Latest / Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love / 205: Popular Replay: Ronnie Deaver | How to Leverage Google to Help Your Firm Scale Faster

Transcript

205: Popular Replay: Ronnie Deaver | How to Leverage Google to Help Your Firm Scale Faster · Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love

• 0:01
  Intro: Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. What
• 0:05
  Intro: if
• 0:05
  Intro: you could hang out with successful women lawyers, ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more. Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love. Deaver is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams. Now here's Devina.
• 0:51
  Davina: Hi, this is Devina. And before we jump into today's show, I'd like first to introduce you to some of our sponsors. Over the last four years, Noble Marketing has tracked more than two fifty law firms and discovered 60 to 80% of new client calls were generated through Google My Business and Google Ads. Basically, you need to be on Google, Noble Marketing can help. I recommend them because they have an incredible guarantee.
• 1:20
  Your campaign will be profitable in three months or less, or they'll work for free up to an additional three months. If they fail after a total of six months, they'll refund your entire investment, including ad spend. If you could use more qualified leads, I encourage you to reach out to Ronnie Deaver at noble marketing dot co Mention you heard about them here on the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, and Noble Marketing will waive your setup fee instantly saving you $2,500 or more. When prospective clients are looking for an attorney, they usually turn to Google first. Optimize My Firm helps law firms grow their practices and attract more right fit clients through on page and back end search engine optimization.
• 2:06
  Optimize My Firm can help your firm rank higher on Google so that clients can find you before they find your competition. They serve personal injury, family law, workers' comp, immigration, and other types of law firms. Optimize My Firm does seo the right way, delivering meaningful results with geographic exclusivity and no contracts. Contact them today at optimizemyfirm.com or click the link in the show notes.
• 2:35
  Intro: Hi, and welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I'm super excited today to have Ronnie Deaver here with us because Ronnie is the CEO of Noble Marketing, and they actually specialize they're a lawyer exclusive marketing agency that specializes in generating leads and increasing potential new clients and turning them into paying clients. And they are so confident in the work that they do that they actually have a 100% guarantee, which is very, very rare in marketing industry. So I've got lots of questions for Ronnie today, and he's got lots of answers for me, I'm sure. So welcome, Ronnie.
• 3:13
  We're so glad to have you here.
• 3:14
  Ronnie: Oh, thank you so much. I'm so thrilled to be here as well.
• 3:20
  Intro: As I have a coughing fit.
• 3:23
  Ronnie: I've had that happen while recording before, it's the worst.
• 3:27
  Intro: Right, we're just gonna roll with it. Everybody's just gonna have to live with it today. Unfortunately, I live in Florida and right now everything is gold down here and it's all pollen, not monetary gold. Ronnie, tell us, I apologize for that. Tell us a little bit about you.
• 3:45
  I want to know how you kind of got into marketing and what made you specifically focus on lawyers?
• 3:52
  Ronnie: Yeah, so I got into marketing like ten years ago in a very, it's one of those fun young stories, but looking back, it's kind of crazy. But basically, was like young and broke. I just moved to the city of Boston. I chased a girl. The girl didn't work out, but the city did.
• 4:08
  No, of course not. Was 19 thinking I was in love, right? Like, I was like but anyways, so the girl didn't work out, but the city did. And I was broke. Right?
• 4:18
  And so I went on Craigslist, and I found a gig where somebody said, hey, need a website built. And I was like, I can build a website. I got this. So I met with a guy, Adam McDonald's. Right?
• 4:28
  And the first thing he says to me is he's like, hey, man. I want a website, but what I really want is to show up number one on Google. Right? And of course, young and broke, I was like, you know what, man? Pay me 400 a month and I'll make it happen.
• 4:40
  Right? Not that I had any idea how to make it happen. Alright, I spoke a good talk. I kind of knew the terms, you know, content marketing and on page SEO optimization and whatever. Right?
• 4:50
  But anyways, I ended up giving me the gig and that's when I learned about Google My Business. And I actually succeeded. We actually did get him number one on Google. He did start making money off the campaign. And then I got started at marketing.
• 5:01
  And then ten years later found my way into working with lawyers, which is really where I found my passion and love for it. And main reason being, I mean, lawyers, y'all are some amazing inspirational people, all of you. I don't care what industry you work in because you guys voluntarily decide to get involved with people during their most emotional times of their lives. Like, you're just like, yeah, those guys, they're at the worst of their lives. But you know what?
• 5:27
  I'm gonna go help those guys. Right? And I'm like, wow. Woah. So I I I love I love lawyers.
• 5:34
  I love what you do. And for me, I love the the marketing because it works well. It's very direct. People either have a need for a lawyer or they don't need a lawyer. There's not a lot of in between.
• 5:44
  There's not a lot of Yeah,
• 5:45
  Intro: they're just hanging out one day and saying, you know what, I think I'll go hire a lawyer.
• 5:49
  Ronnie: No, don't run a Facebook ad that says need a divorce, right? Like maybe you don't like your spouse as much, Like you're not doing a lot of awareness marketing about divorce as much, right? Or a lot of So it's very direct. And of course there's time and space for other types of marketing. I'm not saying they have no role, but it's also a very direct industry where people are like, hey, I have a need.
• 6:10
  Can you fulfill it? And that's a style of marketing that I really just love.
• 6:13
  Intro: Yeah. A lot of different industries don't have the kind of urgency already built in baked in because urgency is a huge factor in successful marketing is if your prospective client doesn't have a need for what you do and doesn't have an urgent need for what you do, then they're less likely to hire you. It's one thing that's for most attorneys, there's a built in urgency. If somebody's hiring a lawyer, they're doing it because they have a need, not some want, just want. Have a need
• 6:43
  Ronnie: for Except for state planning, they've got a little harder.
• 6:47
  Intro: Probably a little bit harder, yeah. But I do think that even then there comes a time when it becomes a need. I just think that there are a lot of people who don't realize that they have a need. And so you might have to do a little more education that But there is a talk to me about Google Ads, Google Local, because I really love to get some clarity around the difference. So first of all, for most of us out there probably realize that Google is a page ranking site.
• 7:20
  A lot of people think of it as a search engine, and it puts everything that's on the internet out there so we can find it. But the thing that kind of differentiated it is it came out as a page ranking service. And it actually goes out and crawls the internet and says, Okay, there's all these different sites of tag of this keyword, let's put them in order of what we think is the most important, right? So when we're talking about doing Google advertising, Google has rolled out different things. They have Google Ads and then they have Google Express with something that they came out with to get people to do their own Google Ads.
• 8:00
  Ronnie: Normal idea, never use Google Express, by the way.
• 8:02
  Intro: Right. So I want to talk about it. That's why I brought it up. Basically, the only one making money when you use Google Express is Google. They're making And a then they Google Local.
• 8:15
  And I want to dig into a little deeper into what each of those are. So why don't you And anything I'm missing here. So why don't you sort of give us just a little brief primer to kind of sort these out into buckets for us so we have an understanding that we're not always talking about the same thing when we're talking to people?
• 8:31
  Ronnie: Yeah, well, I think the easiest way I found to kind of parse it out is really just based on like, if you do a Google search, say any search, say criminal justice lawyer, Kentucky, right? Or criminal justice lawyer, specifically Louisville, Kentucky, pick a city, right? If you do that search, right? And anybody watching this, I encourage you to do that search. You'll immediately see at the top are ads, right?
• 8:51
  What you might see are one of two things. You're gonna see local service ads, right? Those are the things that have like the image of the lawyer, the actual attorney's face, all right? That's a new form. That's basically, since you mentioned it, Google Express Ads has evolved.
• 9:06
  Basically Google keeps trying to find a way that the platform is easier and profitable for small businesses who don't have any technical know how to run their own ads. Okay? Google Express was effectively and entirely a failure. I don't know anybody ever who ran Google Express and made money on it. It was all over the place.
• 9:22
  If you were an estate lawyer, you'd get calls for criminal. If you're a criminal, you get called for PI. If you're a PI, you get a call for family law. Like, it it was just terrible. Right?
• 9:31
  Intro: And they were making that platform. The purpose of that platform was to make it so the small business who didn't have somebody to help them could be They used this. Right? Only except it really was just a moneymaker for Google.
• 9:45
  Ronnie: Exactly. They failed entirely at the optimization. Right? Ironically, Nick, here's the thing. This is between agencies and Google is a never ending war.
• 9:53
  Okay? Because Google's goal is to make money. Right? Right? So if you ever wonder like why do you hire an agency?
• 9:58
  It's because an agency is your representative who's fighting Google and saying, no, no, no, Google. You're not going to take that money from me because I don't think that's going to turn into a lead. I don't think that's going to turn into money. So for example, putting a lot of effort into saying, I don't wanna pay for pro bono. I don't wanna pay for free.
• 10:13
  I don't wanna pay for cheap. I don't wanna pay for this or that. Or somebody who tends to search this tends to not be profitable, right? Like you, they don't know the human mind, right? They don't have that data of what actually from a click turned into a call and what calls turned into a case, right?
• 10:29
  But an agency does, right? As an agency, I can actually tell exactly every keyword that was clicked on if they turned into a call. And if my client is giving me the data, if those calls turned into clients. Right? Which then means I can optimize an entire campaign to tell Google to stop spending my money.
• 10:48
  Right? So my job as an agency is to not get more clicks. It's to remove as many clicks as possible. It's the exact opposite. Right?
• 10:55
  So a lot of my campaigns, we may pay a $100 or more per click. Right? Which is a lot. A $100 for one click. Yeah.
• 11:02
  Right? Yeah. But so then on a $3,000 budget, we get 30 clicks. Right? But of those 30 clicks, 15 of them called you.
• 11:09
  And of those 15 that called you, five to eight of them became clients, which really
• 11:14
  Intro: Yeah, pays right.
• 11:16
  Ronnie: Well worth But the game there then is removing clicks, not getting clicks. Google's good at getting clicks. You don't want clicks though. You need to remove the ones that aren't worth anything. But anyways, so Google Express came out total failure because it wasn't based on the idea of removing clicks.
• 11:30
  It was get more clicks and that's horrible idea. So Google Express then evolved into the next attempt they made, which is now local service ads, which admittedly is way better than Google Express. Okay? They made it its own little separate ad, its own little separate platform, its own little thing, right? And it's got this little visual.
• 11:47
  It's Google screened, Google approved. You know, they get you to go through this whole process of validating that you're a legit business. And that does okay. I see people get cases for maybe $507.50 bucks a case. It's all right.
• 11:59
  Pretty easy to set up. It doesn't scale very well. It has limits, but it's easier. It's better than Google Express, right? And then the newest thing that they just launched is now Performance Max, which is basically Google Express but like combined with like their ideas that they got from Google screened and or local service ads.
• 12:18
  And now they're saying, okay, now instead of just running Google Ads, you can also run display ads, which are like ads on websites. And you can run YouTube ads and Gmail ads, and you can run all these ads in one simplified campaign that's super easy for a small business owner to set up. Now personally, I fully expect it to fail. Right? Like, I don't know that I'm not a perfect Google expert.
• 12:39
  Somebody on here who's listening who is, tell me I'm wrong. It's fine. But for me, it just smells of Google Express of here's a What's super easy
• 12:47
  Intro: it called? Super max or?
• 12:49
  Ronnie: Performance max.
• 12:51
  Intro: Performance max. Okay. Performance max. All right. Good.
• 12:54
  So we got that in mind. I had not heard of performance max. Yeah. It's only out for
• 12:57
  Ronnie: like a month. It's brand new.
• 12:59
  Intro: Alright. So let's talk about Google Local because I so I've looked I have a client who uses Google Local, and they've done their own ads through Google Local, and it's paid off really well for them.
• 13:14
  Ronnie: Yep.
• 13:15
  Intro: And they just noticed a drop in one of their practice areas, but in the other practice areas, it's still doing pretty well. Is that something that people can do for themselves? This is a different question than is that something they should do? This is something they can do for themselves.
• 13:35
  Ronnie: Yeah, I mean, could do any of this for yourself. A lot of it's just grunt work at the end of the day. And to kind of tie it to the previous question, we hadn't quite finished with saying like, hey, what are the different elements, right? But you have Google Ads. Then the next thing you see is Google My Business and or Google Business Profile is the new name now, but also known as Google Local, the Map Pack three Pack, has a bunch of different names, right?
• 13:55
  So that's second, right? And then third is what used to be traditional SEO, where people used to say, when they say rank one, that's what they meant, was showing up on what was traditional SEO, the actual text result, right? That's now effectively, nobody cares about that. Justia owns that. Super Lawyer owns that.
• 14:11
  Fine Law owns that. It's a small business. You're never gonna be able to put enough money to own traditional SEO. Right?
• 14:16
  Intro: Yeah. I wanna dig into that just a little bit. Was just talking about a little bit. Okay? Because this is one of the things that is a distinction that I'm always oftentimes when I'm speaking with law firm owners, they tell me about SEO and they paid somebody a lot of money to SEO their do SEO on their website and do it monthly SEO and all that.
• 14:38
  And I tell them there's a distinction between SEO and pay per click, right? Yep. PPC, which is when you're paying for the ads. SEO is something that we think we're willing to get a a certain amount of organic reach. And that what you just said has always been my argument is that you want to take advantage of signing up for all the attorney services.
• 15:02
  Just get their free listing. Don't have to pay for those listings, but you want to be on Justia. You wanna be on any of the ones that you could be on for free because they've they've got that first page of Google's just so not.
• 15:16
  Ronnie: Yeah. Right? Well, this is actually where I wanna add something to your kind of your your framework there is that there is now a middle step between PPC, Google Ads, and traditional SEO, SEO, right? There's now local SEO, right? And that's Google My Business.
• 15:32
  And here's the thing, the work you do for traditional SEO helps Google My Business, right? Which is the map pack, three pack, Google Local, the thing in between Google Ads. So there is a role for SEO and it still can make quite a bit of money, but it's not in the way that people thought of it about five, ten years ago. Back in the day, five, ten years ago, you cared about website traffic. Nowadays, I don't give a crap if anyone has ever gone to your website.
• 15:53
  It doesn't matter. The goal is have a good website. You have to, it's important to have one. But the goal of it is to have a good website because that helps your Google My Business or Google Business profile rank better in that local search part. And that in itself is very profitable because Google Local SEO is built on the foundation of what used to be traditional SEO.
• 16:14
  So traditional SEO has a role, not in the way that people think of it. They used to think of it as like website traffic in rank one. And now I'm like, no, none of that. Use it as a supporting tool to help you with Google Business, which kind of gets us more into if you wanna talk about it, what do you actually do to take advantage of Google Business?
• 16:31
  Intro: Well, so if you've got so for SEO, SEO is is what's happening on your website, on the back end of your website, on the front end of your website. Yep. It's about the content, how the content reads. Does it follow certain rules that Google has put out there that says that they prefer for ranking? And so there are all kinds of plugins that you can use to help you get the back end set up the right way, and then there's certain contents or rules.
• 16:59
  And I love what I like about the the the certain plugins is they get the little green light, you know, so you know
• 17:05
  Ronnie: Yoast SEO.
• 17:06
  Intro: Make people happy. Yeah. It makes much sense when you look in the front of your site, but at least you make Google happy if you get it with the green light. So this is like keyword stuffing, all of that just does it's not nearly as effective as it used to be when people first started doing SEO, you know? So tell us a little bit about SEO, kind of like what's not working anymore on that and sort of what is.
• 17:31
  Ronnie: Yeah. So a lot of what you just talked about was actually what's known as on page SEO. SEO can technically be divided into two categories, on page, off page. Very simple. On page means stuff you do with your own website.
• 17:42
  Off page means stuff you do with other people's websites. So off page SEO would be like trying to get backlinks from other websites like Justeo, Fine Law, etcetera. Okay? All that kind of stuff off off page SEO getting some backlinks. I mean, it's worth it to the degree like if it's free, go for it, but it's not worth it to necessarily buy links or put a lot of effort into it, you know, off page SEO stuff.
• 18:01
  What is still worth it is on page SEO, but not as much as people used to think. Used to be in the old days, you'd pay $2.3000 a month or more just for on page SEO. And on page SEO would mean would be blog posts, optimizing the website, meta titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, local schema. I'm just throwing out technical terms. Forgive me for anyone who doesn't know But all this really technical stuff that you do on this website and on the ongoing would be new content, etcetera, etcetera.
• 18:29
  Paying 2,000 to $3,000 just for that nowadays isn't going to be profitable. And the reason for that being, as I said, is that you are never going to spend enough money to beat Justia or Fine Law or Super Lawyers or any of them, okay, for any of those relevant terms like criminal lawyer insert city. You're not gonna win. You just don't have the money. Those guys are spending millions a year.
• 18:51
  You just don't have the money. Right.
• 18:52
  Intro: I learned that the when we were researching that LegalZoom is what everything is gauged against. LegalZoom is like the number one vendor of Google Ads and investing in Google far and above multiple, multiple times over anybody else. Yeah. So you and they set the standard for, like, what keywords cost for lawyers.
• 19:14
  Ronnie: Yep. Yeah. You're not gonna so you're not gonna win that game with with that traditional SEO. And here's the thing, even if you did, and this is actually the biggest mind shift that I need people to understand. I've actually set up call tracking and form tracking and lead tracking on over 150 campaigns.
• 19:31
  Okay? And so what that means is that if a lead came in, if they called you, if they sent an email, if they filled out a form, if they live chatted, it didn't matter how they came in. If they came in, I knew about it. Okay? So I've tracked well over 50,000 leads.
• 19:43
  Okay? And what I have consistently found is no matter how large the firm was, small or big, 60 to 80% of every lead they generated could be directly or indirectly attributed to just Google My Business. That's not the website. That's not even Google Ads. That's just Google My Business.
• 20:02
  So here's the thing. Even if you do invest all this money into SEO and you somehow beat Justia and Fine Law, or maybe you find some really long term key, like long keyword that they don't think of like, you know, specifically marijuana lawyer in Lawrence County, right? Like this really long Maybe one, you win that and that gets you an extra couple 100 people per month on your website, okay? On average, only 3% of the people who go to your website will ever call you. So a boost of 300 people on your website, which is a big boost, right?
• 20:31
  That's a big number for a lawyer. Most people only get 300 for their whole website. Okay? So 300 for one blog is not bad. That's only gonna net you nine calls a month.
• 20:41
  Nine calls. All that effort, all that money, thousands of dollars for nine calls. The math just doesn't work out. When you compare that to Google My Business where most of my clients are getting somewhere between at least 50 but often a 100 plus calls a month from their investment on Google My Business. Okay?
• 20:59
  So it's really the mind shift there is like, hey, the calls, the call volume really comes from nowadays Google My Business. And it's just like the way I think about it. When you do a restaurant search, you say Italian restaurant near me. Do you ever go to their website? No, almost never.
• 21:14
  You look at their reviews and you either say and the menu's even on there. They don't even need to go to the website to look at the menu. Nowadays you can even click order now and order takeout without ever going to the website. Okay. So it's all on Google My Business.
• 21:27
  So the same thing happens with lawyers. Somebody looks for a lawyer near me. They look at your reviews. They check out your profile. They look for your information and say, oh, that looks good.
• 21:34
  Call. And I actually track that. 75% of the people who call you from Google My Business or somehow attributed to it only call from Google My Business. They don't even look at your website at all. So 75 of people aren't even looking at your website.
• 21:48
  They call you without ever looking at it. It's huge. It's crazy. So Google My Business is where the call volume is. Google Business Profile is a new name technically.
• 21:56
  And your website is for me a supporting metric nowadays. Any investment, like hardcore investment into your website without focusing on Google My Business in my opinion is now a waste and is not gonna get you ROI. Because even if you boosted your traffic by 300, you only get nine calls out of that. It's a lot of money for only nine calls. Yeah.
• 22:14
  But you can get a lot more out of that from Google Business.
• 22:17
  Intro: Now does it so does it matter if you well, everything, I mean it's in the name, Google Local. So really is about focusing locally, regionally. So if you have a national.
• 22:30
  Ronnie: Well, so for anybody with national presence, the only way you can get money out of Google Business is you have separate locations in specific cities, okay? So for most lawyers, that's not a problem because they just have one or two locations, three, four, you know, whatever. Have actual physical locations. And then they just have a location there. They have a profile for each location And each, fill it out.
• 22:51
  They make it, you know, do everything they can on the profile. They get reviews, etcetera, and then they compete. And Google Business Profile has about a 25 mile radius where you'll compete in. Unless you're in a very rural market like Salem, Ohio, Middle of Nowhere, Ohio, you can maybe get 50 miles. But mostly it's about 25 miles.
• 23:09
  But if you're a national, you just need to have multiple locations. And there's lots of different Yeah.
• 23:14
  Intro: Because you and I were talking earlier about the call. Like for our business models where we're where we're dealing with clients all over the country, you know, having a local or regional is not something. For law firms Yeah. It makes that I mean, your clients are coming within even even working remotely.
• 23:33
  Ronnie: Yep.
• 23:33
  Intro: There's only so many places your clients are going to come from and people are going to hire people local more than they are going to hire somebody on the other end of the state to do their will or handle their divorce or whatever. Because you got to find somebody who goes to court for you where you live in your area. Right? So that local model, that regional model is really an important sort of distinction. Right?
• 23:58
  Ronnie: Yeah. Google business no. Google Ads, you can do whatever you want.
• 24:02
  Intro: Yeah. It it's it's one of the, with traditional Google ads, it's one of the sort of pitfalls of kind of running your own Google ads that people have found in the past is like, I'm getting calls from, you know, or whatever. I'm getting calls. I live in Sanford, Florida. You know, I keep calls from Sanford, North Carolina or whatever because, you know, you have to be very dialed in and paying attention to where your calls were coming from.
• 24:28
  Right?
• 24:28
  Ronnie: Yeah. That's both the Achilles heel. So I'd double edged stories. It's amazing because at the same time you can have that nationwide presence and you can get cases anywhere with Google Ads. Now there's no limits nationwide.
• 24:39
  As long as you can practice in the area, you can run an ad. Downside being if you're not managing it, if you're not watching it, yeah, it happens all the time that you get calls from areas you can't serve. Now local service ads help with that a little bit because local service ads make it the same concept, right? They're very clear on your local service area. It's in the name, right?
• 24:57
  Local service ads. So that helps a lot. So local service ads are safer, but your traditional kind of text ads, which is still the majority of ads on Google. Yeah, you gotta be real careful. But yeah, Google My Business, hyper local, 25 mile radius.
• 25:10
  And then for any of those people listening who are trying to have a virtual office, you mentioned this. I'm gonna tell you right now, you're just gonna have to, you're gonna have to find a way that you have a physical location. There's no way around it. And trust me, there's enough money to be made on the platform that it's worth it. You can make deals with your local person.
• 25:25
  You go to a dentist and say, hey, do have a broom closet I can rent for a $100 a month, Right? As long as you have some kind of lease agreement with them, that counts as a location. You can use that. If you're willing, you can use your own home address or a friend's home address if they're willing to have it publicized. But you need some form of location if you're gonna generate leads from Google business.
• 25:41
  There's no way around it.
• 25:43
  Intro: Things like you might I guess some of the mailbox services now instead of the are they using street numbers for, like, UPS, whatever? Or they
• 25:53
  Ronnie: Even if they do, you'll get caught eventually, and you'll get suspended, and then it's gonna be brutal. You have a sudden drop in lead flow, you're not gonna want it.
• 26:00
  Intro: We're clear on that point. So UPS store, local UPS store or the FedEx store or whatever, those do not count. Google doesn't like it if they find out that that's where you've got a box there or something
• 26:15
  Ronnie: and it's
• 26:15
  Intro: not No, an actual
• 26:17
  Ronnie: you need to have some kind of physical location. And there's actually, there's a cool story behind this. Basically what happened, here's the thing. A lot of small businesses, small people are like, oh, I wanna go virtual. I wanna start my own business.
• 26:26
  Why is Google stopping me? You know, they're very angry at Google and I get it. It's very annoying to be stopped like
• 26:30
  Intro: this.
• 26:31
  Ronnie: But here's the thing. It actually protects you a lot. The people that protects the most are the small businesses because here's what happened. At one point, it wasn't necessary. And this is what happened.
• 26:40
  The guys with money, Morgan and Morgan, went into every city and every market and created a brand new listing with no reviews because they didn't need it because they're freaking Morgan and Morgan and everyone knows them anyways. Didn't matter if they had reviews. So they opened thousands of GMB listings and crushed every local competitor. So it became useless for local businesses. Local businesses had no role to play.
• 27:03
  So the only way that the local business is gonna be protected is if Google forces a verification of some form of a local presence, right? So it's actually in your benefit even as a virtual smaller firm that if you wanna make money on this platform to be to accept Google and saying, hey, I appreciate that we verify locally to some degree because it at least prevents Morgan and Morgan and anybody with enough money from coming in and launching thousands of these nationwide and just crushing everybody.
• 27:29
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• 28:03
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• 28:17
  Intro: I gotta say, Doug Morgan is always impressing me, man. He's always steps ahead of everybody else in trying things and trying to do things from a marketing standpoint. Some of it white hat, some of it black hat.
• 28:30
  Ronnie: Oh my God. I mean, that was the biggest suspension wave I've ever seen in my career. I mean, we saw thousands of listings get suspended. Some of them from obviously people like that who are making these thousands of them, but others just from other law firms who just said, oh, I'll just keep making more virtual offices. Who had kind of taken up the same idea but not to the same scale.
• 28:48
  And people in regus offices, co working spots sometimes still get suspended. Yeah, mean it's tough. But if you put the effort in either at a home address or again, make a deal with a local dentist, a noncompetitive business, and say, look, do you have a closet? And like that I could rent for $100 a month. You're gonna get more than $100 a month in clients out of doing that effort.
• 29:07
  Just have a legit lease agreement, which again, I'm very big on doing this as ethically as you can. It's not breaking terms of service. You do have a legitimate lease agreement that says you rent this thing. Right? That way you can give it to Google if you ever get suspended.
• 29:19
  Intro: And maybe something great for if you have other attorneys out there that you can rent their conference space for, use of their conference space if you pay them a certain amount and have a lease agreement with them or something like that may be a good way to go. Yep. And also, I do like the idea of other types of businesses, especially let's say if you're you know, you're an attorney and maybe you rent space with a therapist or something.
• 29:50
  Ronnie: Oh, therapists are great because therapists, they're in a similar situation where they're not in it all the time. So they're very incentivized.
• 29:57
  Intro: Yeah. Yeah. So great idea. All right. So let's go back to where we were kind of clearing up the distinction between all of these.
• 30:06
  So I think the last one we were talking about was just kind of like what Google Ads, just straight Google Ads, what normal people normally think of when they think of hiring the agency to do Google Ads for them. They're not necessarily thinking Google Local. They're thinking, you know, we're gonna put ads out there or make it local by the keywords we use or by the parameters or something like that. Is there anything we need to know about that and how that's different?
• 30:32
  Ronnie: Yeah. I would generally say like, I would never do Google Ads on your own ever. Like, and of course, I'm biased in that. But if I were to separate my own business and I didn't have an agency right now, I'd say the same thing. And the reason is like, I've just seen too much money be burned.
• 30:46
  I mean, unless you like the full and you want a full time job of managing it, it's just a lot of effort. It's just a lot of going in every day and seeing, okay, where is Google spending my money and then telling it not to spend the money there. Okay? Like it's just a lot of every day going in and saying don't spend my money this way. And unless you're willing to go in every day, you're gonna burn a lot of money.
• 31:04
  Okay? Local service ads, sure. You can do that on your own. That's pretty easy. It's limited enough in scope that you set it up once.
• 31:12
  It's really set and forget. Local service ads is kind of the first time Google succeeded in what I think is a set forget campaign. Mhmm. So that's fine. But don't ever run Google Ads on your own.
• 31:21
  And if you hire somebody, make sure that you get them and ask them to talk about how they limit clicks and figure out if they talk about really the metrics that matter, like actually getting cases. Because impressions, clicks, click through rate, none of that means anything if it doesn't turn into cases. I don't care if they got a 100 clicks. Did any one of those turn into a call? Did those calls turn into cases?
• 31:42
  Or are they calls that we're talking about social security when you're not a disability lawyer, right? Like it actually, you gotta get them to talk about like, hey, no, no. We generate cases and here's how we do that by getting rid of clicks as much as we can. And if they can't talk about that, don't hire them. Just don't.
• 31:57
  Yeah. Like they're not gonna help you make money.
• 32:01
  Intro: And one of the experiences we had is we learned, my husband who works with me in this business to provide, it's the only thing that we still do for our clients is that we do a done for you is Google Ads. And when he became Google certified, it was just a whole another level of knowledge and information that all the sort of secrets that you don't realize. That's why we were telling everybody, oh my God, do not to Google yourself. Because there's so much stuff. And we learned that the hard way because we had another business.
• 32:33
  Ronnie: Yeah.
• 32:34
  Intro: And that's what propelled him to go and become certified and learn it because he was spending all this money to advertise another type of business. And it was like, oh my gosh, there's so much you don't know. And they that you can't find you can't Google it. No. You can't
• 32:50
  Ronnie: you learn the hard way. That's almost it. There's some online courses, but it's still hard to find.
• 32:54
  Intro: Yeah. Yeah. And they probably aren't as one of things you and I were talking about earlier was how we're talking about Meta and Facebook advertising, Instagram. And all of these services are all Google is a little bit more intuitive, but they're all always changing. So you can go watch a video from somebody who says, this is how you do such and so on YouTube.
• 33:18
  I mean, my nephews, who are in college, they're famous for going to YouTube, figure out how to do things. Right? And my husband, you know, will go look at things in YouTube, but it's amazing how quickly those types of things expire
• 33:31
  Ronnie: Yep.
• 33:32
  Intro: Because they're no longer good because, the platforms have changed what they're doing. They're always evolving. Facebook right now is in a huge, becoming meta and all their focus and how they're shifting things. They're changing a lot of things. And you have to have people help you figure those things out because you can go watch videos all day long, but then you'd be looking at your screen, go, I don't have any of those buttons.
• 34:01
  Where they?
• 34:02
  Ronnie: Where are those buttons at?
• 34:04
  Intro: Exactly, exactly. Things are always evolving, right? So you have a very interesting guarantee. You have a 100% guarantee that what you do will work and will result in cases. So why don't you go into a little bit more detail about that?
• 34:19
  Because I know people are going So one thing about lawyers, as fun as we may be to work with, is that we're skeptical a lot. And we might look at that and go, Oh, I don't believe that. You can't do that. And of course, we're told everywhere that, Well, there's no guarantee of marketing because we can't It's fluid. Things are always changing, right?
• 34:44
  So tell me what made you decide to do this guarantee and what it is exactly.
• 34:50
  Ronnie: Yeah. So we'll start with kind of talking about what is the actual guarantee. So the explicit guarantee is we guarantee the campaign will be profitable in three months or less. And if we fail in three months, we'll work for free for up to three more months. And if we fail again after six months, we'll actually refund all your money, okay?
• 35:06
  Wow. And so for example, if you were to do our base campaign starts at $1,500 a month, okay? Which means within three months, you'd spend $4,500 with me, which means by the end of that time period, most lawyers, we base it on gross profit. So most lawyers gross profit around 60 to 80%, which means we need to be getting you at least $5,600 to about $7,800 in revenue to make that profitable for you, minimum. Okay?
• 35:28
  And the main reason we do this guarantee is not because like three months, you know, getting only $7,600 in revenue, like that's not the end goal, right? Like that's not a goal, right? We want you to make way more money than that. But the reason we do it is our goal is in that three months is that if we can get to the point where the campaign makes enough money to pay for itself, well then you can sustain the campaign, okay? So then you can sustain it over the next twelve months, twenty four months.
• 35:53
  And that's where you're gonna start seeing major gains like doubling your business or tripling your business. But before we can do that, for a lot of lawyers, if you can't start making money in three months, you can't sustain it for twelve months. Like you don't wanna take that risk. A lot of people, you know, they took SEO risks of when they got burned and they spent twelve months investing for $2,000 a month. And then twelve months later, they didn't make $24,000 in revenue back, you know, despite all this investment in quote unquote SEO.
• 36:17
  And so I was very much like, I don't want to be that way. I want you to make at least enough to cover the cost of the campaign within three months so then you can sustain it over the long haul over the next twelve months. And then I can make you even more money than whatever I did in the first three months. Okay? Right.
• 36:31
  So that's kind of what the guarantee is. Why I did it was just because it's the type of business I wanna run. I just I love running business in a way that I'm like, no, no. I'm actually helping these people grow their business. Like it is not a success for me if I did all this work and you didn't make money.
• 36:45
  Okay? Like that's a failure state. Like that's not acceptable. That is not an outcome that I'm okay with. There are many businesses that are.
• 36:52
  That's their whole business model. Like that's okay. Like they're like $500 a month. And I'm like, that's not okay for me. That's not fine.
• 36:57
  If you're not making money, then I'm wasting my time. It just doesn't feel good. So that's why I did it. In terms of like how do we do it? I mean, long story short, we just kinda have the data on it.
• 37:06
  In general, we succeed within the three months about 80% of the time. We succeed within the next six months 98% of the time. We almost never have anybody completely fail within six months, okay? And basically the thing that fails more than often than anything is not the marketing. It's often close rate.
• 37:23
  And I was actually listening to the sales conversation you had with the CEO of Select Sales Development.
• 37:29
  Intro: Yeah, Merrick. Merrick Klein. Yeah.
• 37:31
  Ronnie: Yeah. I love that episode, by the way. So cool. The plan method, talking about how to management questions, etcetera. That was a great episode.
• 37:38
  But anyways, so we're often also doing like sales training support, and I have my own theories on that. Anyways, But the point is we just have the data that like we put the grunt work into Google Business Profile. We know that 60 to 80% of calls come from Google Business. So we're putting the effort where the you know, basically we found the 20% that drives 80%. So we're putting all our effort into that.
• 37:57
  And we found that basically Google likes Google. So if you put effort into Google by filling everything out, by doing everything you can do on the profile possible, right? Putting all the grunt work in you can, that Google rewards you. And that in most situations within three months, most of our clients have gotten at least 16 consultations. And usually if they have at least a 30% closing rate, that turns into, you know, three, four cases.
• 38:20
  Okay? And most people's average case value is somewhere between 3 and $5,000, which means even at the low end, they're looking at $9,000 okay? Which of course, more than pays the campaign off. So a lot of this just comes down to pure numbers, okay?
• 38:32
  Intro: Right,
• 38:33
  Ronnie: And that's how we do it and why we do it.
• 38:36
  Intro: Yeah, no, that's great. It's great for you to share that because, and I think one thing that's really interesting about that too, is that you make the point that it takes, this is something that takes time. This is something that, when working with anybody on ads, and we're just very select, only work with my coaching clients But on when we do, it's always like, it takes a while because you're tweaking, you're changing, you're seeing what's working, what's not. And also things change. You're in a dynamic environment.
• 39:09
  And they're always sort of working that to tweak and make better. Like you said, remove those clicks that you shouldn't be getting, right? And so I think that's something that people need to keep in mind. Like any marketing that you do, you have to give it time to work. And three months is not sufficient really to give it time to work.
• 39:32
  You have to give it time, six months, twelve months, to really see-
• 39:38
  Ronnie: The full potential.
• 39:39
  Intro: Big benefit. Not some benefit, you certainly should be seeing something like you shouldn't just be throwing money out of pit, but at the same time, to get the full benefit, it's something that the longer you sort of stick with it. Just, I remember we had a gym and the first one we opened, we wound up having to close that one and we changed the name and we did something similar or different. But that old site just got so much We were ranked like top when we switched.
• 40:11
  Ronnie: Yeah. Yeah.
• 40:12
  Intro: It was way back in 2005 or something. We were ranked like number one. And so we couldn't We didn't wanna give that up. You know, we were driving traffic from that name because some of it is just like how long you've been around and how long you've been doing something and how long Because Google looks at that as the longer you're around, the more credible you are.
• 40:33
  Ronnie: The more you've put consistent effort in. You know, basically, especially with Google Business, which is separate than Google Ads, right? But Google Business, a lot of it, I think of it as kind of the online equivalent of how do you have a good referral business, okay? So in a good referral business, the way you get referrals is that you prove you're an expert to people. You help as many people as you can.
• 40:50
  You build their trust. You get them to speak well of you. And you build your authority, right? Expertise, authority, and trust, okay? And then people naturally wanna refer you because they're like, hey, this guy helped me.
• 40:59
  He did good work. He's an expert. He's gonna help you in everything he does, right? Or she, I'm just saying he because I'm a he. It's difficult.
• 41:04
  But anyways, you know, that's how you build a referral. Well, Google Business is the same thing. You go on there. If you put the effort in consistently to prove you're an authority, you really fill up the profile, you put in your information that you do this service and that service, and you post frequently, you add photos and you do questions and answers. You prove you're an expert.
• 41:21
  You prove you're an authority by putting that effort in over time, and you build trust by getting reviews and then responding to those reviews. Just put that effort in. Well, then Google's then gonna refer you cases because now you are the highest expert with the most authority and the most trust. Okay? It's just the same thing.
• 41:36
  And of course, as you said, that takes time. And what we're doing is we're trying to bum rush it in three months just because that's the challenge we wanna put to ourselves. It's like, hey, we want you to make money. Let's prove we can do it in three months. But then the real gains, I mean, have people, it's not uncommon.
• 41:48
  We have clients who double their business in twelve months. Like that's, we started out at like 200,000, now it's doing 400,000. And that's a fairly small firm still, but like we've had other situations go from 400 to 800. Like that happens. It's normal.
• 42:01
  Yeah.
• 42:02
  Intro: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I thank you so much for being here, Dave. We have to wrap it up, but I appreciate you being here. And I think I've learned a lot and I'm sure that our listeners have learned a lot.
• 42:13
  So tell us how we can find out more about you and how to connect with you and get, you know, dig into noble marketing, get to know more about what you're doing.
• 42:23
  Ronnie: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the first thing's first, can always contact me at rdeaver. That's R as in Roger, D as in dog, E A, V as in victory, ER noblemarketing dot co. You can always contact me there. It's also the website.
• 42:35
  And if you don't mind, do you mind if I actually suggest a link to another podcast that I think people would appreciate listening to after Yeah. They listen to this So I did a podcast with Susan Guthrie. She's a top 1.5% podcaster and lawyer. And her podcast that we did together was basically on the tutorial of everything you can really do to take advantage of the Google Business profile and how you can really work it to get your money's worth out of it. And you had mentioned, you said, hey, can you do this on your own?
• 43:02
  And I said for Google Business, yes. It's just a lot of grunt work at the end of the day. Okay? So when anybody asks me like, what do I do? I say, look, I sell grunt work.
• 43:10
  Okay? Like we have a black box. There's no black magic. At the end of the day, what do I do? I take your Google Business profile over.
• 43:17
  I take your Google Ads profile over, and I just put in hours of work every day on Google Business that turns into posts, that's photos, that's questions and answers, that's breaking out your services into 100 subcategories with 300 character descriptions, Right? That's adding products. That's helping you get reviews. That's responding to reviews. It's just grunt work.
• 43:34
  There's a lot you can do on the profile. It is not a set and forget profile. It is absolutely a proactive thing. Same thing with Google Ads as we talked about proactive removing negative keywords. We just put the grunt work in.
• 43:44
  So I want you to watch that podcast, hear the grunt work. And if you wanna do it yourself, great, go do it. You'll make a ton of money. And if you don't wanna do it yourself, come talk to me. We've got campaigns.
• 43:54
  We guarantee they'll be profitable starting as low as $1,500 a month. And I'd love to help you.
• 43:58
  Intro: Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic. You and I discussed that, and we were talking about whether you whether what you can do and whether you should be doing it. So my clients, anybody who's followed me for a while knows that I'm gonna tell them you absolutely should not be spending your time doing this.
• 44:13
  Ronnie: I don't recommend it.
• 44:15
  Intro: If you wait maybe at the very beginning
• 44:18
  Ronnie: of Yep.
• 44:18
  Intro: Business where you have more time than money, maybe. But I I would also make an argument that it's worth it to put it on a credit card, invest for a little while.
• 44:28
  Ronnie: I've done that before. I have people who would do three months of credit, and then by the end of the three months, they've made the money back and they're fine. Like it happens all the time.
• 44:36
  Intro: Yeah, because it's really a matter of should you do it? And I think what people don't realize about marketing in general and any marketing that you're doing, no matter what you're doing for marketing, it is a lot more detailed and there's a lot more knowledge there. There's a learning curve. For people who are marketing on certain platforms, there's a learning curve. I always use Instagram as my example.
• 45:03
  I have someone who runs my Instagram account for me. She and I meet, we work strategy. It's me, it's my content, it's my voice, all that. But she's there, she loves Instagram. She's on Instagram all day long.
• 45:14
  She's got tired of being on Instagram. She plays, she loves it. It's awesome. And I don't have that kind of time. I'm busy serving clients, doing other things, and I don't want to dig in and, Oh, I just found out that now you can add links to stories.
• 45:30
  Ronnie: Oh my god.
• 45:32
  Intro: I don't want to spend the time digging. And I don't think as a if you're trying to be the CEO of your law firm business, it's not where you need to be spending your time, but you definitely need people to help you do that. So Ronnie, thanks for sharing with us today. And you'll send me those links. We'll include them in the show notes for this podcast so everybody can just easily click on them and go listen to Susan Guthrie's podcast as well and hear all those details.
• 45:55
  Thanks so much for being here and sharing with us today.
• 45:58
  Ronnie: Thank you so much. Was a pleasure.
• 46:02
  Intro: If you're ready to create more of what you truly desire in your business and your life, then you'll want to visit us at wealthywomanlawyer.com to learn more about how we help our clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.