Andrew Stickel

How To Get More Law Clients From Your GMB Profile Pictures

The question:

How can I geotag my photos for my Google My Business profile?

My answer:

There’s a very expensive tool you need for geo-tagging your profile. I’m holding it in my hand, and I bet you have yours with you right now as well. The only tool that you need to geotag your photos for your Google My Business profile is an iPhone or an Android… as long as the location services are turned on.

How does geotagging photos work?

A lot of people don’t know this, but if you take a picture on your iPhone or your Android, it stores the location of where the photo was taken, using latitude and longitude.

It stores it in the metadata. This means that Google can use that information and see exactly where the picture was taken. And your Google My Business profile has a spot where it allows you to upload photos.

We always tell our clients to take 20 pictures of the interior of their office and 20 pictures of the exterior of their office. We also tell them to upload them to their Google My Business Profile and make sure that they take them using their iPhone or their Android.

Why do you want to do that?

It will make sure that the metadata gets stored on your profile. That’s the easiest way to geotag photos and geotagging makes you more relevant to the location. It basically reaffirms to Google that you’re actually in that location. It also shows them that you’re a real business. It’s is one of the things that we do for all of our clients. We always make sure that we have geotagged photos added to their Google My Business profile.

An alternative and more information

There’s another program that you can use to geotag photos. I don’t remember the name of it off the top of my head. But if you go to HeyLawyers.com, you can get a free guide. It’s a 24-part video series that shows you step by step how you get your law firm ranked in the Google Maps.

And a couple of the videos in there show how to use this software that will allow you to do that. We also show you how to upload the photos, where to upload the photos and some other ways that you can actually geotag and get the most out of your pictures.

All you have to do is go to HeyLawyers.com. You can grab that guide for free. Just cover shipping and handling. We’ll send it out to you on a USB Drive.

How to Hire a Marketing Company That Can Get Results For Lawyers

The question:

When looking to hire a marketing company, how can I make sure that they know how to get results for lawyers? How can I make sure they understand my market?

My answer:

Start by asking questions

The biggest thing you want to find out is how many other lawyers have they worked with. And specifically, how many other lawyers with your type of law firm have they worked with.

Is it a good fit?

Let’s say it’s a marketing firm that does a lot of stuff with lawyers but mostly they’re focusing on mass torts like generating leads for mass torts. If you’re a divorce lawyer, it’s a different type of marketing.

They might not necessarily know how to get leads for a divorce lawyer. That’s the first thing. You need to make sure that they have worked with your type of practice area before.

I mean honestly it’s so hard to find good marketing companies out there. They’re definitely are out there. If you go to freebookforlawyers.com, you can get a copy of my free book. It has a 10 page guide on how to hire a marketing company.

The most important question

The most important question that I always tell everyone about hiring a marketing company to ask is: “Can I talk to your clients? Can I talk to some clients that have had success with your services?”

For my company, for example, for Social Firestarter, I don’t I don’t think that there’s a single client that we have that would not give us a glowing review. At least not unless you were a competitors trying to hire us. Then they might say, “Oh yes, they suck.”

You really want to talk to the clients and find out how they feel as customers of the company because it’s great when everything goes right. But the other thing to find out is how they handle things when things don’t go right. With 50 clients doing internet marketing with something that’s really not in our control, such as Google, things are not always going to go right.

What happens when things go wrong?

The bigger indicator of a company is what they do when things go wrong. We have clients that we’ve worked with where the campaigns have not gone the way that everyone wanted them to go, and where we haven’t gotten results.

It doesn’t mean we didn’t try. It just means that for whatever reason, whether it was a Google update or if it was a stubborn site. things didn’t work. Any legitimate SEO expert will tell you there are websites out there that they just cannot do anything with. It’s happened before.

The real question to ask

The question is not did they fail or succeed, but what did they do about it? Specifically, what did they do when it didn’t work out? For our clients we will actually come out of pocket and pay for things like Google Adwords or Facebook ads or do different campaigns while we’re working on the SEO strategy.

That’s because we want to make sure that the clients are actually getting results. It’s really a big indicator of the character of a company to see what happens when things go wrong. That’s what I would do. And the easiest way to find out is by talking to their clients.

Does Website Speed Impact Your Law Firm’s Google Ranking

The question:

How important is the speed of my website for ranking it higher on Google? Do you have any tips on how I can speed up my site?

My answer:

The speed factor

Ranking speed is interesting. There are conflicting reports because Google says one thing and what we see in the real world is another thing. Then there are ancillary reasons why you would want it to be another thing.

Why you should aim for speed

You should always make your site as fast as possible. Just from a user standpoint, if I go to a website and it takes forever to load, I’m leaving because I hate slow internet. I’m the most impatient person in the world.

If I go to a website and it takes forever to load then I’m just going to hit the back button. I’m going to go to another website and a lot of people in this on-demand Amazon Prime and Netflix world, Netflix will do the same. In that world everybody wants things now. A fast website is very important for a good user experience.

What Google says about speed

Google has said a few different things about this. I don’t entirely know what their official answer is. They’ve said before that website speed is a ranking factor. And then they’ve also said that we’re not going to reward you for a fast website but we’re going to penalize you for a slow website.

Then again, I’ve seen slow websites ranking very well and I’ve seen fast websites that don’t rank at all. I think it’s maybe one point of many that Google looks at in terms of ranking a website. But it could also affect things indirectly because if you have a slow website, that’s going to lead to really bad user metrics because you know Google also looks at the bounce rate.

How a slow website can affect your rankings

For example, somebody clicks on your website and it doesn’t load quickly enough. So they hit the back button and click on the next listing. That’s going to hurt you because basically Google is learning that your website is not a good answer for the search that somebody just performed.

So Google isn’t necessarily dinging you for your website speed. They’re dinging you because somebody wants your website and didn’t have a good experience. But since it was caused by your website’s speed, it could hurt you indirectly. So you want to be sure your website is as fast as you can make it.

How we make our clients’ sites faster

There are some things that we do for our clients that really improve the website. It starts when we build the website. We build our websites using the Genesis framework. Every single one of our clients get their websites built using Genesis just because it’s a lighter framework.

There’s just not as much stuff in it. There’s not as much unnecessary coding in it so it’s just a lot easier and things go a lot faster. We host all of our client websites using Amazon or AWS, and then we also use content delivery networks.

How content delivery networks increase loading speed

A content delivery network stores your website on multiple servers around the world. And depending on where the person is accessing your website from, it will actually download the website from the closest server. Or it will at least download the images and the media from the closest server. This makes your website load a lot faster.

If you’re in Florida, your website may be pulled from a data center in Atlanta. If you’re in California that exact same website might be served from a data center in Phoenix, Arizona, because it’s closer.

It basically picks the closest data center. That way, the information doesn’t have to travel as far. We’re talking a difference of half a second or a second or maybe even a couple seconds, but it does make a difference. It does speed things up.

We do a lot of stuff with our client websites.  For example, we compress images as much as we can.

Concessions and weighing decisions about priorities

There are also things where you have to make concessions. For example, having an embedded Google Map on a website helps rank the website higher in the Google Maps. But the iframe that you use to embed the map will slow the website down significantly.

So you have to decide do we want to sacrifice some speed to have the embedded map on the site? Or do we want to sacrifice the rankings? Or perhaps we decide to work harder in other areas for the rankings and remove the map.

Google is kind of tricky in that respect. Sometimes that’s just how it is. You have to make some decisions about what you’re going to do. Are we going to have the maps and hopefully rank better or are we going to take away the maps and increase the speed? There’s not always an easy answer. Sometimes you have to look at the totality of the circumstances and figure out for each individual website what makes the most sense.

How Often Should You Post in Your Law Firm’s Google My Business Profile

The question:

How often should I post to my Google My Business page? Is there a minimum amount I should shoot for or is quality better than quantity?

My answer:

If we’re talking about Google posts, we post pretty frequently. But I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know the answer to exactly how frequently we post. This is actually one that kind of stumps me a little bit.

Different types of posts

With Google My Business there are several different types of posts. We look at the expiration dates because there are some posts that will stay up for a couple days and then they come down. Then there are other posts that will stay up for a couple months before they come down.

I don’t remember off the top of my head what types of posts do what, but we basically have a posting schedule. For example, I believe posts about coupons or deals will actually stay up for several months, or maybe even for a year. We’ll do those posts and leave them up for the long haul. And then we’ll post for the maximum length of time for the other types of posts.

What we do for our clients

For our clients we post pretty frequently, but I can’t remember the exact frequency. Our Google My Business team handles all that. Whatever it is, they basically post them for the maximum number of days apart before the posts come down. That’s how we do it. It’s really good for engagement and we’ve seen a lot of benefits from it.

Does Your Law Firm Need Separate Websites For Each Lawyer

The question:

Does my law firm need a separate website for each lawyer? Is there any benefit to this?

My answer:

One website per law firm

I like having one website for the entire law firm. We have a couple of instances where a law firm will have multiple websites, and it’s not a fun experience. It creates a lot of challenges that we have to deal with. One website for the law firm is how I typically do it.

The Google My Business Solution

However, there is one thing that you can do. You can give every lawyer their own Google My Business profile. For example, if you have a site for the Smith & Johnson law firm, you can then let Mike Smith have his own Google My Business location. And Bill Johnson, or whoever the other attorney is, can have his own Google My Business location as well.

But I would do one website for the entire law firm. And then the various practitioners can each have their own individual Google My Business profiles.

How to Convert Contacts to Law Firm Leads From Offline Events

The question:

How should we integrate offline marketing into other marketing efforts? For instance, if I sponsor a half-time field goal competition or a half-time full court shot competition for a school, how do I maximize returns? Should I try to set up a funnel for leads or contacts captured or something like that?

My answer:

Get their contact information

First of all, you always want to get their contact information, especially their email address so you can add them to your email list. You also want to get their phone number so you can start text messaging them.

The easiest way to do it

The easiest way to do it is by using some sort of giveaway. “Enter your email address for a chance to win.” :Text us for a chance to win.” That’s the best way to do it.

You always want to get their contact information because otherwise they’re gone and you never have any way to contact them again. But if you get their email address then you can start contacting them. So that’s how you do that.