You have to spend money to make money, right? Yes and no. Many attorneys waste thousands of dollars a month on SEO and Google Ads without knowing what kind of return on investment they're getting. These attorneys should stop spending money on ads immediately. On the other hand, if a law firm has a specific SEO and marketing strategy, they've defined metrics of success, and they're tracking the results, then they should spend more money since they've built a lead machine that will produce consistent clients.
Video Transcription
Dave Martin (00:00):
What does the Loch Ness Monster and attorneys spending a ton of money on marketing just to get a lot of clients have in common with each other? That's right. They're both myths. And that's what I'm going to be talking about today is what is the biggest myth with attorney marketing?
(00:23):
Okay, so when it comes to myth, I'm a guy that has to see it to believe it. So show me Nessie, show me the Loch Ness Monster, I'll believe it, but I probably won't see it, at least anytime soon. I also don't live anywhere close to the Loch, so I'm probably not going to see that. But another myth that I see almost every single day, that is attorneys spending a ton of money on marketing. They really shouldn't. Now I preface that with, they should be spending money on things that are working. And oftentimes, attorneys, especially attorneys that remember the old days, and when I say the old days, I might lose half of you that are watching this, but in the old days, attorneys used something called the Yellow Pages, something like this big and this thick, this yellow book with all the businesses in a city alphabetized by the industry.
(01:20):
Well, attorneys would spend thousands of dollars a month to have their faces on pictures, they call them double truck, to be on both sides of the page. And it would be worth five, six, $10,000 a month to get your information in the yellow pages like that and your picture, but the thing is, it worked. And honestly, the more money you spent, it had a direct proportion to the amount of clients that came in. What's happened though, is that as digital marketing has gained prominence, a lot of these sales channels and marketing channels have fragmented. So having all your money in one or two channels, it only can work so far. And so this is what we see all the time with attorneys that we end up working with, is that many of them are spending 10, 20, $30,000 just with Google Ads, but they haven't looked at any other channels on how to acquire clients.
(02:17):
And that is where we start with in helping attorneys really kind of bursting this myth that you have to spend more money to get more clients. So where should attorneys put their money? Well, instead of putting all of it into one or two advertising channels, the obvious answer is an SEO or search engine optimization. Now, that probably sounds like common sense. Most attorneys know they should be investing in SEO, but therein lies the issue. The average attorney is spending four or $5,000 a month on SEO. Some of them are spending over $20,000 a month, getting high quality back links and guest blog posts, which all result in a much higher ranking on Google.
(03:03):
But here's the issue. There's so many attorneys out there that look at SEO as, "Well, if I spend a lot of money there, I'm not going to see a lot from that in a long time. Versus if I put the same money in Google, I'm going to keep getting calls and things like that." Of course, on the surface that makes sense, but we all know Google, you're going to lease space with Google Ads, you lease space at the top of a Google search result, but with SEO, you're actually earning that space so that you could stay on page one. So what this video is about, it's not about spending 15, $20,000 on SEO, but it is, how do you have a very refined SEO campaign that's going to get you clients much cheaper than what you're spending with Google? So if you like wasting money, keep spending 15, 20 grand a month in SEO, but a lot of our clients are spending a fraction of that and they're getting similar results. And so I want to cover the three top things that we're doing right now with these clients to get results.
(04:06):
So the first one is focusing on long-tail keywords. Now, what does that really mean? Well, it'd be great if your website appeared for personal injury attorney, Los Angeles, assuming you're based in Los Angeles. Well, that is one of the most competitive search terms in Los Angeles County. You could spend two and a half years going after that to appear on page one, and you might not totally get there. So why even start? Instead, you could go after more long-tail keywords, best dog bite lawyer, Los Angeles. Sure there's going to be a lot less searches for best dog bite lawyer in Los Angeles, but that's a much shorter mountain to climb, and you could get up to page one very quickly focusing on long-tail keywords.
(04:55):
The next is blog posts. So Google loves fresh, relevant content. Sure, you could stuff your website full of the keywords that you want, but you really can't go crazy anymore because Google will ding you for having too many keywords unnaturally occurring in your site. So what many attorneys do is they'll have an ongoing blog post that would target a lot of these key words. So you might be thinking, "Well, that sounds great, but I don't have any time to write myself."
(05:28):
Well, you don't have to. You could go to a service like Upwork or like ProBlogger, and there's tons of writers that have legal experience that can write on any topic that you want covered for a fraction of what you charge per hour. That content would have the keywords you want in it, and then it's put on your site. And that's a very fast way targeting these long-tail keywords to rank for them eventually on page one.
(05:56):
The last tip I want to give you is getting more online reviews. It still surprises me that there's always about 5% of attorneys that really get this in any city. You'll see them. They usually have over a hundred reviews on Google and Yelp. And not only do people read those and make decisions to call based on what those reviews say, but Google loves them, because you're doing Google's job for them. Now, really quick, put yourself in the position of Google. Pretend for a second, you own Google. And if somebody Googles some search, best personal injury attorney, what results are you going to show them? Well, you're trying to determine how relevant are these attorneys that I'm going to list out on page one. So if as an attorney you've gone to the trouble of getting 170 reviews on Google and Yelp, well then you're showing Google that you are relevant as an attorney, as a personal injury attorney, for example, because you've gotten all these reviews about that.
(06:54):
And that's something that factors in huge when it comes to Google ranking, personal injury and other kinds of attorneys on page one. And the best part is it does not cost anything to ask past clients to give you a review. It's amazing to us how attorneys that do these three things, invest in long-tail keywords, targeting them on their site, creating blog posts, targeting those long-tail keywords with those blog posts, and then lastly, getting more reviews online, it's amazing how when they do these things, that many of our campaigns have similar results to the same competition spending five, 10 plus thousand dollars a month on a SEO campaign. So the point is, don't stop spending money. Of course, as an attorney, it is part of being an attorney. You're going to have to spend, but you want to make sure that you put good dollars on good tactics, and that's what this is all about. You can get so much more of an SEO campaign by laser focusing on where your dollars need to go. Thanks.
