Ep. 52 - SEO Reality Check for Law Firm Growth

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor, I break down how the 80-20 rule applies to your law firm’s SEO — and why most firms are focusing their time, money, and effort in the wrong places.

The reality is that a small percentage of your content is likely generating the majority of your results. But if you’re treating every page, every signal, and every platform equally, you’re diluting your impact and slowing your growth.

I explain how to identify the pages, platforms, and signals that are actually driving client conversions, how to allocate resources more effectively, and why the Pareto principle should be treated as a flexible strategy — not a rigid formula. We also cover how to interpret your data correctly, avoid over-investing in underperforming content, and build a more efficient SEO system that compounds results over time.

If you want to stop guessing and start focusing on what’s truly working in your marketing, this episode will give you a practical framework to optimize your efforts and scale your firm more effectively.

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. Now, chances are good that somewhere in your studies or just in day-to-day life, you've heard about the 80-20 rule, or the Pareto principle. Today I want to drill into this as it equates to your SEO for your law firm. Because if you average it out, you'll most likely find that 20% of your total content gives you 80% of your results. Now, on average, over this time, this formula isn't going to always work. So let's get that straight right off the bat. What the Pareto principle teaches us is that we need to be focusing the majority of our resources on a minority of our total output, because that's top 20%. That's what you're going to be looking at at all times. So what does that look like? Like in the world of SEO. Well, for our purposes, what it means is this if you have, let's say, 10 web pages on your site, then you need to identify the top two that are getting you clicks and contacts. And those are the pages you want to emphasize the most in your SEO strategy. Now that sounds very simple and cut and dried. So what I want you to look at is, for example, the contact me page. And you want to look at probably your overall firm page. That's fine. But it's not as simple as just saying if you're going to prioritize two out of ten web pages, you need to figure out which ones are getting you the most views. And those are the ones where you really want to hammer on your SEO. Everything on your website should link to those critical pages. Again, if you have 10 web pages, every single one of them should be pointing back to both of the two pages that are driving the majority of your engagement. That only makes good sense, right? However, you can apply this in other ways. If you have, say, uh a checklist of 100 different SEO signals that you and your SEO agency have decided you want to prioritize, well, right now is the time that you want to drill down. You want to look at the top 20 of those that are the most impactful on your SEO performance and build those out to the point where the top 20 signals are getting about 80% of your effort and your engagement and your investment. Again, I want to stress that this is not as simple as it sounds because what may be right for a personal injury law firm may be completely wrong for an estate law firm, and maybe also completely wrong for a family law firm, and so on. So you need to understand your market and what motivates your client base and drives them to or away from your firm. You need to understand where your engagement is coming from. And this is where you need to drill into user intent and search strings. How are people finding your website? What are they doing once they're there? And what's your average visitor time on your site or on your page? All of these things come into play here. Now, granted, I've said this before, and you don't need to focus overly on clicks and visits and so forth. To be fair, these stats are important information in their own way, but they're only really helpful to you as background for how your website is performing and what it's doing for your firm. Now, another thing I want to stress here is that the Pareto rule is not a hard and fast law. Your proportions may be more like 70-30 or even 60-40, and that's fine. If you've got 10 individual pages on your website and four of them are driving traffic to becoming full clients of your firm, then you want to emphasize all of those pages. That's perfectly fine. You can do that. You can and should internally link every part of your website to link to those pages. This helps to make sure that your funnel is as wide as possible. But the key to the Pareto principle is that it basically says don't throw good money, good time, good resources after pages that aren't doing all that much for you. If they're not doing that much for you, you need to find out why, and you need to focus the majority of your attention on the pages that are doing more for you. At the same time, you and your SEO agency need to try to get all the content on your site on that same level as the ones that are pulling the serious value-added traffic. Now, walking that tight rope is not necessarily an easy thing to pull off, because it's going to take some time to generate the new data, the statistics, and the overall high-level understanding of how your website is performing versus your competition and your intended goals. Once you have that information, you're in a position to start really fighting back. You can start paring away at pages and signals to figure out the ideal mix. You may say, okay, these pages are working for me. We need to double down on those pages that aren't doing so much of the heavy lifting and try to find out why. Yes, we need to come up with a playbook for keeping those pages up to date and refining them as much as we need to, so we're sure to keep them updated. Yes, we need to make sure the SEO is tight, and yes, we need to make sure that we're hitting as many signals as we possibly can. But that doesn't mean that you're throwing good money after bad. The Pareto principle would say that instead of spending 10% on each page, you're spending as much as 80% of your marketing spend on 20% of your pages and the other 20% on the remaining 80%. That's not intuitive, and you're not going to get perfectly even results distribution every time. And if you do, that's a likely indicator that something's not right. So the Pareto principle is a good guideline and a sorting screen for asset allocation. It's a good starting point. And I want to really emphasize this point. Once you have some data, you have to have the data first. But before you can even hope to start to properly apply it, you need the data. I would say if you're starting fresh and cold with no website, no social media, no nothing, you're going to want to get at least six months of hard data behind you and review that data more or less continuously so you can see the trends over time. And again, you've got a lot of signals you can choose from. So maybe you pick the top 10 signals that you think are really crucial. Out of that 10, the two that you've earmarked as the top drivers are the ones that you want to focus on. But the numbers may not always bear out a perfect 80-20 relationship. And that's why I stress that the Pareto Principle is a starting point, not an end game onto itself. And a lot of people miss that. They think that the Pareto principle came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets. And so that it's some law that you can't violate. It's not. It's a theory, it's an observation, and it's a way of thinking that's something that can broadly be said to apply, not just to digital marketing or SEO, which is where I'm applying it here, but to everything. In reality, the actual numbers you find yourself dealing with are going to need some tweaking. So instead of the 80-20 rule or the Pareto principle, which ties the focus to that perfect ideal example figure, maybe we could say instead that a minority of your output is going to impact a majority of your input. Input in this case being client referrals, signed documents, retainers. That's the output that you're getting from the input you've got on your site and on your social media. So one of the things here is not to be dogmatic about the Pareto principle or assume it automatically even applies to your firm's digital marketing situation. Yes, you do need to pay attention to this stuff, but your results may trend more, like I said, 70-30, or where 30% of your content drives 70% of your optimum results. Or it could even be 60-40. It doesn't matter what the numbers are. What does matter is that you know what the numbers are so that you can work with them and identify your digital marketing successes and weaknesses and then shore them up. So what I always recommend for law firms that I'm onboarding is to take a hard look at as much of your web history as we possibly can for as far back as possible. Let's see what your visitor count is. Let's see what your click count is. Check this stuff out, because once you've done that and we've isolated the main drivers, we know where to commit a majority of resources because those are the pages and the outlets that are getting you the results you want. Let's say that you have five social media channels, and out of all of them, TikTok is doing the best for you. TikTok is getting you the views and the clicks and the engagement and the funnel results that you're looking for. If you've got that, then you know that you want to spend about 80% of your resources on TikTok. It doesn't mean you should neglect Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, X, whatever you're doing. But in this example, TikTok is going to be far and away a better investment of your resources. That's the key to the Pareto principle. It's not the exact proportions or hitting some magical 80-20 mix. That's not what you're trying to do here. What you are trying to do is determine where your resources are best spent and how to allocate them so you get maximum results. The same would apply if you had, let's say, TikTok and Facebook as your main client drivers, and they're performing about neck and neck, historically speaking. Okay, well, that's 60% of your social media budget. In this case, the Pareto principle seems to fail because you haven't hit that 80-20 mix, but the principle still applies. Only what it takes is a few tweaks in the numbers, and that's where I hammer on this, especially to people who haven't done a whole lot of SEO, people who don't really understand SEO, or who, let's be honest, don't really care about SEO. You care about getting clients. You don't care how you get them. I mean, as long as you're doing it within ethical constraints, you don't care where you get them. You want to understand the Pareto principle and understanding that it can be a little more fluid than the average web breakdown would suggest. It's just another tool in your toolbox, but it's an important one, which is why I'm devoting an entire episode to it. I'm sure you've heard the old saw that 20% of the people in any organization will be responsible for 80% of the work getting done. Or 20% of computer bugs cause 80% of website crashes. These are everyday examples of the Pareto principle that people trot out to say, okay, yes, see, look, that this does work. Well, it does, but it doesn't work in a vacuum. And as I mentioned, uh, as I mentioned before, and I'm going to hammer on this again, it's not always a perfect 80-20 split. If you're approaching the 50 feet mark by applying the Pareto principle, something probably isn't right. Something weird is going on, and you need to figure out what that is, because it's very rare that things even out so nicely. And that's especially true when it comes to the internet, that you don't get those perfect breakdowns. So if you're getting a 50-50 result, you need to take a hard look at why, because something is likely wrong. And you can get into the weeds or click through rate and user experience and bounce rate and all of these things. And yes, they're important. I'm not trying to negate or downplay downplay their importance. What I am trying to do is illustrate that the Pareto principle should generally more or less prove itself over time. And you should see similar results over time. If you're not seeing those results, it's time to back up and figure out why. But if you're getting a 6040 or 7030 or 8020, that's great. Now on the other side of the spectrum, if 10% of your website is carrying 90% of your load, something is probably amiss with your SEO and you need to take a hard look at what that is. Maybe this page was really well written. You've got the authority quotes, you've got everything that you need to convince a potential client that your firm is the right one. But what are the other nine pages doing then? Why aren't they carrying their share of the weight? Now, granted, again, you're not going to get a smooth, even division. If every single page is giving you 10% of your click-through rate or client retention, that's weird. Something is wrong because it shouldn't really work that way. And it could even indicate a potential cyber attack or something unusual. Because these are rare circumstances where that could happen organically, and it might actually be benign, but that's going to depend drastically on what field of law you're in and what you're trying to accomplish. You don't want a solution that's a perfectly even distribution curve, uh, and it's not something you should strive for. That's actually a sign of a potential problem. You don't want half of your website doing the work and half of your website just sitting there. You don't want one page to be carrying everything. All of these are problematic for different reasons. And you and your SEO agency would need to sit down and drill down into what's happening here? Why is this happening? This doesn't make any sense when you apply the Pareto principle. And again, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. This does not happen. You don't get that 80-20 distribution overnight. Sometimes you're going to see a 90-10 or you're going to see a 50-50. But those should be rare one-off things where you can say, okay, I redid that web page and it blew up. All of a sudden, I've got 20 new clicks once I redid that page. Great. Now you have hard, actionable facts that you can look back to. Now a lot of people treat the Pareto principle again like it's gospel, like it's a law no less significant or immutable than gravity. And to these people, I'd say that tells me you don't really understand the Pareto principle or how to apply it. The minority of inputs control the majority of outputs, and that's positive or negative. So take a second and think about how the Pareto principle affects your daily life. Maybe you have one pair of shoes that you wear and 20% of your working life. But when you wear these shoes, 80% of your cases turn out. Well, okay, that's the Pareto principle. It's kind of an off-beat application of it that I just made up. But if the shoe fits, wear it, right? Keep the Pareto principle in mind and don't get hung up on the exact proportions. If it's not exactly 80-20 all of the time, that's fine. Because your website plus your social media is a living ecosystem onto itself. But if you could identify where the majority of your output is coming from, it tells you what you need to put into that and where to put it in order to get the best results. And at the end of the day, that's what SEO is all about. It's about getting you and your firm the best results, the most clients, and then doing it in a way that makes sure you're going to continue to get those results when somebody else is trying to sprint, which in this case is to say cheat. And that gets some way to get them to number one fast. Well, they may make it, but that's not going to last. Meanwhile, you're at position three on page one, but you're steadily climbing the rankings every single time Google updates. So think of the Pareto principle as one more tool and one more way to evaluate what your internet presence is doing and where you can best and most effectively commit resources. It doesn't mean sleep on everything else. And it doesn't mean, oh well, I can pare my website down to two pages because these other eight don't matter. No, that's not it. And people who think that, again, are people who've completely missed the point. So keep the Pareto principle in mind, be flexible about the numbers, and make sure that you've got enough data on a month over month or year over year basis to properly apply it to your website, your client base, and what you're trying to accomplish. If you do that, you've got one hell of a powerful tool at your disposal. Again, I'm John Rizvy, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Before you leave today, I'd appreciate it if you could click the like button, make sure to 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 all next week. Thank you.