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Greg Sterling walks Mike Blumenthal through original Near Media user research — the "Choosing a Lawyer" study of the Atlanta personal-injury market, first presented at the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit in Nashville. Using a user-testing video, a 350-person survey, and head-to-head ad-creative testing, the episode shows how prior brand awareness quietly steers online behavior: which result gets the click, which firm gets the benefit of the doubt, and who ultimately gets hired.

The throughline: brand is a pre-existing advantage that works before anyone compares options. Google is still the default first stop (fewer than 2% start with AI), reviews are the single biggest factor when brand is absent, and TV — not digital — builds most of the awareness in legal. Strong creative can close a 20-point awareness gap, but when forced to pick one, people still revert to the firm they already know. Brand and performance marketing aren't rivals; they compound.

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Four agency operators join Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal to close out the Near Memo brand-building series: Paula French (Search Influence), Joy Hawkins (Sterling Sky), Andrew Shotland (Local SEO Guide), and Matt McGee (SEO Savvy Agent). It's a tactics-first conversation about what "brand" means for a local business now that AI Overviews, LSAs, and ads have squeezed organic off the first screen.

The panel gets specific: a startup's AI visibility jumping ~400% in a week off two press mentions, why third-party mentions now outweigh review count in AI answers, local listings as a cheap brand-mention engine, the reusable "fast expert" bio that scripts what LLMs say about you, "competitor jiu-jitsu" content, and why YouTube is both a top lead source and the most AI-proof play you can make. It closes on a warning: scaled content and scaled link building are what's getting penalized this year — foundational marketing is what's rewarded.

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We're on vacation this week, so we're re-running one of our favorite April conversations. It still speaks to our current series on brand in local, and a live panel on local digital brand strategy follows next week.

Cyrus Shepard (founder of Zyppy) joins David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal to unpack what the Google antitrust trial, the leaked patents, and the API leak revealed about how Google really ranks: user click data. They walk through the three signals that matter — clicks, long clicks, and the "last longest click" — why brand search keeps correlating with rankings, and what AI Overviews are doing to the click ecosystem, including how local businesses can still earn (and satisfy) the click.

Practical throughout: consolidating reviews and booking onto owned surfaces, using Search Console's branded-query filter as an AI-Overviews scorecard, and why a too-clickable title tag quietly costs you traffic.

Be sure to listen to our series on branding.

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