Local Link Building With ZipSprout and Sallie Clark

Sallie Clark: [00:00:00] Thanks, Matt. It's great to be here.

Matt Hepburn: I'm so happy to have you on the show today to talk a little bit to lawyers and law firms about zip sprout the platform and how this type of link building can help with local search results, either the local organic search results and in some instances also influence the Google local 3 pack or the Google local pack.

Matt Hepburn: So thank you so much for being on the show and, just for the listeners note ZipSpout is part of Citation Labs. We have two other episodes that are going live on the show with both Garrett French and James Wirth, who are part of Citation Labs and we'll talk about other forms of link building.

Matt Hepburn: I was hoping you could talk a little bit about ZipSpout. What Zip Sprout does and how it's different from other forms of link building for local and, and how it can really help lawyers, change their rankings locally. That'd be great. [00:01:00]

Sallie Clark: Absolutely. Well, law firms, it's a very crowded space.

Sallie Clark: And in order to rank and to really become visible in the search results, it takes a plethora of different marketing tactics and one of them would be local link building. Our clients are either their marketing agencies or directly with law firms themselves, but they're wanting to engage with their community.

Sallie Clark: Show support, develop grassroots connections, and this is a great way to do it. Our clients come to us, tell us where their locations are, what their budget is, and then we go to work finding relevant, sponsorable opportunities. So, when I say relevance there's three different factors that we look at.

Sallie Clark: There's local, audience, and topical. And each one of those [00:02:00] are very important. The local relevance is, You can give us a zip code, a county, an area on a map, and we'll search within that area. Topical, it's more like topical related article or connections. And then same with the audience, it's meaningful links for specific audiences.

Sallie Clark: If you can get all three of these relevance factors, you've hit the sweet spot.

Matt Hepburn: That's fantastic.

Sallie Clark: But even if you just hit one of these relevance factors, like the location factor, it can help your local Google rankings.

Matt Hepburn: So what would you actually recommend for lawyers and law firms if they were to get links from ZipSpout?

Matt Hepburn: Would you have them link directly to the location page that's associated with the Google business profile? Or would you have it linked to their home page or to their area of practice? What, what is the best practices that you guys usually look at? [00:03:00]

Sallie Clark: Well, it's completely up to the firm. You know, if they have opened a new you know, estate and planning type of sector that they want to promote, we can go to that page.

Sallie Clark: Obviously, if it's a firm with several different locations, and we're looking, let's say, one of the locations is in Dayton, Ohio, then we would want to, of course, link it to the Dayton page in order for the location to be relevant.

Matt Hepburn: Right. That's that's what I thought, but I just wanted to double check. So that, that is, that is fantastic.

Matt Hepburn: So when you said, could you explain what a sponsorship opportunity is for the lawyers and law firms that may not understand what that is and how that's different in link building versus a guest post or a citation, the business citation that you might have for a Google business profile. That'd be fantastic.

Sallie Clark: Absolutely. So we always ask for preferences, like it may be something close to their heart, like [00:04:00] they love animal shelters, or they love supporting breast cancer awareness or something like that. We can focus on that, but let's say it's a private injury law firm, we will go for, look for more high risk behavior type organizations, like, Rugby clubs or, you know snow skiing outfits, that type of thing.

Sallie Clark: And we'll make a donation on the law firm's behalf, according to their budget. And in recognition of the donation, the organization puts our clients logo and link on their website for 12 months. And that is something that we facilitate on their behalf from start to finish. They just approve or reject.

Sallie Clark: There's always an option. I guess I should put this in here. We're matchmakers. Really? We find these opportunities, we present them to the organization. If they say yes, we agree. Then we move forward and present it to the law [00:05:00] firm or the marketing agency. And if they say yes, then we handle fulfillment on their behalf.

Sallie Clark: The beautiful thing about our business model is it's completely free to the organizations that we sponsor. Our client pays our fee. And so this is link building. You can really feel good about. We've donated over, I think we're up to 6. 5 million now on behalf of our clients since we've been in business.

Matt Hepburn: I know from some of our other conversations that you said there might be a renewal opportunity for some type of links. Could you explain a little bit about that?

Sallie Clark: Sure, sure. If a year's up and any client wants to renew them, these are half priced.

Sallie Clark: So our fee is 150 per fulfilled length. So a renewal would be 75 plus the cost of the sponsorship. But what we do is we go in and we make sure that the client still isn't listed. Often times. [00:06:00] These organizations don't have the manpower or they just kind of want to leave their sponsors up and we won't renew that.

Sallie Clark: We leave those alone. But if it's been taken down, then we can reach out for renewal and see if they're interested.

Matt Hepburn: You also have a tool, right? If, if they wanted to do a D Y I opportunity, if the lawyer, if they had an inside marketing person they, they could look up some of these sponsorship opportunities themselves.

Matt Hepburn: Could you talk a little bit about the tool?

Sallie Clark: Sure we do have the local sponsorship finder. I will share with you, it's not as full of a database as what we tap into, but it is a good starting point. And also I can reference our blog on our website. There is a DIY, sort of a process that you can follow to [00:07:00] know what information to gather when you're talking to the organizations and, and that type of thing to try and it's a very time consuming and tedious process, tedious process.

Sallie Clark: And that's why people engage with us to do it because it does take a lot of time to get in touch with the right person and, And lay out all these details that get them nailed down. We have that process down pat.

Matt Hepburn: To that point, I mean, there are a lot of back and forth of emails, right?

Matt Hepburn: I think that most lawyers are very busy and they're going to want to have the service take care of it. They're not going to want to spend the time to do that. So, I love the fact that it also supports the local community. All right. So that, that actually is, brand awareness to that firm, isn't that, would that be right?

Sallie Clark: Yeah, it really helps cultivate those grassroots connections. You know, if I'm, if I have my child in a little league [00:08:00] and all of a sudden I need a lawyer, I might, Go to that law firm that's supporting my child's extracurricular activities.

Sallie Clark: And also, it's important to note too, Matt, that we can do logo and link, but if you, on the website for 12 months, but if you want to further engage, like set up a booth at an event, put a banner in the outfield, social media mentions, anything like that, we can look for that too. We just need to know to look for it, but I will say that those who engage more with the organizations that they sponsor reap more benefits from the sponsorship.

Sallie Clark: So yeah, yeah. And that really helps get those relationships, started.

Matt Hepburn: Well, is there a way for, how do people contact you? How did they get started with, with us?

Sallie Clark: Sure. You can reach out directly to me. I'm [00:09:00] Sally with an IE at zipsprout. com or go to zipsprout. com and there's a request for more information.

Sallie Clark: And that comes to me and I'll be happy to respond to you.

Matt Hepburn: This is amazing. I'm so happy that you came on the show today. Was there any other information about the platform that you wanted to share today?

Sallie Clark: Well, the one thing that I think is really relevant right now is a lot of link building seems to be done by AI.

Sallie Clark: And that's where you can get into trouble without that human connection. You don't want to go to Google jail. You know, if someone comes to us and says, I want 50 links, we're going to say, well, we're not going to build them all in one month. We need to spread them out and, and let's have organic growth here.

Sallie Clark: So we're really looking out for best practices from Google and trying to share them with you, with our [00:10:00] clients so that everything. goes exactly the way we imagined it would.

Matt Hepburn: Yeah. I think we talked about a Sterling sky case study recently where it talked about the velocity of links being built and how people are starting to get penalized and in this case, I think that case study was 87 links and that website had gone from zero to 87 links within 12 months.

Matt Hepburn: And Google just said that. You know, for a local business that wasn't realistic.

Sallie Clark: Right.

Matt Hepburn: To your point, I think it's very important to set the expectations to lawyers and law firms that, you know, one a month, two month, perfectly acceptable and we'll move the needle where we need it to move.

Sallie Clark: Right.

Matt Hepburn: As long as it's, like you said, that relevance of, of audience and topic.

Matt Hepburn: And what was the other one?

Sallie Clark: Location.

Matt Hepburn: Yes, location. [00:11:00] So the three trifecta, we'll call them.

Sallie Clark: There you go. The other thing that I would love to touch on too is domain authority. Yeah. In local link building, domain authority does not have as much weight as location. They, you know, it's, it's.

Sallie Clark: It's the weight of the links being location based overshadows the website's DA score. And what makes that so wonderful is higher DAs generally cost more, but you really don't have to pay it at this focused level.

Matt Hepburn: for the audience, domain authority or DA is a third party metric that's been created by software companies like Moz and Ahrefs.

Matt Hepburn: They all have their own version of it and it usually is an indication of how many referring domains as well as backlinks are coming to that website. And the [00:12:00] philosophy that was built upon was originally that said, Hey, the, the more links that this website has coming into them the easier it is going to be if you get a link from them to rank your, your content.

Matt Hepburn: And what we found in the last few years is that Google has said it is not the number of links. But is the relevance of the link. So especially topically relevant and what it's not just about the page, it's about what the whole websites about. It's about the incoming links that are going to that website.

Matt Hepburn: So holistically, you really want that website to be topically related. If it can be locally related and the audience who is looking at is aligned or What we call a shoulder niche, very closely aligned to what you're talking about, then it makes sense. And that's relevant. So that's why less links make more sense as long as they are [00:13:00] relevant versus trying to get tons of links that are not relevant.

Matt Hepburn: And we'll end up getting you into Google jail, like you said.

Sallie Clark: Right, right. One thing that one service that we do offer is a link gap analysis. It's completely free to our clients. We take an in depth look at them and their competition and it gives you a good gauge of where you rank and what you may need to do in order to catch or pass your competition.

Sallie Clark: And then also. We have no minimums or maximums on how many orders or how many links you need to order at a time. You can do one a year, you can do four a quarter, you can do, you know, it's completely up to you. So we just work at your pace. Which is great, especially on the local side. So, you know, it can be something that's affordable for the budget.

Matt Hepburn: And it looked like that the beginning kind of sponsorships were somewhere in [00:14:00] between 350 to 550 of what I saw from the presentation. Is that correct?

Sallie Clark: Yes. They run between that. And then the client adds our fee onto it. So if it's 350, the total cost would be 500 for presence on a local organization for 12 months.

Sallie Clark: It's a pretty good deal.

Matt Hepburn: Yeah, no, it's fantastic. Well, did you have anything else that you wanted to share about local links and ZipSprout?

Sallie Clark: Well, I think we've covered all of it. I really do. It's really a, we're in a very niche market, and this is what we specialize in and have been doing for years.

Sallie Clark: And we're here because we do it well.

Matt Hepburn: I hope to talk to you and Citation Labs very shortly.

Sallie Clark: Sounds great, Matt.