The Rising Costs of Google Ads || Traffic for Traffic’s Sake?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis (00:06):

Go blue. Conrad.

Conrad Saam (00:07):

Go blue, baby. I am super psyched. I thoroughly enjoy the thrashing of Ohio and the competent win over Iowa. I will tell you though, man, it’s a little bitter, not even bittersweet. It’s tainted. We’ve got the whole cheating scandal, which I know you’d believe is not a cheating scandal. But I also really, and I hate to throw any props towards Florida in general, but FSU got screwed, man.

Gyi Tsakalakis (00:32):

Well, breaking news, Senator Rick Scott, as we are recording this episode has issued a letter to the College Football Playoff Committee, demanding transparency as to how FSU didn’t make it. And to his point, first time undefeated Power Five conference excluded. But in the words of Jerry McGuire, not Jerry McGuire, Cuba Gooding Jr’s character from Jerry McGuire that I’m forgetting the name of. What’s his name?

Conrad Saam (01:01):

Look it up. Yeah, no, I have no idea, but keep going. I know it’s a

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:06):

Pop culture

Conrad Saam (01:06):

Reference show. Show me the money. Show

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:07):

Me the money.

Conrad Saam (01:08):

So this might be about money, but listen, I’m going back to hating on Florida again. Now your senators, the best use of your time is to complain about a football game. Go back to fixing the country, please. That’s not what you should be doing. Alright,

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:19):

We didn’t even say anything about our good friend Bart Sard challenging us

Conrad Saam (01:24):

On LinkedIn. We’re

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:25):

Going to have to totally redo this banter because it’s a total disaster.

Conrad Saam (01:28):

I was genius.

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:30):

Well, you were fine.

Conrad Saam (01:32):

Okay, so finally, someone’s offered to put a wager down, a friendly wager,

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:37):

A non-monetary wager,

Conrad Saam (01:39):

A non-monetary, mostly pride wager, a

Gyi Tsakalakis (01:41):

Legal wager of friendliness.

Conrad Saam (01:44):

Maybe now that we’re broadcasting this a jersey to the winner of the Michigan Bama game in beautiful Pasadena, California where I will be sitting next to my very good friend and vicious competitor, HeLas

Gyi Tsakalakis (02:00):

Conrad, you are a true gentleman inviting me out to the game and I’m super excited. Thank you so much. But our Dhir listeners are probably sick and tired of hearing about lying, cheating, Michigan. What else we got today?

Conrad Saam (02:14):

Holy cow. We have a lot of news. There’s a lot of news going on, most of it coming out of Google. So buckle up, there’s some foreshadowing for you. So after the news, we have a great conversation about Google ads and how Google is working to get more money out of your pocket. And finally, we’re ending with a question brought to you by Ben Sessions, one of our loyal listeners. Is there value in having traffic for traffic’s sake? And my thinking on that answer has evolved over the last 12 months.

Gyi Tsakalakis (02:49):

And in response to Senator Scott’s CFP letter, Lockwood hit the music.

Speaker 3 (02:59):

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing teaching you how to promote market and make fad stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam (03:20):

All right everybody, welcome back. It took me a moment to realize that Gyi was doing a beautiful job of setting up the transition from Show me the money to Money makes the world go round. So well done. I apologize for stepping all over your great thought out.

Gyi Tsakalakis (03:38):

We’ll fix it in post-production. We’ll fix

Conrad Saam (03:40):

It in post baby. That makes me feel like when Adam calls us the talent, it makes me feel like we’re real

Gyi Tsakalakis (03:46):

Something.

Conrad Saam (03:47):

Fix it in post and being called the talent. That’s great. Again, a hundred dollars to anyone who calls me the talent in front of my spouse. Alright, let’s hit the news. Alright, Gyi, lots, lots of news going on. I feel like there’s more and more stuff coming on the airwaves than we’ve had recently. So Twitter advertisers and Elon Musk not getting along. What’s going on here? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis (04:15):

Well, in a very interesting interview, Elon Musk told all of his advertisers to go f themselves. Well at least the ones that are calling for in his view, that are blackmailing him for his speech. But Mr. Musk clearly is not a constitutional law scholar because he doesn’t understand how the First Amendment actually works. You get to say you’re crazy stuff and we get to judge you by spending our money where we want.

Conrad Saam (04:43):

Not in Gyi’s Garage tomorrow is a Tesla model y. Alright, noted.

(04:49):

Alright, speaking of kind of outrageous statements, Danny Sullivan, he’s a good, I’ll call him a good old friend from back in my early SEO days replaced Matt Cutz as the head of speaking and relationships among the SEO community. He has given a warning in the midst of a bunch of Google algorithm updates, he told everyone to buckle up because it’s going to get worse. My personal read on this, Gyi, is it is more likely that SGE actually rolls out early 2024 because I don’t recall anytime where a spokesperson from Google has made a more kind of a dramatic statement, vitriolic vitriolic than buckle up baby, right? This was a big deal. And so I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, but I would expect more turbulence in the search results. Alright, also, from Google structured data changes. Gyi, how much does this apply to our clients and what should they be thinking about?

Gyi Tsakalakis (05:52):

Very much applicable, in my opinion to law firms. So the news is, is that Google is supporting new structured data discussion forum and profile page markup. And if you are a person that follows Google, you might think to yourself that they would love to be able to surface content from the experts. And in my view, this is a step in that direction because helping the machines understand who the authors are of content and conversations are going on in forums. And we already know, and Google mentions this in the announcements and we’ll put it in the show notes that this will be supported in perspectives and some of their other search features. And so to me, this is all in that same conversation we’ve been having about TikTok eating Google’s lunch for search and Google’s got to do something to make search results better. It’s the Google enough stuff. Google doesn’t want to serve 10 blue links. They want to be the Star Trek computer. And in order to do that, they need to know who’s talking and who’s writing about stuff online. And this is a step to help the machines understand that in my opinion

Conrad Saam (07:00):

And fully support that you’ll remember you heard from us that they’ve added the social profiles on your GMB profile. I really strongly believe this is a throwback to what was called authorship back in the day. You can listen to some of our old episodes about that authorship basically was a concept that we are going to use as a ranking factor. The person who wrote this piece of content and with SGE coming out that is heavily done around perspectives as well as this thing called about this author. So when you see a piece of content, you can read depth about who wrote it, right? And so all of this falls into place. This to me is a direction that search is going. And I would not overlook this if I were you finally, I’m tired of talking about Google, but we’re going to give one more news item about Google because I think it is very important.

(07:50):

It also gives us a beautiful seamless segue into our first segment about the cost of Google ads going up. Jerry Disher at Google was the head of advertising and he has resigned to go pursue new alternatives for himself. But Dish’s, one of Dish’s comments was we tend not to tell advertisers about pricing changes, which doesn’t go over very well with people like the US government or advertisers for that matter. So that happened this week and I would expect more shakeups around this both from a regulatory perspective as well as what actually happens with Google Ads. When we come back. We are going to go into the Rising costs of your Google ad spend.

(10:02):

Alright, Google advertising. Gyi, the cost of Google advertising has been Rising as more and more people get into the game. And yet it feels like Google has deliberately changed the game over the last say 18 months. And I’m sure you are seeing this among your pay-per-click campaigns, but it is getting increasingly competitive. And I think there are two reasons why that may have happened from a tactical perspective. Number one, and everyone has struggled with this, but Google has increasingly conflated law firm brands with practice area. So the istic example is Morgan and Morgan and personal injury lawyer are now seen semantically as being synonymous. And what happens when you do that is you can confuse those high value clicks. I’m looking for a personal injury lawyer. If you are say a law firm in Florida that does personal injury, not named Morgan and Morgan with people looking for Morgan and Morgan.

(11:10):

And so in doing so, what ultimately happens is poorly configured campaigns end up bidding on brand terms as if they were intent terms, right? And that drives up the overall cost of the system and it puts more money into the people in Mountain View. And the other thing, and Gyi, I’m sure you’ve seen this, but Google is regularly making recommendations on how to optimize your campaigns. And it seems to me, Gyi, that the usual recommendation is to maximize clicks. And what you do when you maximize clicks is you draw down your pay-per-click costs, but you also increase the amount of clicks overall, which as a market increases the amount of it’s going to Mountain View. Gyi, are you seeing similar or is my experience kind of out there in a vacuum?

Gyi Tsakalakis (12:01):

No, I mean we’ve been doing this long enough. Have clicks ever gone down in price in your experience ever once?

Conrad Saam (12:09):

No. No. The economic

Gyi Tsakalakis (12:11):

Not as a trend. Yeah, not as a

Conrad Saam (12:13):

Trend. The economic theory is that more people get into the market because it’s a bidding system, the price of the market goes up, which is fine, I’m okay with that. That doesn’t feel insidious.

Gyi Tsakalakis (12:23):

What you’re talking about is part of it. Another part of it is not just more competition coming in, but lack of sophistication in bidding. I know Lawyerist who are like, I want to be number one for personal injury lawyer on Google ads. And so they just set the bid to a thousand dollars a click and they don’t care. That’s part of it. It goes to the competition thing, but it’s a little bit slightly different than that. Two that you alluded to is the machine is designed to drive clicks. That’s what the machine wants because that’s what drives revenue. And in fact, based even on the news segment, we come to have learned that and we knew this, but we now Google seems to be caught on it, that they’re also independently just raising the prices to be able to hit revenue targets. And there’s a third thing that I think about with this.

(13:16):

I think it’s a tectonic shift in how the machine works at a fundamental level. And you alluded to some of this stuff. So in the past, because I think we we’re going to get a little nerdy here, so I’m going to try to slow down and lay some things out. In the past, a paid search person would say, okay, tell me about your business. Let’s do some keyword research about the keywords that are relevant. And one approach would be to look at exact match keywords. So I’m going to oversimplify a lot of this. So if you’re super nerdy about paid search, you can go bash me at the hashtag, but I’m oversimplifying all this, but you might conclude that, okay, I’m a personal injury lawyer, a car accident lawyer in Chicago, so I’m going to exact match car accident lawyer Chicago because it’s extremely relevant.

(14:05):

It’s high intent, it’s bottom of the funnel, it’s got my practice error, it’s geographically modified and I want to bid on those terms. I don’t want to bid on lawyer because lawyer, someone that’s looking for a landlord, tenant lawyer or whatever, divorce lawyer or whatever, they could be using the term lawyer as well. And if I show ads to them, I’m going to run up my impressions. Maybe I’m going to hurt my click through rate, which is going to hurt my ad quality score. Maybe I’m actually going to generate some clicks on irrelevant queries. Okay? So that’s kind of how we used to do it. Google made the change. One of the things that they changed was this close variance and you were talking about this in the context of the category, the brand versus non-brand that plays into this close variance stuff. So the short version of that is you can’t even bid on car accident lawyer in Chicago because even if you exact match it, Google’s going to show your ads for stuff that’s not that exact match.

(14:58):

That’s close variance. Okay, well that shift is continuing and now what Google is pushing or suggesting, and this is why this, I think a lot of the suggestions they seem to be like just driving more clicks is what they’re saying is, look, you paid search manager, you human, you mere meager human brain, you don’t get it. We have signals that are telling us that we can show ads to someone that’s searching for lawyer that for a variety of reasons is actually more likely searching for a Chicago personal injury lawyer. Now you and I we’re going to hear that and we’re going to say bss, that’s not true. That’s Google trying to increase the clicks. But if you see what the machine is able to do, and if you say you turn on T ROAS campaigns or these campaigns that are supposed to be more performance driven, the learning curve for the machine, it’s bad, it’s ugly.

(15:55):

You see, you start to go dig into your search query report and you’re like, gosh, the machine’s showing my ads for all this stuff that it’s totally irrelevant and you’re paying for those clicks and so you’re paying for that process. However, and again, it’s not every single time and it still requires a lot of shepherding and the machine’s not perfect. However, what I’m seeing is is that the machine is getting better. So it is showing, it’s saying, look, you paid search marketer, you think that this person searching on lawyer could be searching anything. We actually know that they’re not searching for any kind of lawyer. And so we’re going to now using our AI and the signaling information that we have, we’re going to try to show ads. It’s not going to be keyword driven anymore. It’s going to be these additional signals. It’s going to be a bunch of other stuff that we know about the user that is going to play a role in here. But to your point, it still drives up the cost, especially during the learning phase because it’s got to get data. And we’ve talked about this before, if you don’t have big budgets, there’s data scarcity problem. The machine’s never going to learn. Anyway, that’s my rant on that.

Conrad Saam (17:01):

So you’ve got a good counterpoint on this basically saying that the machine learning that Google can do is actually super, super effective at finding people who are likely to convert.

Gyi Tsakalakis (17:09):

Hold on. One more thing I want to add in there and then you can go. It’s also really important if you’re going to do this for the machine to learn, because you brought this up, you got to feed back the signals. Okay, go ahead. I don’t want No,

Conrad Saam (17:22):

No, this is really, really important. And 99 out of a hundred of you don’t get this, so keep going.

Gyi Tsakalakis (17:28):

You don’t want the machine to learn based on conversion pixel fires because if your conversion is a pixel fire, you’re going to be learning off of noise, you’re going to be learning off of unqualified leads. And so it’s really, really, ideally, ideally it’s not. Ideally that’s not even true because I’ve seen it work both ways. One way you might think to do is say you’re selling something, you’re not even out of the context of Lawyerist. I just want to kind of give this example and maybe some practices there, it might make sense to think about this more. The most efficient teaching of the tool would be we only want to learn off of clients the clicks that turned into fees for us. That’s the quote most efficient. Now again, that gets tricky in PI because it’s like is the machine really going to be able to distinguish between, you don’t want to overly optimize and say we only want the ones that we actually signed a case on, but at the very least you want to be optimizing to qualified consultations in my opinion, because presumably if you qualified it, even if it ends up not being a fee for you, even if for a variety of reasons the client doesn’t sign up or there’s no case or blah blah, blah, you’re saying this contact, they were a qualified contact for us, it’s a qualified consultation.

(18:44):

Go tell the machine that. So the machine can look for the patterns that can detect that that is the type of profile that they’re looking for so they can show more of those ads. But anyway, that was a very long-winded ranty way of saying the days of just optimizing on keywords are over.

Conrad Saam (18:59):

So let me be crystal clear on this, and this is why I said 99% of you are not doing this. The way marketers talk about leads, the way we talk about how we do with our marketing is, and most marketers stop at leads. Leads are actually trackable. If you have a well configured Google Ads account and a Google analytics account, you can actually track those leads and automagically push those back in phone call form, fill text or chat that can actually be done. The problem is leads are garbage. So across our clients, I know that 83% of the leads that we deliver, phone call form, fill text or chat are garbage. That’s why we talk about consultations. The trick with consultations is that data cannot automagically be pushed back into Google. You have to go through the process because that data lives in your IMS system.

(19:48):

For example, your Lawmatics, bing, bing, bing, one of our favorite friends or whatever your intake management system might be. And so you have to go through the process to push that back in. And that is why 99 out of a hundred view are not doing that. Let me go back though. So we went kind of in depth in terms of how this can actually work. My opinion, Gyi, is that there are so many people who are, I will call it the do it yourselfer or the unqualified young person that you’ve thrown into this mix because they understand the internet because they’re under the age of 40. It’s really complicated to do this. Now Google has made it really easy to get in the game. Google has made it really easy to follow their recommendations on what you should be doing, maximize clicks for example, and to hit those buttons.

(20:35):

And what happens, my experience has been, Gyi, when people are following those directives, the economics of their campaigns usually go to crap because they don’t understand the sophisticated. Now this is a really self-serving comment to make, but it feels like to me at this point in time 24 months ago, I would disagree with myself on this at this point in time because so much money is being spent because it has been made really easy for you guys to blow money on things that are not going to convert. Many campaigns that we look at that are kind of in-house run or DIY run are failing because of that. And what’s happened with a lot of clients or a lot of law firms that I talked to is we tried pay-per-click and it doesn’t work, right? Well, it’s because you didn’t set it up correctly. It’s because you didn’t understand the nuances of what Google’s trying to get you to do versus what your actual business goals are. That’s why it failed, not because it as a concept doesn’t fail $220 billion right? A year.

Gyi Tsakalakis (21:31):

Yeah. I’m going to give a slightly different take because I agree with you and I think most of the time it fails because they don’t have a couple of things set up. But interestingly, I think that this AI stuff, the machine taking over the reins, if you do some MVP stuff, right, you actually could have more success as a do-it-yourself than you could in the past. And the reason is back to this idea where you don’t have to be mining the keywords and on top of it every single day, but you do have to have the essentials of you’re feeding back the qualified consultations back into the machine. So you might say, well, DIYers aren’t doing that. And it’s like that might be true, but it’s actually a lot easier to set up the machine to tell ads the qualified consultation versus not qualified consultation.

(22:22):

And if you do that at least, and you get some of the basics around geotargeting, right? And some of the other basic settings in the account, right? I think in some ways it’s actually easier to manage the campaign than when with the old fashioned way, when it was you had to wake up every day, run your search query reports, go add negative keywords and all that kind of stuff. The more than the machine does this right, the easier it becomes to manage. As long as you get those essential signaling things back into the system, maybe a slightly different take.

Conrad Saam (22:50):

I feel like we need a Pink Floyd lyric here. Welcome to Machine.

Gyi Tsakalakis (22:55):

Welcome to the Machine.

Conrad Saam (22:57):

When we come back more Google, we’re going from the paid side to the organic side with a question from our good friend Ben Sessions.

(22:57):

(22:57):

Gyi Tsakalakis (24:26):

And we’re back and as our regular LHLMRs will know, we’d love to get questions from our audience and we are so grateful that Ben’s sessions took the time to record himself asking a fantastic question on Facebook. And here’s Ben

Ben Sessions (24:45):

Gyi and Conrad. Thank you guys for the hat. It’s awesome. I love it. And thank you guys for all that you do in this podcast and in your videos. They are super helpful. They provide a lot of substantive content that you just don’t get many other places. So I really appreciate you guys for doing it. I have a question for you, and I’m going to just post up a screenshot of it as well. I know that you guys have talked about marketing for things that don’t really bring in business for you. Let’s say for example, that you rank for, I think Gyi uses the example of the Detroit Lions merchandise and that sort thing. You don’t sell Detroit Lions merchandise, but let’s say the question is a little bit closer. Let’s say that you have a page that ranks really well in your search and that page is somewhat related to your practice area.

(25:35):

Let’s say for example, mine is a walk and turn page, it gets a pretty good amount of traffic, but it really doesn’t translate into any business for me. I mean people who are searching for walk and turn clues or walk and turn administration are not really people that typically are hiring you. Those are probably Lawyerist and that sort of thing. So what I’m trying to figure out is how can I capitalize upon the performance of that page for my site overall? Because it ranks number one, it does really well. And if you search for walk and turn clues, probably we’re going to pop up there, but I’d like the be able to use it, for example, optimizing my Atlanta DUI page if I can. So if there’s some way that I could leverage that, I’d like to do it. And I’m really interested to see your thoughts on that. Thank you so much again, really appreciate the hat and really appreciate all you guys. Do you guys set a great example of that cross-pollination of people and using other people in your business to really help your business? You guys do a great job of it and thank you for setting that example for all of us. Thank you.

Gyi Tsakalakis (26:38):

Okay, so what Ben is asking about if it wasn’t clear from the video clip is that he’s got a page, it’s generating a lot of traffic, it’s quasi relevant to what he does, but it’s not really monetizable. And we get this question all the time. Connor, you get this question I’m sure all the time. What do you do when you have a page that’s generating a lot of organic search traffic but it’s not converting directly into clients? What are some ideas for Ben?

Conrad Saam (27:10):

Okay, so let me give the kind of 1 0 1 and maybe 12 months old answer to this because I think content strategy is something that we forget about a lot. You and I have talked a lot on this podcast about the importance of actually trimming content. And so one of the things that we look at as an agency when we’re looking at content strategy for a firm, is this page getting any traffic, ideally organic inbound traffic or does it have any links, right? And if one of those two conditions is met, we typically like to keep that page. Ben’s nuance here is this is a useless page. No one is ever going to hire you because of the content on this page. And so is there inherent value in that? I would have said in the past, my old SEO answer would have been, if you’re getting a bunch of traffic to the page but there are no links to it and that traffic is never going to hire you, I would kill it.

(28:06):

I’ll give you an example. We had a client, I’ve talked about this client before. It’s very, very SEO strategy is very, very high up in the funnel and they do highly technical medical stuff. And there were some schools in India, medical schools in India that were citing some of their pages for homework for some of their students. And so they got a ton of traffic, a ton of traffic, they were always getting all this traffic and it threw their numbers off and they were convinced that it didn’t do anything for them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so we actually cut those pages out of their site and traffic fell precipitously and interestingly, their conversions actually went up because more of their site was about what people wanted to hire them for. That is an old answer. I think the fundamental thing that has changed for me on this here, Gyi, is the implicit question is, is there any SEO value in just getting traffic traffic for traffic’s sake? I have my take on this and it’s evolved. Gyi, I’m wondering what you think about that.

Gyi Tsakalakis (29:03):

So the answer, I think it’s really important. There’s a lot of nuance in here.

Conrad Saam (29:08):

Okay?

Gyi Tsakalakis (29:10):

The annoying answer is if it supplies the searcher’s intent, it delivers on what the searcher is looking for. It’s still valuable because you’re telling the machine that your site is giving the searcher helpful answers, but that doesn’t just mean clicks. It means a bunch of things to Google. They did a search, they clicked on your site, they didn’t come back to Google and do another search, that kind of stuff. That’s user engagement stuff that we’ve been talking about in light of the G enough and Reddit, and this is why Reddit and Quora are taking over the world because Google’s machine is rewarding sites that deliver content that satisfy the user’s intent. Now, if what you have on your site is generating traffic, but the searcher is going back to the result and searching again, I would say kill it because that’s hurting the signaling to Google. So anyway, so the click-through stuff, the user engagement signal stuff, which has become much more prominent recently, I think that’s got to be added to your mix from an SEO perspective, right? You’ve got to be thinking it’s not just the traffic. I just want to make that distinction. It’s not just traffic for traffic’s sake. It’s satisfying search intent for search intent’s sake, I guess is not a better way to say it.

Conrad Saam (30:34):

Yeah, we talked about this last episode and I think this is under talked about in the legal SEO world, because I think people know it. AJ Cohen blind, five-year-old had an article cloud, and I’ve seen this before this article came out objectively, Google uses a click-through rate as a ranking signal period is, and they’ve said that that’s not the case forever, and some of the naive SEOs believe that, but from both a local search perspective and an organic search perspective, that is part of the mix. And that is exactly what Gyi is talking about. Driving clicks, driving click-throughs, having a high click-through rate when people see your results helps. So having a well-known brand that helps. So offline ad spend is going to help that and it is going to, the interesting thing here is this is going to encourage clicks on those things that do convert that is really, really impactful. So that is why my thinking on this has evolved over the last 12 to 18 months.

Gyi Tsakalakis (31:36):

So here’s the other thing though that I think about.

Conrad Saam (31:38):

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis (31:38):

So that’s the SEO kind of answer. Sure. So assuming your page is delivering on the search intent, and this goes back to we were talking about with content strategy, what were they looking for that caused them to click? What was the thing they were looking for? What was the need that your content delivered? Who are these people? And now put something else on your page that they might also be in need of. So I might’ve gotten this wrong from Ben’s video, but I think he at least alluded to that it might be other Lawyerist that are looking for information on this field sobriety test. Well, guess what? Put on your page something that talks about how you do referral relationships or maybe you have some kind of email content. Ben, by the way, is a super smart attorney. I had an opportunity to be down there for one of his masterminds and he’s in this group and I’m like, the stuff that they’re talking about, other attorneys would pay them for that stuff.

(32:39):

And so maybe that’s a way that maybe you put something like sign up to join our premium mastermind. If it’s Lawyerist that are coming to the page, maybe there’s something else that you can deliver to get them to continue to be engaged with your business. But even if you can’t do that, so it’s like maybe you have a downloadable resource, maybe you’ve got some additional ungated content, maybe you’ve got premium subscription, you can make some money off of it. But even if you can’t do that, and I don’t know if this is right for Ben’s particular page or not, but they’ve clicked on your site. So once someone clicks on your site Conrad, what do you get to do to ’em?

Conrad Saam (33:17):

Well, you can do all sorts of things like retargeting. My favorite most cost-effective advertising medium.

Gyi Tsakalakis (33:23):

And so now again, I’m not saying it’s right for you Ben, but if you drive traffic to a page, if they’re there and they’re dealing with some life legal issue that you can help solve and they don’t convert from that, maybe you can retarget ’em in a way so that you’re staying on top of mind with them, whether it’s on social, maybe it’s on some managed placements on publisher sites that Google’s got advertising on. If you capture their email, you can add ’em to a custom audience. So now you’ve got first party targeting on social media, obviously you get email opt-in. You also get email permission to send them information. Vieth email, and I love this question because it does come up all the time, but it goes to the same theme that we’ve been talking about really this whole year, which is get out of the search, click call, hire mindset, and think about a more holistic potential client journey that might not convert just because they saw they clicked on your site.

(34:23):

Maybe they need some nurturing, maybe they need to say top of mind, maybe you’re integrating paid social. And I’ll tell you this paid social stuff if you do the paid social thing, right? Again, not necessarily direct response, but now you’re in their world because you’ve seen people walking around with their phones. What do you think they’re on on these social media sites? And if you’re giving them content that they actually want that’s answering their questions, or maybe it’s just awareness play. Ideally, I think, and you could talk more about this if you want, but ideally there’s some kind of affinity, right? You’ve got a social ads that are talking about community service that you’re doing or something that makes you, people actually like your stuff. That’s super, super powerful. Ben mentioned the Detroit Lions example in the video. So you driving a bunch of traffic for irrelevant sports terms. Well, they’re not, they’re irrelevant from a sell them legal services. But guess what? People searching for local sports teams, they’re probably just self-selected as geo-targeting, right? Because they just told you they’re interested in Detroit.

Conrad Saam (35:19):

So this is my big caveat on this, and every time I get this question and look at the data, and I think everyone who does this, assuming you have a localized practice and then 95% of you listening to have a localized practice, what regularly happens with this is you get a boatload of traffic that is not in your market, that is never going to be relevant to you. And yeah, if you have content about the Detroit lines like Merry Christmas, those people are probably from Detroit. If you have content about a field sobriety test, the likelihood that the people who are viewing that and landing on that page are in your addressable market low. By the way, you can validate this based on your GA data. So go into ga, filter by location and validate whether or not Conrad is right or right. It may be all local, I don’t know, but hold on,

Gyi Tsakalakis (36:06):

Time out. One more thing to add there. This is really important and good. Take what Conrad is talking about. Take your GA data and go cross reference it with your search console data because remember, GA’s not going to have queries. And so take the combination of like, okay, here’s where the people are that are searching for it. What are they searching for also? Okay,

Conrad Saam (36:27):

So you’re going to get the what they’re searching for, but right out of ga, you’re going to get that landing page and who’s seeing that? Who is? So where are they’ll go Really tactical. A landing page in GA is the first page that someone saw on your site. So they’re landing, they’re learning about you because they ended up on this page. If you can find that a large portion of those people are within your geographic addressable market game on all day long, retarget like mad. If you find that the people looking at that content are in India, don’t blow your dollars on people in India, and I mean it can be Alaska or New York, whatever it might be. I find that typically those pages that have low conversion, high volume, when you actually cut it by geography, most of the time they are massively out of your market. I think the overall takeaway here, Gyi, is your point about we need to get out of this head space of organic being direct response all the time. Query, click, website visit, call, hire, right? There is much more to it than this, but be proactive in thinking about how you’re dealing with your content strategy, what pages to keep killer combined. Because some of those pages are getting low, converting high volume traffic that are in your market. That’s a win. And there’s more that you can do with them.

Gyi Tsakalakis (37:53):

Yeah, you might be getting positive user signals from it. You might be actually, and this is another one too. You mentioned this at the topic, it was implied, but don’t go start killing your pages if they have links to them and then not redirecting those pages somewhere else. We see this all the time. Oh, well this page doesn’t convert. Let’s kill it. What you just killed all the link equity that was coming back to this page. So to Conrad’s point, take a much more holistic approach to your content. Content is not just designed only to convert. There’s a lot of other things that are going on in this ecosystem. Keep those in mind when you’re making decisions about your content. Great question. Thank you so much Ben. And if you’re listening and you’ve got a question that you’ve been dying to ask, send it to us. We would love to answer your question.

Conrad Saam (38:36):

Alright, with that, we bid you, you do this, part Gyi. I always suck at it. Go try again.

Gyi Tsakalakis (38:43):

I thought you were going to try it.

Conrad Saam (38:45):

Nope. I’m not going to even try. It’s like I can’t ice skate, so I’m not going to try. I’m out. I’m out. I’m too old to learn. New tricks go.

Gyi Tsakalakis (38:52):

So thanks again, Ben. We really appreciate that question. We hopely found it useful, and with that, unfortunately we are out of time. Until next time, this is Conrad and Gyi, Lunch, Hour, Legal, Marketing. I’ve now have blown up the wrap up as well because I’m so confused by Conrad’s botching of the wrapup. But if you are still interested in listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, after this disastrous wrap up, we would love for you to subscribe and download and comment and send us questions and hit the hashtag and share on YouTube. Get on YouTube and get on TikTok. I got to tell you, I’ve been getting on TikTok recently more. There’s actually a lot better conversation going on in TikTok than I had guessed. And so my own TikTok bias is being slowly eroded and this has gone on way too long. Pull the hook, Conrad and Gyi, we’re out of

Conrad Saam (39:44):

Here. Get that guy off stage.

(39:44):

Speaker 3 (39:52):

Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legal talk network.com. Subscribe Vieth Apple podcasts and rss. Follow legal Talk network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Conrad Saam (40:19):

Listen, if you like us talking about legal marketing and not our spouses or Michigan football, we would love to get our word out to more people just like you. If you could please subscribe, leave a comment. If you’re on YouTube, talk about how great we are. So more people hear us. These feeds, the algo and Gyi and I are all about feeding the algo. Your engagement will bring our wisdom and occasional mission gen banter to more people just like you. Well, you’re

Gyi Tsakalakis (40:45):

Way off script. I have no idea where we are.

Conrad Saam (40:48):

We are in the ad break. Hey, like what we’re doing here. Do us a favor and subscribe. Give us a like and leave us a comment.

Gyi Tsakalakis (40:54):

No, we’re in. Let’s do some news This up.

Conrad Saam (40:58):

Jesus,

Gyi Tsakalakis (40:59):

You actually have not this one up before. This is the first time that you’ve screwed this one up in particular. See, we got high energy. We are off the rails though. We’re on a crazy train.

Conrad Saam (41:11):

This episode brought to you by too much fucking coffee.

Continue Reading