engines and AI to recognize your firm. Because if AI can't read you, clients can't find you. Let's get into it. Well, hello everyone and welcome to Rankings live virtual event where we'll be discussing how you can use smart site structure to get found in AI and 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. Today's webinar is 45 minutes in length. We'll have approximately 30 minutes to talk through our findings before moving on to the Q and A session. Then we'll have about 10 to 15 minutes to answer any questions you may have. I'd like to introduce to you our speakers. First up, we have Nikolay Hernandez. Nikolai is the Technical SEO Manager here at Rankings, where he leads, you guessed it, the technical SEO department. At Rankings, Nico leads the technical SEO strategy implementation. Implementation, oversees rankings, website auditing and helps optimize website structure, internal linking and URL structure for maximum search visibility. He also oversees the resolution of crawl errors, broken links, redirect chains and duplicate content issues. This is live and it's a mouthful, folks. And when he's not doing all that, he works with all teams to ensure website performance in the broader SEO strategy. Welcome, Nico.
- [02:04]
B
Pleasure to be here.
- [02:06]
A
Next, join me in welcoming Eric Fedde. Eric is our technical SEO specialist here at Rankings. With over a decade of experience in SEO and a unique background in construction, Eric has mastered the art of diagnosing and fixing technical website issues. He conducts deep technical audits for clients, expertly implements advanced schema markup, and is passionate about improving page load speeds and user experience. Eric's dedication to increasing website visibility makes him an invaluable asset. Welcome, Eric.
- [02:46]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [02:48]
A
All right, today we are diving into a game changing and yet often overlooked topic. Optimizing your website schema to stand out in AI powered searches for law firms. Listen, I get it. Talking about your site's schema structure isn't a real winner at cocktail parties. But as AI assistants like ChatGPT become the new standard for recommendations, it's your site structure that helps these tools recognize and recommend your firm. So on today's call, we'll explore practical steps to ensure that AI understands who you are, what you do, and why you're the best choice for potential clients. Nico, I will let you kick things off and I will go off screen. Thank you.
- [03:41]
C
Awesome. Thanks, Ken. And very, very excited to be here. Going to say hello to everyone that's tuning in from all over. It looks like we've got people literally all over the world, which is very exciting stuff. Um, so to go right into it, one of the first things that I think is important and it's kind of why I wanted this one to be tip number one, is we have to start with the foundations. So before you can run, you gotta know how to walk.
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B
Right?
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C
Pretty simple stuff. But you know, you would be surprised in our line of work how many times the basic fundamentals just aren't there and it's no one's fault. So the very first thing is we, we have to remind ourselves that Google looks at your website, looks at your firm as an entity, and like any entity, they're very strong and recognizable entities. And there's other ones that are not really on the map anywhere. So one of the first things that we need to make sure is in line is how well structured our websites are. And why is this important and how does that actually connect with your possibility of being served in AI generated search results? The reason why is what we like to call a subfolder. Right? A well structured subfolder outline for a website is absolutely crucial for your overall indexability and visibility. So by having a logical subfolder structure, given that your website warrants it and that you have all the content in place to actually build this type of organization, what you are, what you are doing by this is you are maximizing the ability of your content, of your pages to be understood and crawled by Google's bots. So when we talk about like subfolders and site structures, a lot of people will focus on the URLs, which, it makes sense. You guys can see the example that we have right there of what we consider a good subfolder, what we consider a bad subfolder. But as much as that helps us as human beings visually looking at a website, what we really need to understand and why we should care about this is how Google again views us as an entity. Views your website as an entity. So by having a very logical and well structured subfolder and having that aligned with your sitemap, it's going to help all of the search engines, not just Google. Obviously, we care a little bit more about Google, but this applies to all of them. It's going to help all the engines easily crawl, index and understand the hierarchy of your website, the hierarchy of your content. So if you have a mess and you're not following any of these structures, Google is going to look at your entity and say, well, hey, we don't really see a lot of path of organization here. We don't see a lot of hierarchy and as far as what you are organizing on your website for us to go through. So we are going to treat everything on your website as to 1 to 1 to 1. And like everything is super important when in reality we need to have a clear hierarchy. You have your main topics, if you're a personal injury lawyer, you have your main PI location pages, you have your main car accident service pages, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have your subtopics. Then you have each one of those subtopics with their own own little hub of supporting content. So everything kind of starts from your benchmarks. And this is one of the most important things and the biggest takeaway is how do we make Google, how do we make your website more accessible to Google to understand what you have so that they can evaluate if you actually qualify for the next step, which is ideally, you know, getting you into the AI search results.
- [07:27]
B
Cool.
- [07:28]
C
So that, that's really the main things that we have here for tip number one, which can segue perfectly into the second one for tip number two. Awesome. Okay, so I originally labeled this interlinking strategy, but like, you know, at the end of the day, let's, let's keep it simple. One of the better, one of the most effective ways, aside from having a very logical and clean site structure, to again boost your visibility, boost the ability for Google to crawl and understand you as an entity, is creating links of organization. And basically what we call that is your interlinking. So a good example is like what we have listed right here, something that's a blog post on your website that's talking about a specific topic. It's not enough to just have that in a little subfolder that kind of lives on its own island. We want to build the semantical authority. That's one of my favorite phrases. And the way that we do that in Google's eyes is by launching a very cohesive and a very smart interlinking strategy. I want to be clear here, it does not do you any good to just link random pages to other random pages. Google will look at that and see is very shoddy SEO. A lot of Times people do this and they end up creating a bunch of duplicate content issues for themselves that create a lot of keyword spamming and keyword stuffing because they're just throwing pages into other pages and putting a anchor text that is a direct keyword match and just kind of like running the gauntlet. That's not necessarily going to help you. There was a day in time where just throwing a bunch of internal links was an easy way to tell Google, hey, this page is really important. This is the one you should be crawling and serving. But those days are gone, right? So we need to be a little bit more smarter, a little bit more diligent as far as creating a strong internal linking structure. And again, I want to tie that back to again, what is the main point, right? Like how do we maximize the possibility of your website being selected to appear based off your content in AI generated search results? This is another one of those benchmark stepping stones. So having a very clean site structure, utilizing subfolders where they make sense, I'm not saying to just throw everything into a subfolder for the sake of it. It needs to be done in the way that makes sense. Right? The same exact thing will apply to your interlinking strategy. So having related content linked out to your more important they could be primary practice area pages, primary location pages, or you know, primary service level pages. It really doesn't matter, you know, what your end goal with that end page is. What matters is all the legwork you put behind it. So again, tying that to your site structure like we, we talked about in tip number one, and what does your actual interlinking strategy look like in tip number two? You could do everything perfectly and have amazing content and have the most amazing on page experience. But if you're not doing that legwork, again, those foundational pieces in the background that are still important, that are still heavily weighted in the way that all the algorithms actually search and evaluate your content, then you're not maximizing your, the performance of your website first and foremost. But in, in a little bit more of an AI term like you're not, you're not maximizing the visibility of your website in a totality. And remember, we're talking about you as an entity. So you know, don't focus on your brand name, don't focus on what you personally have done. Google doesn't care. They care about what your website reflects. So you could be the best lawyer that has been serving your metropolitan area for 45 years. But if you're not doing these things to really Clean house on your digital presence. Google is not going to view you as that very strong and authoritative entity. So strong interlinking structure, it's going to help you create the best type of environment for Google's bots to crawl, index and understand what are the most important pages, how are they the most important, why are they the most important? And seeing everything on the back end, that really boosts the ability for you to show up. So those two things are super important. Again, it's probably not brand new stuff that you guys have never heard before, but you would be surprised how much of this is just not getting hit on because everyone's focusing on the next shiny thing when in reality we have to reverse engineer all that and fundamentals are still at play. And then that would lead me into tip number three that we have for you guys. Okay, I cannot stress this enough. You need to be optimizing your website for Core web vitals performance. At this point, I am going to safely assume that everyone that is on this call that was interested in learning about this, understands or has heard of at the very minimum, core web vitals and what they are. Core web vitals are the set of metrics that Google themselves have prepared and shown to you. What do we look at to determine a high performing website with a smooth and reliable user experience? And how do we value that against the content on that page for itself or the blinks that point to that page by itself in a vacuum? So Core Way Vitals has been around for at least six years. The reason why I deem this as important as all the other things that we're going to talk to you guys about. Every single algorithm update, there are hundreds that happen every year and there's only a handful that Google will actually tell us that are happening. Every single one of them has been making and showing that Core web vitals is a more heavily weighted ranking factor. So again, it all goes back into your fundamentals. Google views you as an entity. What is Google's number one job? They want to serve the best possible result for whatever query somebody has entered. You could have amazing content, amazing backlinks, decent site structure, good interlinking. But if I get to your website and it takes me 25 seconds to load the biggest piece of content, first contentful paint, then I'm going to bounce right off. I'm not even going to care about anything that you have to offer. That's me, Nikolai, as the human being, as the person. And that's true. If your website takes longer than five seconds, I'm probably leaving Google views it the same exact way and this is becoming a more and more important aspect to their overall ranking algorithm. So it's no longer just how I personally feel or how your customers or potential customers personally might feel. It's literally what they're telling us is important for you to have. So as long as you are paying attention to these things, it's going to help you again maximize the possibility of you being served in AI generated results and anything new that comes further down the pipeline. Strong site structure, very clear, coherent interlinking strategy. Obviously your content needs to be up to par. Your core web vitals importance is just as high as all those other things. So you may have heard this with some of the marketing managers that you're working with or other vendors, but you know, I would encourage you to use the tools that are at your own disposal. Run your website through GTMetrics, run it through Page Speed Insights, find out how you're stacking up. What does Google think of you as an entity? And then those are the questions that you should be asking whoever you're working with. Hey, what are we doing to optimize this? Am I due for a website rebuild? I've been running the same theme for eight years. It works great, it's easy to use, but maybe it's not the most optimized platform to really hit the mark. When we talk about providing a smooth and stable experience not just for your users, but also for the bots that crawl your website, that's really what we care about in the technical world. So we've got it to the point where we have to care about what our website actually looks like. Because again, this is becoming more and more important with every single algorithm update that gets launched. And that's. Yep, those are it for the the first three tips that we have for you guys.
- [15:56]
B
All right, so that was good stuff. As Nico mentioned, it's best to have the basics of your SEO campaigns down pat because there's no sense on implementing any type of advanced strategies if your pages don't load fast. If Google can't crawl the website, if the website can't be indexed, nothing else that you do is really going to matter until you get those basics down pat and on point and get your site speed loading fast, or at least fast enough. It doesn't have to be the fastest, but you need to at least, as Nico mentioned, not be so slow that people are going to wait a second and then bounce back out because your page didn't load right. So once you've got that down pat. Then you can start talking about adding some more advanced schema or even just basic schema markup for those that don't know. Schema is a semantic vocabulary that was created by Google, Microsoft and a few other people as a language to add to web data that is strictly for machines. Schema markup has nothing to do with the human element as far as where you're applying it and how it works. The human element comes into play later on down the road once the machines, the crawlers, the bots, the search engines understand your data, what your page is about, what your business, your organization, the people, the products, the services, and everything in between that has to do with your website are all about. That information can later on present itself, such as sitelink extensions. In a Google search engine result, you can have one of your questions and answers in a people also ask section. So it's very important to add this, but only after you've gotten the basics down. The way crawlers and bots work is they start at the top of the page and they work their way down. When Google crawls your website for the first time, there's no JavaScript involved. It is purely a text crawl. So any type of content that you have that's applied via JavaScript isn't going to be found until Google comes back and crawls your pages again. But there's still no guarantee that any of that information is going to be found, because particularly if your pages are very large. If your pages are very large and over a 15 megabyte limit, Google doesn't crawl anything past that 15 megabyte limit. So going back to the site structure and everything, you want to make sure your pages are as small as possible so that they load as fast as possible and Google can actually crawl it from top to bottom. The other part of this is you really want to place your schema markup in the head of your website, all because of the way the crawlers and the bots scan the page. If they crawl the page from the top down and they reach your schema markup and get a good understanding of that page, even if your page is over that 15 megabyte limit, Google and every other search engine is going to understand what your page is about because you've presented that data way up in the head before it ever had to crawl any of your giant videos, large photos, or any of the content that might be added via JavaScript later on down the road. Every single word. And your content isn't as important to the machines as that basic understanding of your data. So schema can be applied in a few different ways. I remember a time when all of your SEO plugins had nothing to do with schema. And then all of a sudden Yoast and Rank Math started having that schema component built into it. So even if you don't have advanced schema, using something like your SEO plugin to apply schema is better than having no schema at all. The main thing to remember with the plugins like Yoast Rank Math, all in one SEO, et cetera, is to actually go in and completely fill out all of the fields in that setup so that that particular plugin has your actual business name, your legal name, if the field is there, the address, the phone number, et cetera, et cetera. Because all of that information that it's asking for is actually used in the schema markup that Yoast Rank Math all in one SEO actually apply to your pages throughout your website. So the more data you give that plugin in the setup, the better the schema is going to be that it's applying across your entire website. And it's much better than not having schema at all. But you can also take it a step further and use something that is strictly for schema markups, such as the Schema Pro or Schema app plugins. This has nothing to do with SEO per se, but it has everything to do with schema markup. So you're going to be able to get a little bit more granular and apply a lot more data with those schema apps than you are just a generic SEO plugin, right? Either of them is going to be fine. They'll all get you a lot more information on your website. Presenting that data to Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, all of the AIs, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, et cetera. Any information that you can add via schema markup, via that semantic markup language, language is going to benefit you in the long run. And again, 15 megabyte limit on Google's crawling. But if you put all of your markup in the head, like Rank Math and Yoast do on their own, then they're going to see that data long before they ever try to reach the bottom of your page. The best thing to do as far as schema markup is to hand code your schema, particularly your more advanced schema markups. You can let Yoast or Rank Math apply your webpage schema because it does a pretty decent job of that. And it's just information about the web page the URL, the title, the description, so forth and so forth. Right? Where you really want to use the advanced schema markup is when you're trying to apply something such as legal service markup to represent your actual firm. Right? That's where you're going to want to do this manually and go and do the research to find all of the different properties that are related to you, such as your, your just webpage, the Avvo webpage, and all of the other citations out there that are specific for your legal firm, your legal service, your Yelp page, your Facebook page, your LinkedIn page, anything that represents your firm, you're going to want to include that in that legal service schema under the same as property because all of those different social media profiles are representative of your business.
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C
Right?
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B
So that's a really easy thing to do when it comes to that advanced schema markup, but you can get a lot more granular with it by diving into some of the other properties that are available by looking@schema.org that is going to be your best friend. If you want to really get involved in the advanced schema markup and start producing some high level schema, it's going to give you the ability to go deeper into the relational data. Like we mentioned, with the same as stuff, you have the ability to mark up multiple locations, Yoast and Rank Math. If you have two locations, Yoast and Rank Math don't give you the ability to add those two locations, addresses or geodata or anything like that. So moving over to that advanced handwritten schema, you absolutely have the ability to add multiple locations that you are located in. As far as your firm, if you got three locations, you can add all three locations in your legal service markup. Right? You can link to other schemas by way of the entities. And this is a little bit different than what Nico mentioned earlier as far as Google treating your business as an entity, because everything online is treated as an entity. As far as Google concerns, when we talk about an entity within your schema markup, this is kind of how you reference other markups to where it can suck in data from another markup that's found on the same page. In other words, FAQ page schema, when you write out your FAQ page schema, if you reference that that web page, that FAQ page schema is part of the web page which is part of the website, those two properties will link together with the schema markup that's being applied by Yoast and it will suck in the fact that this website or this web page is published by the organization. Right. So you can really expand your schema markup by utilizing those entities within your markup so that everything can be linked together. And that's kind of the whole idea behind schema markup and the different entities that are available is it's all connected on your website. And what you're trying to do is give all of these different machines the signals that they need to understand that all of this stuff is related, all of those external properties are representative of you. This aggregate rating is representative of your theme. Three business locations combined. Right. All of that is possible with advanced manually created schema markup, that not all schema markups give rich snippets. So when you're talking about schema markup or you're looking at schema markup, don't think that every single schema type that you're going to add to your web pages is going to provide some type of a rich snippet. There are only so many that provide rich snippets within the Google search results. But every type of schema that you apply to your website is going to give the search search engines, the bots, the crawlers, the machines, more data and a better understanding of you, your business, your properties and everything else.
- [25:34]
A
Love it. Okay, well, thank you, Nico and Eric. And because we want your site looking like the graph on the left instead of the graph on the right, we have a nice little bonus for you on the next slide, as you can see on the screen, we are giving out a bonus resource and in the resource section in the nav bar below. So down below in that resource section, we've placed a link for the action checklist that includes links to schema text files and more. It's a tidy starter pack to help you implement everything we talked about on the call today. So make sure you click on that link and get it downloaded so that you have it for future reference. Perfect. Okay, well, we are going to move into the Q and A session. We've had quite a few come in. Let me just go ahead. Perfect. And I'm going to go ahead and throw out the first question and I'll try and I'll try and do it as I kind of remember it came in. And I'll ask either Nico or Eric. So, Nico, I think this first one is for you. How would you define a subfolder? How would you term that?
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C
Yeah, absolutely. I would define subfolders as sections within the website's URL structure that help Organize your website into different content. You can call them silos, you can call them departments, you can call them sections. You know, the terminology doesn't matter too much. It's really just link silos. If we could go back to tip one on the slides, I can actually show you exactly what I mean by that. So right here on tip one, what is that? I want you to look at the good substruct, the good subfolder structure example. So what is this? You can see we have a folder for services, meaning you have your domain right.com, but you have another section of your website that is specifically talking about the services you offer. Within that section, talking about your services, you have another folder for SEO. And every single SEO related service should be organized underneath that services SEO folder. As you can see in that example, we have a specific service level page for technical audits. So if you were looking at, you know, the rankings website, it would follow something along these lines. That's really what a subfolder is. So you compare that to the one at the bottom. You heard me say earlier about like flat URLs. Flat URLs are kind of just like the whole string and there is no folder. So there is a folder in that bad folder example. But just look at it. I mean, that's terrible. What the hell is 123 ABC? Why is that a folder on your website right off the bat? You are upsetting the search engines and you're probably upsetting some of the more technical people that are looking at your website too. Just as a personal note. So the subfolder, how you defined it, it's basically the sections within your website and how cleanly organized they are. So if you're a lawyer, right, most of our audience is going to be from the legal space. Take a look at your website. Are you structuring personal injury services under a personal injury folder? Do you have multiple law firm practices? Do you do family, criminal, PI, everything all at once? Fantastic. How do you prove that as an entity to Google, One of the cleanest and best ways is by utilizing subfolders so that you can organize your content in the way that makes sense. And again, it's just going to make it that much easier for you to get crawled, acknowledged, placed into Google's index and ultimately rewarded. Right, for having one part of this down. It's not the be all end all, but if you're doing this the right way, you're going to make it a lot easier for everything else to kind of flow through A positive structure versus fighting within yourself, fighting within your own website. Because you have really good, really good content, but you're not organizing it anywhere and it's just kind of like floating around and you're kind of hoping and praying that Google knows what is the most important, what are the most important sections, what should we be caring about? And ultimately, what would be deemed valuable enough to get incorporated into AI driven search results. It's not too different from your normal SEO, but again, this is a benchmark, a foundational piece that, you know, a lot of people probably don't pay a lot of attention to or don't understand the pros and cons and they kind of just stick with whatever was used from whenever and because, hey, that's how my website has always been, right? So that, that is how I would define a subfolder.
- [30:35]
A
Okay, well, I appreciate that. And moving on, how can we ensure that our website runs smoothly and quickly? What tools would we use to monitor and update that?
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B
Nico mentioned a couple of good ones earlier, which would be the GT Metrics. That's a really good website that you can put your URLs in that will test your page load speeds and tell you exactly where you're doing good and doing bad, what needs to be addressed, what doesn't need to be addressed. And what I really like about GT Metrics is it's got this thing called a waterfall where it gives you a visual representation of every file and component that's being loaded as your page loads, and it gives you a visual indication of how long it takes to load, how large that resource is, et cetera, et cetera. I find that to be invaluable whenever I am working on page load speeds and trying to optimize a website. You also have, like you mentioned, the Lighthouse, which is built into Chrome. That's a really easy and free tool to use. That's in every Chrome browser. You just need to bring up your developer tools and it does the same thing. It just kind of tests the loading of the page and gives you a readout on what's causing slowdowns or what's not causing slowdowns, where you need to work on it, where you don't need to work on it. And it's a great resource. It's absolutely free from Google to help people out. We, as professionals, we tend to use things like Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog is a great application, but it is a paid application that will give you a deep dive into your website, tell you all of your redirects that are Happening show you all of your 404 pages, internal and external. You can also connect it with APIs and pull in your Google Analytics data, your search console data. It connects to the AIs as well if you want to utilize some of those options in there. But it's a absolutely fantastic tool to diagnose how your website performs and what you need to do to increase the performance of that website. There are a lot of free tools out there that you can use to compress your images. One of my favorites is I think it's a tiny URL. I just do a search for webp converter and convert all my jpegs to webp and you're literally saving three quarters of the space which will absolutely increase your page load speeds. I recommend that you do a full size image for your desktop and a, you know, a cropped image for your mobile because obviously mobile doesn't need a full 1200 pixel wide image to load. Thus improving your page load speeds, improving the performance of your website, improving the user experience. So those are just a few of the tools highly recommend if you are on WordPress to use some type of an optimization plugin. They have several of them out there. Some of the better ones are going to be WP Rocket. You also have the Nitro Pack which is I believe created by WP engine. That's another good one. Both of those will help you compress your images, minify your files, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It also can help control lazy loading which if you don't know images below the fold, you don't want them to load on page load, you only want the stuff in the top to load. So applying lazy load to everything below the fold again increases your page load speeds, performance and perfect okay metrics.
- [34:15]
C
Those are the two that I would recommend anybody can use. They're free tools and they're very easy. PageSpeed Insights GT metrics start with that to get a baseline and then as you learn more you can use some of the different tools to really see.
- [34:27]
A
Okay and then I want to rapid fire these two because they came in as you were talking. Eric, we would Microsoft Clarity be helpful in this case or not?
- [34:38]
C
I can definitely offer some insight to that. Microsoft Clarity would be a good tool to use as a supplementary kind of a byproduct of your main objective of improving core web vitals. The reason why is because Microsoft Clarity, it's really good for the heat map so that you can really see visually what people do when they enter your page. So for example, if you have A bunch of heat maps that are showing like people scroll to the midway point of the page and then the session ends. They might be having trouble seeing your content load. So you would compare that with the report you get from PageSpeed Insights or GT Metrics and you would look at that page and you can really identify where is it that people are dropping off and why. So Microsoft Clarity and other like Crazy Egg is another heat map tool that I'm pretty familiar with. They're going to show you what people do, but they won't necessarily show you exactly what the problem is to help diagnose. So you want to use those in tandem. It won't be enough to just say, oh, this session looks weird from Microsoft Clarity. You know, have someone take a look at that. You want to be a little bit more intuitive now that you know more. Ideally you can do more. Right? So I would run Page Speed Insights in congruence with whatever page you're looking at within your Clarity heat map reports and you can see if that matches up. So if it's taking five seconds for that hero image on your page to load and it takes up half the page and then you look at the heat map and you see people are getting right there and then they're bouncing and they're leaving, you probably have a good indication as to an on page issue that you can resolve by combining those two data sources.
- [36:21]
A
Okay, great. Now we just got five minutes left, so I'm going to rapid fire these. Okay, so Eric, a question came in. How do we know if our site has schema markup on it?
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B
Easiest way is to use the schema.org validator, which if you just go schema.org, they have a validator link up in the top. Navigation. Really easy to get to. If you run a business or manage a website, I recommend you bookmark that page and use it very often. The other really good tool to check your schema markup is the Google Rich Snippets testing tool. The only downside to the Rich Snippets tool is it doesn't tell you every single schema type that's found on your page. It's only going to give you information on the schemas that actually produce rich snippets. But both of those are going to be really good and valuable tools for you to bookmark and use regularly.
- [37:14]
A
Okay, this next question came in as we were talking about taking, you know, the large images and files and making sure that they were also mobile friendly. Instead, was that converting a jpeg to a Web3. What was the second file format there?
- [37:32]
B
WebP, as in all.
- [37:35]
A
Okay, WebP. Perfect. Okay. All right, so let's see here. We've got four minutes left and I think we got a few more questions. Okay, so this is kind of going back to more of the top of the hour. And Nico, I think you had just kind of talked a little bit about like having a good link structure on, on the page. But the, the question came in, how many links are too many on a page? Is there, is there kind of a rule of thumb?
- [38:00]
C
That's a great question. And there is a general rule of thumb, however, and I'm going to use the, my all time favorite phrase that every SEO loves to use. You guys ready? It depends. It really does depend because it's going to be tied based off. You want to look at what the SERP is actually rewarding. Okay. Like this is not rocket science. It may seem like rocket science sometimes with all the crazy terminology, but at the end of the day, our jobs is to reverse engineer what is working and apply that in a way that's going to be successful for you. So when we talk about interlinking strategies and how many links is enough links, one of your guiding lights is going to be looking at what the SERPs are rewarding. What do I mean? Look at the first four or five organic search results you know, you want to filter out for directories. We have to deal with that with, within the legal space. I'm not going to compare your website to a justia.com because they're two completely different types of entities and Google knows that. So I would look at your competitors and I would try to see like, hey, you know, the top five ranking results that are actual law firms with service pages have about eight links internally pointed to that service page. Our client or our website that we're working on has one or zero. Okay, I have a very decent gap that I know how to fill. Again, that doesn't mean that you need to have exactly eight or exactly more than eight or exactly less than eight. It depends. But we know that we have a baseline that we need to be aiming towards. So you don't want to get crazy and get lost in the sauce and just start throwing links for the sake of throwing links. Because you're going to create a web that will be a mess to untangle. You want to be smart and diligent about how you place the internal linking and why you're doing it. So don't do it for the sake of doing it. Just because we tell you, right? You want to look at what's working. Ask these types of questions to your vendors, see what they tell you, and tell them, well, hey, I heard that we should be really basing that based off the Serpent competitive reports and see what these people have. Can you tell me how many links that you know? This law firm that I'm competing with has pointed to their car accident page. Maybe we use that as a, as a baseline. If you throw that at whatever vendor you're working with, they're going to be like, whoa, whoa, these guys know their stuff. We're going to have to start really kicking it into gear, I promise you. So it depends. But there are ways to build the general baseline of what you should be doing. And as long as you're not straying too far to either side on the extreme high end or extreme low end, as long as you are practicing it in a logical way, it's only going to help you, not hurt you. Again, don't throw links just for the sake of throwing links. You want to do it in the way that makes sense, in a way that has a clear objective. And the way that you get to that objective is by looking at your competitors. Look at the SERP results, find out what they have, and what do you have in comparison? That's going to be very. A very bright starting point as far as understanding how many links is a good number. So it depends, but there are ways to figure it out.
- [41:06]
A
Okay, all right, well, I appreciate that. And then we are at time. So the last question, I'll just answer because I know the answer to this one. Regarding core web vitals, does this apply to other search engines like IE, Bing and things like that? And the answer is yes. Obviously the dominant player is Google. We play to win in Google, but anything you do there has great knock on effects for every other search engine out there. You're basically making sure your site is logical and locked down so that the crawlers understand what they're seeing. Did I get that right?
- [41:42]
B
Absolutely.
- [41:42]
A
Yep. Okay. All right. Gold star for Ken. We're going to keep bringing you the freshest insights into how you can continue to be at the top of your marketing game. So be on the lookout for next month's webinar in your email inbox as we wrap things up. It is worth mentioning 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, make sure you have folks like Nico and Eric on your side and in your corner and make sure that you're hitting your intake goals. As always, Rankings is here to help you get the most out of your lead generation effort. Our expertise and understanding of the legal market puts you, our clients, in the winning position. So contact us today to see how you can get the most out of your marketing campaigns. You won't be disappointed. Bye for now.