Speaker 1: 0:05

Why ranking number one on Google is probably not going to fix your lead problem. Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. You finally hit number one on Google. Everything should be amazing, but the phone is just not ringing why this is the best keyword ever.

Speaker 1: 0:23

Look, we're going to unpack this today, and this is a conversation I have with attorneys all the time. But ranking number one on Google may not be the fix to your lead or business or bottom line problem that you have. Visibility is great, yes, but it doesn't always equal conversion, and the same is true for SEO. Seo is great If we do it effectively. It can be really powerful for visibility, but it's not an effective intake process. What we're doing on the website is not going to be warming people up enough. So today we're talking about basically these two items what the visibility conversion gap is, the SEO intake gap, and then what to fix before you start chasing these rankings, because let's start with something that is. It's going to ruffle a few feathers.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Ranking number one on Google is not a big win. It can be, but most of the time it's not. And don't get me wrong. Like I just said, visibility does matter. We want our firm to show up when someone's searching for help. But here's the problem Too many lawyers, too many of you guys, you treat that top spot like the finish line, but the reality is that it is in a lot of cases just the starting gate, if not a warm-up before getting to the start line. And the obsession with these rankings it is everywhere. It's not unique to attorneys and it's kind of good because, you know, rankings are easy to measure. They give us a number that we can show our team, our partners, our marketing agency hey, we're doing great, we're number one, and it does feel like progress, it feels like a victory, and sometimes it is. But if your phone isn't ringing, if qualified leads aren't, you know banging down your door to get into the office, then what did we win? I mean, you know there's a lot of ego stuff here that we're not going to get into, but like, if this doesn't turn into clients, you know, here's the dirty little secret Agencies, myself included.

Speaker 1: 2:16

We love selling SEO rankings because it makes us look good, whether or not those rankings turn into clients for you. We look good because you rank number one and, honestly, a lot of lawyers love it too, because it's tangible and it's something that you know, the better intake response time. That's not as tangible as we rank number one for this, for this and for this. But here's the thing Ranking is not results. It does not equal results. It does not equal results If your messaging is off, if your intake process is slow or disorganized, if your website reads like a law school essay instead of something that's built for the stressed out human beings that are going to need your services.

Speaker 1: 2:53

You are pouring water. You've got a big, giant fire hose of water into this leaky bucket. The bucket's full, but it's leaking, and being number one just means that more people get to see what parts of your business aren't working, and we're going to talk about this in a second. But look, you're not alone in this. We've seen firms that spend tens of thousands of dollars chasing rankings on keyword after keyword and they still come to us wondering why the leads still suck or why the cases aren't ideal. And it's like, yeah, man, because that's not the whole problem. The problem is in the traffic, it's what happens after someone clicks, it's what's on the website. So before you invest another dollar trying to outrank this guy across town, pause and ask this is my site actually ready for more attention. Can I handle 100,000 users a month? Because Google might send the traffic? They probably will. But if what they find isn't going to be compelling, useful, trustworthy, they're going to bounce off that website fast. And when that happens, it really doesn't matter if we're number one, number three, number 33. We are invisible any way we slice it.

Speaker 1: 4:01

So now let's shift this situation a little bit. Let's say you are already ranking well, you're showing up on the first page or in that top. You know that really coveted top spot and the traffic's coming in. You got 10, 12, 25,000 visits a month, but the leads maybe they're not great, or worse, they're just not existent. Like everyone who fills out, your form is some kind of spam. Out, your form is some kind of spam. So what's going on? This is where the wheels fall off. For a lot of businesses and law firms specifically, it's. You know, the assumption is that the high rankings is going to translate into phone calls, form submissions, all that stuff. But the real truth is that SEO only gets us part of the way and the rest is on our content, our site experience, our intake process. And yes, I can hear you saying well, but didn't we do that when we ranked well.

Speaker 1: 4:47

Well, sure, but let's break this down a little bit. The first problem and this is something that you know it should be necessary to get up into a first ranking on Google, but sometimes people cheat it. So we're looking at weak headlines and meta descriptions. These are our first impression on Google, and most firms waste them Even in the number one spot. You'd be shocked by how many have something completely unrelated to the topic in their meta description. So if your title tag says Smith Johnson, experienced attorneys in Dallas, guess what? So does everyone else's.

Speaker 1: 5:19

There's nothing that makes a stressed out, time crunched user stop in their tracks, stop scrolling through the page and say, oh, these guys, smith and Johnson, they've got me. We need to tell them what problem we solve. What outcome can we help them achieve? That's where the user is, and if we don't answer that in a compelling way, even in position one, we're invisible. Number two is generic or irrelevant landing pages. This is a little unavoidable in some scenarios, but the real key is to every page you push out, make sure that content is going to convert somebody.

Speaker 1: 5:53

So imagine that someone searches for can I keep my house in a divorce? They click on your link and then they just end up on your homepage. That is going to be a bounce. People want the actual answers. If you're somehow able to rank for, can I keep my house in a divorce, answer it in the first paragraph. They want the answers fast, not this whole wall of text before getting to the answers. They may want that wall of text after they get their answer. You know, yes, you can keep your house, however, but the content is supposed to match the intent of the search. We've talked about this a little bit before, especially in the pay-per-click context, but this is supposed to make them feel like oh yes, this attorney gets exactly what I'm going through.

Speaker 1: 6:36

And then, third, this is an absolute killer. I talk about this a lot, but slow intake response and let's not sugarcoat this If you're waiting an hour, 15 minutes sometimes, to respond to a web inquiry or a missed call, you may have already lost the lead. It doesn't take them 15 minutes to call the next attorney, but if it takes you 15 minutes to call them back, they may be gone. This is where so many firms are burning perfectly good SEO dollars. It's the same thing with remarketing. We got the lead. Now we have to capture them. We've spent thousands of dollars bringing this person to our site. They've actually reached out and then we basically ignored them. So we must have systems in place to follow up instantly whether that's a trained human, a well-configured chatbot, a CRM-powered auto-reply that actually sounds human, any of those things. You just need to be doing something.

Speaker 1: 7:26

And fourth, we don't have any trust signals. We've talked about different trust signals in the past, but we'll talk about them more in the future. Our site might look fine, our words on our site might be great, but if we're missing the glue between that, the emotional glue, the testimonials, the star ratings, media mentions, local awards, we're just essentially asking these people who have just randomly found our website to take this leap of faith, and most are not going to, especially in the legal industry. Trust is everything. If your competitors have 200 Google reviews and you have six, that's the whole decision, right there. It's not even a competition.

Speaker 1: 8:04

And here's the underlying issue with all of these things All of these things that you may have missed you're optimizing for Google. You're not necessarily optimizing for humans, and that is the biggest challenge of SEO. It's why we don't sell a lot of SEO stuff, or why I don't do a lot of SEO stuff Because, at the end of the day, we want to sell to the clients. And Google's great. Yes, it sends us a lot of traffic and we can pay for traffic too. But if we start really only playing their game, people will notice. Seo used to be about, you know, keyword stuffing and backlinks, but modern SEO is much more of a shift towards matching actual search intent. And, yes, that's good for Google as well.

Speaker 1: 8:45

Once someone lands on our site, it's no longer about the algorithms and sure, the algorithm needs to get them there, but we need to have the empathy, the clarity, the speed, and then we need to build that trust to get that conversion to happen. We can't Google our way out of a broken experience. The algorithm might send some traffic and it might work well for a little while, but our site and our systems are the ones that have to actually close the deal here. So if we're wondering why the leads aren't converging, start there. Google is all the traffic that everybody searches with Google. I mean, do you know anyone who uses Bing other than your grandparents or anyone under 80, essentially.

Speaker 1: 9:22

So, yes, we do need to take a look at this and we do need to play this game, but don't start with another SEO retainer. Start with an honest look at what actually happens after someone finds you, but we also need to talk about what to actually do there. I'm not going to leave you hanging with no ideas. So what do we actually fix? First, if rankings alone aren't solving the problem, what should we focus on? Let's get practical. That's the easiest way to look at this. I'm going to talk about four areas that consistently move the needle. Most law firms are underperforming in at least two, probably three, often four of these, and if you fix these, you're going to get more from any marketing channel. This isn't just relevant for SEO, but it's good for pay-per-click, for referrals, word of mouth. If you're advertising in a magazine, all of these will help you, but the catch is that they're just not that sexy.

Speaker 1: 10:10

So first fix your intake, and this can apply to you. If you think it doesn't apply to you, it definitely does. Your intake is your emergency room. If someone calls, fills out a form, the clock starts immediately. You've seen it at fast food restaurants. They have a clock on every order. Why wouldn't we do that? Every minute that passes without a real response, it's chipping away at trust with a big chisel. You need speed, yes, but we also need tone. So, yes, we need to be quick, but we need to understand how we sound. Is our receptionist warm, confident, or does our auto response sound actually human, by email, or is it clearly AI? Do you have follow-up systems in place for missed calls, after-hours inquiries, no-shows? If not, we are bleeding here.

Speaker 1: 10:56

The second upgrade your messaging. You can always upgrade. Do it now, do it in two years, do it two years after that, do it six. You can make a schedule and always be tweaking and refining and building. Most legal websites are still talking in practice area language.

Speaker 1: 11:10

We handle divorce, custody, child support. That's fine, but it's not what people care about. They want to hear we help you protect your time with your kids. We help you protect your savings. We help you protect your life. Speak to the pain. And then there's the outcome when your copy mirrors what your clients are actually feeling. They are. I could make up a number, but it's so much more likely that they will stick around when it reads like a CLE brochure bye-bye.

Speaker 1: 11:39

Third is our conversion flow. Even if our message is solid, the site has to actually function like a high-performing intake machine. That means clear, repeated calls to action, no confusions. It means maybe offering chat and form options, but not then 15 phone numbers. Different people do prefer different ways to reach out, but we don't want to overload them with decision making. And this also means fast load times. Mobile first design Everybody's on iPhones today. And because the reality, if it takes more than about two and a half, 2.7 seconds to load or find the contact button, that user is gone, because Google is pretty much instant. It's like it's not even real internet.

Speaker 1: 12:18

Now on to number four. We talked about this. We talked about this. We talked about this. We talked about this Build trust fast. Don't make people dig. Put your Google review score right on the homepage. It could be at the bottom, but make it on that page Like future client testimonials and in video, put them in bold quotes. Make sure that people know that you are trusted. We don't have to put a whole bunch of badges from organizations. You can use user-generated content. This is trust from the community, from past clients. Professional organizations are a good part of this, but people are real to other people and people want to feel safe hiring you. They're going to spend money, they're going to spend time with you. They're going to give you a lot of their trust, and every detail in this process is either building or knocking down that trust. The bottom line is that before you chase any other SEO milestone, you must fix the foundation. If your intake, your messaging, your conversion flow, your trust signals, they're all dialed in, only then is it really going to start to matter that you're ranking number one on whatever keyword it is that you actually care about.

Speaker 1: 13:26

But now we need to talk a little bit about the SEO side of things. I profess to not be an SEO expert. I think the reality at this point is that I probably am, with the amount of work that I have been doing on SEO over the last decade. But there are people who are way more advanced than me, and really my relationship with SEO is more as a tool in our toolbox when we need to go high octane. We talk to the big deal high octane SEOs, but having an understanding of how these systems works is critical, and so, now that we've dismantled this fantasy of just get to number one, the leads will come, because, yeah, it does happen every now. And then let's actually talk about what works with SEO, things that, yes, might help us get to number one because, yes, seo can be powerful, but this is the right strategy for bringing in the right users, and the keyword here is intent.

Speaker 1: 14:17

This is a big shift over the last decade on Google and it's really important that you are adjusting your content, your website, all of your marketing towards matching the intent of your user. Too many law firms are chasing high-volume keywords like divorce lawyer, car accident attorney because they seem cool and they seem like they'll bring in a lot of traffic. They get a ton of searches, but the truth is that intent beats volume every single time. You're not trying to get everyone. We don't care about getting everyone. We are trying to get the right people at the right moment, and that's where local SEO and long-tail keywords come in. We've talked about these both on the podcast before. Local SEO helps us show up in the ultra-high intent searches like best DUI lawyer near me or immigration lawyer in Houston open.

Speaker 1: 15:02

Now. These are people who are actively looking to hire. These are searches that are going to lead to a phone call today. They're not just browsing. So we want to make sure our Google business profile is fully built out. We want to do all the local SEO stuff, the nap stuff. It's all in previous podcast episodes and we can even do things like adding practice area, specific pages for each location and get real reviews, putting these reviews on the website, testimonials, any kind of video we can get anything. This is really basic but it is totally, totally foundational and that's just the reality of fundamentals a lot of the time.

Speaker 1: 15:39

But then we can go deeper. We can target these long tail keywords tied to specific urgent questions, so they're going to be localized, usually something like can I keep my house if I file for bankruptcy in Florida? A lot of words, long search. Probably not a lot of people optimizing for that specifically. But if we optimize for something like how to modify child custody if the other parent moves, this is one I've seen a lot the searchers who are searching these long keywords. They're not casually poking around, they're not. I'll just see if there's some divorce lawyers in the area and what the price ranges are. They are. I need to modify child support because the other parent moved. They're hurting and they are looking for help and this is your chance to show up with clarity and compassion. But here's the thing. We talked about this earlier in the episode. This is the twist. Most firms are missing.

Speaker 1: 16:29

Seo doesn't stop once we get them on the website. You can't assume that the experience on Google is going to be consistent. What happens after someone lands on your site is probably the most important part. It may be a lot more important than how they got there, and that's where things like remarketing come in. We've already paid in time and energy or money to get them to our site, and so we need to have good content. We need to be able to track them, we need to be able to remarket to these users, because we cannot let that visit be a one and done. Yes, we don't pay per click with SEO, but we do. We absolutely do so we want to make sure we're doing things like remarketing to stay visible across YouTube, google display, facebook or Instagram and we can show testimonials, helpful guides, just reminding them that we exist and putting them through a system. Of course, we want to have the content to keep them on the page, but remarketing it keeps our firm top of mind after the moment of search Because, yes, people rarely hire a lawyer on the first click.

Speaker 1: 17:29

There are these instances with these long tail keywords where we can do really, really well, but most people think they research, they ask around, but if our face, our brand, our message, it follows them around for a few days, everywhere they're going, we could become the default choice, just by brainwashing, essentially. And then, finally, we need to do this on every website, on everything we are doing. This is valid for PPC, this is valid for SEO, this is valid for anything. But I've alluded to it, it's that we need to build our content for conversions, not just clicks. A 2,000-word blog post on what is personal injury law is probably going to rank in a lot of markets, yeah, but is it moving someone closer to contacting you? Who cares what personal injury law is? It's not going to move them closer to contacting you.

Speaker 1: 18:20

So instead, let's write content that focuses on things that are actually useful and actionable for people, not lists of okay, this statute is relevant to this car-related thing in this particular way, but what to do in the first 24 hours after a car accident in Virginia?

Speaker 1: 18:38

This is way more likely to result in a phone call, because it is relevant, it's urgent and we've already proven that we can give them good information. So if we structure our pages to guide people, not just to impress Google, we have clear headlines, faqs outcome focus copy calls to actions that say more than just contact us. Seo is built for people. I mean, yes, we can please Google and do all of this, but SEO that works is SEO that is built for humans. Rankings are not what's going to hire you, and being able to tell the guy at dinner tonight that you have a number one ranking on this keyword in your area it's not going to make you any more money, but actually building this for people, that's going to make you some money. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more Thanks.