attorney marketing

Is It Ethical For Lawyers To E-mail an E-book?

How To Use Retargeting To Get More Law Firm Clients. Watch the Video above to learn more!

The question

There’s a big spender in my market. They spend $100,000 a month on TV. If I want to spend $5,000 a month to compete, what would be your advice? I’m a personal injury attorney. 

My answer

So it’s $5,000 versus $100,000 a month. You’re not going to be able to compete with them. So don’t even try to compete with them, because whoever can spend the most money to acquire a client will always win. 

You know that that’s just what it comes down to. That’s why things like self-liquidating offers are great because if you create a self-liquidating offer and spend $5, you know that $5 is coming back from your ads. And then you can essentially keep spending more and more.

Don’t try to compete. What to do instead…

But trying to compete with somebody who is spending $100,000 on ads with a $5,000 budget is not going to work. What you need to do instead is take that money to YouTube or to Facebook. 

What other personal injury attorneys have done

You’re a personal injury attorney. I’m not sure what types of clients you’re trying to get. But we’re actually working with a couple of personal injury attorneys right now. We’re actually running Facebook ads for them and we’re doing Facebook campaigns and we’re generating leads at $50 to $70 per lead. 

And I actually talked to a client today who is a personal injury attorney in Philadelphia. And uh, they’ve signed up a few of those things. We’ve spent $2,000 and it’s just been running for a month. We’re not spending a lot of money.

We’ve spent like 50 bucks a day, spent two grand. I know he’s got cases out of it. So Facebook advertising is going to be a better bet than $5,000 spent on TV because $5,000 spent on TV will be gone in a flash. 

Facebook can be much more effective (and affordable)

And Facebook advertising will be a little more granular. You can actually exclude certain people and you can niche down. if you have $5,000, pick a niche, pick motorcycle riders for example, and then just go after motorcycle cases. 

How to approach Facebook ads

On Facebook, you show your ads only to people that are interested in riding motorcycles. And you’re going to show ads talking about how insurance companies will always blame motorcycle riders for every accident, regardless of whose fault it actually was.

So you’re going to take this us versus them approach. You’ll basically say we fight for motorcycle riders. We fight the insurance companies and tell them that you do have a legal right to ride a motorcycle. And you’re not accepting this additional risk. 

Because a lot of times I’ve heard insurance companies say, oh well, he was riding a motorcycle. He knew the danger. So we’re not going to pay his medical bills. That’s BS. You’re going to take that approach and you’re going to appeal to motorcycle riders,. 

Here’s my advice

And I bet you can spend $2,500 and get twice as many cases from Facebook than you would have gotten if you had spent it on TV. 

Do not bring a knife to a gunfight. You’re going to lose. You’ve got to go somewhere else. So if someone’s spending $100,000 in your market, don’t go after them with five grand. Go somewhere else. And that’s my advice.

How Often To Update Your Law Firm’s SEO

What is the number one SEO factor that skyrockets your Google Ranking? This is a question that is asked by nearly every client. Sometimes people are surprised to hear that I still think it is backlinks. With all the growth and advancement of technology, backlinks are still the most important factor? Yes. Let me explain.

What are backlinks and why do they matter?

Backlinks are when other websites link to yous. I’ve given this example before, just because it’s the easiest one I know. Let’s say for example the New York Times links to your website. Google knows that the New York Times is an authoritative website and because they have so much authority, Google pays attention to who they link to. So, if the New York Times puts a link from their website to your website, then Google looks at that link and says: “Okay, well, New York Times is authoritative, they’re not going to just link to any old spammy website. So, this website that they are linking to must have some sort of authority.” So, that boosts up your overall authority or your overall page rank.

This happens on many, many, many, many, many different levels. There are a lot more factors that go into it than just that because obviously, not everyone’s gonna get links from websites as powerful as the New York Times, but Google does look at a few different things in conjunction with links. Google notices nuances like:

● How many links does the website have?
● What type of links does it have?
● Are they “do-follow or no-follow” links

Outbound Links

There was a time when people wanted really powerful outbound links. So, they would do these scholarships and I am sure there is a lot of law firms out there that have scholarships. So, what you do is create a scholarship and then contact all the colleges and say, “We are running a scholarship that we would like to offer to all of your students. Just link to our website.’ This will get you links from .edu websites, links from college websites, and those are really really good links. However, some of the colleges will link to any website. They will link to 5000 different scholarship pages. So, The problem is, if Google looks at the actual page, it has 5,000 outbound links.

Whatever authority is going to come from that link (website) gets divided by all of those links that are going out. The power of the link is really really diminished. But, there could be a bigger problem.

If this is a situation where the website is linking to a lot of different things, you can run into a Google penalty issue. In fact, this has already happened.

I believe it was Christmas day 2017, Google rolled out something called the “banhammer update.” Basically, that really penalized a lot of these websites that were relying on scholarship links, to be honest with you. But what I usually look for in a website is an authoritative website that actually gets real traffic. If it’s a website that doesn’t get traffic, it’s usually not that great of a link. I try to get links on pages that rank on the first page of Google for some search terms because if it doesn’t rank on the first page of Google, then Google doesn’t think it’s that important. I look for links that are relevant to what I’m linking to Keep it relevant
So, if you’re a car accident attorney and it’s a website all about soccer, that doesn’t make any sense. But if you’re a car accident attorney and it’s a website all about, back injuries or something like that it makes more sense. So, I try to make it relevant.

Local relevance

And then the other thing also is local relevancy. So, that’s the one instance where you can have a website that’s all about soccer. Sometimes you can go to a local organization and make a donation and they will give you a link. So, for example, if you go to your city and state and search, “Baltimore youth soccer” and they’ll give you a link from their website. So, if you’re a Baltimore DUI attorney and you have a link from a youth soccer organization in Baltimore, while that website is all about soccer, it is also relevant to Baltimore, so, you’re going to get that local relevance like that.

There are a lot of different things like that. Google has hundreds of algorithms. I don’t know how many pieces their algorithms there are now. There’s also the local algorithm and then there are the organic algorithms. There are two different algorithms, but I think that links consistently still inks make a difference with your website. If I had to boil down to one thing. That might not always be the case but that’s my gut feeling right now on it.

Recently I was asked this question, “Is it okay to post on your Facebook Group Page from your personal page, if it has your name and business title.” I am not sure what question they are asking, so let’s drill it down.
Putting your business title on your Facebook Page
It is not necessarily a bad thing to put your title on your page. I mean, if you list yourself “Bob Jones, Personal Injury Attorney” But, I always caution people against being too sales-y. It is really not a big deal.

If you are worried about people thinking you are trying to sell them too much, drum up business, or trolling Facebook, it could put some strain on your friends. It is easy enough to remove the “Personal Injury Attorney”.

If you want to leave the words on, and you are hoping that you are going to increase your ranking from adding keywords to your group, that is not going to get anything from that.

If this is not the question you are asking, reach out again because it is a bit confusing. I hope I answered your question.