Google Business Profiles for Lawyers - Fastlane Founders with Marilyn Jenkins - Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard

Marilyn Jenkins talks with Jason Barnard about Google Business Profiles for lawyers.

Marilyn Jenkins is a seasoned digital growth strategist with a career spanning back
to 1998 and the founder of MJ Media Group, LLC, and Law Marketing Zone®.

Marilyn Jenkins reveals game-changing strategies for lawyers to boost their digital presence. She underscores the importance of accurately selecting categories, maintaining consistent name, address, and phone number (NAP) details across the web, and leveraging reviews and Q&As to bolster the profile’s effectiveness.

Learn why consistent updates, strategic reviews, and practitioner listings are crucial for your law firm’s success. Get insider tips on leveraging Google’s free tools to attract clients, establish credibility, and outrank competitors. Plus, discover how to turn your practice’s digital footprint into a powerful client acquisition channel. So if you’re an attorney looking to maximize your online visibility and grow your practice, this is a must-watch episode for you.

What you’ll learn from Marilyn Jenkins

00:00 Marilyn Jenkins and Jason Barnard
01:34 What Do ChatGPT and Other Assistive Engines Use to Supplement Their Results?
01:44 What Do Google and Bing Use to Supplement Their Search Results?
02:35 What is the Fundamental Difference Between Google My Business and Google Business Profile?
03:36 How Does Google Business Profile Help Google Understand Who You Are, What You Do and Who You Serve?
03:53 What is the First Way to Show Google What You Do?
04:56 What is the Feature in Google Business Profile Where You Could Do Keyword-Rich Images?
06:10 What is the Right Term to Use Instead of Keywords as Mentioned by Jason Barnard?
07:04 What Does Google Value Most When Ranking Business Profiles Aside from Keywords?
08:00 What Should You Do with Reviews, Whether They’re 1-Star or 5-Star?
10:03 How Can You Use Those Reviews to Your Advantage to Help Google Understand Your Business Even Better?
11:41 How Can You Ask People to Leave Useful Reviews that Will Be Helpful for Both Users and Google?
12:30 What is Next After the Reviews?
14:42 What Other Things Must You Do to Build More “Know, Like, and Trust” on Your Google Business Profile?
16:01 How Important is It That Your Name, Address and Phone Number Are Correct Everywhere Else on the Web?
19:01 Why is It Important to Only Give Manager Access to Your Google Business Profile?

This episode was recorded live on video December 3rd 2024

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://youtu.be/FWXLAJVGjIU
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-automate-linkedin-to-land-executive-professional/id1717325062?i=1000642909126
Marilyn Jenkins

Transcript from Google Business Profiles for Lawyers – Fastlane Founders with Marilyn Jenkins

[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy? A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: A quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Marilyn Jenkins.

[00:00:37] Marilyn Jenkins: Hi, how are you?

[00:00:37] Jason Barnard: I’m fine, thank you very much. Welcome. We’re going to be talking about Google Business Profiles for Lawyers. I’m really curious because from what I understand, it’s the easy win for a lawyer.

[00:00:53] Marilyn Jenkins: It is, absolutely. And it’s a free service.

[00:00:58] Jason Barnard: It’s a free service from Google and we can look at how that can be a really quick win to bring clients to your law firm.

[00:01:06] Marilyn Jenkins: Exactly.

[00:01:07] Jason Barnard: Right. Wonderful. But before we do that, I wanted to show you this. We specialize at Kalicube in optimizing people’s personal brand for Google search and AI. And I had a look in ChatGPT and this happens a lot. It isn’t clear about which Marilyn Jenkins I’m talking about. But as soon as I specify, you get a delightful description when it searches the web. And that’s really interesting from our perspective, and I think for anybody who cares about their personal brand, that ChatGPT and other assistive engines are now using the web to supplement their results.

[00:01:43] Marilyn Jenkins: Exactly.

[00:01:44] Jason Barnard: And the web, Google and Bing are using engines like ChatGPT to supplement the search results. And it’s all kind of coming together, which I love.

[00:01:53] Marilyn Jenkins: Yes, exactly.

[00:01:55] Jason Barnard: I see you love it too, don’t you?

[00:01:57] Marilyn Jenkins: Yeah, I do. I mean, and the power of using the Google Business Profile for your branding is just amazing. And the fact that Google provides that and we think of Google My Business, or a lot of people think of Google My Business, which is the old version. The Google Business Profile is like, I think, the eighth iteration of Google Places. And every time you get more and more features, more and more opportunities to tell Google what searches you’re relevant for.

[00:02:25] Jason Barnard: Okay. Which is brilliant. Question number one is what’s the difference fundamentally for you when they changed the name from Google My Business to Google Business Profile? Was it just a rebrand or did it actually change?

[00:02:35] Marilyn Jenkins: Massive, massive new features. And like, you have a management portal that’s different for different areas. They don’t roll out the same thing globally. The management portal is so much more simple to use, much more visual, more insights, and you also have a lot more content that you can put on it. It is virtually like your own blog and your own social media. I mean, it’s just, it’s interesting how, you know, Google is the number one search engine because they provide good results for their visitors. Right. Engagement is what they’re looking for and they have to provide good results. So by giving them everything you need that you can on your Google Business Profile.

You’re saying, I am interested in good user results as well. And they reward you for that.

[00:03:21] Jason Barnard: The Google Business Profile is an acquisition channel, a whole acquisition channel just on its own.

[00:03:27] Marilyn Jenkins: Exactly, exactly.

[00:03:28] Jason Barnard: And you were saying it’s a really good way for you to explain to Google who you are and what you offer and to whom. Can you go into more detail there?

[00:03:36] Marilyn Jenkins: Yeah. So you want to use your actual business name. Don’t use like a keyword or a city in your business name. If it’s not your legal business name, that will detract. You want to use your name, address and phone number and use it the same everywhere on the web that you list your company. But the big one is your category that you have. I believe in most places, up to seven categories you can choose. You want to choose your category in priority ordered, what type of customer you want.

So say you’re a Family Law Attorney, but you really want to do child custody. The new list, the child custody first, divorce second, those kinds of things. Same with personal injury. Choose what you want first and then you keep the rest of them. So the categories is the first way you show Google what you do. Right.

[00:04:22] Jason Barnard: The categories from what you just said go actually quite specific.

[00:04:26] Marilyn Jenkins: They do, and they’re predetermined. So it’s not something you can go in and type in. You choose off of a list. And it’s worth checking back every so often to see if that number is increased. Because when they first launched the Google Business Profile, it was three.

[00:04:41] Jason Barnard: Right. And you find that a lot of attorneys get that wrong.

[00:04:47] Marilyn Jenkins: Yes. A lot of them put law firm.

[00:04:50] Jason Barnard: All right, very gentle.

[00:04:52] Marilyn Jenkins: That tells nothing. Right. It doesn’t say anything about what you do. The other big thing is they have, they now have Posts and Products and Services. So think posts, think blogs, blog posts. Right. Where you could do keyword rich images the whole nine years and put content on your Google Business Profile. But on products and services, I’ve seen Estate Planning Attorneys that we put, you know, their wills and trusts and put those and each services its own separate service. Same for any other attorney. You can put a photo that’s got a named as a keyword. You describe the service using your keywords, your city, that sort of thing. Again, every little thing you give it, Google reads and says, okay, if this search comes up, you’re relevant for that.

[00:05:40] Jason Barnard: I mean, you use the word keyword, but do you really mean the name of my service very specifically stated, yes.

[00:05:48] Marilyn Jenkins: So if I am a Personal Injury Attorney. And I want to focus on car accidents or motorcycle accidents. I want to have articles that mention motorcycle accidents in my state or my city. Absolutely.

[00:06:02] Jason Barnard: Right. Okay. I mean, because the word keywords I think is something that people don’t necessarily understand and often as well, if people get really into the SEO and how to manage Google keywords is not really the term we should be using I believe. It should be words that are key and being very specific and accurate in what you’re saying.

[00:06:23] Marilyn Jenkins: No, no, no. I mean, you’re right, you’re right because I’m old school SEO. I’ve been doing this since the late 90s. Right. So it was keywords and keyword phrases. When I think keyword, I’m thinking whatever my potential new customer would type in, you’re saying exactly the same thing. So I like keywords, the words that are key.

[00:06:43] Jason Barnard: Words that are key. It’s actually my partner who said that to me and I thought that’s loads better because it makes sense to everybody. Right. We’ve got categories, we’ve got posts and we’ve got products and services that you can add. That’s a lot of work adding all of that. But for the products and services done for once. Finished.

[00:07:02] Marilyn Jenkins: Yeah. But what I suggest. So those are just a few of the features. What Google is looking for is people that are interested in making sure there’s a good user experience. Engagement. They want user engagement. That’s why when someone comes and does a search on Google, they’re going for the zero click results. So it’s like if you type in how to blah blah blah and a YouTube video comes up, they will timestamp it where your answer is. That is a zero click answer.

Right. So if you’ve given a lot of information on your blog posts, you’ve got your services detailed on there and you update it like once a week. And I suggest clients spend 10 minutes a week updating something. Google will see that you’re engaged and if you have maybe less reviews than your most next competition because you’re engaged, then they’re not, you can outrank them.

[00:07:57] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. So the next question is Reviews.

[00:07:58] Marilyn Jenkins: Yes. Reviews are hugely important and replying to the reviews are very, very important. Whether they’re one star or five star, you should, you should reply to all of them. And you know, going with a five star company, trying to get five star reviews is perfect. But don’t beat yourself up if you’re 4.7 or 4.8. As my grandmother used to say, nobody walks on water. You know, people are going to have bad days, whether it’s at your company or the client or maybe it’s just a rogue review that doesn’t relate to you, but your response is to them.

[00:08:30] Jason Barnard: Right. And sometimes it’s actually just client perception rather than reality. And that can be damaging is somebody can say I didn’t like the toilets or the receptionist pointed me the wrong way and I had to fight, take five extra, extra steps to get to the attorney’s office.

[00:08:46] Marilyn Jenkins: Some are that silly, some are disgruntled employees. Right? But your reply to them. So if you reply to each of your reviews, what you’re telling Google is I care about the next customer that comes through because I’m going to talk to these people. You thank them using whatever words that are key in your reply. And if it’s a one star, reply professionally. Is it real? Would you apologize? Would you explain what happened? Is it not real? This person was never a client. I’ve never met with this person before. I’d be happy to help you, blah, blah, blah. Just something kind.

Because I tell you, Amazon has made us all look at reviews and made them important, right? So when I’m looking for somebody, I’m going to look at those one star reviews. I’m going to see, can I tell the person was just having a crappy day. But I also want to see how the business responded. Right. And that tells you a lot.

[00:09:42] Jason Barnard: Yeah, 100%. And you’ve talked about feeding information to Google so that it better understands you. And up until now it’s been posts and the name of my company, the address, the products and services. I’ve been feeding information myself. Reviews is feeding information to Google from somebody else. How can you leverage that to most effect?

[00:10:03] Marilyn Jenkins: I would go one step further and go questions and answers. Okay, so with reviews, if you do not have it as part of your business process, every time you finish a free consultation, every time you finish a case, if it’s not part of your business process to ask for a review. Today it becomes that. It is hugely important. And staying on the ideal reviews, you can’t go and say, okay, you know what, I’ve had 40 cases and I’ve never asked anybody for a review. I’m going to go ask them all. Well, if you get 20 reviews this week and you average two a month, none of those are going to be put on. Right. They’re going to be gatekeeping. That’s just the way Google does it because you’re you just under you, you came in too frequent.

So if you’re behind, then this week ask for two, next week ask for two. But make it part of your business process so that every single time you finish a job that could be reviewed, you ask for a review.

[00:11:03] Jason Barnard: What I hear here from the 10 minutes a week to asking for a regular number of reviews over time is steady. Steady wins the game.

[00:11:11] Marilyn Jenkins: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:11:13] Jason Barnard: Right. So stick to steady. And I’ve seen on the review section of Google Business Profiles lots of tabs and then you can click on it and those are generated from what I understand by the contents of the review. So getting people to talk about the things, for example a marriage, divorce, specifics about that in the reviews is really helpful. How can you frame your request to get people to say useful things that will help both the users and Google?

[00:11:41] Marilyn Jenkins: Well, you can give them ideas of what to write, but you don’t do anything. It’ll be copy and paste because it looks unrealistic if everybody said the same thing. But you know, you could give them ideas of what to say and then if they don’t say everything, you know, the obviously confidential information on your reply, you can actually say it was a pleasure to handle your motorcycle accident. I’m glad that we were able to get you, you bring in those keywords if they’re not saying it. So yeah, your reply also can help solidify that review and the information you want to get through.

[00:12:19] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. I mean that’s a really good piece of advice is that if the clients don’t say it, you can still say it in your reply. Feed that information to Google. What would you do next after the Reviews?

[00:12:30] Marilyn Jenkins: Q&As. So we think of Q&As as I can’t ask the question because I’m the business. Well, you’re not just waiting for people to ask the question. Every single attorney has FAQs, right. People ask the same question with the same practice area they’re going to. Everybody has the same questions. So once a week add a Q and A, ask the question and answer it and be deliberate about, you know, okay, this is the question people ask. Be super deliberate about your answer because you’re then you’re telling Google if this question ever comes up, these are our answers.

And you may be that zero click result, right?

[00:13:08] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And the Google Business Profile and we’re coming back to that zero click result. You said it multiple times and that appears to be significant is don’t expect people to visit your website. They may well just make a decision right there on Google.

[00:13:22] Marilyn Jenkins: Its potential that they can just hit the button and call you.

[00:13:25] Jason Barnard: Right. So after I’ve done my reviews, what do I do next?

[00:13:31] Marilyn Jenkins: Once a week or once a month, put a post on it. You want to also. So now we’ve got everything on there and we know what our next steps are. We’re going to put our hours of operation. Okay, we want a phone number so it’s click to call. If you want to, click to your link to your calendar, all of the things you possibly can. Photos, videos. Now

and now if you take a photo of the front of your office, don’t let it stay named image 1942, blah, blah, blah, JPEG. Name it the company name, name it the city, name it the service that you’re providing. Then upload as many pictures as you can on the pictures of your people. People do business with people they know, like and trust. Okay. Do a little video, an intro video, talking about what you do for your clients and welcome them to come to the office or call. Right. So put all of that out there.

[00:14:26] Jason Barnard: Yeah. You mentioned know, like and trust. And what just struck me is you just walked us through those three elements in one single panel, which is the Google Business Profile.

[00:14:35] Marilyn Jenkins: Exactly.

[00:14:36] Jason Barnard: Is there anything else I need to do as an attorney to move that needle on know, like and trust in that one panel,?

[00:14:42] Marilyn Jenkins: I would watch your insights. So again, that’s in your management portal and you can see how people are using your Google Business Profile. How many searches does you show up in? How many times have they clicked to call or click directions or gone to your website? Right, so just keep adding stuff. There’s no, there’s no limit. So you’ll reach a point where there’s a limit of photos and then that’ll be increased in the future. But I would put videos and photos, put your logo up there so that you’re, you know, that sensitive people see it. But adding posts, adding more services, updating stuff. Right? Now, especially as we’re coming into the holidays, right.

It’s going to be super important that your hours of operations are up to date. So along the holiday time, when people do a search and say you come up, it will have a little red night note that says last updated. So assume that there’s three and you’re the only one that’s recently updated. And how many people you think you’re going to click on someone else if they know that you’ve updated your profile.

[00:15:47] Jason Barnard: Right. Okay. And you mentioned being consistent with what I would call name, address, phone number, NAPs, which is the local business. How important is that to go around the rest of the web and correct the name, address, phone number or whatever?

[00:16:01] Marilyn Jenkins: Huge. I mean as detailed as like spelling out the word suite as opposed to ste. Right. You need to be exactly the same everywhere that you’re listed. So if you’re on the Chamber of Commerce website, if you sponsor a softball or little kids T ball team and they link back to you, make sure that every directory listing you have, every website you listed on, has your name, address and phone number exactly the same. That’s the one thing that’s going to take you more time is finding the place. So I’d set up a spreadsheet, have your assistant set up a spreadsheet and just make a note of everywhere you are and just double check it’s correct.

[00:16:38] Jason Barnard: What I find really interesting, that was kind of a leading question because the NAPs, the name, address, phone number, consistency across the web is exactly what we find is vitally important when we’re managing the personal brand of an attorney themselves as opposed to the business. We’ve just talked about the business and Kalicube looks after the personal brand of the attorney. And it’s incredibly important that the information about the people in the company is also consistent.

[00:17:04] Marilyn Jenkins: Exactly. And with your Google Business Profile, you have one for the business. You also can have practitioner listings. Okay, say there’s a Barnard and Jenkins Law Firm. Okay. Now I can go in and go, okay, under this, under our law firm, I want a practitioner listing and it’s just me. You can do the same thing. So when you talk about that personal brand, a lot of law firms, it is the attorney, Right.

It’s their shingle, they hung out. However, whenever it gets to the point where there’s multiple partners and the names changed and it’s three or four names, now you have practitioners. So it’s called that because, you know, thinking medical and stuff, it just works across the board. It’s called a practitioner listing. But your principals can have their own Google Business Profile.

[00:17:52] Jason Barnard: Right. So it’s a separate Google Business Profile. You have one for the company and then one for each of the leading attorneys.

[00:18:02] Marilyn Jenkins: Yeah, because if you think about it, when two attorneys come together or multiple come together, they each bring their own brand, their own reputation, their own reviews type thing. So it makes sense to be able to have a practitioner listing and it can all be linked together. And you know, even from in the post talk about, you know, the particular practitioner and link to their Google Business Profile.

[00:18:26] Jason Barnard: Right. And what are the differences between the individual practitioner profile and the company profile? the practice profile?

[00:18:31] Marilyn Jenkins: There isn’t. As far as the features, they’re the same.

[00:18:37] Jason Barnard: So the practitioner would go through and the individual attorney and post and add the specific services they offer that perhaps the other attorneys don’t offer within that.

[00:18:48] Marilyn Jenkins: Yeah, I mean, you could use the same post, just instead of branding it for the company, you branded for yourself. So you could literally have your assistant or one of the assistants or intake people in their spare time take care of this for you. Because in your Google Business Profile, you can assign a manager, which is when we work with our clients, we are a manager. This is a asset that is a very valuable asset for you as your personal brand and as the company. So you never want to give anybody administrative permission on that. You want them to be managers. That way they can make changes, but they can’t make dramatic changes. They can’t delete it.

They can’t, you know, give it to someone else. You know, it’s one of those things you need to be very careful with. But setting up a manager is very easy.

[00:19:34] Jason Barnard: Okay. And all of this is very much DIY. Or do you need a professional to help?

[00:19:39] Marilyn Jenkins: You don’t need a professional to help. If you have the time to spend some time each week doing it. What we do when we help our clients do this, we go above and beyond in that. We, we do an article every week. We don’t. We also syndicate that article out. We put the article on your website. So we’re providing consistent content for you.

[00:20:00] Jason Barnard: Okay. And if I understand correctly, you’ve written a book about this which is generally for local businesses, but a lawyer would find this super useful as well. And managing the Google Business Profile, I really wanted to talk about lawyers in particular and attorneys, which is really generous of you to talk about specifically that. But this actually applies to anybody. That was brilliant. Marilyn, if you’ve got anything that I didn’t ask that you really feel is important for attorneys managing their Google Business Profile.

[00:20:26] Marilyn Jenkins: I would say if you haven’t looked at it in a long time, do, it’s that very important. Absolutely. Go make sure you have it, verify it, claim it. If you haven’t done that. It’s so very important for local business and local law firms to be the go to attorney in your area, to be the one that updates the Google Business Profile often.

[00:20:46] Jason Barnard: Thank you so much.

[00:20:48] Marilyn Jenkins: Thank you.

[00:20:48] Jason Barnard: A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Marilyn.

[00:20:53] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube.