Do Law Firms Really Need SEO?
What My 6-Year Old Daughter Can Teach Lawyers
Last week, we took my 6-year-old daughter to Disney. She went on a rollercoaster for the first time. If I showed you the picture of her from the ride, you would see that she squeezed all of the blood out of both my wife and I’s arms because she was afraid.
She went on the rollercoaster, and she was terrified before we got on the rollercoaster. We’ve been trying to get her on a rollercoaster probably for six months now. She finally did it and it had me thinking.
She had been terrified of getting on and was almost crying before we got on the ride. Even in the middle of the ride, she was a little unsure of it, but then, after it was over, she was like, all right, let’s do it again.
She was terrified in the beginning and then once, she did it, she realized how much fun it was. She realized that it was actually a pretty enjoyable experience and that she liked it, and then, she wanted to go ride again.
Don’t Let Fear Hold You Back
I see this happen with lawyers over and over again. I’ve talked to lawyers that are afraid to start creating content and start doing anything that’s going to put themselves out there for their marketing.
What I see is that once lawyers actually get the phone out and record a video, post it on Facebook, then record another one, and start sharing, they actually start getting some pretty good feedback.
What happens is they realize, “Oh wow, this is pretty cool. This isn’t nearly as scary as I thought it was going to be. This isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.” Then, they continue to create and share content.
That’s exactly how I was the first time that I was doing video content. I looked a lot like my daughter, terrified, sitting between my wife and me, because it’s scary. You don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know what people are going to think about you.
Unfortunately, people can be trolls and it’s not a fun thing. So, a lot of times I talk to lawyers who want to get more clients, expand their law firm, and get their dream clients. They want to stop getting tire kickers and stop competing over price. Instead, they want to start creating video content, putting value out there, and helping people solve small problems.
What’s The Best Way To Start Creating Video Content?
A lot of times lawyers are just afraid to start creating content and get over that fear. You’ve got to get on the rollercoaster, and once you get on there, you’re going to realize it’s not that bad, scary, difficult, or hard.
It’s a little bit of a different type of video than what I normally do. It’s more instructional in any way. If you want to get more clients, then what you need to do is stop being afraid and stop doing what everyone else is doing. You’ve got to put yourself out there, start providing value and content.
Just look at what I do. Everything I do is all about providing value. It’s just providing free content out there, and people are contacting me all the time to help them with marketing for their law firms.
I don’t typically have a call to action out there. I don’t say, “Hey, if you’re interested in marketing your law firm, give me a call.”
All I do is provide value and people contact me. So, if you need some inspiration, just know that if my 6-year-old can tackle her fears, then you can absolutely tackle yours.
The Future of Law Firm Marketing
The Future of Law Firm Marketing
Has Your Law Firm Been Sent This Weird Email?
I recently received an email from a client about someone who was working on a mental health project. That is, the person that sent this email to my client is working on a mental health project.
Their goal is to educate more families and individuals about mental health, wellness topics, and blah, blah, blah. They’re trying to work with websites like my client’s. Then the email lists a specific blog post and says that I noticed it would be a great resource if you would link to our page psychcentral.com.
A lot of our clients will forward these to us and ask, should we link to this? Will this benefit us in any way? What is this email?
I realize that a lot of people don’t quite understand what these emails are or why they’re receiving these emails or what the benefit or the pros and the cons are.
What Are These Emails?
This email is probably from a search engine optimization company. You could tell because the website is psychcentral.com, but the email is sent from MariaMiguel746@gmail.com.
Usually, if it were a legitimate thing, it would come from a psychcentral.com email address. Now, it doesn’t mean it’s not legitimate, but it means that this is probably sent from a company that’s working for psychcentral.com to boost their rankings.
And what they’re trying to do is they’re sending out emails, and this is cool. This is a classic outreach campaign for search engine optimization. They’re trying to find websites that will add a link on their website to the psychcentral.com website.
Why Do These Companies Do That?
Now, why is that important? In Google, one of the most important factors that determine where you rank, how well you rank, and how many pages on your website rank on the first page of Google is how many backlinks and referring domains you have.
Now, the difference between the two is if you have a link on five different pages on a website that’s five links, but only one referring domain. So why is this important?
Well, Google looks at websites linking to you as if the websites are voting for you. They’re kind of vouching for you, giving you credibility.
How Other Companies Utilize This?
Let me give you a really easy example. Let’s say the New York Times links to your website. The New York Times is a pretty official website. Google understands that authoritative sites like the New York Times have lots of content.
They have lots of links that are going to them. They’ve been around for a long time. Google understands that typically sites these authoritative will not link to spam content. They won’t link to crappy websites.
If the New York Times links to your website, then Google looks at that and says, okay, we know the New York Times is pretty authoritative, so anyone that they link to has got to have some level of credibility. Because you get a link from the New York Times, that’s going to boost your rankings up a little bit.
This happens on many different levels. Obviously, the more powerful a website is, the more powerful the link juice, as they call it, will be. You’ll probably benefit more from a website like the New York Times than you would from Bob’s website.
How These Emails Work
What ends up happening is that these search engine optimization companies are trying to get links. My company does this as well, but it’s not a bad thing. I want you to understand what the purpose of this actually is.
What happens is their software that you have entered keywords into will scrape all the websites. They’ll find the email addresses of the website owners, and they have a template email that inserts the URL of your website and the URL of the website that they want you to link to.
It’s a numbers game. They know that maybe 2% or 3% of the people that they send this email to will link to the website.
What You Should Do When You Get This Email
Will, it hurt you to link to the website? No, it probably won’t. If it’s a spam website, it might. Obviously, you don’t want to link to anything that’s related to porn, gambling, pharmaceuticals, or anything like that. You typically want to stay away from linking to those sites.
Linking to them probably won’t benefit you either. With these types of things, I typically tell my clients, let’s pass on it because we don’t gain anything from linking to this website, but a lot of people don’t really know what these links are. They don’t know why people are doing it. They don’t know if it’s going to help them or hurt them.
If you get emails like this, and it’s typically a template saying, “I love your blog. I was reading this post, and I think that this link would be a really good resource to add to your blog post.” That’s all they’re trying to do. They’re trying to get you to add a link from your blog post to their post.
If you’ve added these links before, it’s probably not the end of the world, but it’s probably not going to help you either. We typically don’t do them on our clients’ websites, but if you want to, it’s up to you.
The Less You Talk, The Better Your Ads Will Be
There’s a false belief out there that people, that’s regular consumers and everyday people, hate advertising, and that’s not true. People actually love advertising.
People Love Good Advertising
What people hate is bad advertising. If you don’t believe me, just think about the Super Bowl and how many people watch, but don’t care at all about the game.
The only thing they care about is the ads, and that’s because good ads either entertain or inform. If you have an ad that entertains or informs, people will pay attention to it.
Ads Need To Be Entertaining, Informative, Or Both
Now, you have to remember people don’t hate attorney ads — people despise attorney ads. As an attorney, it’s going to be that much more difficult and important for you to create ads that are entertaining or informative, preferably both.
The Attorney Ad That Went Viral
Maybe you’ve seen the video ads that’s going around lately with the two attorneys that are smoking weed and telling you to shut the fuck up. This video is entertaining, and it’s also informative.
It’s also an ad that’s been shared nearly 45,000 times. How many cases do you think that this law firm got based on this viral video alone?
And at the end, there’s no call to action. It does not say call today if you’ve been arrested or call us for a free consultation. All it does is tell you to shut the f**k up. People liked the message; they shared it, and the video went viral.
What You Can Do To Make Your Own Ads Effective
Now, you don’t have to be outrageous or use bad language in your ads to make them effective. All you have to do is think about what is the most beneficial information for the person that you’re trying to attract with your ad and put that in there.
Follow that school of thought and provide value in your ads. If you lead with value, then people will not even realize that they’re watching an ad. Just think, you could be watching an ad right now and not even know it.
How to Target DUI & Injury Cases With Video on Facebook
Daniel asked, “Referencing an old video where you recommend to create approximately five-minute videos and then create a second video. Should there be a call to action driving you to a landing page or is it okay for the purposes of qualifying to just push the quality info with the video, without a landing page?”
You can do either, to be totally honest with you. Basically, what Daniel is asking about is a strategy I have. I call it Authority Branding, while other people call it other things, but that’s usually what I call it. Basically, the idea is that you’re taking a large pool of people.
Targeting Accident Victims Or DUI Cases On Facebook
Let’s say you’re trying to get accident victims. The challenge with car accidents is that everybody drives a car. The same thing is true for DUI. It’s one of those crimes where anyone can go out to dinner, have a drink with dinner, and then be pulled over and get arrested for DUI. How do you target people like that?
Well, I do something called Authority Branding. Basically, what you do is you create a video that’s at least five minutes long and you want the video to be value-packed. Think about what problems people have and how can you help them solve those problems.
How The Authority Branding Strategy Works
For example, if you’re trying to get car accidents, what are the common problems that people come to you for when they’ve had a car accident? What are their questions, what are their fears, all those types of things. You want to create a video that talks about exactly that and it does it for about five minutes.
Then you’re going to go to Facebook, you’re going to run that video as an ad and you’re going to create a custom audience of people that watch at least 25% of that video. The reason you’re going to do this is because you’re going to run it as an ad and you want the video to talk about something that only car accident victims would be interested in.
The theory is that the video is five minutes long. If you’re going to put a video out there, you’re going to monitor people that watch 25% of that video, which is a minute and 15 seconds. Nobody on Facebook is going to watch a minute and 15 seconds of a video that they don’t care about.
Basically what you’re doing is you’re getting people that might be interested in that topic to raise their hand. The reason that you want to do that is because if they’re interested in the topic, it’s probably because they got into a car accident or they know somebody who got into a car accident.
My New Approach About How To End The Video
I used to always tell people not to pitch in these videos. Lately, I’ve been moving away from that, but not necessarily in the way that you might think. Typically, I used to say, provide value, and then just end the video, saying, “Hope you enjoyed this video as much as I liked making it. Have a good day.”
Recently though I started transitioning to a strategy called hook story offer. Here, you make an offer at the end of the video. And you make the offer the same way that you would make an offer to a friend.
For example, let’s say we’re going for the car accident approach. You could tell a story about car insurance companies. “Here’s a trick that car insurance companies always use to try to reduce the amount of money that they have to pay a car accident victim.” That would be your hook.
You could also say, “Here are two tricks that car insurance companies use to avoid paying you as much as possible.” And then you go into the story. Say something like this, “We have a client named Bill. Bill was driving down the road the other day and blah blah blah happened.” You tell an entire story that basically goes to support your hook.
You talk about how the car insurance company tried to trick Bill or maybe they showed up at the scene of the accident and took pictures of his car and of him walking around. They also asked him all kinds of question and tried to make him sign a document.
They did it basically so that they would not have to pay for Bill’s medical bills. What we did as attorneys was blah blah blah and this is the result that he got. At the end, I used to just say, “Thanks for watching. Have a good one.”
How To Create An Offer
Now, I create an offer and I create what’s called a stack with that offer. I say “If you’re in a situation like Bill and you think the car insurance company is trying to screw you, then I would like to take a look at your case and review your medical documents. I’ll also review the police report.
“I just want to make sure that you’re not getting screwed. If I can help you, I will. It won’t cost you anything. It’s completely free. If I can’t help you, I’ll point you in the direction of somebody who can.”
As you can see, I didn’t do the typical thing that attorneys do, which is, “If you’ve been in a car accident, call me for a free consultation,” because you don’t do that. What you do instead is talk to people more like you’re talking to a friend.
If a friend got into a car accident, you don’t say “Call me for a free consultation.” You’d say, “Send me your insurance information. Send me the police report. I’ll take a look and see how I can help you and at least make sure that you’re not getting screwed.” You put a call to action like that at the end of the video.
Basically what Daniel was asking in his authority branding question was whether to put a call to action at the end of the video. I used to say no, but now I’m starting to say yes. I’m starting to add these calls to action and what to do in the call to action.
How To Stack The Value
And you can do this anywhere. You can do this with your consultations, your strategy sessions, your case evaluations, or whatever you want to call them. You should start listing the things that they’re going to get in the consultation or in the strategy session.
Don’t just say, “Call me for a free case evaluation.” Instead, you want to say, “If you want me to take a look at your case, let me know. What I’ll do is I’ll take a look at the police report to make sure that they didn’t miss anything. I’ll look at your insurance and I’ll figure out exactly how much money you’re entitled to. I’ll also make sure that you’re filling out all the right documents.” You say, “I’ll help you for free.”
If it’s an arrest, for example, you can say, “I’ll look at everything. I’ll look at the statutes and I’ll let you now exactly what the potential consequences are, such as whether you’re looking at jail time or at just at a fine. I’ll check into some different ways you can beat the case.”
Basically you’re trying to essentially give them a list of valuable things you’re stacking off that they’re going to get. When you show value like that, then it’s not just a consultation. You’re actually showing them a list of things that they’re going to get.
When I’m going to look at your case, I’m going to tell you what to do. I’m going to provide you with help. I’m going to point you in the right direction if I can’t help you. It’s all valuable. At the end of the day, what’s in it for me?
People think consultations are synonymous with sales now. That’s why I like the term “strategy sessions” and I tell them what they’re actually going to get during that strategy session. That’s your answer.
Should You Send Them To A Landing Page?
Here’s another question. “Should you push them to a landing page or is it a verbal offer?” You can do either. A lot of times, I do Facebook lead ads. But the problem with Facebook lead ads is that sometimes you don’t necessarily get the right phone number.
Actually, we just had that like 20 minutes ago. We got a lead for a client and it wasn’t the right phone number. It’s because I didn’t do this one thing. I say, “Click the link included in this video. Enter your information and I will text you the car accident secrets pocket guide.”
I might also say, “I’ll text you a free guide that shows you the three things you should never do after a car accident so you can review it and then I’ll give you a call as soon as I can.” Saying you’re going to text them something will actually get them to give you the right phone number.
You could just push them to a landing page and I’ve done that a lot using ClickFunnels. I do that very successfully all the time. It just depends on what you have set up and what your goal is. I test both. I’ve got campaigns running for both. I’ve got some that have landing pages and some that are Facebook lead ads.
The thing is, you’ve got to have them doing something. Otherwise you can’t capture them. I don’t like to ask them to call me and just include a phone number because then you’re not capturing their data. You want to capture the data somehow.
Should You Include A Chiron?
There was one more question. “Should you include a Chiron for the duration of the video or is that too hard?” Don’t do that. Think about what you’d do if you were sending this to a friend. That’s the bottomline. You don’t want to come across all sales-y. Just do it at the end. You just want to engage them with a story and you don’t want anything else on the screen.
