Ep. 43 - Why You Should Audit Your SEO Every Week

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor podcast, I explain why auditing your own SEO regularly is critical—even if you’ve hired an agency. Broken links, outdated content, and spam comments can damage your site’s performance and reputation, and ultimately cost you clients.

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Google won’t penalize your SEO firm for mistakes; they’ll penalize your website. I share a simple, 10-minute process for checking your site: verify that links work, content is current, and pages load quickly. I also discuss why these audits protect you from technical glitches, malicious software, and poor agency oversight.

Plus, I reveal how regular audits keep your SEO firm accountable and strengthen your partnership. 

If you’ve ever assumed your SEO agency handles everything, this episode will show you why taking a proactive role can save you headaches—and boost your bottom line.

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 Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. And for my new listeners, I'm pleased you've come to join me today. 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. Now, one key thing that I see a lot of law firms not doing is auditing their own SEO on a regular basis. Now what exactly does this mean? Basically, you're making sure that everything looks right. All your links point to where you want them to go. There's no garbage comments or spam on your profiles, and everything is tight, crisp, and ready to go. Now a lot of people say, well, yes, but I hired a digital marketing agency specifically so I don't have to do all of this stuff. That's true. However, they're going to see what they're looking for, and you're going to see what you're looking for, and what these two things look like in practice might be completely different. For a homegrown SEO audit, what I recommend is first you go through and you make sure that all your content's up to date. If a Supreme Court decision overruled a major tenant of law in your field, then you need to get out in front of that and make sure people are aware of it. Of course, you're probably doing that anyway. We tend to gear our content towards evergreen. So we want to make sure that while it's evergreen, it's also kept current. That's the first thing you need to do. The second thing you need to do is you need to look at all of your links. Are they all functioning the way they should be? What I like to do is go through and just spot check and make sure that the links I click still point where I want them to go. Why? Because websites go dark, sometimes they're put on hold or they go out of commission for any number of reasons, and this happens all the time. You don't want to have a link on your site that goes to a dead link because Google will weigh that against you. Now is one link out of a hundred a big deal? Probably not. But if you find one, chances are that there's more. So you like to take some time every week and just spot check your links. Make sure that they still go where you intend them to go. Your internal links are still working, your outbound links are still working. Your internal links, your incoming links, of course, they look right. The URLs are correct and all of that good stuff. Now you may be asking again, John, I pay a digital marketing agency for this, so why do I need to double check this stuff? And the answer is because people miss things. I have a writer acquaintance in Oregon and I I spoke with him a while ago about this, and he said, you know, John, one of the great things about being a writer and seeing other writers make mistakes is it makes me feel better about the mistakes that I made. If a New York Times best-selling author who I consider uh to be one of my literary heroes can make a mistake that makes it through any number of uh proofreaders, half a dozen editors and editorial assistants, um, and make it out to the general public, then I don't feel that bad about misspelling rain, R-E-I-G-N, as rain, R-E-I-N, that one time. So you've got to consider it. You know, people are going to miss things, even the best and most experienced digital marketing agencies. Or if something's going to slip through the cracks, uh, and it will eventually. Of course, here's the thing that people don't consider. Yes, if you're outsourcing the work, you don't have to do it all yourself. On the other hand, ultimately, you're the one who's going to pay the price for any mistakes because Google is not going to downvote your digital marketing agency's website. If your website is missing links or broken links are there or there's information that isn't evergreen, you're the one who's there looking at it, and you're the one whose website is going to pay the penalties. So you need to be cognizant of that and you need to understand that that's how this works. And in doing that, make sure that you have a game plan for when things inevitably go pear-shaped. So you want to check your URL URLs, you want to check your links, and you want to make sure that everything performs as you would expect it to perform if you were a client. If you've got a broken internal link, say you're trying to get from your general information page to book a consultation, but the link is taking you to an article about your firm that was written five years ago, that's not going to help. And a lot of people are not very tech savvy. They don't want to be, they don't feel like they need to be. And so they're going to say, you know what? I spent 10 minutes trying to contact your law firm, and now I'm just not going to bother. I'm going to go to a law firm where the website works correctly. And that's the biggest reason why you need to be on top of this stuff because ultimately you're the one who's going to pay for it if it's not right. Now, of course, I mentioned before your SEO company is going to miss things occasionally. Sometimes it's going to happen. They may improperly quote a case, they may put a keyword where it's not necessarily appropriate. This is a function of dealing with human beings. Now you could try to risk it all on AI, but I wouldn't recommend it because AI is prone to hallucinations or as we call it, meet space lying. Now being confidently incorrect. So if you want to think about that, you want to realize that these mistakes can happen whether you're doing it and whether it's your SEO firm doing it or whatever. And since you're the one with the final sign-off, you're the one who has to explain when it goes south, you should play your part. Here's the thing: even mediocre digital marketing agencies get it right a whole lot often than they don't. It's rare that you see an experienced person make a mistake that can't be fixed in about 60 seconds. Sometimes, yes, it does happen. And I'm not trying to turn you off from the notion of dealing with digital marketing agencies altogether. Quite the opposite. But I'm asking you to remember that even though this is a tech-heavy space, there are still human beings involved at every level. And that means there's opportunities for human mistakes. So consider that when you're deciding how you want to play your interactions with your SEO providers or your digital marketing agency. Another question you need to ask is, is my website doing the job? Does it seem slow? Does it seem like if you go in and you just click around, one page feels like it's loading a lot slower than the others? If so, you want to find out why. You know, say, hey, I was doing my weekly SEO audit this morning and there seems to be a lot of lag on this page. Can you look into it and see if you can figure out where it's coming from? If your SEO company is doing everything they should be doing, they will know exactly what you're talking about. They'll be able to take a look at it and they should be able to fix it very quickly. You know, you don't have to fix these things yourself. This is more like you taking ground level readings that you can relay to the SEO agency so that they know, hey, we may have a problem here, or hey, I need to be focusing on this because something isn't right and I need to figure out why it's not right. Now, of course, you know, tech fails happen all the time. You get glitches, you get twitches, you get gremlins, you know a piece of code gets corrupted somehow, and it could be something entirely innocent. It could also be a precursor to a malicious software attack. Is there a virus or just a random glitch? So, another good reason to do your own independent SEO audit is to protect your firm and clients from malicious software, and you need to know what to look for in order to tell if it's if there's a problem or not. So if you want to look at the site run speed, do your links work as intended? Do the URLs look right? And is the information current? If you've done those things, you've done a fairly comprehensive SEO audit. And here's the thing: this is quick. This again, like your online reputation management, should not take more than 10 minutes once you've done it a few times. Once you learn what you're looking for, and once you see how uh that you'll know how to check for these things, and then you should have no problems. But of course, a lot of people say, well, yes, but that's now 10 more minutes out of my week that I could be doing uh uh something else. Yes, and again, as I stress with online reputation management, you're the one who pays the price if something isn't right, because you should never ever trust your uh agency uh is doing it perfectly until they've done it perfectly enough times to establish a comfort zone. Now, what that may look like to your practice, I can't say. It's highly probable that what's right for an estate planning law firm will be totally wrong for a personal injury law firm and it'll be wrong for a family law practice, and so on. You know your market better than everybody, then uh actually anybody and everybody, your SEO agency or your whoever does your digital marketing, they can help you and they can certainly guide you. They may even have a legal experience that you find beneficial, but ultimately the success or failure of your law firm is up to you, and that means yes, you do need to be involved with uh your online reputation management and also with uh this basic level audit of your SEO. Another benefit of doing your own SEO audit is that your SEO agency will know that you're watching and on top of things, they'll know you're paying attention, uh, and they're not going to try to slip things past you like cut rate SEO agencies sometimes will in the absence of oversight. To be clear, I'm not saying you should do this uh going in with a mindset of okay, let me find everything that these people screwed up and tell them why they screwed up and then have them go fix it. No, you go into it saying, I want to make sure everything is right. And if it's not, I want to get a handle on it before it gets out of control. That's fair and that's reasonable. And any good SEO firm that's not should not even bat an eye when you try to tell them that. Now, on the other hand, it's also a great way to call out mediocre or substandard digital marketing firms because they'll get offended and their pride will get involved and they'll say, well, that's not how we do it, and that's not how we do it, and we did it this way or that way, or we're gonna do it this way. Uh but then you respond with, okay, but why does this link on my website take me to someplace that's completely unrelated to anything that to do with my uh field of my practice area? A good SEO agency will take it in stride and they'll say, Okay, uh this may have been a mistake on our part and we can fix it. A not so good SEO agency will start pointing fingers and assigning blame elsewhere to anybody else except for themselves, even when it's patently clear that it's their responsibility. Now, again, I want to stress that this is not a way to say gotcha. It's it's you being collaborative and proactive and knowing what's going on with your website. You know, you might want to poke around in uh the back end a bit, take a look at the dashboard, see what the comments are, see how everything's running. Um, oh, comments. I mentioned that at the top of this episode, but you want to I want to get back to that for a minute. A lot of spammers these days love to target websites with comment spam, especially those with WordPress. You'll see this kind of thing a lot. You're looking up a recipe uh for chicken, say, and the first comment is something like, I made$40,000 in one month by doing this one weird trick. Click here for details. I promise you the owner of that website is probably not too happy about that, but somehow those comments keep getting through. And it's because they're not properly moderated. So this is another time where you can get out in front of your online reputation and your SEO in one step. So keep that in mind when you're weighing whether or not or not this is a good investment of time and of your resources. So, see, one of the biggest problems that you'll ever run into is people who want to take a laisse-a-faire attitude towards their own affairs. You've probably all seen it with clients who are absolutely determined to shoot themselves in the foot by making outlandish claims or trying to play that I believe uh they're called sovereign citizens, trying to use those tricks and tactics. We all know how much judges uh love that this nonsense. In the same way, you need to be proactive in your own defense of your firm. And that means, yes, taking a look at what's going on with your website, with your SEO, and with your social media, and working out how to do it to optimize your results. Again, uh, you want to come at this in a collaborative manner. You want to say, hey, by the way, I was doing my weekly audit and I came across some irregularities. Can we check into this and see what's going on? And then document everything you find. Because if you're finding a lot of errors, a lot of mistakes, and a lot of outright incorrect information, that's a very serious problem that you should bring up with your digital marketing agency right away. Their reaction will tell you everything you need to know about whether or not you should stay with them. So be sure to take all of that into account. Be sure to think about all of that. Everything you do, document. If you have a conversation with your SEO firm, document it with bullet points. What are we talking about? Uh you you can tell them about an SEO audit and everything wasn't well. If you emailed, make sure you preserve a record of that email. Make sure you keep the receipts. It's amazing how many attorneys drop the ball at this point and and then suddenly want to fall back on it's my agency's job. But yes again, it's not their name on the website, and they're not the ones who are going to pay uh the reputational price uh if there's fallout from this, if something goes wrong. So I'm not telling you to scare off your digital marketing agency in general or to make uh to try to make you feel like you're gonna have to do all of this yourself. So why did you even bother engaging a digital marketing agency? The fact is, you and your agency need to be partners. You need to be on the same page, and that means you need to make sure that they know that you're watching. The best and easiest way to do this is by auditing your online reputation and by auditing your SEO at least once a week. Like I said, uh we take 10 minutes each, bang it out, and get it done and dealt with. And then you only have to worry about problems like that if your website's suddenly down and you don't know why. That would be a problem, and that would be an emergency, and they do need to deal with those urgently. But that's not the same thing with auditing, which is what you're doing. You're just checking in, and if you keep checking in and you keep making sure everything's right, tight, and crisp the way it needs to be, and it takes your clients where they need to go and you want where you want them to go, that leads to more money. Would you spend 10 minutes a week doing something you don't like doing to make a lot more money? Probably. So figure out how you're going to integrate SEO audits and online reputation audits into your regular routine and your regular practice. It doesn't always have to be you. You could play round robin with it in the office. Maybe it's you for one week, and then it's your office manager the following week, it's your managing partner the next week, and then it's an intern that takes 10 minutes. That way you get more eyes on it as well, which is uh only of benefit to you and your firm because you have increased the odds of catching mistakes before the general public and your prospects do. And that boosts client confidence and makes it more likely that they'll want to work with your firm. Isn't that worth 10 minutes a week to you and your firm? Again, I'm John Risvey, the Law Firm Growth Professor. 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 and colleagues who may find this podcast helpful. Thank you so much for stopping by today and be sure to tune in next week for more tips and ideas on making your firm's digital presence stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you next week.