Estate Planning: From Lead Inconsistency to $100K Months with SEO

What if you could transform your solo estate planning practice and achieve remarkable growth with a few strategic tweaks to your online presence? Join us on this episode of the Marketing Law Cast, where we uncover the story of Shawn, an estate planning attorney who transitioned from California to Texas, encountering numerous challenges along the way. Struggling with inconsistent lead flow and revenue instability, Shawn turned to SEO and building an authoritative online presence. The results were astounding—within months, Shawn was billing up to $100,000 in a single month and closing nearly 80% of his leads. Learn the strategies and techniques that made this possible and how you can apply them to your own practice.

We delve into actionable insights for maximizing your law firm's online authority, focusing on key elements like optimizing your Google Business Profile, enhancing on-page SEO, managing reviews, and building authoritative backlinks. Discover how to claim and update business citations, leverage automated systems for review management, and create impactful long-form content for reputable media outlets. We'll also discuss the importance of localized content and technical SEO improvements. To take your firm's marketing strategies to the next level, don't forget to book a free strategy call through our website. Tune in for expert advice and real-life success stories that can help you elevate your practice to new heights.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You're tuned into the Marketing Law Cast with James Campbell. Brace yourselves for game-changing digital marketing tips and exclusive interviews with industry gurus and top-tier attorneys, smashing the six and seven-figure barrier. It's time to drive your practice to success. Welcome to the Marketing Law Cast.

Speaker 2: 0:17

Welcome to part two of this two-part series on building online authority. In today's episode of the Marketing Law Cast, we'll hear from real-life attorneys as they discuss the impact of increasing online authority and what it's done for their practice and their revenue. Now what does it look like in real life for a solo estate planner in a new market to focus on SEO, to focus on building his authority? I want to talk about Sean just a little bit here and what he was able to accomplish in that same situation. Sean is a estate planning attorney in Texas. He's a pure solo. He has one paralegal and his big challenges prior to hiring us were these he had moved from California to Texas and opened up a new estate planning firm in a brand new market. He had inconsistent lead flow. He had inconsistent revenue. He was undercharging for his service about half of what he was charging in California. He had no reputation. He had no referrals. His marketing was disjointed. He was paying multiple agencies one agency to work on his website, one to work on his ads, one to work on his content and everything was disjointed. In the midst of all this, sean has a wife and five children to support and spend time with. So what were some of Sean's goals.

Speaker 2: 1:45

Well, sean really needed the consistency. He needed consistent revenue and he had a goal revenue of $50,000 per month, more than doubling where he was at currently. Okay, he wanted to double his revenue. He wanted to spend more time with his family, his five kids. He wanted to become the authority in his market. He wanted folks to think about estate planning and think of him.

Speaker 2: 2:07

Okay, he wanted that authoritative reputation. He wanted to be able to understand his marketing and his numbers. He wanted to know where the leads are coming from. What is he paying per lead? What's it cost him for a new client? This way, he could keep overhead under control. No need to hire on a bunch of attorneys if you can become efficient and you know what your cost per lead is and you know where your leads are coming from and you have a method of consistency to know what leads are going to come in next. He didn't want to have to work outside of office hours and put in 12-hour days just to be able to make ends meet. He also didn't want to have to rub elbows or attend networking events, but instead he wanted to spend, like I said, more time with his family, which is very important to him. Let's take a listen to what Sean had to say for himself and what effect becoming the authority in his market has done for him.

Speaker 3: 3:01

For the last 30 days, you know, I've billed $80,000. And if I go back one more month, 160. So I mean it's like 80 the last couple of months and like during one point in time I had a role in 30 days where I actually hit 100,000 in billing. I'm kind of on an island, you know, solo practitioner and I stay busy enough between that and a family with five kids that I don't do a lot of networking stuff or rub elbows with a bunch of other attorneys, and so I never really know how I'm doing, you know, in comparison to kind of what's out there, and so I'm always kind of curious well, how am I doing? And so I was sharing some numbers with the other attorney that I was talking to, who used to work at an estate planning firm, and he said those are just like amazing because I'm closing like close to 80% of what I have come in.

Speaker 2: 3:46

It's like 76% of things. Okay. So listening to that, maybe we can tell why SEO is so important, what effect it can have on the law firm. My friends, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. 50% of all web traffic comes from organic search. Seo drives a thousand percent more traffic than organic social media. Search is where it's at Now. You can't ignore social media. You have to have a presence on social media because why not? Right? You need to be there where your prospects and your potential new clients are. But search drives a thousand percent more traffic than social media alone, and almost 70% of search queries contain four words or more. So people aren't just searching for estate planning. More like estate planning attorney near me. Okay, seo leads to higher close ratio with your prospects. This is because you're achieving. You're attaining those buyers in power or the buyers in pain. You're attracting the folks that want an authoritative firm, that are ready to hire. This leads to higher closing ratio with each prospect that you meet with and, again, supporting a higher fee structure.

Speaker 2: 5:03

I can't overemphasize the importance of becoming the authority in your marketplace. Also, the client acquisition cost is much lower. If you're spending money on ads, you're going to be able to boost your ad performance by having a great authoritative presence on Google. People see those ads and then they go and Google you and they see all of the authoritative assets supporting that ad. The ads are going to perform much better as well and again, this leads to a lower cost per lead. So for those of you that are interested in scaling up your firm, you've got to focus on SEO. You've got to drive your cost per lead down, you've got to boost your closing ratio with each prospect, you've got to boost your average fee with each client, and that comes by attracting those buyers in pain the best possible prospects out there.

Speaker 2: 6:00

Let's continue on. So why does SEO deliver better leads? Well, because we understand what the leads are searching for. So our team does keyword research for buying intent. Who are those high intent people that are looking to hire an attorney and what are they searching for? Then we implement those keywords into the content and the website and all the places that Google can find that authority. This also builds your authority and trustworthiness with prospects. Again, if you have that high ranking and you have those great reviews and you've done the things that build up your search engine optimization, the clients will trust you much more quickly and much more deeply because they understand your authority. This brings in high quality leads or prospects to your website. Where you can brand, where your brand can work for you. You can set and control the frame for your initial consultation, for your sales meetings. You can better prepare your team for how to handle these buyers in pain and move them through the sales funnel and increase your revenue and increase your revenue. Now I'm going to get on my little bit of a nerd, my nerd glasses here and just talk about what impacts your local ranking. Okay, so, becoming that authority.

Speaker 2: 7:25

If we can look here, you see four big pieces your Google business profile is blue, what happens on your website, your on-page SEO, your reviews and your links. My friends, if we can get a handle on these four things, the rest of it sort of works out for us. Okay, those other areas that they're important to pay attention to. But most of the time, attorneys and law firms are missing the mark big time when it comes to their Google business profile, the optimization of their website, how they gather reviews and how they respond to reviews, how many reviews they have and the authoritative links on the internet that link to and from their website. These are things that are completely overlooked by so many law firms, and if we can pay attention to those, we can see what an effect it can have when we go from bad to great on these big four.

Speaker 2: 8:18

It's not just about optimizing the website. We talk a lot about search engine optimization and what happens on the websites People think about is optimizing my website. That is super important, yes, but we can't forget that's not the whole story. We've got to be able to claim and optimize the Google business profile listing. That's so important. If you haven't done that, make sure that happens. Claim and update all of your citations wherever your business is listed on the internet. Better make sure it doesn't have any errors. Better make sure it's not outdated. Better make sure it's claimed and filled out. All of that matters with your search engine optimization and the authority you have with the community and with Google at large Getting Google reviews and leveraging an automated system.

Speaker 2: 9:03

Don't let great clients go without leaving a review. We have a special process put in place to help generate the reviews and then our team does the keyword research and responds to reviews with the keywords in the responses. Again, that's on Google and a big portion of your optimization is what happens on your Google business profile. So we've also got to be able to build authoritative links back to your website. This comes in the form of having great copy, long form copy that's useful, readable and meant for readers to actually come back to. Okay, it's meant to have that those legs and life value.

Speaker 2: 9:45

So long form content that our process is we submit that to media outlets to get syndicated on authoritative sites. So places like Forbes, smart Money, money Magazine, kiplinger's, to name a few, wall Street Journal so submitting these content on behalf of our clients to have those outlets syndicate pick up that article and then link to our client's website. That's how you build authoritative backlinks. Don't sign up for those. Hey, I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine where you're just adding a bunch of links to your website. Don't do that. That's a bad idea. You also got to deploy strategic content through syndication. So part of optimizing your profile, your footprint on the internet, is traffic, is engagement and experience people have with engaging with that content. So we've got to be able to consistently push content out there Again that's optimized for search but that's going to bring traffic to either that blog or website. It's going to show more authority to Google when we do that. More authority to Google when we do that.

Speaker 2: 10:55

Are you ranking on the Google Maps we talked about the 84% of clicks go to those top three and the top four in the organic, well, 44% go to the map pack and the map pack that's on first display. So these three right here they're going to get the 44% of clicks. But how do you get on the Google Maps? We have a proven formula to getting ranked on the map pack, which we call it. It starts with optimizing your Google business profile. That's going to mean updating images, localized images with geo-tagging, up-to-date office information, optimized content and articles that alldate office information, optimized content and articles. That all goes on your Google Business profile, as well as the reviews and the responses to reviews with the keywords. Again, we do that as a done-for-you service for our clients.

Speaker 2: 11:46

An optimized website, keyword-rich content, location pages. I'll give you an example about why location pages are important. I'll use our company president Kyle as an example. He's a full-time estate planning attorney in Overland Park, kansas, which is a suburb of Kansas City. Around Overland Park, kansas, you also have Leawood, stilwell, olathe, further away, lee's Summit, blue Springs, independence, maybe up to Lenexa. You have all these other suburbs that are really close to Overland Park, where Kyle's office is. So on Kyle's website there's a page Overland Park Estate Planning. Then we have a page Estate Planning for Lenexa residents. Then we have a page Olathe brings us unique challenges to estate planning. Then we have a page estate planning for Lenexa residents. Then we have a page a life. That brings us unique challenges to estate planning and different content on each page. Link to the website, link to the Google business profile. This is one of the ways that we show Google that, hey, I know our office is located here, but we really serve clients who typically deal with these issues in this location. So maybe there is a big hospital in your own backyard. Well, people that work at the hospital might need some information about estate planning. Great way to do that is a location page about where that hospital is located, just as an example.

Speaker 2: 13:08

Okay, we've also got to be able to have all of our nerdy stuff our title tags, our meta description, our alt text. We have to make sure the images are sized properly so that the site loads quickly Our H1 headers, all of that stuff, all of the technical SEO that obviously has to get done as well. The difference comes in the engagement that you have through these different channels. Are you producing content? Are you showing up as the authority? Does the market at large see you as the authority? These are some of the ways that you're gonna get into that map pack and start gaining and being part of taking a piece of that 44%, with offsite optimization. This is gonna be those link building resources and building up those authoritative backlinks, so those authoritative sites that link to your website and you link to theirs. Then we got to be able to track results. If we can pull all of these things together, you're going to have a great strategy for SEO.

Speaker 2: 14:06

Let's talk about ways that we can help. I know we talked a lot about your profiles on the internet and your website, and so I would encourage you if you're with a different agency and you're not getting great results you're not getting results like what Sean is getting make the switch. Switch to our Essentials program. The best thing to do is to get your phone out, scan that QR code. It'll take you right to our discovery meeting calendar and you can book a meeting there. Talk with our team. We'll see if we can come up with the best strategy to help you become the authority.

Speaker 2: 14:37

Alternatively, if you maybe recently purchased a website or had your website redone, or you just love your site and don't want to move it, perfectly fine, our team can help you with the off-site SEO, and if you have access to your website it's not through some other agency that won't give you access we can optimize your current website and make those adjustments. So, whatever the situation is for you whether you're ready to make the switch completely and have us manage your full marketing online, or you would like for us to manage the website or manage the SEO of your existing website we're able to do that as well. Now would be the time for you to go ahead and submit any questions that you have into the chat. I'm gonna close down the video portion and we'll be able to take your questions live here. All right, guys? Thanks a lot, and start putting your questions there in the drop box or in the chat box. Thank you.

Speaker 1: 15:33

That's a wrap on this edition of the Marketing Lawcast. Thanks for joining us. Head over to imsrockscom for more growth-focused insights. If you're ready to skyrocket your firm's marketing, don't hesitate to book a free strategy call with our team right on our website. Here's to your success. See you next time.