Insider's Guide to Legal SEO: A Deep Dive into Challenges and Growth Prospects

Thank you so much. I’m honored to be here.

Yeah, I think like almost everybody in the world of SEO, you stumble upon this industry. And then eventually it just becomes an interest, then eventually turns into a passion, and then it turns into an obsession. So for me, I was in college living in Las Vegas. I had just gotten out of the Air Force. And I’ll give you a short version of the story. Living in Las Vegas, I again, had just gotten out of the Air Force, was going to college at UV, studying business, and was studying for something called the LSAT here. That’s a test that you take to become a lawyer. I was going to go down that track. At the time, I had a company that was helping pay for college, and I was DJing weddings. I’m an entrepreneur. I have been since I was five years old, and so I had an idea of tech. If I’m DJing weddings, why don’t I create a website? This is way back in 2001 when brides could plan their wedding in Las Vegas because it was like a destination wedding. I ended up paying somebody to build that website. It was called Vegas Wedding Mall at the time.

After about three months that the site was live, no traffic was coming to it. I was looking at the analytics and what the heck? Is this broken? I reached out to the developer and he said, No, that’s called SEO. I don’t do that. I just develop websites. I’m like, I wish I would have known that before I paid you $5,000 to develop this website. I’m like, Now that I have this, I guess I got to teach myself this SEO. Back then, there wasn’t a lot of content in line with SEO, especially reliable content. There was a guy named Aaron Wall who wrote a book called SEO Book. He’s one of the pioneers up there with Bruce Clay’s and the world and stuff like that. I bought his book and I read it front to back twice. I started to implement some of the techniques and I got results. Then I was just hooked. I’m like, You know what? I don’t know if I want to be a lawyer anymore. I’m having fun with this SEO stuff. And then from there, I ended up going down the rabbit hole doing affiliate marketing at the time. And then I got into working on poker websites, which are strictly very cut-throat and competitive.

And then in 2008, I spoke at a conference to a group of lawyers, and I ended up getting some of my clients there. And that’s the world I’ve been in since.

Yeah, that’s the hardest part of growing an agency, and it’s probably the reason why a lot of agencies fail because there are a lot of really good SEO people who if they work on one website, there’s nothing that can stop them. Good luck competing with them on one website. But when you give them 100 websites, right now that’s a whole different level of a game that you’re playing. And it’s mostly through trial and error. And that’s the other thing, too, is usually when I first started this agency, I had me. When I was doing everything, I was doing accounting, I was doing sales, I was doing business development, I was doing keyword research, I was doing link building. Then I hired three people. And then the next thing we started doing things. And then we got more clients and we hired six people. There’s something called the one-in-three rule of business. And so the systems and strategies that work for one client won’t work when you have three clients. And these SOPs, if you will, that you have for three clients won’t work for 10 clients and 10 to 30 and 30 to 100.

And so you have to always be thinking that way. And I think one of the benefits, I sell, this is how I pitch myself, I say, One of the real reasons why you benefit by working with me is because since 2001, I’ve been making so many mistakes, and I have learned from those mistakes over the year. And we’ve put better systems and processes in so that we don’t make the same mistake. And so that’s truly my competitive advantage now is all my failures.

Yeah. This is something that I did. I did this when I was going to hire an executive assistant. And my coach, I’ve got a coach, amazing coach, his name is Cameron Herold. He said, If you don’t have an executive assistant, you are your executive assistant. And I did an exercise where I spent 30 days tracking every single thing that I did. I wake up in the morning, I get some coffee, and I spend two hours on email, responding to emails. Then I’ve got a client call, and then I’ve got a sales call. Then 30 minutes later, this fire came up where this website, for whatever reason, has this issue and tracking it. Then once I was done with that, I had a spreadsheet of every little task that I did. Then the second thing that I did was say, How much would I be willing to pay somebody to do this task? And somebody to look at my emails X dollars per hour, somebody to do business development, close leads X dollars per hour or two X dollars per hour. Someone to write a book for me. I’m not going to pay anybody to do that.

I need to do that. That’s me. So that’s unique to me. So then I went through that list and then I was like, What is something that I hate and I do not like doing? What are the things that I’m okay with but I can maybe delegate? And then what are things that are just unique to me that even if I wasn’t getting paid, I would still do it? I was able to sort all of that. Believe it or not, 70 % of my time on everything that I was doing could have been delegated to somebody that I would pay so many dollars per hour. I think that a good exercise for people who are growing agencies is to look at where you’re spending your time and then figure out how you can maybe delegate it.

Yeah. I wish I could take all the credit for that. That is not me. Because when we were just a team of 15, it wasn’t awarded great places to work. And that’s just because we were just grinding, trying to get new clients. And so you get to a point where you have so many employees where you have to look at their success. How do you measure their success? How do you make sure that they’re happy? Because the true mission of any company is to make sure your employees are happy first, even before your clients are happy. That’s priority number one. And so we measure that. We do something called an NPS survey, and we do it twice a year. We send it out to all employees and we say, hey, on a scale of 0-10, how enthusiastic would you be to recommend somebody to work here? And if they score anything below a 10, which we encourage, we don’t want us all to be at 10 because then we never learn what we can do. But if we get a nine the next follow-up question is like, What could we do better? And then we get all kinds of feedback.

And we take that feedback very seriously. But a big thing that we did was we brought in, at the time, she was the director of People’s Success. She’s our VP of People’s Success. But she came in and she did an audit of everybody’s salary, who’s being underpaid based on market conditions. How come we are not doing a 401(k)? How come our health benefits are this? How come we are only giving our staff so many days off for PTO? And she just came in and just whipped us into shape. And since then, our culture has improved. Everybody, from what I understand, enjoys working here. Our retention is very high. And as a result of that, you get these third-party companies like Inc. and Best Places to Work that come in and they rate it and that’s how you win the award.

Thank you. Again, I pass all of that credit to my team, for sure.

Yeah. The SEO for lawyers, for one, it’s a very competitive niche. And the reason why it’s so competitive is because there’s such a high margin with that service, especially in the United States.

You look at the billboards, and you look at the cost per click for some of these keywords and pay per click. And why would anybody in their right mind spend $400 or $500 per click for something like a truck accident lawyer? Well, it’s because that could land them a $25 million case. And so anyway, it’s a very competitive industry. And when you have a competitive industry like that, you need firepower to compete. A lot of agencies, might not have the team or resources to build a strategy using that firepower. They might not have the guts to ask for big budgets. They might not have the experience to close a lead. But so anyway, like most of the clients that we work with, to compete in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Las Vegas for personal injury law keywords, you’re not doing that for 1,500 bucks a month. We turn down clients a lot more than we take on clients just because we were able to be realistic and manage expectations. But anyway, that’s one of the challenges is that it is a very competitive industry. However, some of the opportunities are that once you compete in a very competitive industry and you have success with some of the strategies, guess what?

That becomes an advantage for you as you start to compete in another market. Because you already know some of the shortcuts of the strategies that worked and you’ve deployed for eight years, nine years for this other client, and you can see the forecast of what this will look like in the future. I think that’s really where a lot of our clients benefit because we have access to so much data from some of the biggest law firms in the country that use us to do their digital marketing.

Yeah, I think as with anything, experience is built over time. Should you not? If that’s interesting if you’re listening to this and you want to get a law client, hey, who am I to say no? I think it’s a great industry. Some lawyers are great to work with. Other lawyers are a little difficult. It just depends. But I think over time, as you are speaking with lawyers and going to conferences and engaging with them and having dinners with them and truly understanding their vernacular, how they speak, and what is some of their lingo, and what’s important to them. And not only that, then really understanding. It’s one thing to do keyword research, but it’s a whole other thing to understand what the true value of if we were to rank for this keyword versus that keyword, and how much more profitable could it be if we were able to accomplish this versus that? I think that is where you start to Excel, is in the experience and the relationships. Because it’s not just one thing about SEO, that’s one thing. But it’s a whole other thing about helping your client answer the phone a little bit better and close some more of the leads.

And so there are other variables that we help our clients with that have nothing to do with SEO. It’s just because we have so much experience in this particular field.

Yeah, some lawyers are really specific, and they want to learn every nuance of SEO to truly understand the ROI and stuff like that. Other lawyers just look at it as, Okay, great, I’m spending this. How many leads am I getting and how many signed cases did I get? And so what is the cost per lead? What is the cost per sign case? Hey, either of those situations is perfectly fine. Granted, I love SEO and I always like it when lawyers appreciate what we do. So when we get a strong link from a DR 92 site like Forbes or something, hey, I want them to celebrate with me because those are all means to an end. At the end of the day, really what we’re being measured upon is generating sign cases for the client. That’s the priority. The second priority is generating leads, and the third priority is increasing traffic. Everything else links and technical SEO and page feed and all this other stuff that we talk about is SEOs, and we get excited by. That’s not the metrics that we’re measuring. We’re truly measuring what’s important to them.

Yeah. And that’s why I wrote a whole chapter about that in my book. The reason why I did that is because it is important to understand what a digital marketing team looks like. A lot of people get the misconception that they paid somebody to develop their website who’s an awesome designer and is a friend of a cousin. And they asked them, Are you going to do SEO? And they said, Oh, yeah, I’m going to do SEO. And they did develop the website and they changed some title tags, and they say that’s SEO. As one, I know that’s not SEO. That’s just like the foundation if you will. SEO is an ongoing process, especially if you want to be competitive. And what does the team look like? A, you need somebody that is going to manage the technical aspects of the website that’s going to be crawling it and looking at internal links and page speed and all that stuff. Then you need people who are going to write content and make sure that you’re writing content that’s going to satisfy the intent of somebody searching. And then using tools like Surfer SEO to go in and reoptimize pages.

Then you need somebody who is reverse engineering link strategies of some of their competitors and figuring out what links we got to get. Now you have somebody that’s doing link building. Then you might need somebody who can take videos and add videos to pages so that you can improve the user signals when you’re on Google. Then you might need a graphic designer to come in and embellish the pages so that they convert a little bit higher. In my book, I’m like, hey, in the ideal world, you need this person, you need this person. We built our agency so that when you hire us, you’re assigned a pod. And that pod has every single thing that you need to be successful. That’s how we looked at it.

So for one, we want to audit all of the content that they already have and just see, if A, is even optimized correctly. Are you using the right titles? Do you have duplicates, H1s, and all that stuff? So the first thing is auditing what they have. And the second piece is truly understanding the client and what are some of their goals. And which markets do they work in? Which practice areas do they target? From there, we put together a content strategy that’s usually done in Excel based on some of the cured research that we do. And then that is built so that we know that when we publish this page, it’s going to link from the navigation this way, and there’s going to be sidebar links that link here, and all the internal links are going to link to their proceeding page and the breadcrumb and then the first link. So there’s a whole system to the madness. And then once we publish the content, we monitor it. We’ve got some of our internal tools to see where that page settled after. And do we need to go in and revamp that page?

And then from there, we’ll go in and we’ll make some adjustments to the page and attempt to push it up in addition to building links and stuff. That’s the process without going into specific details of things at some level. Yeah.

Sure.

We price our services on just how competitive the space is and based on the goals of the organization or a law firm that we’re trying to work with. Typically, our proposals are built with a couple of things in mind. First, we call it a digital consulting bucket. Digital consulting covers us building out the strategy every month, analytics, and making sure that we’re tracking the results. We have an account manager who is somebody who’s going to meet with the client and act as the point of contact at our agency. And we have a full support system. So when people need to make changes to their website or upload a new person that just got hired or removed somebody, that’s all included in that. That’s the first line item, that’s digital consulting. The second line item is Engineering/Web Development. Once we develop the strategy, that’s the team of engineers that go in and implement the strategy each month, whether it’s publishing pages, adding schema, internal linking, everything that happens with the website, and improving its performance. The third line item is link building, and that’s based on how many links we feel that we need to build for this client in a given month.

So that’s that. The fourth line item, we’ve got a little bit of time for graphic design so that we can do some conversion rate optimization to improve the conversion percentages and then content creation. So writing content and researching it and making sure that we are, and some clients we’re writing 20,000 words of content per month, and some clients are writing 200,000 words of content per month. So it just depends. And then we also are doing things like digital PR now. We’re trying to get some longer links. So anyway, there’s a lot of other things that we’re doing too, but that’s the foundation of how we price our services.

It’s value-based, but it’s also realistic based on how competitive a market is. I’m not the guy that if I know realistically that this is going to take $25,000 per month to be competitive in a market, if the client says, Hey, that’s way too much. All I’ve got is 5,000, I’m not the person who’s going to say yes to that just to make $5,000 because I know my reputation is at stake and I don’t want to mismanage expectations. And I feel like I would be taking this person’s money without really delivering the value that his expectations are.

Yeah, you have to add. Our sales process is truly educating them. That’s really what we do, is we’re educating our clients in the sales process so that they understand why this proposal is so big. So that’s a big part of, and I think that one of my strengths is I’m able to break down something as complex as SEO and educate it. And that was the reason why I wrote my book, which was to break through that cycle so that if lawyers want to understand what the heck is in this world of SEO and hold people like me accountable, they could just read the book, Law from SEO.

That’s right. Yeah, I can tell you’re probably the same way.

Yeah, surprise. I wrote a whole chapter about this in my book. So what I did was link this as well as I do. There are no surprises in the world of SEO. If you know the right tools, you can see why our website is ranking higher than others. And that’s really what link building is. And so a lot of times it’s just understanding what the market demands, who has what links? How do I start to chip away at some of those links? It’s this game of cat and mouse. These people are ranking higher than me. They got a link from the Better Business Bureau. I don’t. Let me go get that link. Okay, great. And you just go through this. And then you’re doing things like guest blog posts, which hopefully you’re differentiating you from them. And then you start to do some of the digital PR where you’re trying to get the media involved and you’re doing studies and research. That’s really what separates a lot of people right now. We’re having a lot of success with some of our digital PR campaigns because those are the links that your competitors can’t clone.

And it’s super high. So in my book, there’s a full chapter here. And so what I did was I spent probably a good six months putting together a full list of every link that I feel lawyers should have if they wanted to compete. And so this right here, this one is for law firm SEO, for example, I went through and reverse-engineered the top 50 markets in the United States, from New York to Los Angeles and down to Texas. And so why do the top three websites rank? What links do they have? What patterns do they have? And so here on page 142 are the top 25 legal directories that every lawyer should be on. These are the top 50 foundational links that every lawyer should have. These right here are the top media links, the news, and media links that you should try to get. How can you get a link from the New York Times? How can you try to get a link from CNN? How do you try to get a link from Bloomberg? In the order of priority. And I talk about colleges, how can you link from those?

This chapter alone pays for the whole admission of this book. I’ve done the research, and it’s also an honest SEO. So if you’re not a lawyer, we’ve got a similar exercise that I did in honest SEO as well for other law businesses that are not legal.

Yeah. I know most of my competitors read my books and they thank me for it, and I say, Hope you got some value. You know what I mean? I’m just a very transparent person. I’ve got nothing to hide here.

Yeah, 100 %. Even in the competition that I have here, there are probably five reputable firms or agencies that do law firm marketing. Oftentimes, it’ll come down to it where we speak with the client and they’re like, Yeah, so I’ve done my research and so far it’s between you, this agency, and this agency. Then I’m just like, Hey, if you’ve already done your due diligence and it’s between us three, great job. Because you’re not going to go wrong with any of those three options. And then usually one of us will land the account and then the other two will congratulate us. You know what I mean? Hey, I’m bummed that I missed this one, but at least they’re working with you. I knew you were going to take care of them. And that’s just text messages because we’re buddies. I agree with that.

People do not give video content enough value and why it’s so important. We did some experiments, too. We took a website that was ranking for certain terms. Let’s say it’s ranking in position three. We take a video, we put it on the website. Not just any video. This is the lawyer quickly for two minutes just talking candidly about this particular topic. A, it’s very apparent that you can tell that the person is very passionate and knowledgeable about this particular topic. Just like you and I are speaking right now, it’s a lot different than if you were emailing me. I don’t know who you are. You don’t know who I am. You don’t know our personality. It makes more of a human connection. And people like to do business with those that they like and trust. And so if some stranger just comes to your website and it’s just text, that’s the same thing as you emailing me and me emailing you. But once you put this video on it’s, oh, I like that person. After watching their video, they come across as super knowledgeable about link building. I would use that person for link-building because it’s pretty obvious.

So one, we know that when people go from Google over to a page, the video keeps them on the page a little bit longer, which is a user signal that Google uses. So it’s probably going to increase your rankings by having a video there. But the second thing is that the conversion percentages are going to go way up just because now you’re making that human connection.

For one, they’re not truly utilizing all of the assets that Google gives you when you set up your local listings and your business profiles. So they’re not leveraging FAQs, they’re not selecting the right categories. They’re not uploading images. If they have multiple locations, they might be uploading the same images on all of the locations. These are common mistakes. The second thing is trying to get a lot of reviews. That’s super important as well as I do. The more reviews that you have, the quicker you are to respond to the reviews, the keywords that people put in the reviews have a pretty big significance in how you rank and what you rank for. A lot of times people just set it up and it’s just set it and forget it. And if somebody leaves a positive review, hey, that’s cool. If somebody leaves a negative review, they’re not doing anything about it. They’re not uploading images regularly. I think those who pay attention to it and look at it every couple of days and when updated are the ones who are doing well locally.

Yeah. So obviously, there are different software that you can use that try to help you automate this. But I think the biggest thing is building it within your culture putting systems and processes around it and incentivizing your team to get reviews. And the other thing, too, is just how you get a review. A lot of lawyers think that you have to wait until somebody picks up a check and two years later and you’ve been working on this case and they finally come in and they get a $500,000 check. And while they’re in the office, By the way, can you leave us a review? I think waiting that long is a bad strategy. I think do it at the beginning. When somebody calls your firm and it’s the first phone call and the person that answers the call is just amazing and answers all their questions. And then they get transferred to a lawyer who breaks down the whole process of how they’re going to help you. At the end of that call say, hey, by the way, did I answer all your questions? Is there anything else I could do for you? By the way, what’s your mailing address?

We’d like to send you a little welcome gift. Boy, do I feel great? And you’re also going to get another email for me if you wouldn’t mind maybe just leaving a review. Now, boom, you’re getting a review at the beginning of the case, just changing their strategy.

I think it’s important, A if you are somebody who is not comfortable hosting your podcast, that’s perfectly fine. But you should certainly be on the lookout for opportunities where you can be a guest on the podcast because A, it’s raising social awareness. Usually, the people who are interviewing you have their network and their reach. Now you’re leveraging their notoriety because they’re going to share it. And now those people that didn’t know about who you are, and then people might link to it and people might reach out to maybe do business with you. There are all kinds of benefits to being on a podcast. Heck, I think when I looked at this opportunity, I looked at your domain rating and I’m like, Hey, if I do this podcast, there’s a chance he’s probably going to link back to me and you’ve got a DR 70. I don’t know what your DR is, but that’s me as an SEO. Lawyers aren’t doing that. It’s a link-building strategy too. And then the other side, if you are comfortable with it, now it allows you to meet people that you might not have been able to meet.

Here, me and you are now connected and we’re going to be hanging out in Thailand next week. Just because you reached out and you said, Be on my podcast. And now we have a connection. Eventually, that connection will turn into a friendship and partnership, and who knows? So it’s great.

My favorite client story? There are two. I just got one text message 10 days ago. I got a text message saying, Hey, Jay, and this is from a client. I just want to let you know we just settled a $2.5 million case, and that was all SEO. And I wanted to say I’m thankful for that. Awesome. And then I said, Oh, my God, that’s awesome. Thank you for sharing that with me. I’ll be sure to share that with the team. And this was a client that when we first started working with them, month three came in. I’m not getting the results that I’m expecting. I’m just like, Come on, man, it takes a little time. Month six. Okay, it’s working, but not all that. When does it kick in? Here we are now, like three years later. And he goes, But by the way, that’s not even the most impressive piece of this. He goes, I’m even more excited about all the leads that we’re getting from SEO, so that was one. And the second was I opened up my book Law Firm SEO with it, which is a story about how we started working with the law firm.

And after about nine months, they got a lead. And that lead eventually turned into a $25 million case for our client. I don’t think of it as That’s great. The law firm made $25 million, and they’ll get 33% of that as their fee. But really, what I’m happy about is that there was a family that lost a loved one and they didn’t know what to do and if they were going to be able to make ends meet because the father of the family was the one that passed away. And here they are, and they don’t know that they’re going to have to go into foreclosure and all this other stuff, because they weren’t prepared for the passing. And then here comes the hero of the law firm that truly works with the family to fight for the justice of the liability of the negligence of the person who ended up taking this person’s life. And that’s really what I get excited about if I do my job correctly, I’m connecting those in a real need, in life, in their lives with somebody who can truly help them.

A couple of things I’m excited to buy. For one, we have a tool called POWA that we just launched, P-O-W-A. That’s a tool that we built that helps websites that are on WordPress, past Core Web Vitals, and increase page speeds, mobile and desktop. Our engineering team has been working on that for about two years now. That just went live, so we’re excited by that. And then just continuing to improve our product and take more market share.

Perfect.

Coffee. But it’s been tea lately, but I’d say coffee.

My favorite book is a book called Rework by the founders of Base Camp.

As with everybody, it was probably like Atlanta’s personal injury lawyer just to see where one of my clients was ranking this time. It’s something like that, to be honest.

A comedy. Yeah, I don’t take my life seriously, so it would be a comedy.

We like to go to the Bahamas. Yeah, that’s a different place.

Yeah, man, I appreciate you taking the time to interview me, and I’m excited to get to hang out here next week, for sure.