Ep. 53 - The Law Firm Marketing Mistake That Slows Growth

In this episode of The Law Firm Growth Professor, I tackle one of the most common — and most misunderstood — questions law firms face when launching or refining their SEO strategy: Where should you actually be spending your marketing budget?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but there is a smarter way to think about it. I break down the 60-40 framework for balancing long-term foundational SEO with short-term marketing efforts that generate immediate visibility. More importantly, I explain why this split is not a fixed rule — and how blindly following it can lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities.

We cover how your field of law impacts your strategy, when to prioritize evergreen content versus timely updates, and why your allocation should evolve as your firm grows. I also walk through how to use real performance data — not guesswork — to determine where your marketing dollars are actually driving client acquisition.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re investing in the right places — or feel like your marketing spend isn’t translating into real clients — this episode will give you a practical framework to allocate resources more effectively and grow your firm with intention.

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. Now 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 biggest pain points I see with a lot of my law firm clients is trying to figure out where to allocate resources initially when you're just starting out or when you're rolling out a new SEO campaign. Now there's no hard and fast rules for this, so much of it is contextually dependent so that it can be really difficult to say, oh well, you need to do this, this, this, and this in this exact order, and it will work. Well, that's not necessarily the case, and there's a lot of nuance that a one size doesn't fit anyone checklist is going to bury. But what I generally suggest is when you're starting a comprehensive SEO campaign, you'll want to allocate about 60% of your overall spend to long-term, long-range goals. This includes stuff like building your website, getting your advertising channels in place, doing your content, all of this setup and housekeeping. Meanwhile, the other 40% is allocated towards short-term goals. So what might that look like for a law firm? Well, let's say, for example, you're in IP law and just starting out with no website or social media, well, go ahead and start there because that's my wheelhouse. In IP law, I'd want to get my website nailed down, get the content right, get the SEO right, and I want to devote about 60% of my overall marketing spend to things like developing that long-term evergreen content and outward-facing applications. Meanwhile, the other 40% is allocated to working on your short-term goals. This is A-B testing on your social media channels. This is doing your weekly blog post, whatever the topic may be for your law firm. Things that don't necessarily have to be evergreen, but they may draw attention to more of your evergreen stuff. So if you want these things ideally to be working in tandem, but all in all, I found that a 60-40 split for long-term versus short-term marketing is a good way to go. Now, as I said in the last episode about the Pareto principle, this isn't going to work for everybody. Your split may be more like 70-30 or 80-20, especially when you're starting out and trying to smooth over all the cracks and sand off the rougher edges. But overall, over time, you should stabilize at about a 60-40 split. Now, if you're starting from zero, of course, you need to be thinking long-term across the board. So everything needs to be treated like it's part of that long-term goal. So you might end up devoting 100% of your initial marketing spend just to getting the foundation set up. But over time, that 100% should start to creep down to 90 to 80% to 70 until you hit about 60%. Now some people find that 50-50 is a good balance. Some find over time that 40% long-term and 60% short term gets better results. And this is particularly true in areas of the law where things tend to change very quickly. Civil rights attorneys or immigration law, for example, they may want to go all in on short-term marketing because there's so much going on in the world right now that influences that body of law and the demand for attorneys in that field. So there's no magic formula per se. And how you apply that is going to depend largely on what field of law you practice and what's going on in your field. Fields that tend to be relatively stable, like PI law or estate planning, are not going to be as heavily impacted by short-term changes such as tax law, civil rights law, family law, intellectual property law. These are constantly changing. Somebody who's just starting out may want to prioritize more of that quick grab content and breaking news. Hey, the Supreme Court just ruled, blah, blah, blah, and here's how it affects you. This is an example of short-term marketing that can be parlayed into long-term marketing, of course. But that doesn't mean you should or can ignore the more evergreen content of your firm's landing pages and your contact page. It also means investing in things like building your social media presence so you have more channels for putting out your blurbs on a regular basis. Long-term versus short-term, right? So a lot of people get tripped up by this because they're looking for a magic formula or a magic bullet. And I'm sorry to tell you, there's no such animal. What there is in this situation is an opportunity. Let's say that you've done all the long-term ground laying and now you're ready to start drilling into more short-term marketing. So you'd still want to keep that emphasis about 60% on your long-term marketing, making sure that your pages are properly audited, making sure that you're keeping them up to date, making sure that all of the links work, all the basic housekeeping stuff that so many people tend to forget about, but which is so incredibly important. So the first thing you need to evaluate is what's my field of law? Are there a lot of changes? Are there a lot of shakeups happening? If so, you'll probably want to go harder on the short term than the long term, especially if you've already got a well-established website. If you've got your website and your social media channels and you've had them in place for a decade, uh you've probably got a pretty good idea of where the bulk of your clicks are coming from and where that puts your potential clients in your sales funnel. So with a 6040 split again, I want to stress this. Don't be dogmatic about it. Don't latch on to, oh well, 6040 is the ideal mix and there's no point in arguing it. That's not true because every law firm, every field of law is going to be a little bit different. And it's crucial that you remember that and that you understand that 6040 is a good rule of thumb, but it's not necessarily a rule that you want to hang your website's ongoing success on. So the first thing you do to be uh brutally honest about where you are in your SEO journey, that's important. Are you just starting out? Do you not have a website yet? If you don't, if you don't have a website, you don't have social media channels, you should probably figure 100% of your marketing spend for about the first three to six months is going to all be long term. You cannot get away from that because you've got to have the bricks in place and you've got to have the foundation laid properly before you can start getting into short-term stuff that might grab you more authority and more clients in the short term, uh, but not something that's going to help you long term. So you you need to get the long term in first, and you're probably not going to have time to be doing a whole lot of social commentary in your first six months after you've started your website. But contrast this with somebody who's had their website and their social media in place for five years. They're going to have a completely different set of priorities. They're going to have a different paradigm to look at uh at things with. And they may allocate their marketing budget differently than the person who's just starting out. And they should, because that means that they've grown. They've grown past the point where everything has to be long-term and everything has to be complete, everything has to be in place. Uh, once you've already got that, you can start going after your authority. You can start going after think pieces, blog posts, uh, news articles, or current events, and talking about new legislation or new Supreme Court rulings. Uh, you know, things that will grab people's attention on a more immediate level and help give you more authority when you're talking about those situations as they affect your field of law. And of course, the more of those authority links you can get, the more people you can get quoting you on the news, the more you can get Google AI to reference your work in summaries, the better off you're going to be. So for some people, it may even be 60% long term, 40% short term, especially if you've had a system in place for a long time and one that's working well. Now, the other thing to remember is that just because you hit a magic number, whether it's 70, 30 or 40, 60, it doesn't matter. You have to be willing to be flexible and keep in mind that things are going to shift over time. A page that is getting you a thousand clicks a day in January might only get you 700 clicks a day in February. Why? Because the time of year, which political party is in power, who controls Congress, the composition of the Supreme Court at any given time, this all could impact your field of law in some way. So as laws change, as rules change, as social norms change, you're going to find that you're trying to hit a moving target. Now, if you're in a field where the law tends to stay relatively stable, you're probably going to have an easier time deciding, oh, okay, I need to allocate X percent to long-term development and Y percent to short-term development. But uh, you have to have those numbers first. I stress this again because so many people want to go from a standing start to 200 miles an hour, but they haven't gone through any of the intermediate steps. SEO and digital marketing is not a sprint, it's a marathon. And what the perfect allocation is going to look like for you and your law firm right now may be different a week from now, a month from now, or a year from now than it is right at this moment. And of course, if you've already got the bricks in place, you're still going to need to go through and you're still going to need to make sure everything's kept updated. Everything is as accurate and timely as it can possibly be, but still be evergreen. And this trips up a lot of people because they forget that web pages are not intended to be constantly changed, except on an SEO level. So, yes, you should tweak the content, you should make sure the links are working right. Yes, you should make sure all of your keywords are in place, all of that good stuff. But that doesn't help you from a standing start to answer the question, where do I spend my money? Because you want to spend the majority of your money where it's going to get you the majority of clients. That's only logical. But then again, as we talked about in the last episode, you've got the Pareto principle, which says that 20% of your content is going to get you 80% of your clients in theory. And of course, I discussed why that's a fallacy and why you shouldn't be dogmatic about those percentages either. Well, I'm applying that same logic to the 60-40 rule. It's not really a rule, it's more of a guideline if you don't have any better idea of what to do next. So that frustrates a lot of people because we as attorneys, we have to say it depends so often to our clients. It depends on this, it depends on that, it depends on the weather, the judge, uh, the ambient temperature in the courtroom, whatever. You've got all of these things that you have to consider. But I've also mentioned before, attorneys tend to be very risk averse. So when it comes to our own business, we like hard and fast answers. But as I've said before, there's no such thing as a hard and fast, guaranteed to work every time answer when it comes to digital marketing. And that applies to the 60-40 rule as much as it does to anything else. So anytime somebody starts quoting the Pareto principle or whatever without any disclaimers, it's generally a good idea to take it with a grain of salt and double check your figures because your figures may not align with either of these precisely. Your figures may say that you know what, we need to be going 30% long-term and 70% short term because we've done so much with the long-term SEO. Now it's really just maintenance, it's making sure that everything's up to date, but the short-term stuff is where our bread and butter is going to be. Again, this is going to be more true for fields where the law is constantly changing and constantly evolving than it is in fields where things tend to stay a little more static. So the best way to determine how to allocate these resources is to look at what I already have. What are the pages that are doing me the most good? What are the social media outlets that are doing me the most good? What are the other marketing tools at my disposal that are getting me clients? That's the key. If it's not getting you clients, it's probably not something you want to invest in, or at least you don't want to invest much in. You want to kind of split it out and split it out in a way so that the majority of your marketing spend is going towards the channels that bring you clients, because otherwise you're just throwing good money after bad. That doesn't mean that the rest of it is not important and can or should be completely ignored. But it does mean that you want to emphasize the places where you're seeing the most growth by investing more money in them. And that's only logical. The 60-40 rule is a good one if you don't know where to start. It's like, okay, let's try this and see what happens. But again, the individual needs are going to impact that a lot. If you've had a website for five years, but you haven't updated your website in five years. Maybe you've done a blog post here and there or whatever, but by and large, your website has largely remained static. It's going to be time for a serious uh renovation or upgrade, updating the content and making sure that everything's correct. Make sure that everything is as it should be. And I want to emphasize this again. Google looks at that. How often are these pages updated? If you're in a field of law where maybe once a year you go through and clean house, great. But you should still have some dynamic content on there. These are your blog posts, your hey, I just donated $10,000 to the Little League program in our city. Whatever. It doesn't matter what it is, but stuff like that needs to be a part of your website as well, because that shows that there's constant activity and Google looks at that. Now, where you allocate the money or how you decide, okay, I'm gonna put X amount of my market spend here for the next six months, and we're going to see what happens. Largely, this is gonna depend on where you're starting now. Your SEO agency, they're probably not going to care. They're just happy to get your business and of course your money. But a good SEO agency will say, okay, before we cash this check, let's take a look and see where we need to be allocating this. And there should always be communication about that. So how am I allocating the spend for this retainer cycle for this month? Whatever is appropriate to your situation. Not everybody gets that, and a lot of people tend to think that SEO is a set it and forget it type of thing, but it isn't. It's constantly evolving and it's constantly updating, and you need to be uh constantly evolving and updating right along with it. That's why I say the 6040 rule is a good starting point. Uh, it's not and should not be taken as the be all end all, and it's certainly not a get out of jail free card if your SEO isn't doing the job. So if you're stuck for a place to start, 6040 is a reasonable one. But a good SEO agency will be able to show you the numbers and say, okay, this is what your website has been doing month over month, year over year. These are the places where you're doing well, and these are the places where you could probably stand to allocate some more resources, and they will have the numbers to back that up, and it's not just going to be vanity metrics, you're going to be able to cross-reference that against how many clients you're getting, and that will determine whether or not you're investing your marketing spend wisely. So keep the 6040 rule in mind, but treat it like the Pareto principle we spoke about. It's a handy guideline, but don't hang your hat on it. Again, I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. So before you leave today, I'd appreciate it 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 may find this podcast helpful. Thank you so much for stopping by today, and make sure you tune in next week for more tips and ideas for making your firm's digital presence stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you all next time. Thank you.