The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Maximizing Local SEO for Law Firms with Doug Bradley on Renegade Lawyer Podcast
In this episode of The Renegade Lawyers Podcast, join us as we dive into the world of web development and SEO with Doug Bradley of Everest Legal Marketing. We discuss the importance of local SEO for lawyers, managing expectations when transitioning web services, and the impact of AI on future search habits. Don't miss these valuable insights for your law firm's online strategy!
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
I personally, for the most part, especially with my segment of business, which are small, medium-sized law firms, we're really trying to find clients for them locally, within a 20 to maybe 30-mile radius, and lawyers will always ask me well, I want business from this county which is 50 or 60 or 70 miles away.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I said, yeah, you might get some referrals from 50 or 60 miles away, but trying to get someone from the internet inspired to give you a call, versus all of the other businesses or law firms that are in that area, that's a real tough sell. So let's focus on the geography of the people who are most likely to hire you the fastest and the most. Let's look at local and let that be the center of the bull who are most likely to hire you the fastest and the most? Let's look at local and let that be the center of the bullseye first.
Speaker 3:Hey there. I just want to take a quick break from today's podcast to tell you about an event that we're hosting August 1 and 2. I'm going to be hosting a small, intimate event for solo and small firm lawyers here in our offices in Fairfax, virginia. If you've never been to a great legal marketing event before, or even if you have, this is going to be the place for you to start. If you're running a small law firm and you're looking for ways to attract more clients without spending a lot more money, we're going to be diving deeper over those two days into all of the little DIY things you can do, even if you have a small team. This is going to be perfect for a law firm that's doing between about $500,000 and a million dollars in top line revenue. If you're making more money than that, good for you. You're doing a lot of things right, but this event isn't for you.
Speaker 3:Let me tell you what this is not. This is not an event where, under the guise of a seminar, we're going to be selling you websites, pay-per-click ads or other digital marketing media. That's not our space in the market. This is where you're going to learn how to effectively use your next hour and your next dollar in growing your law firm. We'll be part lecture and part workshop. There'll be some prep work to do before the event and some post-event follow-up so we can answer lingering questions and keep you motivated to building a better life for you and your family. Together. Let's figure out why you're not making more money, getting better cases and converting more of your leads. Again, this is August 1 and 2 in our offices in Fairfax, virginia, and if you want to be on the early list of people who are getting up-to-date information, just shoot me an email at ben at greatlegalmarketingcom. That's ben at greatlegalmarketingcom, and I'll make sure you're one of the first to know.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show where we ask the questions why aren't more lawyers living flourishing lives and inspiring others? And can you really get wealthy while doing only the work you love with people you like? Many lawyers are. Get ready to hear from your host, ben Glass, the founder of the law firm Ben Glass Law in Fairfax, virginia, and Great Legal Marketing, an organization that helps good people succeed by coaching, inspiring and supporting law firm owners. Join us for today's conversation.
Speaker 3:Hey everyone, this is Ben. Welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast where I get to interview folks inside and outside the legal profession entrepreneurs who are making a ding in the world today. We're inside the legal profession. I've got Doug Bradley, everest Legal Marketing. Doug's got an interesting backstory because he started. A part of his history is with Martindale, hubble and lawyerscom, which, if you're old enough, you'll remember when they were, I think, more important than they are today. But then he started his own entrepreneurial venture. We're going to talk today about web development, seo, ai, all these things. And Doug, one of the reasons I do the podcast is I get to talk to experts and ask them questions, the answers I want to know about for my own stuff, so welcome to the episode.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Ben. I'm really happy to be on and thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk.
Speaker 3:Yeah, before we went live, you told me you're out there in Southern California in a great weather environment, except when it gets too hot. Talk to us a little bit about your journey, because this is a show for entrepreneurs and of course our audience is probably mainly lawyers, but I know that it's beyond that and folks are always asking. You know so many folks Doug like they have a job but they see an opportunity or they want an opportunity and they take risks and they have fears and all that stuff. So tell us a little bit about how you went from corporate world and Martindale Hubbell was not the only corporate venture, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, actually I think it starts a little before Martindale Hubbell. My first real advertising job out of college was in the yellow pages and yeah, so I know you'll remember those, but maybe some of the younger audience members. I didn't realize when I was growing up that businesses paid to have ads in the yellow pages. It just didn't even occur to me that it was even advertising. It was just the place you went to go find someone that you needed, when you needed them at that moment, delivered to your doorstep at your house, exactly. So I really got exposed to the marketing world in any given at that point. Any given phone book. About 20 to 30% of the overall revenue of a book drop was law firms and to me when I heard that statistic working there, I'm like wow, I can't believe that a quarter of our revenue comes from law firms. That's pretty intense.
Speaker 1:Yes, comes from law firms that's pretty intense, and so, after a few years of working there, we went through the recession at that time, and everybody was just dropping like flies.
Speaker 1:Advertisers were dropping like flies, employees were dropping.
Speaker 1:I was actually recruited over to Martindale Hubble, the lawyerscom division, digital marketing, and I thought it was a really good idea, because, having sold Yellow Pages, it seemed like the natural progression from print to digital, and I really learned a lot about working with lawyers, working with law firms, what makes them drive, what drives their practices, the different types of attorneys and I think to many people they just don't understand it as a business model, who aren't really exposed to it, talking with lawyers and numerous lawyers directly, and so part of my role, though, was developing my local territory with all of these lawyers, and what ended up happening, ben, was I would sell attorneys on website and search engine optimization, and I would tell them we're going to get your website on page one of Google, we're going to get you visibility for X, y and Z.
Speaker 1:And then those clients, their campaigns went live, and all the promises I started seeing were crumbling before me because the company at that time and maybe they've changed they just didn't execute, and so we would have clients calling me back saying, hey, you sold me this program and I can't find myself anywhere except for when I search my name. And that's not the deal we made. And so I really quickly had to learn how to do the functional aspects of search engine optimization for a law firm, or all of these sales were coming out and I'd be broke. So that was really how I got into the functional aspect of it.
Speaker 3:How did you? Because so you were involved in sales of yellow pages to lawyers.
Speaker 3:I'm curious what you did yourself to learn about effective marketing, because you're right, and for those who are too young to remember, there are museums and there are yellow pages in museums now, but literally 100, 150 pages under the A section and under the L section of attorneys and lawyers, with most of the ads looking exactly the same. Honestly, my mentor, Dan Kennedy I've studied under for 25 years said here's a project just go to the local library, which I did, and they had a regional library, Doug, and they had like every yellow page book, like literally shelves of them. And I remember sitting down one afternoon and just going through the A and the L section to look at the different messages, and you know there was about seven different messages, Only seven, across hundreds of pages. What did you do, if anything?
Speaker 1:to kind of learn about advertising as a psychology, advertising, you know, as a science, Because I would think that anyone who would understand that I mean that was my advantage is I started to learn it, yeah, so luckily for me, I had a lot of really good mentors while I was working in Yellow Pages and they taught me a lot about mentors while I was working in Yellow Pages and they taught me a lot about what appeals to consumers, what ads were effective for different types of lawyers. And I read books. One of the ones that comes to mind was the autobiography of Phil Knight at Nike and how he took Nike to where it is today. I mean, this was probably 20 years ago.
Speaker 3:If you haven't read, if you're listening to this and you haven't read that book, Phil's book.
Speaker 1:It really is a really interesting book.
Speaker 1:But one of my supervisors in Yellow Pages sat me down one day and we had this, you know, and this is actually an example of a really good idea.
Speaker 1:But the client didn't want to be different than his competition and he said we have these new products for the yellow pages where they're going to be different size ads and they're going to be designed to fill different portions of the yellow pages that are unpurchased advertising, and so we can put in a business card a half page, a quarter page, and it'll just be all throughout kind of a creative spin on it.
Speaker 1:And we wrote up this campaign for an estate planning lawyer and I thought you know what Older population uses yellow pages? Why don't we appeal if it's an estate planning lawyer? And we put together this vignette of people who had questions about what's going to happen to their house when they pass away, what's going to happen to their collectibles, what's going to happen to this, and so there was about four or five different vignettes of these ad sizes and it really got me thinking about how creative you can be with marketing and get people thinking without necessarily hitting them over the head with you know the direct message that you want to get, but get them thinking about the marketing and most of the direct messages that lawyers were using back then was the name of their phone.
Speaker 3:It wasn't like the bar was really high, I can remember, and there were sort of two competing major Yellow Page players in our area and I would write more and more aggressive ads, right, and you know one would go, no, we can't do that because it's different. And the other would go, yeah, I'll take your money and do it. And so I would go to the one that took my money and did it and so. But you know, the principles of marketing remain the same, because here we are, we're recording this in May of 2024.
Speaker 3:And you know, truth be told, if you look at most lawyer websites, they tend to look. So if you're looking at the estate planning genre of websites, they tend to look the same. A lot of them use legal. They don't do what you were doing, which is addressing the problem or the potential problem of can I keep my house, can I get into a nursing home? In estate planning, for example, will my daughter's dirtbag ex-husband take all of my inheritance money? They don't do that. They talk about things like pour over trust and inter vivos wills and stuff I don't understand about.
Speaker 3:So you were onto something early, but today I still think that most lawyer websites tend to blend in and look the same, and so I'm curious about what your coaching is, because your target is solo and small firms, much like the audience of Great Legal Marketing who are trying to battle Doug guys and gals who are spending I've heard $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a month in some metropolitan areas in PI just on SEO, which is, for our market, huge. So what's your coaching? A new potential client comes to you, a law firm. They're three to five to six, seven lawyers. They're in, say, the PI space, which is one of the highly competitive spaces, and they're in a major market area.
Speaker 1:That's a really great question and I do think that there's a certain level of expectation that users have when they get to any lawyer's website. You want to know who they are, what they do, where they're located. Those types of things, I think, really need to be nailed by any website pretty quickly so that way the user is confident that they're in the right spot. But after that I tell lawyers and law firm owners think of the avatar of the person you want to appeal to. Let's create the content, let's create the imagery around who that person is and don't worry about anyone else, Because if that's the person we want to attract, let's be really successful in marketing to that person, Whether it's a specific demographic or geographic location. Let's look at that person. What does that person make decisions based off of? What are those things that person will be considering? And let's bring that into the marketing message and embrace whatever differences that you have amongst other law firms locally.
Speaker 3:When you have that conversation, how many lawyers that you talk to do you think are sophisticated enough to go. Oh, that sounds like a good idea. Because what I see, and what you probably see with most lawyer websites who aren't thinking about this, is if they're in a PI space, they've got 15 different things they say they do and that they're expert at, and 15 different avatars, and you and I both know that's ridiculous and actually really harmful to your brand. But I'm curious now what you are hearing on the ground. Do you find lawyers are getting more sophisticated about the questions to ask you, or are they still dumb as a doorknob?
Speaker 1:Well, I wouldn't say dumb as a doorknob, but I think many lawyers they need help. Marketing, I mean, for what we do. We're really directed at search engine optimization, so we're really focused on getting the result with search engines, or I even say search platforms now, because it won't necessarily be Google forever. But I do think that there are far more lawyers today than there were just five or 10 years ago that understand that branding and messaging and the message or the relatability to that lawyer. Those are valuable assets to have and to market and to bring forward into the conversation, rather than trying to be the person for everyone.
Speaker 3:What do you think? So let me ask you are most of your clients someone who is? They're coming to you because they're dissatisfied with current vendor, current results, or they're starting a new law firm I have.
Speaker 1:I have dissatisfied associates who are going to start their own firm and that's a pretty big category. People who've just graduated law school and they want to open their law firm, or people who've been in it for 20 years and they've just decided. You know what I really want to do this on my own, and now is the time to do that, and so a combination of those groups of people are really most of our clientele.
Speaker 3:So that sounds like a mostly new website.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I will say to your point sorry, yes, people who are dissatisfied with current vendors is also a major aspect of it.
Speaker 3:So let's talk about the new websites first, because you know I'm fortunate. We have the same domain that we've had for 25 years.
Speaker 3:And so we could be kind of crappy and still be pretty good, and I would think I do think that you know building a website today, you, doug, are going to really have to manage expectations from scratch. Almost anywhere in the country there's already a bunch of money being spent and time being spent by other firms to sort of firmly establish their position on the internet. So sort of take me through a rubric of how you and your next client are going to think about. All right, I'm building this barn from ground zero. Where do I spend my time, energy and money?
Speaker 1:mostly, yeah, I think my brain goes to technical and I think of what are the things if I were starting, if I was Lawyer Doug and I was going to start a website tomorrow and I wanted that to be the linchpin of my online marketing, what would that look like? And I actually just had this conversation of this past Saturday with a dissatisfied associate who's getting ready to leave his law firm and he's kind of building up the infrastructure of online marketing and what to call it, what the domain will be, and the suggestion was his name and so-and-so law firm or something of that sort, and the area of law that he wanted to practice was pretty specific, and my guidance to him was think about your domain as something.
Speaker 1:If you're building this law firm to bring on other people, potentially other partners, and then eventually, at some point you may extract yourself from this firm Maybe you'll retire, maybe you'll move on to something else you want this domain to have some communication other than your last name, at least at this point. You might want to change that later on.
Speaker 3:I think that's exactly right. So ours has been Glasslaw, but that's because that's what it was in 2005 or something. But today, knowing what I know at age 66, I would be building something, if I was building from ground up that I could sell Firm and domain. Yes, exactly, john Morrill's book Built to Sell Built to Sell is another great podcast to listen to. So I think that advice is really good. And then I guess the challenge is all right finding out what's available, figuring out all the different ways that domain name and that law firm name are going to be used in that geographic area, in that niche, specific area. But that's a really good. That's a really good point you just made about thinking deeply about name of firm, name of domain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I, when I had mentioned that, it wasn't even a consideration that he had. And when I mentioned it to him, he's like gosh, wow, you're right, you know this might not be something I'm it to him, he's like gosh, wow, you're right, you know, this might not be something I'm going to be involved with in 20 years. And this might be the type of thing that I want to set up on the front end, to be something that can be flexible and I can transition at some point. And you know, believe it or not, after the meeting, we both went home and we looked up you know domain names and we found one that was really well suited for him and he bought it on the spot, and those types of things are still out there to be purchased.
Speaker 3:Oh, they are, and it's kind of amazing. Again, this is kind of a side note, but if you kind of troll the expired domain list, there's some amazing opportunities there. Now most lawyers are going to get one. We own probably hundreds for a variety of reasons, but I've even, you know, I've bought domain names of dead lawyers from the estate I mean like purely legit, right and from sites that had traffic, still get traffic even though there's no website there. But now the traffic's directed to our website and it's quality traffic, so all right.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, so settling on what are we going to call this thing that we're building from the ground up? And then there's always this I think tension Doug between you know, kind of the user experience, the visitor experience. When they get to the website, do they know who you're for and what to do next, right, and, and that the lawyer or the law firm has the experience for my case, and so there's time and energy and money spent making that really good. But then there's time, energy, money either getting paid traffic to drive traffic there, doing other social media to drive traffic there or doing what. What you have built up, I think, really well, is the SEO space right.
Speaker 3:So again for that lawyer or lawyers who are coming to you saying, hey, we're starting something in August. We've got our new law firm. How are you directing money? Time budget, I think for a new client in that space. You're building out the website, just in terms of percentage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. I personally for the most part, especially with my segment of business, which are small, medium sized law firm.
Speaker 1:we're really trying to find clients for them locally within a 20 to maybe 30 mile radius, and lawyers will always ask me well, I want business from this county which is 50 or 60 or 70 miles away and I said yeah, you might get some referrals from 50 or 60 miles away, but trying to get someone from the internet inspired to give you a call, versus all of the other businesses or law firms that are in that area, that's a real tough sell. So let's focus on the geography of the people who are most likely to hire you the fastest and the most. Let's look at local and let that be the center of the bullseye first.
Speaker 3:So if you're listening to this, rewind 60 seconds and get out a pencil and paper and write down what Doug just said, because it's absolutely correct, right? Because imagine if, no matter what your practice area is, just imagine if you have all of those cases within a two and a half mile radius of your office. I guarantee you, for most of us, you'll be fat and happy, right? And lawyers are like well, but you know so. Virginia personal lawyers are like oh, but you know so. In Virginia, personal injury like oh, there might be a great case out of Roanoke, you know, 200 miles away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there might be?
Speaker 3:Yeah, there might be, but there's probably 20 great cases within three miles of the office.
Speaker 3:And let's at least start there. I see these firms or these websites Doug where they've. I saw a guy recently I was in contact with and the website was really crappy. I thought it looked like it was totally AI written and he had a page for literally every city or town in Virginia Really written. You could tell this was BS, ai written because every page was exactly the same Doug, except for the name of the city or town, and this guy didn't even hear. The shame was he didn't really know this existed, like I put my team on it to go look at this and these are, quote, hidden pages. But somebody wasted a whole bunch of time, energy and money, I am sure, when this guy had a good, reputable practice in his part of the state and could have spent probably less time, energy, money focused on his local area and gotten cases from that. So do you get pushback when you're making that recommendation or do lawyers go? Yeah, yeah, that sounds really good.
Speaker 1:Usually, most lawyers embrace it and what I would say is just kind of backing up to what that to me. I think a lot of attorneys conflate visibility with conversion and just because you're visible in a geography doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to click on your website and call you or click on your website and contact you. But I think the higher the likelihood is far higher if you're somewhere local and they can drive to your office, they can pick up and dial a local prefix number. You know those types of things all help bring in and capture people, I think better than those landing pages that are written by AI or specifically for search engines, and we've had clients who've had 100 plus pages of those types of pages where it's just all written, then the city names replaced and they've replaced a photo with a local landmark maybe.
Speaker 3:Oh, that would be the high end of sophistication. I think you're right and I was going to ask you something about that, but now it it slipped my mind. What that's all right of old people, okay, so? So focus on locals. Spend your capital, your time and your money on local first, and then talk to me about that again, that user experience, the visitor experience, because I think a lot of firms fall down on this. You know, you click on the button, it doesn't work. You submit a form, but then the landing page for the form is kind of crappy. By the way, nobody calls you back in three days after you've filled out the form. So talk about your work there in making this an easy-to-use resource for the consumer, who has either heard your name and went to your website or found you through search or paid traffic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a big part of user satisfaction and user confidence, and Google knows it too, because Google tracks these things. You know, one of the things that's been exposed with Google's recent antitrust lawsuit is the amount of attention that Google pays to and behavior. Once traffic is on your website, they like to know how long they were there, what pages they went to. If they clicked on something, what happened when they clicked. Did they click the back button? Did they exit back to search? Did they redo their search? And those types of things were things that I think a lot of SEO people thought of and thought were important before, but Google never really confirmed it. Well, emails that were basically made public through the discovery process through this antitrust lawsuit have now really confirmed that a lot of those things are definitely ranking factors. So the things that people do on your website. If they're broken, people will leave your website and Google's algorithm does take note of that.
Speaker 3:So you so pause there for a second. You've been paying closer attention to this antitrust lawsuit than I have sound like, to the extent of trolling emails or articles about emails. Those would be good article topics. If you want to write something for our journal because that's really interesting, all right. And you've dug deep into something that most of us aren't paying a lot of attention to because we simply don't have the time to, into something that most of us aren't paying a lot of attention to because we simply don't have the time to.
Speaker 3:And here's the point I wanted to make Now my brain kicked back in about local is that even though we say we lawyers go, if you could be 200 miles away we'll meet by Zoom, court hearings are by Zoom, all this stuff that's still not the consumer experience. They are biased, for better or for worse, towards a local provider by and large. So I see these firms advertising in our area, so Northern Virginia, washington DC marketplace, and they're advertising even though some of them barely have a lawyer license in Virginia. I go and check this stuff. I just wonder how effective that is. I don't think it really is. Even if you are like a big law firm but you really don't have a presence in Virginia for real, I still think consumers are looking for local by and large.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I would say too, I think lawyers sometimes forget not always, but sometimes forget that hiring a lawyer is incredibly emotional and stressful for the consumer and they want, for better or worse, they want someone local, that they know that if they have an issue they can reach out to, they can stop by, they can call, and that proximity, I think, really gives a bit more of a trust and a warm and fuzzy to the potential client than a Zoom meeting.
Speaker 3:We forget how scary we are to people who most people have not had a lawyer in their life at all. Maybe they had a lawyer helping with settlement documents of a real estate transaction. If they have had a lawyer, it has been maybe a distasteful experience, because it was. You know, we get involved in those problems by and large and so, yeah, you made a very good point is we forget how scary it is, and so part of what we're trying to do in all of our marketing, but particularly web, is like hey, we're like human beings, we're normal people, we're good at what we do. If your case or your need is in this vertical, like we, are the ones for that right and I need it to be clear.
Speaker 2:The cases that we're not the ones for.
Speaker 3:And so, again, that's a really important point because, doug, as people think, where am I going to spend my time, energy and money? Like developing what we would call the trust clues anything from what the website is saying, what the chat box is saying, and then when the damn phone rings, like is someone actually answering the phone with care and empathy? Like all trust clues. Let me switch gears for a second, because I want to talk a bit about the challenge that you have as a web developer when someone is coming to you and saying I've got an existing website, you know it's on this kind of platform and I'm just ready to move on. I'm ready to find a vendor. You know we were challenged on that. I found it painstakingly horrible. I would never want to go through that again.
Speaker 3:What level of like set the expectation for lawyers who come to you? They've got a company they've been with for five years. They're not happy with the results and they want you to make magic in 90 days or less.
Speaker 1:Yeah that you know. That's a pretty common order, I think, with new clients. But setting the expectations I think you nailed it is the right way to do it, and we've worked with clients who've come to us with train wrecks of webs and they want not just the website fixed or a brand new website, but they're also changing domains, and that creates a whole different set of problems where, if you don't have a very specific set of transitioning and migrating from one domain to a new domain and managing all of the redirects, then also what do we do with the old emails and how do we coordinate all of this? You really need someone who understands all of those functional things that are happening with the website and that the client my client, a lawyer understands. These are lots of things that need to happen simultaneously and hopefully in the process. There's no technical issues that happen along the path, right right, right.
Speaker 1:But the other thing that we do is we during our discovery process, is what does, what is the client wanting and what do they? Where do they want to draw places, what type of cases, what severity of cases? What again, what does their avatar look like? And so through that process we develop content and we develop a strategy and where are we marketing? How are we marketing? What are we saying? What are we not saying? And so, along the way, we're setting those expectations, but we're also saying here's the deliverables Once we actually implement this plan and we're going forward. We're going to be tracking traffic, we're going to be tracking rankings, we're going to be tracking on-site behavior, we're going to be looking at all kinds of things, and these are the metrics that we're going to go by, as well as how many times did your contact form get submitted? How many times did your phone ring? Are you getting the clients that you want? Are you not getting the clients that you want?
Speaker 3:So it's a very interactive exchange for the most part tech stack of recommendations of other technology that you use or recommend. With Everest, for example, many of us use programs like Mead, docket, zapier. We'll have CRM, and we're trying to get them all to talk to each other with some level of accuracy A challenge for sure, do you?
Speaker 1:have favorites.
Speaker 1:I recently started using a pretty cool feature that's been around for a while called If this, then that, and it's basically this yeah, it's a great little simple tool that just allows you to say if something happens, then do this, and that's been helping me with track, some things like mentions on Twitter and some other things. I'm learning more about that tool and some other things I'm learning more about that tool. The other thing that I would recommend that's really easy for lawyers to use is rank tracking. Are you tracking your rankings and how you're visible on Google? I personally use SE Ranking.
Speaker 1:For that there's another tool called SEM Rush, which is a little bit more expensive and a little bit more advanced. Those are great tools and they're very consumer friendly. They're not difficult to navigate, so things like that I like. Chatgpt is great. I think it's a great tool to use, not to lean on too heavily, but definitely helpful to leverage. And then the other thing I think that a lot of lawyers need to be personally engaged in is their Google business profile need to be personally engaged in. Is their Google business profile? Yeah, that is something I think that you really need to understand what's happening on your map, location within Google and how people are responding, you know, clicking on your website, calling you, and all of that activity that you can see that people are actually users are actually doing on your business profile in Google.
Speaker 3:The Google business profile is a missed opportunity for most firms because A I know Google rolls out new features and they roll them out sort of regionally and so you know what a firm in your part of the country Southern California may have available is different maybe from a firm in Northern Virginia. But we have found that to be a terrific source of new business. We try to maximize all the pieces, so we have products up there, we have lots of photos, we have lots of questions and answers and, of course, we have lots of quality, authentic reviews and replies to reviews and all of that. So again, if anyone is listening to this, if you and your web team, if not, aren't maximizing everything that Google really is giving you, I think with a business profile, that's missed opportunity.
Speaker 3:All right, got a couple of minutes here, washington Post headline this morning and I'm going to paraphrase it a little bit. Is Google afraid of, or really businesses that use Google and use search are afraid of AI because it's going to change the whole world and no one's going to be using Google anymore because chat CBT is going to answer everything. Now I just grossly paraphrase and probably exaggerated that. I just grossly paraphrased and probably exaggerated that. But here we are again. It's May of 24, just in the last seven, eight months that our law firm has paid close attention to AI and what it can do for our firm. We have been blown away. We try to stay on top of it. We use it every day, not just in marketing although a bunch in marketing but also in case flows and things like that. I'm curious as to what you know. Who do you read and what do you? You know what's Doug's prediction about the future of chat, gbt and SEO? Well, you can join the crowd of people making predictions, my friend.
Speaker 1:Well, you can join the crowd of people making predictions. My friend, People aren't going to stop looking for lawyers. Lawyers are an industry where there's built-in demand and people are always going to need lawyers, just like people are always going to need other people to solve problems for them. And regardless if Google is in that ecosystem or not, whatever it is that takes Google's place or takes market share from Google whether that be Google's SGE platform, whether that be ChatGPT, whether that be other tools that are out, Bing or other competitors that are going to come out those platforms need to have your information when people are looking for lawyers.
Speaker 1:So for me, sure, we built a lot of infrastructure around Google, because that's where 90 plus percent of market share is going to find lawyers at the moment. Even if that changes to 50% down the road, there's still 50% of people who are going to Google to look for a lawyer. But we also have to make sure that we're getting our clients found, and lawyers need to make sure that their firm is found when people are using other types of platforms to search for lawyers. So I don't think it's as drastic and dire as a lot of people seem to make it sound. Things are going to change, but people are still going to need lawyers.
Speaker 3:Well, I think you're exactly right. I think that you know people are making money by creating a lot of fear. And on lawyers, if you go to kind of not lawyer marketing conferences but regular lawyer conferences, you are literally in a caveman age. Like the discussions there are incredibly kindergarten. Like there are incredibly kindergarten-like. So there's this whole world of people who don't even wouldn't be able to keep up with.
Speaker 3:This conversation that we've had and I would say this too for our listeners is that you know the vast majority of your best traffic that's going to go to your website is someone who's gotten a referral from a human being, doug or Ben and said, oh, I need to go check these guys out, so that requires almost no SEO. Like they will find your site when they get to your site. Like that experience better be good. And then thinking about all these things that you just mentioned about that Google is tracking like all right, when that referred human being comes to my site, how long are they staying? You know, are they watching the videos, are they requesting the downloads, are they interacting with the chat machine? These are all critical, I think you know. I know that marketing, web marketing firms like to offer audit. We'll do an audit of your site and I tell lawyers, here's your first audit. Go and make sure everything works.
Speaker 1:That's the first thing I do, by the way, Ben, is I make sure stuff works on websites.
Speaker 3:Well, look, this has been a great conversation. You know there's a ton more out there. You know there's just new learning every day. That's potential. I'm curious like who do you as a business person, as an entrepreneur, doug, who do you read, listen to? You have favorite podcasts. You showed John Warwell's book Built to Sell.
Speaker 1:Who else are influencers for you? I haven't really dug into the SEO niche, so I consume a lot of information regarding SEO. Consume a lot of information regarding SEO, so I always look at, looking at, like Etsy journals, search engine journal, barry Schwartz from search engine roundtable, lily Ray there's a couple of really great legal marketers Guy Chakalakis, excuse me, guy Chakalakis, conrad Sam and a lot of others that do legal marketing specifically, and they have really good information and that's really who I consume on a regular basis. Because things change so fast. I want to make sure that I'm up there with them, because I want to zig and zag too.
Speaker 3:And I'll point out too, for folks who don't know, like Guy and Conrad, they're quote competitors, and this lunchtime, marketing.
Speaker 1:They're good guys. I've talked with them.
Speaker 3:They're really good guys yeah, they're really good guys, which, you know, just demonstrates a philosophy like the market is big enough. The market is huge. There's a place for those who I mentioned earlier in the call, who are spending 30, 40, 50K a month just on SEO that's before EPC spend. And then there's a place where I think the vast majority of America lies American lawyers lies that they're running small firms, they're trying to make a difference in their communities and for their clients and they are trying to be heard in a very crowded market, and that's, of course, what great legal marketing helps them do. Doug, it's Everest Legal Marketing. I could guess the URL, but why don't you tell me, just so we're clear and we'll put it in the show notes?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's it, everestlegalmarketingcom. I do also offer a free audit on my website, but if someone does that free audit and they choose to schedule time with me, we go into a lot more detail of things that are not included on that audit. And yeah, everest Legal Marketing on Twitter.
Speaker 3:That's where I'm usually posting anything that I see that's kind of new or different in the world of SEO for law firms. Well, very good, this has been a great conversation. We'll have to have another one here at some point. And again, I'd invite you to consider writing some articles for our journal. I'll send you a link on that. And again, folks who are listening to this can reach out to Doug. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Remember to put like or comment or something so that the Renegade Lawyer podcast gets out there to more solo and small firm lawyers who are trying to keep up with these 800 pound gorillas. Doug, it's been great.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate it Absolutely high-quality legal services coupled with top-notch customer service to clients who pay, stay and refer. Learn more at GreatLegalMarketingcom. That's GreatLegalMarketingcom.
