Ethically Find More Clients on FB with your current Clients’ Email Addresses.Here’s How…
Does Your Law Firm Rely on Google For Leads? Then You Need to See This….
A lot of attorneys are relying on Google and SEO. What I am advising all my clients is that SEO is by no means dead. It’s not that you can’t SEO, but what’s going to end up happening is SEO is getting more difficult. Google is trying to monetize as much as they can.
As you can see, this is what’s happening with the plumbers right now in San Francisco. Google is testing this out in their own backyard, and they’ve been doing this for a while. Actually, if you want to see what’s Google’s working on, you can usually search for plumbers in San Francisco.
For some reason, that is the niche that they’ve taken on. If you look up “Plumbers San Francisco.” At the very top, they’ve got this Google Guarantee. Now, these are all ads. But, look at this. They’ve got Google Guarantee, they’ve got their stars, etc. Below that, you’ve got three more ads.
The Evolution Of Ads On Google
If you think about the evolution of how ads used to be, there used to be three ads at the top, and there was a lot of ads on the side. Then, they got rid of the ads on the side, and they added four on the top. Now, they went back to three right here. Now, you’ve actually got six ads above the fold.
Now, look at this. What’s happening here? Basically, above the fold, you’ve got six ads, you’ve got one organic listing right here. Mr. Ruder Plumbing of San Francisco, who is also right here.
If you keep going down, you see you’ve got the ads. The other thing is that a lot of times, you’re also going to start seeing an ad at the top of this list as well.
It gets even worse. Now, you come down, and the first two listings are Yelp. I’m sure you see that a lot. Yelp, Justia, FindLaw, all these big names and brands are ranking high in the organic listings. What you need is to be ranking here.
Why Does Google Optimize Their Search Pages?
The problem is there’s so much stuff, and you have to remember, Google is constantly optimizing. They’ve got billions of clicks, so they know that having Google Guaranteed in this font, in all capital letters next to a green check performs better than a red check with Google Guaranteed in lowercase letters, in a different type of font.
They can test all this stuff, and they optimize this to perfection. That’s what you see here in this green ad. It’s green letters in a green box, and it blends in there. This used to be yellow for a long time, and it said ad and sponsored.
What’s happening is Google does all these tests, and they figure out what increases the clickthrough rates. What do you do about this?
The first thing you do is you can keep doing SEO. I’m not saying give up SEO. I’m not telling you or my clients to give up on SEO because SEO will always be around. For Google to have these paid listings, they have to have organic listings. But, the clicks are getting harder and harder.
If you’re the absolute number one organic position on this page, that’s this guy right here. What are the odds? A lot of people bypass the ads, but there’s a lot of people that don’t bypass the ads. What ends up happening is even though you’re the absolute number one organic on the page, you’re going to start getting fewer and fewer clicks because they’re doing such a good job optimizing up here.
Can Social Media Help?
How do you take this back? Social media is the way. I’ve been saying that you need to figure out how to do social media. I’ve already figured out how to do social media for lawyers. In the coming weeks and months, you’re going to be getting a lot of content from me. I’ve already given you some content about social media, but I’m really going to be cranking up the social media content in terms of how can you use social media for your law firm.
Have you seen this in any other areas? I know it’s in San Francisco. I have not seen it in any other markets, but I do know that they’re starting to roll it out in a lot of different places. There’s the talk of it.
Do you think that SEO is going to go away? Are you focusing on SEO? Do you think it’s time to jump in to social media yet? Do you think it’s time to jump into something else?
Marketing a Law Firm is Easy… You’re Just Doing it Wrong
I was just talking to a client about marketing a law firm compared to marketing any other business. He was telling me that he thinks marketing a law firm is much more difficult than if you are selling iPhones or a restaurant or anything like that.
Marketing a law firm definitely has challenges that some other businesses don’t have. For example, if you’re running a restaurant, you can do coupons or discounts.
Lawyers typically don’t do discounts, coupons, or anything like that. But, at the end of the day, the psychology of marketing is the same because whether you’re selling legal services or you’re trying to sell pizzas, you’re selling to people. That’s the whole thing, it’s that the people are your target audience.
Finding Your Niche
If you apply the fundamentals of psychology that are required for selling anything, then marketing a law firm is not that difficult. The secret to marketing that most people don’t understand, and this is why most people fail at marketing, is all you have to do is find a niche.
You already found your niche. You’re a lawyer: bankruptcy, personal injury, criminal defense, etc. Then, you need to figure out what do people in that niche, what do your potential customers or potential clients, what is it that they want? And then, all you have to do is give that to them.
Now, I know that sounds easier said than done. But you have to remember, people buy what they want, not what they need. For example, I just bought a new MacBook. Last year’s model didn’t have all the fancy bells and whistles for what I need. It had decent stats, a big screen, it would last me for a long time, but I wanted all the fancy stuff. I wanted the touch screen and everything else that came with the new model that I didn’t really need. Again, I do not need this, but that’s what I wanted.
I spent about 700 dollars more on this computer just because it’s things that I wanted, not what I needed. If I had bought what I needed, I probably would spend 900 bucks, but instead, I spent 1600 dollars.
Once you figure that out, then marketing becomes really easy. I’m not saying that you have to deliver 100 percent of what people want. But once you start realizing what people want and what their desires and fears are, that will make your life and marketing a lot easier.
Catering To What People Want, Not What They Need
I’m a big proponent of creating something you can give away that solves a small problem in advance. Some sort of PDF document that you type up on your computer, save as a pdf and have it on a download form where when they download it, they get added to your email list.
I talk to a lot of lawyers who have a white paper that they wrote, but nobody downloads it and the reason why is because they didn’t answer that fundamental question. You didn’t ask yourself what do people that I’m trying to get to hire my law firm, what do they want? Now, what do they need because people don’t care about what they need. They care about what they want.
That’s why McDonald’s is so successful because people want a Big Mac. They can get a salad or whatever, but people buy what they want. What you need to do is you need to sell them or give them what they want and then, deliver what they need. So, that’s the basic marketing strategy.
How To Implement This Strategy For Your Law Firm
If you could just figure out and ask yourself: what does my client actually want? If I’m a Bankruptcy Attorney, what does my client want? Do they want relief from all debt? Do they want to keep their house? Do they want to fix their credit, so they can get buy house one day?
If you’re a Divorce Lawyer, obviously divorce is the angle, but what do they want? Do they want more time with their kids? Do they want financial freedom? Do they want to escape an abusive relationship?
If you’re a Personal Injury Attorney, what do they actually want? Do they really care about getting this huge settlement or do they just want to make sure that the medical bills are covered?
I’m not saying that’s the only thing you’re going to give them. But what is it that they actually want? And if you can play up to what they want and then you could give them what they need, then you’re going to have a lot of success.
I just created a webinar not too long ago, and it’s completely free. It goes into the strategy in extreme detail. It really gives you enough information that you could probably hit the ground running with the strategy. It talks about how to figure out what do your clients actually want and then how do you deliver. How do you create that bait that gives them the answer to a small problem? But, they still need a lawyer for a big problem, to solve the big problem.
If you want to register that, it’s completely free. Go to lawyermasterclass.com. Fill out the information and just select your preferred time. Just select the time to attend the webinar, and I look forward to seeing you there.
Do You Write Like a Lawyer? If So, It May Be Costing You Money
A lot of times, lawyers tend to over complicate things. Now, the one thing you have to remember is that most lawyers have a higher level of education than most of their clients. You have four years of college plus you have an advanced degree of a law degree. Some attorneys even have other degrees. In fact, I know some lawyers that are also medical doctors.
What happens is that I see content that’s written by lawyers, either blog posts, social media posts, or advertisements and the problem is that it’s written like a lawyer would write it. Now, the issue with that is that it’s typically too complicated for the average person to understand. You need to make things very simple and write it at a third or fourth-grade level.
How Can I Simplify My Writing?
I want to show you how you can simplify your copy, as well as a free tool that you should run everything you write through, making life simple.
Here’s the status update that I’m going to use for this exact video. It’s “Hey lawyers, when you compose advertising copy for your website or social media posts or advertisements, do you write like a lawyer? If so, there’s a high probability that you’re making your content overly complicated, and you can capture more attention if you made it easier to understand. Below is an extremely simple method that you can implement to accomplish this goal.”
Using The Hemingway App To Make Your Content Easier To Read
Before I post this, what I’m going to do is copy this and go to Hemingway editor. All you have to do is go to Hemingwayapp.com.
What’s cool about this is it gives you a tutorial of how the Hemingway app works before you even use it. So, if you look here at the yellow sentence, if a sentence is hard to read, then it highlights it yellow. If it is very hard to read, it highlights it red. It gives you the option to use alternative phrases and utilize shorter and easier words.
What you should do is paste your copy here. Your goal is to make this so that there is no color whatsoever. At the end of the day, you want to make sure that every person can understand and interpret the message in your writing, no matter what level of education they have received.
Your Law Firm’s Website May Have Plagiarized Content…and It Probably Isn’t Your Fault
I want to show a website that I think is helpful for online marketing. It’s a website called Copyscape, and it checks your website and scans the internet for plagiarism.
Plagiarism could be people that copied your work, or it could be if your internet marketing company copied somebody else’s website. Another example of plagiarism is if you’re like a client that we have who used to have FindLaw, they would take the same website content and use it across all of their FindLaw websites.
How To Use Copyscape
I’m going to show you how we check for plagiarized content, and I want to show you some examples of where plagiarism occurs. We use this website called Copyscape, which is cheap. You have to buy credits, and I believe its five cents per search.
What you need to do is go to Copyscape and log in. I think there’s also a free version where you can search, and I believe the free search will pull up copies, but I recommend you spend the minimum which is $10 on PayPal.
For my company, we use the premium search. So, here’s an example. Dixon and Pope, P.A. is in Kansas City and they were one of the websites that we’ve found that our client had a lot of duplicate content from their website. When I ran Dixon and Pope’s website through Copyscape, I found that there’s a lot of other websites that have content that matches theirs. So, I want to show you what that looks like.
If you’re going to run a batch search, what’s cool about this is you enter your website URL, and it will populate everything. What you’re going to do is go to premium and then, batch search. You add all the URLs you want to search and then after the search is done, Copyscape is going to go and look at every link on this page and find all the other pages on your website. Once it’s finished, you end up with a detailed report.
This report will have every URL on the website and how many matches on the internet were found of content on this URL. Green is the best and the higher word count percentage that’s found, the darker red it gets.
Why Is Duplicate Content A Problem?
If we look at this report, there’s lots of duplicate content. Why is duplicate content a problem? There’s an algorithm that Google uses called the Panda algorithm. The Panda algorithm examines the overall quality of your website and the quality of the content of your website. So, if you have pages that have a lot of duplicate content, that can hurt your Panda score.
The problem with the Panda score is that it is part of the live Google algorithm and part of your rankings, which could cause some issues there. You won’t necessarily get a penalty, but the problem is that Google doesn’t necessarily want to show two of the same pieces of content.
If I click on the slip and fall page, the same content is found on other pages, with some of that same content found on davidamallesq.com, then tedlion.com, helmslaw.com, and libbylaw.com
What will happen is Google will not necessarily show all of these on the search results. You won’t get as much visibility because Google thinks there are other pages out there that have this exact content. Why would we show the same content multiple times?
We’re going to look at davidamallesquire.com, and what’s nice about Copyscape is you can see the page below has 262 words matching 33% of the page as highlighted below. Everything that’s highlighted is duplicated. So, let’s see source page.
Just look at the first sentence here, “Property owners have a duty to properly manage, supervise and operate their property to minimize unnecessary risk of harm to others.” Now, let’s go back to the found page. “Property owners have a duty to properly managed, supervise, operate their property.” It’s the exact same thing. This is a problem, and I’ve seen this with FindLaw websites over and over again.
As you get further down the list, there’s less plagiarized content, but it can be copywriters that are working for the same company, that are just basically recycling content. It can be people that just copy your website. It can be bots that are scraping your website. There’s a lot of different ways that this can happen. So, I want to make people aware of this, especially if you have a FindLaw website.
Hopefully, this has shed some light on the topic of plagiarism for you. Take a look at Copyscape, run your page through Copyscape, and let me know if you find any duplicate content.
Need to Get More Done? Here’s My Secret Recipe For Getting Things DONE!
I have a tip for you today that is more about productivity then it is about marketing. There are some days when you just have to get a lot of stuff accomplished in a short amount of time, and I have a secret that I use always.
Whenever I need to get a lot done in a short amount of time, I have a combination of a few different things that I use, and I want to show you what those are. I get more accomplished in a day when I do this, then I do in a whole week.
So, here’s what you do. The key for me is just blocking everything out, and I know that’s difficult because there are distractions everywhere.
The Ultimate Combination For Productivity
The first thing I have is a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. My second secret weapon is my Spotify account, but I don’t sit here and listen to music because I’m the type of person that can’t multitask.
What I do with Spotify is play white noise, which is awesome. They have genres and moods, with one being called focus. In there, they have white noise.
If you want to take it even one step further, there’s one more secret button on your iPhone. It’s called airplane mode, that way you don’t get text messages either. This triad is my secret combination.
If you need to get stuff done and you’ve got stuff in your office that’s distracting you, try this out. Let me know how it works for you because I’m always looking for more productivity tips, so if you have any productivity tips, let me know.
