Latest / Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love / Episode 248 Do’s and Don’ts of Optimal SEO with Doug Bradley

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Episode 248 Do’s and Don’ts of Optimal SEO with Doug Bradley · Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love

• 0:00
  Doug: I've always thought that the best way to prove to a lawyer that I could actually do and that my agency can actually do the work is to show them results from other lawyers who we actually work with. And, know, one thing that's kind of unique, I think about my relationship with my clients is we only do month to month contracts. We don't lock our clients into a one year contract because we prove our value every single month, and a client can fire us at any point, and we provide them with all of the things that we've done, all of our work that we've done for them, and they can leave if they choose to. And we've done that a couple of times, and a couple of times clients came back and said, Hey, I tried this other agency that's a more brand name aware agency, and I I definitely wanna come back.
• 0:51
  Intro: Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. What if 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. Devina 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.
• 1:37
  Now here's Devina.
• 1:40
  Davina: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Devina Frederick, and my guest today is Doug Bradley. Doug Bradley is president and founder of Everest Legal Marketing. His commitment to trust and ethical business practices sets him apart from others in the industry. He values strong relationships with his client and strives for excellence in his work.
• 2:01
  Doug's journey to success is a testament to his resilience and his work ethic. Despite juggling two jobs, marriage and homeownership, he managed to achieve a double major in business administration and broadcasting at the University of LaFern. This dedication and perseverance inspire confidence in his abilities and his commitment to his work. Afterward, he entered the advertising world working at Dex Media and witnessing firsthand the decline of yellow page advertising for attorneys during the great recession. He then transitioned to lawyers.com where he excelled excelled in the new industry, mastering all things SEO.
• 2:42
  When Martell Hubbell sold lawyers.com, Doug decided to secure his financial independence founding Everest Legal Marketing, a company that provides SEO, web design, and content marketing services to attorneys and law firms across The US. Please welcome my guest, Doug Bradley. Hi, Doug. Welcome. Hi.
• 3:02
  Doug: Thank you so much for having me on.
• 3:04
  Davina: I appreciate you being here. I think we're gonna have a fun conversation today. We were just talking before the show about, that I used to, be in marketing. And so I have some familiarity with this topic, but it's been a it's been a minute. And I'm sure there've been a lot of changes.
• 3:20
  And so I wanted to bring you on and and introduce you to our audience as as a resource for them. Tell us, I gave, you know, kind of an intro beforehand, but tell us your sort of journey that led you. I don't think I don't think kids are bored and say, I'm gonna grow up and be an SEO marketer. No.
• 3:41
  Doug: No. No. I I definitely not. And it's funny because I was you know, I I graduated in '96, and search engine optimization wasn't even a thing back then. And so if if somebody had asked me, what do you wanna do when you grow up?
• 3:53
  It wouldn't have been an option as a career path anyway. Yeah. But, you know, I've I actually got into this because I worked for a large legal directory and selling advertising. And I was really good at it. And one of the things that they were really bad at was doing websites and search engine optimization.
• 4:13
  And as many may know in the sales industry, if you sell something and either the client doesn't pay for it or they cancel it, you get a chargeback. And so they were so bad at it and I would get these chargebacks that the only way to kind of insulate myself from these chargebacks was to help the SEO campaign along. And so I've kind of inserted myself in between the execution team and the client and said, okay, how do we make this work? What do you need to happen? And I kind of taught myself search engine optimization along the way.
• 4:47
  And a few years into that job, I thought I was gonna be there for a long time. They sold the business and ended up firing all the sales reps. And that was the day I decided that I never wanted to have one company be beholden over my financial future.
• 5:02
  Davina: Right. Right. I certainly I know that everybody listening to this podcast can relate to that because we're all business owners. Sure. And and a lot of the dream is that we're gonna, you know, that we work for ourselves and work eighty hours for ourselves rather than work forty hours for somebody else.
• 5:17
  And it has a lot to do with controlling your financial future. So I certainly appreciate that, story. You, I did share in the introduction the legal directory you mentioned. Everybody I know will hear will be familiar with it. Okay.
• 5:32
  But you, and before that, you have a degree in what are your two? You have a double major. What's your degrees in? Yeah. Yeah.
• 5:40
  Doug: I actually double majored in business administration and communications with a minor in broadcasting. I really thought that I was gonna go into the broadcasting industry. And then after college, I was already making a pretty good living working and going to school full time and going into the broadcasting industry. I was looking at the jobs and what they were paying, and then I would have had to take a huge step back in order to just get my foot in the door in broadcasting. And so I kind of went the other direction and into marketing.
• 6:12
  Davina: Yeah. And you worked for an agency for a while.
• 6:15
  Doug: Yeah. My first professional agency experience was selling Yellow Page advertising. Lawyers happened to be, at the time, over 25% of the revenue for any given phone book in any geography. And so I worked with a lot of lawyers at that time as well. But, yeah, that was my fur actually selling the ads that went in the phone book.
• 6:39
  Prior to that, I didn't even know that companies bought phone book advertising.
• 6:43
  Davina: That interesting. That was so that's something I'm always discussing with people when I'm talking about what I sort of recommend that they do in terms of advertising is I tell them Google is the new yellow pages. Like, what lawyers used to do is when when lawyers were finally allowed to advertise, That was not for many, many decades. Hundreds of years, lawyers were not allowed to advertise. But when we were allowed to advertise, there were only certain types of law firms that really took advantage of advertising.
• 7:11
  Everybody else sort of thought it was unseemly. And, but Yellow Pages was the place to be. And, now that is really search engines, and in particular, Google, is the one that is the largest search engine with YouTube falling behind it. So your job now is to really help your law firm owner clients, your lawyer clients get their website moving up the ranks in Google so they're not buried on page 30 someplace where nobody ever sees them. Right?
• 7:44
  Doug: Yeah. Yeah. And, mean, the analogy to Yellow Pages is that there's already a demand built in for the service. You don't go shopping for a lawyer if you don't need one. And so people who are looking for a lawyer, they already have a very high intent to hire somebody and typically pretty quickly.
• 8:02
  And so that what that is what lends itself well to the SEO environment is that if you're available, there's a pretty good chance that someone's gonna click on your website and see your marketing message and see what it is that you do and your brand and and how you do what you do.
• 8:17
  Davina: Yeah. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about, just, I know I've covered this before and a lot of people know, but tell us what search engine optimization is.
• 8:29
  Doug: Ugh. If you got the next hour, I guess I could go into more deep.
• 8:34
  Davina: I don't need the details. I need enough to educate our audience in case they don't know. I think Yeah. Well,
• 8:40
  Doug: it it it's three primary things. And and if anybody does any investigation of this, you'll probably hear other SEO professionals echo this sentiment. Is it's the technical construction of your website? Is your website, does it have an SSL security or an SSL certificate? Does it load acceptably fast?
• 8:59
  Are the pages well organized? Does it is it technically sound? Does it not crash? So the website construction is a piece of it. The content on the website is a huge piece of it.
• 9:12
  How well is the content written? Does it provide helpful information? And is it well organized within the website? And then the last thing, which is usually kind of the most murky, is how authoritative is the website. And that's a little bit of a combination of other websites that are credible and relevant that link back to your website, social media engagement, and a and a handful of other puzzle pieces that fit into, developing what Google would perceive as an authoritative or credible website.
• 9:46
  Davina: Okay. Good. So I think that was a wonderfully succinct way to do it. I gave you stuff to hang our hat on. Alright.
• 9:53
  So you're tell me about Everest legal marketing and the services you provide because some people say, we only do SEO. We only do content. We only do social media management. We only do website design. And I think people get very confused when they hear they're they're trying to compare marketers, legal marketers, and they're getting a lot of apples and oranges and bananas comparison because everybody falls under the marketing category.
• 10:22
  But marketing can be like like when Martindale Hubbell was listing lawyers.com. Yeah. It was he was legal marketing, but that was a to be on a directory. So that's an example of marketing. And then there are other people out there who, you know, manage your Instagram, and that falls under marketing.
• 10:40
  So tell me where Everest legal marketing falls within the marketing sort of spectrum.
• 10:44
  Doug: Yeah. We I mean, our company, our agency has a, I would say, fairly narrow, focus. We build websites for the purposes of being found. We write content for our clients because nine times out of 10 our clients don't have the time or the patience to write properly constructed pages and blog posts. And then we build that authority on an ongoing basis for our clients.
• 11:12
  And so we we we manage all of that. Basically anything that a lawyer doesn't want to do with their website, we manage for them. So we can design the website, we write the content, We host it. We maintain it. We secure it.
• 11:26
  We back it up, and we also optimize it so that it's found when someone's looking for a lawyer or when someone's looking for a top of funnel search that might lead them to your website.
• 11:37
  Davina: Top of funnel search. What do you mean by that?
• 11:39
  Doug: Yeah. So I I I think that's probably the it's a it's it's a complex answer, but it's a really easy once you start to visualize how it works. And it's basically, what would someone search who doesn't necessarily need a lawyer right at that moment, but they're probably considering that they're gonna need a lawyer at some time. And so that search might look something like, what's the statute of limitations on a DUI in Colorado? And so maybe they had a DUI and they wanna know, you know, how long is it gonna be until I get charged or what's the limit?
• 12:12
  And if you have content that meets that query, that's authoritative and well written on a good website that loads fast and is well constructed, there's a pretty good chance that you're going be on page one. And even though they might not need you at that moment, they may decide to reach out to you because you've answered the question so well your content is there essentially to meet them right where they're at in the hopes that they're gonna hire you or retain you for services.
• 12:40
  Davina: Right. So now you're they're in your marketing funnel, so to speak, because they've engaged with you on some level. Right? So tell me what law firms you've been doing this a while now. You work with a lot of law firms and lawyers.
• 12:54
  What do law firms get wrong about website marketing?
• 12:59
  Doug: So a couple of things. Oftentimes, law firms, especially law fir smaller law firms, they tend to hire friends and family and or amateurs who've never marketed a law firm before. That's pretty common.
• 13:19
  Davina: So build you're getting the nephew to build your website.
• 13:22
  Doug: Yeah. Yes. Yes. You you wanna pull in high end customers, but the website is built, and it's not a very impressive marketing message. The other thing is poor content development, and poor content organization.
• 13:38
  A good example is that if you wanna rank for a car accident lawyer search in, you know, anywhere, city, America, a lot of, the time you think, well, if I put car accident lawyer on this page so many times and I make the page 3,000 words long and I make five or six of those pages throughout my website, I'll sure to be found and be relevant for that type of search, but in fact that could backfire and have the absolute opposite effect. So I see that a lot in
• 14:15
  Davina: How is how would that have the opposite effect?
• 14:18
  Doug: Well, it's kind of a a technical answer because the way that Google looks at content on your website, if they see two or three or four or five pages that are kinda targeting the same search phrase, Google doesn't know which one you want people to find. And so they may either deliver the page that you really don't want people to find, or they might not deliver any of those pages. And that's something called content or key phrase cannibalism.
• 14:43
  Davina: Oh, interesting. Now that I had not heard. So tell us what is good legal content?
• 14:50
  Doug: Well, I think it's it's content that answers a question that's helpful without providing, obviously, specific legal advice. Right? It's also content that can be easily digested that doesn't have a huge amount of legalese, and it's down to earth, and it also showcases your experience and expertise that builds confidence in the person who's visiting your website that you're the right law firm to meet that legal need.
• 15:22
  Davina: Yeah. It it's interesting you say that with the legalese and the jargon because I find that a lot of lawyers well, of course, we've been taught to write like lawyers. Right? Sure. We say, I'm a good writer, and I write my own content.
• 15:37
  And they write like lawyers in a language that only other lawyers can understand. And and then I'll have some people say to me, yes, but my referral sources are other lawyers. And then I say, yes. But even lawyers don't wanna spend their free time scrolling and reading your blog article that is written like a a lawyer would write it. But right?
• 15:59
  Because even lawyers have short we have we have shorter attention spans because we literally spend all day reading legal documents. Yes. That's class we wanna in our free time. What do you think are some what tips would you have for somebody for creating good legal content? You know, everybody's video is all the rage now.
• 16:21
  Yes. Should we be creating videos in lieu of blogs? Should we be doing blogs and videos? Should we be doing videos with transcripts? What kinds of things do we see for ongoing content?
• 16:33
  Doug: Yeah. As well, as someone who has an education in broadcasting, I absolutely always, tell my clients if if you can have the patience to do video, do video. Video is extremely compelling. But I think blogging or article writing that is, intentional is also important. In our world today, we've we've really got about eight seconds to capture someone's attention when it comes to a marketing message.
• 17:05
  Some of the research that I did recently for a webinar I was a part of, suggested that people have about the attention span of a goldfish these days. And so we're talking about three to four seconds where you gotta kinda hook people in to what your marketing message is. And so good content helps hook people in to read a little bit further. And we we definitely have a bit of a recipe for good content or what we believe to be good content. And we give it to our writers and you say, follow this recipe.
• 17:35
  You're the writer. You write this content, but please follow this recipe and use your own ingredients. And and that seems to work really, really well. But good content hooks people in. It proves to your potential client that you're the expert in that matter and that you can be talked to easily without being either talked down to or judged based off of what your case is about or, you know, things of that sort.
• 18:00
  Davina: Right. Right. Yeah. I think the when it comes to writing so, like, my undergrad degree was in journalism. I was I was going to, you know, go into print media.
• 18:10
  We see where that went. So it's a good thing I didn't. I had bullet. I went into marketing instead. But, you know, one of the things that that we learn is there are different styles of writing.
• 18:21
  So with journalism, you learn a different style of writing. For TV, you learn a different style of writing. Then for print. For for law, you learn a different style of writing. And and even within your area of law, it's a different style of writing.
• 18:33
  And law school is a different style of writing than, you know, even when you become a lawyer. So it makes sense then that writing video scripts, writing blog content for your website. I think where a lot of attorneys get confused around that is thinking that their job is to educate Mhmm. And teach people the law. And, really, their job is to help people make a decision to hire their law firms so they can solve the problem for them.
• 19:03
  Right? We're not wanting to give them a law school education and a blog. We're wanting to move them closer to a decision to hire us. Right?
• 19:10
  Doug: No. And the user doesn't want that education. They came there because they would hire someone who has that education. If I'm if I'm looking for any other type of a service person or roofer, I don't necessarily care about the tar on the back of composite shingles and why it's a good choice. You know, I don't care about that.
• 19:28
  I wanna know that you know what you know that and that you know how to apply that knowledge.
• 19:32
  Davina: Right. Right. Absolutely. And I love that analogy. Tell me, what do you think the biggest mistakes are?
• 19:39
  And I know there are categories of mistake. There's design. There's content. There's the technical back end. But what do you think the biggest mistakes are that law firms make?
• 19:49
  So do you see law firms coming to you for a website redesign? Mhmm. What are some of the things that you're seeing that you're like, holy cow.
• 19:59
  Doug: So a couple big ones here is a lot of law firms don't treat their marketing or at least their website as assets. Some law firms don't even own their website or their domain name. And I gasp when I
• 20:15
  Davina: Yeah, that's always a big mistake.
• 20:18
  Doug: That's like not owning the land that your house was built on. It's that big of a deal. And we've got to make sure that we're very careful with those types of circumstances and that we ease into that engagement very carefully. So it seems to me very common that it's a marketing, especially website marketing, because it's confusing, there's a lot of moving parts, and a lot of busy lawyers kind of want to outsource that to someone. And in that process, if someone on the other end of that is, you know, maybe doesn't have their best interest at heart, they could leverage that ownership of their domain or of their hosting or of all of the work that they built onto their SEO program against them should the relationship sour.
• 21:08
  Davina: Yeah. That's a that's a horror story, isn't it?
• 21:11
  Doug: It's a it's a big horror story, and I've seen it.
• 21:14
  Davina: Yeah. Yeah. What other mistakes do you think they make in terms of let's talk about design because I know that's a big one. I I know well, you can immediately tell when something was done, you know, like, the early 2000s or in the nineties. Right?
• 21:27
  Doug: Sure.
• 21:27
  Davina: So but what are are what are the kind of the current things that we're seeing in design that people should be paying attention to?
• 21:38
  Doug: Well, maybe it might not necessarily be so timely, but making sure that your website is well formatted for all screens, making sure that it has a responsive website design. Some common mistakes that we try to steer our clients away from is trying to, before the website launches, when we're in the design and development phase, is trying to really paint the Mona Lisa and make sure every single thing on the website is perfect before they launch. And there always comes a time in a website design where we're a few months into a custom website development and the website is ready to launch and maybe there's a couple of small elements that need to be refined. My advice is always launch the website, let us start working on the optimization of that website and we can update your photo when you get your headshots next week at that time. We can update the CV at a later time.
• 22:38
  We can update, an email address, or we can update these other things as they happen. But don't put your marketing on hold for two, three, four months. So that way, every single thing is perfect on your website because you're missing opportunity during that time.
• 22:55
  Davina: Yeah. I I totally get that because a lot of lawyers are perfectionists. You know? There's so much we're we're trained to be to focus on the details. But I love, published is better than perfect is what I tell myself.
• 23:08
  And I publish many things that I have looked over looked over, and I don't see the typo until it's published. Sure. So but you but it gets out there, and it does the job. Even if, you know, somebody sends me a message and tells me there's a typo, it's okay. Yeah.
• 23:23
  Yeah. So I I yeah. I think that's a huge one for lawyers and law firms. One of the things I thought was interesting when I was looking at your portfolio is you had some sort of, like, befores and afters. Mhmm.
• 23:36
  And one of the things that I really liked was that I that I think makes your the sites that you're designing more modern is you didn't have you you went from the scale of justice and the the courtrooms that nobody ever actually goes to with the con Roman pillars. That kind of stuff. Yeah. All you went from that look to to sites that had more graphic images that might convey the geographic location or convey something about the core values of the firm or something. Can you talk to me about that a little bit?
• 24:10
  Why that's why you think that's important?
• 24:13
  Doug: Yeah. I think I think my experience when I was at Martindale Hubbell was that every stock photo they used was either scales of justice or, you know, the Roman pillars outside of a courtroom. And so I've I've told my designer, I've told my project manager, I never ever want to see those photos on any website or anything we ever develop unless the client specifically asks for it because it's so cliche and it's so terrible.
• 24:40
  Davina: Hold on a second. I'm near you. I hear you. You need to shut that all day out. Go sit down.
• 24:46
  Go sit down. Down. Left we'll to cut that part. That's my English bulldog. Oh, good.
• 24:54
  I thought if I saw her with a tile. That was see, that there's somebody at the door, and she's letting me know she's not happy about it. Sorry about that. Anyway, back to back to your answer. We'll we'll trim this part up.
• 25:06
  But, back to your answer, you were talking about you never wanna see scales of justice. Never wanna see courthouse again.
• 25:12
  Doug: Yeah. I I definitely never wanna see the scales of justice, Roman columns, any of those super cliche types of photos on our websites. I'd rather have it be localized to the geography, or relevant to the practice or something that conveys something about the firm, rather than, just a boring picture of a courthouse. I want I want there to be real engagement when somebody arrives at the website and not have it look like every single other law firm website.
• 25:50
  Davina: Yeah. And I think that's the danger is that, you know, when we're creating websites, we're really trying to put out a message that says we're different from the other guys. Call us. And it can be difficult when you feel like, well, no. We're not that different.
• 26:04
  We're all sort of doing the same thing. So we're looking for ways to differentiate ourselves and oftentimes core values, our philosophy, our technology, or the way we work with clients. And so a website really is our place to that we fully own and have control over, that we can really shine and put everything out there that we wanna say about our law firm. Right?
• 26:29
  Doug: Yeah. There's there's a lot of room for creativity on law firm websites. Sometimes it just takes the the the fortitude to put something out there that's a little bit different than anyone else. On my on my personal website, I had my chat, operator say, hey. You can load up a video on there.
• 26:48
  And, you know, every other agency has a person who's, you know, saying, hey. We're an agency, and we do website designs in this. And I decided to use that that valuable engagement piece to do something that I've never seen anybody else do and make it very unique. And I get I I think I get so many confidence on that little piece that it really took me thirty seconds to shoot that it was kind of a throwaway idea, but it was very just very completely different.
• 27:16
  Davina: And so people could picture it. I know they're gonna rush to your website after so they can see it themselves, but it jumped out at me too because I went to your website, and I was like, oh, that is so cool. And I called my husband in. Come look at this. This is so cool.
• 27:29
  And it it rather that chat box that pops up, you know, that people are accustomed to seeing, It's your face. It's you. It's a little video, and you're talking. You know? And it's making faces and really catches your attention.
• 27:43
  So I liked that. I thought, this guy really has some personality. So, you know, he he conveyed that about your That's what was hoping for him to do. Exactly. So he's got a sense of humor.
• 27:55
  I probably would really like to work with him. So I thought that was that was very clever. So I love those sort of bells and whistles. Let's let's dig into SEO and talk about that a little bit. I think the frustration a lot of people have so our company does Google Ads for our clients.
• 28:15
  And we don't we're not we don't do SEO or websites or anything like that anymore. But one of the frustration I think people have with Google Ads and or with SEO are any of these sort of back end services that they can't really see, taste, touch, or understand Yeah. Is it takes a while for it to show results. Sure. So tell me about how long you think if you come in, with a new website design, you design the site, and then you're applying your SEO strategy.
• 28:49
  Or maybe you have an older site and you're applying an SEO strategy to it. I don't know. But how long does it take for us to see results with search engine optimization?
• 28:58
  Doug: Oh, that's a great question. And I get I I get that question all the time, as you can imagine. So from a what what my agency looks at quite a bit is visibility and rankings for the targeted phrases that a law firm wants to be a part of, or or where they wanna be visible for. So if you're a divorce law firm in Miami, we want to track your visibility for the search phrases for divorce lawyer Miami, Miami divorce attorney, etcetera, and then other terms that are similar, for that target. When you have a brand new website on a brand new domain, there's no reason for Google to trust you because anybody can develop a website and you have no authority, you have no history, you have no credibility, you might have some good content on there, but Google doesn't yet trust you.
• 29:48
  And they're certainly not going to put you on page one of visibility if your website's a month old when they have 40 other law firms that have been up and running for five plus years. So that's the hurdle, but we we always start tracking the visibility of a website from day one because we wanna be able to see how our effort is impacting the visibility. And over time, typically within the first ninety days of engagement, even on a brand new URL, we'll be able to see a growth in visibility for those targeted search phrases and maybe other lower competition search phrases that we're also targeting simultaneously.
• 30:27
  Davina: Gotcha. So why it takes a while to be effective. How long do you think it takes before you start sort of kind of seeing results from your SEO investment?
• 30:38
  Doug: Yeah. Well, I've I've had, and this this isn't, you know, a a pat on the back for me or anything, but I've had clients genuinely get start getting clients in month one of SEO. But it also might be in those situations that their starting line was different than the person who was starting with a brand new URL. If they had a website that's been around for five or ten years, maybe there was content on that website that was decent content. Maybe they had some good backlinks to their website from some reputable, incredible legal directories, or maybe they were in the news and had some links back.
• 31:12
  They already have some trust and credibility with Google. And if you take that as your starting point, get a new website, new content, new SEO strategy, and you start moving forward with that, you're going to see results far faster than the firm who has a brand new URL. But I would say just conservatively speaking, you should start to be able to see and feel leads starting to come in after month three. And then by month six, you should really have a pretty decent, idea of what it's going to be like from there forward, and it should be improving over time.
• 31:51
  Davina: Right. So let's talk about the cost because I don't know that I I don't know that you need to give me exact numbers, but, because I know a lot goes into making decisions about what you charge people, based on their circumstances. But I but the question, what a lot of people say to me is is it's expensive. I'm paying my SEO guy $2,000 a month, and I and most lawyers don't really understand what they're paying for. Sure.
• 32:23
  And so I think that's something I'd like to discuss to give me an idea of what I'm not saying you're $2,000 not, but what I'm saying is, like, what is tell me some of the things that are typically included in sort of an SEO package. We mentioned website design may be an option. What else are we talking about here? What goes into SEO that makes it costly?
• 32:44
  Doug: Well, I'll also backtrack a little bit here and and just make a comment. What's more expensive than SEO is renting an office and not having the phone ring. That's really expensive. So let's first start there. We need effective marketing if we want the phone to ring.
• 33:00
  And so, you know, when we're talking about, you know, maybe how long does it take and how effective it can be, Really, we need to focus on what are you targeting? Who are you targeting? What's the plan in place? And are you getting your website hosted? Is your website secure?
• 33:25
  Is content being made on a regular basis for your website? Are you strategically publishing on other credible websites? Are you building credible links from other websites that link back to your website? Or some sort of a strategy that's linking to your website? Are you doing search engine, excuse me, social media marketing at all?
• 33:49
  Are you posting and engaging on social media? Are you getting reviews and responding to those reviews? All of those things are are really a cohesive strategy when it comes to search engine optimization, and it's very common for SEO vendors in the legal space who are experts at this to charge a minimum of about $2,500 a month on up to very competitive geographies and very competitive practice areas, you know, well in excess of 5 to $10,000 a month.
• 34:19
  Davina: Mhmm. So it depends on first of all, depends on the size of your marketing, your strategy, your goal, how many pieces of parts you somebody's handling for you, and instead of you doing it. Because as you're rattling off this list, of course, it's exhausting. When you run your own company and you're hearing, oh, this, that, and the other, you're thinking, oh, I don't have time for any of that. Yeah.
• 34:40
  So there's value. There's a value in hiring somebody who's an expert who already knows it to do those things for you.
• 34:46
  Doug: Right? And and problems come up too. You know, if your business gets suspended on Google, does the professional that you hired, have the expertise to figure out what to do now? Those are all these are all things that just come up with marketing, that we we have to be prepared for.
• 35:04
  Davina: Right. And I, of course, I always tell people, you know, I'm like, well, how many clients does it take to cover the cost of a thing for it to be valuable to you? Right. So if you start looking at it in those terms, I'm, people often will focus on the expense and won't focus on the return on the investment. So Yeah.
• 35:23
  If I invest this, what is my expected return? And I do think there are different, law firms are different. If you're just starting out and you don't have a lot of capital, this may not be the best thing for you. But if you're a few years down the road and you really need some leverage to really grow to that 7 figure, multi 7 figure, 8 figure, whatever, this is a strategy that really makes a lot of sense because it's gotta be done because your competitors are doing it.
• 35:48
  Doug: Yeah. The the other thing that SEO can do is help make decisions. So if you're spending several thousand dollars a month on a legal directory, an SEO agency should be able to go in and see how much traffic you received, when you received that traffic, how long that traffic stays on your website, what pages of your website that traffic went to when they got to your website, potentially if they called you or if they contacted you. And you may be able to find we've we've been able to find, on several occasions, unproductive marketing for our clients that save them tens of thousands of dollars per year just because we looked at the numbers and we said, you know, here's everything. You're spending $45,000 a year on this marketing.
• 36:30
  And if we're looking at the traffic, it's really not producing a good, a good amount of traffic, and that traffic when it gets to you is pretty worthless.
• 36:38
  Davina: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a I think that's wonderful insight to help people think about this in a different sort of way. How do you think, so I know there are some people out there who are promoting attorneys doing webinars on social media and that kind of thing and men running ads from Facebook and Instagram and these other social media platforms to webinars to get business in it. And they will say SEO is not the way to go.
• 37:05
  This is the way to go. Do you know very much about that strategy enough to speak on it and kind of give us some comparison there of why you think SEO works better?
• 37:15
  Doug: Well, I think when it comes to SEO, much like we go back to the analogy of the yellow pages, it's really a primary location where people have directional intention. It's somewhere where people are going to go. They're going to go to a search engine of their choice, Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, wherever they're starting their search. Maybe it's going to be on one of these new AI platforms like SGE. People are always going to have demand to hire a lawyer.
• 37:43
  And SEO is the place where you meet that person where their demand is and they're ready to hire a lawyer. Doing a webinar is great. I'm never going to tell a lawyer or a client don't do a webinar. I'm never gonna say don't do a video or open a TikTok account or do YouTube videos. I'm never gonna say that to a client.
• 38:02
  But when someone's ready to hire a lawyer, typically they don't go to YouTube. Typically, they don't go to Facebook. Sometimes they do, but typically they want a lawyer, and they're gonna go to a search engine, and they're gonna find somebody in a timely manner. And that's what the value of SEO is, is being present and showing your value to someone at the moment they need your service.
• 38:24
  Davina: So let me ask you. There's a lot of people out there in legal marketing, and in SEO website world, specifically that are not good, don't know what they're talking about, trying to sell you things that are hidden behind jargon terms that you don't understand to make it sound like it's an important thing. Right? Yeah. And we know it's really a widget.
• 38:52
  Yeah. And but they're trying to add some tremendous value to it. What kinds of things can we look out for to protect ourselves who are out there looking for somebody to help us design our websites, provide SEO support, help us generate ongoing content, and get these valuable backlinks. What are some of the things we need to be looking for to kind of avoid these nefarious players?
• 39:18
  Doug: Yeah. Well, I think on the front end, if you're very intentional about the questions that you're asking of someone, if you're looking for a partner to do SEO with, you want to make sure that that partner knows how to do search engine optimization. Can you show me some of your clients who rank for some competitive search phrases? Can you show me some of your ranking trends of websites that you manage? Can you show me the types of profiles that you've built, that help direct traffic and get backlinks to a website?
• 39:57
  You know, show me those things and how they impacted that law firm. And that really, I think that goes a long way. There's a lot of there is a ton of people who do very creative marketing, and they might build beautiful websites. I come into this problem quite a bit where a designer has built a very beautiful website, and it's very nice, and it can't be found for anything other than the lawyer's brand name search. It doesn't appear for any search except for the lawyer's name or the name of their fur.
• 40:32
  And that's usually the problem when my clients try to find me is I have this website I just spent, you know, $2.03, $45,000 making this website or whatever they spent, and I'm not really getting any results. How do we do search engine optimization? And so I think the process of holding a vendor's feet to the fire in the beginning is, do you have that experience? Do you have an experience working specifically with law firms? Because it's a completely different animal working for law firms than it is working for a veterinarian or a dentist or somebody else.
• 41:11
  It's it is the most competitive you could possibly think of in the country.
• 41:17
  Davina: Right. Right. I I think that's very helpful. And one of the things that you have on your site that I found also to be interesting besides your cute little pop up that you did was you have case studies where you've actually printed out for people graphs to see where somebody started, generating you know, where they were ranked when they started with you and where they're ranked, you know, thirty, sixty, ninety days from them or whatever. So I I thought that was I liked having you having your case studies, and it really kind of is transparent for people.
• 41:48
  And I think really you're looking for when you're hiring vendors, you're really looking for transparency and people who can just like with lawyers, you're looking for people who can explain a complex thing to you without condescending or using jargon or or that kind of thing, that they're able to they're able to tell you what those stats mean. Because I could tell you, looking on the back end of Facebook and Instagram and Google, that even even the most intuitive things, you know, sometimes are like, what? If you're not used to dealing with that all day every day, what does that mean? What does that exactly mean? Because they have their, their own language, you know, these search engines.
• 42:27
  Right?
• 42:28
  Doug: Yeah. Yeah. And and I've always thought that the best way to prove to a lawyer that I could actually do and that my agency can actually do the work is to show them results from other lawyers who we actually work with. And, you know, one thing that's kind of unique, I think, about my relationship with my clients is we only do month to month contracts. We don't walk our clients into a one year contract because we make we prove our value every single month.
• 42:56
  And a client can fire us at any point, and we provide them with all of the things that we've done, all of our work that we've done for them, and they can leave, if they choose to. And we've done that a couple of times. And a couple of times, clients came back and said, hey, I tried this other agency, that's a more brand name aware agency, and, I'd I definitely wanna come back and accept that. Yeah.
• 43:20
  Davina: There are some people out there that, you know, are are that are well known among lawyers and law firms that are large agencies. But just like anything else, you, you know, you have to do your research and figure out what's a good fit for you. How can you is there a way that we can find hidden revenue in our business with our website?
• 43:40
  Doug: Yeah. Absolutely. I I've got a great I've got a great story, about a client who does personal injury law, and he hired me just to do personal injury law. And during my intake process and discovery with him, he kinda said, oh, well, you know, by the other by the way, I do this other little area of law, but I don't want to put it on my website. Mean, it's, you know, called partition referee work.
• 44:01
  And I said, oh, I happen to know what that is because I worked in that industry a little bit. So I know what, you know, partition referee is. And he said, yeah, but don't, you know, don't even put it on my website. Nobody's gonna nobody's going to look for a partition referee on the Internet. So fast forward five, six years later now, it's well over half of his business.
• 44:21
  He he could imagine that a lawyer or a judge would go to the Internet to find another lawyer, and he was dead wrong.
• 44:30
  Davina: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Wow. Wonderful.
• 44:34
  Doug: Yeah.
• 44:34
  Davina: So so by going through the process with a marketing agency, you guys can, you know, help find help ask those questions to get you thinking about your business in a different way than maybe you're thinking about it.
• 44:46
  Doug: Sure. The the other thing an agency would have access to is search volume. We can see what types of search volume that users are actually using when they search Google. And so we can say you might want to focus on if you're a family law attorney. Well, in this geography, it seems that, you know, people are searching for this quite a bit in this geography.
• 45:07
  We might wanna have a page that markets to that very specific search phrase or that topic. Or you're in this geography, but did you know that 10 miles to the east of you, there's no lawyers that do what you do. And if we just set up some landing pages in that geography, you could probably get anybody who's searching there to come to you. We can find those things, and we can that's the way that I think a smart SEO agency can help.
• 45:34
  Davina: Right. It's really looking at the data and helping helping to make the lead. It's not just the data. It's the interpretation of the data Sure. As a way to grow your business.
• 45:42
  Right? So I noticed that you also own several domains that you have posted on your website. Tell us about those, and tell us how you think that benefits your clients.
• 45:54
  Doug: Well, you know, some of those, we we developed in house, and I and I think I took a page out of my former employer's book where they had lots of domains that they used to help market their attorneys and their clients. And that's essentially what we did. We wanna bring value to our clients. And most SEO agencies, they don't build their own properties, but I've always felt value in building out our own properties to market our clients because it helps everybody. It helps us as an agency develop a valuable piece of property online.
• 46:24
  It helps the client because they're getting visibility on a property that they otherwise wouldn't have. It helps the SEO process in some ways. It helps visibility. And, you know, it's a way for us also to prove that we are in this as this is the only thing that we do. You know, we don't print flyers.
• 46:44
  Yeah. We are a legal marketing agency, and these are the things that we build to help market our clients.
• 46:50
  Davina: Yeah. That's wonderful. I thought that was very, sort of innovative for you to put that on there because your clients are coming to you because they're wanting to market their businesses better and to offer them other avenues for marketing with these legal directories. It's one of the things that is always sort of the debate about with law firms, how much do you spend on trying to get on the first page of Google. When you go to the first page of Google, what you see are Justia and Fine Law and all of these sort of directories.
• 47:17
  And you say, well, am I ever gonna get on the front page because all these directories LegalZoom is the largest buyer of legal advertising by far of any law firm, away over any law firm. So you think to yourself, well, is it even worth it for me? Because what is the likelihood of me getting on page one with all these legal directories? What do you say to that?
• 47:37
  Doug: Well, we we I think as consumers, we have the perception that just because there are other people there that there's no possible way or as business owners, I should say, that there's no other possible way that they could choose to click on my website or to click on my Google business listing, but not everybody behaves in a different way, and we're not marketing to everybody the same way. Some clients we, you know, we're marketing for, we want them to come to our website. So we might tailor a title tag or a description in a way that tries to speak to that person as they're searching. And then the other thing is that when someone goes to a legal directory, that is also an SEO strategy is, you know, it's something called barnacle SEO. It's a term that's kind of old, but it's basically if you can be a part of a property that's already rafing on page one and have your profile on that property, much like Justia or some of the other legal directories, you should be doing that too.
• 48:41
  Yeah. But just because you're you can't imagine people go going to your website instead of Fine Law or Justia doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it.
• 48:52
  Davina: Yeah. It was that was one of my strategies when I started my law firm way back when in 2007 is I signed up for every directory I could if it was free. Every direct because I'm like, the more I'm out there, you know, because we never know who's coming to this directory. And I I held back on investing in any to sort of see, you know, what the but I I got people reach out to me from legal directories from my free listing on them. So it definitely is an effective strategy.
• 49:19
  So anything else that we should know before we end our call today? What is the kind of like the last thought you want to leave people with in terms of their law firm? Well, actually, before you get to that, let me ask you this question. Yeah. Because this is something that comes up a lot.
• 49:38
  There are a lot more virtual law firms now than there used to be. Yeah. And we have kind of an issue with Google because Google doesn't like something without an address, a physical address. Mhmm. So how do you help clients with virtual law firms overcome something like that?
• 49:56
  Doug: Yeah. It it depends on the resources, that are available because is it possible to rent some space in a city that you're trying to be found in and have a phone number and a and an actual office location, in that geography that you're targeting? If so, then that is a great solution is that we have an actual location in that city. The other option is that through search engine optimization, your website becomes more visible and you can target other cities and be found organically in cities that you're not physically located. And I have many clients who are the number one result even preceding the local results over the local map pack in a geography, and their organic placement is above the local results simply because their website's very authoritative, the page is very well written, has a good content footprint, and it's an authoritative website.
• 50:56
  You can be found through those through that type of strategy using search engine optimization as the vehicle for that.
• 51:02
  Davina: Now interesting. Because that is something that, you know, in all different industries, certainly in the coaching industry, that's you know, a lot of coaches are virtual. They don't have a, you know, an office. And we're seeing it more and more with law firms, certainly. I'm seeing it with solos who are coming out of law school.
• 51:19
  I'm gonna start my own firm. I'm gonna start virtual. I'm gonna keep my overhead low. And this has been the sticky wicket is how do I get Google to even pay attention to me because I I don't have a physical location. I don't wanna put my home address.
• 51:31
  Helping. Yeah. Don't do
• 51:33
  Doug: that. Don't do that. But, yeah, if you have the resources to, a, hire a search engine optimization professional, that person should be able to guide you through kind of the pros and cons of each approach. And b, if you have the resources to open a secondary office, even if it's a virtual office, I would say go for it. But Google's also very smart about firms and businesses that just kinda spam the map pack.
• 52:01
  So you wanna be careful about if you're choosing like a Regis office, Google is very aware of all the Regis locations throughout America. And so you have to be very, very careful and strategic with how you find yourself into the map pack. But your website can absolutely be found in geographies that you're not located in if it has authority, if it has content, if it's well constructed, it has good URL structure, and all of those things that we talked about previously.
• 52:29
  Davina: Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Now the last question. Is there anything any thought you wanna leave us with?
• 52:34
  Doug: Yeah. I I'm so I would say for for any law firm that's trying to go from 6 to 7 to $8.08 figures, if if there's something to focus on with a marketing partner of any sort, whether it be SEO, whether it be pay per click, whether it be social media, really nail down attribution and accountability. How do we attribute leads and how are you accountable to receive, to get that traffic or to get those leads generated? And what are the metrics that we're going to follow? Is it traffic?
• 53:07
  Is it visibility? And how do we attribute those leads when they come in? Are we using, you know, piece of software, CRM software? Are we using CallRail? Who's answering the phone?
• 53:19
  What does that look like? Is it a good sales presentation when someone's answering the phone? Is it a good experience? Make sure that those things are tightened up because on the front end, if you get those things really well dialed in, as you scale up, those things that are dialed in are only gonna get better over time.
• 53:37
  Davina: Yeah. That's wonderful advice because it is something we see in doing, Google Ads is that, like, there's only so much we can do if you've got you're getting calls. If you're measuring it by the number of calls you're getting, you're getting calls. And then what's happening? How are you tracking those calls when your person is answering the phone?
• 53:55
  How what is that human factor that they're filtering things through to understand the source of that call and that kind of thing? Do we have some software or a dedicated phone number or something that helps us track that? And then what's happening at that point? Because sometimes people are thinking, well, this is not working, and it's not that they're not getting lots of calls, not getting lots of traffic, not getting a it's that they have somebody there who's undermining the process because they're not well trained or or whatever. I I had that happen saw that happen recently with a client.
• 54:25
  It was not somebody we were doing ads for, but somebody else does. And it took her a few weeks, to figure out that the problem because she was like, why are we not booking anything? I we have been going like gangbusters. I'm investing all this money in my marketing company. They're doing a great job.
• 54:43
  Why are we not booking anything? And she finally realized it was her person at the front desk Mhmm. Was just rappelling clients left and right, and it cost her a a lot of money. So I do think that's a that's wonderful advice, to look at the whole process. Alright.
• 55:00
  So tell us how we can find out more about Everest Legal Marketing and how we can connect with you if you want.
• 55:05
  Doug: Yeah. My website, everestlegalmarketing.com. All of my social media channels are connected there. You can also go there and do a free SEO audit, a free light SEO audit, of your website. You just plug in your business name and, you know, we generate a report for you.
• 55:22
  I'm pretty active on Twitter as well. A lot of the things I do on Twitter are kind of a little bit exposing what's going on in the SEO industry that are is very tailored to the legal industry.
• 55:33
  Davina: Mhmm. Wonderful. Thank you. Well, doc, thanks so much for being here. I've really enjoyed it and enjoyed our conversation.
• 55:39
  Doug: Same here. I appreciate the, the platform. Thank you.
• 55:43
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