Ep. 48 - Why Your Law Firm SEO Might Not Be Delivering ROI

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor, I answer one of the most frustrating questions attorneys ask after investing in SEO: Is this thing actually working?

SEO doesn’t deliver overnight results, and anyone who promises instant ROI is using tactics that can ultimately damage your firm. Instead, growth happens in stages — from early traffic signals in the first three to six months, to measurable client increases over the first year, to long-term scaling decisions as your numbers compound.

I walk through three clear phases you should monitor to determine whether your SEO campaign is performing as intended. We cover what realistic growth looks like, how to track internet traffic against actual signed clients, why A-B testing matters, and how to interpret peaks, valleys, and plateaus without overreacting. I also explain when vanity metrics start to matter — and how to tie impressions and clicks back to real revenue.

If you’ve been wondering when the ROI kicks in — or whether your marketing dollars are truly moving the needle — this episode will give you a practical framework to evaluate performance, measure growth, and make informed decisions about scaling 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 that 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. A question that a lot of people ask about their SEO, especially after they've been doing it for a while, is is this thing on? Are they hearing me? Is my message landing? This is always a frustrating time because you've invested time, energy, and money in your SEO. And at a certain point you start to wonder, okay, so when do I start seeing the returns? When does the ROI kick in? And this is a fair question. And the answer is it depends. But the good news is there are some ways that you can find out for yourself if your SEO is working and if it's doing the job that you intended it to do. So we're going to jump into that and we're going to take a long, hard look at three ways that you can tell that your SEO is working. The first way runs from deployment of your campaign to let's say three to six months out. There you probably think three to six months, God, that's a long time. I need the ROI now. Well, it doesn't work that way. It has to have time to function and it has to have time to cook and do its job. And even Google says you cannot rely on overnight results. You may get them and you may get lucky, but you can't bank on that. And anybody who tells you that they can bank on overnight results is selling you something you really, really don't want. Because the methods they're going to use are problems. We've discussed this before. Black hat SEO, things like this. You don't want that anywhere near your law firm. Because when that happens, when you get caught, and you will, you're the one who's going to be holding the bag, not your SEO agency. So you need to be aware of that. So our baseline is from deployment to three to six months. What should you start to see? Uh you should start to see a gradual uptick in traffic. If it goes well, it begins to increase exponentially. Now you're going to have some fits and starts, and there's going to be some moments where things kind of plateau, uh, and you're going to have times when you seem to be losing ground. All of this is normal. You have to think about the timing of when you deployed your SEO campaign. If you deployed it right before a major holiday, for example, uh, you're probably not going to get the same traction that you would if you deployed it on a Tuesday morning in April. So there's uh when there's not a whole lot happening. So you want to start monitoring and auditing your own SEO in addition to what your SEO agency is doing. And we've talked about this before. Why auditing your own SEO is so important and why is it it's beneficial to you and your law firm? The next thing you need to be looking at is how many new clients have you gotten now? You can parse this out to a degree by asking intake questions. How did you hear about us? Where did you find out about us? Uh, were we referred to you by the state bar? Did you get it us through a friend? Or did you see us online? Uh did you see a billboard? Anything like that. Um these are perfectly fair questions and valid questions, and they'll give you some insight into how your SEO is performing. Ideally, you want 75 to 90% of your clients to come from the internet, and especially if you've just deployed a new campaign, you'll be able to gauge that. Okay, this must be working because it's getting this influx of new clients contacting us, asking about what we're doing, and hopefully filtering through the pipeline to become fully contracted clients. Now it's not always going to work that way. You're going to have people who are lawyer shopping or they want to get a sense of where their case, whether their case is any good, but they're not actually looking to move on it right now. We all know those frustrations, we all know those clients, and there's not a great deal you can do about that. But it will at least give you some insight into where your primary foot traffic is coming from. Ideally, internet traffic will translate to foot traffic, which will translate to cash flow. This is the hope, and this is what you're looking for. Anytime you see positive, verifiable signs of this, it's a good sign that you're on the right track and that this will last. Like I said, anywhere from deployment to three to six months out. Now, in that time, you're doing A-B testing, you're auditing, you're comparing notes with what your SEO agency says, and then you're getting a clear picture of how it's performing. If they're doing A-B testing, maybe on your B days you notice that your traction slides a little bit, or weeks, or whatever unit of temporal measure that you're using. But then you go to A testing and you say, okay, well, A worked. Well, what if I combine this with an element of B, and then all of a sudden you've got a C test that goes through the roof. This is how you stress test your SEO to make sure that it's working so that you can see that. Yes, the mic is on and people are hearing, so you've got that part of it down. The next part, let's say six months to a year after deploying your SEO. By this time, you should have your SEO pretty well refined to the point where you're seeing a consistent, stable, steady stream of traffic from your SEO taken as an average. This is the part that people miss a lot. They forget uh what you're going that you're going to have peaks and valleys, you're going to have plateaus, you're going to have times when a whole lot doesn't seem to be going on, and you're not seeing the traction that you want, while at the same time there's nothing else going on out in the world that would explain why the sudden low has come. So why am I hearing crickets all of a sudden? Well, it's because you can't predict what the market is doing at any given time. There may be times when your services are simply less in demand, but you need to be tracking the overall curve and how you're getting clients on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis. If you have 15% more clients than you had last year, you're doing well. If you have 50% more clients than you had last year, you're blowing it out of the water. You're doing great. That's not a whole there's not a whole lot to change there. Obviously, you want to stick with what works, but you need to be ready to pivot in case people's tastes change or the market changes. Let's say you're using a certain song for your marketing, um, and all of a sudden the cultural tastes change, and that song is no longer good to use for whatever reason. Maybe the artist became radioactive because of their personal conduct and got canceled. Maybe it's just, oh, I've heard that song too many times now. And now, of course, we assume we've gone through all the proper licensing and you're not engaging uh in IP infringement because that's not a good look, no matter how you do it. So drop the song and pick another. But you're making refinements uh when needed, and your SEO is still working and it's still holding up, and if you're still getting results, then stick with it. Maybe in month one you see three new clients, month two you see seven new clients, month three, you don't see any. But then month four comes and all of a sudden you have ten new clients. Now you know uh that you're onto something, and it's a gradual incremental increase. You're not looking to hit home runs all day, you're looking for singles. You don't need to hit it out of the park, you just want to hit singles all day long. I've got one client in, I've got uh one client in onboarding, another two clients that have just signed contracts. Great, you're doing well. And as you track that over time, what you should see is a clear upward curve. Now, yes, it's going to be a little erratic when you plot it as a graph. It's going to look more like an EKG than a smooth curve. But over time, you should see a smooth, clear ascent from where you started to where you are. Now, if you're not seeing this, something is very, very wrong. And that's where you need to stop and regroup. Re-evaluate what you're doing with your SEO and what's not resonating with your target audience. And it's perfectly fair to ask people, okay, what isn't working about this? What do you like about this campaign? What did you not like about this campaign? Your SEO agency can do some of that and think tank it for you so that you don't have to deal with focus groups and so forth. Most marketing agencies that have any inclination towards traditional marketing methods will probably do some of that for you. They'll organize focus groups and find out what's working, maybe uh run some split tests uh online, which is fairly easy, and then you identify what's resonating and what isn't. And then they'll make refinements to get the best part out of your SEO campaign while mitigating or eliminating the worst of it. You're going to need a little bit of uh of hands-on attention at this stage. It may be tempting to say, well, I don't need to know this or that because that's my SEO agency's job, and I pay them for a reason. I say that you still do because you're the one looking to reap the ultimate benefits from it, and it's your money at stake. It's in your best interest to make sure that you're paying attention to this stuff. So now we come to uh a year plus. When you look back over the year, you're looking back over all the raw data that you've gathered. And I really hope you're tracking this stuff regularly. I would suggest no less than weekly. A lot of people like to do it monthly. Some people just look at it year after year. These are all fine, they all have their good points, they all have their weaknesses and problems. But when you're auditing your SEO weekly and you're comparing that against the incoming traffic to your firm, you're spending a lot of time gathering those numbers on a weekly basis. However, after a while, you can learn to spot the trends without having to monitor as aggressively or as often. Maybe you cut it down from weekly to every two weeks, and then from every two weeks to monthly. Uh, perhaps, and this is you know a bit of a stretch, but maybe you go quarterly and you look at it really hard every quarter. But again, this is at least a year out from when you launch your initial SEO campaign. Now, for our purposes, I'm going to say that when your campaign started, uh, let's assume you had you didn't have a decent website, you didn't have a social media presence uh to speak of. You're giving out business cards uh at networking meetings and taking out ads um uh in different places, maybe bench ads, billboards, whatever it is. There's some random people out there, believe it or not, that that still use an old-fashioned phone book. So they still exist. Uh, but say you've you've built this this system and you're starting to work on it and have it polished and so crystal clear so that you've become the go-to person that everybody thinks of uh when they think about law firms in your field of law. Your practice should be the name on everybody's lips. And if you've done it right, then you've got that at the very least. You'll be the go-to person the public thinks of, even if they don't ultimately engage your services. Or if they can't engage your services, there's a conflict of interest or whatever. The next question you have is where am I with all of this stuff? Of course, you need all those numbers. Uh, you need to be able to assess that. You can't tell if your SEO campaign is working if you don't know how many impressions, how many clicks, and how many visitors you're getting. These vanity metrics, uh, they do become important at this point because you can take that information and compare it against the number of actual visitors to your firm. And from there, you extrapolate how many new clients have you onboarded and how many have you managed to retain. And when you have those, then you know that the mic is on and you know it's working, and you know it's doing what you need it to do. That's wonderful, but you have to do the legwork on the front end. You can't guarantee that your SEO agency is going to do this for you. They should, and as a matter of course, the reputable ones will. But again, there's no guarantee that you and them are looking at the same things at the same time and expecting the same outcomes. There's going to they're going to be more geared towards what's happening in cyberspace and online because that's their lane. Whereas you're naturally more guaranteed, more geared towards what's happening in the real world. How many actual people are scheduling appointments? How many am I contacting? Uh, how many are signing up? And perhaps uh most importantly, how much cash flow is all of this activity bringing into my law firm? But with all these numbers, you can assess all of this fairly easily, and you can say, uh, for this fiscal year we had X number of clients. Okay, next year we had X plus let's say 27%, just to kind of split the difference. A 27% increase in volume in one year is pretty good. Those are great numbers, and nobody's gonna complain about that, and you'd be insane to do so. However, if you're looking to scale, this is the time when you're going to need to start thinking about these things because if you've got a 27% incremental year-over-year increase in the amount of clients looking to be represented by your firm, you know you're going to need to bring in more people. You're going to need more paralegals, more secretaries, more attorneys. You may even need to look at upgrading to larger office space. So, as I mentioned in the last podcast, it's critical that you understand and remember that when this takes off, and it will, if it's done right, and if it's handled properly on the real world side, you're going to need to scale and you're going to need to have a plan in place for what things are going to look like. So by three years from the time you first deployed your SEO campaign and it started to gain traction, you should be planning to expand. Now, a lot of people get shy about that. They get nervous about it. They don't like the idea of scaling because they think it means less personalized service, more administrative headaches. Both of these are generally true, but not necessarily, and they don't have to be. It's all a question of how your law firm's culture is structured. And some areas of law are less in demand than others. For example, you may have a lot of people looking at family law or personal injury. Fewer people, uh much fewer, look for IP protection. I know this as a patent attorney, uh, and and or or trademarks. And same thing for estate planning law. Depending on your field of practice, it may be very cut and dry. You just don't know. Now, you know your own field better than I do. I know what's going on in patent and trademark law. I understand it. I keep an eye to the ground in my field, but I can't tell you what the trends are in family law or what they are in estate planning or what's going on in personal injury. Unless something really major blows up in the news, I'm probably not going to hear about it if it's not in my practice area, because it's just not my lane. So you're going to have to assess and decide for yourself how this should be arranged. But if you have uh proof that your SEO campaign is working and that everything's firing the way that it should be, and you're getting more people in, you're getting better results, you're seeing more clients, even if you decide not to represent them, you still have a lot of information to work from. And with that information, you can realistically project what the next results are going to be based on past performance. Of course, there's always the risk that something weird is going to happen. The Supreme Court's going to come out with a ruling that makes everybody go, wait, what? That's never worked this way before. Or Congress may pass a new law, or the president may pass an executive order that all of a sudden everybody's jumping on the bandwagon for. Another pandemic hits and it uphends everything. If that happens, you need to be prepared and adapt to that. But I'm getting those metrics, getting that information, and tracking it carefully, routinely, and keeping on with the A-B testing, keeping on with asking people, how did you find my law firm? These data points will tell you pretty much everything you need to know so that you can be sure that your SEO campaign is working as advertised, performing as intended, and is getting more people and more money into your law firm. Again, I'm John Rizvi, 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 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 make 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 time at the Law Firm Growth Professor podcast.