Ep. 44 - Why Ignoring SEO Could Cost Your Law Firm Big

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor podcast, I flip the usual question on its head: What happens if you don’t invest in SEO? The shortanswer—nothing changes. You stay exactly where you are.

If you’re happy with your current revenue and have no plans to grow, that’s fine. But if you want to scale your firm, attract higher-value clients, and gain the freedom to choose the cases you love, SEO is the key.

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

I explain why SEO isn’t just about getting more calls—it’s about building visibility, credibility, and options. I share how investing in SEO can transform your firm’s revenue, why digital marketing beats traditional advertising, and why doing nothing guarantees stagnation. 

Plus, I tackle the common misconception that SEO is “selling air” and show how it’s actually the first stepping stone to financial freedom. If you’ve ever wondered whether SEO is worth the time and money, this episode will give you the perspective you need to make the right decision for your firm’s future.

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

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

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. And for my returning listeners, it's always great to have you. In this 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 come at this from a slightly different angle. I've been telling you about all the reasons why attorneys and law firms need SEO, why updating your website is a good idea, and why you want to understand what Black Hat SEO is, what White Hat SEO is, and how it all fits together. But today I'm going to look at this from a different perspective. Why do you need SEO at all? I know that I've addressed this question in a slightly different way in another podcast. But the question to address now is not just why do you need SEO to help your law firm, the bigger and more important question is, what happens if you don't use SEO? Or the short answer is nothing changes. You stay exactly where you are, you've got all the clients you need, the channels you've got are working for you, you're getting referrals, you're getting billable hours, and you're happy with that, that's wonderful. However, things don't stay in the status quo on Google. There's always new people entering and your rankings are going to fall. However, even if they don't, the point of SEO is not just to get your phones ringing, it's to enhance your overall perception in digital and real life spaces. The problem, of course, is that a lot of people don't see how these things fit together or simply don't care about that. They think, well, my law firm's pulling in, say,$100,000 a month. Okay, that's great, but how much a month is going out the door? If your top gun associate is walking out the door with$10,000 a month, you've got your professional insurance, your business and rent, all your other expenses that you have to incur in order to stay compliant with your state bar and to have a place to eat and stay out of the rain, you've got to think about this. And a lot of people think, well, hey, I'm making overhead and I'm still running a little bit of profit, that's great. But what if you want to expand your firm or aim for bigger, higher dollar, higher profile cases or clients? That's the question a lot of people don't address. They say, I'm happy where I am and I'm making plenty of money for what I'm trying to get done. That's great. Well, I have good news for you. You don't need SEO if the status quo could be maintained. However, if you don't continue focusing on SEO, your phone is going to stop ringing because there's always changes to the algorithm and there's always new entrants, and your position on Google is gonna fall. But SEO, what it does is it helps you get more clients. It helps you bring more people in the door and it helps you diversify. It gives your law firm more options and lets you be more selective in the kinds of cases and clients you choose. Wouldn't that be great instead of just having to take anybody that walks through the door with a hard luck story? Wouldn't you love to be able to say this person right here has the kind of case that I have dreamed of working my entire career? These are the people that you're targeting, and SEO can help bring these people to you. Yes, it costs money, yes, it requires a time investment, yes, there's more to it than simply throwing a bunch of words on a screen and hoping that something happens. But as with everything else, you have to spend money to make money. Now, some people win the lottery with their SEO. They hit five or ten times their ROI. Some law firms gain absolutely ridiculous ROI off of their SEO. That's wonderful. If you can pull that off, more power to you. Why would you settle for a hundred thousand a month when you could be making two hundred or five hundred thousand a month? Uh when I say you, of course, I mean your entire firm. I don't mean you specifically. There aren't that many hours in the day. Um so you can avoid that by increasing your revenues and hiring additional attorneys. So say you've got three associates under you pulling in and handling the work that you don't want to do while you handle the cases and clients that you've always dreamed of, doing the things that matter to you in your profession, the things you dreamed of when you decided this was the avenue of legal practice that you wanted to pursue. These were the people you dreamed of meeting. Well, SEO can make it so you can actually have time for these people, and you can give them the time and attention and counsel that these clients warrant. Now imagine if you're clocking$100,000 a month in billables right now. Uh in 12 months you're making, say,$500,000 a month. If your monthly overhead has only gone up by$10,000, that's an additional$400,000 of profit. Wouldn't you say that's worth a couple hours of your time every day to multiply your firm's revenue by a factor of five? Most people wouldn't bat an eyelash to that, and uh they'd basically ask how much and where do I sign? The irony is when you get down to brass tacks and start talking to people about SEO and trying to explain how search engine marketing works and how digital advertising works, their eyes kind of glaze over. They go, I don't understand this. It sounds like you're selling air. That's what we often are uh accused of as attorneys as well. We sell an interpretation of facts as determined by the law, and it's text and different courts' interpretation of that text, and then we pass that on to our clients and give them strategies that uh might allow them to overcome problems while staying within the parameters of the law. And we can certainly acknowledge there's places where the law has not caught up to the realities of modern life or the laws uh don't really apply to a given situation. This is where you have to be creative, and this is how you're going to get in in front of the clients who need that creative slant to an interpretation of the law that might allow them to prevail in court if uh they but they can't do that if they don't know you exist. And this is the benefit of SEO. This is where your ability and your uh uh faculty with the law comes into play. The better you do it, the more choices you will have. And that's really what it comes down to. It's all about having choices. Now imagine having to take any case that comes in off the street because your light bill is three days past due, uh, or you've got a pile of past due notices stacking up in your inbox, or you've got to be in court in half an hour. In that case, something's wrong. You're not using your time, knowledge, or resources well. You want to change that and and you want to know how. Well, in this scenario, we're presented with a stark problem of either having to start from zero and attempt to learn SEO in a day, or just pick up on it on the fly as you go, or outsourcing the work to somebody who already knows what they're doing. Yes, it's going to cost you more because they've put in the time to learn. It's just like if you take on a new client who doesn't have a law degree, it's going to cost them more to speak to you because you do have the degree and you have the knowledge and you've put in the time to become a resource in your field. That's how you need to be looking at search engine optimization. Now, I've also mentioned before that a lot of attorneys tend to be very risk averse. We're very careful not to guarantee results to our clients, and we should, because we don't know what the judge is going to say or what a jury is going to say. We don't know if somebody's going to pop up with that one weird piece of evidence that blows our entire argument completely out of the water and leaves us looking like a fool. There are a thousand other examples I can come up with. However, when it comes to our own affairs, our own law firms, and our own billing, we like concrete, straightforward answers and expectations. This is what it's going to cost, this is what's going to be the outcome, and we're trying to play the lottery in some cases as if you know what the numbers are, but you don't, and the lottery doesn't work that way, and SEO doesn't work that way. As I've said a thousand times, and will probably say it 10,000 more times in my career, there are no guarantees to search engine optimization, and any digital marketing agency that gives you a guarantee, I would be suspectful of. Now, sure, you could get lucky and somebody walks through the door and you might capture a case that that gets headlines, and then all of a sudden you're in the New York Times, and you're in the Wall Street Journal, uh, the Washington Post, and you're a fixture on every major TV channel, and you're getting interviewed on the radio. Wonderful if that happens for you, uh, and you didn't need to spend a dime on SEO to do it. The problem is all of that media attention is going to go away sooner or later, and you're going to be stuck with what you have on the internet that's current. And you're going to be stuck with the ever-present question of how are people going to find you? Now, yes, there's plenty of internet savvy people out there who will probably point clients your way, but do you want to roll that those those dice? Do you want to bet on that? I don't think so. Why would you, if you can put the bricks into place now, to make sure that when that headline grabbing case comes through, uh, are you prepared to fully capitalize on it? Why wouldn't you do this? Yes, it's going to cost your firm some money, yes, it's going to put uh uh a dent in your advertising budget, but you would have been spending the exact same money regardless. At least now you know that you're going to be getting some kind of a result out of it. So, in that case, why would you not do it? I've never heard anyone say, you know, I wouldn't spend an extra hundred dollars a month if I knew for a fact that I was going to get five times ROI or quadruple my billings in the course of a year by spending an extra hundred dollars a month. You'd be insane not to. Now, to be fair, there's genuinely people out there who think, yeah, I've got a nice little retirement nest egg, I've got my clients, I've got my groove, and I'm perfectly happy with what I do have. I don't work in a sector that makes a lot of waves, and I don't work in one of the quote uh sexy areas of the law. So I don't do high-profile criminal defense or high-dollar corporate lawsuit litigation, things like that. So why would I need uh to put money into expanding? Well, it's not so much that you're putting money into expanding, but you need to maintain the status quo and with constantly uh new lawyers entering, revising their website, adding content, if you don't focus on SEO, you're not going to stay where you are and your rankings will fall. Uh and and if you don't uh implement these strategies, just listening to this podcast isn't going to do you any good. But for everyone else, everyone who does want to uh do better, uh and and what if you could afford uh uh putting additional money into SEO today um for ten times the return later on? Uh what would that look like? Um so that's where SEO comes into play. And that's the benefit to you and your firm. You make more money, your firm makes more money, your associates make more money, and there's room for growth. Because without that, uh how does somebody in your firm, an associate, a paralegal, how do they progress? How do they get promoted? Uh you need growth to create new positions and additional responsibility. It's literally the rising tide that raises all boats. But I get this a lot. I get people asking, well, John, why do I need this? Why do I want this? And what is SEO going to do for me that I can't do just as easily on my own? And that's a fair question because SEO is not an ending point. It's a stepping stone. Actually, if you want to be technical about it, as those of you who've been with me for a while will know, it's a series of stepping stones to get you from point to point to point until all of a sudden you wake up one day and you wait and you realize, hey, wait a minute, I've had to hire three new associates uh to cover my caseload. You know, or for the first time in six years, all of a sudden I'm not getting a threatening notice from the electric company or the water company or the landlord for the rent because all of my bills are not only paid, they're paid ahead of time, and I've got money left over uh for additional investment in the firm, improving my technology, and uh further uh investing in my staff. And how did that happen? That happened because you probably listened to somebody who knew what they were talking about and asked you to invest in digital marketing and particularly in SEO. Now, everybody wants that dream, everybody wants the financial freedom. You want it, your partners want it, your junior associates want it, uh, your paralegals want it. Every single person in your firm, from the mailroom to the conference room, wants that freedom, and that's what they're working towards. Now, what that freedom looks like for them individually is different for everybody. Somebody wants to have a baby, somebody wants to buy a 1964 Aston Martin, somebody wants to sail around the world for three months and leave their cell phone at home. What it looks like doesn't matter. The point is everybody's chasing the same dream, and SEO is one of the first and most important stepping stones to get you to that dream. Uh you want to get by, and if you want to hang a shingle on Main Street and sit in a small office for a couple years and work your way up to so-so accommodations and then shoot for something a little higher, uh, and something benefiting your skills and what you think your station ought to be, that's one option. But the other option is to invest money up front in your firm's marketing to get you out of that loop. And that's where SEO comes in. That's where the internet marketing, the search engine optimization, the search engine marketing, and the digital advertising, it's all going to come into play for you. And yes, to a certain point, you can't afford to sleep on print and traditional media advertising either. But those are becoming far less important than they used to be. Digital is where it's at, and I'm willing to bet the last 10 times you searched for anything, goods, services, a new place to eat, a new movie theater, whatever, doesn't matter what you were searching for, but the last 10 times you did that, I'll bet you didn't go to the yellow pages, you didn't go to the newspaper, uh, and you didn't call 411 to find the number. You went online, you went to Google or Firefox, your favorite browser and search engine. I promise you, it's not just the last 10 things you searched for, that you when you did, you did it on a computer or through your cell phone. And I'm not knocking that at all. That's exactly the opposite of what I'm doing. The point is, is that you had all of this information literally at your fingertips and you use resources that you knew would put this information at your fingertips. What do you think your clients are doing? Your clients aren't looking for you in prestigious listings on Martindale Hubble, they're not going to the yellow pages anymore. They're not looking for billboards, they're not watching TV or listening to the radio, uh, and then you're hoping they suddenly hear your jingle and go, Oh yes, I need this attorney to help me uh with my estate planning. What they're doing is they're going online, and online is where you need to meet them. So that's what you need to understand when I tell you about this stuff. I'm not selling you air, I'm showing you that the first brick on the road to the financial success you want for your law firm, uh, it's going to be by digital marketing. You know what? I'm going to start uh a lot of people think they're going to start studying law because lawyers make bank. And that's the rumor. Well, yes, if you put it to work and if you lay the groundwork and if you do the right things, that's possible. But one of the right things is promoting your firm. And these days, digital marketing is the way to promote your firm. That's why when I say uh SEO is optional, if you're happy to stay where you are and slowly lose rankings, that's true. If you're happy with what you're making, you're happy with what your firm's books look like, uh, you still need to invest in digital marketing and in SEO just to maintain the status quo. Um, if you don't have any concerns about uh a slowly dwindling practice 6, 12, or 18 months from now, uh then fine, you can go ahead and you can switch off right now. But the fact is that that the fact that you're still here tells me you're not one of those uh that are willing to have their firms slowly uh go down and uh and slowly lose revenue. Uh you want something more and you're willing to invest some effort. You're either having to uh gonna have to learn how to do this for yourself or hire somebody that already knows how to do it. And if you do that, uh just be comfortable with the fact that there are no guarantees. Just like uh there's no guarantee that we're going to uh achieve a specific result for our clients as lawyers. I can't guarantee you that if you hire an SEO agency that you're going to see the ROI that you're hoping for. But what I can guarantee you is that if you don't, then you have absolutely no chance. As Wayne Gretzky famously said, you miss a hundred percent of the shots that you don't take. Not betting on SEO right now is not a good bet. Yes, there's always somebody out there who will beat the odds or say they did it without SEO. There's always somebody out there who looks like they're just sailing through uh and a growing firm effortlessly. And these high-profile cases, they just keep falling in their lap. Well, I promise you this, if that's the case, it's because they're plugged into a social stratum that you probably haven't climbed yet. Uh or they have connections or friends, or have already spent enough time uh building a reputation uh that they're uh able to leverage that and they're getting the good cases. But if you're not, then you need to do something else, and that means SEO, and that means focusing on digital marketing. Again, I'm John Risby, the law firm growth professor. Thank you so much for stopping by today. And before you go, I'd appreciate it if you can send me a uh give me a link. Sorry. I'm gonna do the whole ending again to track time for Kurt. Once again, I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Thank you so much for stopping by today. Before you go, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me a like and be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss uh great content like this next week. Uh I'll be talking about some data, the same data with different outcomes. And don't forget to share this with your friends or colleagues that are attorneys. I'll see you next week.