How to Get Your Law Firm to Page One of Google: A Q&A With Rankings.io

 

With PPC costs rising and Google’s algorithm constantly changing, achieving better search placements may seem like an impossible task.

Here’s the good news: it isn’t impossible, and we’re going to show you just how to secure prime Google real estate for your law firm.

We’re partnering with Rankings.io, a team that’s been called “the best of the best” in legal SEO for a Q&A that will show you how to improve your search placement, effectively budget your PPC efforts and generate more leads from Google.

You can watch the webinar above and keep reading for a full transcription.

Michael Mogill: I’m extremely excited to have Chris Dreyer, the founder and CEO of Rankings.io. We’re going to talk about how to get your law firm to page one of Google. It’s going to be a Q&A. Chris Dreyer is the founder and CEO of Rankings.io.

These guys are absolutely incredible. You, guys, are essentially the law firm SEO experts. Our niche is video and video marketing. Your niche is SEO.

Chris Dreyer: Yes, that’s it, Mike. We only do SEO and we only do it for law firms. We really niched down. We just decided to focus on what we did best. We find great strategic relationships and partners for other services. We try to find the best in their industry, like Crisp for video and other agencies for pay-per-click and so on and so forth.

Michael Mogill: Here are some of the things that we’re going to cover during our discussion today. One is going to be ‘How to Improve your Search Placement’ and also ‘How to Effectively Budget Some of your PPC Efforts’ as well as ‘Generating More Leads from Google’. Then, ‘How to Leverage your Website Content to Boost SEO’.

To kick it off: why is SEO important for law firms? For those who don’t know, SEO is Search Engine Optimization.

Chris Dreyer: The reason I love SEO is because I think of it more as an investment versus a cost. It’s permanent. The content that you create, you can use as leverage for the history of all your firms and business. It has that compounding interest type effect versus, essentially, leasing or renting the real estate.

It’s more of an investment that can pay off with dividends in the future. It does take time. It’s not immediate like pay-per-click. There are some advantages of pay-per-click and that is a good lead gen opportunity as well but there are just so many queries that are typed in daily. It’s just a gray opportunity for law firms to advertise with.

Michael Mogill: Agreed, agreed. Here is the thing, though. This is where it gets interesting: How realistic is it to get to page one of Google?

Chris Dreyer: It’s very realistic if you set expectations properly and you do your due diligence with discovery. What I mean by that is, in some markets, you need a lot less content and a lot less links or votes, in Google’s eyes, to rank on page one. If we’re talking Southern Illinois, Carbondale, Illinois, you may need 100 high quality backlinks and a few decent landing pages. They’re not extremely thorough. You could probably rank on page one. When we’re talking LA, when we’re talking Chicago, these major metros, the amount of work needed is substantially higher. You need more links, more votes or prominence.

Michael Mogill: If you just run the math, in terms of the number of spots available on page one and also consider the amount of firms in that market that are competing on SEO for a ranking position, the reality is, not everyone can win. It’s impossible. Someone’s got to be on page 2 or on page 8 or page 20.

In terms of allocation of one’s marketing efforts and even one’s marketing budget and resources and so on, is this a battle worth fighting? If you’re, let’s say, in a major market, do you even stand a chance?

Chris Dreyer: Yes, absolutely. We work with many clients across the US in major metros like Houston. We’ve got the number one client that ranks for “car accident lawyer nationwide” and across the nation. The amount of revenue, return on investment, that they are receiving for their investment in SEO services is substantially higher than what we’ve been able to measure against. Specifically, things like pay-per-click and sponsored positions.

I do love what Crisp is doing for video because there’s less competition. Google owns Youtube. It’s the second biggest search engine. It has that compounding effect and rapport building and all those UX elements. We just see a substantial return on investment when is done properly and expectations are set in the front end.

Michael Mogill: Yes, I agree 100%. The reality is that working for many firms. We see ones that are able to be very successful at . As a result, it becomes probably, if not one of the top, resources for them. When you get it right, worth it.

Following that, how long does it take to get to page one of Google? These are broad questions because, I think, every answer to all of these is probably, “It depends.”

I guess we could pose this as, how long does it take [to reach page one] in a super competitive market versus a very rural market?

Chris Dreyer: It takes a lot of discovery. It depends upon the competition and where they’re currently at. If a firm has been doing a lot of top-of-mind branding and TV and they have all of these assets that you can use as leverage and maybe mentions in these nice editorial and media-type placements, you can use that as leverage to accelerate the amount of time that it takes to get to page one.

If you’re starting from zero in a major metro, it’s very very difficult. You’ve got to not only create a substantial amount of content, but you also have to improve your prominence.

A lot of people refer to prominence as just links. They need links, links, links.

Prominence is more than just links: it’s reviews, it’s citations, it’s mentions, it’s social activity. It all factors in the prominence. To answer your question, it depends in major metros. It’s the amount of investment that they’re going to put towards benchmarks.

Let’s say, hypothetically, your site has 200 referring domains and the top competitor has 800 referring domains pointing to their website. Well, you’ve got a 600 referring domain disparity there that you need to make up. Now, link quality can differ. But from a numbers standpoint, you have to achieve more referring domains in order to stand a realistic chance to obtain market share. Then, you take that number and then you can map it out on a monthly period.

I know Google says on their ‘How to Hire an SEO Expert’ tutorial that it takes six months. Everyone that you interview is going to say six months. That’s not always the case. Sometimes, they are doing a lot of the right things with content links but maybe there’s site architecture issues that can be fixed and then you can rank immediately. It really depends on the situation and the discovery process.

Michael Mogill: I’m hoping that this is one of those things that’s probably one of the most abused on the internet. Meaning, everybody is using SEO companies. I almost admire, in a way, what you must have to deal with on a daily basis because we hear on the other end when we speak with firms and their SEO company is telling them, “Yes, we’ll get you to page 1 in 30 days.” Or, “$400 bucks and we’ll give you 1,000 backlinks.”

How can you discern between who’s legitimate and who’s BS (the guys who are just doing a wonderful sales pitch but not delivering on the back end)?

Chris Dreyer: That’s a great question. Imagine if you took your car into an auto dealer. Before you pop open the hood, the guy comes around to your window and says, “It’s going to be $2,000 a month.” You would think, “You’re crazy. What are you talking about?”

When SEO is priced as a commodity where you get X amount of links, that’s a major red flag.

The competition and your situation with what your website has per assets and clout and prestige and prominence is different.

The agencies that spend more time at discovery and auditing and analyzing your current state and then that creates a strategy has substantially better likelihood of generating results.

Michael: Yes, I agree 100%. You have to go through that discovery process to really get an idea as to where someone stands. I know you mentioned referring domains. Do you mean backlinks and then referring domains from the Wall Street Journal or referring domains from other countries?

Chris: Well, I would love if you can give me the hook up for Wall Street Journal links that I could get for all our clients – I would love that. That’s like top down. You’ve got to have some type of qualifying metrics for what’s considered a good domain. It needs to have a high domain authority, high trust flow, there needs to be social activity, it needs to have a community, it needs to be curated. There’s always these metrics when it comes to discerning what is vs. isn’t a quality link.

I typically look at referring domains as the number of websites linking to a property versus total links because there’s diminishing returns when you get multiple links from the same source. There’s all these metrics but the biggest ones I would say are whether you’re using Open Site Explorer’s Domain Authority or Ahrefs’ domain rating or Majestic Trust Flow, it’s just using some metric to evaluate quality. You want to look for those quality opportunities.

Michael: I’m sure a lot of people are asking: how do you get these referring domains? How do you get somebody to link to you?

Chris: There are many ways to do this. The easiest are directory submissions; there’s all different types of directories. If you’re a law firm the first ones you want to look at are those legal niche-specific links. Avvo, LawGuru, YourLocalLawyer, Super Lawyer, etc.

That’s filling out your profile and claiming them. Then there are social opportunities that even if there are no follow links, meaning they don’t pass link equity you still want to have a presence on those major sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, many sites like that. There are local directories like Yellow Pages and Yelp where you can fill out your profile information and claim them.

Those are the ones that are easy to submit to and find.

The harder opportunities require outreach. When you have something that is a linkable asset whether it’s a scholarship, statistics, an infographic that takes a lot more leg work because you’ve got to reach out to influencers to tell them about the linkable asset.

However those can create barriers of entry for your competitors because they’re harder to replicate. Anyone can go see your firm solicit in Yellow Pages and replicate that. It’s much harder to be mentioned in The Wall Street Journal or to get outreach face links and that’s a different type of tactic.

Michael: Is there a difference between good mentions and bad mentions?

Chris: It may help with the ranking positions. I would say that in terms of social proof or conversions, if you’ve got a back link from Ripoff Report I don’t know if that would be very good.

Michael: Business Bureau or something.

Chris: Better Business Bureau, that’s a great example. That’s $300 depending upon the size of your company. It’s a phenomenal backlink, high domain authority, it’s got the local metrics, it’s got the review base metrics. It’s a great link.

Michael: Agreed. I wanted to touch on two things today – one is SEO and the other is pay-per-click but let’s start with SEO.

Chris: Once you do the discovery, you need to budget accordingly. If you break it down into two main pillars, it’s going to be content and it’s going to be links.

First of all if you’re trying to get more car accidents you have to have a dedicated car accident landing page. If you want truck accidents you have to have these foundational pieces.

The thing that I like to say is a lot of people talk about long form content and writing longer landing pages. There are two reasons for this:

First, when you write longer content you naturally include related phrases and synonyms. They’d give you additional opportunities that you could potentially rank for.
The second reason is that Google doesn’t understand that a consumer is happy when they go and visit a page. They can’t see the smile on their face but they can measure the amount of time that consumer was on the page or if they left and visited other pages and those metrics can be defined by the quality of your content. The same aspect of that would be embedding a video on your landing pages because when somebody clicks on the video they’re staying, they’re keeping that page open and that’s a quality metric.

So to reiterate, the first thing you’d do would be to evaluate your content disparity versus your competition. That will show you how many landing pages you need to create.

The second main metric that gets looked at in terms of prominence is links.

It’s how they differentiate it from AOL and Yahoo! back in the day. Think of these as votes. Again, Google can’t tell if someone’s happy but they can see how many sites link to a page. If you’ve got 100 links in the top ranking site as 1,000. From a quantity, I realize that one link could be worth tons but from a quantity standpoint you need to put more effort there. It’s budgeting for the content disparity and budgeting for more prominence with more link building efforts.

Michael: I’m sure there are people watching and saying, “Chris, I agree with that, but I want to hear a number.”

They want to know if they need a budget of $500 or $10,000 or $100,000 and, again, I know it obviously depends on how much content they need.

Let me ask it another way. What would be a red flag type of investment for achieving these types of results? If the expectations are to get on page one and an SEO company is like, “All right, we’ll do it for $1,000 bucks a month.” Can it be achieved?

Chris: No. The pricing component has to do with the number of links you can obtain. Even if you use offshore directories or you’re using a service like BrightLocal or Whitespark, you’re still going to pay anywhere from $3 to $15 a link. That’s directory submissions. Those require filling out a profile. When you get into things like outreach, when you measure the time it takes to do outreach to quality opportunities then you have to select a topic, then you have to go through editorial review process. You’re talking a minimum $200 to $300 minimum per guest post link.

When you’re talking about a situation where you need 1,000 referring domains and somebody quotes you $500, if you get one or two guest posts and then a handful of directories you’re only getting maybe 15-20 links a month.

You’re never going to achieve the position you want. First, you’ve got to nail that number and keep in mind that directory submissions, while they’re lower cost, they typically have lower ratings because they’re deeper on sites.

The Yellow Pages has 1,000,000 search results. You want to earn contextual links with guest posts that are in content, that are getting crawled and getting social comments.

Even in the smallest legal market anything less than $1,000 should automatically be a red flag, no question.

I don’t care if it’s elder law or trademark law, it’s a red flag. For personal injury, if you’re in a major metro and you expect to get results in Chicago, Houston, these areas, you’re looking at close to a $10,000 investment. There’s no jumping to the front of the line without investing because, again, there’s a scarcity of positions and it requires more prominence, more content links. Mid-markets require an investment of $3,000 to $5,000. That’s what we’ve seen based upon anecdotal testing and proof and through working with a lot of law firms.

Michael: If it’s done right, if you’re talking in a major market, like New York or what have you, and you invest in say $10,000 a month what is the value in the return from that? What is the value of being on page one for something like “car accident”?

Chris: The metrics change for every market but I can tell you we’ve got clients signing 20 car accident cases a week and we’ve got one client that gets over 400 calls a month from web alone.

It’s subjective and it’s different per market and per practice area but it’s a substantial return. I wish I had those metrics with our company.

Michael: This is assuming that your firm is on page one for a relevant search term. If you’re coming up for “car accident” or “trucking accident” or just something that people are actually searching for, how much of an impact does that organic traffic represent in terms of just overall leads being submitted, relative to other types of marketing verticals?

Chris: You can’t look at the total traffic because when consumers do a query they have different intent for the result they’re looking for.

If you’re talking about direct intent pages at the bottom of the funnel which would be someone typing in ‘car accident lawyer’, a 4% conversion to calls is very reasonable.

Those type of metrics when you look at top of the funnel when people are looking for information and they’re searching around and they’re not in that buying decision, it’s substantially lower.

Part of your SEO’s job is to concentrate on those direct intent pages that have a higher likelihood of conversion.

Michael: What marketing strategies should a law firm use when it comes to SEO? What are some of the things they can do that would actually benefit them?

Chris: First of all, you should be tracking your site with Google Analytics or another analytical tool even if it’s Google Search Console.

The quickest win that you could have is to take your top performing content and improve them.

Add subsections, answer common questions, link to other related blogs, make those pages better.

You need to concentrate on content development; you have to create a plan for the content. Don’t just write blogs because you’ll repeat the same topic. You need to have a focused plan.

If you want more car accidents, for example, create a series of articles around that topic so that you’re not creating any redundancies – that can really help with your SEO.

The second thing is being more consciously aware of link opportunities. When you get interviewed on a news station, see if you can drop your link into the text. You can also look at your Chamber of Commerce where they have a membership directory. You can ask to have your website added and that’s a great link.

The third one that is often overlooked but I find it’s having a significantly higher impact specifically on local SEO is asking for reviews at the point of delight. If you’re trying to take your database and email a consumer four months from when their point of delight is the likelihood of them converting is a lot lower.

Now I know that reviews are a little murky for advertising ethics and you’ll have to run that by your State Bar, some states are more friendly to that than others, but the three things I would say is creating a content plan, looking for backlink opportunities and the third one would be actively pursuing reviews.

Michael: How many reviews should a law firm pursue? We’ve seen firms that get five reviews and then another one’s got 500. These are across platforms like Facebook and Yelp but the majority of the SEO benefit seems to come from Google, right?

Chris: Yes. The more reviews the merrier. It’s better for social proof. If they don’t have a Gmail account the first place I typically recommend is I send them to Facebook. Facebook’s Terms of Service is so light. Everybody’s got Facebook. It’s easy to get a review there. Yelp, you really can’t solicit reviews.

If you type in your brand and if it’s John Smith Law and you take a look at the sites on the first page and if you see Yellow Pages and Better Business Bureau, try to get reviews on those sites. Because that’s where a consumer is going to look for social proof statements.

Michael: Since you mentioned Facebook, does my law firm social media content impact my SEO at all? Obviously, since social media has become very prominent, law firms, of course, want to jump on any type of new opportunity and now people on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and so on but what kind of SEO impact does this have?

Chris: I love that you asked this question, by the way. These social links, nada. Almost all of them are no-follow. If you’re a firm and you’ve got a Facebook profile that you’re not actively trying to seek an audience and engage with your audience and you just syndicate your blogs, that is not going to help one iota.

What does help is when you do create an active community and you have a lot of followers, your social reach, your content can be re-shared and that can be an opportunity for top-of-mind brand awareness. In some situations you can get some link opportunities that will help your SEO and it also matters in regards to the traffic.

If you have an active community that reads your content and they go to your articles and they stay for a while that’s a good metric, a good UX signal. But, in general, the links themselves I’m just syndicating, and in my opinion I don’t see any benefit from just the social links themselves.

Michael: Well, since you just said that now every law firm is deleting their Facebook business page and their Twitter account and so on. That being said, I want to make sure people understand this. There isn’t really any SEO benefit in terms of ranking. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t see the content. It also doesn’t mean they don’t click on the content and get to your website. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they will get there organically per se in the form of a Google search. If they see something on your Facebook business page and click on it that’s still very viable. Not to discount those things it’s just important to consider what impacts a Google search ranking for example.

Chris: I’m not saying you shouldn’t do social media. I’m saying are the links themselves going to move you up in the rankings position? Very marginal, very minimal gain. But should you be on social? Yes. I don’t think of social media in the traditional sense, I think of social media as a community. You want to advertise where your community interacts and that’s where people are. You need to have top of mind brand awareness there.

Michael: Absolutely. So this leads us back to pay-per-click. What is more effective? In terms of lead generation, pay-per-click or organic search placement? What’s more effective and how would you answer this?

Chris: Well, there’s more queries for organic. There’s more queries, there’s more real estate in terms of the number of queries and click opportunities from organic. In terms of what’s more effective, it depends. I can’t give a definitive answer; they’re both great lead generation opportunities as long as you can get the metrics right. Just to give you an example, I think using Southern Illinois as an example.

But that’s where I’m from, that’s where I went to college, at SIU, and I work with the firm there. We’re talking PI and they’re paying $30 for car accident clicks when compared to Chicago or LA where you’re paying $200 – $300 per click. It depends on the competition. Both of them can be very strong lead generation sources. You’ve just got to run the numbers and make sure your base acquisition costs aren’t too high.

Michael: Absolutely, it’s one of those things where it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Meaning that if you’re doing a phenomenal job on organic search, pay-per-click offers another opportunity in terms of getting your messaging out there if you’ve got the budget to invest.

Ultimately, you can still saturate the market. Sometimes there’s diminished effectiveness depending on the platform. But we have found that it’s important to have multiple spokes. From a law firm’s marketing standpoint you don’t want to rely on your leads coming solely from any one source.

Chris: I totally agree.

Michael: For the people that are watching this, if the majority of your leads are coming from referrals or word-of-mouth, I think it’s a great thing. It implies that the firm is doing a phenomenal job. Their clients are referring to them, other attorneys are referring to them. But how much of that is in your control and how proactive can you be in terms of forecasting that? It’s the same thing we see with outsourced lead generation services. What are your thoughts on those?

Chris: Hey, they’re not bad. It’s playing the numbers. You’ve got For Legal Leads, you’ve got Thumbtack, even FindLaw had this program going on for a little while. It’s running the numbers. If you keep the case acquisition cost low, you can get some quality leads. Nolo is another one. It really depends; you’ve got to have great intake and be very responsive to these lead opportunities. Because the likelihood of converting is going to be a lot higher too.

Michael: What about when we’re talking about pay-per-click? I guess for the purpose of this there’s many ways of doing paid marketing. There’s Google PPC, but there’s also Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads, you can be on Instagram, and so on. What have you found is the most effective?

Chris: First, pay-per-click is not my baby. But I am in the weeds and I do hear from a lot of our clients. I will say video pre-roll ads are great; they’re so cheap and you get tons of impressions versus traditional clicks. It’s an amazing opportunity because of the amount of people that watch video. I’m saying that unbiased –  I know Mike’s got Crisp Video.

In really competitive markets you should look at mobile-call-only based ads, where you’re basically paying just for the call. You can keep your lead cost down and re-targeting is a phenomenal source of marketing for paid services. The ones that you need to be careful about is if you hear anyone talking about the amount of leads that they’re generating for geofencing and these display type ads. I haven’t seen it happen.

Michael: Thank you. I’m still on the search for one person who can tell me that they’ve actually legitimately seen successful geofencing. Now this has been like the unicorn. You geofence around an urgent care center or a hospital or a chiropractor’s office. Then of course they see your ads and so on. I have yet to see an instance where this actually works.

Chris: I’ve never seen it work.

Michael: I just would love to see an effective use case of it. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. You haven’t seen it and I haven’t seen it. This gets into the fact that there’s always so many marketing tactics. There’s always that new thing that comes out. Geofencing is one of them and then it’s like a 360 video or what have you.

We find that it’s always the foundational things. There’s certain foundational things that do not change.

Great content does not change across platforms. Even when the platforms change and the algorithms change. Having quality content that provides value to people and engages people – that’s pretty consistent year-over-year. What other things have you found are the staples of a great content strategy? We’re going back to just SEO in general.

Chris: You’re dead-on. Ultimately, Google is trying to provide the best consumer experience for the person making the search. The pages that are thin and don’t provide a lot of answers for their intent, they’re never going to win in the long game. The quality results are always going to provide substantially more value. Spending time on your content, that is a great investment that you can never go wrong with.

Michael: What content are what are we talking about? How much of this content should a law firm be creating versus either hiring a marketing director or hiring an outside company to work on? What are your thoughts on that?

Chris: Well, you definitely need to have your landing pages for all the services that you provide. But I can tell you if you’re a PI attorney and you’re trying to get brain injury or some of these other birth injuries, the number of queries that those pages generate is so low. Personal injury and accidents and some of those top-level pages, you’ve got to have great landing pages for. Because those are the ones that get the actual queries. One of the things that we like to do is we like to create a very strong page for these main keywords you’re targeting.

We try to tie in our blogs with the power pages. If I was going to give you an example, let’s say you have a car accident landing page. Create a blog that could possibly improve your power page. If it’s on car accidents, you could do maybe a blog on distracted driving or hit-and-run collision or rear-end collisions. Then go back to your power page and update it with a little section that links to the blog. What you’re doing is you’re continually making your main landing page better with each new blog that you create.

It’s getting constantly refreshed. It’s harder for your competitors to replicate. When they look at replicating a 10,000 word landing page with supportive blogs, it just puts you in a different place that they can’t touch.

Michael: Chris, what are some of the biggest mistakes attorneys make when it comes to SEO? What are some of the biggest mistakes that you have seen?

Chris: Not creating geo-specific landing pages is a huge mistake. You can’t target multiple geographic locations on one page. You also want to make sure those geography phrases are in your title tags which is one of the main metrics that Google looks at. Number one it’s those location-specific pages.

Michael: When you say locations do you mean different cities?

Chris: Yes.

Michael: Different states? What’s the threshold for having multiple pages depending on the geolocation?

Chris: It’s the different cities. Because, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, it’s having a specific page. You don’t want to just have one car accident landing page for all of California. You need to have these city specific pages because you can talk about statistics to the area. You can use photography related to the area. You can use reviews related to the area and all of these give you a better opportunity to rank in the 3-pack and in organic search results in regards to that specific city. That’s one really big mistake. I would say the biggest mistake when attorneys hire an agency is not paying close enough attention to the link building efforts.

A lot of agencies aren’t transparent with their link acquisition efforts. It’s a very important metric to move you up on page one. That’s a huge mistake is not paying attention to backlinks. Then the third is reviews. I realized that criminal defense and bankruptcy is a little bit harder to get reviews. I get it. But you still need to actively seek reviews and it will really help your efforts out. Not only from a conversion standpoint but also from local SEO rankings.

Michael: Just because it’s difficult it doesn’t make it unnecessary. It doesn’t mean that it’s not beneficial because there are firms that do find a way and they are able to leverage that. I think without a doubt reviews are a huge opportunity particularly for a lot of firms that are like, let’s say, solos and small firms that are trying to compete with these huge advertisers. This is a great way to actually really not only just boost the rankings but even get into that local pack.

Chris: Totally, 100% agree.

Michael: Now Chris, how can you use video to improve SEO? How can you leverage it?

Chris: Good one. There’s a lot of opportunities here. One of the second most visited pages on your site is your bio pages. Get video for all of your bio pages. Because, the consumer wants to be able to relate to who they’re working with and it’s nice to develop a rapport before you even meet the person.

Video will help with your conversions. You should have video content for all of your main keywords because the competition is less and you can get double real estate placement from not only Google but also YouTube.

Any main service bottom of the funnel page could benefit from a video because it keeps the consumer engaged on the page longer. Helps with those metrics and conversions.

Then any page that receives a lot of traffic because you could replicate some of that traffic on YouTube search results as well. Also for link building. There’s many video based directories if you don’t have video that you can obtain those backlinks from. There’s many sites that you can submit your video to and get a backlink back to your website. You can leverage it in that manner as well.

Michael: I think a lot of what we talked about has been very algorithm and metric driven from the standpoint of make sure you’re listed on directories and backlinks and a domain authority and so on. But as you mentioned with the content, the actual blog posts that you’re writing, the videos that you’re producing, all these different things, at the end of the day these are human beings that are picking up the phone and calling your office and getting them engaged. We’ve seen a lot of SEO companies check the box on blog posts and say we’ve hit our blog quota, we’ll turn out some blog posts every week.

They really don’t have anything to do. We’ve seen trucking attorneys and law firms that have blog posts on dog bites or something. It’s just checking the box so it’s not enough to just simply throw up a landing page or just to throw up a few blog posts or just be blogging consistently. The actual content itself has to engage the person who’s visiting the website.

Chris: Totally. Who actually likes to write long content? Maybe some of you but it’s so much easier for you to do a video and then just do the transcription. It’s a double win. You’ve got your content for YouTube and you’ve got your content for your blog post article that Google can crawl. There’s tons of use cases for video.

Michael: To echo what you’ve mentioned, this Q&A we’ll transcribe it and turn it into a blog post and make the video available on demand. If you shoot a video, let’s say you’re doing interviews or you’re doing educational content, not only can that go on YouTube and Facebook and your website, you can transcribe it into a blog post. You can even turn it into a podcast. All sorts of different things. What are some ways you can multi-purpose content?

Chris: You just nailed it. Audio you can submit to audio submission sites. PDFs you can turn them into PDF submission sites for links. Video we mentioned there’s tons of media based sites that you can submit your content to. There’s also content curation sites like Scoopa and Flipboard that you can submit to. Even getting on Amazon’s feed, you can publish your content into a book. Then get on Amazon’s feed to get a no-follow link from Amazon. It sets up these barriers. If an individual that you’re competing against is only writing content, well, they’re not going to be able to obtain video, PDF, and all these different types of links that you would be able to. It sets up those gaps that are hard to replicate.

Michael: There are people that actually use YouTube as a search engine. They actually will go on YouTube all day and just ask questions. This was probably maybe six or seven years ago. I don’t know that a lot of people really think about that too. That people are really consuming content in different ways.

As much as we would love for everyone to be searching the same way, type in a Google search, click to your website, read everything, spend a whole lot of time on there and be super engaged, the reality is there is no shortage of legal options for them. In a way you’ve got so many firms fighting for a consumer’s attention that you’ve got to differentiate.

Chris: Totally, 100% agree.

Michael: Awesome, is there anything else that you want to mention in regards to SEO? This is one of the most controversial things. Nearly every law firm that I speak with they’ve been burned probably eight times already by either another SEO company, they’ve had a poor experience. Is there anything else you want to leave people with?

Chris: I would just say do your due diligence when looking at an agency that you’re considering hiring. Make sure that they have a very thorough discovery process to understand your firm, your goals and also understand what those benchmarks are that you have to obtain and achieve in order to get results. Spend a lot of time in the discovery process.

Michael: Excellent, man. Well, thank you again. I really appreciate you taking the time out to share these insights. In a sea of BS SEO companies you guys are sharing the harsh truths and the harsh realities.

But also doing things in the right way to actually get results for your clients. I appreciate your honesty and not saying, it’s easy, just do these couple strategies you’re like page one in two weeks. But actually outlining here’s how it works. Because this is what is actually I think beneficial to law firms as they’re growing, as they’re approaching an initiative like this.

Chris: Thanks, Michael. I really appreciate it, I really appreciate that. Thank you.

Michael: Excellent, thanks, again, man.