Hey guys, Andy Stickel again.
Wanted to make a quick video here,
just to let you know about something
that's been working really well for us.
A lot of our clients want to get into the Maps,
which I'm not sure if you know what the Maps are,
but in Google when you
search for something like
"Baltimore personal injury attorney"
or "Baltimore estate planning lawyer".
Typically what's going to happen is,
the searcher is going to see
three listings at the top of search results
that are below the ads but
above the organic listings.
And there's going to be a
map associated with these
and it's got the address, the phone number,
a link to the website, driving directions,
all that kind of stuff.
There's only three listings
so it's really important
that you optimize your website
really well to appear in these listings.
because a lot of times if you're in these
three listings and you have the most reviews,
you are probably going to get the phone calls.
So one of the things that you need to think
about in terms of how to appear in these,
Google is typically looking
for proximity to the searcher.
So what that means is that if you're
physically located near the searcher,
Google is going to
show a preference to you.
The other thing you can do to make sure
that you're more relevant to more searchers,
is to convince Google that you're
geographically relevant to the search.
So for example, if someone searches
"Baltimore personal injury attorney"
or "Baltimore DUI lawyer",
you want to make sure
that Google sees your website as
being highly relevant to Baltimore.
Now the way that we found to this is
by getting links from other organizations
and businesses in Baltimore
to link to the website.
So there's a couple ways you can do this.
First thing you can do is
if you know any local businesses
 that you can partner up with,
maybe do a guest post,
or maybe you could just toss them
a couple bucks for a link to the website.
But a lot of times, our clients
don't necessarily want to do that.
So what we actually do is
we find youth sports organizations.
So we'll search "Baltimore youth soccer",
"Baltimore youth hockey",
"Baltimore youth cheerleading"
baseball, basketball, football,
T-ball, dance, anything like that.
And we email the organizations
and we offer to make
a donation to their organization
anywhere in the realm of $150-$300,
just kind of depending on
how generous you're feeling.
But in the email we say,
"Listen, we'd like to make a donation
in exchange for a link from your website."
We typically email anywhere from fifty to
a hundred organizations per client
and we typically get about a 10 to 20% return.
So you know, we end up with 10 or 20 links that are,
are highly relevant to our client's website.
Now the nice part is,
is that typically we make a one-year deal,
we say "We'll give you $250 for one year".
But a lot of these organizations
are not extremely organized.
So what ends up happening is
after that year, the link usually stays up,
so what ends up happening is
you end up getting a link for you know,
three or four years for what
you agreed to pay for one year.
Now, if you want to go back and make
another donation that's totally up to you.
If you want to just kind of let it roll and see
how long one link can get you
for your initial donation,
that's up to you as well.
But you know getting in the Maps
is extremely important and
this is a really good way to get
a heads up on your competition.
It doesn't take any
technical ability whatsoever.
All it takes is a few emails and some research
that can be done in a few hours.
Hope this helps.
If you have any other questions about this tip
let me know and we'll talk to you soon.
