Ep. 45 - Why Most Law Firms Fail at SEO Before They Ever Start

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor podcast, I tackle one of the most common — and most misunderstood — questions attorneys ask about SEO: How do you know if you’re doing it right from the very beginning?

The truth is, SEO isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula. What works for a brand-new firm starting from zero looks very different from what works for an established practice that already has a website, social media, and content — but still isn’t seeing the phones ring.

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

I break down the foundational building blocks every law firm must have in place before worrying about rankings, clicks, or vanity metrics. From choosing the right domain and protecting your brand, to identifying effective keywords, creating long-form evergreen content, and building real-world authority that fuels online growth, this episode walks you through SEO the right way — brick by brick.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by SEO advice, unsure where to start, or frustrated that your digital marketing isn’t delivering results, this episode will give you a clear framework to evaluate where you are, what’s missing, and how to build a sustainable SEO strategy that actually works for your firm.

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 Rizvi, 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. One of the simplest and yet most complicated questions that I get from attorneys looking to enhance their SEO is how do I know that I'm doing this right? How do I know that I'm starting off on the right foot? How do I know that the KPIs I'm choosing are actually going to get me where I need to be? This is not an easy question, although it seems pretty simple. This is because every law firm is going to need something a little bit different. If you're starting from zero and you have no SEO, no social media, no website, no nothing, it's really simple because the short answer is you're going to need everything. But if you've already got a website and social media channels and a blog and everything else that you need, then we need to take a more nuanced approach based on where you are versus where you want to be with your search engine campaign. This is problematic because a lot of people fall somewhere in between, I have never done this before and haven't even started, and we've got all the channels, but for some reason our phones aren't ringing. So the first thing you need to do is evaluate the basics. Do I have a website? Do I have social media channels? At a minimum, I would suggest that you have X, which used to be Twitter. You should have Reddit, you should have Facebook, and then you can think about Instagram and TikTok and outlets like that. Quara is a great one also. But a lot of attorneys don't avail themselves of it, which is, to be fair, probably smart because a lot of people go on Quara looking for free legal advice. And of course, you can't give legal advice online. You can speak about cases and generalities, you can speak about topics in the law in generalities, but every single person's case is going to be a little bit different. So if you're giving uh advice through Quara or Reddit or what have you, you need to stop right now because that can get you in trouble with your state bar association. So you need to make sure that you have these basics in place. If your website's up and running, uh then you're already a good portion of the way there. If your social media channels are up and running, again, you're already quite a ways along. If you have both of these, great, you're in good shape, especially if you're just starting out. Now we need to figure out what's not working with your campaigns. But let's say that you're starting from zero, you don't have a good website, uh, you don't have social media platforms in place, you don't have any of that stuff. So what we need to do now is figure out your best starting point. Okay, first off, what is your area of practice? If your firm covers a wide range of legal issues, it's going to be a completely different ballgame than if you're limited to one or two practice areas. Maybe you do family law and torts, or maybe you're strictly criminal defense. Maybe you only concern yourself with personal injury cases. If this is the case, then it becomes a lot easier to plan out an SEO campaign than if you have multiple channels or multiple fields that your firm works in. And the more fields you work in, the more important it becomes to make sure you have a clear, consistent game plan for your SEO across the board that meets with your brand. So the first thing you want to do is make sure that if you're starting a website for the first time, the website URL points to a domain that you actually want. If you have a specific brand for your firm instead of just the usual boring blend and blob LLC or PA, then you want to make sure that the URL points to a website that actually reflects your business. So for example, if you call yourself the Personal Injury Lawyers, then your URL should be the personal injury lawyers.com.net or what have you, perhaps uh several. If there's an existing website that already uses that tagline, you're going to have to stop and rethink this right off the bat because you want to keep it consistent, you want to keep your branding consistent, and that means you need to keep your URL consistent. You want to be able to keep all of your marketing materials the same and consistent across the board. Now this can be complicated because just because a firm with that particular name practices in certain states doesn't necessarily mean that they practice in others. But you could easily run afoul of somebody who does this if you're not extremely careful about making sure your intended firm brand isn't stepping on someone else's intellectual property rights in your state or in the jurisdictions in which you do business. Now, if you're practicing in some states and someone else is practicing in other states, it may not be as much of a legal problem, but if you go ahead and use the same name for your firm and your competition later expands into territories that you do practice in, you have a problem because if they had their name first and filed for a trademark, they have a prior claim and priority rights to that name. And if it goes to court, you're probably going to lose. So our very first priority has to be to figure out your branding and ensure that whatever your brand is, it's something unique enough that if someone else tries to get in on your territory or expand later, you have a clear and irrefutable way to say no. No, I was here first. This was my unique name for my law firm, and so-and-so came in from South Dakota or whatever and said, Oh, I'm going to use that name. Well, that's great for them until and unless you expand your firm into South Dakota. And now you're in court because they're accusing you of IP infringement even though you were there with that name first. So let's not have that happen. The next thing you need to do is make sure that your keywords are on point and ready to go. Now, what your keywords are going to look like is going to be largely predicated on what your practice area is. My suggestion is to take the first five words that you can come up with and describe your field of practice. Write them down. Then try for 10. Try for 25, try for 50. These are the keywords that you're probably going to want to use because they're the ones that people who are looking for your services are going to type into a search engine. And bear in mind again that keywords don't have to be a single word. They can be a multi-word phrase. Miami, best personal injury attorney, and so on. Now, of course, you want to be careful with that because you want to make sure that however you put those keywords in and whatever those keywords are, that you can insert them into copy on your website, on your social media, and on your other promotional materials, and that they flow naturally, that they make sense. That it doesn't read like gobbledygook. And that's one of the reasons why spinning content is considered a huge no-no with major search engine algorithms. A lot of the content that spinning generates comes out reading completely irrationally to a human being and a human mind and eyes. It doesn't look right, it doesn't feel right, and it doesn't sound right, and that's going to scare people off. So you don't want to do that. What you want is to plan out your target keywords and your search phrases so that they've got the keywords that you can insert comfortably and naturally into any content promoting your firm. The next thing you have to do, of course, is create that content. And make no mistake, you need lots and lots of content. Long form content is the gold standard for Google. It always has been. There's no indication that it's going to stop being the gold standard anytime soon. So you need to make sure that you have as much of that as you possibly can generate. Now, granted, one of the biggest hurdles you'll face is the fact that you want and need that content to be evergreen. You want to target content that somebody can look at 10 years from now and it's still valid. That means you're going to have to make some updates, you're going to have to make some tough choices regarding what kind of content you go after and what kind of content you need to not be using it this time. For example, a white paper on a brand new Supreme Court ruling is probably not going to help you very much unless it gets serious and immediate ties that somehow link your field of practice. Now, in some cases, a white paper is a great idea. However, I would recommend that you hold that until at the very least you get somebody calling your firm to ask you about these things. Once that happens, you have more options. You can say, oh okay, well yes, I heard about this case, so what I want to do now is send you this white paper about the case and explain how it's relevant to your case that you're bringing to me. This is a great marketing tool, but you want to keep your content on your website largely between 1500 and 3,000 words. You want to make sure it's keyword rich but not overly dense. And if you want to be sure that it's all relevant to your field of practice, because that's key, and you've got to be a little careful about that. The next thing you want to do is you want to populate your social media channels so that people can see visible ongoing updates. You want people to say, oh hey, this person is doing things, this firm is doing things, filing suits on behalf of the ASPCA or whatever. It doesn't matter what it is, but you need to make sure you're visible, you're active, and that they're clear that you are visible, active, and working in this field. Because if you click on, let's say, an X profile, and the last time that they posted was in 2023, here at the beginning of 2026, they're going to be, are they going to take that seriously? I hope not, and you shouldn't. Neither should your clients. The same goes for Facebook and applies just the same to any other channels that your law firm uses for your search engine marketing and for your online reputation building and management. Now, if you've done these three things, you're off to a pretty good start, which begs the question of, okay, so what's missing? Well, at this point, you start getting into stats like traffic and clicks and likes and vanity metrics of that sort. That's stuff you can hold off on until you're ready to start worrying about it. But it doesn't make sense to worry about questions like, well, where am I going to get clicks from until you have something for people to click on in the first place? And this is another problem that I see a lot, especially with newer law firms or law firms that are just launching their SEO campaigns. You get a lot of people trying to put the cart before the horse, but they have no cart. They have no horse. And what they're trying to ride to market already just doesn't have a need. It doesn't apply. There's no demand for it. And they don't understand that this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. It has to be meticulously built. One page, one word, one picture at a time. One link even. Let's not forget about the links. The other thing you need to do before you start worrying about your SEO is to find and gather all the places where you've already got authority backlinks. If you wrote an insightful piece for the Harvard Law Review, or you wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post that was well received, these are things that you want on your website. Why? Because they show that you're actively interested in these things and that you're actively practicing in the area of law that you want to promote, and that the people you're working with are actually doing their job. So you need to be thinking about things like that before you ever start your SEO. You need to be working on building your reputation in the real world. And that means getting your name out there every way you can. Radio, television, print newspapers, periodicals, journals. If you're doing analysis of Supreme Court decisions, that's great. As long as they're relevant to your area of law, go for it. Get them in there. Because building your real world reputation is going to help bolster your SEO success. If you have a lot of backlinks to your site from authority sites like the Washington Post, the Harvard Law Review, you're already better off than about 90% of the law firms out there. Now, if you don't have this stuff right now, it doesn't matter. You could still start building your brand. You could still start working on your reputation, and you could start building your online presence, but it's going to be a lot harder if you don't have some of this stuff to back you up. Now, some of you may be saying, wait, John, this sounds like the old, well, we want you to have experience before you get the position, but how can I get the experience if no one's going to give me a chance? Fortunately, this part's pretty easy. This is where you start looking for calls for opinions or perspectives on legal issues. There's places where you can go online and people are looking for professional and expert opinions on just about anything. You don't even have to be an expert, you just have to be a professional in the field. Let's say you wrote an answer to a hypothetical legal question on Quora and your answer gets a million views and a thousand upvotes. That's great. You want that on your website because that's a great way to showcase what you're already capable of doing. Obviously, the more authority sites you can get, the better. But don't sleep on the social media stuff either, because the more of that you do, the more likely it is that somebody's going to seek you out and say, hey, I saw your opinion about Watkins v. Jones or whatever the case is, and I'd like to get your opinion about the rest of this case or this other case that's similar. And it maybe it's different, but you're getting recognition in print and on TV, and you're getting those other avenues and you're getting those outlets for engagement that you need so desperately to make sure that your website and your SEO is going to take off. If you started with these things, you've got most of the basics of SEO licked. The problem, of course, is getting people to think it about it in the right terms. And this is a brick by brick by brick process. It's not a situation where you just slam it all down at one time and say, hey, look, I'm done. Nothing happens overnight. There's no such thing in SEO as an overnight success. Rome wasn't built in a day. And SEO and online marketing doesn't work that way either. They never have and they never will. And that's just the reality. So you need to be cognizant of that. But if you've got all these pieces and you're working to put them together into one cohesive whole, you're off to a very, very good start. And there's a good chance that you're trying to find your SEO, and eventually you'll get the signal right, and your SEO will take off a whole lot faster and a lot more successfully than you expected if you don't do these fundamental basic steps. And you'll probably find it takes a lot less time and a lot less effort than you expected if you put the right pieces in place early and build on them. But you've got to have the basics in play if you want to get the results that you're hoping for. Again, I'm John Risve, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Before you leave today, I'd appreciate it if you could click the link below. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any updates on 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 marketing your firm's digital presence stronger and making it more durable. I look forward to seeing you next week.