Law Firms On The Map
Law Firms On The Map
Digital PR for Law Firms- Fery Kaszoni & Kristaps Brencans Discuss Future of Legal Link Building
Join host Kristaps Brencans in this episode of "Law Firms On The Map" as he sits down with Fery Kaszoni, the digital PR expert, renowned as the "godfather of digital PR."
Fery shares profound insights into digital PR strategies, particularly in the context of law firm SEO, shedding light on how to secure large media publication backlinks for SEO success. He emphasizes the importance of link-building in digital PR and distinguishes between generating coverage and generating links. Digital PR for law firms is an ongoing activity and one that you can definitely leverage as a consistent, link velocity generator.
Key Highlights:
- Reactive PR, Expert Commentary PR, and Data-Driven PR, with real-world examples for law firms.
- Is link-building for attorneys difficult?
- Fery's brainstorming process for creating captivating PR ideas for law firms.
- The future of SEO in 2024, with Fery predicting a shift towards extreme authenticity and Google's increased focus on unique, trustworthy content.
Connect with Fery Kaszoni on LinkedIn to stay updated with his insights and expertise in digital PR.
If you enjoyed the show please leave a review on Apple. If you have any questions you can find me (Kristaps Brencans, the CEO at On The Map Marketing on Twitter).
Thank you for listening :)
[00:00:00]
Kristaps Brencans
Welcome to Law Firms On The Map, the go to digital marketing show for attorneys serious about their business growth. I'm your host, Christops Brankens, CEO of On The Map Marketing. Our agency has helped thousands of attorneys crush their SEO and digital marketing goals over the last Today, I'm meeting with the one and only digital PR godfather, Fery Casoni.
[00:00:23]
Yes, Fery, I just called you a godfather of digital PR. I know you appreciated that. Fery is one of the best in business when it comes to landing large media publication backlinks. He has accomplished that through creative digital PR. PR campaigns and even better. He has actually done it for tons of law firms, hence why he's here.
[00:00:43]
And that's what we're going to be talking about today. Digital PR for law firms. Fery, thank you so much for coming on.
[00:00:49]
Fery Kaszoni
Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to. Sharing knowledge with everyone. Oh,
[00:00:55]
Kristaps Brencans
You're well known for that. And your knowledge generosity is unmatched.
[00:01:00]
Maybe you can give us a really quick intro about yourself and how you got into digital PR.
[00:01:05]
Fery Kaszoni
I can say I am an SEO who figured out PR which I think is a massive leverage because if we do, if you go the other way around, then PRs have to figure out SEO in order to. Be able to generate the links and to understand, you know philosophically why we need links with pr Usually pr is about coverage, but we don't care about coverage.
[00:01:27]
We care about then at the SEOs We should care about links And so i've been building websites monetized with ads and affiliates Before even I had like clients for SEO and then I started taking on clients for SEO I started building them, guest post links and forum links and even you know lots of link exchanges and in 2020, I discovered digital PR and we had two employees in 2020.
[00:01:52]
And we had no, no proper, department, but then I said, we're going to stop doing anything, but digital PR in 2021, and we have morphed from like an SEO agency into a PR agency that actually, focuses on SEO. And that's how we started, experimenting with stories, with creative concepts for PR.
[00:02:13]
That will enable us to earn links and yeah, we are an SEO agency who quit doing SEO and who's doing PR now for, SEO departments.
[00:02:23]
Kristaps Brencans
That's awesome. So you've really, there is this concept that's floating around for agencies niching down. So you really niche down within the digital PR space.
[00:02:33]
And I've noticed that too. Funny thing, most of the digital PR. Agencies are out of UK. I don't know what's about that, but maybe you guys are the ones that started this concept of digital PR really for SEO. Maybe you can explain how do you see the overlap between the actual PR benefits, which is for brand awareness and the SEO benefits between the digital PR link building approach.
[00:02:58]
Fery Kaszoni
It is definitely both. So there's definitely sometimes some stories get shared even on Twitter and Or like big publications. Sometimes you can see they have a thousand comments on some of the stories that not just us, but other agencies as well produce which is amazing. But I think digital PR agencies should.
[00:03:14]
Especially the ones who are focusing on link, link building should stop and measuring, coverage as a success. And I know this will, this is, scratching the chalkboard now with the fingernails, but it's either, either you are focusing on generating links or either you're focusing on generating coverage.
[00:03:32]
And it's two, I think it's two different skill sets and approaches, even from the ideation upwards that you have to. Take with the two methods. So I think both of the Benefits can be there for digital pr campaign like links and coverage but if you want to really, just nail the SEO game in with digital pr The only focus should be links.
[00:03:54]
I know, again, it sounds bad. Any PR agency will probably stop watching the video now. Stop saying that, I'm sorry. Yeah, hopefully not. But, I think for digital PRs who want To help, the SEO, it's mostly about links. And that's our philosophy. And that's how we have built, this service up.
[00:04:15]
And I can see many other agencies doing this as well. So talk to us a
[00:04:18]
Kristaps Brencans
little bit about that. We've dabbled a little bit in digital PR as well. The conversations that usually come up is when can you really see the positive PR? And obviously this is It depends type of question, but maybe you can give your answer to that.
[00:04:38]
How should people start looking at it? Because, you might launch one digital PR campaign. Is that enough? Or what's, coming from an expert, what is really the way to start analyzing the impacts from these links on SEO
[00:04:51]
Fery Kaszoni
campaign? Digital PR should be regarded as an ongoing activity.
[00:04:55]
It's just like with any link building practice, right? If you start building links and you stop. Then Google will be like, Hey, we had 20 links in two months. And then it suddenly stopped. What does that signal to Google? It means that, something artificial happened there or something that's only trendy and short lived.
[00:05:12]
And we've seen, we have clients who've been, we've been running campaigns every month for the past two years. And with every Google update, they kept on going up and up. We've also had clients who've done one campaign and they explored it after one campaign. So it's not it's not black or white.
[00:05:27]
It really depends on how, what link velocity the domain has already got. Do they already have consistent link velocity from other link building methods, or even just earning organic links because they have, 5, 000 pieces of content already, which is the case with many big websites.
[00:05:44]
If, let's say the website is small, Then they can just run one campaign every quarter and they will see a big improvement after two, three quarters. As I said, there are cases when you launch one campaign and you have an instant explosion in rankings. But I don't think that should be an expected outcome for any pr campaign I don't think anyone should expect oh i'm going to launch one campaign I'm going to get like 10 links in nbc and whatever National original publication and then i'm going to explode that should not be the expectation i'm going to invest into this As a consistent, link velocity generator where i'm being mentioned as the expert In my field, who conducts research, everyone, or who provides tips, everyone about about topics relevant to my niche.
[00:06:30]
And that's how I want to, I want to just keep on getting buzz in the media every month. And that's how this should be approached.
[00:06:38]
Kristaps Brencans
So conceptually, what are the approaches to digital PR? Just want to unpack that a little bit for our listeners. What are the main strategies, how you guys get these links from big media publications?
[00:06:52]
It's it's the holy grail of link building. Any client will want to See those links. And as you already mentioned, the impacts on SEO are really amazing from landing those. There's
[00:07:03]
Fery Kaszoni
three methods that we use. And then I suggest anyone to use. It's a reactive PR, it's expert commentary PR and data driven PR.
[00:07:13]
With reactive PR, if something happens in the world, I know a celebrity gets sued then as the law expert, as a legal expert, you can jump in and add an expert commentary saying, we think. That they are most likely to lose And this lawsuit because we think this and this and what this is, what they could do to actually win if hot in the news, you will 100 percent get coverage and lots of links if you can jump on it on time.
[00:07:40]
So that's reactive PR and we've done this for. Almost every niche from fitness to sleep to everything, even smoking, like, when Snoop Dogg announced that he's gonna stop, smoking, it was like a hoax, right? We got them 10 links for a vaping client because we quickly jumped on the trend.
[00:07:58]
And it can be can be the same in every niche, including the legal niche. Whenever something's happen, happening in the media, in the news, jump on it within one or two hours. And just push an expert commentary just add your opinion on what's happening. It's a reactive PR, but combined with expert commentary, right?
[00:08:16]
But then there's expert commentary that's not tied into a reactive piece. Which means if, if it's Christmas and that's it can be like a planned expert commentary, you can, as a low expert, you can talk about, what to do so your neighbors are not going to see if they fall over your backyard or something like that, right?
[00:08:35]
And I think they sleep on the ice. I know you're in Miami, there's no ice there, there's lots of regions where there's lots of ice during Christmas. How to avoid neighbors from suing you slip and fall. Exactly. Right? That's an expert commentary tied into Christmas. And I
[00:08:51]
Kristaps Brencans
think avoid the Christmas slip and fall.
[00:08:54]
That's genius. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:08:56]
Fery Kaszoni
Yeah. And these are just ideas that fly through my head now, but I can see those working really well, both in the U. S. and the U. K. Because journalists will write about Christmas and then they will write about. Topics and it's, and they always need an expert. They always need like an extra, sprinkle on the stories.
[00:09:11]
So they make it more unique and more interesting than they will. They will definitely cover cover your insight and they will, most of the cases link back to your website or your client's website. That's
[00:09:20]
Kristaps Brencans
awesome. And the third piece you mentioned was data driven
[00:09:24]
Fery Kaszoni
It's driven. So data driven means you go to the government website.
[00:09:30]
And you analyze some data about, either workplace accidents or car accidents, or even, even lawsuits there's probably data in the US that, the most you know, lawsuit obsessed states, and where you find out per 100, 000 population, how many lawsuits have been, ra launched, and per 100, 000, People in every area of the U.
[00:09:53]
S. That's a story that will definitely land. Lots of links, right? So you analyze data sets. You combine it with population data. Or even, you analyze accidents. Data. Combine it with the miles off. The roads that you have in every state or every city, and that you say, according to these are the most dangerous areas to drive in the U.
[00:10:15]
S. According to data and combined looking at number of accidents per 1, 000 miles in the state, something like that, right? In these type
[00:10:24]
Kristaps Brencans
of campaigns, do you target specific specific journalists or how do you control the actual outreach strategy?
[00:10:33]
Fery Kaszoni
Absolutely. You go to tools like Roxhill Media or Cision.
[00:10:36]
And you can just say, give me all the journalists who have written about accidents or like road accidents in the past six months, and it gives you a list of like hundreds of journalists, and you download that list, and then you push it out. Again, you can also target regional journalists who write about stories in certain regions, say, they're like journalists who write about, just things happening in Miami.
[00:11:00]
And if Miami ranks in top 10 or bottom 10 in like the most accident prone cities or the least accident prone cities, And you can push locations, the editors who write specific about those locations, say, Hey, we have our research finds in Miami, like the third most, accident prone and area in America.
[00:11:21]
And then they would definitely cover it. It's like ego bait, most or least top 10, bottom 10.
[00:11:27]
Kristaps Brencans
So you have to have a really unique angle in these pitches.
[00:11:31]
Fery Kaszoni
Yeah, we sometimes re angle, sometimes do 50 angles for a piece. There
[00:11:36]
Kristaps Brencans
is this concept in law firm SEO that no one wants to link to attorney websites because they can be, pretty different niches like a criminal attorney, personal injury attorney, there's boring topics and there's often even stigma with attorneys for some reason people are not huge fans of attorneys.
[00:11:56]
How many links have you landed? Do you believe this concept as well? That you can't, it's hard to build links
[00:12:01]
Fery Kaszoni
for attorneys. Absolutely not. It's super easy to build links if you have a good story. So as long as the client is in a in a niche that's not illegal or it's not unethical, you can actually land links.
[00:12:12]
If you give the journalist a good story, they are happy to link back to the company who commissioned the research, right? That's the key. Give them a good story. Give them a story so good that they have no option but to publish it. To answer your question, we built probably thousands of links to authority.
[00:12:28]
Websites we have one of our second largest client base is at attorney. Attorney. The biggest client base is gambling and casino. Right. .
[00:12:38]
Kristaps Brencans
Wow. Okay. Talking about the hardest SEO
[00:12:40]
Fery Kaszoni
niches. Yeah, that is, yeah. The second one, the second largest one is attorneys and personal injury lawyers and so on.
[00:12:47]
And we have, yeah, we have built thousands of links in this niche and it's not hard. As long as you give the journalist what they want, which is an interesting story or insight.
[00:12:56]
Kristaps Brencans
So, with the experience you have in digital PR for law firms, what, you mentioned already a couple ideas how to approach it, but maybe you can talk about some of the most successful ones you have seen in your experience.
[00:13:09]
Fery Kaszoni
Yeah, we've done a lot. We've done lots of interesting ones. We've done We've done the most dangerous state for pedestrians where we have found and that's a we actually got in forbes with that and msn and lots of other, regional publications And we have analyzed accidents that involve pedestrians and I think the team has calculated the number of accidents per a per population and then we you know We created again top 10 bottom 10 And we push it out on behalf of our local client and we got them, lots of links with this story.
[00:13:41]
The same story but angle to cyclists, the most dangerous states for cyclists. It's the same kind of approach, but with a different angle. Again, that got us lots of links for like personal injury lawyer clients. Most dangerous state. States for all the drivers.
[00:13:57]
Kristaps Brencans
These are amazing ideas.
[00:13:58]
Can you explain this brainstorming process? Or are you guys just such a bunch of creatives that just sit down and you're like, all right let's drop some ideas. How do you come up with these amazing concepts?
[00:14:13]
Fery Kaszoni
The best place to go is the news outlets themselves. So just go and analyze what journalists are writing about.
[00:14:19]
That's the best place to start from. Analyze what they have written. You can use advanced Google search queries, say like site, forbes. com, and then you can say In title, and then you can just say, accidents, or you can just say the most or the least, and then you can just put in your law related queries further down, you can analyze what they are written about in the past six months, or even the past one year, just to get the vibe of the media.
[00:14:47]
And then that's a starting point. And then we have a Slack channel where the whole team is there and we share the ideas together. We also analyze lots of previous digital PR campaigns from all agencies in the world. We have a big database of, thousands of campaigns that we have collected to just see what works, what doesn't work, why this works, why that doesn't work.
[00:15:07]
So we analyze previous campaigns combined with analyzing the news that was trending now. And figuring out what's the next thing that we can launch that will be most likely successful for this client.
[00:15:20]
Kristaps Brencans
And I imagine there's also some repetitive nature as well when you're doing the outreach to the journalists.
[00:15:27]
They start seeing the same names. Does that help as well to land the placements?
[00:15:34]
Fery Kaszoni
It could help, but that's probably not the main factor. Like We, yeah, I think if you're an agency that's got a good reputation but it can help but it shouldn't be the fact that's not the fact. I think the story itself is the actual, success factor.
[00:15:50]
It doesn't matter if, if you're like a reputable agency, if the story is not good, right? The story has to be good. So we don't rely on our, our name or the volume that we execute. I think, and nobody should, should be put off by, oh, we're like, small, digital PR freelancer, or like our department is just a one man band in in this company.
[00:16:09]
It doesn't matter as long as the story is good, you will land links.
[00:16:12]
Kristaps Brencans
And when you guys do the outreach, do you do it as agency or you do it on behalf of the client as with the client's emails? We
[00:16:20]
Fery Kaszoni
do it as an agency. Yeah. With our agency email, we have 50 or 50 executives who. Push out lots of campaigns every day.
[00:16:30]
Kristaps Brencans
So the volume does matter. Not only the idea has to be good, but then the volume of the outreach to the journalists has
[00:16:36]
Fery Kaszoni
to play the volume game as well. Yes, indeed. You cannot just send 50 emails and then expect anything to land. Most cases, it will not land.
[00:16:45]
Kristaps Brencans
You guys use some mass email tools to reach out to the journalists at the same time?
[00:16:50]
Fery Kaszoni
You can use Roxhill Media and Cision as well. Cision has got a built in outreach tool. So, those are pretty, pretty good. You can just, create the list and send it out straight from there. And we actually send, thousands of campaigns through Roxhill and Cision as well.
[00:17:04]
Kristaps Brencans
You guys are busy. How many emails do you guys send a day?
[00:17:07]
Fery Kaszoni
Like 10,000. It can in a more than 10,000. More. More we have, yeah. We have days when we go even beyond six figures. Wow. Wow.
[00:17:16]
Kristaps Brencans
Okay. Impressive. Yeah. It
[00:17:17]
Fery Kaszoni
shows the results. It's large team. It's a large team. It's a very large team.
[00:17:21]
Kristaps Brencans
You guys are doing great work. Okay. I wanted to ask you one more question. You've been very generous already with the ideas and the concepts. I want to switch the gears just a little bit from law firm digital PR to where SEO is heading. We're in such a insane time right now. So I just want to hear your thoughts on ai, SGE, all these algorithm updates.
[00:17:45]
Like what's happening? Where are we gonna see SEO in 2024 for the predictable future? .
[00:17:52]
Fery Kaszoni
I think SEO SEOs are forcing Google, I mean including our us, right? We always experiment crazy things. We are forcing Google to pay more attention to extreme authenticity on the web. So the date of the AI.
[00:18:08]
AI picture, a profile picture, authors are gone. I think if you don't have any credentials online as an author of the website, you will become more and more irrelevant. And even if you have credentials, you will have to be able with technical SEO to prove it because that's what Google will trust. So Google will start you will start finding more authentic content on the web.
[00:18:34]
And I appreciate at the beginning, it's going to be, not perfect and it's probably going to be a mess, but that's why I can see Google is going towards very unique, very authentic authors, very unique, very authentic content as well. Like AI can just rewrite any content, but if you have videos as well, if you have a unique images, if you have a real persona, you are an expert in your field.
[00:18:56]
And I think Google will pay more and more attention. To signals such as, being mentioned in this big publication. And that's why Digital PR is actually booming now. Because Google will pay more and more attention to even your social media presence. What people think about you. So if you Google your name or your company name, what minus, your site, you say minus minus site and then your website, what does the World Wide Web talk about you?
[00:19:23]
That's going to be more and more important. So I think short term is going to be a chaos, but long term, the search results will be more authentic and from more trusted sources.
[00:19:33]
Kristaps Brencans
I love it. Extreme authenticity. That's a new term now labeled by you, Fery. Fery, thank you so much. You've been extremely generous with your time.
[00:19:42]
and ideas. We can literally now go build links for our clients ourselves. I know it's not that easy, but thank you so much. I appreciate your time. If our listeners want to learn more about you or follow you online where can they find you?
[00:19:56]
Fery Kaszoni
Just LinkedIn, just Google Fery and then Kazoni and you will find me on LinkedIn.
[00:20:00]
That's where I hung out. Even when I wake up at three 50 in the nighttime, I will, I just open LinkedIn first and then I go back to sleep.
[00:20:07]
Kristaps Brencans
saMe. I love LinkedIn. All right. Thank you so much, Fery. Appreciate your time. And maybe we'll see you soon back again. Talk about part two.
[00:20:16]
All right. Thank you.
