In November of 2020, we released our inaugural submission of “How Law Firms Will Win in 2021.” This piece outlined ten approaches that we have seen trending for successful law firms. The piece also explained how successful law firms could attract ideal clients during that year. Nearly all of the subjects covered became focal points in 2021, and the law firms that embraced them benefited greatly.
As of October of 2021, we are releasing the resources to be ahead of the curve once again. In the following article, you will find everything you need to tackle each approach. If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact our team. We can help you find the best way to execute the approaches in order to have a successful law firm.
The following material is broken up into two parts: (1) five topics, some of which are accompanied by links; and (2) the podcast transcription, should you choose to read along instead of listen.
10 Ways Law Firms Will Win in 2022
The following are the various approaches that law firms can take to be successful in 2022. Along with some of the approaches, you will find corresponding links. In addition, here’s a link to the entire podcast. Continue reading to discover the ways in which law firms will win in 2022.
Segmentation and Tracking of New Potential Clients
Many law firms have taken up the good habit of tracking leads. Firms have begun tracking the source of their leads, either manually with their trained team or using a CRM or Intake Software Dashboard. Segmentation is the next step in meaningful tracking. Segmentation entails understanding the method by which the potential client got in touch with the firm (i.e., chat, text, call, or form submission), and it also involves a more granular breakdown from each marketing standpoint. For example, if SEO was the source of a lead, what specific page on the website converted them? If it was Google Ads, what particular ad (along with a keyword) created the combination you can continue to replicate with success?
Having a Strong Business-Oriented Stance for Their Law Firm
Attorneys often say, “Law school doesn’t prepare you to be a business owner.” While that may be true, the cliché does not have to be dismissed. In the past year, there has been a surge in law firms embracing business principles and disciplines. There is a noticeable gap in growth potential between the firms that are working on business development and the firms that are not. The firms that are actively becoming more business-oriented are reading business books, hiring COOs, implementing Six Sigma and EOS, and much more. These items alone could break any stagnation being faced by a firm and fast-track a revitalization for a firm.
Taking a Close Look at Paid Marketing Campaigns
Paid forms of digital advertising are expensive. In some instances, they are more expensive than they have ever been, especially for purchasing leads and doing Google Ads. It is important to scrutinize some of these campaigns on nearly a weekly basis to ensure the costs for clicks, conversions, and sign-ups fit within your projections. Since conversion is paramount for these types of campaigns, Conversion Rate Optimization is absolutely necessary for your paid campaigns to succeed. This leads us to the next point.
Introducing Proper CRO to Digital Assets
Conversion Rate Optimization will be heavily on the radar in 2022. Many people (and SEOs) are overlooking the fact that they may have built sites that have massive authority and traffic; however, they could struggle with converting the qualified traffic they are receiving into leads and clients. For example, if your main traffic pages are receiving 5,000 visitors a month, and you are converting 0.5% of them, you may be getting twenty-five leads from that page. Perhaps you could improve the following:
- The load speed of this page
- The mobile experience of this page
- The ease of contact from this page
- The level of engagement on this page (Many websites still have the “big blocks of text” experience on their mobile, where many consumers may engage with content easier if there was imagery or video.)
Simply moving your conversion rate from 0.5% to 1.0% would lead to twenty-five to fifty leads, 300 more leads a year, and who knows how many more clients.
Expanding Their Geographic Presence
This approach is potentially a rehash from last year, but it will forever be important because of how people search. Expanding your geographic presence via content and actual physical locations is extremely important for winning on a local level. There are law firms that win in markets hundreds of miles outside of their backyards by simply executing on a strong geographic content strategy alone. If expanding your geographic presence is not in your arsenal yet, you should make it a priority. This is especially true given the relative ease of entry and traction with this type of campaign.
For more information on expanding your geographic presence, see No. 4 in the following piece.
Continuing to Increase Social Validation
Your average consumer scrutinizes reviews. They will look on Google, Avvo, BBB, and even Facebook. Unfortunately, they even use Yelp. Having a plan in place consistently to have an airtight image online can truly be a make or break for some potential clients, and you may not even know about it. They may even want to see an occasional post on Facebook and Twitter to know you’re engaging your audience and community. Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be a full-blown, heavily involved campaign. Many of these campaigns can be automated, and many vendors can pick up the slack more than ever.
Understanding Vanity Keywords are Vainer Than Ever
When did your main website keywords become the golden standard for gauging how well your SEO is going? Keyword rankings and being a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) can be reliable in setting expectations for leads. For example, if you rank #1 for a strong keyword that your SEO tool states has 150 searches a month—and based on consumer behavior that position may get about 20-30% of the clicks after maps and paid ads—you should get roughly 30-45 visitors a month. Because those visitors used a high intent keyword, the conversion rate should be fairly high. However, these are merely expectations that help us set targets and goals for what we should expect, therefore making the keyword ranking an indicator.
These types of keywords, which would be your “Orlando Family Lawyer” and “NYC Probate Attorney,” are called vanity keywords in SEO circles because they look good when your website is positioned high for them, but don’t guarantee an influx in business. Consumer behavior has changed drastically in the past couple of years, and with the advent of voice search and the adoption of smartphones knowing your location, the lack of use in geographic keywords and the rise of longer, inquisitive queries are making vanity keywords less relevant.
Vanity keywords will always be used, but do you know what percentage of people are actually using them? 50%? 10%? This is something rarely discussed and extremely crucial to your particular market and demographic.
Preparing For Changes in Consumer and Computing Behavior
Every year I ask myself “If people are doing so much research on a lawyer ahead of time, why are directories so relevant?” From an engagement standpoint, “how-to” videos perform once someone is on the website because they are so rarely using YouTube to find an answer to their question.
Law firms that are prepared for changes are asking themselves these questions ahead of time, and maintain a voracious stance to understand Google’s next move, along with finding ways to engage their audience that sets them apart from their competition.
Having a Comprehensive Technical Audit Performed for Their Website
Sometimes it’s great to have an outside perspective or another set of eyes to do a deep dive into your website from many different angles. Whether you work with an agency, consultant, or have in-house that are all absolutely on point with the progress of your digital marketing, it is not uncommon for these law firms to pursue additional insight and have new and fresh conversations about what they can be doing better during project-based, consultative and collaborative audits.
If the budget doesn’t warrant the audit, going through a checklist from someone you believe knows their stuff is always a great option.
Partnering With Transparent, Honest Vendors That Will Help Them Succeed
Transparency has really fallen by the wayside over the years. Law firms that have strong vendors that have their back are just as willing to provide context on the bad as they are with the good. They showcase and highlight not only KPIs (traffic, rankings, etc.) but also have the means to show you a detailed breakdown of what their efforts have provided in the form of qualified leads. That also means filtering out leads that are overly unqualified (form submissions from other marketers, calls from medical offices, calls that hung up after 30 seconds). This is long overdue in the industry, and when strong law firms are finding vendors that possess the values of honesty and transparency in addition to having a formidable service, their relationships will last almost indefinitely.
Podcast Transcripts
Part 1
Chase Williams:
Today on the Legal Mastermind Podcast, we’re going to revisit one of our popular podcasts that Ryan Klein and myself, Chase Williams, did in the past. It was how law firms will win in 2021. And a lot of those topics and items came true, so we kind of wanted to see, right now, it’s September 2021. We wanted to make some predictions for 2022. So, starting off, Ryan, what’s your number one prediction on how law firms will win?
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, I’m excited about this one. It’s a shame we can’t record this later on and just backdate it because we already did say it is September 2021, so we’ll be held accountable certainly for these predictions. None of them are sensational. I think that they’re pretty straightforward, but we’ll go into a little bit of detail for each one. So, you want to start with the segmentation and tracking of new potential clients?
Chase Williams:
It’s becoming easier and easier as the years go on due to technology and new pieces of software coming out, pieces of software that are free, pieces of software that are specifically utilized in the legal industry. And those pieces of software are all integrated together forming one complete tech stack, making life and managing your firm much, much easier.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, like you’re saying, it’s easier than ever to really do solid tracking. Any law firms that are listening that are doing any sort of marketing online, whether it be paid or organic or social, they’re always wondering where things are coming from. Did they come from my Facebook campaign? Did they come from their Google ads or local service ads? And a lot of people can easily track with their website via forums, via chat with phone. And sometimes people throw things together still at this point. So, you’ll have, it came online, we should be way past that. It came from the internet, great. I mean, a lot of things to come from the internet.
Ryan Klein:
Then we have the website, and then at this point, we have individual pages. We know what page people came from, and then from Google My Business, if you have five Google My Business locations, you don’t even want to just say Google My Business, you want to know what location it is. So that’s when the segmentation comes into play. It’s not good enough to just say it came from my Maps. Which Maps? It came from my Google ads. Probably if you have a couple of different campaigns running, don’t you want to know what campaign is working better than another one?
Chase Williams:
It’s also a great way to hold your vendors accountable, rather than saying, yeah, we’re helping out with that. We’re part of your internet campaign. Especially if you have maybe one vendor for pay-per-click, one vendor for SEO, you might even have a specific vendor that’s helping you out with some Maps campaigns. There’s a lot of diversifications right now in the types of services that legal vendors are offering. It’s a really good idea to have some tracking in place, the more specific, the better. A lot of our clients are starting to use products like Lead Docket that give you a total view of a lead all the way to the actual intake, so you’re getting that really, really clear picture for those lawyers that might really want to have that picture and see the value in having all that data. The real value at the end of the day is like, hey, what’s working, what’s not working? Let’s do more of what’s working and let’s cut out the stuff that’s not working. That’s what it really comes down to. Let’s put our marketing dollars into things that work.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. I think that mentioning Lead Docket and there’s all sorts of different case management and CRMs that law firms are really taking on that a traditional business has been using forever. And I think that more than ever, really in the past year, especially when COVID got going, that a lot of law firms have viewed their law firms more as a business now more than ever, and so that’s a good segue. So having a strong business-oriented stance for their law firm, I think the law firms that are really going to excel are really adopting an official outlook on their law firm being a business. And what comes with that is, like you said, some of those business-oriented software and technologies.
Chase Williams:
So, what’s really the first step in destroying your competitors?
Ryan Klein:
Well, there’s a lot of ways to really have that business mindset. There are groups, there are masterminds, it could be on social, it could be on LinkedIn, it can be in person. Reading and educating yourself as a business owner as opposed to, I’m sure you’re a great lawyer and you’ve practiced for a while, and we know that fortunately and unfortunately, a lot of the lawyers that run their law firm like a business are the ones that really experienced the growth at the end day because if you’re B2C, you’re appealing to a consumer. Your consumer doesn’t know that you’re a great lawyer just because you have case results and verdict settlements. They’re going to see you if you’re doing great marketing and advertising and a lot of other things business related.
Chase Williams:
There are many people that don’t like to read so there are great podcasts. There’s a lot of good people to listen to with a grain of salt on YouTube, and a lot of it’s just, if you can take one thing away from a podcast or one thing away from a Booker or a motivational speaker and implement it, it’s always good not to… A lot of these speakers and a lot of these books will be like, this is the way and live your life by what I’m saying right here. And that’s kind of scary because a lot of these guys are perpetuating nonsense, and it’s just the same thing regurgitated. So, it’s important to take a step back and say, hey, does this make sense for my business? How would my employees respond to this? How do my customers respond to these types of actions or ways that I should be running my business?
Chase Williams:
So, it’s kind of good to step back when you’re hearing or listening or reading, or just starting to implement a new business system, is this going to be the best fit for my business? Perfect example for us is EOS. So many people were like, “If you want EOS to be successful, you have to do everything.” And it kind of turned us off for a little bit. So, all at once, we were just like, hey, you know what? We can do EOS, but let’s just start slowly, let’s do one piece of it. We started doing some types of meetings, some types of goals and what EOS calls rocks and setting those up. And we realized, hey, this works really great for our business. What else can we do to implement this part of this organizational system?
Ryan Klein:
If there are some common themes for our clients that we believe have experienced really great growth over the past couple of years, besides working with us. But a lot of them do use EOS, the Entrepreneurial Organizational System. And it’s funny because we’ll have these client meetings and casually, they’ll say, “Oh, tomorrow’s going to be busy. I have my traction meeting.” We’re like, “Traction? What are you doing, EOS?” “Yeah.” Okay. Well, that’s one. Another person. My rocks. Are you doing it us? Yes. Another person. Oh, look at the scorecard. You’re doing EOS. It’s so funny how the terminology comes up in these conversations and the theme is that these particular firms are the ones that really have their stuff together and are organized and are experiencing great growth, and they’re really open with their ideas and they’re extremely optimistic about the future. It’s really cooled to see that.
Ryan Klein:
And then I mentioned mastermind groups before, and I think that’s been really cool for us. And that’s really a good experience for other lawyers that have a little bit of that business mindset, being in an intimate group with other people, hopefully some like-minded individuals, and just talking about what’s working and what’s not. Having that little bit of perspective, it goes a long way.
Chase Williams:
Also realizing that maybe your direct competitor, it’s not always a bad idea to ignore that person. It might make sense to develop a relationship with them and possibly even help each other and learn from each other. And that’s really, really hard to do, especially when you’ve been seeing their advertisements your whole life and you drive by their billboard every day. And you’re like, “I hate this person.”
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, like, that’s so cheesy, their tagline sucks. And especially in legal, since there are egos at play and it can be very competitive, but if you can put that aside, there are a lot of great insights that can come from that.
Chase Williams:
So, shifting a little bit towards maybe away from how you’re running your business and more into the marketing your business. Some of the ways that firms will win, we think that taking a closer look at your paid campaigns. We’ve seen a ton of changes over the past year with paid campaigns, and obviously with LSAs and recommendations on Google, and Google getting rid of certain types of keyword matching, it’s been an interesting year for paid.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, it has, and I think I want to mention this is that paid campaigns can get expensive very quickly. Anyone that has tried doing Google ads on their own and set a budget, then burned through a couple thousand, maybe tens of thousands very, very quickly and didn’t have anything to show for it know that it can be an intimidating process. So that doesn’t mean that anyone’s an expert is completely averse to that. It’s just really easy to burn through the cash when it comes to paid so just really having a grasp, I think. Going back to tying in the beginning, segmentation and tracking, knowing with total certainty, because you can especially with paid, what’s really coming in, truly coming in through those campaigns and making sure it doesn’t really get muddled and just grouped in with everything else that may be working.
Ryan Klein:
Where it’s like, oh yeah, the whole campaign is working, but I have organic tied into that or I have some other things I’m doing unfortunately getting attribution with a paid campaign. So, I think it’s more of a note or a reminder to be very aware of where the marketing dollars go.
Chase Williams:
Yeah. And speaking of that, you just mentioned attribution, that people don’t really talk about much is how a lead is actually attributed to a specific click or a campaign. Because a lot of times, it’s not just the first time someone’s seeing you where that lead comes through. So, let’s say a lead comes through and your setup for last click attribution and it came from somebody searching your branded term. So right away, you’re going to say, okay, well, my branded ad words campaigns are working really well, but that doesn’t really give you a clear picture because maybe what happened was, they went to Google, they typed in personal injury lawyer. They did their research, they saved five different firms. They go back and they say, all right, let me go back and Google Ryan Klein firm, and then they click on an ad and then the lead comes through there.
Chase Williams:
That initial search for personal injury lawyer isn’t going to get credit because you’re set up at a last click attribution. So, there’s other options to do such as a blended attribution or a first click attribution, so it’s something interesting to see when you’re making those decisions about paid.
Ryan Klein:
What’s your favorite attribution? I like the middle click, like the middle child.
Chase Williams:
The middle child. Yeah.
Ryan Klein:
I don’t know if there’s such a thing.
Chase Williams:
Yeah, no. It’s like a blended attribution [crosstalk 00:11:04].
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, blended sounds about right.
Chase Williams:
It makes sense because you can say, all right, this lead came through. All right, 50% is going to go to the first click. [inaudible 00:11:11] go to the last click. And this does happen more often when you’re implementing things like retargeting and your branded searches, but it’s just something to think about when you’re spending your marketing dollars. And especially when you’re talking to your pay-per-click farmer in house, like, hey, what kind of attribution model are we optimizing our campaigns for?
Ryan Klein:
I mean, that can be a difference between a source getting 100% credit and 0% credit. So, it’s very, very important, especially depending on the practice area, how many touch points. PI and criminal, which might be like one click and it’s a good call to action and it’s done, but if you’re doing something that’s a little bit more nurture, someone that’s doing estate planning, someone that is on the fence about declaring bankruptcy, there might be multiple touchpoints. So just some food for thought. That could be a podcast in itself really.
Ryan Klein:
So, something that’s come up a lot this year, which is interesting, it’s been around for quite some time, but I know I’ve been talking about this with the content team, and it carries over to web dev and SEO is having proper CRO or conversion rate optimization for a lot of your digital assets.
Ryan Klein:
So, I know that from a paid standpoint, pulling that back in, that people on paid are obsessed about conversion rates of landing pages. Because again, spending a lot of money on Google ads and other forms of paid traffic in that landing page is going to make or break pretty much of them contacting you. So, people obsess like, “I need to have a 20% conversion rate, or else this landing page is crap.” That kind of thing. But people don’t really think about it too often from an organic standpoint. When you spend all that time creating all that content on your website and optimizing and getting a lot of qualified traffic, for all you know, you have a lot of traffic onto the website but if you don’t track that, that’s a waste of money too. So, you’d have to apply CRO to everything equally, so that’s been something really important this past year.
Chase Williams:
So, what are some examples that you’ve seen, specifically in organic and optimizing?
Ryan Klein:
So, SEOs have a bad habit of going through the process of being like, I’m going to create this page, I’m going to optimize it on-site, we’re going to build links and once the qualified traffic starts to come in, my work here is done. But there also is a role where it’s like, well, what happens to that traffic once it gets to the website? What happens if the page was just big blocks of text? Is that a good user experience? What happens if it looks good on desktop but actually, it looks terrible on mobile? What happens if it’s hard to read? What happens if it doesn’t have a good call to action? What happens if the click to call doesn’t work? So, it’s like CRO is like, I get the traffic, I’ve done the first leg of my work, but the next part is really owning that traffic and seeing what else you can do.
Ryan Klein:
So, in some instances, it depends on the behavior, and it depends on the practice area, but look at it like in someone else’s shoes. If I got to this site, do I want the content leading with something generic or do I want it leading with something that’s going to engage me? Is it easy to contact you once I get to the page? In some instances, even video is a great way to engage someone or get your information across better than text, so that could be a great way to convert people or engage them much more than text would otherwise because, you hear it all the time, people’s attention spans get more in line with a goldfish, if you will, and people want to engage with different forms of content, not always text. So different kinds of content mediums came across once you get them, this is going to be pretty important.
Chase Williams:
Just one final topic we’ll talk about today is expanding your firm’s presence geographically. So, this one’s all you, Ryan, because I you’re doing this all the time for our clients. I’m not really touching much of this.
Ryan Klein:
Well, it’s something that we’ve been doing for quite some time and I’m sure that many people listening has thought about the idea of open up other offices, maybe virtual offices, even though Google doesn’t want you to say it’s a virtual office. They want you to have your own receptionist there and team, which pretty well, a lot of people do that. But just the way things have been going in the past year and a half, people are certainly getting used to doing video consults, they’re used to a lot of professional services being done via Zoom. It’s still the direction we’re going in, I don’t think that people necessarily want to hop in the car and drive across town to meet with someone if they can do it from the comfort of their own home, so therefore, your presence can expand beyond your backyard.
Ryan Klein:
This is happening a ton in California, where there’s lawyers that have been competing diligently in LA. More power to them, it’s very difficult out there, but they can now go out to other areas. People that are down there and they expand out to Fresno, Modesto and San Jose and Burbank and the dozens, if not hundreds of other huge metropolitan areas in California. So, you can do this via local service ads, seems pretty generous about your geography. Of course, you can use Google ads and find opportunities that are less competitive. We still do a virtual office strategy for plenty of people. Sometimes they’re virtual, sometimes they are a physical location. So, the opportunity is still there considering consumer behavior and just how law firms are able to present themselves online.
Chase Williams:
Yeah, and for that virtual office, I think the tip of the day is to not use a virtual office service like Regus. I think that’s just to save anybody that’s never done that a ton of time. Google cracked down a while ago on that, but they’re continuing to crack down on anybody that’s labeling themselves as a virtual office and flagging that location.
Ryan Klein:
You can maybe use your house, but then everyone’s [crosstalk 00:16:53] where you live.
Chase Williams:
I think you should only use your house if you’re a criminal defense lawyer.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:16:58] So yeah, there’s still a lot of opportunities there. People don’t have to always compete, again, in their backyard. Of course, that’s always going to be your home base, but statewide campaigns are extremely viable considering the climate. So those are just five. I think that we have another five to delight our listeners with next time. We’ll be unveiling that later on.
Chase Williams:
And if anybody has any questions for Ryan or me, you can reach out to us at chase@marketmymarket.com or ryan@marketmymarket.com.
Part 2
Chase Williams:
Today on Legal Mastermind Podcast, myself Chase Williams, and my co-host Ryan Klein will be discussing our second part of our two-part series of how law firms will win in 2022. How is it going, Ryan?
Ryan Klein:
It’s going well.
Chase Williams:
Cool. So, we’ve got a couple things to go over today. I’ll just go over these topics and then we can just dive in. So, the first topic is going to be having a comprehensive, technical audit performed on your website. Second, it’s going to be partnering with transparent, honest vendors that will help your law firm succeed. Third, is continuing to increase your social validation. Fourth topic is understanding vanity keywords are more vain than ever. And our last topic will be preparing for changes in consumer and computing behavior, and this one’s really cool. We’re saving it for last because this is the third time we’ve done the study regarding consumer behavior specifically on Google.
Chase Williams:
So, diving right in, having a comprehensive technical audit performed on your website. And I’m sure most law firms have had this done before by various vendors, but technology changes, what Google wants to see is changing. What are your recommendations on things to look out for Ryan?
Ryan Klein:
I feel like the list might be kind of exhaustive. A lot of the technical audits, as it says, they’re technical. So, it’s not so much just using an SEMrush tool or your favorite tool that just gives you a kind of a number or a score, it just spits out really generic information. It’s kind of having people go in and seeing if the site is set up properly from an architecture standpoint, being able to look in maybe Google search console or using a tool like Screaming Frog, to know how robots from Google crawl on your website and make sure that they go to all the pages that you kind of want them to on the website and making sure that there are files that exist in their server without getting hyper-technical, such as a htaccess file or robots.txt to ensure that everything is set up properly to make sure the website’s indexed.
Ryan Klein:
So it’s technical, that’s a podcast in itself, and it’s good to have another set of eyes periodically. Even if you have an in-house, even if you have a SEO agency, just getting a little bit of insight from a third party, every once in a while.
Chase Williams:
And one thing to be wary of you kind of mentioned it is that score that a marketing firm might give you, something like Screaming Frog, or some of the other tools it’s good to use as a baseline. But if you’re reaching out to a marketing firm and ask for an audit and they return a report that says, “Hey, you got a 70 out of 100,” that’s most likely an automated report. And you might be able to catch some things in there that are pretty obvious that have to do with some very technical things. But you really want to find somebody performing an audit that’s really diving into your actual website and not just clicking a button and putting your URL in and delivering you a candid PDF.
Ryan Klein:
I completely agree. It’s not very common for some sort of SEO consultant or agency to just use it like a one to 100 score because numbers are typically arbitrary and they’re mostly used as a reference point for automated reports. So I would like to see something closer to saying “what aspect of your website is either a priority? Is it low; is it medium; is it high? Is it critical?” And then maybe using something like that as a metric as opposed to a number, because if they say something like your meta titles are really poor right now, and they cite a bunch of examples, saying something like “meta titles are extremely important,” and then also saying “it’s highly critical that you update them” would make sense. But if they said you got a 20 out of 100 for your meta titles, it doesn’t mean anything.
Chase Williams:
Moving onto our next topic is partnering with transparent, honest vendors that will help your firm succeed. And this is really important, because a lot of marketing vendors and marketing firms get a bad rep for just not being transparent and hiding things, or not doing the work that they’re promising. And I think one of the, I don’t want to say ridiculous things because it is like a tactic of many firms is like, “oh, SEO is our secret. These tactics we’re performing, they’re all secrets,” and “just worry about your rankings and we’ll take care of everything else.” And a lot of times, a lot of those firms I think, are probably just middlemen and just outsourcing the SEO work anyways. And they might not even understand what’s going into the building of the links or any of the other SEO tactics are going on for the accounts. And I think this is a very common thing.
Chase Williams:
So asking for more transparency from your marketing vendor, it’s something that everybody should be doing because there are no secret and I mean, there’s a couple things that like tips and tricks that you can do to maybe help some of your rankings in some aspects or help rank certain pages or appear more favorably and maybe on your Google local or things like that. But transparency is so key when you’re working with somebody when it’s, especially when it’s supposed to be a partnership and you really want a long lasting partnership.
Chase Williams:
And if you’re one of those law firms, and they’re out there, that just hop every six months to a new vendor, that’s bad too, because you’re not being transparent with your intentions. And it’s difficult for marketing vendors to come up with the strategy, execute on that strategy, and deliver. Trying to think many times a lot of firms think, “oh, the grass is greener,” you know, but at the same time, there’s so many variables that come into play when you’re focusing on a SEO campaign and a successful one that you might have some things that are planned out about six months in advance that you can’t even execute on if you’re you’re hopping vendor to vendor.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. I mean, especially with SEO, SEO is a long play. It happens in a lot of phases and a lot of things aren’t going to happen in the first six months or even maybe even the first year, even though, if it’s comprehensive, a lot of things will- legal is hyper competitive and it’s not cheap. And I don’t think it’s too much to ask for your vendors to be honest, and then also very transparent. So transparency for paid, it doesn’t look like impressions and clicks for SEO, it doesn’t look like keyword rankings and traffic and bounce rate and time and site and onsite behavior; it looks like leads, qualified leads. Was it a first time caller? How long did they call you for? There’s moving along the funnel as far we can go, we get the leads, but also collaborating and being transparent and being proactive and knowing if those leads converted, that’s really the partnership that needs to happen nowadays.
Ryan Klein:
And I know that the law firms that are partnered with the vendors that are really making things happen for them, they probably across the board have plenty of vendors that provide all the information they’re looking for. And then they’re asking for all this information too, to make long term and educated marketing decisions because you need that kind of data. When I think of SEO and transparency, if you’re not being transparent about the work even being done, the law firm might even think that they have to go to another vendor, or get another partner, or pay for another thing because they’re not even sure what they’re doing. They might be doing double work or paying double for a lot of things. If there’s no transparency, so guarantee that’s happening in these relationships.
Chase Williams:
I think one of the best ways to find a trustworthy and reliable and honest vendor is to ask other law firms their experience and to get referrals. So moving on to our next topic is continuing to increase your social validation. So there’s many, many ways to do this. What’s the key technique that’s going to be maybe be a little bit different in 2022?
Ryan Klein:
I think that we used to have conversations with clients about “where should I get my reviews? Should I spread it across different places?” So if it was even just a couple years ago, we’d advise clients, we’re going to get a bunch on Google, but then we’re going to make sure maybe we direct people to Avvo. And just to take a step back working to come up with essentially an email campaign for former clients to ask for reviews, that kind of thing. And we would spread it you know, Avvo or Facebook or maybe a few other places.
Ryan Klein:
But at this point it’s very evident that the benefit of pushing it towards Google is really there because social validation, people doing the research that they do before contacting a lawyer, we did surveys seeing how much time people spend could be as much as 30 minutes people spend. You know how many websites people can go to and how much research they can do in 30 minutes? More than enough, for sure. So that’s definitely one way, is going all in for Google reviews and some other places you may be seeing for your particular practice here. But I think that we’re really heavy with that at this point. What do you think are some other things that consumers are looking for?
Chase Williams:
Yeah. I mean the referral of course is key to any relationship now, especially online. I can’t tell you how many times I bought something on Amazon that had some great reviews and then I’m like, “this product is horrible,” and then you kind of look back at the reviews and I’m like, “man, there’s a lot of fake reviews on here.”
Ryan Klein:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ryan Klein:
So it’s really diving in and making sure that, maybe it might make sense to have a presence on something like an Avvo or Martindale just to have some sort of presence there to increase that validation. One of the key factors too, would be responding to those reviews. So if someone leaves you a positive review, respond to that review. Someone leaves you a negative review, respond to that review. So it’s just more of that validation showing that you’re an actual firm, and across the board this reflects on even social media.
Ryan Klein:
So having a somewhat of a presence, I know we’re not recommending to hire a social media company to go out there and post social for you, but having a presence on Facebook is very important. Having some sort of presence on Instagram is very important. Just showing that you are active people, like you said, that they’re doing their research before they hire somebody. And it might be, we’ve got clients that they love their dogs, and so they don’t have any fancy branded posts. Those are excellent as well, but they’re just showing “Hey, we’re people, these are our dogs. We love our dogs.” And you know, dog people are good people, right? But it really comes down to just helping your consumer make a decision through having these reviews or having some sort of presence.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, I completely agree. Especially we’re talking about social platforms that people have really got into to the swing of blogging a lot, because you don’t want someone going to your website and seeing you last blogged four years ago, you don’t update your website, you don’t update your firm. “Are you even doing anything anymore?” was kind of the mindset. But then that’s true, there aren’t too many law firms that don’t have at least a Facebook, a Twitter, Instagram is really coming about, LinkedIn as well. And no one’s saying you have to post four times a week, but it’s the same thing. If your last post on Facebook was four years ago, people look at that, like what has your firm been doing for the past four years? It’s just that consumer mindset.
Chase Williams:
Moving on to our next topic. We’re going to be talking about vanity keywords and understanding while vanity keywords are very vain, very vain- we were trying to think of a word here. We won’t even get into it, but they’re more vain than they’ve ever been these vanity keywords. And do they even matter? There’s been many times where clients reach out and are appalled that they don’t rank for some very vain keyword at no one’s even searching for.
Ryan Klein:
We’re in Austin, “criminal defense, Austin, DUI, lawyer.” There’s no doubt that 10 years ago, the dominant keyword is “Austin DUI lawyer.” And then you have advent of mobile devices and the changes of consumer behavior and things like COVID that happened. And before you know it, that keyword 10 years ago of “Austin DUI, lawyer” is still important, but it just isn’t as important as it was a decade ago. But yet there hasn’t been this shift partially in ego play of that being a representation of your dominance online.
Ryan Klein:
So I feel like there’s the same emphasis and there’s the same weight placed on “Austin DUI lawyer” as there is now, but there’s not as much volume as there was, but yet law firms pegged that as being a sign of success. Because, like I said, search behaviors changed. People are aware that on a mobile device you don’t have to always propend your geography to get a local search result. So then in that you have just “DUI lawyer” and your result’s going to be in Austin. Then you have people that use proximity. So they use “close to me, by me.” And then you have people that ask questions because they’re doing voice search. And then before you know it, you have all these different search queries and changes in behavior that those keywords, while they’re important, don’t have the same weight that they used to, but the mentality hasn’t shifted.
Chase Williams:
And DUI is a pretty broad example. Something more specific would be like “PI lawyer,” right? And there’s a bunch of cases that PI lawyer, you don’t want. And that’s a whole other angle. Maybe you’re going after specific slip and fall cases and those keywords are going to be way more valuable to you than just general “PI lawyer near me.”
Ryan Klein:
And there’s also the legal jargon that gets wrapped up with what consumers wouldn’t be searching for. So we have conversations about “I want to rank for premises liability lawyer,” and it’s like, what consumer knows what premises liability is? Do they know what negligent security is? Are those the people that are like “I was hurt because there was no security somewhere,” does that sound more in line with it? It’s not a perfect example, but as a consumer when you’re searching, you’re doing your best to really figure out what kind of lawyer’s going to do what, or “can I, or should I, or would I,” and the jargon doesn’t really come into to play as much. Even medical malpractice probably does happen, but if you were talking about like nursing home abuse and neglect, searching “hurt injured at a nursing home” or “accident in a nursing home lawyer,” not trying to say that those are the exact keywords and that’s the searches, but it isn’t often that people are putting themselves in the position of how the search query would actually happen from the consumer standpoint.
Chase Williams:
So just to recap, if you rank for PI lawyer in your city, that’s amazing. And that is a huge vanity keyword. But if you don’t, there’s many other tactics where you might get more qualified cases, ranking for possibly a long tail to keyword or some other variations that we talked about.
Ryan Klein:
Sure. Yeah, I mean, even recently we had a conversation with a law firm that says, “I only want seven figure cases, but I’m okay with car accident cases.” And it’s like, well, if you were to go after “car accident lawyer,” you’d probably get 99 cases you don’t take for every one that you probably do want. So you want to flood your firm, bog down your resources with the stuff, or do you want kind of find the kind of searches or take the different approaches to actually get in front of those more specific people?
Chase Williams:
Yeah, so as a lawyer, if you knew that case was involved with like a wrongful death, that’s the case they’re probably looking for, right? You know, it’s something to think about. That’s not really changing for ’21 versus 2022, but it’s thinking about how the consumer searches, and that’s changing. Our final topic here is preparing for changes in consumer and computing behavior. And this one’s really exciting because Ryan, you’ve done three studies now. And when I say you’ve done studies, these aren’t studies internally, these are quantitative and qualitative studies through third parties with hundreds and hundreds of people, right?
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, each survey probably had between 300 to 500 people that participated. Showed them a page of a search result, you know a SRP, and basically put them in a hypothetical situation and said “number one would be local service ads, and this is Google ads and this is GMB, Google My Business, and these are organic results,” and basically saying “which one would you select based off of your search preference? Why, why not?” And I believe this study started really when local service ads just started getting rolling. So that would’ve been just around like August of 2020, then again in January of this year, then again in June, and then recently September. So I actually probably did it about four times and really it just showed this trend where local service ads, if anyone doesn’t know, those are ads that show up with pictures of lawyers at the top with social validation, the reviews, and no one really adopted it at first.
Ryan Klein:
So it was about 10% of the clicks, and then it went up to about double to 20, and now it’s hanging around, I think about 30% of people said that they prefer those ads, and all the while the preference was taking clicks, or the preferred method was all coming away from Google ads, and not coming away from organic. So the whole time organic was sitting at a combined 60% between maps and organic, and the 40% was paid above. But as for pretty much every percentage was going towards LSAs, they’re coming away from ads. So most recently having done this survey, in this particular survey only 10% of people preferred clicking on Google ads, which is, that’s pretty low. The reason that they gave us was very clearly an ad. I think that a lot of people are getting sick of advertisements and compared to LSAs, they’ve just kind of become, I want to say closer to a no brainer.
Chase Williams:
Many of the consumers, I don’t think, know that an LSA specifically is an ad, even though I believe it might say that right on top, but just through training over the years of search on Google those first couple queries, now that show up are ads. And this kind of flows down to the other thing I thought was interesting in your study, Ryan was the maps. I don’t know if you want to talk about that a little bit.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, and that’s at an all time high too. Again, this all ties into social validation. You know, LSAs have reviews, GMB has reviews. So maps has really kind of peaked at about 40% of clicks. This has a lot to do with how they’re presented on mobile. I mean, they do provide all the information. Organic, everything below, people are saying “no one’s going down there.” We agree that being one, two, or three, or anything below that is an uphill battle. Those are the most coveted searches.
Ryan Klein:
So for short tail this was a vanity search too, going back to that, I was like, “Orlando, DUI, lawyer,” or something like that. So organic was hanging around 20%, but that’s for the short tail for long tail, organic is still dominant. LSAs, don’t always show up in long tail, sometimes they don’t at all. Google ads doesn’t show up as much even Google My Business doesn’t always show up for the long tail. So organic is always going to be relevant because it does have a presence in the short tail, but it definitely does in the long tail. Organic is hanging steady since we started it, hovering around 60% has not moved for the past almost year and a half.
Chase Williams:
Yeah, it’s probably just as people that are just going to really do their research and look across Google to find and the best content that they’re looking for based on their search.
Ryan Klein:
So I think this is what we have to look forward to next year. I think that a lot of the firms that are finding success in 2021 are going to be doing most or all of the initiatives that we’ve discussed over the past two podcasts.
Chase Williams:
Yeah, definitely. And it’s October of 2021 right now we are three months away from the end of the year. So I know everybody’s kind of planning their last quarter. So hopefully many of the listeners are able to implement some of these tactics into their either Q4 or Q1 2022 plans.
Ryan Klein:
Don’t wait to get started.
Speaker 2:
Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind Podcast. If you’re interested in working with Ryan and Chase, please email mastermind@marketmymarket.com. Make sure to join the free mastermind group for growing and managing your firm at lawfirmmastermind.com. Ryan Klein and Chase Williams are the managing partners at Market My Market, one of the top legal marketing companies in the United States.
The ongoing digital revolution is transforming the way that all businesses interact with clients and customers. Consumers rely heavily on digital channels for researching products and services and expect to make buying choices with the swipe of a finger. For organizations that want to remain competitive, having a defined digital marketing strategy and execution plan is essential for successful outcomes. With a demonstrated history of creating and implementing strategic digital marketing initiatives that drive growth, I am committed to delivering real, measurable results for my clients.
