Ep. 49 - The Five SEO Mistakes Law Firms Cannot Afford to Make

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor, I break down the five SEO mistakes your law firm simply cannot afford to make.

SEO is forgiving in many ways. You can make small missteps and recover. But there are critical errors that quietly undermine your brand, stall your growth, and prevent your firm from reaching its full potential — even when you think everything is “working.”

I walk through why ignoring SEO altogether is a fatal flaw, why operating without a clear strategy leaves you vulnerable during both peaks and plateaus, and why failing to audit your SEO regularly can allow vanity metrics to distract you from what actually drives signed clients. We also discuss how to capitalize on unexpected opportunities when they arise — and why resting on past success is one of the fastest ways to fall behind competitors who are paying closer attention.

If you want your SEO to support real, sustainable growth — not just traffic and impressions — this episode will help you avoid the strategic mistakes that derail law firms before they even realize what went wrong.

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

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:01

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. And 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. Now there's a lot of things that you can do with SEO, and if you mess them up, you're probably going to be okay. But a lot of people ask me, okay, John, what are the mistakes that I absolutely cannot make with SEO and expect it to work? Now this is an incredibly important question because it makes a huge difference in how your brand is perceived, both online and in the real world. Now, SEO is very forgiving. Generally speaking, like I said, you can make a lot of mistakes with SEO and still bounce back from them. But there are five mistakes that a lot of people make and then they're surprised that they don't get the results they're after, or worse, they find out that they're that they've compromised their brand and they had no idea. So with that in mind, let's jump in with both feet and go over these five mistakes that your law firm cannot afford to make. The first and most obvious naturally is not having SEO at all. You put up a website and you put up some social media channels, but you have no SEO plan. You have no idea what your next moves need to be. You don't have a starting point and you don't have an end game in mind. You're just throwing things at the wall and hoping that something sticks. This is a mistake that a lot of people make. It's one of the easiest to remedy, but it's also one of the hardest to bounce back from. You have to have some SEO going in. Now again, when you set up your website, especially if you do it through a service like WordPress, you can expect that your SEO is going to be more or less okay, kind of right out of the box, except for your own content. That doesn't mean you don't have to put effort into it, and it doesn't mean that other things don't have to be done. And we've talked about this before: keywords and search strings, good content, a good linking strategy, uh, building out your online profile so that you have authority links that you can refer to. Preferably things that you've written or done interviews that you've given things like this, uh, interviews on. That's going to put you ahead of the pack. If you don't have that, it's not the end of the world, but it's something you need to be working on and you need to be developing those links, that content, those keyword strategies. And of course, you have to have a plan for what happens when your SEO starts taking off, as we'll discuss in the next episode. If you do that, you're probably going to be okay, but you cannot afford to ignore SEO altogether. And you can't ignore to sit to have, say, a website and say that I have social media channels and think that that's good enough. It isn't. Not in today's world. Not when so much of SEO is so tightly focused and so geared towards reaching the top of Google. Uh, you've got a lot of competition that you're working against, and you need to be cognizant of that right from the start. The second concern is not having a strategy. Now, this kind of dovetails with number one, but you've got to have a strategy in place. You have to know what your next moves are. You have to plan for scale, and you have to plan for a sudden influx of business. You also have to plan for times when you plateau or times when suddenly your phones aren't ringing as much as they were. But you're still getting the same amount of traffic. You need plans and fallbacks for either of those situations. And a lot of people don't worry about that. They think, well, you know, business drops off at certain times of the year. Nobody wants to work around the holidays or uh over the summer, uh, depending on what you're doing. Uh, it could be a dead time because everybody's on vacation, they're taking trips with their families, or they're just enjoying the weather and they don't want to mess with it. That doesn't mean that you can afford to sleep on the slack times. During the slack times, you need to be evaluating what's going on, what's happened, how has my brand evolved, and you need to put plans in place to develop your next moves. This is where a lot of people go wrong because again, they make the mistake of thinking, well, this is on autopilot, and yes, there's going to be sudden peaks and there's going to be sudden valleys. You're going to find that you plateau high or suddenly your business drops down low, and people think, oh well, this happens, this is normal, and it's natural. And it is up to a point. But during the downtimes, you need to be prepping for the busy times. You need to be thinking about, okay, we're in a low right now, but let's say September 1st comes around and school starts and everybody's back to their normal lives, everybody's back to their jobs, and you can anticipate a rush of business depending on your practice area. Well, if that's the case, especially in, for example, family law, this is a great time for you to be digging in and saying, okay, what's worked for us in the past? What can we double down on? And what should we get rid of? And how are we going to do that in a way that keeps our branding cohesive, keeps our messaging clear, and makes sure that we attract the right attention from the right people? This is a hard concept to get across to some people because they think you go in knowing that there's going to be ebbs and flows, and that you're going to have times when there's not much going on. And you're going to have times when it's all hands on deck and you have to cancel vacations, and everybody's working overtime to make sure all of these things are getting done properly for your client. And that happened, it's part of business. Humans are not a reliable species. We're kind of a messy lot in general. Part of humanity's messiness is its unpredictability. So you want to try to make things as predictable as possible, and you want to know in advance how are we going to respond to sudden changes in our clients' approach? And that's number two. The third thing you can't afford with SEO is not auditing it regularly. This is the one that drives me absolutely crazy. I'll ask my clients, when was the last time you audited your SEO? And they'll say, How do I do that? Why do I do that? Why do I care? Uh isn't that my SEO agency's job? Yes, it is. And I've discussed this before. There's a time and a place to let your agency do what it does. And then there's a time, once everything's dialed in, where you need to be monitoring it yourself and making sure that your SEO agency is actually reporting the metrics that you care about. And you need to make sure that you're on the same page with that. It's if nothing else, it's a good way to keep your agency honest. Now, most SEO agencies, as I've said before, they're not out to deliberately screw you or your firm. They're not out to get something for nothing. They're not out to do the absolute minimum. Phone it in and then stick you with a bill. What they're going to do over time is you'll start noticing some scope creep. You start looking at your metrics, and these are the KPIs that you're interested in. But all of a sudden they start going, okay, we've got these dialed in, so let's look at these metrics over here that don't matter as much. This is where you start getting into vanity metrics. Your likes, your clicks, your visitor traffic, all of that stuff is great, but it doesn't tell you anything in a vacuum. And it certainly doesn't tell you in a vacuum how you're getting from impressions all the way to signed contracts and from impressions to I will take your case and now you're on the clock. Not all SEO agencies understand this, and they're not going to be as concerned about your bottom line as you are. That only makes sense. Again, as I've stressed before, it's your name on the door, it's your name on the letterhead, and it's your reputation on the line. Ultimately, the buck is going to stop with you, and you need to be aware of that. So just getting your SEO agency to run it and not asking questions isn't the answer. Do your own independent auditing uh completely. That's never a good idea either. Especially if this is this field is new to you and it's not your forte. So, what you need to think about hard and you need to make sure that your SEO agencies knows that you're going to be doing an independent auditing on your own. Some people like to take 10 to 20 minutes at the beginning or the end of the week and look at these numbers and evaluate the KPIs for themselves to see if the results they're getting match up with what you set up with your agency. Some people bring in another SEO agency to double check the first agency's work. I don't recommend this because it's a lot of extra expense, but it's a perfectly valid way to do it, and it's a great way to create a tiebreaker if your agency is saying something that that you that you question or the numbers you're seeing are not supported by their assertions, and you want to know if there's a conflict or if there's a disconnect. In these cases, it does make sense to bring in an independent SEO agency and have them do an audit and to make sure you have as complete of a picture as you possibly can. Now, a lot of people they don't like doing this, they feel like it's shady or it's sneaky or somehow it's disloyal to their own agency. That's not the case at all. Any reputable SEO agency should actually invite you to do your own auditing and to double check their numbers. That's because they should be the first to admit that they're not perfect. They'll miss things, they'll make mistakes, and it keeps everybody honest and it's make sure and it makes sure that everyone's on the same page and looking at the same things. So get the idea that this is that this is a shady or sneaky or disloyal thing that you're doing out of your mind. You need to make sure that you're doing an audit and at least stress testing uh the SEO plan and looking at what your own agency is doing. Um, the fourth mistake is not capitalizing on opportunities. If you notice that you're getting a lot of traction from a post on LinkedIn or something you wrote on Reddit or whatever, it doesn't matter where it's coming from, but you need to be capitalizing on that. You need to make sure that you're working towards bolstering that reputational boost that you're getting because it's going to be those reputational boosts and those sudden blips of unusual interest in your firm that are going to help take you to the next level. And the next level and the next level after that. These things are how you determine whether or not you're scaling or whether or not you're hitting the KPIs that you need. So, for example, say you suddenly have a post about a new state law that catches fire, and the traffic on your social media site goes up 50-fold, then that traffic to your website goes up 20 fold, and the number of people asking for more information or free consultations or whatever goes up tenfold. Great, you're doing something right. As long as you keep hammering on that popularity, you go where the popularity is to a degree you can afford to ignore social media outlets that aren't getting you those results. Or maybe you phone in a little more on those and double down on the ones that are getting you the traffic that you're looking for. However, you need to be asking, why did this catch fire? Why is this suddenly blowing up? What is it about this topic at this time that has people so interested? Because people don't just get interested in things in a vacuum. Something is going on. Uh, maybe there's a massive shift in state or federal law where you live, something that impacts your field of law, and all of a sudden people are nervous, people are curious, they want to know more about how this is going to impact me. And that's where you have the advantage, and you can keep a finger on that pulse of what people are interested in and concerned about and capitalize on it. Now I get that. This sounds cold-blooded, and to a degree, to be fair, it is. It's strictly by the numbers, but you're trying to grow a business, and growing a business with data is better than growing it based on your gut feel. If you're trying to hit KPIs and you're trying to hit your target uh client onboarding, and you're trying to hit your target client retention rates, then you have to use every tool in the toolbox to make sure that it gets done. And finally, the fifth thing, the final thing is the part where everybody seems to struggle with the most. This is almost universal. Now, looking back at what's been successful and trying to figure out how to make it better. A lot of people say, well, I did this and it was good enough. I got the KPIs I was looking for. I don't need to worry about it anymore. Wrong. You do need to worry about it because the more consistently you're hitting those KPIs, the more consistently your content uh brings in new clients. And the more you're getting that regular traffic and the traction on Google and elsewhere for your content, the easier it's going to be to hit those metrics. And the easier it is to hit those metrics, the easier it will be to scale your law firm where you need it to be. Yes, this entails a lot of extra work on your end. It means that you can't just rest on your laurels and say, oh well, we did a good job. Uh, last one out, catch the lights. No, you need to be looking at what succeeded and why now again. This dovetails with the last point I made. Because you need to understand what it is that's attracting your clients to your firm. What are you doing better than the other firms that are out there? That's something you need to be looking at as well. And just because your SEO is taking off, you also need to be monitoring what your competitors are doing and figuring out what they're doing better than you. If you're doing something better than them, that's great. Don't worry about it. But be ready to pivot in case they do suddenly come up with something that you didn't see, something that uh gets them in front of you in the Google results. You need to be constantly aware of the ecosystem in which you're working. Whether you're working in one city or one state, or whether you're trying to build a nationwide law firm like I am with the patent professor, no matter how you do it, you need to be prepared to pivot and to make sure that if your competition is doing something, uh something that you're doing it well also. Uh and you're trying to do it, not just as good as them, do it better, do it cleaner. And if you notice one of your competitors is using a lot of AI-generated content, uh, and you you see hallucinations in it, which which you'll find with AI, you have a chance to capitalize on that. How you do that is up to you, and you should always work uh with your state's advertising and ethics um uh requirements. But provided you do that, you're in a good position to solidify your market reach by providing content that's better and more accurate and establishing yourself as the reliable source for information on those topics. This is critically important, and so many people ignore that fact and they do it to their own detriment. So don't be one of those people. Make sure that you've established all of these points and that you're not making these mistakes, you're not ignoring what's going on in your ecosystem, you're not ignoring what your competitors are doing, and you're not sleeping on SEO as a concept altogether. If you do these things, you'll generally find that you're a lot better positioned versus your competition, and you'll be ready for a sudden influx of clients where they may have to turn business away and send people to you. Nobody wants to do that. You will if you have to, but wouldn't you rather be in a position to capitalize on someone else's overflow than be the one having to send overflow that you worked hard to get and spent a lot of money to get, sending that overflow elsewhere? Because that's how you make money and that's how you build a million-dollar, five million dollar, a ten million dollar firm. So be cognizant of these things and be thinking about these things and be ready to implement these things if you haven't done it already. Again, I'm John Risvie, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Before you leave today, I'd appreciate if you could click the like button. 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 are attorneys. Uh, thank you so much for stopping by and be sure to tune in next week for more tips and ideas for making your firm's digital presence stronger. I look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you.