Ep. 68 - How to Turn Your Legal Experience Into High-Ranking Content

Google is no longer rewarding law firms simply for publishing the most content. Today, quality, relevance, originality, and firsthand experience matter far more than another generic article repeating information that already exists online.

In this episode, I explain why your personal experience as an attorney may be your greatest SEO advantage. I share how law firms can move beyond commodity content, listicles, and recycled legal updates to create detailed, authoritative resources that speak directly to the people they genuinely want to serve.

I also discuss why conversational language builds trust, how to identify topics your competitors cannot replicate, and why understanding your ideal client is essential to creating content that both Google and prospective clients value.

Your competitors may be able to cover the same legal topics, but they cannot duplicate your experiences, observations, voice, or passion for the work you do. The firms that learn how to communicate those things clearly will have a significant advantage in the changing world of search.

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 Rizvey, 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, one of the biggest changes in how SEO works in the last couple of years is the way that they're no longer prioritizing quantity of content over quality of content. Now, what does quality content mean? Quality content is unique, first person, and detailed. You're going into a deep dive about what you're talking about. Unique means no one else out there is doing the same thing. So this strengthens your position as regards to SEO, which is great. It's also authoritative. You need to know what you're talking about and be able to easily translate that into layperson terms that your target audience can readily understand. That one is probably the most obvious. So we're going to kind of skip over that one. We're going to ignore that, and instead, I'm going to drill down to the bedrock of what unique content looks like and what it does. So you want to be unique, specific, and authoritative. If you're coming from an attorney's perspective, obviously you should already have some authority in your field. You should know what you're talking about. That makes sense. Uniqueness drills down into something that not everybody in the world is talking about, and it has to be authentic. Authenticity is always key. We've talked about this before, but if you're obviously just rehashing bullet points from somebody else's work, Google is going to pick up on that and they will penalize you for it. Whereas if you're working from your own experience, your own knowledge, your own specific base of information, that's going to change the game. And the best part is this gives you a lot of options in terms of how you present your information to potential clients and therefore to Google and make your SEO shine. So authenticity, we've talked about this before. I'm not going to get deep into the weeds on that, but I am going to reiterate that it's important to speak in your own voice, in your own words. Use the legalese when necessary. But bear in mind, you're likely not talking to other attorneys. As a general rule, you're talking to Joe Public, who doesn't understand this stuff, and they don't need to understand this stuff. They've never needed to understand this until all of a sudden they need to understand it. Now our job as attorneys is largely being one of translators for Joe and Jane Public to make this legal stuff make sense and to boil the Latin terms down into everyday language that people can readily apprehend. Why? So they can readily, easily understand. Oh, that's what he's talking about. So you want to be authentic and you want to be conversational with your authenticity. I've always been a big believer in the idea that conversational language will always get you further, and that makes sense. As I'm talking to you right now, I'm not throwing around a bunch of legalese or technical terms because I'm not trying to talk to you about the technical side of SEO. What I'm trying to talk to you about is general and broad, and I'm trying to do it in a way that's easily understood. Now, some of you will likely be thinking, okay, John, you're teaching this on a broad general level. But what if you're not? What if you've never dealt with this stuff before? You've never had to, uh, your law firm's SEO presence, um, or you've never had to rehab it. And all of a sudden, you need to know how this stuff works, but you don't know the technical terms. And you don't really care about the technical terms. You don't need to the same way that we don't need our clients to understand the legalese uh unless it's truly essential to their case in order to serve them properly and make them understand that this is what you can do or cannot do. Or in this particular situation, you need to work a certain way in order for things to work out the way that you want. So I'm trying to do the same thing here: authenticity, directness, simple basic language, but your content also has to be unique. Now, how do you do that if 17 people are charging to be the first to give their hot take on the same case study at the same time? Well, okay, this is where you have to figure out where what can I pull from this? What can I extract, and what can I deliver to my prospective client? Now, these other 16 uh people, they're out there trying to talk about the same topic, but they cannot do what you're doing because they're not you, and that's an important distinction. And most crucially, it has to be relevant. It always has to be relevant to what your ideal client is looking for. The less relevant it is, the more likely it is that you're going to have problems with gaining traction from your content. So the point is, what you're trying to not do here is create what Google calls commodity content. They don't want to be presenting content that isn't unique, specific, authentic, and doesn't speak to people who actually need that content. Google uses the acronym SCA for scaled content abuse to describe this sort of low-value, low benefit, low effort content. Now, some of you may know the acronym SEA or the Society for Creative Anachronism. That's a good way for you to remember this other acronym. What it means is simple. You don't want to just go for scaled content. You want proprietary content. You want things that you can speak to specifically from your practice and uh from firsthand field experience. If you've had a hundred clients go through the same thing, you've probably noticed similarities between their cases. And of course, not every case is automatically going to fall into that bucket. But over time you start to notice similarities. So you start to say, oh, okay, I've got this going and I've got that going. Great. Now you have an excellent starting point right in front of you. But your personal lived experience conveyed in an authentic conversational voice is going to do you a whole lot better than any number of fill-in-the-blank case studies that are basically an aggregate of what a lot of other people experience. So hone in and speak from your own experience, speak from your mind, and speak from your heart. Yes, I know all the jokes. Attorneys don't have hearts, right? But clients are looking for somebody to represent them. They're looking for somebody who comes off as human and approachable, someone who understands the situation that they're dealing with and understands the problems inherent in that situation. That's only fair. That's only human. If you go to a doctor and you don't feel like the doctor is listening to you, you're probably not going to listen to that doctor either. Well, Google's doing the exact same thing, and they're translating it into a more defined rubric for how they judge and analyze content. So the days of uh listicles and just pumping endless rehashes of other people's content are largely over. That's simply not going to fly anymore. The other important thing to consider is that Google is no longer looking for quantity of content. For the longest time, that was the gold standard for every single SEO agency out there. Pump out as much content as you can as often as you can and try to do it before the other guy or gal and uh and do it as often as possible. Uh but now being first off the line doesn't matter as much. Let me really underline this point. It doesn't matter. Why? Because these deep dives, these articles where you say things like, I have seen in my practice that dot dot dot happens in 87% of cases is more relevant, more valuable, more interesting, and therefore more likely to be rated highly on Google than any number of the Supreme Court or this government agency says blah, blah, blah. If you can work in authority information like that, then great. But you have to be able to bring that information down to the person on the ground who's looking for an attorney to represent them in this specific situation at this specific time. Uh so if you know that, you've already then you're already ahead of the game. And some of you probably are there right now. Some of you probably have been doing this since day one, and you're thinking, well, John, you're the this is uh kind of common sense. But the truth is, not a lot of attorneys are doing this. Um, and that's actually good for those that are. But the other people who are looking at using and leaning on more aggregated content as an integral part of their SEO schemes are the ones who need to hear this. So I'm not saying to tune out because you may still find something of value, but please don't think that I'm trying to tell you something you already know. If anything, I'm trying to emphasize the importance of something you already know. So aggregating content from other places, listicles, think pieces, and so forth only work if they're applied through a very, very personal lens. And that means a lens that's personal to you. And if it's not personal to you, if you don't particularly care about it, if you don't find it interesting or relevant or necessary to know, there's they're gonna come across as generic in your content. Prospective clients will pick up on that, and they will pick up uh with someone who's more enthusiastic about the content and isn't just phoning it in because they'll say, This person really truly gets my issue on a visceral level. This is someone who can help me with my problem that's related to fill in the blank. So hopefully that makes sense. The key point that you need to take away from this is that your voice, your lived experience, your knowledge, uh, these things are going to do you a lot better in this situation than any number of quoted Supreme Court precedents or government articles or what have you. Now you know that your content has to be specific and it has to be relevant to the client where they are. And Google is prioritizing deep content. Not a lot of content. You're not trying to uh fling out something every day on all your social media channels in hopes that it'll attract attention. Of course, there's advertising and so forth. Things you can do that way, but when it comes down to the real bedrock content that's going to convince this person who looked at your ad and checked you out to call you and make an appointment, you need to be as specific as possible. For example, there's one that I've trotted out a lot over over the course of this podcast. Uh, there's a family law practice based in Portland, Oregon that specifically addresses support services and systems for fathers who are going through divorce. And a lot of people think, wow, that's really niche. Well, no, because roughly 50% of all marriages in the United States end in divorce. So if family law is your lane and you want to talk to their concerns directly, you want to address things like how do I get this person the emotional, mental, psychological, physical support that they need to get through this and come out on the other side as a fully functional human being. And if you can do that and you put your heart into it, you put your mind into it, you put your experience into it, that's going to generate trust with the people that you're targeting. I would do something similar in my practice. If I was trying to convince inventors and innovators that I have the law firm they want to talk to, I would be addressing their concerns with protecting their invention, making sure that they could monetize it, making sure that somebody doesn't steal it out from under them, making sure that I address their questions where they live, whether it's a garage inventor or a multinational corporation that has 10,000 patents already. I have to meet those people where they are. Here's a personal note on my part. I never wanted to work with companies or big business. When it came to patenting, I wanted to find the garage inventor. I wanted the Steve Jobs before he became Steve Jobs and Apple. I wanted Mark Zuckerberg when he was just launching Facebook. I wanted those kinds of people as my clients and to work with them one-on-one, like Alexander Graham Bell when his invention was the prototype. And the Wright brothers, right after they got proof of their concept at Kitty Hawk. These are the kind of uh people, the kind of inventors I wanted to deal with. And for the first several years of my journey as an attorney, I was in constant conversation with other attorneys on behalf of big business. Uh and I hated it. These weren't the people I wanted to deal with. I was a gray suit in a sea of gray suits, dealing with other gray suits. I hated it because I wanted to deal with the Henry Fords, the Alexander Graham Bells, the Wright brothers, people like this who really changed the face of the world. And I wanted to get them before their inventions kicked off. So I try to make it personal when I'm talking to these people. I try to really punch home the idea that I want to talk to the garage inventor. I want to speak to uh the person who's uh like signal hopping to and that leads to something on the internet. I want to speak to uh, for example, Alex Gomez, a client of mine who created a surgical camera that doesn't have to be dipped in a bucket of water or the patient's undergoing surgery. Uh and you know, and I'm not kidding about this. You can uh look up this client case um on our website, and you'll see how the device ended up uh with the patent and sold the company for a hundred million dollars. Uh so these are the kinds of things that I'm passionate about and that I talk about uh when I'm speaking with clients. I talk about it in my content, on my podcasts. Uh that's the kind of person and the kind of inventor that I want to deal with. So who's the person that you want to deal with? What's your ideal client? Not necessarily in terms of money or size, but of course, we all want to find clients that can afford to pay our legal fees, but not even necessarily in terms of prestige. Uh what I want to know uh is who are the clients that you love working with, the ones that'll benefit from your knowledge, your experience, and your observations on a field of law that you specialize in. Doesn't matter if it's personal injury, estate planning law, family law, whatever. What matters is can you digest and distill your experience, your knowledge, and your passion for your field into something your clients or prospective clients will respond to. If you can do that, you're 90% of the way there already. And you're already way, way ahead of the field. So knowing that Google is prioritizing this kind of content, the kind that comes from the heart, the kind that's a deep dive and gives you an edge. If it takes 5,000 words, great, let it be 5,000 words. Google will give you an up check on that, even though it's a longer piece, because it's deep, it's authentic, it's personal, and it's personable, and it gives real value to the people that are searching. So if you know that you're already 90% of the way there, that's great. And you want that for your law firm. So you don't want to be throwing just random snippets out every hour. You want to do something deep. Don't be afraid to go deep or be afraid to speak from your heart. And don't be afraid to capitalize on what you know, what you feel, and what you've experienced. Because all of these things, when put together, create something that Google is going to prioritize a whole lot more than any number of listicles where somebody's throwing out 10 of them a day. Quality is going to win you the race at this point. If you can manage quality and quantity, then by all means do so. But if you can't, and let's be real, most of us can't do that. Instead, it's better to aim for 10 a day, uh, or one every couple of weeks, maybe, or every month. We still have practices to manage, we still have cases to oversee, we still have clients to attend to, and uh many of us have a full plate of legal work already, and that's okay. By taking the time to craft something that's going to be relevant to your ideal clients, that's going to get you a whole lot further in the long run, both with prospective clients and with Google. And obviously, without Google, getting those prospective clients becomes a much steeper uh obstacle to overcome. So consider that and ask yourself, how can I apply this to my law firm? How can I apply this to my practice? And what do I have to say that no one else can say the way that I can? And then, as Nike says, just do it. Again, I'm John Rizby, 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 for making your firm's digital presence stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you next time.