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The biggest marketing budget doesn’t always win. Nick Cohen explains how local businesses can punch above their weight by focusing on reviews, local authority, and content that helps both Google and AI platforms recognize them as trusted experts in their market.
The Local SEO Playbook for Beating Bigger Competitors
Every small business owner I talk to has some version of the same fear: SEO is a game built for companies with bottomless budgets and there’s no point even trying to compete. I hear it constantly, and after talking with my latest podcast guest, I’m positive that it’s just not true.
Nick Cohen is a practicing attorney and the COO of Matador, where he helps over 180 law firms (the one-to-fifteen-attorney kind, not the mega-firms with ten floors of a downtown office tower) compete against firms with ten times their marketing budget. If a small personal injury practice can outrank a regional giant, your HVAC company, dental office, or marketing agency can compete in your local market too.
How to Compete Against Bigger Firms in Search
Cohen told me straight up: “Misconception number one is that it’s not worth it because I’ll never win.” He’s right that if you try to outspend the big guys on pay-per-click, you’ll lose, and you’ll lose fast. That’s a budget war, and budget wars favor whoever has the bigger checkbook.
But that’s not the only game in town. “If you play the SEO, the GEO, the review game, you can absolutely win,” Cohen said. The local businesses that win aren’t the ones spending six figures a month. They’re the ones doing consistent, unglamorous work that nobody puts on a highlight reel: writing good content, fixing technical issues, and asking happy customers for reviews.
What You Do, Where You Do It
Nick has a straightforward framework that you can implement easily.
Step one: list everything you do. If you’re an estate planning attorney, that’s trusts, wills, probate, business succession planning. If you’re a plumber, that’s drain cleaning, water heater installation, emergency repairs.
Step two: list everywhere you do it. Every city, town, or neighborhood you serve.
Cross those two lists and you’ve got your keyword map. In Nick’s words, “that list is equal to a root keyword.” Every combination of a service and a location deserves its own well-written page that answers a question a real customer would ask. That list can get long fast, and that’s the point. It gives you a concrete, unsexy to-do list instead of a vague feeling that you “should probably do more SEO.”
The Three Buckets of SEO
Once you know what you’re targeting, Nick sorts every piece of SEO work into three buckets: content, technical SEO, and backlinks.
Content means writing pages that show real expertise, not generic filler. This is referred to as EEAT (experience, expertise, authority, trust), and Nick’s advice is to lean on first-party information: your case results, your credentials, your specific experience. This applies whether you’re a lawyer or a landscaper. Nobody trusts a page that could have been written about literally any business in your industry.
Technical SEO covers the stuff most business owners will eventually need help with: title tags, page speed, broken links, schema markup. It’s the foundation, but Nick was clear that it’s not where most small businesses should start.
Backlinks are simply other websites linking to yours, and despite a decade of people declaring them dead, Nick says they might matter more today than ever. Local chambers of commerce, industry associations, and press releases are all realistic starting points for a small business without an agency budget.
Reviews Are Doing More Work Than You Realize
If Nick had to pick one thing to obsess over, it’s reviews. “If you have five hours to spend on marketing a month, you should be spending all five of those hours generating reviews,” he told me.
The trick isn’t asking more people for reviews. It’s asking better. Nick’s data shows a generic email blast barely converts. A personalized text message with a one-click link, sent by someone who talked with the customer directly, converts dramatically better.
Reviews help you two ways: they get you into the local map pack, one of the biggest sources of new business, and they’re what people check even when they were referred to you by a friend. A thin pile of mediocre reviews, and you can lose a referral you already had in hand.
Welcome to GEO: Getting Found by AI
People are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for recommendations instead of Googling, and Nick is seeing it show up directly in his own law firm’s numbers: three of his last seven cases came from AI platforms.
The strategy for this new channel, which Nick calls GEO (generative engine optimization), overlaps heavily with traditional SEO, but with a twist. Third-party credibility matters even more. That means digital PR, being mentioned in local “best of” lists, and yes, showing up on Reddit, which Nick notes is the most-cited source by ChatGPT.
Not every trendy tactic holds up, though. Nick’s team tested whether having an llms.txt file correlated with ranking well in AI results. After analyzing the top law firms in the most competitive markets, they found fewer than 40% even had one. Correlation: basically none. It’s a good reminder to test your assumptions instead of chasing every new acronym that shows up in your LinkedIn feed.
Play the Hand You Were Dealt
Nick quoted something he’d read on LinkedIn: “You gotta play the hand you were dealt.” As a small business, you’re never going to out-market a company with a hundred-person team. But you can out-local them, out-personal them, and out-authentic them every single time.
You’re not going to beat a national brand by pretending to be one. You beat them by being unmistakably, specifically you.
Your Next Steps for winning in Local SEO
If you’re starting from zero this week, here’s the order Nick recommends. Start generating reviews before you worry about anything else. Get a decent website up, even a simple one. Start writing content about what you do and where you do it. Skip the SEO and GEO rabbit holes until you have a budget and a foundation worth optimizing.
Small and local isn’t a disadvantage. It’s your competitive advantage, if you’re willing to do the work most of your competitors won’t.
Transcript from Nick Cohen’s Episode
Rich: My guest today is Matador‘s chief operating officer and a licensed California attorney. His experience at the intersection of business, marketing, and law dates back to when he was just 12 years old, learning to code on WordPress and helping his family firm generate new cases online. He guides Matador’s co-op strategy, implementing a combination of online case acquisition and industry-leading best practices for over 150 law firms across the country.
Today, we’re going to get him outside the courtroom and talk about how any local business can compete against the big guys on local search with Nick Cohen. Nick, welcome to the podcast.
Nick: Thanks for having me. Very happy to be here.
Rich: So I was going to ask, why didn’t you just become a lawyer like your mom wanted you to be? But you are a lawyer, and you’re also doing this local SEO work or working with small businesses. Is that correct?
Nick: That is exactly right. I come from a huge family of lawyers. Both my parents are trial lawyers. My brother is a lawyer. I have three cousins in law school, an uncle who’s a lawyer, and another cousin who’s a lawyer. And so I was sort of born into this world.
And for a long time I had no interest in being a lawyer. And then as I started working with more and more lawyers, I said, “This is also something I want to do.” So I went to law school at night. I started law school when I was 24, which was three years after I graduated college, and I went to law school at night while building Matador during the day.
Rich: Pretty impressive story. And I can only imagine what your Thanksgiving dinners must be like with all those lawyers around the table.
So what led you to focus helping local businesses – especially law firms – compete online, especially in markets that are dominated by larger players?
Nick: It started with my family. So I’m 29, and if you go back 17 years to when I was 12, I had started working with my dad, who was also a little bit techy, and started working on his website and really figuring that out just as more of a hobby. And we got really good at it. And there are huge firms in the Washington, DC market where I’m from, and they were small to mid-size, and quickly just started dominating the market from a search perspective.
And over time, people would start to ask us and say, “You guys are really good at this. Can you help me?” And so we fell into it. And now we’ve sort of found this sweet spot of helping one to 15 attorney firms compete against much bigger ones with 10 times the budget.
Rich: When we think about competing locally, whether we’re a lawyer, CPA, web designer, what are the biggest misconceptions that people tend to have about SEO and digital marketing?
Nick: Misconception number one is that it’s not worth it because I’ll never win. And unless I’m spending $100,000 a month as a personal injury firm on SEO and pay-per-click and meta and all that stuff, you’re never going to win. That the biggest misconception.
And so sure, if you go and you play the pay-per-click game, you’re really, you’re not going to win on that front in that way. But if you play the SEO, the GEO, the review game, you can absolutely win. And that’s the biggest misconception is that it’s hopeless, and it’s, it’s certainly not.
There’s tons of great people doing great work in this space, you know, me being one of them, helping these lawyers get cases online. Who are very deserving, I should mention, of these cases by the way.
Rich: So if you strip away the complexity, and I think for a lot of people it does seem like a black box and very complex. What does it actually take for a local business to show up in search?
Nick: Yeah. So I think if we limit that question to a search engine. So we’re talking about Google or Bing. A generative engine with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok. That’s a completely different sort of underlying methodology, although there’s a lot of overlap. And if we just limit the question to search, what we’re thinking about is, do I have great content that says what you do and where you do it, and why you’re uniquely qualified to help somebody with it, and is it first-party efficient? Meaning, is it your own information that you’re applying to the issue.
Because some people will say, “Well, there’s only so many ways to write about car accidents in New Orleans.” Well, maybe. What unique spin can you do? What unique case results do you do? What makes you uniquely qualified? So that’s the first bucket of things that you need to do. And a lot of this can be done successfully in-house if you’re just starting out.
Number two is code. So we’ll talk about, okay, obviously you have to have your basics, right?
The stuff you learn in a high school SEO class, like your title tags, your metas, your H1. You also want to have a good-looking site that loads fast. That’s the second piece that you need to be looking for.
And that third piece is a backlink. And for a long time, like a decade, people have been saying backlinks are dead. That’s not true at all. In fact, they may be more valuable today. And a backlink is simply one website somewhere else listing you and linking to you. That’s a backlink. And what it says is, “Hey, on this website over here, I’m giving authority to this website over here. You should rank them higher.”
And then of course, the number one thing that I tell my clients, or what we call ‘co-op members’, on how they can impact our work together is review generation. If you have five hours to spend on marketing a month, you should be spending all five of those hours generating reviews. That’s the number one thing you can do to help me help you.
Rich: When you say generating reviews, you’re obviously not talking about going online and reviewing your own business, your own practice. So what are some of the things that you’re advising your clients to do to get those good reviews other than winning the cases?
Nick: Yeah. So a review on Google has to be an accurate experience with your firm, right? But it doesn’t have to be a past client that you got a great case result for. It can be somebody that called your office that didn’t have a case that you gave a great experience to. And you could say, “Hey, I’m sorry we weren’t able to take your case, but if we were helpful, would you mind leaving us a review?” People you engage with, if you do pro bono work, these people can all leave you reviews that are real experiences with your firm.
And then you want to make the mechanism for leaving the review really easy. So you don’t just want to send an email blast out that says, “Hey did you have a good experience, with [some dynamic name in there], “will you leave us a review?” No, that does not get the highest review conversion rate. What you actually want to do in today’s world is send a text message that’s personalized with a short link that has one click, and on the one click they just open it up and it opens up that review box, they press five stars, write their experience.
You need to make it a frictionless experience. And I use the story of my dentist all the time. And so I love my dentist as much as one person, as much as one can actually love their dentist. Which is only a certain amount. But as far as dentists go, I love her. She’s great. Every time I leave the office, I get an automated email. “How was your experience? Will you leave me a review?” I never open it. I never leave the review. Now when I actually left, the front desk person or someone on behalf of the dentist themself said, “Nick, so great seeing you today. Glad we talked about X, Y, Z. Could you do me a favor and leave me a review? Here’s the short link.” Then I would leave the review. So unless you’re really coaxing someone into it, people are not going to leave a review for the most part on their own accord.
Rich: So make it as easy as possible, but also make it as personalized as possible, is what I’m hearing from you.
Nick: Yeah, we find that it’s well worth the work. And if you look at review conversion rate, which is basically how many people do I ask versus how many do I get, the more personalized you go with it, the better chance of getting the good review you have.
Rich: I would think for dentists the other option would be is while you’re still in the chair and they’re thinking about giving you some more Novocain, that’s when you should ask for it. “If you give us a good review, we could actually give you some more Novocaine, maybe even some nitrous”, and we’ll see how that works out.
Nick: Yeah.
Rich: Yeah, exactly.
Nick: I promise it won’t hurt, right?
Rich: I know that you have a simple framework for what we do and where we do it. Can you kind of walk us through how you work with your clients using that framework?
Nick: Yeah. So this world is such a black box, and in my world working with attorneys, attorneys have just been ripped off left and right for two decades getting sold a bag of goods and a magic black box. And so I say, look, here’s what you need to think about. You need to think about what you do and where you do it. So when we think about what you do, that means what’s everything that somebody comes to me with?
So if you’re an estate planning lawyer, someone’s going to come to you looking for a trust, an irrevocable trust, a revocable trust, potentially probate if you do that, a living will. “Help me set up business succession planning.” And that’s what you do, so you put that in one list. If you’re a divorce lawyer it’s child custody, alimony, child support, divorce, high net worth divorce, complex divorce, prenups, right? That’s what you do. Then you say, “Where do I do it?” I.e., where do I want business from?
And under that lens, you just want to write out every city or geographic area or neighborhood or state or whatever it is that you do something. Then you put those together, and that gives you a list of what you do and where you do it, and that list could end up being hundreds long. That list is equal to a root keyword. What you do, where you do it.
Then you need to make sure, and this is what obviously Matador does. You need to make sure you have a piece of content that says what you do and where you do it, and that content has to be really rich and really good. But I find that that framework of thinking for people sort of demystifies how we think about keywords. What you do, where you do it. That’s the keyword.
Rich: So once we’ve mapped out our services and our locations, since we are focused on local SEO right now, is there a way that we can evaluate whether we can realistically compete on those searches?
I’m working right now with a PT in part of Maine where he’s admitted there’s not a lot of local competition. So of course, he’s crushing them. He’s always appearing in the local search. But you take that same business, you pop it into the middle of New York City, and there’s going to be 20 people on the same block who might be offering those services.
Nick: Yeah. So there’s a couple ways we do analysis. Obviously, you have the classic way of like, okay, let’s just take my backlink profile, let’s take the number of pages of content, and let’s take my domain rating or domain authority, depending on what your tool of choice is, Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, whatever the tool of choice is today. And for me, that’s changing every day.
And then you’re going to say, “Okay, what keyword do I want to rank for, or what keyword cluster do I want to rank for? How strong are the sites that are beating me for those keywords?” And then we just draw a line, and we say, “All right. My domain rating is a 10. They’re a 25. What’s the path and what’s the time it takes to get me to a 25?”
That’s a pretty good starting point and approximation. There’s another factor that comes into play here, and we see this a lot. Hyper local will beat out a national site that’s much stronger. And so I think of it like a bullseye. So it’s really easy to rank in your own backyard. You should be able to do that pretty quickly, unless assuming your own backyard is like LA or New York City, right?
But if you’re in Long Island in a small town, you can beat out a much bigger site if your office is right there. And then you go one layer out on the bullseye, say it’s two miles or five miles or 10 miles, and from there it gets a little bit harder. So your domain has to be a little stronger. And then as you go out another layer, it gets a little bit harder, and your domain has to be a little bit stronger. This is obviously all just on Google, right? But that’s sort of the methodology that I think about for how to run competitor analysis, if we’re not steeped in SEO.
Rich: When you say your domain has to be stronger, what does that mean, and are there actions we can take to make our domain stronger?
Nick: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a couple big SEO tools that exist today. You have Moz, you have Ahrefs, you have SEMrush. Even most lawyers have heard of these tools in some way or another. And each of these tools will give you something called a domain authority, a domain ranking, or some approximation of that. And that number is a score out of 100 that analyzes your website.
Each has a little bit different of a ranking methodology, but it’s some approximation of, okay, how good is my content? How good is my backlink profile? It’s some approximation of that. Typically, higher is better. And so the way you can increase your domain rating, domain authority, again, whatever your tool of choice is, I got to have good content. I got to have good backlinks. I have to be doing work every single month. And that’s how we do it.
Now, again, these tools are just approximations. I’ve seen sites with 15 domain rating that have great content and great technical SEO, and even some decent backlinks, but simply don’t have a high domain rating ranking in competitive markets. But if you look on a broad scale, like just as a broad sweeping general statement, higher domain rating typically equals higher chance of ranking.
Rich: So once we understand the landscape, we’ve gone through this process of kind of looking at us versus our competition, what are some of the specific things that we can do on our own website to help our chances of getting found in local search?
Nick: So I like to think about local search. So you have your map listing stuff, and that is just pump reviews, do everything you can, which we talked about.
And then when we talk about AI overview, traditional SERPs all that stuff, I like to think in terms of three buckets. And I say, “Okay, what activity am I doing, and what bucket does it fall into?” So bucket one is content, bucket two is technical SEO or code, and bucket three is backlinking or linking overall.
So within that framework, everything I do has to fall into one of those three buckets. So if we talk about the content bucket, we need to write in ways that show our EEAT, expertise, experience, authority, and trust. If you’re a lawyer, we like to use first-party information. Where’d you go to school? What cases have you had? Why should you trust us? What laws do we know about that are relevant to serve to you that show we have experience in this field and that you should trust us?
And you can do some really cool stuff right now actually with the use of AI. For example, if you have 500 case results you could upload, you can actually include your first-party data. Say we had a scooter accident in 2025, we want to write that on our scooter accident page, by way of example. And this is just something that anybody can really do. And then we’re going to write about local resources.
On the technical SEO side, most of our clients or members can’t do technical SEO on their own right now. That’s when they need an expert for it. But we want to make sure we have no broken links, fix any permanent redirect chains, make sure the site loads fast, make sure we have great internal linking, make sure our schema is up to date.
And then backlinking. So things you can do in-house to generate your own backlink profile. And we’re lucky, we have a lot of great clients who understand SEO over time and start to develop their own minds and get backlinks on their own, which is fantastic. So for me, it’s what local business chambers of commerce can you do? Can you guest write on bar associations? Can we run press releases? All that sort of jazz.
Rich: That makes a lot of sense. Now, I’ve worked with some lawyers over the years, and lawyers can write cases very well, but they can’t always write great copy for their website. So when it comes to content quality, what separates the businesses that win from the businesses that just put up content and hope for the best?
Nick: Yeah. Here’s my philosophy on it that’s a little bit different. I care about showing up first and doing what I need to do to show up first and then optimizing messaging later. That’s more important to me. I’d rather be first with sort of messaging I’m not the happiest with, than 10th with messaging I love. And if you look at the click-through rates, all the data would support that. So that’s the first thing I want to say.
But when we talk about messaging, so if we’re looking at content that ranks, that’s what we just talked about, EEAT. First-party data is so important today. And writing question-focused content that actually we’re starting to see huge impact on traditional SERP and GEO. And question-first content is winning right now.
Now let’s go back to that question of how a small firm can compete against a big firm. You need to trade on what you have. So we know that if you’re competing against a big firm, you’re not going to get to talk to the lawyer every time. You’re not going to talk to the lawyer when you pick up the phone. It’s going to be harder. So as a small firm, how can we message around this?
Okay, well, you can say you’re local, right? And how do you know you’re local? You can show it. You can have video of you. You can say, “We pick up ourselves.” And you have to trade on whatever marketing message you have. And there’s someone I was reading on LinkedIn this morning that says, “You got to play the hand you were dealt.” And so whatever hand you were dealt, you should play that because it is your competitive advantage.
At my own law firm, over the last week I’ve received three calls from people that are leaving bigger firms or want to leave bigger firms because they’re not happy with their representation. Most people when a big firm comes into the market, they say this sucks. I’m going to get swallowed up.” I look at it and say, “Well, this is a huge opportunity to show why you’re so much better because you’re known, you’re local, you’ve been serving this area for 30 years. You didn’t just come in with a bunch of money.” So win on that and demonstrate that.
Rich: I want to go back to something you said earlier in the conversation. It was you were giving an example of somebody who might be doing personal injury law in New Orleans, and what would separate them from some of the bigger firms that are out there. And you know, you said something along the lines of you have to come up with your own premise or your own perspective, what makes you different. That sounds great in theory, but do you have any examples when you’ve worked with a client where you’ve helped them uncover something very specific or an approach that they have for DUI that’s different than seemingly what every other firm does?
Because I think that’s where sometimes this gets lost. Everybody knows they need to figure out what makes them remarkable and share that with the world. But sometimes it’s hard to actually find that when you feel like, well, I went to law school and I’m doing this stuff and everybody else is doing the same.
Nick: Yeah. Well, lawyers are not businesspeople for the most part, although that’s changing pretty quickly. And the way I find out somebody’s appropriate messaging is super organic, so I’ve had so many calls lately as we’re bringing new co-op members on, where they’ll say something, they’ll get fired up about something on the call, and I’ll be like, “Wow, we need to record this, put this into an AI tool, and use this as your messaging. Because whatever you just said was so authentic to you that we have to use it. We have to message on it. We have to trade on it.”
And I think people know it internally because if I hand it to somebody, and I’m not claiming to be a branding expert by any means. It’s not my go-to. But if I hand somebody and say, “This is your messaging,” it’s probably not authentic enough. And so you have to tease it out of that person a little bit differently.
And so on these calls, I’ve had so many experiences where it’s like, “Wait, what you just said is perfect. We need to go back to this recording and get this all over the website.” So it’s really organic for me, and it’s fun. It’s fun hearing people get fired up about whatever makes their firm unique.
Rich: Well, hopefully people will be able to take that and run with it. Now, I want to circle back to something else because you had mentioned a couple times GEO. There’s a lot of acronyms out there. I prefer GEO myself, and basically just optimizing so that AI platforms will cite and refer business to you and hopefully even link to you.
As you’re seeing this new channel emerge, what are you telling your clients in terms of how they need to show up for AI in the same way that you helped them show up for local search?
Nick: Yeah. So this is something we’ve been studying since it came out. And as somebody who has invested a lot of time, money, effort, energy into this, I can confidently tell you one thing, that anybody telling you they absolutely understand AI search is lying to you. And I feel really confident saying that.
But here’s what we do know today that impacts AI search. So traditional SEO is just as important as it ever was, right? It’s still a huge part of how you show up in AI search. But AI search, GEO, whatever the acronym is, I like GEO as well, it has another third-party credibility piece to it.
So we’re looking at that as digital PR. How local am I? How many listicles am I in? And then on the website, what’s my content look like? Is it super question-focused? And then there’s a whole list of things that we’re trying that we have no idea if they’re going to work, but we’re trying them now because the people that are earlier in the testing right now and are investing in it are going to win and move faster as we start to learn what works.
So we’re trying ridiculous things. Can we ask chat and say, “Hey, why don’t you recommend me more?” Does that work? Probably not. Do llms.txt files work? This was a huge thing we started looking at when everyone was freaking out about them, and then we actually ran an analysis, and we looked at the top 10 most competitive personal injury markets in the country. We took the first three law firms it recommended, and then we said, “Do these firms have llms.txt files?” Less than 40% of them actually had the files. So we said, okay, there’s probably no correlation here.
And so the things that firms can be doing, or businesses can be doing, are number one, still focus on review generation. Number two, focus on great content. Great content and SEO. Number three, focus on distribution, not just on your own website, and this is the biggest differentiator. So you should be on social media. If you can be, Reddit is the number one cited source by ChatGPT. If you can be on Reddit as yourself for an hour a week commenting, that’s valuable. If you can get third-party distribution through press releases, through best of local lists, hyperlocal is super important. And then work with a partner who is honest about saying, “We don’t know everything today, but we’re working on figuring it out as we get more information.”
Rich: I like everything you said. And you know, it’s funny because I have often gone to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini after asking, “What are the top five digital agencies in Maine”, or whatever it might be that’s relevant for my business. And if I don’t see my company name, I’m like, “How about flyte new media?” And then usually it’s, “That’s a good one, too.” And I say, “Well, what is it that the other firms had that I didn’t? Or I might say something like, “How do you make your decision on what sources are you using?”
And I actually discovered a few of these kind of online guides that apparently ChatGPT was using that I had never heard of. which then made me say I need to invest a little bit of time and effort learning about these platforms because maybe we need to be spending some money or time there. So I love your approach to just asking these AI platforms why you chose the firms you did.
Nick: I took the opposite approach. I said, “Okay, I see where you’re pulling it from, and I’m choosing not to play in this racket because you’re this directory that you’re pulling all these companies from $20,000 to $30,000 a year, I’m just not playing this game.”
Rich: $20,000 to $30,000 would probably get me to find another route as well. This was like free listing and maybe $100 a year or something like that.
Nick: Yeah. Yeah, I was just like, I’m not playing this game. But it’s good information to know. And I also will say, you know, we ask everybody how they found us, right? Everybody. And people are using ChatGPT more, and I’m coming up and I’m satisfied. On the law firm side, of the last seven cases I’ve signed — I track everything closely — three of them have come from ChatGPT.
Rich: I’ve noticed an uptick when I ask my clients, “How did you hear about us?” Where it used to be word of mouth or Google, I’m hearing a higher and higher percentage of AI platforms.
And the other interesting thing is we also track our AI traffic to the website, and although it’s higher than it’s been in the past, it’s a fraction of Google. But it converts at such a higher rate, which is why I think this traffic is so valuable.
And I have a theory that it’s because when we talk to AI, the average person assumes that AI’s done all the research. As opposed to Google, where Google will give us a list of possibilities, then we have to research them. We were like, “Oh, well, AI must have figured out who the best firm is to go with, and so I’ll just start there.”
And I think that that makes a huge difference. That is human psychology. And it may change over time, but for right now, I think the AI’s doing a lot of heavy lifting, so investing in that space makes a lot of sense.
Nick: There one thing I would add to that, which is right now when someone searches on Google, it’s typically a short-tail search. It’s best law firm, divorce lawyer, SEO company, right? And we rank great for it. Or estate planning lawyer, SEO company, or bankruptcy lawyer, it’s super short-tail. Now, if you compare that to how somebody searches in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, whatever platform we’re talking about, it’s typically not these short searches.
What’s actually happening, and I’ll use the law firm example of my own firm, what’s actually happening is somebody is searching their actual facts, and they’re sometimes doing this through a voice search and saying, “This is what happened to me. What should I do?” And they’re just into their AI. And this is changing so much about how we get clients and how we get clients for our clients.
And I think one of the reasons, like my firm’s brand new, right? I went to law school at night. I graduated a year ago. My dad and I opened up the firm. It’s brand new. And the fact that we’re getting three of our last seven cases over the last three weeks on ChatGPT is crazy to me. Crazy, crazy, crazy. But I think it’s because our content is so question-focused, and we just revamped everything about how we write. And so we’re able to provide more information, be a citable source when people call us.
Rich: Yeah, and I definitely think that there is a lot of overlap between traditional SEO and what we’re now calling GEO. So if you were doing a lot of things right with SEO, I think you probably already have a head start on other firms who are just getting started.
Nick, if a small business wanted to get started this week with becoming more competitive in search in their local market, what’s the first thing they should do?
Nick: If you don’t have an agency budget, let’s assume that’s the case, right? Let’s say you’re not going to work with an agency partner, what can you do in-house? Number one, you have to generate reviews, and that has to be your number one focus. Before you start to worry about having an amazing website, before you start to worry about SEO, before you start to worry about GEO, number one thing you can do is generate reviews. This is helpful for two reasons. Number one, it helps you show up in the local map pack or the three-pack. That is huge, right? That’s one of the number one sources of new client calls.
But number two is even when someone gets referred to you via word of mouth, they are searching you, and when they search you, they will read your reviews. And if you don’t have good reviews or a decent volume of reviews, you are going to lose that potential referral. Once you have that in place, you can set up your own website or spend a little bit of money and hire somebody, a freelancer, to build you an average website, and that’s just fine. Then you should just start writing content and getting something out there.
And don’t worry about SEO, don’t worry about GEO, because just by writing content, you’re going to be getting a little bit ahead of the game. And then when you have budget and you can grow, and you want to bring in an expert, then let them fix it. At least you’re handing them something that is somewhat workable rather than starting from scratch.
So I don’t think doing nothing is a good idea. I also don’t believe that spending 20 hours a month when you could be running your business trying to focus on SEO is the best path out there.
Rich: All right. Nick, if people want to learn more about you, about your firm, where can we send them online?
Nick: Yeah, so my law firm is cohen.law. That’s it, just type in cohen.law. You can email me at nick@coheninjurylawgroup. If you’re a lawyer listening to this and you want to talk to me about marketing, Matador, we work with actually over 180 law firms now. My website is matadorsolutions.net, and my email is nick@matadorsolutions.net.
Rich: All right. We’ll have all those in the show notes. Nick, thanks so much for your time today.
Nick: Had a blast. Thank you so much
Rich: Great conversation.
Show Notes:
Nick Cohen is a licensed California attorney and Chief Operating Officer at Matador Solutions, helping law firms and local businesses grow through smarter search marketing strategies. Combining expertise in SEO, AI search, and digital marketing, he has helped businesses compete successfully against much larger competitors by focusing on local visibility, reputation, and content that converts.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.