Ep. 40 - SEO Without the Overload – What Attorneys Really Need to Know

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor podcast, I break down SEO for attorneys in a way that cuts through the jargon and focuses on what truly matters. 

You don’t need to memorize thousands of Google signals or speak in acronym-heavy tech language to make SEO work for your firm. What you do need is clarity on your KPIs and a high-level understanding of how SEO impacts your bottom line.

📲Get The Support Your Law Firm Needs: https://www.thelawfirmgrowthprofessor.com/

I explain why most metrics in SEO reports are noise and why ROI—not clicks or likes—is the golden metric. You’ll learn the difference between white hat and black hat SEO, why great content is the foundation of success, and how to align your marketing strategy with your ideal client. I also share practical tips for working with SEO agencies, avoiding vanity metrics, and ensuring your campaigns deliver real results.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by SEO terminology or wondered whether you need to become an expert to grow your firm online, this episode will show you why the answer is no—and what you should focus on instead.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

The Law Firm Growth Professor 0:00

This is Pod Populi, podcast for the people. Call the Pod Professor. That's my name.

John Rizvi 0:13

Hi, and welcome. I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came to join me today. For my returning listeners, it's always great to have you. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today. A team of 60 professionals generating over$10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs. Today, I want to talk to you about SEO specifically for attorneys. More to the point, I want to explain why you don't have to know every single term, acronym, and abbreviation that SEO agencies use. Did you know that you don't need to know this stuff? It's good to have a grounding in it, it's good to understand the basics and the high-level things that will impact your marketing campaign and your bottom line and your ROI on your marketing. It's not important that you know and understand down to the granular level every single one of the 14,000 plus signals that Google analyzes. Most of them do not matter in practice. Sure, they're good as a baseline and you can use them as a tiebreaker in the event that you have two conflicting data points and one of them says everything's going great, and the other one says not so much. However, for an attorney, you've got plenty to do already with your practice. You've got plenty on your mind and plenty in your head. So you have to have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish with your marketing. Otherwise, you're not hiring. Why would you be hiring a marketing agency in the first place? And I've stressed this before, and I'm going to stress this again. You need to have a very, very clear picture of what your key performance indicators are. And once you know that, you know about 90% of what you need to make this work. Your SEO agency can help fill in the blanks. But here are a few things that I really think people need to know and don't spend enough time thinking about. The first one is White Hat SEO. We've talked about this before. White Hat SEO is simply SEO done right, done ethically, done correctly, and done with the needs of the client and the end user in mind. Black Hat SEO, on the other hand, is only concerned with getting you results fast. It's all about the client. It's not about the final end user. And it's not about whether or not they have a good experience. It's all about throwing garbage on the board and seeing what sticks. If you understand that difference, you now understand about 95% more about SEO than the average person on the street. The next thing you need to understand is metrics. There are all kinds of metrics in SEO. You can get metrics until you're blue in the face. Do all of these metrics matter? Most of the time, again, they don't, because these metrics are tied to one of 14,000 data points that Google looks at to decide where to rank websites and web pages for presentation to the final end viewer. Most of this stuff you don't need to know, and you'll never have to know. You will never ever be quizzed on this. It's not going to matter in the slightest to your bottom line. Your SEO consultant will likely not know more than a quarter of them at any given time. And they're supposed to be the experts in this, but they only know a quarter of all the signals, and that's on the high end being optimistic. So we can hand wave that right now. What I can tell you is that the metrics that uh that don't matter, these are your clicks and likes and vanity metrics similar to those. Page views start to get important because they can give you a clear trail from this click to these page views to people asking for more information. They're digital breadcrumbs that you can figure out, use to figure out approximately how many impressions you need to generate to distill that down to one paying client. This information is important and you can leverage it, but it takes time. It takes a willingness to stay the course and it takes an understanding that you're not going to get all of this information in one shot on day one. You may have to wait six to twelve months, and in the meantime, you'll need to keep constantly refining, polishing, replacing, upgrading, and renovating until you finally find the magic formula for you and your law firm. The one thing you can't and you must not sleep on is the difference between search engine marketing and social media marketing. They're both important and each can absolutely influence the other, and they do. This is why I advocate that people going on X or people going on Reddit and doing Facebook advertising, if you have the budget for that, all of these things help. And of course, marketing directly through the search engine is never a bad idea either. That being said, you need to understand the difference and the limitations between marketing for a search engine and marketing for social media. They work along a lot of the same lines, but they're not the same. And they don't accomplish the same things in a vacuum. So you need to be very clear where you're going to start with your marketing. And that's a decision that you and your SEO agency will have to make together and through communicating. The next point that you need to think about is how do you figure out your ROI? ROI is the golden metric. If you spend$5,000 and you get 5 million clicks, you only get three clients out of that. It might not be a great investment. It depends on what your average case value is. But if you spend$5,000, you get$500,000 clicks, and you get 10 clients, now things are looking a lot better. Now again, I've spoken about this before. Some SEO agencies will want to tie the success of your campaign to vanity metrics, which makes no sense because vanity metrics aren't padding your bank account. They're not going to, and they can't. It's simply not possible. Therefore, you have to figure out which metrics are really important and which metrics don't matter. And you have to understand what to do with them. Think of it like this. Most of us know about HTTP and URLs and things like that. We see them and we work with them all the time. Do you have to know what they do to get the results you're looking for? No, you don't. It's helpful to understand why we use them and how they work. Yes, it is. The HTTP protocol scheme was invented by Dr. Tim Berners-Lee. He's today considered the father of the modern internet because these protocols allow us to communicate with each other seamlessly and to some degree securely. But you don't have to know how a URL markup works in order to use one. And you probably don't care why a good URL markup can help your website show up in Google to the best possible advantage. That's where the SEO agency comes in and says, yes, we've done this, we've done this, and we've done this, and this is the result. But you don't need to become an internet marketing expert in your own right if you don't want to. And let's face it, most people don't want to. They don't give a damn. What they inevitably want is a process that they can take with faith that their SEO agency knows what they're doing, and that they really care about is whether or not the campaign works. Is this website redesigned doing what I intended it to do? What I wanted and needed it to do in order to keep my associates paid, my rent current, and cover my overhead, and allow me a reasonable standard of living. If the answers to all of these things are yes, then congratulations, you're on the right track. What about acronym heavy technical robotic language? It sometimes helps to understand the basic glossary. But honestly, if you know the four terms I've given you here, you're already ahead of the game by a lot. So now the question becomes well, if I don't need to know this, what's stopping me from doing it myself? And the truth is, nothing is stopping you. But it's helpful to at least have a high-level understanding of how all of this works and how it all fits together and how it's influencing your bottom line. Because a lot of uh SEO agencies are bad about this. Uh, when they're not sure of their footing, they'll turn to jargon and techno babble and hope that they can lose you and get you off on a bunny trail so that you're not thinking about the actual important questions, which is what exactly am I paying you X dollars a month for when I'm not seeing that money coming back into my firm? And this is a perfectly fair question, if as I've discussed before. So the question then becomes okay, how do I know what's important and how do I know what's just smoke and mirrors and static that I can ignore? I'll make that very simple for you. You can safely ignore about 99.9% of the metrics that you see in an average SEO agency report. 99.9% isn't that sounds crazy, but you don't have to know all of this stuff. Most of this stuff only matters in relation to everything else. So if you pull it out, it makes no difference whatsoever in a vacuum. So uh what you want to know then, and what you need to focus on is uh that you have great content that's updating and you're making sure that everything's correct, factually correct, and relevant to your client's needs. Again, I'm going to go back to something I've talked about before. You need to understand your ideal client. You need to have a conversation with your ideal client, and then your ideal client will find you. And so will others that fall in that same bucket. So you need to know that, you need to understand that, and you need to be ready for that. But it starts and ends with great content, and you need to keep it relevant. You need to make sure that your content answers a question or serves a purpose for a client. Now you can do a lot of things without giving legal advice. For instance, you could offer, say, a checklist for estate planning law. Uh, 10 things that you should be doing right now to prepare your estate for your passing. That would be a great uh great one. Listicles are not as popular as they used to be online. That's of course uh uh you know something that that could change, but listicles are still a good way to get a lot of good factual information and a lot of great SEO opportunities into a relatively small package. And that's why listicles are still popular with content creators. Long-form content is another example of content that's always welcome on Google. If you evaluate a case that might be relevant to somebody dealing with a problem with family law, something the Supreme Court or the circuit courts have ruled on, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. The point is, thought pieces like how does the Supreme Court's new ruling impact your child custody case? If you're a family law attorney, you have that knowledge, you have that background, you have that skill. So go ahead and play to your strengths. The final question that you need to be asking yourself is this What is it that you need to know that's not necessarily what marketers want you to see? Am I meeting the EEAT parameters that Google has laid down? Is my message getting out? Do I have it calibrated on Google Ads so that I'm getting the maximum number of real returns versus false positives or surfers? So I guess what I'm saying here is you don't really need to understand SEO in depth at all. You do need to understand your clients and you do need to understand how keywords work, how links work, and why they're important to the overall rating that Google gives your website and your social media. But you don't have to understand all of the signals. And most SEO agencies wouldn't suggest that you even try. Now, to be clear, it's never a waste of time to educate yourself. If someone's throwing around this particular metric a lot and they're saying, well, this is not working right, it's a good time to stop and back up and ask yourself, okay, what do I need to be doing then? And of course, that depends on your SEO agency being able to tell you in clear, concise English what the problem is, why it's not hitting the marks that you think it should, and what to do about it. So I'm not saying don't educate yourself. It's important to understand the signals that your SEO agency thinks are important and why they matter. But you don't necessarily need to know how they work down to the granular level to be able to use that information, such as how to set up a proper internal and outbound linking scheme for your website. Basically, make sure your links go where they're supposed to go. If you have an outbound link, make sure that it works the way that you plan. If you have a link within your site, make sure it takes you where you want to go. If you have a link that leads to somewhere that you don't intend it to, you need to get that fixed. And so, yes, you're probably going to spend a little time learning how to fix links on your own. And again, I want to stress that it's not a bad thing. And again, learning's never wasted one way or the other. But having that knowledge and having that understanding means that when your SEO agencies tells you that you have a problem, you have some idea of what the next steps need to be. And if a link is supposed to go to whitehouse.gov, but it goes to whitehouse.com, you'll know how to fix that. This isn't the best example because your SEO agency should catch slips like this before they end up on your website. But sometimes even the best of us make mistakes. And in all fairness, you should be auditing your website every so often anyway, just to be certain that things like this don't happen. People get tired, people make mistakes, people get distracted, uh, and then they sometimes will put a placeholder thinking that they're going to fix something later on. And then before you know it, the website goes live and it doesn't get fixed. So you need to understand and to be ready to deal with situations like that if uh they come up, or more likely when they come up. And what you need to focus on though is making sure that the content aligns with your tone, your brand, your intent, and that your intent aligns with that of your intended ideal client. And if you can do that, you understand all the important aspects of SEO that you need to understand as a law firm owner. The rest of it you can default to the experts, which in this case should be your SEO agency. Although anybody can hang out a shingle as an SEO expert and wait for someone to come along and need their help, uh, we can't do that in the legal profession. But SEO agencies can, and there's absolutely no oversight to stop them. So think about that as well. So I guess what I'm saying here is identify the KPIs that you want, learn the terminology that goes with those KPIs, and the rest of it don't even worry about. Don't even think about it. Let's you let your SEO agency do what you're paying them to do and figure out the 25 to 50% of those signals that they worry about. Because after all, that's the point of paying a professional to do it for you. Let it be their problem. You can put uh out an essay on your office computer about your field of law, hand it off to your SEO agency and say, okay, take this tone, punch it up for SEO, and get me more attention online. That should be no trick at all for an experienced SEO agency. And you should make sure that they have all the information they need as far as links and whatnot to reputable sources so they can get the job done. Beyond that though, your part of it is done and it's up to the SEO agency to make sure that it's done right. However, you do need to double check their work at the end and make sure you're happy with it, because if you're not, you've got a problem. But if you don't really need to know much about SEO to make it work, you just have to have an idea of what the main target metrics are that you're looking at, why they matter to your sales funnel, and make sure that you and your SEO agency are on the same page as far as those key performance indicators and how they're supposed to perform. If you can do that, you're golden. Once again, I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Before you go, please take a second to drop a like on this episode. Click the subscribe button if you haven't done so already, uh, so you don't miss other podcasts that are coming up. And be sure to share the link with your colleagues and friends that are attorneys. Uh again, thanks for coming by and I look forward to speaking with you next week.

The Law Firm Growth Professor 18:52

So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the professor. That's my name. I'm a lawful professor. An engineer too. I think that oh, your ideas add new that's what they're right. So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the professor. That's my name.