Do you have a background in design? Do you have years of experience designing and developing websites for lawyers? For business? For anyone? Stop pretending you do. Stop telling yourself that your sites are "good enough." Stop using crappy stock legal imagery. Stop blending in with all of the other do-it-yourself legal websites. Stop telling us about how hard you'll fight and how passionate you are. Stop trying to turn your website into another law firm television ad.
Do you have something to write that's actually worth writing about? Do people actually subscribe to your blog? Do you even know? Would even know how to figure that out? Do people talk about your blog? Do they share what you've written with others? Has anyone ever emailed one of your posts to somebody else? Stop churning out regurgitated news stories. Stop creating posts for every iteration of "your city" + "your practice area(s)" + 'lawyer or attorney or law firm."
Do you know the fundamentals of user experience, information architecture and conversion optimization? Do you know the best practices to help search engines find, crawl and index your web pages? Are you familiar with the webmaster guidelines of major search engines? Is your best SEO strategy figuring out the right keyword density of your pages? Are you familiar with the most recent major Google algorithm updates? Do you know who this is:
Stop pretending you're an SEO. Stop wasting time and money on article and directory submission software. Stop buying hundreds of legal domains and linking them altogether. Stop being surprised when your sites get a major penalty from search engines. Stop using content scraped from other sites. Stop creating pages for the purpose of ranking for a particular keyword. In fact, stop focusing on your rankings altogether.
Are you Adwords Certified? If I said "enhanced campaigns" to you, would you stare back blankly? Stop blaming Adwords. It's not Google's fault that you're broad matching every legal term you can think of. It's not their fault that your ad copy is weak. It's not their fault that your landing pages suck, are slow to load and don't respond well to mobile devices. It's also not their fault that you're not tracking, measuring and optimizing your campaigns to increase conversion and lower your average CPA (that's cost-per-action to you).
You're a grown-a** lawyer. Stop blaming your marketing consultant for your crappy web marketing. Stop blaming them for hurting your reputation and causing ethics violations. Start taking ownership of your decisions to hire web marketing consultants. Spend some time vetting the people you work with. Understand what they're planning to do on your behalf. Hold them accountable for acting without your permission.
Stop pretending you're listening. Stop commenting, sharing, liking and re-tweeting these posts and then going out and leaving blog comment spam, publishing spun and scraped content and sending unsolicited emails for links.
Stop incessantly nodding like some creepy bobble-head, only to go out and create another crappy website and pouring time and money into "tricking Google."
Stop doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
Stop it!
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]
