Ep. 39 - If You Want to Grow, You Need SEO

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor podcast, I tackle one of the most misunderstood topics in law firm marketing: SEO. 

I share why SEO is essential for growth and how I’ve used it to help scale my firm from a spare bedroom with just a laptop and cellphone to a 10,000-square-foot headquarters generating over $10 million annually.

I break down the truth about SEO metrics—why clicks, likes, and page views are just vanity numbers unless they lead to conversions and revenue.

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

I explain how to set clear KPIs before signing with an SEO agency, so you’re not just chasing traffic but building a pipeline that brings in paying clients. You’ll learn why most agencies focus on the wrong metrics and how to make sure your SEO strategy aligns with your real-world business goals.

If you’ve ever wondered whether SEO is worth the investment or how to measure its success, this episode gives you the roadmap. 

Tune in to discover how mastering SEO can transform your law firm’s growth and why aligning your metrics with outcomes is the key to success.

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. Called a professor. That's my name.

John Rizvi 0:13

Hi, and welcome. I'm John Rizby, 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. Now, one big problem that I see a lot and that a lot of attorneys tell me about is the complications of getting people looking at the same metrics. Here's the thing: every single SEO agency has access to the same details and the same metrics. That's why they're called metrics, common baselines for measurement and assessment of marketing success. The problem comes in when you have your SEO agency looking at the exact same numbers, but they want to focus on metrics that don't really matter or aren't as interesting to you as the ones that they've identified as the KPIs in this situation. Why? This is a problem because you're looking at the exact same data, but you're getting two different outcomes. Your SEO agency may say, well, look at all these clicks and likes and views and page visits and whatnot. That's great. Clicks, likes, page views. All of those are important because they mean that people are seeing your message. It's getting out to the people that need it. But they only matter if you have a direct pipeline from those clicks and likes and page views to action. They're filling out the form, they're taking the survey, they're signing up for your services. At this point, you have completed the conversion, and completed conversions are the golden metric. Yes, they increase your footprint in the digital world, and that's is not an important thing. But if those clicks and likes and views do not somehow funnel into concluding deals and getting paid, which of course is the entire point of internet marketing, then you're wasting your money. Now, a lot of SEO agencies will defend this by saying, well, you know, you have to have the sales funnel first, and then the completed transactions will trickle down through the funnel over time. And this is true to a point. And yes, there is a time period during which you should expect not to recoup your ROI. That's reasonable. And that's expected behavior, and it's why Google says that if someone's saying that you'll see results in less than six months to a year, they're probably selling you a bad bill of goods. They're either using Black Hat SEO or they're just flat out delusional. Now, sure, every once in a while lightning strikes and you write something that's great. You roll out a new ad campaign that suddenly gets all kinds of attention where it wasn't before. If that's the case, wonderful. But you still have all these metrics to look through, and your SEO is going to leverage the metrics that show growth and try to downplay the ones that don't. To some degree, this is only to be expected because if they cannot show growth in one dimension, they have to be able to show it in another. Otherwise, it casts doubt on the entire process, and people start asking uncomfortable questions like why am I spending money on this? So, hey, wow, look, you had 5,000 page views last month. You've got 10,000 this month. Yes, that's great. But where's the corresponding increase in incoming money? If there's no more money, but you've got double the traffic, you haven't really accomplished anything, and a lot of agencies will try to sock puppet their way through that and pretend that it's not as important as it sounds. I'm aware I'm casting this in a negative light right now, but stick with me. The point is, you and your SEO agency, before you ink the deal, you need to settle on the KPIs that you're both comfortable with because you want this in the contract. You may be looking for a minimum X amount of page views, Y amounts of interaction, and you're looking for an increase in revenue of Z. If you have that and your SEO agency says, sure, within six months to a year, this should be doable and you've set your goals accordingly, there's no reason that this should be a problem. However, the issue you run into here is that SEO agencies aren't going to want to link their paycheck to yours, which again is understandable to a degree. A key point to remember about most SEO agencies is that they want you to succeed, but they also want to ensure that they have a continuous pipeline of money coming through. As attorneys, generally speaking, we like repeat customers because we know that they trust the results that we're giving them and they believe that they're getting value for that money. SEO agencies have to create that value. It doesn't just come bundled into a package. It's not like a product that you can look up at the store and say, oh, okay, this is totally worth my money. The SEO agency has to set metrics that demonstrate that they're actually doing their job and getting you results. But if those metrics don't equate to actual success on your side, more money, more actual clients, more billable hours, all of these things, it's not going to do you any good. So you want to make sure that there's a mix of things that the SEO agency can be doing from day one to demonstrate value to your law firm and things further down the line. If everything's been done properly and in accordance with the rules of good internet marketing, you'll start seeing an upward turn in billables. Now, again, that doesn't happen overnight, so it's kind of a touchy subject for a lot of people. Because as I've said before, attorneys tend to be very, very good about not making any promises of results to our clients because we can't. We're legally and ethically barred from doing so. Uh, and it's we're also very uh very risk averse when it comes to our personal matters. When it comes to our finances, we like concrete, definite, known things. This is where our mindset and the ethics of our profession work against us because SEO and marketing in general is so much less regulated than the legal profession. So we have to think about that. We have to ask ourselves what metrics can we look at that tell me what I'm actually seeing for the results that I'm paying for, and that those results are in time going to lead to more money. And if that's not in play, you do have a problem. Likes, vanity metrics on social media, these things don't mean anything. So clicks, likes, impressions on social media, and your website. They are all important, but you need and you need to know them and you need to track them. However, if you predicate the success or failure of your campaign on these metrics, that would be going too far and you shouldn't do that. What you start with is page views. Who is funneling onto your website's pages? And what pages are they looking at the most? And why are they looking at those pages the most? As you can imagine right now, immigration attorneys are seeing a huge uptick in the number of page views that they're receiving. Why? Because of ICE and customs and border patrol enforcement. People around the country are stacking up immigration lawyers' calendars for literally months. So of course, something like that you would expect to lead to a sharp upturn. Likewise, if Congress suddenly revisited current estate taxation plans, uh, perhaps at the federal level, you would see a sharp rise in real estate and estate law because people would want to know how they can safeguard themselves, how do they protect themselves, and how do they stop this stuff, or how can they best shelter their estate from taxes in the event of their death? These are reasonable questions, but you have to find out what is resonating most with your target audience at that moment and then work to meet it. This is where page views tell you what's going on. How many of those people go from your page to your contact form or call you through your website? That's the next thing you need to know. Page views, and then who's signing up, who's asking for a consultation, who's reaching out for more information. These are metrics that you can count on. Clicks, likes, whatever. If somebody's randomly surfing Reddit and they come across an ad for your law firm, they're probably not going to care. They may click it, they may not. There's a good chance they'll click it by accident, perhaps while they're trying to scroll on to something else, uh the next cat video or whatever. So you need to have metrics in place that tell you uh exactly what they're looking at and that give you some idea that what you did is getting people to your website. And once you have this information, you have a starting point. Without it, you're dead in the water. There is a really uh serious issue with a lot of SEO agencies because they want to tie everything about the success of a campaign to vanity metrics. In a lot of cases, it's because they don't know any better. They don't see that there's a clear and sharp distinction between vanity metrics and metrics that actually lead to you getting paid, which in turn leads to them getting paid and being kept on retainer for a longer period of time. Of course, because I don't do things that way and never have, my question is what's with the other SEO agencies who use metrics like this to say, uh, listen, we did our part and we're done. Now, yes, there's some onus on you and your firm and your people to make sure that your clients are being taken care of, your prospects are being communicated with uh in a regular, timely fashion. All of these things are important. And I'm not going to say they're not because some SEO agencies have a policy that if you fumble the ball after they get you clients to the point where they're prepared to sign a contract with you, they've done their part. This is fair, and you do need to be aware of that. You cannot blame SEO or poor marketing management for failures at the sales level, at the basic customer service level. You need to be mindful of your firm's culture. You need to be mindful of the people that you're dealing with, and you need to understand how they think and make sure that you understand what they consider to be responsive versus what you consider to be responsive. This is a fine line to walk for many people, and it's not a question of right or wrong. It's just a question of whether this may get you better results than that. Now, another point to consider is that the metrics you see on the screen don't always equate to a bump in real life. Again, you could put out a catchy ad that gets a lot of people looking at you, or sharing, or liking your ad, but it doesn't equate to clicks. There's no magic formula for a given field of law. Some fields are going to have more social weight, especially right now. Some fields are going to be consistently steady where not much changes on the broader stage. Uh, you know far better than I do whether your field uh goes in this direction and what's trending right now in your field. But you do need to know and research your market. You need to understand what the clients are enlisting your services, uh, what they're looking for and why they're looking for it. This is so incredibly important. And so many attorneys don't realize that they actually do have an ideal client type that they're looking for. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with prioritizing your ideal clients because those are the very people you want walking through the door. In criminal defense, uh there's there's a lot of jokes about the types of clients that uh they want, and we've heard them, but nothing's new here. I'm not treading any controversial ground here. Criminal defense attorneys tend to have a very clear understanding of what their ideal client looks like because they're going to be willing to pay to fight the system and not have to pay a price in terms of their freedom, their livelihood, or their fortune. So they're perfectly willing to pay somebody to try to make these problems go away. Now you have to do the same thing for your practice, no matter what it is. Who do you consider to be an ideal client? In some cases, you may want to prioritize one type of client over another. It just depends on what field you practice. And I'm not an expert on every field by any means, and I don't pretend to be, and I don't want to be. If I wanted to practice criminal law or family law or estate law, I would have gone into that instead of intellectual property law and patents. But you're the expert on what your clients are looking for. Your SEO agency isn't going to know that. You do. They may know how to come and try to attract those people, and they may know how to get those prospects' attention, but that doesn't make them experts on your field of law and your prospects. You're the one who knows what you're trying to accomplish and what your goals are. Some of your goals may have nothing to do whatsoever with your SEO, or it will, but it will be tied into a lot of other things as well. So say you're looking at billable hours and you're looking at client count, caseload, or things like that. Your SEO helps with that, but only indirectly. And you have to know the metrics that you're looking for and you're looking at so you can correlate the rises and falls in client communication versus what you're doing online. Most SEO agencies will want to have some kind of hardening in place so that if there's a dip in traffic, they'll be insulated. And there will be because there's always peaks, valleys, and plateaus that you're going to reach where nothing you do seems to move the needle, and then all of a sudden, things can explode. It's crazy, so you need to know and understand your clients and what your goals are. You don't necessarily have to divulge them all to your SEO agency because a lot of the results are not their problem and are not relevant to them. But if you say I want to double my caseload, I want to get more clients, which of course means more money, these are things that they can help you with, but you have to set the metrics that you need first. Until and unless you've done that, you don't have anything. So you and your SEO agency both need to have your own KPIs that you're chasing, that your SEO doesn't necessarily know about. Then you need to break that down into metrics. Working from this framework, you should share that with your SEO agency. Now you're in a position to say, these are the core KPIs that I will be using to evaluate your performance. Yes, I'm interested in the rest of it. Yes, I want to see the page views, yes, I want to see the likes, I want to see the results of your A B testing for this new social media campaign. I need all of that. But only you are ultimately in the position to determine whether all of these metrics that you're seeking from your SEO actually equate to a bump in business in the real world. And that's why I say it's so critical when you're looking at the same data that you're not just looking at the same data, but you're looking at the same data with the same intent and prioritizing the same outcomes. Because then there's no question about whether or not you're looking for the in the right direction for your law firm. So for today, I want to challenge you to make a list of five to ten key performance indicators or KPIs that you would consider to be a valid measure of marketing success. Pick a couple online and maybe some in the real world and break them up however you want. But make that list and figure out okay, these are the key performance indicators that I want to share with my SEO agency, and I want to bake them into my contract. These are the ones I'm looking at from the back end, and then determine which of these should get precedence. If you can do that, you're 90% of the way there, and you'll run into a lot less problems with your SEO agency when you're telling them to look, when they're telling you to look at clicks or likes or shares. Um, but you want to turn around and say, yes, but look at my bank account. The clicks and likes and shares that you're getting me are not ultimately putting money into my account. And uh you need to make sure that you and your SEO agency are on the same page about that. Make sure you have a plan. Make sure that you and your SEO agency both clearly understand what your next moves need to be. And once you've done that, you're in great shape. Again, I'm John Risvey, the Law Firm Growth Professor. So before you leave today, I'd appreciate it if you could click the like button and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any updates from this channel. And don't forget to share with your friends that are attorneys or other colleagues that find this podcast helpful. Thank you so much for stopping by today and be sure to tune in next week when I break down SEO specifically for attorneys who don't have time to learn SEO. I look forward to seeing you all next week.

The Law Firm Growth Professor 18:45

So when a new idea pops into your brain, professor, that's my name. I'm a law school professor. An engineer too. I think that is your ideas are new that's what they're right. So when a new idea pops into your brain, oh professor. That's my name.