Ep. 31 - Moving Targets: Why You Need to Be Thinking Beyond the Next Algorithm Update

 In this episode, I tackle one of the most frustrating truths about digital marketing: the future is unpredictable. 

Google has over fourteen thousand ranking signals, AI is rewriting the playbook overnight, and every new update feels like aiming at a moving target you can’t even see. 

No wonder most law firms are scrambling to keep up.

But here’s the secret: you don’t need to hit every target. 

You don’t need to chase every signal. Instead, I show you how to build a marketing foundation that lasts no matter what Google or AI throws at us. I break down the three pillars of staying ahead—creating evergreen content, keeping it updated, and positioning yourself as a trusted thought leader - while also showing you how to balance long-term stability with short-term flexibility.

If you’re tired of chasing algorithms and want a smarter, calmer way to grow your law firm, this episode is for you.

Tune in and discover how to stop reacting to every algorithm update and start building a practice that thrives for years to come.

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. 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. I was talking to a writer acquaintance of mine the other day about why he was taking so long to get something done. And he said, John, have you ever seen the movie Sniper? And I had to confess that I hadn't. And he said in the movie, the main character says to someone that he's teaching how to be a sniper, that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. He said, I work slow so that I can get it done faster. And I said, That doesn't make any sense. It's completely illogical. And he said, Not necessarily. If you think about it, it doesn't matter if the sniper is shooting 60 rounds a minute, if he's not hitting anything. But if he takes his time and that one shot hits the target and gets the job done, he has been successful. Therefore, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I had to think about that, but when I did, I realized that okay, that actually does make sense. Speed doesn't matter if it doesn't give you the results you're looking for. Internet marketing is much the same way. We want to move fast, break stuff, and move on. This is Silicon Valley logic. It makes sense as far as it goes, but it doesn't really hold up to real-world applications. The reason being that Silicon Valley rules don't work when you're trying to build something that's going to last more than the next venture capital round. So we have to think a little bit further and dig a little bit deeper. We have to consider how we're going to approach the ongoing problems that we have 1, 5, 10, or 15 years down the line. In the last episode, I talked about how we need to be thinking beyond the next Google algorithm update or the next paradigm shift in the internet. Or whatever. We need to build things that will stand the test of time. We need to build website content that draws in clients. We need to create social media channels and content to fill them that will keep working for and promoting our firms and services after we've forgotten all about them. Well, how do we know it's going to stand the test of time? You don't. But you do the best you can with the knowledge and resources in front of you. And you hope that that's better than what your competition can bring to the table. Now, are there ways to game the system? Absolutely. These are fewer and farther between than they were in the early days of the internet. They're not as easy to accomplish as they used to be, unless you're willing to dive into black hat tactics, which will probably get your website banned in about 3.2 microseconds. If you want something that's going to last, if you want something that's durable, if you want something that's going to give you real results that will stand up to algorithm changes and internet taste changes and changes and how the Supreme Court evaluates cases, then this is what you need. So how do we do this? How do we make sure that we're moving slow? Well, the first step, as I've said before, I'll say it again a thousand times, because this is the first commandment of the internet. Make great content. Start with great content and everything else will follow. But what's great content? Great content, if you boil it down to its simplest components, is something that gives real value to your visitors and viewers. It shows them that you know what you're doing and tells them why you're the right person to help them through whatever their problem is. For example, if you work in tort law, your ideal client is going to need somebody who understands how torts work. Things like contracts and personal injury. Your clients want somebody who understands the difference between malicious injury, intentional negligence, and accidental harm. These are distinct portions of tort law. Your clients don't know that and they don't care. They know I got hurt and I want somebody to pay who is not me, which is in some cases reasonable. In some cases, it's not. However, in either case, that's what they're looking for. They're looking for somebody to represent their interests in court, which is fair. That's why we as Americans have the legal system that we do. That being said, you need to be able to explain why you're the right person and your firm is the right place to represent this client in their particular situation regarding tort law. I have to do the same in my practice when it comes to the patent professor. I have to explain why my firm is the right firm for inventors and innovators to get their work protected through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office with as little friction as possible. There are a thousand different variations: family law, tort law, patent law, uh, estate law. I could go down the list, but I'm not going to. The point is that you understand what your strengths are. A tort attorney is probably not going to understand patent law to the same degree that I do. Likewise, I don't understand estate law or family law or tort law to the same degree that a dedicated practitioner in those fields would. Nor should I. That's not my lane. It's not my chosen field of practice. Your chosen field of practice is what drew you there. The beauty of your field is that you must have been driven there by some kind of passion, some kind of a need, some sort of drive. Maybe you saw somebody taken advantage of by the system when you were a child because something happened and they were unjustly penalized for something that was not their fault. So you became a tort attorney, or you became a criminal defense attorney, or you became a prosecutor. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. I mean, obviously, prosecutors work for the state generally, so that's not as much of a consideration here. However, the point is that you want what you want to do is play to your passion. Start there. Because if you can start from your passion, you can convince somebody else why you're the right person for the job. The next step is to demonstrate your knowledge. Now, this doesn't mean quoting musty piles of legal books. That's not going to get it done for you. I'm sorry, it's just not. What is going to get it done for you is how is this case that the Supreme Court decided in 1954 relevant to your case that you're arguing this year? And how is this precedent that the Supreme Court has laid down going to help your client prevail in a situation where they otherwise might not be able to? It's a very fine line to walk, but if you can do it right, and if you can do it well, it will pay dividends. And if you can do it compellingly, then you can achieve a lot. You have to be able to tell a story. You have to be able to make the client understand why you're the right person to represent them. Not just that, that you are the right person with the right firm, in the right place, at the right time for your client. That is not an easy line to walk. To be fair, it shouldn't be, because only the people with true passion, true knowledge, true expertise, and true concern for their client are going to be able to put all of those things together and put them on an internet page in a way that is meaningful to your client. That is to say, when it comes to your firm, what's going to set you apart there? It's slow, it takes time, it takes work, it takes multiple drafts, and it may take some late nights, and it may take some aggravation. That's fine. Doesn't matter how you get there. What matters is you get there for your clients and you can demonstrate that this is what you are. Now, how does this help you in internet marketing? That's a perfectly fair question. The fact is, what is going to help you most in internet marketing is understanding that you're not going to hit with everyone. And you shouldn't. You shouldn't even try. That may sound weird coming from somebody who's trying to promote internet marketing for law firms. But the fact of the matter is, you don't just want any client that walks through your doors or can call you up on the phone. You want the right client. The client you can represent properly, ably, and ethically, and get them what they deserve. That's not an easy line to walk either. So to be a combination of storyteller, an archivist, and specialist, and well, pardon me, I shouldn't use the word specialist in this case, just because so many state bars frown on that unless you actually have a specialty in the type of law you're practicing. If you do have that designation, then please, by all means, use that to your advantage. No, seriously, I insist, because specialists in any given legal field, specialists are fairly rare. The stats work out to about one out of every hundred attorneys that's considered a specialist in their field. So if you have that designation, yes, by all means, flaunt it. But if you don't have that designation, you shouldn't call yourself a specialist. But you can still explain to people what drew you to this particular facet of law. Why did you go into family law? Why did you go into tort law or personal injury? Why did you go into estate planning or criminal defense? What did you do that makes you a specialist in patent law? And what drew you there? And you tell them that and you can make it resonate with them in a way that says, hey, this person sees me, and you're halfway there already. You're already in a whole lot better shape than you would be if you're trying to start out cold as a second-year law student trying to explain to somebody why this wet behind the ears intern is the right person to help them defend a parking ticket. So again, we come back to passion, storytelling, resonating with the client. How does that help me as an attorney? How is that going to help me draw clients to my firm? These are fair questions. And the answer to both is it is going to help you because people want to work with somebody who is just as passionate about their issue as they are. For your clients, their issue is personal. Is this a simple custody dispute? Or are we going to wind up running a case that ultimately ends up rewriting the entire rules of engagement for family law just based on how we handle this case? We don't know. Are we going to set a precedent that the U.S. Patent Office defers to in future rulings? When this inventor walks into our office, we don't know. We can't know. But if we do it the right way, the slow way, we build on each individual success that we rack up. We broadcast our individual successes, and we use those successes to demonstrate why we're the right people for the job. From that point, clients will find us when they need us on the strength of what we've accomplished previously. Then of course, we have a further obligation to show them in real time why they made the right choice by choosing us. That's not easy. It's not fast and it's not going to happen overnight. You can do SEO tricks and have a reasonable chance in three months of being number one on Google. But if your client's service and your firm's responsiveness to your clients, if your results in court or in front of the patent office, in my case, if they don't match up with your number one listing on Google, how does that help you in the long run? It doesn't. Because it's not commensurate with the results you're giving your clients. And believe me, your clients will let you know. The point about building your online presence slowly and methodically is that you have more control over where your internet presence goes. You're not tied to the whims of Google. You're not tied to what the algorithms are doing. You're going to be impacted to some degree. Everybody is. There's no escaping that. But you do have some options and you do have more flexibility in a lot of ways than people who are trying to chase every single signal that Google has to consider. Like I've noted before, there's at least 14,000 of them to choose from. And if you're not very, very careful, you'll wind up getting lost in that signal rabbit hole and completely losing sight of the things that will actually help your website stay front and center in the Google rankings. This means you've got to be really careful about that. That's why I say going slow is better for you. Yes, it's going to take longer to get to the top of Google's rankings. It's going to take you longer to get above the fold. But when you've gotten there, it's also going to be a great deal harder to dislodge you because you've put in the time, you've put in the work, you've put in the effort, and you've built something that is much harder for newcomers to fight against. You've already established your credentials. You've already set yourself up as a leader in your field, and you've already earned the trust of the audience and Google. If you're really lucky, you've gotten into the AI overview as a quoted source, which is a great thing. Whether AI overviews in and of themselves is a great thing, we'll discuss in a future episode. For now, just getting into a position where you can be quoted by them is what you're after. If you can pull that off, if you've already accomplished a great deal, more than a lot of your competitors ever will. And that's awesome. So you need to be looking at the long game again. Play the long game. Look forward to what's coming. Not with the next Google algorithm update, but what's coming in a year, five years, maybe even ten years down the road. Don't be thinking about what's coming so much as what you need to do. Make sure that no matter what happens, your rankings are going to be fairly secure. As I've also mentioned previously, when Google algorithms roll out and they change things, you can go up and down dramatically very quickly. In a few days to a couple of weeks, you can generally expect this to stabilize and you have a better idea of where you actually stand. But the stronger you make your foundation to start with, the more likely you are to be able to weather those storms when algorithm changes hit. So you won't be sitting there going, What the hell just happened to my rankings? Because you already know. You've built the foundation, you've set yourself up and your firm up to be future-proof. You've planned and executed your SEO and your content to a degree that almost ensures that you can't fail on the marketing level. And that's how it should be if you want to survive in the modern market. So since I skipped this on the last episode, I want to issue you a challenge today. What are you doing to build your SEO slowly? What's your favorite approach to handling the challenges of looking forward and future-proofing your law firm's marketing? And what do you foresee is going to be your firm's biggest challenge? And what do you think is the best way to get in front of it before it becomes an insurmountable problem? The comments are open and I'm listening. Once again, I'm John Rizby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Thank you so much for stopping by and spending this time with me. Please make sure before you leave to hit that like button. If you haven't already, please subscribe. And be sure to share this episode with your friends and other attorneys that are colleagues, people that you think would find this information valuable or helpful to them in growing their own law firms and marketing. We'll see you next time when we talk about the experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness paradox, EEAT for short, and why unraveling it matters to your marketing.

The Law Firm Growth Professor: 17:23

So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the pack professor. That's my name. I'm a law school professor. An engineer too. I think that is both. If the pack office says your ideas are new, that's just red tape that will cut, right? So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the pack professor. That's my name.